We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12666782 and marked it off-topic.

It's too bad that people are willing to use their money and influence to negatively affect specific groups of people. Both Eich and Luckey made personal choices that negatively affected users of their products. As a response, these users, and people who support them, have decided to reject them.

It's hardly the new McCarthyism when there's no government force that leads the charge against private citizens, driving them to be unable to find any work in their field in the US.

The public deciding that it doesn't want to support someone is an entirely different phenomenon. The public can still be wrong, of course, but there's no need to conflate the two situations.

They're both the phenomenon of policing thought and coercing others to publicly profess, or at least acquiesce to, only blessed opinions. It hardly matters, to this point, whether the behavior is centralized or emergent.

> ostracize

Brendan has his own startup in SV and appears in JS community podcasts, conferences, and meetups. The community is always talking to him on Twitter in a positive way. He may have had to leave Mozilla, but he's anything but ostracized.

No, it's not too bad that assholes are called out.

oh man totally. neither brendan eich nor palmer luckey have gotten any work ever since they were blackballed by silicon valley.

oh wait. they weren't was blackballed. and one has his own startup, the other is basically set for life.

oh wait. has either one of them appeared in from the a senate committee to defend themselves for false accusations of subverting the u.s. gov, or committing treason? without any evidence?

Well, that's hardly true. I thought we'd established that JS in inferior to Lisp.

;-)

You forgot this: (

That's only funny once.

Then it gets frustrating;

DAMMIT where the heck is it!!!

That, OTOH, might be funny for a second time. Maybe.

This feels like basically the reverse of the ad hominem, where if you agree with the things someone is saying in a particular context, you also have to praise them as a person. And it's a fallacy for the same reason the ad hominem is a fallacy. I can respect Brendan Eich's technical views without having to respect his political / social ones, and I can believe that he's amazingly qualified to be CTO of Mozilla, a technical role, and yet amazingly unsuited to be CEO, a political/social role. And this isn't just me - none of the controversy started until he moved from CTO to CEO.

If we can't do that, then we ostracize people who aren't a cookie-cutter $political_view.

And how many users does your programming language have?

We would be better off if JavaScript didn't exist, so by that rationale I've contributed more than him by not creating a language.

You would be better off. I love JavaScript, it's my favorite language (I like things that are accessible to everyone), so I would be worse off.

Well, it's not like he wanted to do it.

That's un-called for.

Well that escalated quickly.