Comment by zwdr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zwdr | Hacker News Reader

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>Hypothetically, if the CEO of another tech company was revealed to have political interests in slavery, would we feel the need to tip-toe so carefully? First, I would ask if that interest influences his job. If that's not the case, it doesn't concern the broad public. At the very least not in combination with his status as CEO. And that's it. Everything further is a witch hunt.

>While I don't feel comfortable lynching someone based on contextually irrelevant beliefs

You say the words but somehow you manage to do the exact opposite.

In his blog (https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/) he writes

>I intend to demonstrate with meaningful action my commitment to a Mozilla that lives up to its ideals, including that of being an open and inclusive community.

I believe that, until proven wrong. So how about judging him by his actions as a CEO? Instead of a private donation? IMO its the only correct thing.

That was point one. The second one I want to make is about elephants and blind people. Elephants are big– so big that blind people are only able to perceive a part of them. So they all disagree about what the elephant is. And gay marriage is an elephant and opinions are elephant parts. I doubt this elephant has just two parts labelled "Equality For Everyone" and "Hate And Bigotry". Please don't make the error of boiling down a complex issue to two sides.

What's complex about allowing gay marriage? Sure, you've got some tax law wording to fiddle with, maybe, and the definition of "partner" probably needs changing in a few ordinances but how is it complex? Even the UK (and we're pretty useless most of the time) has managed to allow it with civilisation collapsing.

The complex part is that a lot of people have a lot of different opinions on it. Now I don't know most of them, because I have no personal interest in it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_marriage has a few...), but dismissing every argument made against same-sex-marriage in one broad swipe is refusing to take every other point of view into consideration.

People have lots of different opinions on things but government hasn't ground to a halt (except when yours does but I don't think that's policy paralysis.)

Saying "there's many sides to the story" is a lame excuse that people (especially politicians) use to avoid making decisions.

>Saying "there's many sides to the story" is a lame excuse that people (especially politicians) use to avoid making decisions.

That might be true, but it's also true that making decisions based on a strongly opinionated argument led to literal witch hunts. With burning and everything involved. (And OS-flamewars, these are even worse). I guess the best option is to find a healthy balance between choosing a side and considering conflicting points of view.

In this case, I think there are some angles of view that might be contra-marriage but not hateful. That's all I wanted to say– I don't think Eich is a bigot, his reason might be different than the one that a a lot of people placed in his mouth.

I agree with you there - in that I don't think he's a bigot in the general sense of the word - he's misguided (IMHO, natch) in voting for Prop 8 but probably not actually homophobic (he might be - it's not possible to tell from this single action.)

But if you're going to be the CEO of a very public organisation, things like this (or, say, shooting an elephant, hiring hula girls for trade show, using racial epithets, whatever) will bite you badly in the ass and you really need a good narrative beyond "the lurkers[1] support me".

[1] Indonesians

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