This time it’s Javascript inventor Brendan Eich, who failed to pull his neck in quickly enough as the Overton Window sped leftward. He was defenestrated today as head of Mozilla, for supporting a rational ideological position that every society on earth — and even Barack Obama himself — defended until just a couple of years ago. (Please forgive this mangled mish-mosh of metaphors.)
Have a heterodox opinion? Better keep it to yourself, if you have anything to lose. Your career is now fair game if you make unapproved comments or political donations.
21 Comments
I agree with you here. His personal views have nothing to do with his qualifications to run the business.
andrew sullivan was great on this today:
“The Hounding Of A Heretic”
“The whole episode disgusts me — as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today — hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else — then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.”
Peter, you have made my day.
HBD, thanks for that link. Glad to see Sullivan is on the right side of this.
In coming years, as more and more of these tumbrels begin to roll, I think we are going to see a lot of intelligent and decent people on the Left pulling back in horror as they begin to understand what they have unleashed on the West. These things take on a momentum of their own.
I once worked for a company next to Mozilla in Mountain View (we took over their old space when they moved to larger quarters next door). It’s an oddball outfit. Mozilla is a not-for-profit foundation, and the people who work there seem to have the skewed vision of the world which can occur when you don’t have to compete in the marketplace. I don’t think that Eich’s ouster is emblematic of anything more than how weird Mozilla is.
This is the sort of move that convinces people of the existence of a Lavender Lobby and a Homosexual Agenda.
It’s extra insane when I consider the specific background and position of Eich: he’s the creator of Javascript (which is widely used across the internet), co-founder of Mozilla, and he gets kicked of Mozilla.
If a man can be pressed out of a company in his own field that he helped start where he has demonstrated particular expertise and experience, where can he NOT be kicked out of? And what precedent does this set for “I don’t like your political contributions” firings in the future?
“I don’t think that Eich’s ouster is emblematic of anything more than how weird Mozilla is.”
I disagree. There was Larry Summers at Harvard, Francis Lawrence at Rutgers, now possibly Stephen Colbert. It’s getting worse.
I intended to link yesterday to an article I recalled had previously been linked to from which I do now.
Alas, I couldn’t recall the fellow’s name nor Bill’s post title …
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2014/04/the-terms-of-our-surrender.html
Probably best I couldn’t recall the author’s title now I think more on it – wouldn’t want to ruin Malcolm, yours and Peter’s current chuminess.
I do recall it appeared in The National Review.
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/brendan-eichs-downfall/
Imagine what would have happened instead had Mr. Eich been fired for making donations in support of homosexual marriage.
This has become quite a contentious issue here in the Valley. A number of heavyweights have come to Eich’s defense, and a lot of Firefox users have switched to Chrome.
You could probably make the case that the Board violated its fiduciary responsibility by (apparently) firing him for reasons unrelated to job or business performance. My guess is that he will be reinstated.
I hope you’re right. To quote this editorial from NRO:
In his book Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, Julius Evola had this to say about the so-called “freedom” that has so often been yoked to the totalitarian fiction of radical “equality”:
It’s time to set some limits.
You would think that NRO would be thrilled with Lawrence v. Texas. If your guiding principle is that the government which governs best is the government which governs least – or its corollary, that the individual should have the freedom and liberty to live his life as he pleases – then the sexual behavior of two consenting adults should be far from the state’s jurisdiction.
Apparently their enthusiasm for Liberty and Freedom only extends to acts they personally approve of.
Don’t confuse conservatism, which often seeks to protect and preserve the cultural order, with hard libertarianism.
That said, NRO didn’t express any opinion, favorable or not, about the worthiness of Lawrence v. Texas.
Conservatism and libertarianism overlap to the extent that both value limited government and (purportedly) individual freedom.
The entire NRO article makes it clear that they disapprove of the “homosexual agenda,” including the decriminalization of sodomy. If they supported Lawrence, that support would be in contradiction to everything else in the piece.
Frank Bruni – no stranger to anal intercourse – also defends Eich and attacks his attackers:
“(Andrew) Sullivan is right to raise concerns about the public flogging of someone like Eich. Such vilification won’t accelerate the timetable of victory, which is certain. And it doesn’t reflect well on the victors.”
When Bruni says that those who vilified Eich went too far, you know they really did go too far.
Despite some overlap, that’s a terrible oversimplification. Even the concept of “freedom”, properly understood, takes on very different meanings for conservatives and libertarians. I won’t belabor the point here (it’s worth a post of its own), but suffice it to say that conservatives, particularly what are known as “traditional” conservatives, prioritize the harmonious functioning of a society as an organic system arising naturally from shared principles, while libertarians prioritize only a radical, atomizing concept of freedom that can be quite at odds with the “conservative” ideal.
As we see already, the radicalization of the sort of “individual freedom” that is at the center of this issue (and is the highest ideal of the libertarian) typically leads not to healthy, organic liberty (let alone a harmonious, well-functioning society), but tilts instead toward ever-greater restrictions on permissible speech and opinion. It creates a society that is not an integrated whole, in which every person has a natural place and relation to the hierarchy, but a seething aggregate of individuals, connected, ultimately, only to the State, whose interests are constantly in conflict.
That may be, but you can’t use the power of the state to enforce “the harmonious functioning of a society as an organic system arising naturally from shared principles” and preach the virtues of limited government at the same time, especially when those principles are no longer shared by growing numbers of people.
If you believe that the government has no right to interfere in the realm of personal conduct and morality, then it has no right to do so regardless of what is traditional or whether the conduct was accepted or disfavored in the past. If you allow the power of the state to block social change simply to adhere to what societal norms once were, then you have no right to proclaim your adherence to limited government and personal freedom.
http://jurist.org/hotline/2014/03/joseph-larue-religious-freedom.php#.U0G4w7dOWM8
Hmmm
http://jurist.org/hotline/2014/03/joseph-larue-religious-freedom.php
Ah, but you see, the more that society is an organic system arising naturally from shared principles, the more liberty you have without the state having to do anything.
This is why open-borders multiculturalism is so lethal, why secularism is so maladaptive, and why the radical dubiety of the Enlightenment itself contained the seeds of social collapse.
This question of the different forms of liberty is a really important one, and it’s been on my mind a lot lately.
But I’m on the road tonight, and so will have to come back to this later.
“If you believe that the government has no right to interfere in the realm of personal conduct and morality, then it has no right to do so regardless of what is traditional or whether the conduct was accepted or disfavored in the past.”
Do you remember David Epstein? The columbia professor and HuffPo contributor who was charged with incest — sex with his daughter. He used Lawrence in his defense.
Just in case you need a definition of slippery slope.