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by bluekeybox 4452 days ago
You are not seeing the full picture. There is no "gay mafia". I have gay friends who are wonderful people, and I support their right to marry. Some of my biggest idols in tech are gay. What scares me, however, is that the same confrontational tactics that are used to police tech sector against you-name-it people who had made a silly or insensitive joke about women or donated a couple of bucks to some non-PC campaign -- those same confrontational, entryist tactics were used in the early 20th century by Lenin and his supporters, and we all know where that led.

It's not the message, it's how it is delivered.
2 comments
fennecfoxen 4452 days ago
First they came for Brendan Eich. But I did not speak out, because I disagreed with Brendan Eich's political position and thought it was obnoxious. Jerk had it coming, I say.

cough

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bluekeybox 4452 days ago
Eich is far from the first. The mob's appetite for blood is greater than you think:

* http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/donglegate-adria-richar...

* http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/pr-executive-j...

* http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/09/10/busines...

* http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/30/paul-graham-responds-to-cri...

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fennecfoxen 4452 days ago
Okay. "First" was rhetorical, rather than factual. :P

In any event, there have been plenty of regimes in history where you needed to be a member of The Party and toe the party line... and if not, you'd be ineligible for any position of power, and maybe out of a job. Perhaps your nation had a revolution, and the party in question is Communists. Perhaps it's merely a Reformation, and you're just not allowed to be Catholic anymore (or a counter-reformation, and you're not allowed to be Protestant). Maybe it's just the local banana republic.

And this is purely a partisan-affiliation play. No one has seriously asserted that Eich was mean to any individual gay person, influenced company policy in a way that said gay people are unwelcome, or anything of that nature.

In any event, it's quite clear that at least some portion of our society -- the one Mozilla operates in -- works under the guiding principles of those regimes. How modern of us!

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weavejester 4452 days ago
A CEO is the public face of a company. Mozilla didn't just hire Eich for his technical skills, but to represent the company as a whole. Unlike many positions, the personal opinions of a CEO are relevant to their job.
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