6 ms·

How many of them actually need to say so before it makes sense to you? 10? 100? 1000? This is part of what I mean by how "cancel" is only applied to the powerf

How many of them actually need to say so before it makes sense to you? 10? 100? 1000? This is part of what I mean by how "cancel" is only applied to the powerful. How many managers are needed to fire someone? Often, only one. https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/3/5579516/outfoxed-how-protests-forced-mozillas-ceo-to-resign-in-11-days https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/3/5579516/outfoxed-how-prote... reports about one of the fellow travelers: > On a rainy morning this week in San Francisco, newly appointed Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich sat down for coffee with one of the people calling for his resignation. Hampton Catlin, a prominent developer of apps for the nascent Firefox OS, announced he was abandoning the platform due to Eich’s handling of the disclosure that in 2008 he donated $1,000 to the fight against same-sex marriage. California’s Proposition 8, which passed with 52 percent of the vote in 2008, made same-sex marriage illegal in California until the law was overturned by the Supreme Court. Over the course of an hour, Catlin explained the suffering that Prop. 8 caused for him and his partner, a Brit who couldn’t immigrate until marriage became legal. Catlin asked Eich for an apology. He didn’t get one. And it's not like this reaction was out of the blue: > ... For starters, Mozilla already fought this battle once, in 2012. That’s when Eich’s donation first became public, leading to a firestorm on Twitter. The Verge also links to https://twitter.com/iamjessklein/status/449233331352514560 https://twitter.com/iamjessklein/status/449233331352514560 "@amjessklein Have waited too long to say this. I'm an employee of @mozilla and I'm asking @brendaneich to step down as CEO.", so there's at least one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Catlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Catlin says "After a large public outcry and several Mozilla Foundation employees publicly calling for him to step down". So there's at least "several". Is that enough for you? If not, how many are enough? To get back to my main thesis - which is that "cancel" has a built-in bias against left-leaning views - we need only to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Firearms_of_Montana#Political_donation_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Firearms_of_Montana#Pol... , where the founder and CEO was ousted for supporting Obama. I don't see any mention of employees there, and while discussions about "cancel culture" often mention things like Eich's situation, they rarely include Cooper.

inglor_cz 6y ago
> Is that enough for you? If not, how many are enough? I do not know, I am interested in the real size of the potential problem. Every change of leadership in a big corporation carries a risk of someone leaving, if not immediately, then within a few months. People who are universally liked rarely get into CEO positions. (High agreeableness makes it really hard to execute painful decisions.) Of course, if 1 person leaves, it is not dramatic. If half of the staff leaves, it is dramatic. But how many are enough? You probably cannot answer the question any more than I do, it is the same question like "how many sand particles you need to call it a heap". Mozilla made their choice. They have a CEO that offends no one and a market share under 1 per cent. Perhaps they would have the same market share under Eich. Perhaps not. I think that Eich was more passionate about the product than current leadership and that it would have made some difference. Individual programmers are, to some degree, fungible; Mozilla ecosystem is one of a kind.
- eesmith 6y ago
  The way you added "Or was someone offended on their behalf, preemptively?" suggested a different intent. I read it as a distrust that anyone at Mozilla would actually care, and explicit doubt on my earlier description of 'LGBT people and their fellow travelers working for and supporting Mozilla'. The overarching question I have: what does "cancel" mean? According to my definition ("negative consequences to rich, powerful, or famous people because of actions or statements that the left disagrees with"), Eich was indeed canceled. But of course, my definition is little different than "those lefties need to shut up and stop complaining!" - just couched in fancier terms. [1] Then, if he was meaningfully "canceled", does that mean that what happened was necessarily a bad thing? Obviously, as a lefty, I don't, since that would mean my complaints would never be heard. I'll construct a dramatic hypothetical. Suppose 90% of the staff threatened to leave if Eich stayed on, because of his support for homophobic legislation. This would have shown that Eich's leadership role would have been rather ineffectual, so decided to leave, in order that Mozilla survive as an organization. Would that still have been "cancelling" Eich in that case? And therefore would it be an intrinsically immoral or unethical act? [1] And I still don't know how "cancel" can be applied to this Suess case, where the copyright holder [2] has decided to stop the publication on what appears to be a voluntary decision with only scattered activism for the change. [2] Really, isn't the problem that copyright is entirely too long? Why should we wait another 40 years before a book published in 1937 enters the public domain? When he wrote it, the maximum copyright period was 56 years - until 1993. As a public domain book, we wouldn't be having this tempest in a teapot!
BrendanEich 6y ago
1. Hampton Catlin was confused about Federal immigration law and enforcement vs. California Prop 8 or any state law. DOMA, not Prop 8, prevented his spouse from immigrating, and its overturn by SCOTUS was the remedy: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2013/07/01/implementation-supreme-court-ruling-defense-marriage-act https://www.dhs.gov/news/2013/07/01/implementation-supreme-c... I've been on the record against DOMA for years, on constitutional grounds. 2. Catlin didn't just try to persuade me, his condition was that "Brendan Eich is completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla": https://web.archive.org/web/20140401004029/http://www.teamrarebit.com/blog/2014/03/24/goodbye_firefox_marketplace/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140401004029/http://www.teamra... Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic called out the self-deceptive, self-pitying ending of Catlin's followup blog post for claiming to be sad about my leaving Mozilla, and for rewriting an explicit demand to remove me from any job at Mozilla, spinning his stance as just an citizen-to-citizen attempt to "try and change someone's mind": https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/mozillas-gay-marriage-litmus-test-violates-liberal-values/360156/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/mozilla... 3. All the "I'm asking @brendaneich to step down as CEO" tweets were from six people who worked for the Mozilla Foundation, not for me at the Mozilla Corporation. The two organizations are arms-length due to non-profit tax law, with separate management and boards (Mitchell Baker is the only common member, and long-standing chair, of both boards). No one who worked for me in fact tweeted asking me to step down. You yourself quote from Catlin's wikipedia page which states my point (2), but you missed the meaning of the "Mozilla Foundation" reference there, which undermines your argument here. None of those people worked for me. They had asked the Foundation executive director, Mark Surman, for permission to tweet as they did, and he gave them a "go" sign. Again, no connection to the Corporation I was running. Obviously there's no guaranteed cancel button that people on the left or right can press, but the left is much better organized than the right in general, and it uses soft power more effectively (see Alinsky). Some on the right aim to play by the same rules and take as many scalps as they can. This won't end well, especially as HN commenters keep misstating facts of my case to support false equivalence or "no such thing" narratives about cancel culture, reopening an old wound and making themselves look like unreliable narrators of recent history. Of course every culture, every society, defines deviance and punishes it. This never goes away, even under classical liberalism (I'm Catholic; English penal laws weren't repealed in full until the 19th Century). It would be great if people could just get the facts of my case, attested by web.archive.org primary sources, right for a change, and move on to more current events.

inglor_cz 6y ago

> Is that enough for you? If not, how many are enough? I do not know, I am interested in the real size of the potential problem. Every change of leadership in a big corporation carries a risk of someone leaving, if not immediately, then within a few months. People who are universally liked rarely get into CEO positions. (High agreeableness makes it really hard to execute painful decisions.) Of course, if 1 person leaves, it is not dramatic. If half of the staff leaves, it is dramatic. But how many are enough? You probably cannot answer the question any more than I do, it is the same question like "how many sand particles you need to call it a heap". Mozilla made their choice. They have a CEO that offends no one and a market share under 1 per cent. Perhaps they would have the same market share under Eich. Perhaps not. I think that Eich was more passionate about the product than current leadership and that it would have made some difference. Individual programmers are, to some degree, fungible; Mozilla ecosystem is one of a kind.

eesmith 6y ago
The way you added "Or was someone offended on their behalf, preemptively?" suggested a different intent. I read it as a distrust that anyone at Mozilla would actually care, and explicit doubt on my earlier description of 'LGBT people and their fellow travelers working for and supporting Mozilla'. The overarching question I have: what does "cancel" mean? According to my definition ("negative consequences to rich, powerful, or famous people because of actions or statements that the left disagrees with"), Eich was indeed canceled. But of course, my definition is little different than "those lefties need to shut up and stop complaining!" - just couched in fancier terms. [1] Then, if he was meaningfully "canceled", does that mean that what happened was necessarily a bad thing? Obviously, as a lefty, I don't, since that would mean my complaints would never be heard. I'll construct a dramatic hypothetical. Suppose 90% of the staff threatened to leave if Eich stayed on, because of his support for homophobic legislation. This would have shown that Eich's leadership role would have been rather ineffectual, so decided to leave, in order that Mozilla survive as an organization. Would that still have been "cancelling" Eich in that case? And therefore would it be an intrinsically immoral or unethical act? [1] And I still don't know how "cancel" can be applied to this Suess case, where the copyright holder [2] has decided to stop the publication on what appears to be a voluntary decision with only scattered activism for the change. [2] Really, isn't the problem that copyright is entirely too long? Why should we wait another 40 years before a book published in 1937 enters the public domain? When he wrote it, the maximum copyright period was 56 years - until 1993. As a public domain book, we wouldn't be having this tempest in a teapot!

BrendanEich 6y ago

1. Hampton Catlin was confused about Federal immigration law and enforcement vs. California Prop 8 or any state law. DOMA, not Prop 8, prevented his spouse from immigrating, and its overturn by SCOTUS was the remedy: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2013/07/01/implementation-supreme-court-ruling-defense-marriage-act https://www.dhs.gov/news/2013/07/01/implementation-supreme-c... I've been on the record against DOMA for years, on constitutional grounds. 2. Catlin didn't just try to persuade me, his condition was that "Brendan Eich is completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla": https://web.archive.org/web/20140401004029/http://www.teamrarebit.com/blog/2014/03/24/goodbye_firefox_marketplace/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140401004029/http://www.teamra... Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic called out the self-deceptive, self-pitying ending of Catlin's followup blog post for claiming to be sad about my leaving Mozilla, and for rewriting an explicit demand to remove me from any job at Mozilla, spinning his stance as just an citizen-to-citizen attempt to "try and change someone's mind": https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/mozillas-gay-marriage-litmus-test-violates-liberal-values/360156/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/mozilla... 3. All the "I'm asking @brendaneich to step down as CEO" tweets were from six people who worked for the Mozilla Foundation, not for me at the Mozilla Corporation. The two organizations are arms-length due to non-profit tax law, with separate management and boards (Mitchell Baker is the only common member, and long-standing chair, of both boards). No one who worked for me in fact tweeted asking me to step down. You yourself quote from Catlin's wikipedia page which states my point (2), but you missed the meaning of the "Mozilla Foundation" reference there, which undermines your argument here. None of those people worked for me. They had asked the Foundation executive director, Mark Surman, for permission to tweet as they did, and he gave them a "go" sign. Again, no connection to the Corporation I was running. Obviously there's no guaranteed cancel button that people on the left or right can press, but the left is much better organized than the right in general, and it uses soft power more effectively (see Alinsky). Some on the right aim to play by the same rules and take as many scalps as they can. This won't end well, especially as HN commenters keep misstating facts of my case to support false equivalence or "no such thing" narratives about cancel culture, reopening an old wound and making themselves look like unreliable narrators of recent history. Of course every culture, every society, defines deviance and punishes it. This never goes away, even under classical liberalism (I'm Catholic; English penal laws weren't repealed in full until the 19th Century). It would be great if people could just get the facts of my case, attested by web.archive.org primary sources, right for a change, and move on to more current events.