The fascists won a round:
What was the Chick-Fil-A battle about? It was about the company’s owner, Dan Cathy, stating his beliefs on marriage in an interview. Democrats tried to shut his company out of whole cities, to shun him and hurt him.
What was the Duck Dynasty battle about? It was about the Robertson family patriarch, Phil Robertson, stating his beliefs on life and marriage in an interview. Activists pressured A&E into taking him and his hit show off the air.
The fascists lost both of those battles, so they adjusted their tactics. The Mozilla battle saw a few employees within the company tweet their displeasure with Eich. No employees tweeted support for him or for the concept of free speech.
In both of those earlier cases, and in Eich’s, private citizens expressed their views, and the fascist mob tried to destroy them and their entire lives for it. The fascists lost the first two battles, but have won the third. Eich is gone and now Mozilla is radioactive to a large number of people. I deleted Firefox from my computers and mobile devices, and replaced it with other products. Many made similar decisions. Web browsers are easy to replace. I’m already happier with Epic and Dolphin browsers than I was with Firefox, which had become buggy and slow.
The progs don’t care what happens to Mozilla. It can live or die, they can’t be bothered about that. It doesn’t matter to them at all. They actively wanted both Chick-Fil-A and Duck Dynasty destroyed. They would probably be content to see Mozilla die too. But it doesn’t matter to them anymore. It did what they want. They will turn and attack some other target when the opportunity arises.
The objective was not to intimidate those of us in the pundit world. On that score, the fascists’ tactic backfired — same-sex marriage supporters have been rightly appalled by all of this.
@BrianSHall We are an org that believes in openness & that no one should be persecuted for the beliefs they hold, no matter what they are.
— Mozilla (@mozilla) April 3, 2014
Indeed. RT @Rand_Simberg: An astronomical lack of self awareness in that tweet, @texasbryanp. @mozilla
— Boss Tweet (@texasbryanp) April 3, 2014
Expressing opinion about SSM: Persecution Hounding someone out of a job for expressing opinion about SSM: Tolerance #MozillaNewspeak
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) April 3, 2014
And good for Andrew Sullivan:
Will he now be forced to walk through the streets in shame? Why not the stocks? The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.
Regardless of what you think about SSM, you should be appalled by the intolerant behavior of Eich's critics.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) April 3, 2014
And remember the outcome of the LGBT attack on Chick-Fil-A: now the #1 fast food chicken outlet in the country with half the number of stores as KFC and open only 6 days a week instead of 7.
I’m switching to Chrome permanently.
I’m removing Firefox on all of my computers. It was slow and bloated anyway.
Any suggestions for a new browser?
I’ve been very happy with Opera version 12 point something, but the other day I downloaded Opera version 20, realized it no longer had anything equivalent to favorites or bookmarks, and I went back to version 12. The only thing I don’t like about it is all the shortcut configuration keys that let my cats change my browser settings every time my back is turned.
Opera is my go to browser on the tablet but I don’t like whatever newer version I have in comparison to the old version I had. It is still better than the alternatives I have tried. I always try and keep several browsers for different types of surfing.
Is anyone really happy with chrome? I use it but there are so many things I don’t like about it.
Try picking version 12.15, which is also the last release for Linux boxes. Later versions apparently morphed into something like Chrome.
Opera versions
I go with
Appearance: Toolbars: tab and address displayed at the top.
Appearance: Panels: bookmarks placed on the right with a panel toggle shown.
Regretfully, I already stopped using Firefox the second Chrome came out so I cannot uninstall it. It had essentially become Netscape all over again – unattractive visually, unintuitive operationally, slow and buggy technically. Eich’s critics were wrong, but you honestly need to be religious about Mozilla to like Mozilla. That kind of product breeds a certain type of corporate culture – us v. them, bitterly-clinging-to-past-glory, “if we could just force our values on the customer they would see we are the best” corporate culture. And that attracts a certain type of employee. Eich could very well be reaping what he sowed here.
Looks to be a pyrrhic victory. Eich lost some face, but Mozilla lost much more. The company employed ~600 people, so it will be interesting what’s left a year from now. If layoffs come, there is an easy list to start. To be clear, I don’t advocate firing people for speaking their minds, either way. But when an employee uses their position with the company to damage the company, then they are not an useful employee. Eich spoke with his money well before becoming Mozilla CEO and he spoke not as a Mozilla representative but as a private citizen. Those facts will be ignored by many.
O Irony. Wasn’t that long ago a hint of being gay could get you fired. How far we have come!
Since the very presence of Bendan Eich is intolerable, isn’t it a bit hypocritical to continue using JavaScript – a technology that runs most of the world’s websites? After all, he created it and I’m sure it is just stuffed to the gills with intolerance.
I’m honestly trying to understand your position here. The people who voiced their displeasure over Eich’s donation record do not control the company. The board does, and they’re the ones who removed Eich because he’s not representing the values Mozilla wants to project. How does that make the individuals who complained “fascists”?
And if conservatives want to punish Mozilla for this action by publicly choosing some other browser, does that make them fascists, too? Or let’s take an even more direct analogy: There were conservative groups in 2013 calling for a boycott of Starbucks because the CEO publicly supported SSM rights. Are they fascists?
Mau mauing someone to get them fired for their religious views is qualitatively different than choosing not to purchase, or to stop using a product. The board wouldn’t have fired him if the employees hadn’t made the stink.
My understanding is that employees might have voiced concern about Eich, but that the pressure came from clients like OKCupid and Rarebit. A small number of Mozilla employees don’t control the actions of those businesses. The boycotts from those entities still don’t look fundamentally different (to me) than the National Organization for Marriage calling for a boycott of Starbucks or (as they’re now demanding) a boycott of Mozilla. If one is mau mauing, I think they’re all may mauing. But I suppose we’re not going to see eye-to-eye on this.
it’s individuals exercising free choice, and free speech, to communicate their
displeasure.
Nothing prevents conservatives from opening the conserva-browser foundation
and setting up in mississippi.
Nothing prevents you from ever making an intelligent comment, except your apparent rampant stupidity.
I’d say nothing prevents him from creating his own blog to make stupid comments, but the ability to free ride is an incentive not too.
The board has every right to do as it wants, as do I by removing Firefox. I don’t know why Rand calls the vocal minority fascists, but I call them that because they only allow a company to have certain views.
There were conservative groups in 2013 calling for a boycott of Starbucks because the CEO publicly supported SSM rights. Are they fascists?
Yes, they are. America is far too polarized these days. Frankly, whiny busybodies are controlling more and more of the public square.
I should also add that those people protesting Starbucks are not trying to Fundamentally Change America.
Not sure why having the same position as Obama and most of the Democrats in 2011 somehow means you should be cast out from society now. That is what is taking place not some bs about corporate standards. It is a leftist PC crusade to remove from society anyone who doesn’t fall enthusiastically in line with ever changing PC orthodoxy.
I am also not sure why Democrats get a pass while the other must be dealt with in the harshest terms. Dick Cheney was for SSM before Obama does that mean we all have to follow Dick Cheney’s political ideology?
Dick Cheney was for SSM before Obama
What? As late as December 2013:
Cheney said that the situation was difficult for the family, but declined to go any further about the issue of gay marriage. “That’s as far as I’m going to go on the subject,” he said to his interviewer. “Don’t waste your time.”
He’s never been for it, even though he has a daughter with a direct stake in the matter. The guy is a heartless lizard, and you’ve been misguided by your favorite media.
So is Obama a heartless lizard for thinking the same way Eich did in 2008? Do we know how Eich actually treats gay people? There are all kinds of people who think differently than me about what marriage is, before you even bring gender into the discussion. It has never stopped me from being able to interact with them professionally in a diverse society.
Also, from lizard man’s wikipedia, “Cheney has stated that he is in favor of gay marriages but that each individual state should decide whether to permit it.[83]” But because he isn’t enthusiastic enough in his support of the Democrat party’s ideological crusade to appropriate culture for partisan politics you think he isn’t even a human being.
So is Obama a heartless lizard for thinking the same way Eich did in 2008?
Yes, he was. I deplored it then, and I applauded him reversing that position later. Cheney could do the same, especially given that he has a child directly affected by bigoted legislation. But he won’t, because ideology trumps all in his world.
It has nothing to do with ideology. At least not for those who don’t want to redefine marriage. It’s about religion.
“Cheney has stated that he is in favor of gay marriages but that each individual state should decide whether to permit it.”
Dave, maybe you should see how your own ideology trumps all before ridiculing Cheney. His view that states should make the decision is in line with the Constitution. What’s your view in line with?
An organization which has produced some excellent software has been libeled by the “gay marriage” lobby, and the full fallout for Mozilla is yet to be seen. At the same time that lobby has attracted ire from a lot of people, some of whom are nominally supportive of said lobby.
The opponents of the Left must use all effective tactics necessary to destroy it completely.
The opponents of the Left must use all effective tactics necessary to destroy it completely
Great that you want to advertise your ideological strategy widely, but a substantive reply to the questions at hand would be more useful for a conversation about the topic. I’ll give Rand credit for allowing that on his website.
It also helps that the Left’s own actions are also assuring its own demise. A good example of this is Andrew Sullivan’s disgust at this obvious Puritan witch hunt against Eich.
Maybe if employees spent more time on the software and less time worrying about gay marriage, Mozilla would have less bugs.
As for those switching to Chrome, doesn’t most of Mozilla’s money come from Google?
My position is that everybody had the legal and ethical right to do what they did – Eich, OKCupid, the Mozilla board, the activists both for and against Eich – but I find many of the players to have acted odiously, and am quite glad that I gave up on Firefox several years ago.
Mozilla is dying anyway; see their recent spin of the decision to put ads in their product for a particularly egregious example.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out over the next year or so. Will the market share for Firefox increase or decrease? How about the relative market shares of OKCupid verses other online dating services like eHarmony and Christian Mingle?
Mozilla’s market share has been declining for years, thanks to a number of terrible decisions. For example, the ‘we’re going to make it just like Chrome’ mania, when many Firefox users used it precisely because it wasn’t just like Chrome, then the ‘Firefox isn’t for business users’ debacle, where many businesses used Firefox because they didn’t trust Internet Explorer, then the repeated changes to the UI which just move things around on every new release and hide options that users are used to having easy access to.
It’s almost as though Google has been paying them to destroy Firefox to eliminate a competitor from the browser market.
Dave, maybe you should see how your own ideology trumps all before ridiculing Cheney. His view that states should make the decision is in line with the Constitution. What’s your view in line with?
Equality under the law. Marriage is a legal contract that affords special rights, benefits, and responsibilities between two people. It’s not a religious institution — the state only recognizes marriages that the state has licensed.
Of course it is not a religious institution as far as how legal marriage works. However the state provides those benefits for a reason which completely escapes proponents of “gay marriage”. Self-perpetuation.
The state has no business deciding who your room mates are. “gay marriage” is pointless expect for people who feel like they should be entitled to benefits other people have without having similar responsibility.
There are also other things like freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of association in the Constitution. Personally, I don’t really care very much one way or the other about gay marriage or gays in general. I do care about the freedom to live as one chooses. People are losing their jobs and businesses for their beliefs (the same beliefs that Obama said he had until 2012) but it’s happening in a very familiar one-sided way. No one is calling for Obama to resign for the beliefs he held in 2008. This is becoming yet another political weapon. The same thing happened in the 1990s when we were lectured ad nauseum about how had sexual harassment is and people lost yheir jobs over it, except for Bill Clinton’s “one free grope” pass from NOW and Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd getting away with their “waitress sandwich” actions.
I think we’re likely to see some strong pushback on all of this. People who don’t care one way or the other might become hostile to the extremists. What’s the likely outcome when a church that doesn’t want to conduct a gay wedding gets sued and ordered by a court to do so? You know it’s going to happen, probably within the next year or two. Do the courts get to dictate (deliberate choice of that word) what religious views are allowable and the contents of the Torah, Bible and Koran? BTW, I’ll bet $100 that none of the gay rights extremists will have the balls to try and force a mosque to hold a gay wedding ceremony.