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Firing people for their opinions is actually fine - if you believe that certain types of people don't deserve rights, for example, and your company has those types of people in it, that's a problem. Freedom of opinion is not guaranteed.
Well done folks, your MAGA browser culture war has ruined browsers just like it ruins everything else it touches.
But maybe they'll actually ban gay marriage again and it will all have been worth it for you.
- External pressure, including a high profile boycott campaign, was widespread and widely reported
- Brendan Eich remained a Mozilla employee for years after his donation was first publicly discussed (in the LA Times and on Twitter), with no apparent pressure to leave. The board appointed him CEO with full knowledge of his views and knowledge that they were publicly known.
- There were relatively few public statements from Mozilla employees asking him to resign, and none from executives or board members.
- I think it's unusual for companies to explicitly lie and say "we tried to get them to stay". It might even expose them to defamation claims or something. If the board forces a resignation, they'll just say "they resigned" (which is technically true) and leave it at that.
They didn't fire him. They even tried to get him to stay after he resigned.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/faq-on-ceo-resignation/
He made a choice, and to the best of my knowledge, he hasn't corrected the record.
It's easy to keep abortions secret. They're protected by privacy laws, so even HR can't ask about them. Medical issues are secret from the workplace by default.
It's impossible to keep your sexuality secret if you're married. Your marital status at work is public by default. And no one should have to keep the identity of their spouse secret for fear of being treated worse by the CEO.
The point being free speech is a two-way street. Speech without consequences is actually un-free in that sense. Because you're free to say whatever, but I'm not free to say whatever in response.
Now, whether corporate actions constitute speech is kind of another question. But the consensus in the US is that yes, they do. Corporations are allowed to have opinions and make donations, and they're allowed to fire you for having opinions or making donations.
The important thing to note is that free speech, as we understand it, is a protection for private entities from public entities. Meaning it protects you, a citizen, from public censorship. And it protects companies, private entities, from public censorship. So it, in a way, enables private companies to censor. Because the public can't censor their censorship.
Just curious: would you defend a company for firing someone for speaking out in support of gay marriage?
Well companies already do this all the time - this is more so the status-quo. I'm not going to pretend the majority are somehow, in some roundabout way, oppressed. Is this person fired for supporting gay marriage, or being gay? Because obviously that's illegal... you can't fire someone for being part of a protected class. Being a republican or whatever is not a protected class, being gay is. One matters, one doesn't.
I consider harassment for political opinions, evil. Privately held political opinions. And Mozilla barred itself from working with a top engineer, inventor of Javascript, for privately-held political reasons, and gave reigns from engineers to business types of people. They kept Mozilla dependent on Google, an economic tie which sidesteps Mozilla from being an alternative to Google.
Some comments say I’m holding a grudge, but Brendan Eich is not the only one harassed, it was a statement from Mozilla, it meant We do not tolerate other opinions
I consider harassment for political opinions, evil. You are free to believe differently, but at least you cannot say with a straight face that Mozilla has a moral standing against Google.
Implementing this meant that people who worked for the state, and other neutral institutions, had to work with others who they honestly believed were heretics that would go to hell. Both they and the institution had to learn to keep their tribal conflicts—nominally religious and doctrinal, but in practice tribal—under control. This was difficult, but very valuable to all sides. The truce enabled mutually beneficial cooperation and the prosperity that entailed.
Centuries later, some tribes find themselves in control of certain institutions. The truce, the principle of neutrality, restricts them, and they see little benefit from it. "Why not violate it, and start a fight over this issue where we have the upper hand? We'll win!" Sometimes this takes the form of arguing tendentiously that the other side violated the truce first, and hence their attacks are in fact justified retaliation. Other times they seem ignorant of the value of having a truce, and are likely ignorant of its history (which is not taught well). So they start trampling on it.
Depending on what we imagine their motives to be, and how narrowly we consider them... On that issue in isolation—gay marriage—it's probably "rational". However, violating the truce makes it easier to do more of that, both for them and their opponents. On this issue they have the upper hand, and they'll win. On abortion, they have the advantage, but less so. On other issues (such as putting biological males in women's sports and women's prisons) they have minority support, and if they keep up their attitude of just fighting because "why not?" (subject to tactical considerations), they will provoke the opposition to fight back more and harder, and eventually they'll lose ground on the issues themselves—to say nothing of the costs of the fighting and the lost value due to the broken truce.
They are short-sighted, ignorant, aggressive little barbarians who start smashing the thing in front of them, unaware that it's a pillar holding up many things we and even they hold dear. They know not what they do. I guess this is where we see the deficiencies of current education.
I do not have an opinion on abortion, and I’d probably lean towards a yes. But Mozilla being capable of making it a problem out of someone’s history, 10 years earlier, a private donation, shows a major issue of intolerance.
The root cause: Mozilla turned woke, and did look into the past of each employee to fire them. The wokists see no problem with that, but for the rest of us, it’s the darkest time for intolerance.
1. Mozilla didn't fire anyone. My understanding is they actually tried to keep him.
2. Public pressure, dollar voting, and boycotts is just the free market at work. The invisible hand is real but it seems to me as soon as the invisible hand starts pushing stuff we all get uncomfortable.
3. Nobody takes anyone seriously who says "woke". That word means absolutely nothing to anyone, it's just a dog whistle. A type of inverse virtue signal that you are not a serious person worth listening to.
Mozilla decided to #2 appeal to those types of people, with various angles including “renewing the masculinity inside Mozilla”. It’s not public pressure, as the public went on for a backlash against wokism in the 2020 and later. Mozilla is in an ironic situation where it is now driven by those incompetent people, while the public moved on, and its values are not a value proposition anymore.
Especially the “We fire people who do not think like us” part. Let me tell you that the kind of public “We harass people into quitting” answers perfectly to #1 in my books.
Just be good. Just be good people! That’s all we ask!
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44446181 and marked it off topic.