I for one commend Eich, for putting on his big boy pants and owning the consequences of his actions.

He held an unpopular view, acted on it, and people weren't happy with him. Far better to step down and let the organization right itself, than to try and hold onto his position and his retrograde views simultaneously. Shows real class.

> He held an unpopular view, acted on it, and people weren't happy with him.

Isn't this the plot to every dystopian story ever told ("conform, or else")?

As a lefty, I understand the motivation, but disagree with it- it will never work; you will never change a persons values (positive or negative) via public shaming, all you will do is force the 'undesirable attitudes' underground. As a member of a 'disadvantaged minority', I'd rather have bigotry out in the open and act accordingly. If Trump has as a silver lining, it is dragging all the latent bigotry into the light.

edit: I always like to compare Mozilla to Dropbox. In the immediate aftermath of Eich being forced out, the same boycott mob tried to pressure Dropbox into removing Condoleezza Rice from its board for being a 'war criminal'. In contrast, Dropbox's board didn't blink- they called the bluff and showed unequivocal support for Ms. Rice with a firm "No" and that was the end of it.

Yeah, this resonates with me a lot.

I think humans are meta and that when censorship occurs like this it only empowers the people it's trying to silence. Meaning that while Brandon Eich may personally have had negative impact, I honestly don't think in terms of public opinion that this incident had a positive impact on gay rights. Instead, it's cited as an example of how the 'regressive left' is silencing conservative views, it strengthens their resolve.

I think a large part of it is due to the internet. Meaning, in the past this likely wouldn't have been seen by nearly as many people, and they wouldn't have the ability or impetus to truly impact the individual.

Given the relative ease of denigrating him, plus acting from a place of moral authority(depending on your views...) this is the result. And the 'justice' felt good too, because it was 'right'.

I think about this a _lot_. I can feel the racial tensions even in my neighborhood, it's never felt this fractious before and I honestly believe the perceived(and in many cases very real) levels of censorship are a major contributing factor.

Racism/Sexism/Homophobia - I firmly believe that the majority of individuals can see the immoral and in many cases plain stupid aspects of these. I also firmly believe that a part of developing a healthy moral framework involves 'testing/bouncing off' offensive beliefs between one another so that we can rationalize and come to the conclusions ourselves, not being able to freely 'play' stifles growth.

All the silence does is make people want to go home and release their angst online, we end up with extremely polarized communities where these specific local instances of injustice from both sides are used to justify/re-enforce a narrative. The end result(or perhaps the ongoing/developing and hopefully not escalating) is things like actual white supremacists on /pol/ and #KillAllWhites etc. on Twitter.

I have so much more I could say about this really.

Not all dystopian stories are about non-comformity, and many, many non-dystopian stories involve social pressure or censure.

Social pressure (conform or face consequences) is one of the basic parts of the human experience, so this is unsurprising.

I too like how Trump is pulling a lot of hidden bigotry back out into the open; it gives me a chance to talk with my well-meaning but ignorant lefty friends about how racism really is still prevalent, and a problem.

But it isn't enough just to show it's there, the point is to top up our sense that those attitudes are unacceptable and don't belong in civil society, and that we all still need to keep working on getting those ideas out of the discourse, and so on.

But getting bigoted ideas out of civil society? Well, we're back to social pressure ("conform to my vision of the world where bigotry is no longer a thing").

If, by the way, you think bigoted ideas do belong in civil society, then we probably won't get any further than that.

>I for one commend Eich, for putting on his big boy pants and owning the consequences of his actions.

You might as well commend Soviet dissidents for "putting on their big boy pants and owning the consequences of their actions" when the KGB marched them off to the Gulag. The fact that someone bows to bullying pressure doesn't make the bullying pressure OK.

There was nothing in Mozilla that needed to be "righted" with respect to Eich, except, as it turned out, cowardice and spinelessness. Of course, working for organization that throws you under the bus on the first sigh somebody on twitter is cross with you is no picnic either, so maybe Eich is better of for this.

The only way this will work is if you keep pretending he had no say in the matter. He resigned. Get over it.

By "say" you mean that if he wanted, he could've stayed and Mozilla as an organization would support him and he wouldn't have any trouble? Yeah right.

Of course he would have had trouble, enough that he felt like he had to go. But this was a personal issue between him and his colleagues. Comparing it into company-wide discrimination is not helpful. You're comparing a matter of policy (company-wide discrimination) with a matter of personal politics (can't work with this guy because we don't agree with him, plus he's using my added value as a way to attack my way of life).

The end results are the same but the mechanism isn't. Could his colleagues have been more accommodating of his views ? Maybe. But they didn't. That's a personal problem that comes from a large cultural clash.

> But this was a personal issue between him and his colleagues.

No it wasn't "personal issue". There was no personal issues with Eich, no evidence of anybody having personal beef with him - either because of sexual orientation issues or any other - was ever documented. It was a purely political issue, namely - political pressure to punish Eich for holding a particular viewpoint, completely unrelated to his job performance.

> Comparing it into company-wide discrimination is not helpful.

There was neither wide nor narrow discrimination. There wasn't any. Discrimination was not the issue. Thoughtcrime on Eich's part was.

> can't work with this guy because we don't agree with him

If you can't work with people that disagree with you, you should work as a lighthouse watcher, ranger in a remote mountainous region, hermit or another profession that puts you out of contact with people. People should not have to lose jobs because you disagree with them.

> Could his colleagues have been more accommodating of his views ? Maybe.

Nobody asked his colleagues to be "accommodating" to anything. The only thing was to have minimum decency to not throw out a person because he committed a thoughtcrime. That proved to high a bar for Mozilla. Thus they organization will now have to live with infamy of what they did. It takes years to build trust, it takes one case like this to destroy it.

> That's a personal problem that comes from a large cultural clash.

There was no "clash". Eich did not "clash" with anybody. There was a campaign of personal destruction, which run him out of the job, and which in eyes of many - including me - branded Mozilla as organization which is cowardly, disloyal to their loyal workers, and easily manipulated by hate mobs.