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I don't believe in the cause that Eich donated to. But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing. If he had donated t

I don't believe in the cause that Eich donated to. But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing. If he had donated to a liberal cause and was forced out because conservative employees had a problem with it, the entire media would have come down on Mozilla like a ton of bricks. Instead his resignation was celebrated. Chilling political discourse by threatening the livelihoods of those you disagree with is a threat to democracy itself and should not ever be allowed to happen. Eich's forced resignation was an offense against everything America allegedly stands for.

rpearl 12y ago
The two sides you paint are not at all equal. Political discourse gets thrown out the window when you are working towards the suppression of the rights of a group of people. If conservative politics is directly linked to bigotry I see no reason we should support it. Perhaps the fiscally conservative, small government political groups should work to dissociate their ideas from intolerance. There is no paradox of tolerance. It is rational to be intolerant of intolerance, in order to preserve a tolerant society. Karl Popper summarizes: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them...We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant"
- downandout 12y ago
  This entire response essentially says that you disagree with his position on the issue. I also disagree with his position on the issue. But here's where we differ. I believe in his right to express his opinion without fear of losing his ability to make a living. You, and the rest of the liberal lynch mob that forced him out, are doing nothing more than suppressing his rights. And thus begins the end of democracy.
  - smtddr 12y ago
    >>You, and the rest of the liberal lynch mob that forced him out, are doing nothing more than suppressing his rights. You have to admit, using your rights to take someone else's rights away.... is a dubious position to hold.
    - ArtDev 12y ago
      He has the right to be a racist, homophobe, Nazi or whatever. That doesn't mean he can lead a company.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - rpearl 12y ago
    Please read the other part of my comment, wherein I claim that he does not have a right to suppress rights. The context is extremely important: totally uncritical tolerance is not useful to society, and erodes tolerance. We need to be able to defend society against intolerance in order to maintain tolerance. You cannot divorce the actual issue he is expressing his opinion on from the fact that he is expressing an opinion. The context matters. You can't consider a different particular instance and expect the same conclusion, because the context changes.
    - downandout 12y ago
      You cannot divorce the actual issue he is expressing his opinion on from the fact that he is expressing an opinion. Of course you can. In fact this is one of the fundamental tenets of our entire political system. There are no carved out exceptions suspending constitutional protections for really bad opinions. We have a framework through which people with strong conflicting opinions can air them without fear of certain kinds of retaliation. That broke down here, and it's disgusting and scary.
      - rpearl 12y ago
        It is not at all one of the fundamental tenets of our political system. You have to take social context into consideration when generating social laws. People in oppressed and minority groups need more help because they are starting from a position of less privilege. And this is what we do: Laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 exist solely to protect the rights of people who are being oppressed and to restrict the rights of people doing the oppressing. Society acted to defend against intolerance, by being more intolerant of intolerant people. The basic slippery slope you envision is "if we restrict rights, from what principle do we decide where to stop doing that?" The fault in the argument is that it is totally reasonable to not tolerate intolerance, and again, uncritical tolerance is not what we desire here, but rather tolerance of viewpoints which are not intolerant.
- drewcrawford 12y ago
  The nature of politics is that if we want to accomplish things, we have to work together. When you throw out statements like > If conservative politics is directly linked to bigotry I see no reason we should support it. Perhaps the fiscally conservative, small government political groups should work to dissociate their ideas from intolerance. All this does is create animosity with moderates who do not consider themselves linked to bigotry, and it does not advance your position, except among people who already agree with it. If you don't want the support of these moderates then that is one thing. But that raises the question of why you would engage them, if not to garner their support.
smtddr 12y ago
>>I don't believe in the cause that Eich donated to. But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing. Let's keep in mind nobody legally kicked him out. He left because he couldn't deal with the consequences of his actions. The law protects your free speech, but does not protect you from the consequences of it. http://xkcd.com/1357/ http://xkcd.com/1357/ Also, let's not forget how nasty the whole prop8 campaign was... http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_supported_prop_8_which_was_worse_than_you_remember.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_s... ....Eich could have donated to prop- 2,147,483,647, to ban interracial marriage. It would be his right, but I hope society would backlash at him the same way as prop-8 donation caused.
- downandout 12y ago
  He was forced out, as everyone is well aware. You are advocating for a society where political intimidation is acceptable. There are many examples of such countries around the world. None have worked out well.
  - smtddr 12y ago
    If I understand your position correctly, then if there really was a prop to ban interracial marriage we should all be okay with that? I don't see any difference between a ban on gay marriage and a ban on interracial marriage. I just want to be sure I understand your calibration settings. If you think a prop on banning interracial marriage should be just as acceptable as what you seem to be saying for prop8, then I'm done discussing this with you.
    - scintill76 12y ago
      Since you linked xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1431/ https://xkcd.com/1431/ It's easy to look down on interracial marriage bans from our oh-so-enlightened modern view, but it took a long time to even get there. You have to look at these ideologies in the context that they were formed in. If the graph is correct, then when Eich donated, same-sex marriage didn't have majority support. (Setting aside what California's specific numbers were.) This isn't to say that "might makes right", but that Eich expressed his vision for how society should be, and it's only fair to also consider how the rest of the society felt about it. In other words, how do you know views you hold today won't be considered the vilest bigotry in 30 years? Is your moral compass so special, that you would have fought for interracial marriage, even if you were born a white in the southern US in the 1800's?
fuligo 12y ago
His resignation was not celebrated here as I recall. Many found it regrettable (and rightly so in my opinion) that he was nominated for the position in the first place, considering what a symbolic figure the CEO of a foundation is. But it was always recognized the culprit in this case was the board of directors who put him in this position, only to retract their support later. Eich is a brilliant technologist, and that should simply have been his role. Becoming the chief brand embassador was never an appropriate choice. I also don't get how you can equate this with a hypothetical where he is extremely liberal and is being attacked by conservatives. Supporting discriminatory laws is not even on the same plane as being "offensively" open-minded.
- hnal943 12y ago
  "Supporting discriminatory laws is not even on the same plane as being "offensively" open-minded." That's an obviously unfair polemic. It could be flipped around thusly (and would be just as invalid): "Seeking to destroy the institution of marriage that has been consistently defined for centuries is not even on the same plane as being 'offensively' traditional."
  - fuligo 12y ago
    I disagree, because actively supporting limiting the rights of minorities over what amounts to an appeal to religious tradition seems more than a matter of opinion to me. Also, I understand that you downvoted me above, but going to my other comments in another thread and giving them the same treatment is abusive - especially since I'm a new user. You have single-handedly destroyed my karma balance. So I guess the message is that I'm not welcome here because I support equal rights?
ScottBurson 12y ago
I don't agree with anyone who says this was an easy call. I think there are very good arguments on both sides. The good argument on the side of opposing his CEO-ship was the concern that he would use his position to influence company policy and culture in a way that he couldn't do as CTO. Like most people, I don't know Eich nor have I ever worked at Mozilla, so this initially sounded like a very valid concern. Eventually, though, it became clear that Eich had done a very good job of keeping his opinion out of the workplace. That's a difficult thing to do, and I don't think I and others were necessarily wrong, at first, to expect that he wouldn't be able to do it. But I read everything I could find on the case, and I never saw anyone even accusing him of intolerant behavior toward gay Mozillians, either in person or in policy -- and he was one of the drafters of the company's diversity policy. Given that, I think it was unfortunate that the Board accepted his resignation. (It's particularly sad considering that they had talked him into taking the position in the first place.) Had the Board told him "No, you can't quit; we're going to get you through this" I think they should then have tried to explain that his record on diversity was excellent, and that he and they both knew that the eyes of the world would be upon him, and that people should give him a chance.
- greendestiny 12y ago
  I tend to think most people look on something like that as an opportunity to score a win for what they believe in rather than genuine concern at his actions as CEO. Some of the decision to let him resign must have come from the lack a successful strategy to respond to it though.
ForrestN 12y ago
The premise that fundamental rights for minorities is or could be the subject of reasonable political debate is preposterous and disturbing. The cause he donated to was not merely "conservative" and was not decried because it was insufficiently liberal. It was cruel and wrong.
- tragic 12y ago
  'Preposterous'? Really? It's - what - 6 years since Prop 8 went through; evidently a debate on this matter was not preposterous to Californians then. And it's only 18 years since DOMA, which made this tortuous state-by-state guerrilla war necessary. And it's only 28 years since homosexuality was removed from the DSM. That's just the States - see elsewhere in this thread re India; in Britain we had Section 28 on the books until recently, and got equal marriage (sort of) last year. The trouble with declaring something, as an individual in a HN thread, beyond the bounds of reasonable discussion is that it does not actually make it so - the bounds of reasonable discussion are set by what people in general are prepared to reasonably discuss. The obvious takeaway from the Eich affair - the best corporate diversity record in the world will not stop individuals from holding to the beliefs that they do. They will just hold them more quietly. Finally - Eich being drilled out of the CEO position is not directly a suppression of his free speech or whatever; he is not being sent to jail for his views. The board of a company has the right to ditch a CEO for being 'embarrassing'. The trouble is that this is not somehow a radical blow for gay rights: indeed, closeted gay people not too long ago would find their positions untenable for exactly the same reason if their sexuality was discovered (it was embarrassing, etc). In order to get to a situation where they could go about their business relatively unmolested, gay people had to fight against, among other things, exactly this sort of kneejerk corporate small-c conservatism. The progress we've made on this issue was not made one non-profit CEO at a time; nor was it through individual gays having great individual 'role models' (sorry Tim), but through prolonged political fights. I have little sympathy for Eich in this matter, but the idea that his being Mozilla CEO was a serious obstacle to gay rights was risible, and remains so.
  - mkr-hn 12y ago
    > 'Preposterous'? Really? It's - what - 6 years since Prop 8 went through; evidently a debate on this matter was not preposterous to Californians then. And it's only 18 years since DOMA, which made this tortuous state-by-state guerrilla war necessary. And it's only 28 years since homosexuality was removed from the DSM. That's just the States - see elsewhere in this thread re India; in Britain we had Section 28 on the books until recently, and got equal marriage (sort of) last year. Don't forget gay sex being illegal in the US up until 2003.
godzilla82 12y ago
>But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing. >Eich's forced resignation was an offense against everything America allegedly stands for. But what if the cause someone donates for, curtails the rights of someone else? Would you say the same thing if he had donated to a terrorist organisation?
wpietri 12y ago
> But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing. That's a very poor framing of what he did. And you followed it with a lot of unsupported drama. He didn't just donate to, say, a Republican candidate. He supported a campaign to strip gay people of the right to equal protection before the law. A successful one. In the US, you can claim that gay people should not be full citizens and have that opinion protected under the first amendment. You can say the same thing about black people too, which is why we let the neo-nazis protest and even give them police protection when they do. But the legal right to say something is not the right to freedom from social consequence. If he were a white supremacist and wanted to run Mozilla, a company with many non-white employees, would you really be outraged that people would fire him? I'm hoping not. Free speech is an important right. But other people also get that right, and the right to freedom of association as well. If I were gay, I wouldn't want to work for a guy who believed I wasn't equal before the law. How could I trust him to treat me equally at work? And as a straight person, I wouldn't want to work for somebody like that either, so I'd take my freedom of association and walk right out the door. Why shouldn't Mozilla's board take account of whether or not people want to work for a CEO?
- DanBC 12y ago
  I generally agree with what you say. > How could I trust him to treat me equally at work? You could see what he's done whilst at work. Apparently he helped create and enforce policies that protected minority employees. The reason I'm uncomfortable with it is what happens if we switch the positions: Joe Bloggs makes a private donation to a bill supporting gay marriage. Years later he is appointed CEO of some org but the customers run a campaign to veto him based on his private political donation. Isn't this precisely why voting is anonymous[1]? While Eich's views are repugnant he should have been judged on what he did in the workplace. The other point is that US style political campaigning is clearly fucked. [1] of course voting isn't actually anonymous in the UK. Some people still aren't aware of that.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    > You could see what he's done whilst at work. It is the same person. If somebody wears a hooded sheet for evening rallies but a suit in the office, it is not unreasonable for black people to say, "Gosh, maybe I should work elsewhere." White people who are anti-racist might feel similarly. Freedom of association is also a right, and one you seem to be giving less weight. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. > The reason I'm uncomfortable with it is what happens if we switch the positions: Joe Bloggs makes a private donation to a bill supporting gay marriage. That is not switching the positions. An equivalent position is, say, supporting a bill to strip Baptists of the right to worship. The sole point of Prop 8 was to remove a constitutionally guaranteed right, equal protection under the law, from gay people. If somebody was trying to strip a civil right from some right-leaning group, I'd say they also should not be running a large company containing those people. > While Eich's views are repugnant he should have been judged on what he did in the workplace. That might be another interesting world, but here people are judged on their out-of-work behavior all the time. Especially when that out-of-work behavior indicates something possibly relevant to work performance. Like, e.g., believing that a significant fraction of your employees are literally second-class citizens.

rpearl 12y ago

The two sides you paint are not at all equal. Political discourse gets thrown out the window when you are working towards the suppression of the rights of a group of people. If conservative politics is directly linked to bigotry I see no reason we should support it. Perhaps the fiscally conservative, small government political groups should work to dissociate their ideas from intolerance. There is no paradox of tolerance. It is rational to be intolerant of intolerance, in order to preserve a tolerant society. Karl Popper summarizes: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them...We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant"

downandout 12y ago
This entire response essentially says that you disagree with his position on the issue. I also disagree with his position on the issue. But here's where we differ. I believe in his right to express his opinion without fear of losing his ability to make a living. You, and the rest of the liberal lynch mob that forced him out, are doing nothing more than suppressing his rights. And thus begins the end of democracy.
- smtddr 12y ago
  >>You, and the rest of the liberal lynch mob that forced him out, are doing nothing more than suppressing his rights. You have to admit, using your rights to take someone else's rights away.... is a dubious position to hold.
  - ArtDev 12y ago
    He has the right to be a racist, homophobe, Nazi or whatever. That doesn't mean he can lead a company.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- rpearl 12y ago
  Please read the other part of my comment, wherein I claim that he does not have a right to suppress rights. The context is extremely important: totally uncritical tolerance is not useful to society, and erodes tolerance. We need to be able to defend society against intolerance in order to maintain tolerance. You cannot divorce the actual issue he is expressing his opinion on from the fact that he is expressing an opinion. The context matters. You can't consider a different particular instance and expect the same conclusion, because the context changes.
  - downandout 12y ago
    You cannot divorce the actual issue he is expressing his opinion on from the fact that he is expressing an opinion. Of course you can. In fact this is one of the fundamental tenets of our entire political system. There are no carved out exceptions suspending constitutional protections for really bad opinions. We have a framework through which people with strong conflicting opinions can air them without fear of certain kinds of retaliation. That broke down here, and it's disgusting and scary.
    - rpearl 12y ago
      It is not at all one of the fundamental tenets of our political system. You have to take social context into consideration when generating social laws. People in oppressed and minority groups need more help because they are starting from a position of less privilege. And this is what we do: Laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 exist solely to protect the rights of people who are being oppressed and to restrict the rights of people doing the oppressing. Society acted to defend against intolerance, by being more intolerant of intolerant people. The basic slippery slope you envision is "if we restrict rights, from what principle do we decide where to stop doing that?" The fault in the argument is that it is totally reasonable to not tolerate intolerance, and again, uncritical tolerance is not what we desire here, but rather tolerance of viewpoints which are not intolerant.
drewcrawford 12y ago
The nature of politics is that if we want to accomplish things, we have to work together. When you throw out statements like > If conservative politics is directly linked to bigotry I see no reason we should support it. Perhaps the fiscally conservative, small government political groups should work to dissociate their ideas from intolerance. All this does is create animosity with moderates who do not consider themselves linked to bigotry, and it does not advance your position, except among people who already agree with it. If you don't want the support of these moderates then that is one thing. But that raises the question of why you would engage them, if not to garner their support.

smtddr 12y ago

>>I don't believe in the cause that Eich donated to. But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing. Let's keep in mind nobody legally kicked him out. He left because he couldn't deal with the consequences of his actions. The law protects your free speech, but does not protect you from the consequences of it. http://xkcd.com/1357/ http://xkcd.com/1357/ Also, let's not forget how nasty the whole prop8 campaign was... http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_supported_prop_8_which_was_worse_than_you_remember.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_s... ....Eich could have donated to prop- 2,147,483,647, to ban interracial marriage. It would be his right, but I hope society would backlash at him the same way as prop-8 donation caused.

downandout 12y ago
He was forced out, as everyone is well aware. You are advocating for a society where political intimidation is acceptable. There are many examples of such countries around the world. None have worked out well.
- smtddr 12y ago
  If I understand your position correctly, then if there really was a prop to ban interracial marriage we should all be okay with that? I don't see any difference between a ban on gay marriage and a ban on interracial marriage. I just want to be sure I understand your calibration settings. If you think a prop on banning interracial marriage should be just as acceptable as what you seem to be saying for prop8, then I'm done discussing this with you.
  - scintill76 12y ago
    Since you linked xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1431/ https://xkcd.com/1431/ It's easy to look down on interracial marriage bans from our oh-so-enlightened modern view, but it took a long time to even get there. You have to look at these ideologies in the context that they were formed in. If the graph is correct, then when Eich donated, same-sex marriage didn't have majority support. (Setting aside what California's specific numbers were.) This isn't to say that "might makes right", but that Eich expressed his vision for how society should be, and it's only fair to also consider how the rest of the society felt about it. In other words, how do you know views you hold today won't be considered the vilest bigotry in 30 years? Is your moral compass so special, that you would have fought for interracial marriage, even if you were born a white in the southern US in the 1800's?

fuligo 12y ago

His resignation was not celebrated here as I recall. Many found it regrettable (and rightly so in my opinion) that he was nominated for the position in the first place, considering what a symbolic figure the CEO of a foundation is. But it was always recognized the culprit in this case was the board of directors who put him in this position, only to retract their support later. Eich is a brilliant technologist, and that should simply have been his role. Becoming the chief brand embassador was never an appropriate choice. I also don't get how you can equate this with a hypothetical where he is extremely liberal and is being attacked by conservatives. Supporting discriminatory laws is not even on the same plane as being "offensively" open-minded.

hnal943 12y ago
"Supporting discriminatory laws is not even on the same plane as being "offensively" open-minded." That's an obviously unfair polemic. It could be flipped around thusly (and would be just as invalid): "Seeking to destroy the institution of marriage that has been consistently defined for centuries is not even on the same plane as being 'offensively' traditional."
- fuligo 12y ago
  I disagree, because actively supporting limiting the rights of minorities over what amounts to an appeal to religious tradition seems more than a matter of opinion to me. Also, I understand that you downvoted me above, but going to my other comments in another thread and giving them the same treatment is abusive - especially since I'm a new user. You have single-handedly destroyed my karma balance. So I guess the message is that I'm not welcome here because I support equal rights?

ScottBurson 12y ago

I don't agree with anyone who says this was an easy call. I think there are very good arguments on both sides. The good argument on the side of opposing his CEO-ship was the concern that he would use his position to influence company policy and culture in a way that he couldn't do as CTO. Like most people, I don't know Eich nor have I ever worked at Mozilla, so this initially sounded like a very valid concern. Eventually, though, it became clear that Eich had done a very good job of keeping his opinion out of the workplace. That's a difficult thing to do, and I don't think I and others were necessarily wrong, at first, to expect that he wouldn't be able to do it. But I read everything I could find on the case, and I never saw anyone even accusing him of intolerant behavior toward gay Mozillians, either in person or in policy -- and he was one of the drafters of the company's diversity policy. Given that, I think it was unfortunate that the Board accepted his resignation. (It's particularly sad considering that they had talked him into taking the position in the first place.) Had the Board told him "No, you can't quit; we're going to get you through this" I think they should then have tried to explain that his record on diversity was excellent, and that he and they both knew that the eyes of the world would be upon him, and that people should give him a chance.

greendestiny 12y ago
I tend to think most people look on something like that as an opportunity to score a win for what they believe in rather than genuine concern at his actions as CEO. Some of the decision to let him resign must have come from the lack a successful strategy to respond to it though.

ForrestN 12y ago

The premise that fundamental rights for minorities is or could be the subject of reasonable political debate is preposterous and disturbing. The cause he donated to was not merely "conservative" and was not decried because it was insufficiently liberal. It was cruel and wrong.

tragic 12y ago
'Preposterous'? Really? It's - what - 6 years since Prop 8 went through; evidently a debate on this matter was not preposterous to Californians then. And it's only 18 years since DOMA, which made this tortuous state-by-state guerrilla war necessary. And it's only 28 years since homosexuality was removed from the DSM. That's just the States - see elsewhere in this thread re India; in Britain we had Section 28 on the books until recently, and got equal marriage (sort of) last year. The trouble with declaring something, as an individual in a HN thread, beyond the bounds of reasonable discussion is that it does not actually make it so - the bounds of reasonable discussion are set by what people in general are prepared to reasonably discuss. The obvious takeaway from the Eich affair - the best corporate diversity record in the world will not stop individuals from holding to the beliefs that they do. They will just hold them more quietly. Finally - Eich being drilled out of the CEO position is not directly a suppression of his free speech or whatever; he is not being sent to jail for his views. The board of a company has the right to ditch a CEO for being 'embarrassing'. The trouble is that this is not somehow a radical blow for gay rights: indeed, closeted gay people not too long ago would find their positions untenable for exactly the same reason if their sexuality was discovered (it was embarrassing, etc). In order to get to a situation where they could go about their business relatively unmolested, gay people had to fight against, among other things, exactly this sort of kneejerk corporate small-c conservatism. The progress we've made on this issue was not made one non-profit CEO at a time; nor was it through individual gays having great individual 'role models' (sorry Tim), but through prolonged political fights. I have little sympathy for Eich in this matter, but the idea that his being Mozilla CEO was a serious obstacle to gay rights was risible, and remains so.
- mkr-hn 12y ago
  > 'Preposterous'? Really? It's - what - 6 years since Prop 8 went through; evidently a debate on this matter was not preposterous to Californians then. And it's only 18 years since DOMA, which made this tortuous state-by-state guerrilla war necessary. And it's only 28 years since homosexuality was removed from the DSM. That's just the States - see elsewhere in this thread re India; in Britain we had Section 28 on the books until recently, and got equal marriage (sort of) last year. Don't forget gay sex being illegal in the US up until 2003.

godzilla82 12y ago

>But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing. >Eich's forced resignation was an offense against everything America allegedly stands for. But what if the cause someone donates for, curtails the rights of someone else? Would you say the same thing if he had donated to a terrorist organisation?

wpietri 12y ago

> But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing. That's a very poor framing of what he did. And you followed it with a lot of unsupported drama. He didn't just donate to, say, a Republican candidate. He supported a campaign to strip gay people of the right to equal protection before the law. A successful one. In the US, you can claim that gay people should not be full citizens and have that opinion protected under the first amendment. You can say the same thing about black people too, which is why we let the neo-nazis protest and even give them police protection when they do. But the legal right to say something is not the right to freedom from social consequence. If he were a white supremacist and wanted to run Mozilla, a company with many non-white employees, would you really be outraged that people would fire him? I'm hoping not. Free speech is an important right. But other people also get that right, and the right to freedom of association as well. If I were gay, I wouldn't want to work for a guy who believed I wasn't equal before the law. How could I trust him to treat me equally at work? And as a straight person, I wouldn't want to work for somebody like that either, so I'd take my freedom of association and walk right out the door. Why shouldn't Mozilla's board take account of whether or not people want to work for a CEO?

DanBC 12y ago
I generally agree with what you say. > How could I trust him to treat me equally at work? You could see what he's done whilst at work. Apparently he helped create and enforce policies that protected minority employees. The reason I'm uncomfortable with it is what happens if we switch the positions: Joe Bloggs makes a private donation to a bill supporting gay marriage. Years later he is appointed CEO of some org but the customers run a campaign to veto him based on his private political donation. Isn't this precisely why voting is anonymous[1]? While Eich's views are repugnant he should have been judged on what he did in the workplace. The other point is that US style political campaigning is clearly fucked. [1] of course voting isn't actually anonymous in the UK. Some people still aren't aware of that.
- wpietri 12y ago
  > You could see what he's done whilst at work. It is the same person. If somebody wears a hooded sheet for evening rallies but a suit in the office, it is not unreasonable for black people to say, "Gosh, maybe I should work elsewhere." White people who are anti-racist might feel similarly. Freedom of association is also a right, and one you seem to be giving less weight. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. > The reason I'm uncomfortable with it is what happens if we switch the positions: Joe Bloggs makes a private donation to a bill supporting gay marriage. That is not switching the positions. An equivalent position is, say, supporting a bill to strip Baptists of the right to worship. The sole point of Prop 8 was to remove a constitutionally guaranteed right, equal protection under the law, from gay people. If somebody was trying to strip a civil right from some right-leaning group, I'd say they also should not be running a large company containing those people. > While Eich's views are repugnant he should have been judged on what he did in the workplace. That might be another interesting world, but here people are judged on their out-of-work behavior all the time. Especially when that out-of-work behavior indicates something possibly relevant to work performance. Like, e.g., believing that a significant fraction of your employees are literally second-class citizens.