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The Hypocrisy Of Sam Yagan and OkCupid

347 points by McKittrick 13y ago

pyduan 13y ago
What is regrettable in all this is that no one seems to consider the possibility that people may have nuanced views about gay marriage. According to the mob you're either a saint or a bigot, and thus Eich's value as a human being was supposedly entirely determined by this one opinion he voiced in 2008. I'm staunchly in favor of gay marriage, which I consider to be a no-brainer -- but it seems to me the motivations of Prop 8 proponents differ a lot in nature, with some being much more excusable than others in their wrongness. For example, there are people who have nothing against homosexuality but are attached to the symbolic value of 'marriage' as a Christian institution and would be completely fine with another civil contract with the same rights but a different name. This seems to be somewhat in line with Eich's actions (I remember reading a memo from Eich stating he had no plan to amend Mozilla's gay-friendly policies and employee benefits). Although I still think this view is guilty of being wrongly attached to outdated models of society, this is not nearly as bad as what Eich has been accused of. There are other possible reasons one could have (for example, those who in ignorance of the many studies that showed that children of homosexual households grow up just fine could have unfounded reservations about gay adoption, but would be ready to change their mind if shown the evidence; I've encountered a couple myself), but my broader point is that there is a huge range in the degree of bigotry between those who voted Prop 8 and one should not jump to conclusions so easily as they do not all deserve the same level of condemnation. Now, I can understand why Eich's views could make him unsuitable as a CEO because, in a purely pragmatic sense, holding views that most of your workforce despise is obviously detrimental to your ability to lead and especially so at such a peculiar organization as Mozilla where ideology matters arguably more than in other companies; it also matters because, as many have said, a CEO is the face of the company and his views and those of the company are sometimes hard to disentangle. But going from there to making a call to boycott Firefox is a huge jump and smells like a pure appropriation of the controversy for PR purposes. This revelation about Sam Yagan seems to strengthen this feeling. Come on people, we're better than this. Being on the right side of history about an issue does not automatically waive us from intellectual rigor and moderation.
- tiquorsj 13y ago
  You will rue the day that a person's ability to lead is judged by how well ago their views align with those they lead. Especially on matters only on the fringe of the primary goal of the workplace and especially in instances whee the workplace actions are aligned. Shared vision is different than group think and mob rule.
- scarmig 13y ago
  Minor point: you speak of Prop 8 opponents, but you're talking about Prop 8 proponents. Remember they were explicitly trying to roll back rights permanently, in the California Constitution, not trying to stop a new law from passing. Anyhow, something to consider: there were onced nuanced segregationists--there's a funny clip where Jimmy Carter's ex chief of staff said he went from being an extreme segregationist, to a moderate segregationist, to a moderate integrationist. That viewpoint seems insane now, because with the benefit of hindsight we can't conceive of how an extreme viewpoint can be viewed as moderate if you're living within it. But thems the breaks. If someone's a bigot, they're a bigot, no matter how complicated an ideological edifice they've erected to prove they're not a bigot.
- couchand 13y ago
  I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I take issue with judging Mr Eich unsuitable. I think as outsiders we are simply unable to reasonably evaluate his fitness as CEO of their organization. Employees and their managers have differences of thought all the time, but that doesn't preclude a mutual respect for each other's work. From what I understand the employees of Mozilla for the most part had glowing reviews of his work, and ultimately that (and I guess the general performance of the company) should be the true judge of his suitability to the job. It is despicable to wish to deny equal treatment under the law to any group. But even if in a person's private life they harbor such wishes, it is not the place of the general public to judge the company they work for.
- masklinn 13y ago
  > For example, there are people who have nothing against homosexuality but are attached to the symbolic value of 'marriage' as a Christian institution Yes, they were also attached to its symbolic value when they used it to condemn miscegenation. Given atheist, muslims, jews or hindus can get married, and so can blacks, browns, reds, yellows and whites (with one another too, which once upon a time was against "the symbolic value of 'marriage' as a Christian institution"), I'm pretty sure civil marriage has nothing to do with "the symbolic value of 'marriage' as a Christian institution". > and would be completely fine with another civil contract with the same rights but a different name. Because "separate but equal" had such a good run last time around eh? > This seems to be somewhat in line with Eich's actions No it is not: 1. Eich donated $1000 to prop 8. Prop 8's goal was to prevent future homosexual marriages in california and to break up existing ones (since prop 8 was passed specifically because proposition 22 had been struck down and homosexual couples were getting married). It did not propose the introduction of an equivalent contract or amend californian law to effectively introduce one 2. Eich refused to acknowledge such an intent and stonewalled instead behind "me giving to people trying to destroy your marriage does not mean I'm a bigot". Does not sound like "separate but equal" was his intent, as distateful as that would have been 3. "I would prefer an alternative to it therefore I donate to amend the constitution in order to ban it" is not what I would call sane and sensible reasoning
napoleoncomplex 13y ago
Things are about to get really interesting for OkCupid. Reap what you sow.
- dfc 13y ago
  Unfortunately, I doubt it that this makes much of a ripple. "OKCupid blocks firefox to send message to Mozilla" is short and easily tweetable. This follow up requires more explanation.
  - anonbanker 13y ago
    you can't make a 10-second soundbyte out of it? I sure can. Picture Scumbag Steve, if you will. ENCOURAGES PEOPLE TO BOYCOT MOZILLA FOR ANTI-GAY CEO. DONATES TO ANTI-GAY CAUSES.
    - dfc 13y ago
      As far as PR nightmare backlashes go your example is a walk in the park. I thought it went without saying that the sound bite needed to be accurate but I guess not. The donation was made to a politician, not to an issue group. These two are not equivalent. The inaccuracy makes it very easy for OKC to dismiss your response and no semi-decent journalist is going to discuss your inaccurate claim. Your response also suffers from the fact that it does not name OKC or Yagan by name and you are relying on the individual having previous knowledge of the issue.
      - anonbanker 13y ago
        So you take the Scumbag Steve hat, and photoshop it on Sam Yagan's head, then place the text I mentioned. I invite you to look into image-based memes, as it seems you're confused on their execution. sound bytes are almost intentionally inaccurate. if you could take such a complex issue and fit it into twenty words or less, you're probably losing a lot, or it wasn't a substantial issue. As far as PR nightmare backlashes go, the Eich one is a walk in the park. An efficient corporate PR campaign would have taken Eich's initial response, and ran with it, having Eich personally donate money to LGBTQ campaigns that aren't related to Proposition 8. That would have crippled the backlash, because half the LBGTQ's would've pointed to the donation as a sign that Brendan-Now is different than Brendan-Then. Sadly, they didn't respond fast enough, or effectively enough. How many other CEO's have been ousted because of their Gay Rights stances?
learc83 13y ago
What did OkCupid think was going to happen here? Did they really think that if they kicked this hornet's nest there wouldn't be any blowback? They didn't think there was any C level executive at OkCupid or match.com who'd made a controversial political donation?
tasty_freeze 13y ago
The other point to make is that OkCupid's protest cost them nothing. If they really cared, their registration page could have the usual checkbox: I hereby agree to blah blah terms and conditions, and a second checkbox saying: "I affirm my support for gay marriage rights." Failing to select both boxes would bounce the user off of the OkCupid side. But no, they wouldn't do that, because that might cost OkCupid business.
- samatman 13y ago
  It's worse than that. Central to OkCupid's algorithm are the match questions, several of which are explicitly about homosexuality. Not only does OkCupid make money from the homophobic, they are precisely aware of exactly how much of their income is derived from the homophobic market. Perhaps they could write one of their famous data-driven blog posts, showing the world exactly how much money they make from anti-gays, creationists, climate-change deniers and the like.
lingben 13y ago
The hypocrisy of okcupid was evident even before this little bit of info (Yagan's past political contribution) was shared. As I and others pointed out, okcupid went on using javascript! As for okcupid occupying the moral high ground, I still remember when, right after their purchase by match.com, they removed one of the most interesting posts on their blog. It was about why you should never pay for dating web sites and why paid dating website were not worth it. As with all of their blog posts it was backed up with data and evidence. After the purchase and change of monetization model, poof! it was gone. Why? because it was rightly critical of match.com !! Here it is: http://www.columbia.edu/~jhb2147/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating.html http://www.columbia.edu/~jhb2147/why-you-should-never-pay-fo...
- krainboltgreene 13y ago
  He is not the CEO of Javascript. He has no brand or direct authority over javascript engines. It's perfectly fine to boycott Firefox and not boycott Javascript.
  - anonbanker 13y ago
    You seem to have a contradiction within your three sentences. Eich was CEO of a company called the Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla Corporation employs people to work on free projects. one of these projects, Firefox, is governed by The Mozilla Foundation, a completely different entity that Brendan Eich is not a member of. Javascript is handled by ECMA, which is a completely different entity that Brendan Eich is not a member of. Brendan Eich was instrumental in the creation of both, but he has no brand or direct authority over either Firefox or Javascript. So while your first two sentences were technically correct, the further understanding makes the third sentence a contradiction. Why is it perfectly fine to boycott a brand Eich has no authority over, but not ban another one for exactly the same reasons?
    - wodenokoto 13y ago
      You have the mozilla governance structure a little wrong. Mozilla owns the Firefox brand and license it to the Mozilla Corporation which in turn are responsible for development and deployment of Firefox. So while the corporation do have to answer to the foundation, they are not just a bunch of developers hired to "work on Firefox", they are very much responsible for everything Firefox, both day to day development and marketing, but also most long term stuff you can think of is the responsibility of the corporation.
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- kevingadd 13y ago
  I don't think you get a pass on a politician with a record like this. http://www.ontheissues.org/house/Chris_Cannon.htm#Civil_Rights http://www.ontheissues.org/house/Chris_Cannon.htm#Civil_Righ... It's like saying 'well, he's a white supremacist, but he has pretty good views on economic policy!' - if those issues are important to you (and they probably should be!) it's not reasonable to overlook them. You have to draw a line somewhere, even if you are occasionally willing to ally with people you disagree with to achieve a common goal.
  - datapolitical 13y ago
    He got primaried three times by guys even more right wing. My bet is that someone said, let's preserve sane republicans while we still can.
    - kevingadd 13y ago
      He simply does not qualify as a 'sane' republican. The lesser of all evils and all that, sure, but when both candidates are absolute monsters you really shouldn't fund either of them (even if, given no other option, you vote for one)
  - anaphor 13y ago
    He also voted for warrantless wiretapping, just sayin
bluntly_said 13y ago
I find the entire Eich scandal disheartening. A man lost his job (one he was undoubtedly qualified for) because people find it easier to heap hatred on someone they've never met, than to act with dignity and respect. We have some serious issues in this country, and our inability to compromise or respect a person we don't agree with is frightening. Life is filled with shades of grey, compromise is not "that nice thing your kindergarten teacher told you about" it's a critical aspect of a functioning democracy. One we seem to be losing.
- deleted 13y ago
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- Karunamon 13y ago
  >because people find it easier to heap hatred on someone they've never met, than to act with dignity and respect. Turn it around. Eich found it easier to treat millions of people he's never met as second class citizens, than to act with dignity and respect. There are two sides to this story, and you seem to be very eager to tell the one and handwave the other for a "why can't we all just get along" platitude.
  - anonbanker 13y ago
    and yet, all these testimonials came out from LGBTQ*'s working at Mozilla, with Brenden Eich, saying that he treated them as equals. Perhaps you could elaborate on when Eich said they were second-class citizens. you know, so you aren't accused of putting words in someone's mouth.
    - seertaak 13y ago
      As Karunamon states, no more evidence is needed than his financial support for a bigoted law, and his subsequent failure to rescind this support. It's kind of sad that this needs to be repeated so often, but Proposition 8 was an attempt to limit the rights of a minority of the population (a minority I happen to belong to, as a bisexual man). It is an unprovoked act of aggression -- bullying, if you want. If Eich had donated $1000 for a law seeking to prohibit marriage between Jews, would you still be asking Karunamon to "elaborate on when Eich said they were second-class citizens"? I just want to add that I applaud Karunamon's cogent and spirited defense of LGBT rights.
funkyy 13y ago
Everyone with strong ties in marketing world will know that dating sites are one of the most shadies businesses balancing on the line of legal/illegal. OKCupid action was blatant marketing stunt - but thei CEO is immune. No one cares what he did etc. No one on the board or anyone working for him will be approving his departure upon this news. Mozilla case is probably one of the most ethical ways to get publicity this guys did in years...
Ryel 13y ago
I doubt this means very much, or is worth anything but FWIW... I had arranged for myself and 2 friends to go have lunch with 2 people from OkCupid specifically about whether or not we would be a good fit into the company and what they would be able to offer. I'm only looking for an entry-level front-end dev position so my time isnt nearly as valuable, but out of the other 2 friends one is an ex-Googler, the other from Morgan Stanley, both as back-end engineers. After this stunt by OkCupid we cancelled the lunch and will not continue on with OkCupid.
- r0s 13y ago
  What an arbitrary career choice. If you'd avoid a job due to politics, you'd probably leave a job due to politics. Maybe you think you're rising above public opinion concerns to polish some kind of sycophantic business mindset, but you're acting just as emotionally as the board of Mozilla. More so, because they have consumer pressure concerns. Maybe your canceled lunch will appear as sober apolitical moves to ... someone. In my opinion you just flushed your credibility down the toilet.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    Or maybe it is political, and that's all right, and it's generally your choice to decide who you want to do business with and why, outside of a few federally protected classes (due to historical reasons.)
anonbanker 13y ago
So, bottom line: Eich was forced out by an astroturf campaign led by professional boycotters (waving the gay rights flag this time) and sleazy opportunists/publicity addicts like Yagan. If Eich is a homophobe, I would like to replace the rest of the world's homophobes with him. While he may have disagreed in private, his public persona was inclusive and friendly. There are multiple testominies from people that never knew he harbored wishes to limit their rights before the controversy came out. Even the LGBTQ* Mozilla employees/volunteers spoke up to say this. Meanwhile, in Montana/Utah, if the CEO learns you're gay, you're likely to be found dead in the middle of the night. But the mob had already formed, and they wanted blood. Blood is what they got. And the Mozilla project suffers as a result. The Eich story, and the lynch mob that followed it, permanantly reduced my respect for HN. While I would not ever donate to a campaign (let alone one that denied equal rights to human beings), this made the gay community of HN (and their supporters) look like easily-influenced livestock. I used to click on the HN comments link before actually clicking the story it was about, because I could rely on the spin being kept to a minimum. I no longer have that guarantee. Similarly, I no longer have the guarantee of fair discourse, and fully expect future comments to be downvoted to oblivion (much like reddit) when one has a dissenting opinion. If someone says you hate gay people (correctly or not), the HN community has proven they will prosecute before a proper inquiry has been made. Even more disturbing, I have now learned that the militant LGBTQ* members in Silicon Valley are just as easily-influenced, and as easily driven to boycott, as members of Stormfront, or the AFA, or the PMRC. This seems to be such a big issue in the Silicon Valley that I'm now solid in my decision to stay out of SV for any new startup ventures. Intolerance (even intolerance for bigots) is not something I want to immerse myself in. (disclosure: this pseudonym is owned and operated by a lgBtq*)
- cheez 13y ago
  Professional boycotters is too kind a term. I think this is straight up bullying.
- bp123 13y ago
  Yes, the world would be a better place if all anti-equality people had donated $1000 to fund constitutional amendments preventing gay marriage. Please. You can't pretend to be a good citizen for equality while donating $1000 to a cause whose only purpose is anti-equality. And look, he could of just apologized and he would have been fine. He didn't. That is why I find this backlash backlash to be just "mob justice" the other way. His actions brought the backlash upon himself, and he didn't do any of the common sense things he could have to fix it. He shouldn't be treated like a martyr.
scarmig 13y ago
No, it's not "exactly the same." I don't think anyone really benefited from this entire shit show, but stop trying to excuse and water down what Prop 8 supporters did. Giving money to a bad politician is not the same as giving money to support a war of pure bigotry and hatred against gay people. Perhaps you weren't there in 2008, or perhaps you weren't a target. But the Yes on Prop 8 campaign deployed deeply disturbing and hateful rhetoric that relied on the worst tropes about gay people--that they want to corrupt your children into homosexuality. All this wasn't just to pass a law, but to permanently enshrine and sacralize hatred in the California Constitution. Here's a question: many people, perhaps you the reader, oppose Eich's forced resignation because of freedom of speech concerns. Great, I'm with you! And why I think this was all a stupid idea that doesn't benefit gay rights at all. But why are we as a society up in arms about this firing in particular? Why are we not focused on ENDA, for instance, which protects you from being fired for saying you're gay? Why aren't we outraged that workers (illegally) get fired for saying they want to unionize? Or, more tech-focused, people getting fired for shit-talking their boss on Facebook? It seems that, as usual, freedom of speech is only a concern in the media if you're a rich, straight white man.
- wwwwwwwwww 13y ago
  Is it really so hard for you to imagine that not everyone comes from the same background and upbringing? Moreover, is it so hard to believe that not everyone who supported prop8 was a gay-hating bigot who wants to see them all burn in hell or whatever? With every political standpoint, there is a spectrum of supporters who support the cause - for varying reasons and varying intensity. It's very important to keep this in mind especially with issues like prop8 where the anti-prop8 branded the prop8 supporters as a whole as gay-hating bigots. Here's the problem: we don't know where Eich fell on the spectrum. We don't know if he hated gays or if he was brought up in a traditional household where marriage is a religious ceremony rather than a love-based ceremony. Hell, I recall some prop8 supporters whose only problem with gay marriage was that it uses the word "marriage", they were people who wanted civil unions to offer the same legal protections/rules as marriage, but wanted to keep marriage as man+woman so the concept of a marriage ceremony still had the same religious significance as it did before. My whole point here is that we have no idea why Eich supported prop 8. There's a whole rainbow of possible reasons, many of them which are not quite as damning as people make out. Since we never heard the other side of the story, this whole fiasco looks like nothing more than a huge joke, but is actually a scary reminder of how passionate and defensive people can get over social issues.
Karunamon 13y ago
This is about as non as non-stories get. For one, there's about 27 universes worth of difference from supporting a specific law which does a specific thing, and supporting a politician who has different positions on different laws. Maybe the other positions he has took priority over marriage equality? For instance: five years ago, coming out of the economic mess, I'd have prioritized economic recovery (so, someone who knows what they're doing on that front) over marriage equality. That's not to say marriage equality isn't important, but it's all rather pointless if the economy is trashed and everything else goes with it.
- russellsprouts 13y ago
  But if you are checking if a person if qualified to be CEO, wouldn't their domain knowledge and ability to lead be better qualities to prioritize than their stance on gay marriage -- especially if their personal views have not been shown to affect how they intend to lead?
  - Karunamon 13y ago
    Absolutely. However, Eich's behavior after the donation came out revealed a crucial flaw in his ability to handle public relations. Even if this kerfluffle had been about something that isn't so contentious, it's been proven that he cannot handle criticism - something a CEO, the public face of a company, has as one of their primary job duties. It also reveals a pretty massive conflict of interest wrt. his personal views on equality and Mozilla's views on equality. If it were any other corporation it may be different, but Mozilla's kind of famous for this.
sparkzilla 13y ago
To paraphrase Hunter S Thompson: When everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught.
- bambax 13y ago
  The only crime is always getting caught; no cuffs no crime.
- crassus 13y ago
  This is a "leftist singularity", when the least revolutionary half of the population is purged, and then the least revolutionary half of the purgers is purged, ad infinitum. It ends when the most righteous leftist kills the second most righteous leftist, or outside events intervene. For examples, see French and Communist revolutions.
Aldo_MX 13y ago
In my honest opinion, I think the point here is that Mozilla is an organization that promotes good principles like equality. OkCupid, in contrast, is just a dating site. Do people really expect good principles from a dating site?
- mbrubeck 13y ago
  As of last week, OkCupid is a dating site that promotes marriage equality, or at least wants to be seen as such.
mkr-hn 13y ago
Prediction: those who insisted that political actions and professional life should be separate will call for Sam Yagan's head, completing the ouroboros of hypocrisy. The author's basis for the claim that this was a PR stunt is that Sam Yagan made a donation similar to Brendan Eich's. Like Brendan Eich, he has the opportunity to say he's changed his mind on the issue in the years since, or provide more context for the donation. Brendan Eich's mistake was avoiding the issue entirely.
- mason240 13y ago
  Prediction: those who insisted that political actions and professional life should be one and the same will respond with "meh," completing the ouroboros of hypocrisy.
adil_h 13y ago
surely banning Firefox was pretty stupid given that it's quite a large open source project? This stunt just seems like a cry for attention.
- camus2 13y ago
  it was what you said it was, just a publicity stunt,nothing more.They couldnt care less about Eich.
  - anonbanker 13y ago
    if it were a publicity stunt, then they were promoting Opera, IE, and Chrome over Firefox. Someone should be looking into why they promoted IE and Blink over Gecko.
mililani 13y ago
Finally, someone who understands the true meaning of hypocrisy. Pretense is a large part of hypocrisy. People often misunderstand that by saying someone who does something opposite of their beliefs is a hypocrite. No, it's both that and pretense. And, Sam Yagan seems like the proverbial hypocrite.
otterley 13y ago
The difference between these cases is that Mr. Yagan donated to a Congressperson's election fund, while Mr. Eich gave directly to supporters of a cause many find abhorrent. The degree of separation is important: although Rep. Cannon was anti-gay-marriage, we don't know whether that was the motivating factor for Mr. Yagan's donation. It could have been for some other reason: perhaps Mr. Cannon helped him or his company in some way, or perhaps Mr. Cannon's opponent's views (relating to things other than gay marriage) were more objectionable to Mr. Yagan than Mr. Cannon's were. It's also important to note that this donation occurred in 2004, when few politicians openly supported gay marriage, and most publicly said they were against it. Politicians have views on all sorts of matters, some of which we agree with and some of which we don't, and most of us aren't single-issue voters. A donation to a politician is not strong evidence of the donor's agreement with all of the views of that politician. A donation to an organization that is specifically trying to pass a law, however, is pretty strong evidence of the donor's agreement with the aims of the law.
- cheez 13y ago
  So why is it OK to donate to a politician who is anti-whatever, but a CEO can't be? Seems like a double standard to me.
  - scarmig 13y ago
    Has the politician spent tens of millions of dollars in a campaign slurring gay people with some of the most hateful and darkest tropes about them, all the while trying to permanently remove their human rights by amending the Constitution?
    - waterlesscloud 13y ago
      Well, the politician literally voted for a law to amend the constitution to prevent gay marriage.
  - otterley 13y ago
    I think you missed my point. And besides, it's impossible to vote for or contribute to a politician who doesn't have views that some minority will vigorously object to.
patrickg_zill 13y ago
There are 7 billion people in the world. Those posters who make the assumption in their posts, that "of course" everyone agrees with their position that Prop 8 was wrong, might want to reflect that probably less than 500 million, or less than 8%, agree with them. The debate that such posters believe has already been settled, will be going on for a long time.
- hk__2 13y ago
  A lot of people didn’t agree with slavery abolition, too. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good thing.
- chaired 13y ago
  You think that we haven't considered the relationship between morality and popular opinion, and that we should give more weight to popular opinion? And that if we did, we'd see it makes a better basis for morality than models that highlight equality and enumerated rights?
  - patrickg_zill 13y ago
    Not at all; however I think there is, how shall I say it, "whistling past the graveyard"? "wilful blindness"? when it is expressed as if it is a majority opinion among humans. It is like the anecdote about the woman living in the cocoon of NYC's Upper East Side, who said after Nixon's landslide win of the presidential election of 1972 "I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him."
- r0s 13y ago
  I really don't care if there's a mindless consensus against the ethically sound perspective, that proves nothing.
mrxd 13y ago
Yagan's personal views don't really matter. In fact, Eich's views don't matter either because in politics, perception is reality. Yagan contributed to the growing perception that holding anti-gay opinions is socially unacceptable, something that the gay rights movement has been trying to achieve for decades. Regardless of his personal views, past actions or other motives, it helped. Eich could have easily saved himself. The key problem was the perception of an anti-gay CEO of Mozilla, and this could have been fixed in the same way that all public figures handle shifting public sentiment: with a statement about how his views have "evolved", he realizes now how wrong he was, apologizing for the hurt he caused and so on. Clearly he chose not to do that.
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slowblood 13y ago
Just think of Prop 8 as an Apartheid law.
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001sky 13y ago
The IAC senior leadership has no (0/13) people of colour, and only one woman (thats 1/13). And in fact, they don't even have anyone who wears glasses. IAC is the owner of OK cupid, and Sam Yagan is on the parent company's wesite here: http://iac.com/about/leadership http://iac.com/about/leadership Google at least has a much more diverse company leadership teams. Ya know, men and women and people who wear glasses and hair color other than "middle brown". For Yagan to take on his own Board as a subordinate, calling them a bunch of "racist bigots" --not for their private beliefs, but for their "public" actions-- as witnessed by their hiring policy, would be quite a stunt.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
Did anyone ever think this was anything more than a PR stunt? I don't agree with Eich's opinion at all but what OKCupid did was pretty shitty. They wanted cheap PR and they were hypocrits about it (continued using JS and now the news of Yagan's donations).
agmartin 13y ago
It really pisses me off when I have to agree with Mike Arrington.
downandout 13y ago
I have no issues with gay marriage, and I don't think that individual religious views have any place in the creation of laws that will affect people's everyday lives. However, this idea that someone can't keep their personal political views outside of their workplace is the territory of small-minded idiots. A good CEO can, indeed, support causes in his personal life that don't wind up becoming policy at the company he or she runs. See this for what it is. The left is trying to make it OK to punish anyone that has ever supported a conservative cause. Everyone should now fear that their political views will endanger their jobs. This is perhaps the most slippery of all slopes, as this marks the beginning of the end of political discourse in the US. If the right made demands like this, they would be skewered in the media. Yet, because our media has an extreme liberal bias, this has, sadly, gained traction. Just say no.
- r0s 13y ago
  A good CEO is the most public figure of the company, under constant media scrutiny. If you think that's unfair or that the public shouldn't care about public figures, that high horse will only take you as far as hand waving theory. OKCupid made a business decision. It could have been as superficial as Eich's hair color but there it is. This pathetic whining about "fairness" to the leadership of such a consumer oriented company is naive and disingenuous.
- kyrra 13y ago
  > I don't think that individual religious views have any place in the creation of laws that will affect people's everyday lives. How can you keep religious views out of law making? The US as we know it today was founded for religious freedom. Also, religion like Christianity is a way of life. How people interpret the Bible will vary between people, as can be seen with the various denominations of Christianity. How people apply those beliefs to their daily interactions will also vary. What I'm trying to get at is, how can someone remove religion from their thinking and actions when it is core to who they are. Could you remove science and technology from your decision making?
- smtddr 13y ago
  >>However, this idea that someone can't keep their personal political views outside of their workplace is the territory of small-minded idiots. That can't be true for everything. If you think it's possible that a KKK member could be an effective leader/planner/organizer for an outreach program for the all the kids of low-income in Oakland, then you'd be wrong.
r0s 13y ago
The Hypocrisy of Some Blogger Summary: The co-founder of OKCupid made a donation to a homophobic senator in 2004. There's a lot wrong with this "scandalous" revelation. Do we have any direct word on Sam Yagan's change of heart to support the oust of Brendan Eich? This blogger does not, from Yagan's actions we have to assume he feels differently now, a decade later. And so, these toothless allegations of hypocrisy fall apart. This point from the rant: > This was a PR stunt, and as I show below, nothing but a PR stunt. The stunt had the intended result, so this statement is either false or in doubt. Or, if the stunt is unrelated to Eich's removal, then it reflects popular sentiment to boost the OKCupid brand; it's familiar bland commercialism and no kind of hypocrisy.
hibikir 13y ago
On this situations, I end up wondering what's the right level of intolerance to intolerance. How much hate can one pour on someone that is being a bit bigot before you end up being just the same, but with a mirror? Then one starts to question if being intolerant with the people that are intolerant of those that are intolerant is any better, and whether we are working in a system that allocates the call stack in the heap or in a defined stack, because too much thinking in this direction would cause a stack overflow in the JVM.
thatthatis 13y ago
There's an enormous false equivalency here: Prop 8 groups are single issue donations. A donation means exactly and only that you agree with the cause of anti-gay marriage. Politicians are many-thousand issue donations. I know of exactly zero people who I agree with on everything. A donation to a politician can have thousands of motives, and even be done in staunch disagreement about certain issues (especially in the case where their opponent is the same on the issue you disagree with and worse on everything else) On net I'm conflicted about the whole thing. But I do think that people who value tolerance should be intolerant of the intolerant.
- bjterry 13y ago
  The CEO of a non-political company is even more of a many-thousand issue than a politician, so I am not sure that this removes the hypocrisy. He was calling for Eich to resign based on one issue which wasn't related to his job, but donated to a politician in spite of that same issue that is directly related to the politician's job. (I made the same argument you did to someone else, and this was his good counterargument)
- scintill76 13y ago
  Tell that to the people who were citing Eich's other donations to "anti-gay" politicians, to further damn him.[0][1] (I'm guessing parent poster is not one of them, though.) If it counts against Eich, let's not let anyone else get a pass for the same thing. At the least it seems perfectly fair to grill Yagan pretty hard on this. Maybe nobody will because the story is saturated and/or this headline is not as juicy. You could say a variant of the "donation ... can have thousands of motives" about Prop 8 or any single-issue group, too. In another sense, once you donate, you don't really have control over what the campaign does, just as you don't over what a politician does. Of course there's not as much latitude, but I'm concerned people ascribe the worst animosity possible to single-issue donors but the most charitable viewpoint to politician donors. If you think there is no morality/empathy gradient on reasons for supporting Prop 8, that supporting it at all is repugnant, that's understandable. Are there any politicians who are so anti-gay-marriage, that donating to them would be just as bad as donating for Prop 8? Maybe this Chris Cannon, who has a "special kind of hate for gays", is one of them? I'm also kind of conflicted. When you get into guessing people's feelings and motives from public documents about multifaceted ideas, it's not black and white. Maybe it's only fair to apply the same logic to anyone who who may have been hypocritically criticizing him, though. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7529538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7529538 [1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/02/controversial-mozilla-ceo-made-donations-right-wing-candidates-brendan-eich http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/02/controvers...

347 points by McKittrick 13y ago

What is regrettable in all this is that no one seems to consider the possibility that people may have nuanced views about gay marriage. According to the mob you're either a saint or a bigot, and thus Eich's value as a human being was supposedly entirely determined by this one opinion he voiced in 2008. I'm staunchly in favor of gay marriage, which I consider to be a no-brainer -- but it seems to me the motivations of Prop 8 proponents differ a lot in nature, with some being much more excusable than others in their wrongness. For example, there are people who have nothing against homosexuality but are attached to the symbolic value of 'marriage' as a Christian institution and would be completely fine with another civil contract with the same rights but a different name. This seems to be somewhat in line with Eich's actions (I remember reading a memo from Eich stating he had no plan to amend Mozilla's gay-friendly policies and employee benefits). Although I still think this view is guilty of being wrongly attached to outdated models of society, this is not nearly as bad as what Eich has been accused of. There are other possible reasons one could have (for example, those who in ignorance of the many studies that showed that children of homosexual households grow up just fine could have unfounded reservations about gay adoption, but would be ready to change their mind if shown the evidence; I've encountered a couple myself), but my broader point is that there is a huge range in the degree of bigotry between those who voted Prop 8 and one should not jump to conclusions so easily as they do not all deserve the same level of condemnation. Now, I can understand why Eich's views could make him unsuitable as a CEO because, in a purely pragmatic sense, holding views that most of your workforce despise is obviously detrimental to your ability to lead and especially so at such a peculiar organization as Mozilla where ideology matters arguably more than in other companies; it also matters because, as many have said, a CEO is the face of the company and his views and those of the company are sometimes hard to disentangle. But going from there to making a call to boycott Firefox is a huge jump and smells like a pure appropriation of the controversy for PR purposes. This revelation about Sam Yagan seems to strengthen this feeling. Come on people, we're better than this. Being on the right side of history about an issue does not automatically waive us from intellectual rigor and moderation.

tiquorsj 13y ago
You will rue the day that a person's ability to lead is judged by how well ago their views align with those they lead. Especially on matters only on the fringe of the primary goal of the workplace and especially in instances whee the workplace actions are aligned. Shared vision is different than group think and mob rule.
scarmig 13y ago
Minor point: you speak of Prop 8 opponents, but you're talking about Prop 8 proponents. Remember they were explicitly trying to roll back rights permanently, in the California Constitution, not trying to stop a new law from passing. Anyhow, something to consider: there were onced nuanced segregationists--there's a funny clip where Jimmy Carter's ex chief of staff said he went from being an extreme segregationist, to a moderate segregationist, to a moderate integrationist. That viewpoint seems insane now, because with the benefit of hindsight we can't conceive of how an extreme viewpoint can be viewed as moderate if you're living within it. But thems the breaks. If someone's a bigot, they're a bigot, no matter how complicated an ideological edifice they've erected to prove they're not a bigot.
couchand 13y ago
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I take issue with judging Mr Eich unsuitable. I think as outsiders we are simply unable to reasonably evaluate his fitness as CEO of their organization. Employees and their managers have differences of thought all the time, but that doesn't preclude a mutual respect for each other's work. From what I understand the employees of Mozilla for the most part had glowing reviews of his work, and ultimately that (and I guess the general performance of the company) should be the true judge of his suitability to the job. It is despicable to wish to deny equal treatment under the law to any group. But even if in a person's private life they harbor such wishes, it is not the place of the general public to judge the company they work for.
masklinn 13y ago
> For example, there are people who have nothing against homosexuality but are attached to the symbolic value of 'marriage' as a Christian institution Yes, they were also attached to its symbolic value when they used it to condemn miscegenation. Given atheist, muslims, jews or hindus can get married, and so can blacks, browns, reds, yellows and whites (with one another too, which once upon a time was against "the symbolic value of 'marriage' as a Christian institution"), I'm pretty sure civil marriage has nothing to do with "the symbolic value of 'marriage' as a Christian institution". > and would be completely fine with another civil contract with the same rights but a different name. Because "separate but equal" had such a good run last time around eh? > This seems to be somewhat in line with Eich's actions No it is not: 1. Eich donated $1000 to prop 8. Prop 8's goal was to prevent future homosexual marriages in california and to break up existing ones (since prop 8 was passed specifically because proposition 22 had been struck down and homosexual couples were getting married). It did not propose the introduction of an equivalent contract or amend californian law to effectively introduce one 2. Eich refused to acknowledge such an intent and stonewalled instead behind "me giving to people trying to destroy your marriage does not mean I'm a bigot". Does not sound like "separate but equal" was his intent, as distateful as that would have been 3. "I would prefer an alternative to it therefore I donate to amend the constitution in order to ban it" is not what I would call sane and sensible reasoning

napoleoncomplex 13y ago

Things are about to get really interesting for OkCupid. Reap what you sow.

dfc 13y ago
Unfortunately, I doubt it that this makes much of a ripple. "OKCupid blocks firefox to send message to Mozilla" is short and easily tweetable. This follow up requires more explanation.
- anonbanker 13y ago
  you can't make a 10-second soundbyte out of it? I sure can. Picture Scumbag Steve, if you will. ENCOURAGES PEOPLE TO BOYCOT MOZILLA FOR ANTI-GAY CEO. DONATES TO ANTI-GAY CAUSES.
  - dfc 13y ago
    As far as PR nightmare backlashes go your example is a walk in the park. I thought it went without saying that the sound bite needed to be accurate but I guess not. The donation was made to a politician, not to an issue group. These two are not equivalent. The inaccuracy makes it very easy for OKC to dismiss your response and no semi-decent journalist is going to discuss your inaccurate claim. Your response also suffers from the fact that it does not name OKC or Yagan by name and you are relying on the individual having previous knowledge of the issue.
    - anonbanker 13y ago
      So you take the Scumbag Steve hat, and photoshop it on Sam Yagan's head, then place the text I mentioned. I invite you to look into image-based memes, as it seems you're confused on their execution. sound bytes are almost intentionally inaccurate. if you could take such a complex issue and fit it into twenty words or less, you're probably losing a lot, or it wasn't a substantial issue. As far as PR nightmare backlashes go, the Eich one is a walk in the park. An efficient corporate PR campaign would have taken Eich's initial response, and ran with it, having Eich personally donate money to LGBTQ campaigns that aren't related to Proposition 8. That would have crippled the backlash, because half the LBGTQ's would've pointed to the donation as a sign that Brendan-Now is different than Brendan-Then. Sadly, they didn't respond fast enough, or effectively enough. How many other CEO's have been ousted because of their Gay Rights stances?

learc83 13y ago

What did OkCupid think was going to happen here? Did they really think that if they kicked this hornet's nest there wouldn't be any blowback? They didn't think there was any C level executive at OkCupid or match.com who'd made a controversial political donation?

tasty_freeze 13y ago

The other point to make is that OkCupid's protest cost them nothing. If they really cared, their registration page could have the usual checkbox: I hereby agree to blah blah terms and conditions, and a second checkbox saying: "I affirm my support for gay marriage rights." Failing to select both boxes would bounce the user off of the OkCupid side. But no, they wouldn't do that, because that might cost OkCupid business.

samatman 13y ago
It's worse than that. Central to OkCupid's algorithm are the match questions, several of which are explicitly about homosexuality. Not only does OkCupid make money from the homophobic, they are precisely aware of exactly how much of their income is derived from the homophobic market. Perhaps they could write one of their famous data-driven blog posts, showing the world exactly how much money they make from anti-gays, creationists, climate-change deniers and the like.

lingben 13y ago

The hypocrisy of okcupid was evident even before this little bit of info (Yagan's past political contribution) was shared. As I and others pointed out, okcupid went on using javascript! As for okcupid occupying the moral high ground, I still remember when, right after their purchase by match.com, they removed one of the most interesting posts on their blog. It was about why you should never pay for dating web sites and why paid dating website were not worth it. As with all of their blog posts it was backed up with data and evidence. After the purchase and change of monetization model, poof! it was gone. Why? because it was rightly critical of match.com !! Here it is: http://www.columbia.edu/~jhb2147/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating.html http://www.columbia.edu/~jhb2147/why-you-should-never-pay-fo...

krainboltgreene 13y ago
He is not the CEO of Javascript. He has no brand or direct authority over javascript engines. It's perfectly fine to boycott Firefox and not boycott Javascript.
- anonbanker 13y ago
  You seem to have a contradiction within your three sentences. Eich was CEO of a company called the Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla Corporation employs people to work on free projects. one of these projects, Firefox, is governed by The Mozilla Foundation, a completely different entity that Brendan Eich is not a member of. Javascript is handled by ECMA, which is a completely different entity that Brendan Eich is not a member of. Brendan Eich was instrumental in the creation of both, but he has no brand or direct authority over either Firefox or Javascript. So while your first two sentences were technically correct, the further understanding makes the third sentence a contradiction. Why is it perfectly fine to boycott a brand Eich has no authority over, but not ban another one for exactly the same reasons?
  - wodenokoto 13y ago
    You have the mozilla governance structure a little wrong. Mozilla owns the Firefox brand and license it to the Mozilla Corporation which in turn are responsible for development and deployment of Firefox. So while the corporation do have to answer to the foundation, they are not just a bunch of developers hired to "work on Firefox", they are very much responsible for everything Firefox, both day to day development and marketing, but also most long term stuff you can think of is the responsibility of the corporation.

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kevingadd 13y ago
I don't think you get a pass on a politician with a record like this. http://www.ontheissues.org/house/Chris_Cannon.htm#Civil_Rights http://www.ontheissues.org/house/Chris_Cannon.htm#Civil_Righ... It's like saying 'well, he's a white supremacist, but he has pretty good views on economic policy!' - if those issues are important to you (and they probably should be!) it's not reasonable to overlook them. You have to draw a line somewhere, even if you are occasionally willing to ally with people you disagree with to achieve a common goal.
- datapolitical 13y ago
  He got primaried three times by guys even more right wing. My bet is that someone said, let's preserve sane republicans while we still can.
  - kevingadd 13y ago
    He simply does not qualify as a 'sane' republican. The lesser of all evils and all that, sure, but when both candidates are absolute monsters you really shouldn't fund either of them (even if, given no other option, you vote for one)
- anaphor 13y ago
  He also voted for warrantless wiretapping, just sayin

bluntly_said 13y ago

I find the entire Eich scandal disheartening. A man lost his job (one he was undoubtedly qualified for) because people find it easier to heap hatred on someone they've never met, than to act with dignity and respect. We have some serious issues in this country, and our inability to compromise or respect a person we don't agree with is frightening. Life is filled with shades of grey, compromise is not "that nice thing your kindergarten teacher told you about" it's a critical aspect of a functioning democracy. One we seem to be losing.

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Karunamon 13y ago
>because people find it easier to heap hatred on someone they've never met, than to act with dignity and respect. Turn it around. Eich found it easier to treat millions of people he's never met as second class citizens, than to act with dignity and respect. There are two sides to this story, and you seem to be very eager to tell the one and handwave the other for a "why can't we all just get along" platitude.
- anonbanker 13y ago
  and yet, all these testimonials came out from LGBTQ*'s working at Mozilla, with Brenden Eich, saying that he treated them as equals. Perhaps you could elaborate on when Eich said they were second-class citizens. you know, so you aren't accused of putting words in someone's mouth.
  - seertaak 13y ago
    As Karunamon states, no more evidence is needed than his financial support for a bigoted law, and his subsequent failure to rescind this support. It's kind of sad that this needs to be repeated so often, but Proposition 8 was an attempt to limit the rights of a minority of the population (a minority I happen to belong to, as a bisexual man). It is an unprovoked act of aggression -- bullying, if you want. If Eich had donated $1000 for a law seeking to prohibit marriage between Jews, would you still be asking Karunamon to "elaborate on when Eich said they were second-class citizens"? I just want to add that I applaud Karunamon's cogent and spirited defense of LGBT rights.

funkyy 13y ago

Everyone with strong ties in marketing world will know that dating sites are one of the most shadies businesses balancing on the line of legal/illegal. OKCupid action was blatant marketing stunt - but thei CEO is immune. No one cares what he did etc. No one on the board or anyone working for him will be approving his departure upon this news. Mozilla case is probably one of the most ethical ways to get publicity this guys did in years...

Ryel 13y ago

I doubt this means very much, or is worth anything but FWIW... I had arranged for myself and 2 friends to go have lunch with 2 people from OkCupid specifically about whether or not we would be a good fit into the company and what they would be able to offer. I'm only looking for an entry-level front-end dev position so my time isnt nearly as valuable, but out of the other 2 friends one is an ex-Googler, the other from Morgan Stanley, both as back-end engineers. After this stunt by OkCupid we cancelled the lunch and will not continue on with OkCupid.

r0s 13y ago
What an arbitrary career choice. If you'd avoid a job due to politics, you'd probably leave a job due to politics. Maybe you think you're rising above public opinion concerns to polish some kind of sycophantic business mindset, but you're acting just as emotionally as the board of Mozilla. More so, because they have consumer pressure concerns. Maybe your canceled lunch will appear as sober apolitical moves to ... someone. In my opinion you just flushed your credibility down the toilet.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  Or maybe it is political, and that's all right, and it's generally your choice to decide who you want to do business with and why, outside of a few federally protected classes (due to historical reasons.)

anonbanker 13y ago

So, bottom line: Eich was forced out by an astroturf campaign led by professional boycotters (waving the gay rights flag this time) and sleazy opportunists/publicity addicts like Yagan. If Eich is a homophobe, I would like to replace the rest of the world's homophobes with him. While he may have disagreed in private, his public persona was inclusive and friendly. There are multiple testominies from people that never knew he harbored wishes to limit their rights before the controversy came out. Even the LGBTQ* Mozilla employees/volunteers spoke up to say this. Meanwhile, in Montana/Utah, if the CEO learns you're gay, you're likely to be found dead in the middle of the night. But the mob had already formed, and they wanted blood. Blood is what they got. And the Mozilla project suffers as a result. The Eich story, and the lynch mob that followed it, permanantly reduced my respect for HN. While I would not ever donate to a campaign (let alone one that denied equal rights to human beings), this made the gay community of HN (and their supporters) look like easily-influenced livestock. I used to click on the HN comments link before actually clicking the story it was about, because I could rely on the spin being kept to a minimum. I no longer have that guarantee. Similarly, I no longer have the guarantee of fair discourse, and fully expect future comments to be downvoted to oblivion (much like reddit) when one has a dissenting opinion. If someone says you hate gay people (correctly or not), the HN community has proven they will prosecute before a proper inquiry has been made. Even more disturbing, I have now learned that the militant LGBTQ* members in Silicon Valley are just as easily-influenced, and as easily driven to boycott, as members of Stormfront, or the AFA, or the PMRC. This seems to be such a big issue in the Silicon Valley that I'm now solid in my decision to stay out of SV for any new startup ventures. Intolerance (even intolerance for bigots) is not something I want to immerse myself in. (disclosure: this pseudonym is owned and operated by a lgBtq*)

cheez 13y ago
Professional boycotters is too kind a term. I think this is straight up bullying.
bp123 13y ago
Yes, the world would be a better place if all anti-equality people had donated $1000 to fund constitutional amendments preventing gay marriage. Please. You can't pretend to be a good citizen for equality while donating $1000 to a cause whose only purpose is anti-equality. And look, he could of just apologized and he would have been fine. He didn't. That is why I find this backlash backlash to be just "mob justice" the other way. His actions brought the backlash upon himself, and he didn't do any of the common sense things he could have to fix it. He shouldn't be treated like a martyr.

scarmig 13y ago

No, it's not "exactly the same." I don't think anyone really benefited from this entire shit show, but stop trying to excuse and water down what Prop 8 supporters did. Giving money to a bad politician is not the same as giving money to support a war of pure bigotry and hatred against gay people. Perhaps you weren't there in 2008, or perhaps you weren't a target. But the Yes on Prop 8 campaign deployed deeply disturbing and hateful rhetoric that relied on the worst tropes about gay people--that they want to corrupt your children into homosexuality. All this wasn't just to pass a law, but to permanently enshrine and sacralize hatred in the California Constitution. Here's a question: many people, perhaps you the reader, oppose Eich's forced resignation because of freedom of speech concerns. Great, I'm with you! And why I think this was all a stupid idea that doesn't benefit gay rights at all. But why are we as a society up in arms about this firing in particular? Why are we not focused on ENDA, for instance, which protects you from being fired for saying you're gay? Why aren't we outraged that workers (illegally) get fired for saying they want to unionize? Or, more tech-focused, people getting fired for shit-talking their boss on Facebook? It seems that, as usual, freedom of speech is only a concern in the media if you're a rich, straight white man.

wwwwwwwwww 13y ago
Is it really so hard for you to imagine that not everyone comes from the same background and upbringing? Moreover, is it so hard to believe that not everyone who supported prop8 was a gay-hating bigot who wants to see them all burn in hell or whatever? With every political standpoint, there is a spectrum of supporters who support the cause - for varying reasons and varying intensity. It's very important to keep this in mind especially with issues like prop8 where the anti-prop8 branded the prop8 supporters as a whole as gay-hating bigots. Here's the problem: we don't know where Eich fell on the spectrum. We don't know if he hated gays or if he was brought up in a traditional household where marriage is a religious ceremony rather than a love-based ceremony. Hell, I recall some prop8 supporters whose only problem with gay marriage was that it uses the word "marriage", they were people who wanted civil unions to offer the same legal protections/rules as marriage, but wanted to keep marriage as man+woman so the concept of a marriage ceremony still had the same religious significance as it did before. My whole point here is that we have no idea why Eich supported prop 8. There's a whole rainbow of possible reasons, many of them which are not quite as damning as people make out. Since we never heard the other side of the story, this whole fiasco looks like nothing more than a huge joke, but is actually a scary reminder of how passionate and defensive people can get over social issues.

Karunamon 13y ago

This is about as non as non-stories get. For one, there's about 27 universes worth of difference from supporting a specific law which does a specific thing, and supporting a politician who has different positions on different laws. Maybe the other positions he has took priority over marriage equality? For instance: five years ago, coming out of the economic mess, I'd have prioritized economic recovery (so, someone who knows what they're doing on that front) over marriage equality. That's not to say marriage equality isn't important, but it's all rather pointless if the economy is trashed and everything else goes with it.

russellsprouts 13y ago
But if you are checking if a person if qualified to be CEO, wouldn't their domain knowledge and ability to lead be better qualities to prioritize than their stance on gay marriage -- especially if their personal views have not been shown to affect how they intend to lead?
- Karunamon 13y ago
  Absolutely. However, Eich's behavior after the donation came out revealed a crucial flaw in his ability to handle public relations. Even if this kerfluffle had been about something that isn't so contentious, it's been proven that he cannot handle criticism - something a CEO, the public face of a company, has as one of their primary job duties. It also reveals a pretty massive conflict of interest wrt. his personal views on equality and Mozilla's views on equality. If it were any other corporation it may be different, but Mozilla's kind of famous for this.

sparkzilla 13y ago

To paraphrase Hunter S Thompson: When everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught.

bambax 13y ago
The only crime is always getting caught; no cuffs no crime.
crassus 13y ago
This is a "leftist singularity", when the least revolutionary half of the population is purged, and then the least revolutionary half of the purgers is purged, ad infinitum. It ends when the most righteous leftist kills the second most righteous leftist, or outside events intervene. For examples, see French and Communist revolutions.

Aldo_MX 13y ago

In my honest opinion, I think the point here is that Mozilla is an organization that promotes good principles like equality. OkCupid, in contrast, is just a dating site. Do people really expect good principles from a dating site?

mbrubeck 13y ago
As of last week, OkCupid is a dating site that promotes marriage equality, or at least wants to be seen as such.

mkr-hn 13y ago

Prediction: those who insisted that political actions and professional life should be separate will call for Sam Yagan's head, completing the ouroboros of hypocrisy. The author's basis for the claim that this was a PR stunt is that Sam Yagan made a donation similar to Brendan Eich's. Like Brendan Eich, he has the opportunity to say he's changed his mind on the issue in the years since, or provide more context for the donation. Brendan Eich's mistake was avoiding the issue entirely.

mason240 13y ago
Prediction: those who insisted that political actions and professional life should be one and the same will respond with "meh," completing the ouroboros of hypocrisy.

adil_h 13y ago

surely banning Firefox was pretty stupid given that it's quite a large open source project? This stunt just seems like a cry for attention.

camus2 13y ago
it was what you said it was, just a publicity stunt,nothing more.They couldnt care less about Eich.
- anonbanker 13y ago
  if it were a publicity stunt, then they were promoting Opera, IE, and Chrome over Firefox. Someone should be looking into why they promoted IE and Blink over Gecko.

mililani 13y ago

Finally, someone who understands the true meaning of hypocrisy. Pretense is a large part of hypocrisy. People often misunderstand that by saying someone who does something opposite of their beliefs is a hypocrite. No, it's both that and pretense. And, Sam Yagan seems like the proverbial hypocrite.

otterley 13y ago

The difference between these cases is that Mr. Yagan donated to a Congressperson's election fund, while Mr. Eich gave directly to supporters of a cause many find abhorrent. The degree of separation is important: although Rep. Cannon was anti-gay-marriage, we don't know whether that was the motivating factor for Mr. Yagan's donation. It could have been for some other reason: perhaps Mr. Cannon helped him or his company in some way, or perhaps Mr. Cannon's opponent's views (relating to things other than gay marriage) were more objectionable to Mr. Yagan than Mr. Cannon's were. It's also important to note that this donation occurred in 2004, when few politicians openly supported gay marriage, and most publicly said they were against it. Politicians have views on all sorts of matters, some of which we agree with and some of which we don't, and most of us aren't single-issue voters. A donation to a politician is not strong evidence of the donor's agreement with all of the views of that politician. A donation to an organization that is specifically trying to pass a law, however, is pretty strong evidence of the donor's agreement with the aims of the law.

cheez 13y ago
So why is it OK to donate to a politician who is anti-whatever, but a CEO can't be? Seems like a double standard to me.
- scarmig 13y ago
  Has the politician spent tens of millions of dollars in a campaign slurring gay people with some of the most hateful and darkest tropes about them, all the while trying to permanently remove their human rights by amending the Constitution?
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    Well, the politician literally voted for a law to amend the constitution to prevent gay marriage.
- otterley 13y ago
  I think you missed my point. And besides, it's impossible to vote for or contribute to a politician who doesn't have views that some minority will vigorously object to.

patrickg_zill 13y ago

There are 7 billion people in the world. Those posters who make the assumption in their posts, that "of course" everyone agrees with their position that Prop 8 was wrong, might want to reflect that probably less than 500 million, or less than 8%, agree with them. The debate that such posters believe has already been settled, will be going on for a long time.

hk__2 13y ago
A lot of people didn’t agree with slavery abolition, too. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good thing.
chaired 13y ago
You think that we haven't considered the relationship between morality and popular opinion, and that we should give more weight to popular opinion? And that if we did, we'd see it makes a better basis for morality than models that highlight equality and enumerated rights?
- patrickg_zill 13y ago
  Not at all; however I think there is, how shall I say it, "whistling past the graveyard"? "wilful blindness"? when it is expressed as if it is a majority opinion among humans. It is like the anecdote about the woman living in the cocoon of NYC's Upper East Side, who said after Nixon's landslide win of the presidential election of 1972 "I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him."
r0s 13y ago
I really don't care if there's a mindless consensus against the ethically sound perspective, that proves nothing.

mrxd 13y ago

Yagan's personal views don't really matter. In fact, Eich's views don't matter either because in politics, perception is reality. Yagan contributed to the growing perception that holding anti-gay opinions is socially unacceptable, something that the gay rights movement has been trying to achieve for decades. Regardless of his personal views, past actions or other motives, it helped. Eich could have easily saved himself. The key problem was the perception of an anti-gay CEO of Mozilla, and this could have been fixed in the same way that all public figures handle shifting public sentiment: with a statement about how his views have "evolved", he realizes now how wrong he was, apologizing for the hurt he caused and so on. Clearly he chose not to do that.

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slowblood 13y ago

Just think of Prop 8 as an Apartheid law.

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001sky 13y ago

The IAC senior leadership has no (0/13) people of colour, and only one woman (thats 1/13). And in fact, they don't even have anyone who wears glasses. IAC is the owner of OK cupid, and Sam Yagan is on the parent company's wesite here: http://iac.com/about/leadership http://iac.com/about/leadership Google at least has a much more diverse company leadership teams. Ya know, men and women and people who wear glasses and hair color other than "middle brown". For Yagan to take on his own Board as a subordinate, calling them a bunch of "racist bigots" --not for their private beliefs, but for their "public" actions-- as witnessed by their hiring policy, would be quite a stunt.

k-mcgrady 13y ago

Did anyone ever think this was anything more than a PR stunt? I don't agree with Eich's opinion at all but what OKCupid did was pretty shitty. They wanted cheap PR and they were hypocrits about it (continued using JS and now the news of Yagan's donations).

agmartin 13y ago

It really pisses me off when I have to agree with Mike Arrington.

downandout 13y ago

I have no issues with gay marriage, and I don't think that individual religious views have any place in the creation of laws that will affect people's everyday lives. However, this idea that someone can't keep their personal political views outside of their workplace is the territory of small-minded idiots. A good CEO can, indeed, support causes in his personal life that don't wind up becoming policy at the company he or she runs. See this for what it is. The left is trying to make it OK to punish anyone that has ever supported a conservative cause. Everyone should now fear that their political views will endanger their jobs. This is perhaps the most slippery of all slopes, as this marks the beginning of the end of political discourse in the US. If the right made demands like this, they would be skewered in the media. Yet, because our media has an extreme liberal bias, this has, sadly, gained traction. Just say no.

r0s 13y ago
A good CEO is the most public figure of the company, under constant media scrutiny. If you think that's unfair or that the public shouldn't care about public figures, that high horse will only take you as far as hand waving theory. OKCupid made a business decision. It could have been as superficial as Eich's hair color but there it is. This pathetic whining about "fairness" to the leadership of such a consumer oriented company is naive and disingenuous.
kyrra 13y ago
> I don't think that individual religious views have any place in the creation of laws that will affect people's everyday lives. How can you keep religious views out of law making? The US as we know it today was founded for religious freedom. Also, religion like Christianity is a way of life. How people interpret the Bible will vary between people, as can be seen with the various denominations of Christianity. How people apply those beliefs to their daily interactions will also vary. What I'm trying to get at is, how can someone remove religion from their thinking and actions when it is core to who they are. Could you remove science and technology from your decision making?
smtddr 13y ago
>>However, this idea that someone can't keep their personal political views outside of their workplace is the territory of small-minded idiots. That can't be true for everything. If you think it's possible that a KKK member could be an effective leader/planner/organizer for an outreach program for the all the kids of low-income in Oakland, then you'd be wrong.

r0s 13y ago

The Hypocrisy of Some Blogger Summary: The co-founder of OKCupid made a donation to a homophobic senator in 2004. There's a lot wrong with this "scandalous" revelation. Do we have any direct word on Sam Yagan's change of heart to support the oust of Brendan Eich? This blogger does not, from Yagan's actions we have to assume he feels differently now, a decade later. And so, these toothless allegations of hypocrisy fall apart. This point from the rant: > This was a PR stunt, and as I show below, nothing but a PR stunt. The stunt had the intended result, so this statement is either false or in doubt. Or, if the stunt is unrelated to Eich's removal, then it reflects popular sentiment to boost the OKCupid brand; it's familiar bland commercialism and no kind of hypocrisy.

hibikir 13y ago

On this situations, I end up wondering what's the right level of intolerance to intolerance. How much hate can one pour on someone that is being a bit bigot before you end up being just the same, but with a mirror? Then one starts to question if being intolerant with the people that are intolerant of those that are intolerant is any better, and whether we are working in a system that allocates the call stack in the heap or in a defined stack, because too much thinking in this direction would cause a stack overflow in the JVM.

thatthatis 13y ago

There's an enormous false equivalency here: Prop 8 groups are single issue donations. A donation means exactly and only that you agree with the cause of anti-gay marriage. Politicians are many-thousand issue donations. I know of exactly zero people who I agree with on everything. A donation to a politician can have thousands of motives, and even be done in staunch disagreement about certain issues (especially in the case where their opponent is the same on the issue you disagree with and worse on everything else) On net I'm conflicted about the whole thing. But I do think that people who value tolerance should be intolerant of the intolerant.

bjterry 13y ago
The CEO of a non-political company is even more of a many-thousand issue than a politician, so I am not sure that this removes the hypocrisy. He was calling for Eich to resign based on one issue which wasn't related to his job, but donated to a politician in spite of that same issue that is directly related to the politician's job. (I made the same argument you did to someone else, and this was his good counterargument)
scintill76 13y ago
Tell that to the people who were citing Eich's other donations to "anti-gay" politicians, to further damn him.[0][1] (I'm guessing parent poster is not one of them, though.) If it counts against Eich, let's not let anyone else get a pass for the same thing. At the least it seems perfectly fair to grill Yagan pretty hard on this. Maybe nobody will because the story is saturated and/or this headline is not as juicy. You could say a variant of the "donation ... can have thousands of motives" about Prop 8 or any single-issue group, too. In another sense, once you donate, you don't really have control over what the campaign does, just as you don't over what a politician does. Of course there's not as much latitude, but I'm concerned people ascribe the worst animosity possible to single-issue donors but the most charitable viewpoint to politician donors. If you think there is no morality/empathy gradient on reasons for supporting Prop 8, that supporting it at all is repugnant, that's understandable. Are there any politicians who are so anti-gay-marriage, that donating to them would be just as bad as donating for Prop 8? Maybe this Chris Cannon, who has a "special kind of hate for gays", is one of them? I'm also kind of conflicted. When you get into guessing people's feelings and motives from public documents about multifaceted ideas, it's not black and white. Maybe it's only fair to apply the same logic to anyone who who may have been hypocritically criticizing him, though. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7529538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7529538 [1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/02/controversial-mozilla-ceo-made-donations-right-wing-candidates-brendan-eich http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/02/controvers...