Is it a detailed email summarized as "I know where you live, you better watch your step, because I'm going to kill you"?
Or a tweet of "Fuck off and die"
Indeed, I've gotten quite a few death threats myself over the years for my radical cause of trying to improve the quality of video game emulators.
The problem with the internet is that you can't really judge a person's mental state from a text post. Quite often the person on the other end making the threats is literally mentally ill.
I love your work by the way.
God's work. Thank you for this.
That said, death threats are always disproportional, and I think we can all agree that however you feel about Eich and his contribution, they were uncalled for.
The lack of survivor benefits is ridiculous. But it is (or could and should be) completely orthogonal to how government defines the term "marriage."
"many felt was incompatible with his personal views"
Who all is "many" here? People at Mozilla? People in the tech industry? People who are LGBT? Angry people on the internet with nothing better to do than troll?
People who actually were directly and personally affected by Eich's actions in donating, of which there are quite few compared to the number of people weighing in on this?
It's easy to have an echo-chamber hollering for blood, but let's not pretend that those voices have any automatic credibility.
Is this the case? There are a whole bunch of LGBT people working at Mozilla, and in the wider tech community. On top of that, there are families and friends of these people, who while not being personally affected can certainly legitimately object to the damage done to their close peers.
I suspect that this affects more people than you are implying.
Again, what damage, and how does that get traced directly back to Eich? The law was repealed, marriage reinstated, and everything's fine. The system worked, so what's the issue?
And a "whole bunch"? How many? Numbers? Percentage? Let us not suspect--we are in the Information Age. Google your way to success.
The only number we have is $1000 from Eich to support Prop 8--that's the only number we have. Somehow that one number is enough evidence to cost the man his job, but magically nobody else has to back up their assails.
Look, if the numbers for this act justify the outrage, sure, I'll recant--but that simply hasn't happened yet, and the bookkeeping is pretty shoddy.
And furthermore, are you really trying to say we should have to directly tie how that money went into the Prop 8 bank account and then was spent to influence voters in California?
You're making completely irrational requests. Showing up at an anti-civil rights protest back in the 60s may not have directly influenced someone to keep their mouth shut out of safety(and how would you prove that it did), but it has an influence and to act like because you can't directly tie it to someone is to absolve people of any past wrongdoings short of force.
Changing your mind is okay. Saying you were wrong is okay. They need to be, as society grows and matures. But the same as the risks taken by those who try to push society's opinions ahead of itself, if you lag behind you're just as likely to get hurt.
Sorry, and I hate to be the one to say it, but his view isn't that far from mainstream. In fact, it would seem less than a decade ago, it was quite popular.
Just because your opinion is currently popular, doesn't mean the people who disagreed with you six years ago owe you an apology or they can't have a job.
So, yeah, I don't think it's unreasonable that, in exchange, we be able to show both columns in the ledger.
When controversial stuff like this happens, it is sadly common to receive death threats on the internet. Given that employees merely voicing support received death threats, I would be surprised if the CEO did not receive such things as well.
While I agree with you that the HN crowd is not YouTube, there are still many people reading this and sharing with others etc., and since the blogger I am talking about has already been harassed, I don't see a point in drawing more attention there. It doesn't help our discussion anyhow, there are only downsides.
[citation needed]
It must have been difficult for him to receive the same treatment as every sufficiently notable LGBT individual.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6239098.stm - 17% of UK gay students report receiving death threats
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2008/victims.html - 17% of hate crimes in the US (2008) are related to sexual orientation (mainly against male homosexuals).
I think it would be fair to extrapolate that famous gay people also receive plenty of death threats.
I don't think that this follows. In this particular case, someone was promoted to a role which many felt was incompatible with his personal views; they made that known, and the person in question stepped down. That's kind of how things should work in a community enterprise.
That said, I understand he's received wildly disproportionate abuse, like death threats. That's totally unacceptable, and frankly I'm surprised that anybody feels that strongly about the issue.