But how do you know it's "overrepresentation"? It's media not a strict reflection of population.
Anyway, so you don't like gay people, but tough luck. Just like you can like or dislike whoever you want, people can like and talk about whoever they want. Sorry to break it to you but its not a conspiracy it's just modern society.
> They conclude with: Voters for far-right parties are frequently less likely to support banning of political advertising on social media
Maybe the issue here is that many political options have social media and underground marketing as their only option due to heavy bias and censorship on European traditional media.
Even the term used here "far right" is an euphemism for opinions not approved by governing European regimes.
In European politics, "far right" is a dogwhistle for "anti-imperialist" or "pro-nationalist". It is otherwise a semantic void into which you can pour whatever prejudices you have against the proletariat and be assured that the state and its apparatchiks will happily reward you for airing them as long as you perpetuate the label of "far right" against their designated class enemies.
So what? That changes nothing about their policies and views.
Ernst Röhm was one of the most powerful people in early Nazi Germany and famously gay. And still, the NSDAP brutally and systemically persecuted queer people.
You act as if hypocrisy, bigotry, moral flexibility and opportunism weren't core "virtues" of far right populists.
With Röhm you are close to Goodwin. The difference is Röhm was hiding his sexual preferences, while Weidel is pretty open about it. Röhm was killed because of it by his party members. Weidels sexual preference is a non issue for AfD members.
Your comparison with Röhm just shows once more that AfD policies are quite opposite to those of the NSDAP.
what? is this serios? to quote my link from the most major jewish organisation:
"Die Zeit der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft mit Millionen getöteter Juden, Sinti und Roma, Homosexueller und politisch Verfolgter ist für den Fraktionsvorsitzenden der AfD lediglich ein „Vogelschiss“. Die darin zum Ausdruck gebrachte Haltung verharmlost in unerträglicher Weise die Gräuel der Geschichte. So wie vor wenigen Jahren bei Pegida oder in Chemnitz laufen AfD-Politiker nun bei Querdenker-Demos neben Hooligans und Rechtsextremen. "
Maybe get out of your buble. Most jewish and gay people despise the AfD. Most jewish and gay people want to leave the country in case of AfD majority. But hey Im talking to an account calling the AfD "most pro-jewish" party.
Yes, that is an opinion you are supposed to have. You are supposed to associate the regime's class enemies with nazis and communists so that their claims can be dismissed without a single rational thought. "They beat up jews and gays!" is a great way to avoid having a difficult conversation about the regime's blatantly hostile policies against their own people.
> It [regime] is used colloquially by some, such as government officials, media journalists, and policy makers, when referring to governments that they believe are repressive, undemocratic, or illegitimate or simply do not square with the person’s own view of the world.
Yes? The Primae Noctis party would largely be “censored” in current social circles.
The fact that we can use money to saturate the information economy, and create the perception of validity, is a form of market manipulation that is used extensively today. See “Intelligent Design” for a great example of how that was applied in America.
These ideological beach heads are strategized and implemented by media consultants, and media owners. Yet this is protected speech. All the while actual fact checkers, researchers and content moderation efforts are censorial.
This super simplistic interpretation of how speech operates in the modern world is now more abused by attackers, than of explanatory value to defenders.
I would really love if people were somehow more interested in the way modern persuasion techniques are applied. At least that way we would have more interesting conversations on how to have checks and balances that work.
The current government constantly violates the consitution, they are still trying to implement Vorratsdatenspeicherung which was ruled illegal by the constitutional court. The former government tried to change how elections work with the goal of kicking out opposition parties. And for the current elections there still wasn't a needed re-count because the organisation that needs to approve a re-count is the current government themselves. How is any of that in line with the consitution? It's ever only an argument when it's the "side I don't like".
It’s funny when people blame opposition for things regime says they would do if they come to power, but tolerate all autocratic tendencies of the current regime. The self-elected one, as you point out.
Edit: self-approved is better term, since without recount of votes we still don’t know if current regime has a majority.
> Which of actual AfD policies are actually far right?
What about most of them? Just look at who they are teaming with in the European Parliament. Or what they say about themselves. That should give you a hint.
> I am ignoring this link since its main source is Corrective, propaganda outlet funded by the German regime.
Right. It’s just what (((they))) want you to believe.
I named various one of them and other provide some links.. You just called the AfD pro-jewish party while most jews despite the party. I think you might just be to check the sources.
To you edit: Again, you are ignoring the issue I raised: Whitewashing nazi issues(not the casual nazi labels we have seen these days, but the actual Nazi Germany) would be considered far right.
This is about the actual fact about whitewashing the actual historical Nazi Germany. So I would take it as you are dodging the question and you are agreeing with my previous criteria:
The people or organization whitewashing the actual historical Nazi Germany issues would be considered as far right.
I am saying the act of whitewashing nazi issues(not the casual nazi labels we have seen these days, but the actual Nazi Germany) would be considered far right. Do you agree that this happened?
No one is calling everyone nazi in this thread. Who are you referring to?
> EDIT: I am ignoring this link since its main source is Corrective, propaganda outlet funded by the German regime.
Well, if you ignore all the evidence you consider inconvenient, you could, you know, read their own self-description as "right wing" and combine that with the observation of them being too right wing for the other right wing parties.
you are here https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/afd-verfassung...
"EDIT: I am ignoring this link since its main source is Corrective, propaganda outlet funded by the German regime" Maybe they just publish what you don't like. They are a left outlet but certainly not pro government.
> Even the term used here "far right" is an euphemism for opinions not approved by governing European regimes.
Seriously. We know what far right is. It’s close to mainstream or mainstream in all EU countries. It is not suppressed anywhere, except for the nazi party in Germany. I mean, even AfD, which is as close as it gets, can still present candidates and campaign for them.
And we have plenty of experience of what happens when they come to power. You can stop clutching your pearls.
"Far right" isn't a euphemism for anything, it's exactly what it is. Countries that collapsed into actual fascism (e.g. Germany, Italy, Spain) within living memory, which then spent the subsequent century abutting the monstrosity of a totalitarian Communist regime ("far left") are indeed reluctant to air "far right" and "far left" views because they understand how they play out in practice: global war killing tens of millions, millions of civilians dead at the hands of their own state-sponsored militaries, a legacy of atrocity that will never wash clean, utter economic and cultural devastation echoing for decades... just an absolutely sickening inversion of the human spirit and what people want to believe in as citizens.
"Far right" views are far right views. They are morally repulsive in the extreme. We've witnessed the consequences before.
The issue with npm is JS doesn't have a stdlib, so developers need to rely on npm and third party libs even for things stdlib provide in languages like Java, Python, Go, ...
And if you use bun or nodejs, you also have out of the box access to an HTTP server, filesystem APIs, gzip, TLS and more. And if you're working in a browser, almost everything in jquery has since been pulled into the browser too. Eg, document.querySelector.
Of course, web frameworks like react aren't part of the standard library in JS. Nor should they be.
What more do you want JS to include by default? What do java, python and go have in their standard libraries that JS is missing?
> When people say "js doesn't have a stdlib" they mean "js doesn't have a robust general purpose stdlib like C++ ...
It does though! The JS stdlib even includes an entire wasm runtime. Its huge!
Seriously. I can barely think of any features in the C++ stdlib that are missing from JS. There's a couple - like JS is missing std::priority_queue. But JS has soooo much stuff that C++ is missing. Its insane.
That's what I assume people mean, because they can't mean trivial stuff like "left-pad" and "is-even" because why would that be part of any language's standard library?
Weird that the JS community relies entirely on external libraries with arbitrarily deep and fragile dependency trees that default fail to wrecking the entire web because JS "doesn't have a stdlib" for this sort of thing then. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It is. Though in their defence, I think this api was added after the leftpad fiasco.
Also not many people seem to know this, but in the aftermath of leftpad being pulled from npm, npmjs changed their policy to disallow module authors from ever pulling old packages, outside a few very exceptional circumstances. The leftpad fiasco can’t happen again.
Totally valid. The Go backend is just a REST API with no Next.js coupling. You could swap the frontend for Go templates + htmx without changing the backend at all.
And yeah, Polar.sh has been great. Merchant of Record means I don't think about tax compliance.
Yep, the next government may be evil tyranny, but it's beyond my comprehension why would I have to trust current or any government with the data I'm sure they'll abuse the moment they have it.
Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.
You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.
And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.
For people too lazy to click, the second post was:
> I think it’s time for the British to gang together, hit the streets and start the slaughter.
> Violence and murder is the only way now. Start off burning every migrant hotel then head off to MPs’ houses and Parliament, we need to take over by FORCE.
I'm not sure what the punishment for such a clear but ineffective incitement to violence should be, but it shouldn't be nothing.
The US has a three part test[1] for what constitutes incitement:
- intent
- imminence
- likelihood
If the UK had speech protections like the US (which I wish they would) then it would fail the imminence and probably the likelihood tests (you rightly note that it is ineffective).
This is definitely not a crime in the US per the US Supreme Court. Several additional conditions not in evidence are required for speech of this type to fall outside of First Amendment protections.
> Several additional conditions not in evidence are required for speech of this type to fall outside of First Amendment protections.
Perhaps your point would be clearer if you indicated what specific conditions you believe are missing. Maybe the tweeter had no followers? Idk, I can only vaguely guess at what you're referring to.
It didn't happen in the US though, so that's neither here nor there. America's political system is not some benchmark that the rest of the world needs to judge themselves against.
> Yarwood replied: ‘Head for the hotels housing them and burn them to the ground.’
That's terrorist speech tho. My problem is that everyone can reasonably get on board with banning speech that indicates violent action, and that the reliance on "muh free speech!!!" has been a net negative for actually defending the right of people to have privacy, because people rely on that sans any other (better) arguments.
As you seem to be unaware of where the 12,183 arrests figure comes from, and suggest that you haven't seen compelling evidence for this figure, you should know that it's from The Times(0). They found that this led to 1,119 sentencings.
In your linked post [1] you suggest that this figure is completely wrong. To demonstrate this, you linked to a FOI request for the Metropolitan Police which shows that the actual figures for 2023 are 124 for Section 127 of the Communications Act and 1,585 for Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act. This is, ironically, completely wrong. These figures are only applicable for the Metropolitan Police in the Greater London area, if you want figures for the UK you need to file FOI requests for all 45 territorial police forces in the UK. This is what The Times did, and 37 of them responded.
The Standard(1) attempts to address the claim of whether the UK arrests more people for social media posts by looking at figures from other countries, fails to point out a country with more arrests for social media posts, and concludes that open and liberal societies will have more arrests for social media posts because we are more free to do so. Go figure.
You also suggest that racial harassment, domestic abuse, stalking, and grooming are covered under the law, which is somewhat true, The Times quoted a spokesperson from Leicestershire police which stated that the laws cover any communications and may deal with cases of domestic abuse, and this is often the only example given to explain the figures. However it should be noted that the Communications Act(2) only covers electronic communications that are 'grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character' (or posts a message known to be false for the purposes of causing 'annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety', prior to 2024), and the Malicious Communications Act(3) while covering letters, EC, articles, etc, only applies if the communication is 'indecent or grossly offensive' (or a threat, prior to 2024).
For some of those issues it can be easy to point to communications that are 'grossly offensive' or threatening/menacing, however there are other more applicable laws to choose from such as the Public Order Act, the Crime and Disorder Act, and the Domestic Abuse Act which largely covers hate crimes and domestic abuse. An order of magnitude more people are arrested for hate crimes under these and similar laws than they are for malicious communications. The Protection from Harassment Act which covers harassment and stalking, the Serious Crime Act covers controlling and coercive behaviour, the Criminal Justice and Courts Act for revenge porn, and the Sexual Offences Act which covers an incredible amount of offences (it's a large act), including everything related to grooming.
The CPS largely discourage using communications offences (unsourced, but (4) is a good starting point), possibly because of the mens rea requirements for 'grossly offensive' or causing distress or anxiety, possibly because the sentencing limit for either communications act limited at 6 months or 12 months for malicious communications (also 6 months for offences prior to 2022), possibly because it has to weigh whether the sentencing is within the public interest with regards to the chilling effect it can have on speech, especially when concerns about Article 10 of the ECHR are brought up, but it has recommended using these acts as a fallback. Prior to 2015 revenge porn wasn't a specific offence but could still be considered under the communications acts for instance.
All of this to say, if the communications acts are being used as a fallback for the issues you mention, it can't be seen as anything other than a failure that the more specific legislation fails to address issues of or prosecuting issues of 'grossly offensive' or 'threatening' communications appropriately, which seems unlikely, but if it is the case, why then is the sentencing rate so pitiful? 10%? For 'racial harassment' and domestic abuse? In a country that records around 130k hate crimes and 230k cases of domestic abuse (of which 35% are related to malicious communications, do the maths) yearly? When the bar is as low as racial slurs or 'threats'?
For a number of high profile cases you could perhaps make the case that the arrest was justified, but these cases are high profile for a reason, they're testing the limits of what can be considered 'grossly offensive' that aren't covered by other more applicable laws. But even then, there are high profile cases simply because the police had absolutely no business arresting anybody(5). For it to be the case that these laws, specific to 'grossly offensive' and 'threatening' behaviour, are being used to address these issues it needs to be demonstrated, and I don't think that has been the case, and the issue of wasted police time needs to be addressed when 90% of arrests didn't need to be made. The last point is especially relevant at a time where petty crime has all but decriminalised over the past decade and when police chiefs are suggesting citizens are the ones that need to do something about shop lifters(6).
In the greater context of the conversation, it should be obvious that police are arresting people for social media posts, regardless of whether you agree with the intent or not, and it should be obvious that the police are interested in policing social media given the absurd number of Non-Crime Hate Incidents being recorded, also around 13,000(7) a year, and I can't see things getting better with the introduction of the OSA. Blaming these issues on a 'right-wing narrative' seems naive at best and missing the forest for the trees at worst. Labour having absolutely abysmal polling issues should suggest that this isn't a partisan issue in the slightest.
You're right about the figures, that's my mistake, thanks for teaching me.
I'm not convinced by the rest of your argument. For example:
> there are other more applicable laws to choose from such as the Public Order Act, the Crime and Disorder Act, and the Domestic Abuse Act which largely covers hate crimes and domestic abuse
Isn't it possible that people get arrested on multiple charges - both for malicious communications and for harrassment, say?
> In the greater context of the conversation, it should be obvious that police are arresting people for social media posts
Yes, but what's not obvious (or even likely) is that 12000 people are being arrested for "online comments" [0], or that the UK leads the world in such arrests. Sentences have been handed out for various other activities, such as sending photographs or abusive private emails. That's the bit that makes it a right-wing narrative: taking a statistic and giving it a misleading interpretation that happens to support your cause. Has Tommy Robinson said anything in defense/support of Joey Barton? I'm guessing not, because the victims were neither Muslim nor immigrants.
No one is getting 20 years for tweet content in the UK like they are in Saudi Arabia. No grandmother is being arrested for holding up a blank sign like in Russia. I can go on just with the reported stuff from memory for an hour wrt Iran, North Korea and China. I don't even know how many books it would take to read to learn of all the examples worse that aren't.
Look I think there are problems with the UK's policy here, but this comment is either disingenuous or naive.
The decline of the US government is the faster than "Europe", because it's been declining rapidly in a few months. The US government currently has a monthly quota for ICE arrests. ICE agents racially profile people and ignore non-white people telling them they are US citizens because they assume they are lying. Non-white US citizens need to have papers on them that prove their status (US citizen), or else might be disappeared. The US government now bans immigrants from a list of dark skin countries but fast-tracks White South Africans for immigration. It politically persecutes their political opponents and ignores the rule of law. It is preparing for war with Venezuela, which would conveniently tie up US resources as Russia positions itself for entering Europe.
The UK is rapidly declining as a close second, but calling it "European" (especially when UK citizens see themselves as non-European) is just a lazy generalization.
> I don't understand why you got heavily downvoted.
Because his post contributes nothing to the discussion.
> Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.
What makes it the fastest?
> You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.
Don't know about you but I'd rather be arrested for posting something in EU then be disappeared in any of the countries that you mentioned.
> And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.
That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.
The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech. Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.
> That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.
Read my comment again. The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy. It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.
>> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech.
> This doesn't mean anything in isolation.
It's pretty good proxy for freedom of speech, one of the features without which democracy is not possible.
>> Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.
> Do we know each other?
Probably not, but I can smell a state believer when I see him.
> No, but there aren't many that are much better so when you take all of that in to account, yes UK an Germany are beacons of democracy.
If they are, it's a pretty low baseline. They are but a shadow of what they once were.
>> It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.
> I already asked this but by what metric are they declining faste?
The article I posted has a link [1]. There you can see the number of people arrested went up from 5502 in 2017 to 12183 in 2023. It's a pretty sharp decline in freedom of speech.
The problem here is that contextually you are falling into the trap of "talking about committing a terrorist act" as being relevant to "having private communications", and in the process you are conflating the two. This means you are falling into the trap that the UK government intentionally creates to suppress privacy — within a reader's head, now the two are related. This also means you haven't had to develop any arguments other than "muh free speech!" with respect to why having private communication is important.
The second problem is that American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue, so to an onlooker who is not in the USA, when people talk about "free speech", it comes across as someone defending someone's right to say incredibly harmful, violent things about Jewish people, Transgender people, and so on. I think for most people outside of the USA (and, to be honest, most minority populations within the USA) you should consider "free speech" as being an incredibly tainted phrase for that purpose.
The flipside of all of this is that fascism is very, very possible even with freedom of speech (actually it seems to rely on it, given how virulent the spread of outright Nazi rhetoric has been in the USA so far). Freedom of speech is not the sole thing that holds up a democracy and it weakens your arguments for you to rely upon it like this.
> American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue
The famous US Supreme Court case[0] that explicitly confirmed that "Nazi speech is free speech" was brought to the court by the ACLU[1], a left-leaning organization that defends things like LGBTQ rights. Your take is completely divorced from factual reality.
American conservatives aren't "framing" it. They are restating what the US Supreme Court has already determined in a case brought to the court by the liberal left. This is a principled defense of free speech that has historically been supported by people across the political spectrum.
You completely missed the point of what I wrote and ignored the majority, just so you could claim that Nazi speech is actually a left-wing issue — which is not a claim I think many people outside of the USA would agree with.
I do not think you understand the optics of how this looks outside of your USA-centric echo-chamber audience.
> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech.
A spokesperson for Leicestershire police clarified that offences under section 127 and section 1 can include any form of communication and may also be “serious domestic abuse-related crimes”. [1]
It seems misleading to count arrests related to domestic abuse as "anti-free speech".
It seems very politically convenient to be able to hide that one number behind the other. To obfuscate something highly controversial by making it artificially conflated with something everyone would agree on with.
This is what governments do when they want to avoid public scrutiny. This is not the win you are looking for.
It would indeed be better to have the separate counts. It's also wrong to attribute to only one case what is a actually a larger category, unless there is actual evidence that it's the overwhelming majority anyways. Both can be true at the same time.
I'm not trying to win anything, and I do support privacy. I just think any argument, especially those citing specific numbers, should be based on an accurate description of reality.
>"That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed."
Give them a little time. They'll catch up. Comparatively to what the UK used to be it is sliding down, more and more. One should be more concerned about what is happening in their country rather than consoling themselves that there are worce places.
The UK is not part of the EU, and its security services are barely affiliated with it. That all ended with Brexit.
It's absolutely hopeless at protecting citizens from foreign threats.
95% of the arrests aren't actually arrests. The police send you a polite letter, you write a polite response, and at least 90% of the time the case is dropped.
Compare with various authoritarian dictatorships where if the police turn up at your door you're unlikely to survive.
And - unlike the US - no one is hauling random British brown people off the streets and sending them to prison camps.
The UK does have a far-right party desperate to end judicial oversight and remove legal protections from torture, etc, by ending support for the ECHR.
There's currently a huge online campaign, funded in part with foreign money and supported by most of the British press (foreign billionaire owned...), to make their far-right dictatorship seem like a political inevitability.
It isn't. But they're trying really really hard to pretend otherwise.
Putin is also really, really pissed at the EU for taking Russian money and using it for defence and reparations.
But - you know - if you start a war because you're a grandiose psychopath, that's what happens.
> 95% of the arrests aren't actually arrests. The police send you a polite letter, you write a polite response, and at least 90% of the time the case is dropped.
Bahaha, as if that's any better.
Guess cops showing up to your door for being mean to someone online is just an inevitability when there is no "second amendment" equivalent in said country.
Sad state of affairs, if they weren't british I'd almost feel bad.
The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox.
The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.
I don't know, if the CEO of some software I used suddenly came out as anti-miscegenation, and started donating money to the cause, I'd stop using the software until the CEO was fired too.
Where this analogy breaks is that at the time (2008), Eich's position had majority support in the US. The proposition he wad funding passed with majority support. Mixed marriages by contrast had overwhelming support in 2008.
Eich didn't suddenly come out against anything in 2014. People dug up his prior funding.
Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic. You can beat someone in a process (Eich's side lost) without demanding total victory forever or declaring more than half of a whole society as permanent villains. In 2008 55% of the US opposed gay marriage, 36% supported it.
This is a non-sequitur. He didn't donate because it was the popular thing to do, he donated because it was consistent with his religious beliefs.
Christianity has never been a popularity contest. It has steadfastness in the face of rejection and martyrdom in the face of oppression baked into its fundamental fabric, borne from its oppression as a minority religion in the first centuries of its existence.
There's three options on every stance: support, oppose, and neutral. When in doubt, you should be neutral - not opposed.
Just because everyone else is opposing gay marriage, or integration, or emancipation, doesn't mean you should.
Maybe you don't have the time or energy to try to find out what path you should take. Okay, fair. You can always do nothing. You can literally say "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion".
But following the majority IS NOT that. You ARE taking a hard stance if you do that! You're making a choice, and that means you better understand that choice. You are responsible for it, accountable to it!
> Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic.
It depends a lot on what that position is. Donating your personal wealth to discriminate against a marginalized group, which includes many of your employees is worth calling out.
Segregation was once a "majority position" in this country. Shaming segregationists was a really effective way to change that. For example, George Wallace, who eventually redeemed himself.
So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
That's exactly what the parent post is talking about. When Mozilla started prioritizing political correctness over software quality, software quality predictably declined. That's why they are struggling now: they reduced their user base to the tiny group of political extremists that will put up with an inferior product for the sake of political signaling.
By the way, Eich didn't “come out” as anything. His private donation (a mere $1000) was exposed by people who wanted to cancel him for his political views. It wasn't Eich who forced the issue, it was his political opponents, who do not tolerate any viewpoint diversity. Eich's views weren't even fringe or extreme at the time: Proposition 8 passed with support from the majority of Californian voters.
I think the correct formulation is: "There are political views that the CEO of Mozilla could hold which would be sufficient for me to abandon the use of products that Mozilla makes". And I think that would be non-controversial for most people.
The problem with that formulation is that it denies the importance of the quantative aspect of the difference of opinion.
Of course there are views so extreme almost nobody would put up with them. But at the same time, being tolerant of differences of opinion is an important aspect of a free society and a functioning democracy. There is a word for people who cannot tolerate even the smallest difference of opinion: bigots.
But differences of opinion aren't binary; they lie on a spectrum. Similarly, bigotry lies on a spectrum. The person who doesn't brook the smallest disagreement is a greater bigot that only considers the most odious points of view beyond the pale.
For an extreme example, consider these cases: 1) A CEO is fired for arguing that the US government should round up all Jews and put them in extermination camps Nazi Germany style. 2) A CEO is fired for arguing that the local sales tax should be raised by 0.25 percentage points.
Are these cases exactly the same? You could argue in both cases the CEO gets fired for expressing sufficiently unorthodox political views, but that doesn't cut at the heart of the matter. Clearly it's necessary to quantify how extreme those views are. The extent to which the board that fires their CEO is bigoted depends on how unreasonable the CEO's views are; they are inversely proportional.
So now back to Eich. What was his sin? He donated $1000 to support Proposition 8, which restricted the legal definition of marriage to couples consisting of a man and a woman. This view was shared at the time by Barack Obama and a majority of California voters. It didn't strip gay couples of any formal rights: all the same rights could be obtained through a domestic partnership or an out-of-state marriage. It was just a nominal dispute about what the word “marriage” means.
Clearly this is a relatively unimportant issue; closer to a tax dispute than a genocide. You can disagree with Eich and the Californian public on this one, but being unable to tolerate their point of view doesn't make them monsters; it makes you a bigot.
The fact that Mozilla didn't allow their CEO to deviate from the majority point of view on this issue (again, a minority viewpoint in California at the time!) revealed Mozilla to be a heavily politicized, extremely bigoted corporation, that puts ideological conformity first.
> There is a word for people who cannot tolerate even the smallest difference of opinion: bigots.
No, that's not what that word means.
> all the same rights could be obtained through a domestic partnership or an out-of-state marriage. It was just a nominal dispute about what the word “marriage” means.
That too is not true.
> The fact that Mozilla didn't allow their CEO to deviate from the majority point of view on this issue (again, a minority viewpoint in California at the time!) revealed Mozilla to be a heavily politicized, extremely bigoted corporation, that puts ideological conformity first.
I feel like we've awakened from a dream. I look around, and I see that the hyper-transphobe's book series has become a best-selling videogame. I wish I were asleep like you...
I think treating every human with equal dignity goes beyond politics. While the specific context here was political, but that is only the context, not the principle.
> So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
He doesn't have to share all of them, but we have to have enough overlap for him to consider me & my friends enough of a human being to share the same rights that he does.
As another commenter pointed out, there are beliefs heinous enough that will override the quality of optional software that I might choose to use.
In 2008. You know, the year the majority of Americans didn't approve of gay marriage? [1] The year Obama said that marriage is between a man and a woman? [2]
Applying modern sensibilities to history is stupid.
Are you referring to his donation to prop 8? Im a younger dev and a bit out of the loop but how would that be anti-miscegenation? Wasn’t that more related to gay marriage?
I used anti-miscegenation as a stand-in, as an example of a ludicrous, indefensible position to hold today, while there are still holdouts who apparently think that gay marriage is some sort of affront to the moral fabric of society.
Oh okay, I see. It is wild to see how much things change because amongst my generation your analogy makes sense, but at the time prop 8 was passed by a majority of Californians.
Eich was appointed Mozilla CEO in 2014. Not 2008. 2014 polls said 60% to 70% of Californians supported same sex marriage. Most California voters would not qualify for most jobs in any case. And Eich's 2008 discrimination support mattered less than his 2014 inability to say he wouldn't do it again.
As an example, Loving v Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down all anti-miscegenation laws, was in 1967. In 1968, a Gallup poll indicated that less that 20% of white Americans "approved of marriage between whites and non-whites."
Three decades later, in 2000, Alabama finally voted to repeal its (inactive) law, and a full 40% of voters voted to keep the racist, useless law in their state constitution.
State-declared marriage is an tax saving scheme, that the state does in expect for future tax payers. Not granting it to people who won't "produce" tax payers seems entirely reasonable to me.
Exactly. It's one thing to be an idiot on Twitter, it's another for you to donate money to a cause specifically designed to deny rights to people - a cause that was actually successful for a time. That's something that speaks to a fundamental lack of empathy that I'm not sure he's ever directly addressed.
But in any case, I've heard this argument before, and the timeline doesn't make sense. At the time he resigned, Chrome was very firmly ahead of Firefox, and given his track record with Brave, the idea that Eich would have single-handedly saved Mozilla is also pretty dubious to me.
It seems like a disingenuous and lazy talking point tailor made to blame the demise of Firefox on a culture war politics, when in reality it's the fact that Google was willing to throw much more time and resources at the browser market than a non-profit, unimpeded by the same sort of anti-trust and lack of development that brought Internet Explorer low.
A) Firing a CEO because there is an immediate, massive public shaming of them is entirely rational from a business perspective
B) This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?
> This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?
That is a wildly uncharitable take. I'm not OP, but I believe that nobody, CEOs or otherwise, should be fired for their activities outside of work. That can be political beliefs, but doesn't have to be either. And yes, that means that sometimes someone whose beliefs you find repugnant is going to have a good job. That is the price of a free society, and I think it's worth it.
Imagine, instead, the opinion he expressed outside of work is that Firefox sucks and nobody should use it. Should he be fired then?
As a CEO, your opinion and perspective is MARKETING. You determine if customers stay or leave. And causing customers to leave is obviously a fireable offense.
So Subway should bring back Jared and Jello should bring back Cosby? Freedom is not a one-way street that guarantees the right to be awful without social consequences.
The words "bigot" and "racist" have been so overused that they've lost all meaning. "Fascist" is not all that far behind. In a recent interview, Nick Fuentes (much more deserving of the bigot label than Eich) openly said he's a racist. I suspect he lost 0 supporters by doing this. Abusing the language like this has consequences - not good ones.
Definition of bigot from Oxford Languages: a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.
Explain how the word isn't being used according to its definition.
> Nick Fuentes openly said he's a racist.
Do you doubt him? In March 2025, he said, "Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise ... White men need to run the household, they need to run the country, they need to run the companies. They just need to run everything, it's that simple. It's literally that simple."
> I suspect he lost 0 supporters by doing this.
You seem to believe that his supporters think he isn't actually racist.
I think GP's point isn't that Fuentes isn't racist, it's that the term "racist" lost a lot of its bite precisely because it was thrown around so recklessly and applied to people who obviously weren't "bad guys". So now you can actually go and openly say things like "I'm racist" and mean it, and there's still plenty of people who don't see a problem with that.
> So now you can actually go and openly say things like "I'm racist" and mean it, and there's still plenty of people who don't see a problem with that.
My point is that the people (Fuentes supporters) that he said see no problem with that are racists themselves, or why would they be Fuentes supporters? That's his whole schtick. They don't see a problem with him saying racist things, so why would they see a problem with him directly admitting he is a racist? https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/conservative-writer-says...
Firefox improved in quality significantly between 2014 and the recent decline. And it's not like Brave has shown incredibly good judgement in these areas.
Equivocating speech and crime as both being "violence" (of similar class, deserving similar response) is a fallacy that lets people justify murder in response to disagreement as long as it's deemed serious enough.
Yes it's not violence, but it's not speech either. Donating money is performing material harm. That might be an unfortunate reality, but it's undeniable. It's a different thing from just saying something.
Also, you can absolutely be fired for just saying something and that's been the case forever. As a CEO, you are essentially marketing your company. Marketing it poorly and losing customers can, and will, get you fired - in every company, ever.
Really? Having an opinion endorsed by the mainstream doctrine of several world religions with billions of adherents is the same as robbing a bank?
That being said, I disagree with Eich and it probably made sense for the org to let him go given how his views might impact public perception of Mozilla.
I'd say it's complicated. If you are running a company in San Francisco I think you want to be sensitive to the culture there. That cause of gay marriage that he opposed was not one of these radicalism for the sake of radicalism queer positions you see on Twitter-dervied platforms but something mainstream at the root. I think of how on The Bulwark podcasts you hear gay people with a conservative but never-Trump viewpoint describing their cozy family life and it just sounds so sweet... and mainstream making the opposition to it not seem so mainstream.
On the other hand I think San Francisco is part of the Mozilla problem because it is less than an hour on the 101 to go see people at Facebook and Google yet they are distant from the 99% of of web developers and web users that live somewhere else whose use Firefox because they don't like what Chrome stands for.
I wish Mozilla was in Boulder or Minneapolis or Cleveland or Dublin or some other second-tier but vibrant city where they might have the capacity to listen to us rather than be in the same monoculture that brings us Chrome and Instagram.
Yeah, I can't say I feel comfortable in the medtech culture around Boston. I worked remote at a clinical notes startup based in research triangle park -- our mission was "CRUSH EPIC!" and do that through user-centric thinking and I think medtech culture would be a buzzkill for that.
Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better. But (2) you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.
> Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better.
Nobody knows this for sure. We do know that Eich was fired for political reasons, and not because of his technological direction.
This betrays a decision making process that prioritizes political correctness above leadership qualities and technical contributions.
> you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
Why not? Why can't the CEO of Mozilla have his own private political views just like anyone else, and donate his own private money to whatever democratic causes he likes?
This really isn't obvious to anyone except the people, like you, who view Mozilla as a political project first, and as a software project a distant second.
Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party only makes sense if you assume the purpose of Mozilla is to push American Democratic politics, rather than make good software that anyone in the world may use (spoiler alert: many users of open-source software are not American Democrats!)
We both know that CEOs are never fired, but there is a difference between resigning on their own accord and “resigning” because they had no organizational support. What happened to Eich was the CEO-equivalent of getting fired.
> Donations are public material support. Not private views.
Not really? Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.
Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever? Or are you simply saying that you Mozillians aren't allowed to donate money to conservative causes? Because it sounds a lot like the second one, and then we're back to the original allegation: that Mozilla today is a political project first, and a technological project second. Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?
> We both know that CEOs are never fired, but there is a difference between resigning on their own accord and “resigning” because they had no organizational support.
CEOs are never fired is false objectively. CEOs must earn support. And there was no reason to state false information if you believed everyone would understand the context of the facts.
> Not really?
Really. Public records are public.
> Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.
No one would know most news stories if someone didn't research and publish them. No one would know what Mozilla's CEO was paid if no one looked it up and published it.
> Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever?
People are allowed to make donations. People are allowed to choose who they follow or support or not.
And jobs have different standards. Eich remained CTO years after his donation was published with little controversy.
> Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?
Who are Mozilla to you? The board appointed Eich CEO years after his donation was published
>It's your own fault you lost this argument because you decided to attempt such a pathetically transparent lie, and you can't back-pedal enough to make up for that. Face it, you're just a dishonest bigot on the wrong side of history, still salty that gay marriage is finally legal, impotent to do anything about it besides being a lying keyboard warrior troll.
>I hope for your own family's sake that your own straight marriage isn't so fragile that it was undermined by gay marriage being legal, as Brendan's and other homophobic bigot's tired arguments claim is the insidious threat of gay marriage.
>Maybe you made bad life choices and want to punish people who didn't, but that's on you, so don't take it out on gay people, even if you're one of the jealous hateful closeted self loathing ones yourself.
This is a particularly egregious post that I think warrants more intervention than just a flag @dang. This user has been doing this quite a lot, over a period of many months, if you search his posts for the word "Eich" or "bigot".
> Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party
This is not what happened. He gave money to a cause with the explicit goal of using that money to prevent his coworkers and users from having equal civil rights based on an inalienable trait they were born with.
That's not an "American Democratic Party" alignment issue, and if you genuinely believe it is, your dog whistle may be broken. It's sounding an awful lot like a normal whistle.
He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:
> A same-sex marriage lawfully performed in another state or foreign jurisdiction on or after November 5, 2008 was fully recognized in California, but Proposition 8 precluded California from designating these relationships with the word "marriage." These couples were afforded every single one of the legal rights, benefits, and obligations of marriage.
Note the last sentence!
Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters, and Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
> He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
I never argued that Mozilla doesn't have the right to fire people for their political views. We're just establishing that Eich _was_ fired for his political views, and that that shows Mozilla had become a political organization first, and a technological company second.
In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters. The fact that that is not true of Mozilla proves it's not a politically neutral company; it's a political project that inherited a software project they are not particularly interested in maintaining except as a vehicle for further promoting their politics.
> That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:
The US rejected separate but equal since decades.
California domestic partnerships provided most of the same rights as marriage. Not all. The California legislature had to pass bills after to address this.[1]
The bill which afforded same sex couples married out of state the same rights as heterosexual couples married in state passed over 11 months after Proposition 8 took effect. The citation of the last sentence revealed this. You did not read it?
Heterosexual couples were not required to marry out of state.
> Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters
Most jobs have requirements which most California voters would not meet.
> Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
Obama opposed stripping rights by vote is a significant difference.
And Obama changed his public position by 2014. Eich was unable to say he would not repeat his harmful action.
And many people suspected Obama's opposition to same sex marriage was a lie in 2008 even. 1 of his advisers claimed this later.
> Eich _was_ fired for his political views
Eich said he resigned because he could not be an effective leader under the circumstances.[2] Did he lie?
Let's say everything you said is right: Just because a heterosexual, Christian majority say they don't support "blacks" in their bathrooms and claim the black community should be happy with their "equal" bathrooms, does NOT mean that it is morally acceptable to financially support legal requirements for segregated bathrooms.
> Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman”
And yet he didn't force the country to only recognize marriages between men and women. Instead, he did the opposite. He voted against DOMA in 1996. He repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell in 2010.
He appointed judges who looked favorably on gay marriage and then told the justice department not to defend DOMA against constitutional attacks. Then he celebrated the Supreme Court's ruling against DOMA.
> In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters.
Barack Obama and California voters (64% of likely voters in 2013 according to PPIC) were on the other side in 2014 when Eich was appointed CEO. Eich remained (and remains to this day) on the wrong side.
The thing is, there's Akamai and Runonflux, two companies hosting the entire public SimpleX infrastructure. If you're not using Tor and SimpleX Onion Services with your buddies, these two companies can perform end-to-end correlation attacks to spy on which IPs are conversing, and TelCos know which IPs belong to which customers at any given time. Mandatory data retention laws about the assigned IPs aren't rare.
Yes, that's why I said I don't like their relays. It doesn't even have to be Akamai, you need to trust SimpleX first that not to track your IP. I'd rather use a messenger where something is not possible (or even hard) than trust.
As long as IP leaks are possible, I'd rather also use Signal, where at least the rest is battle tested and state of the art.
My concern with Signal is they'll either comply or move out of the EU with the incoming Chat Control, and I'd rather have a fully decentralized messenger with as few leaks as possible.
Overrepresentation in mass media is a form of propaganda.
reply