Mozilla CEO resigns after OkCupid boycott

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Cramulus, I don't understand what the complaint is, here.  The public heard something they didn't like, and decided to do something peacefully about it while not being consistent and pure?  That's hardly new.  The public is made up of people, obviously, and people react to things they notice.  For whatever reason, they noticed this.

Not sure what we should do about it, either, or whether we should so something even if we could.

[Cramulus]

Mainly I think it's a big manipulation -- people's reasonable need for social justice is being coopted and used as a weapon in unrelated fights and marketing campaigns which do not meaningfully serve social justice. I think that it's unproductive at best and harmful to the dialog at worst.

I'm having flashbacks to how Nabisco got a lot of street cred for releasing this image:



---and yet the top recipient of Nabisco money is Rick Fucking Santorum.

That's why I see high-profile corporate opinions more in the light of marketing than activism, unless a meaningful amount of money is changing hands. We crave the spectacle surrounding activism. If you could really support LGBT rights by not using firefox or javascript, that would be amazing. If we boycotted companies that gave meaningful amounts of money to trash gay rights, that would be amazing. I just don't think this is doing it.

[Cramulus]

It's probably good that we are driving homophobes underground though, don't get me wrong. I just feel like American activism is badly malnourished and we are just basically feeding it junk food.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Mainly I think it's a big manipulation -- people's reasonable need for social justice is being coopted and used as a weapon in unrelated fights and marketing campaigns which do not meaningfully serve social justice. I think that it's unproductive at best and harmful to the dialog at worst.

I'm having flashbacks to how Nabisco got a lot of street cred for releasing this image:



---and yet the top recipient of Nabisco money is Rick Fucking Santorum.

That's why I see high-profile corporate opinions more in the light of marketing than activism, unless a meaningful amount of money is changing hands. We crave the spectacle surrounding activism. If you could really support LGBT rights by not using firefox or javascript, that would be amazing. If we boycotted companies that gave meaningful amounts of money to trash gay rights, that would be amazing. I just don't think this is doing it.

Problem:  There isn't much dialogue in the first place.  On one side, you have the tumblr social justice warrior assholes, on the other side the WBC shitbags and their ilk...While anyone who has a reasonable approach is ground into hamburger between the two.

What I saw here was a knee-jerk reaction.  That's usually bad.  But it was a knee jerk reaction in the right direction.  A majority of people got pissed because this guy likes to shit all over people who never harmed him, when they heard about it.

Sort of like if you're at a party, and some guy starts jawing racist bullshit.  These days, most of the time, everyone's gonna look at him like he has a communicable disease.  40 years ago, they'd have agreed with him.  30 years ago, they'd have checked to make sure no minorities were around, and then agreed with him.  20 years ago, they would have made excuses for him.

And that's a sort of progress.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

It's probably good that we are driving homophobes underground though, don't get me wrong. I just feel like American activism is badly malnourished and we are just basically feeding it junk food.

Beat me to it.

But I think American activism right now is nothing BUT junk food.  If my first experience with activism was the retards who are getting all the attention these days, I'd be a reactionary.  No shit.

It's sad to say, but this IS the healthiest public reaction I've seen in a while.

[Cramulus]

I hear what you're saying. It's indicative of a positive trend, I agree.

It's just, like, Jim Walton (of the Walmart Clan) gave 75x more money than Eich to oppose gay adoption. And that's just one shareholder. The company as a whole has given unbelievable amounts of money to funding anti-equality legislation. (http://makingchangeatwalmart.org/files/2013/04/LGBT.pdf) But when I ask people why they're not boycotting walmart, they're like "Meh", or make a case that walmart's customers are already bigots, so what can you do? Well I guess making a meaningless browser decision is like helping. Might as well wank off over a gay rights sigil too. 

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I hear what you're saying. It's indicative of a positive trend, I agree.

It's just, like, Jim Walton (of the Walmart Clan) gave 75x more money than Eich to oppose gay adoption. And that's just one shareholder. The company as a whole has given unbelievable amounts of money to funding anti-equality legislation. (http://makingchangeatwalmart.org/files/2013/04/LGBT.pdf) But when I ask people why they're not boycotting walmart, they're like "Meh", or make a case that walmart's customers are already bigots, so what can you do? Well I guess making a meaningless browser decision is like helping. Might as well wank off over a gay rights sigil too. 

True.  I'm not expecting a perfect world by next Tuesday.

The best I can do is not spend a dime at WalMart, to be honest.  But the idea that WalMart's customers are "all bigots" is pretty horrifying, when you consider that what they're ACTUALLY saying is "poor".

[CorbeauEtRenard]

I can say that Walmart's harassment policy at least covers LGBT people...
But I can also say that the policy is roundly ignored, as well.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I can say that Walmart's harassment policy at least covers LGBT people...
But I can also say that the policy is roundly ignored, as well.

That's worse than no policy at all.

[CorbeauEtRenard]

I can say that Walmart's harassment policy at least covers LGBT people...
But I can also say that the policy is roundly ignored, as well.

That's worse than no policy at all.

Pretty much. It's one of several reasons I couldn't put up with their shit for two full pay periods before quitting.

[Cain]

I was always kinda in two minds about the Mozilla boycott.  You all know I'm not exactly a fan of half-measures, or measures that turn out to later be counterproductive.

On the one hand, the CEO is a bigot.  No question about it.  Debate over.  If you feel strongly enough about that to boycott the product, by all means I wont argue with that.  I was considering it myself, though given how used to FF I am over the years, finding another browser I'd like would not be easy.

On the other hand...more than a few gay people in the media were not keen on the campaign.  Andrew Sullivan (admittedly a bit of a strange duck, a Catholic gay conservative Obama supporter), compared the way in which the campaign was conducted as more akin to one of the religious right's five minutes of hate.  And as others, riffing off Sullivan pointed out, it was giving a huge amount of ammunition to the FOX News "lefty socialist tyranny" meme.

Of course, FOX News would generate an outrage where one wouldn't exist anyway.  But given 52% of California did, back in 2008 vote in favour of Prop 8, there's an argument to be made that the conduct of the protest was, perhaps...ill-advised.  Furthermore, there's an unsavoury history in the USA of civil actors engaging in the policing of free speech, especially in California. 

And, as Cram points out, the response was not very proportionate to what actually occured, when one really looks at the money flowing around to homophobic candidates and from other companies.  At the very least, that leaves the protests open to the charge of hypocrisy.

I suspect one of the reasons the protest caught on as much as it did is because Firefox is a browser many internet-savvy people use.  And those internet savvy people are also savvy in the realm of "hashtag activism".  And that's the only game in town, because most of these people don't understand any other way of protesting, or have pre-emptively cut themselves off from the people doing other kinds of protests for some kind of ideological heresy (usually being far less accomodating of capitalism, as it turns out.  See: popular bashing of Jacobin Magazine by Slate, The Nation, NYT etc etc).

[East Coast Hustle]

AHHHHHHHHHHahahahhahahaHAHAHhahah

http://uncrunched.com/2014/04/06/the-hypocrisy-of-sam-yagan-okcupid/


Turns out OKCupid's CEO has donated to strongly homophobic politicians too! Anybody else think this wasn't just a PR stunt?

Donations by the CEO seem more important than ones by employees who are not directly steering the course of the company, to me.

If you can show me how Eich's opinion on The Gays influenced Mozilla's company policy in any way, I'm all ears.

Funny how nobody boycotts javascript though.

You don't browse sites that use javascript? That's some dedication! Javascript runs the front end for google, facebook, youtube, yahoo, wikipedia, twitter, wordpress, amazon, ebay...

That's how I know it's inherently homophobic. Otherwise it would run the back end too. [/borat voice]

[LMNO]

AHHHHHHHHHHahahahhahahaHAHAHhahah

http://uncrunched.com/2014/04/06/the-hypocrisy-of-sam-yagan-okcupid/


Turns out OKCupid's CEO has donated to strongly homophobic politicians too! Anybody else think this wasn't just a PR stunt?

Donations by the CEO seem more important than ones by employees who are not directly steering the course of the company, to me.

If you can show me how Eich's opinion on The Gays influenced Mozilla's company policy in any way, I'm all ears.

Funny how nobody boycotts javascript though.

You don't browse sites that use javascript? That's some dedication! Javascript runs the front end for google, facebook, youtube, yahoo, wikipedia, twitter, wordpress, amazon, ebay...

That's how I know it's inherently homophobic. Otherwise it would run the back end too. [/borat voice]

[Cramulus]

That's how I know it's inherently homophobic. Otherwise it would run the back end too. [/borat voice]

very nice 

Mainly I think it's a big manipulation -- people's reasonable need for social justice is being coopted and used as a weapon in unrelated fights and marketing campaigns which do not meaningfully serve social justice. I think that it's unproductive at best and harmful to the dialog at worst.

I'm having flashbacks to how Nabisco got a lot of street cred for releasing this image:



---and yet the top recipient of Nabisco money is Rick Fucking Santorum.

That's why I see high-profile corporate opinions more in the light of marketing than activism, unless a meaningful amount of money is changing hands. We crave the spectacle surrounding activism. If you could really support LGBT rights by not using firefox or javascript, that would be amazing. If we boycotted companies that gave meaningful amounts of money to trash gay rights, that would be amazing. I just don't think this is doing it.

Problem:  There isn't much dialogue in the first place.  On one side, you have the tumblr social justice warrior assholes, on the other side the WBC shitbags and their ilk...While anyone who has a reasonable approach is ground into hamburger between the two.

What I saw here was a knee-jerk reaction.  That's usually bad.  But it was a knee jerk reaction in the right direction.  A majority of people got pissed because this guy likes to shit all over people who never harmed him, when they heard about it.

Sort of like if you're at a party, and some guy starts jawing racist bullshit.  These days, most of the time, everyone's gonna look at him like he has a communicable disease.  40 years ago, they'd have agreed with him.  30 years ago, they'd have checked to make sure no minorities were around, and then agreed with him.  20 years ago, they would have made excuses for him.

And that's a sort of progress.

I keep coming back to this post.

Because if I'm honest with myself, I should put the Occupy protests and the Firefox boycott in the same boat. I find myself defending occupy on the basis that we need something like it. And you can't expect hashtag activists to become real activists overnight, it's an iterative process. So maybe I shouldn't be as harsh on this thing? It's a start.

They say that for every thousand axes hacking at the branches of corruption, only one or two are actually swinging at the tree's trunk. There are meaningful battles and meaningless battles. You can extinguish the couch but if the house is still on fire, it's a losing game.

In a larger sense, what's do you guys think is the best way to help? Is it better to help redirect all these hatchets to the root of the tree? Or is just better that people get practice with a hatchet? And I realize this is a bit broader than just this particular civil rights battle. Are All forms of protest good, because the Body Politic needs to develop those muscles? Or is it actually destructive / distracting to waste energy on these trivial battlegrounds?

[Cramulus]

Your protest is insufficiently revolutionary,
return to the paddock IMMEDIATELY
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