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Liberal Mob Claims Another Scalp — Jon Gabriel
Brendan Eich, a successful developer and tech legend, was recently named the CEO for Mozilla Corporation. The for-profit venture is most closely associated with their open-source Firefox web browser.
But after his appointment, a dark secret emerged about Eich’s past. Was it embezzlement or child endangerment? Terrorism or even murder? Even worse. Six years ago, he donated $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages in the state.
This personal view, which in 2008 was supported by the majority of California voters and President Obama himself, is now a firing offense in the U.S. Under intense pressure from Silicon Valley activists, Eich has stepped down as CEO and also from the board of the nonprofit foundation which wholly owns it.
Mitchell Baker, Executive Chairwoman of Mozilla announced the change on the company’s blog:
Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard.
Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness. We welcome contributions from everyone regardless of age, culture, ethnicity, gender, gender-identity, language, race, sexual orientation, geographical location and religious views. Mozilla supports equality for all.
We have employees with a wide diversity of views. Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions in public. This is meant to distinguish Mozilla from most organizations and hold us to a higher standard. But this time we failed to listen, to engage, and to be guided by our community.
Of course, this statement utterly contradicts the company’s cowardly submission to a technofascist lynch mob, but that’s beside the point. Diversity is Conformity. Tolerance is Intolerance. Freedom is Slavery.
As the witch hunt grew, Eich insisted that he would not step down. “I don’t want to talk about my personal beliefs because I kept them out of Mozilla all these 15 years we’ve been going,” he said in one interview. “I don’t believe they’re relevant.”
But in a world where the press exposes political donor lists and the IRS demands to know the content of our prayers, the personal is always political. And now, professional.
Published in General
I’m with MJBubba. Call it cowardice, but I’ve got a family to feed and I can act on many other fronts. That said, I’ve just switched from Chrome to Firefox essentially for usability and technical reasons. As a web developer, I need to use all the major browsers, regardless of their posture and actions.
How about “fagscists”
Ugh. I’ve used Firefox since it first came out.
What’s a conservative to do?
Firefox has showed its intolerant fascist side.
Microsoft pumps billions into the Left through Bill Gates.
Google is notorious for slanting in the Progressive direction.
Apple just told me they don’t want my Climate Denier dirty money, so there goes Safari.
The Tech world just screams for some rich conservatives to get together and build the equivalent of Fox News for an OS Apps and browser . Please Koch Brothers, there’s money to be made here….
The example I was thinking of is the civil rights movement. Lots of good people stood with Martin Luther King. A minority of those people went on to support the hate-filled nut Louis Farrakan. That fact does not discredit everyone who supported King.
Re: the possibility of a conservative or right-leaning entity making its own suite of software. Think about the proposition. One massive and well-funded single commercial entity, Microsoft, makes a terrible browser. They made a great office suite 15 years ago but now merely keep dolling up the carcass to preen that it’s new and has renewed value. What magic pixie dust will any other commercial entity else use for anything better? Just because Mozilla is comprised of conflicted vacuous juveniles doesn’t mean that they don’t make great software. The Open Source model of development has its advantageous over commercially built software.
Pro-lifers who shoot doctors are the exception.
Marriage redefinitionists who ruin people’s lives are increasingly becoming the rule.
When there’s a massive outcry from the redefinitionist movement that this is a step too far, I’ll accept the analogy. Unfortunately the Andrew Sullivans (I can’t believe I’m using him as a good example) and Tom Meyers of the world are part of a vanishing minority.
A number of SSM supporters have denounced it, though (including, to my surprise, Andrew Sullivan, who is more than a garden-variety SSM activist in that he’s actually married to his husband). Reihan Salam on NRO did, and numerous people here have (including me).
I think the real question is how many people oppose judicial action on this issue, which I think is the root cause of what’s happening.
Maybe not. He’s probably unemployable in Silicon Valley. But there are plenty of other high tech centers in the U.S. One example is the Dallas – Fort Worth area (aka Silicon Prairie).The people there have a more conservative bent.
I’m skeptical that there’s much money to be made in browsers considering they’re all free.
I’m don’t require a lot of bells, whistles and circus clowns so when I switched over to Mac I stuck with Safari and have had no problems. (My brief flirtation with Chrome left me with a customized border burned into the screen of my iMac.) As for the boycotts, folks can do what they want, but unless you want to live the Luddite lifestyle you’ll still be supporting the intolerant left. I would wager that every tech company in the developed world is the same teeming beehive of greener-than-thou, I hate Republicans more than you do, groupthink moral preeners in Che T-Shirts as you would find on the campus of Berkeley. That’s just the nature of the beast.
Bloomberg News says OKCupid was blocking access to their site from Firefox:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-04-04/mozilla-ceo-exit-exposes-silicon-valley-s-equality-freedom-rift
All the more reason why we need a browser that is owned and operated by conservatives. The day will come when we will all be blocked from the internet. That will be the end of grass-roots conservatism, since we are all now web-based.
Remember that time Chick-Fil-A fired those employees who supported same-sex marriage? Or when Hobby Lobby layed-off the executive who donated to Planned Parenthood? Oh yeah, only the Left is punishing employees in this way.
As I said on a post about the Duck Dynasty hubbub, “The Left started the culture war, won it resoundingly, and now they’re roaming the country shooting the wounded survivors.”
Let me retract my citation of Bloomberg News. The very article I cited above contains this whopper: “In 2012, activists and the mayors of Boston and San Francisco urged boycotts of fast-food chain Chick-fil-A Inc., which donated millions through a foundation to anti-gay rights groups. While the company decided to stop giving to the groups, none of its executives resigned.”
Actually, though Chick-fil-A has donated millions, only a total of about $15,000 ever went to the groups that are called “anti-gay.” Most of their money went to an orphanage, Christian camps for kids, and a Christian marriage enrichment program. This was de-bunked within a week of the story in August of 2012, but still goes around the blogosphere and remains un-retracted by several large progressive sites. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/03/chick-fil-a-controversy-shines-light-on-companys-charitable-giving/comment-page-27/
That article is misleading. What they did was put up a letter to Firefox users (with questionable facts). You could get through if you clicked the link on the bottom of the page. Impeded, sure. Blocked? No.
I’ve switched to Opera, but for what it’s worth, while Microsoft and Google may not be our allies, they haven’t, to my knowledge, committed any overt acts of discrimination the way Mozilla has.
Wouldn’t that make it easier to block us? It would be easier for a site to block all users of the Koch Bros Browser just like OKCupid did with FF than to somehow identify which individual users are conservatives.
I would hesitate to use that analogy. That was neither widespread, nor recent, never mind a growing trend. It was always occassional and always decried by the overwhelming bulk of the Pro-Life movement.
I know it sounds horrible, but if I were in his situation I think I’d look for employment abroad. I don’t think I’d still consider America a free country if I were in his position.
If you want to hurt them, but you really like/depend on certain extentions or features of Firefox, or you don’t really want to support the liberals at Apple, Google or Opera either, you might consider changing the default search to something other than Google. Google pays mozilla for the traffic it gets from making it the default search. It’s easy to install other search engines in Firefox. By not using Google as the default in the search bar, you will cut into the revenue they get from Google.
I just installed Pale Moon browser. It’s a Mozilla clone (hooray for open source) that will run most Firefox plugins.