I find I enjoy the Internet a lot more as long as I stay away from Sully and his proteges, like Young Conor (pictured above in a group portrait of Dish interns). Unfortunately, the awful thing that was done to Brendan Eich keeps bringing those two clowns back into the limelight (here are a couple of excerpts).
Politics is such messy business for the principled conservative. Sometimes you must agree with the liberals. It’s a necessary evil, like mass transit or the tiniest social safety net imaginable. But, in order to keep calling yourself a “conservative”, you need to search under the couch cushions for your last Xanax and retire to a dark room with a cold compress as soon as liberals start exercising a wee bit of political power. So, if you have the delicate constitution of Mr. Sullivan or Mr. Freidersdorf, perhaps you should avert your eyes instead of reading the following couple of paragraphs.
The fundamental assumption these two are making–that Eich’s dismissal was heavy-handed in part because the fight is over–is wrong. Gay marriage is not legal in most states. We might be in a Loving v Virginia situation where ultimately all anti-gay-marriage laws will be overturned, but that remains to be seen. So, going after Brendan Eich, a man who supported a constitutional amendment to deny the rights of a set of Americans, and who never recanted or showed an iota, scintilla or jot of regret about his bigotry, is quite consistent with the ongoing fight. After all, the goal is to give every American, not just a pundit who can travel to Massachusetts to have a picture-perfect wedding, the right to sit at the hospital bedside of their spouse and hold their hand as they pass into the great beyond.
Only a pair of wankers who’ve never set foot in a corporate setting would believe that stated corporate policies trump corporate culture and executive leadership. Corporate policies are barely worth the bits they occupy on some server in HR unless management is committed enough to explain itself when appearances contradict policy. In the case of Eich, again, he reaffirmed the policy but didn’t explain his actions. He promised to “show, not tell” and he expressed “sorrow at causing pain”. The question isn’t whether he’s “sorry if he hurt your feelings”–which ain’t no apology–but whether he still thinks that gay Californians who are not in his employ should be denied a civil right. That question is still unanswered.
It’s important to emphasize that one of the final straws with Eich was OK Cupid redirecting Firefox users to a page advising them of the Mozilla situation. OK Cupid took a business risk to do that. Now, if Sully and the rest think Mozilla did wrong by firing Eich, they can either whine and cry about it, or they can take some political action by redirecting Mozilla users to a page that explains their position on the situation and asks them to run Chrome or IE. But they won’t, and neither will Breitbart, Fox News or Red State (I just checked all three with Firefox). Unlike OK Cupid, they don’t want to risk losing a tiny bit of traffic while their readers ask their grandkids to install a new browser on their PC.
aimai
Very good. We’ve been discussing this for two days over at Lawyer’s Guns and Money but I think your post says something important in a pretty new way.
Patricia Kayden
The 50s must have been scary times — every dang thing was communism.
beth
After the election, one of the memes that got posted on Facebook and websites and e-mailed around was a story of some businessman who went out into his parking lot and fired everyone who had an Obama bumper sticker (various versions had him asking who voted for Obama and then firing them). While I don’t believe this ever really happened, judging from the gleeful way this was passed around and posted everywhere I have no doubt most rightwingers would see nothing at all wrong with it if it had. And while I’m well aware that two wrongs don’t make a right and that folks like Sullivan and Conor most likely wouldn’t agree with it, it does go to show just how hypocritical the whole discussion of this has been.
Richard Shindledecker
The 50s were horrible. If an idea was remotely outside the box you were a pariah. I knew that and I wasn’t even 10 year old.
Cervantes
Great article. Thanks.
Yes.
And just an aside regarding this:
“Marriage” and “wedding” are not the same.
H.K. Anders
This was a market-based solution to a problem. A conservative should love it.
aimai
@beth: Yeah. Not only that but prominent Republicans were on record prior to the election, and again after the passage of the ACA, with stating publicly that they would “have to fire” or not hire people because of unspecified damages due to the ACA. This was all said in the spirit of wish fulfilment and fantasy revenge, of course. I doubt it happened very much. But true believers and circulators of angry emails certainly believe it to be true,and laudable.
I wrote a long blog post about Republicans as angry “tippers” in the restaurant of life. I think its important to point out that one major theme in Republican culture, the Republican imagination, is the revenge the boss takes on uppity or difficult workers. This is a very pleasurable fantasy for Republicans and conservatives. Where normal people see workers and poor people at the mercy of their bosses, conservatives see virtuous bosses at the mercy of their workers. So there’s a lot of revenge porn fantasy about how the boss retaliates, rightfully, against the workers for their inside or outside political actions. Its right up there with the fantasy that they go armed to an event and save the lives of the ungrateful gun grabbers, or that they go to a cocktail party and they stun the effete liberal eggheads with their real world experience/ or their brilliance.
evolved beyond the fist mistermix
@Cervantes: You’re right about wedding/marriage, I fixed it. Thanks.
RSA
I’m having a hard time understanding the rules that the “I like Eich” libertarians want everyone to follow. It can’t be profit in the case of Mozilla. Maybe it’s a sort of corporate non-interference directive.
MattF
Here’s Peggy “I don’t understand healthcare but I’m against it” Noonan:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/43253_In_Which_Peggy_Noonan_Wrestles_the_Many-Armed_Squid_in_Ink-Darkened_Water
It’s⊠soooo⊠complicated.
eric
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, or in the case of Sully and his ilk, the only thing we have to fear is the unwashed. This is all Authority versus democracy. Democracy is messy and they dont like it. Order trumps Justice for these folk.
EconWatcher
Nice picture. Wingnuts were a lot slimmer back then.
Cervantes
I checked the kerning â not to mention the parallax â on that photo. It was taken on August 20, 1959. Intern Young Conor was not yet born; even his Mentor Not-As-Young Andrew was not yet born. You are a fraud, sir.
cleek
@RSA:
it’s simple:
personal matters get checked at the office door. you go to work, do your job and STFU about things that don’t matter to the job. that way, nobody knows what your personal beliefs are so nobody is going to be bothered by them.
it’s hard to do, too.
Scott S.
@aimai:
I wrote a long blog post about Republicans as angry âtippersâ in the restaurant of life.
Linky?
OzarkHillbilly
Offered with out comment:
Honey Maid Love
Barry
@RSA: “Iâm having a hard time understanding the rules that the âI like Eichâ libertarians want everyone to follow. ”
Employers are protected in any right-wing act that they do.
Employees are protected in any right-wing act that they do.
(if there’s a conflict between the right-wing acts of employer and employee, then likely the employer’s rights trump the employees’)
EconWatcher
@Cervantes:
I can’t tell whether you’re misinterpreting the snark, or you’re committting some kind of meta-snark.
randomworker
@MattF: Yeah, I know. I like Wonkette’s headline on that: Peggy Noonan Lifts Head From Bar, Slurs Out More Lies About Obamacare, Passes Back Out
Read more at http://wonkette.com/#DB0P2vAKHMeSrPx5.99
Napoleon
@Cervantes:
I assume you are joking. Doesn’t the fact that one of the signs refers to long hair pretty much guaranty that the picture was taken sometime after February 7, 1964?
Mark S.
They’re all using IE anyway. It’s what came with the machine.
evodevo
@beth:
Yes, the bumper sticker thing did happen – in Alabama, I think, but it was Kerry, not Obama. There were a couple of incidents, one in Vegas and another in Utah that were laid at Obama’s feet. Never underestimate the rage of a conservative boss – they can get away with murder, and never pay for it.
Yatsuno
@MattF: That. Hurt. My. Brain…
SatanicPanic
We better be careful guys or Marine Todd is going to come through the screen and punch us all in the face
EconWatcher
@Yatsuno:
It’s not just stupid, it’s completely backwards. The complexity of ACA did not make it immune from attack. It made it very hard to sell and defend, until the benefits actually started to kick in.
Kay (not the front-pager)
@Patricia Kayden: Now it’s all socialism and fascism. At the same time.
Kay (not the front-pager)
@Patricia Kayden: Now it’s all socialism and fascism. At the same time.
Bob
As a gay man that supports hate crime laws I concede that Sullivan has some good, rational, arguments against them. But on this issue Sullivan’s arguments are without merit.
GregB
These hyperventilating shitheels will also be part of the “gay marriage is a conservative idea” caucus claiming that conservative Republicans were the real champions of this cause. I assume Jonah Goldberg will write the revisionist history on that one: Illiberal Homofascism or something.
The only Republican who deserves one ounce of credit for being ahead of her time is former Governor Jody Rell in Connecticit.
Cervantes
@EconWatcher: Yes, it’s good when one finds a little mystery in life. Not everything needs to be known â just ask Donald Rumsfeld â I believe he has thought deeply about this.
@Napoleon:
No, I know the date pretty well. The photo was taken in Little Rock in 1959. The fine specimens you see in it are protesting the integration of Central High School.
Porco Rosso
@aimai:
I always got the sense that they’re sociopathic free-riders who will take any opportunity to avoid tipping. Though Mitt would let a barista have his leftover latte. So there is that.
OzarkHillbilly
@aimai:
A sometime co-worker of mine always said that “the boss can fwck with you, but you can fwck him.” and boy, was he right. The man was ingenious in his evil.
MikeJ
@Napoleon: That pic is a joke, The original has people protesting “race mixing.”
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/files/2009/10/800px-Little_Rock_integration_protest.jpg
scav
There’s certainly a hell of a lot more universal angst and press coverage about one relatively well-off guy being out of a job than the long-term unemployment status of how many now? Some job markets are clearly more equal and freer than others.
Phantom 309
@EconWatcher: And died younger….
Napoleon
@MikeJ:
That makes sense.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
William Saletan has decided that Eich’s ouster is predicated on the same excuses that gays were fired/refused employment in decades past. As in, exactly the same. As in, liberals who celebrated this should be ashamed because they’re acting like bigots too now.
Gimmie a fucking drink, I don’t give a fuck that it’s only 10am.
Tom
@Richard Shindledecker:
The good thing about the fifties was that it generated a host of liberals.
evolved beyond the fist mistermix
@MikeJ: No, it was taken on the steps of the courthouse in Provincetown after the 10 year Dish reunion. Get your facts straight.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
I’ve heard of Angelo Mozilla but who is Brendan Eich?
gogol's wife
@EconWatcher:
I love that picture! It does remind us that the 27% have been with us a long time.
PurpleGirl
@MikeJ: Meaning that the signs were photoshoped to bring them up to a different date and purpose. But the picture itself is 1959.
Cervantes
@evolved beyond the fist mistermix:
Ah-ha! There is no courthouse in Provincetown! (The closest one is in Orleans.)
You stand exposed again as a fraud, sir! Have you no shame? You will kern â er, burn â in Hell, sir!
gogol's wife
@MikeJ:
Oops, should have read the whole thread. I should have known that the ’50s clothes didn’t go together with the concern about long hair.
Frankensteinbeck
@aimai:
I don’t think they see the boss as virtuous, or see themselves as temporarily embarrassed rich people. Rather, they’re abusive assholes, and lust for the power to indulge every momentary whim of anger by hurting others. Whether the boss is good or bad, and whether the employees are good or bad, is irrelevant. They just envy him his ability to shit on other people and laugh. This is why Republican voters (99% of whom are not rich) support the ‘pro-business’ grinding the poor agenda. It doesn’t matter that they themselves suffer. They get a lizard brain thrill in anybody being able to hurt anybody. That’s why the kleptocrat and cultural conservative coalition ever worked, Reagan set it up, and racists eat it up with a big spoon and ask for seconds.
schrodinger's cat
I find Andrew Sullivan’s anti-science comments about Cosmos, just as annoying. Remind me again why he is considered to be a “sane conservative”?
Cervantes
@gogol’s wife: In that time and in that place, they were considerably more than 27%.
Ash Can
@MattF:
Poor thing. Let this be a lesson to all you kids. Drinking too much cheap liquor fries your brain.
different-church-lady
@EconWatcher: Everyone was a lot slimmer back then.
Cervantes
@schrodinger’s cat: I’ll try, if you remind me again why you’re reading him in the first place.
flukebucket
I love that picture and I have posted it on my Facebook page with the Buckley quote, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it. ”
My question is does anybody have a link where there are lots of those old pictures showing the Tea Party of the 1950’s that I can pull from time to time and caption with quotes from the giants of conservatism?
I know google is my friend but I have not been able to locate just one good solid link for such as that.
schrodinger's cat
@Cervantes: I read him once a month or so, just to see which way the winds of conventional wisdom are blowing. There was also a time when I read him daily when I was more politically naive than I am now. So I also check his blog for old times sake.
Frankensteinbeck
As to the OP, businesses don’t like bad press. Eich was not popular with the board to begin with. When he made the company look bad, they kicked him out. In a corporate culture where CEOs are interchangeable pretty faces from the country club, this is downright normal. A political message was responded to with grassroots political protest. The company made up its own mind. The market gave us the result we wanted. This is not the same as us firing him.
schrodinger's cat
When did Eich drop the mann in his name?
Too soon?
srv
It’s too bad Sully wasn’t around to defend all those conservatives dragging their feet on AIDS.
Me, I can’t go a week without remembering how awesome Reagan was.
eric
@schrodinger’s cat: three words: “very” “low” “bar”
MikeJ
@Frankensteinbeck:
Especially since in the case of Mozilla, the CEO is really just a PR position. Mozilla corp is a for profit owned by the non-profit Mozilla org. The CEO of the corp isn’t expected to double revenue or any of the “normal” things expected of CEOs elsewhere.
Frankensteinbeck
@eric:
Pretty much. These days the bar is set at ‘knows Obama isn’t Muslim.’
mk3872
Since the U.S. Supreme Court and current law stipulates that corporations are the same as people in terms of the Bill of Rights, then by all means, a CEO’s public beliefs are representative of the company.
Mozilla has the right to fire or hire the CEO, head of their company, who will represent their own newly-found corporate freedom of speech and religion.
Roger Moore
@cleek:
I don’t think those are the rules; at the very least, they aren’t the rules any libertarians I’ve met want to follow. I think the rules they really believe in are that they get to express their views and people who disagree with them don’t. They simply aren’t able to distinguish these two sets of rules because they see their views as simple, universal truths that anyone should be allowed to express, while everyone else keeps dragging politics into things by disagreeing.
Mike in NC
@MikeJ:
Yeah, there weren’t any hippies around to be punched in 1959.
kindness
Sully was a tad shrieking earlier last week. Over the course of the week though he seemed to imply some might vote with their feet and hurt Mozilla and having said bigot resign so as not to hurt the company might be reasonable. Of course he still felt it was wrong to go after said bigot.
No Sully reminded me more of GayPatriot more than anything else last week.
nancydarling
Why does Sullivan make comments verboten at his dish?
Napoleon
@flukebucket:
The are some great 1960s pics out there of the yahoos burning Beatles records.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
Because he and Daniel Larison are about as close as we can find. That by itself should tell you something.
Xantar
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
Saletan continues to shame me as a Swarthmore alum.
beergoggles
If you’ve lived long enough, these people sound like old time racists losing their lynching privileges.
PurpleGirl
@Mike in NC: Not hippies but beatniks who spent their time in coffee houses writing and reading weird poetry.
piratedan
@schrodinger’s cat: I think it boils down to less spittle, more concern trolling
Mandalay
You nailed the two most relevant issues over why Eich was forced to resign….
Except that the question was implicitly answered; Eich’s silence on that was deafening.
And that was the end of the end for Eich. It would have been trivial for other web sites to follow their example, and then the Mozilla/Firefox brand would have been in deep, deep trouble.
Jim C.
I seriously only have one question with regards to this whole thing:
Why is it a bad thing if liberals are able to take some high profile scalps? I think it should happen more often. Sully can whine about how awful it is all he wants, just like he whined when liberals complained about Ambrosino.. but the bottom line is that he wouldn’t have half the rights he has today without those liberals he’s now so eager to complain about again.
Organizations like the NRA successfully take even the thought of gun control out of the realm of being politically debateable by successfully enacting consequences whenever anyone tries to mainstream the debate on the subject. They’ve effectively taken it off the table as an issue by taking scalps whenever anyone tries to bring it up. That’s big boy politics right there.
This is a classic case of IOKIYAR. We’re now quickly getting to the point where being opposed to gay marriage paints you as being completely outside of the mainstream and has serious consequences and I couldn’t be happier about it. That’s where it should be. It’s what liberals should be doing more often. Why keep fighting battles on our turf instead of carrying them to your opponents’ side of the field? Why, over the last few years, have we even been debating Paul Ryan budgets and their impact on entitlements? Those are battles that should have been completely over decades ago.
So a rich bigot doesn’t get to be a CEO for a company that likely has a completely progressive corporate culture. Boo freaking hoo. The Supreme Court has decided that money equals speech, and speech has consequences. Would Andrew be complaining if this had been a donation to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Or, using a better example, interractial marriage? Not likely. People would be appalled at the thought of such a bigot leading an important company.
jomike
Fckin’ A right. Maybe the Passion of the Eich will make an impression down at the 19th Hole. The CEO-slash-board-member-go-round is an old boy network; word gets around. Maybe the month or so that the poor dear is forced to live off his meager savings until his next sweet corner office gig will get the attention of fellow pampered candyasses. Those guys are nothing if not birds on a wire.
Cervantes
@Jim C.:
Many, many corporate CEOs donate to Republican and many (allegedly) conservative causes. There’s a fine line between that and being a bigot â so fine you’d be hard-pressed to show it exists.
NorthLeft12
the@MikeJ:
“The CEO of the corp isnât expected to double revenue or any of the ânormalâ things expected of CEOs elsewhere.”
If that is the rationale behind paying executives ridiculous amounts of money, then shareholders are not even getting close to that standard. Unfortunately, just as in our democratic government, the shareholders/voters are not getting what they want from the people they are putting in positions of power.
srv
@Jim C.: Well said.
James Probis
@Jim C.: Would Andrew be complaining if this had been a donation to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Or, using a better example, interractial marriage?
You mean Andrew ““Bell Curve” Sullivan? What ever gave you the impression he would disagree with racism?
schrodinger's cat
@piratedan: I think his accent makes him seem brighter than he actually is.
Gex
@beth: In 2004 there WAS a woman who was fired from her job for having a Kerry sticker on her car. She ended up working on the Kerry campaign. And as I recall quite a bit was said by right wingers and by libertarians (same thing, I know) about the precious freedoms of the employer to do so.
Mnemosyne
@Jim C.:
The thought experiment I used in the thread below was a hypothetical voter initiative in Arizona in 2015 that stripped the right to vote from African-Americans. Would citizens be justified in protesting against any CEOs who were found to have donated money to the initiative, or is it all just free speech and the results don’t matter?
It does seem that people tend to forget that Prop 8 halted gay marriage after thousands of gay couples had gotten married, putting the legal status of those couples into limbo. This wasn’t just another “gays can’t get married” law, it was “all you gay people who already got married aren’t really married after all” law, and it caused a pretty big legal mess for a lot of people. That’s one of the reasons it’s still such a major sore spot out here.
Frankensteinbeck
@James Probis:
I’m inclined to suspect he wants to hold the door open to bigotry in general.
EDIT – I don’t know. Maybe that’s unfair. Outside of what is posted here, I don’t read the man. It’s a filtered view.
? Martin
Ok for a photo like that, you really need to at least include a link to the original, because the original is a very important and revealing photo today.
If anyone ever wonders where the ‘socialism’, ‘communism’, ‘anti-christ’ stuff suddenly came from in 2008 with the flag-wavers, that photo tells you all you need to know. Communism wasn’t just propagandized as a redistribution of wealth, but also a redistribution of power, and white people didn’t like giving up their power.
Gex
@Mnemosyne: And the crux of the Prop 8 message was all the lies told about gays that not only were used to deny us rights, but are the things that Get. Us. Killed. The mainstream press has done a piss poor job of it, but there has been increased violence against gays during this last decade of the war on gays. When gays get murdered it tends to be very brutal. Did you know we have firebombings in America? I’ve read about a house, a car, and a horse stable owned by gay men getting firebombed in the last few years. This shit isn’t just a moderate disagreement about where to set marginal tax rates. This is about the humanity of a group of people.
Sullivan can fuck right off. Apparently he is now quietly conceding the main point I have been making all along: that gay people and their allies are perfectly within their rights to decide not to use Firefox and to say why they are doing so.
It is no kind of protection of freedom of speech to tell them they can’t just so Eich or Mozilla won’t have to feel uncomfortable about things. But alas, his main purpose of being the gay guy who gets quoted a lot because he agrees with the conservatives has already been fulfilled. So many quotes, so many page clicks. Damage already done. I can hear it now. “EVEN Andrew Sullivan says…”
Roger Moore
@Jim C.:
Because the main people complaining are conservatives.
Shakezula
I’d only add that I consider the current state of equal marriage rights in the U.S. irrelevant. He gave money to a hateful cause. In the case of Prop 8 it also happened to have (for a while) been the winning cause. But if Prop 8 had lost at the ballot level and the very next day the S.C. declared all laws that banned equal marriage null and void, it still would have been a hateful cause.
(There’s also the issue that equal marriage rights is not the entirety of equal rights for lgbt* However, the equal marriage fight is currently getting the most coverage and the one that was on the ballot in California. But that’s another discussion.)
Gex
@Gex: Oh, and maybe people who think that gays are too mean now can just step back and compare the difference between the price we extract when we “take a scalp” and the price the haters extracted when they had the upper hand.
“Boo hoo! I can’t be CEO” sounds like a lot more fun than “Fuck me, I’m so miserable I want to kill myself.” These guys should be grateful we don’t dish out like they did. Instead they act like something so minor is worse than anything they ever did. WATB doesn’t even begin to describe how pathetic they are.
Patricia Kayden
@MikeJ: Okay. I actually thought they were protesting long hair. lol
Southern Beale
SHOCKED that once again, right wingers have confused free speech with the free hand.
Ruckus
@Patricia Kayden:
Some people just always need something to be scarred of. And almost all of the time they have to make something up, for the truth is much less scary. For the past 60-80 years we’ve called these people republicans.
Ruckus
@RSA:
Can we, once and for ever get over the idea that a non-profit doesn’t make money? They do. It’s what they do with the money left over(profits) that is different. They have to in some way re-invest it in their business rather than put it in shareholders pockets. How much they pay management/employees, how big their headquarters is, etc is no different.
When I worked for one, my expense account had limits but as long as I could justify in some way what I spent….. There were many months when my expense account was greater than my pay. A lot greater.
Penus
@Ruckus: Yep. “Nonprofit” is a tax designation, not a moral status.
Ruckus
@schrodinger’s cat:
Because sometimes he actually listens and figures out his first response was….. well not wrong per say, let’s use the term, just a bit off.
I don’t get the allowance either, his first response is always wrong and it takes a virtual beating about the head and shoulders to get him to understand anything. His philosophy of life is unchanged, he is still an idiot, or in Monty Python terms a twit, but once in a while he is able to acknowledge that he might have misunderstood a particular situation.
Comrade Veidt
Atrios: “As homophobia is the last truly acceptable bigotry”
No. Actually, that would be Zionism.
JGabriel
mistermix @ top:
Let’s be clear on this: Eich didn’t just support a referendum to deprive or prevent Gay Americans’ right to marry: Eich supported a referendum to take away that right.
That right had already been recognized and granted by the courts in California.
Eich wanted to take it away, by popular referendum.
As a precedent, how does that look? Do we allow popular referendums to take away the rights of women? Blacks? The disabled? Catholics? Jews? Liberals? Conservatives?
Eich wasn’t just opposed to gay marriage – he financially supported a movement that advocated allowing discrimination and the repression of rights by popular referendum.
.
Citizen Alan
@nancydarling:
Rank cowardice?
300baud
One of the things that surprises me about this is how freedom of religion hasn’t been used by the left.
Assuming, as suggested, that Eich is a sincere Christian, it’s perfectly reasonable for him to be opposed to gay marriage. But for gay people whose religion allows them to get married, freedom of religion must require them to be able to follow their own religion.
That is, freedom of religion means that Eich’s views on gay marriage should matter a lot to Eich any anybody else in his church, but cannot control people of other religions.
If Eich had been clear about that distinction, and public about an understanding that it’s wrong to impose religious views on others using the power of the state, then this never would have been a problem.
Citizen Alan
@Comrade Veidt:
Pretty sure it’s fat shaming, actually.
Villago Delenda Est
@H.K. Anders: When the market bites them in the ass (as it often does) they hate it.
They only love the market in its theoretical, academic sense. The market in the real world doesn’t guarantee profit, doesn’t always reward the greedy. It takes careful manipulation of the rules to get those results.
Smith knew this, and wrote about it.
These people have never read Smith. If they had, they’d denounce him as a long hair. That is, as in the illustration, a communist.
Villago Delenda Est
@300baud: It’s a requirement of their vile religion that it seek to impose its tenets on everyone, otherwise, they’re failing to properly follow their religion.
Which is why their religion must be destroyed.
Calouste
@schrodinger’s cat:
I think Sullivan is considered a sane conservative because he can do spelling and grammar. And make a somewhat logically sounding, but always wrong, argument.
Another Holocene Human
@RSA: Libertarians have no principles. That’s the joke.
CanadaGoose
@Patricia Kayden: No hippies in the 1950s. It was mid-60s before Hair became a Xtian Issue.
(And yes, the 1950s were not fun for anyone except the type of guys pictured.)
patroclus
Eich is obviously a bigot who wanted to extinguish civil rights by popular referenda and the fact that some employees and directors at Mozilla objected to their company being led by a bigot is a good result regardless of what Sully says or thinks. I fail to see why gays and lesbians are to blame for the bigot losing his job – I had never even heard of the guy until he resigned, so Sully blaming me is just a tad ridiculous.
patroclus
@300baud: Sorry, but it is not perfectly reasonable for sincere Christians to be bigots. Bigotry is unreasonable by definition.
Another Holocene Human
@CanadaGoose: Looking at the faces of the two in the front, I can almost hear the giant phantom garden mammal calling “Dins-daaaaaaale”.
Quiddity
People should get hounded out of the workplace based on incorrect political stances no matter what the position, CEO or lowly intern. What I want to know is, who’s next? Is someone processing the list of donors to Proposition 8? There’s plenty of names and I’m sure we can find another couple of dozen in no time.
This is something balloon-juice should start working on.
JaneE
And following your conscience and religious doctrines is just fine so long as they tell you not to do business with gays, but not doing business with bigots – that is just liberal fascism. The people complaining about Eich’s treatment by Mozilla are the same people who have been doing the same thing to gays, blacks, browns – anyone they don’t like. The golden rule needs a corollary – you don’t get to complain when you get back what you give.
Villago Delenda Est
@Quiddity: I think dipshits like you should be hounded off the pages of Balloon Juice.
Tonybrown74
@Calouste:
Really? This may be due to the fact that I am no writer, but I do not understand why so many consider him to be such a good writer. Also, he comes off as quite irrational to the point of hysteria when it comes to those issues that do not personally affect him that he feels strongly about (especially when it comes to the “blahs” and the whimen-folk).
His disdain for women (not named Margaret Thatcher) is particularly jarring. I have felt the need to defend Sarah fucking Palin, of all people, when his attacks on her became particularly nasty.
dollared
I am a very shallow person. So I am glad that Brendan Eich is just one “R” short of having the perfect last name.
Villago Delenda Est
@MattF: Noonan is in a state of permanent drunkenness. Treat everything the shrew writes in that light, and you’ll be OK.
300baud
@patroclus:
I agree that Christians shouldn’t be bigots.
I’m saying that it’s reasonable for them to use their own moral code for deciding what they themselves will do. That is, anybody who doesn’t like gay marriage shouldn’t get gay married. And that if a church is opposed to gay marriage, they needn’t perform gay weddings.
But that freedom of religion requires that Christians who think gay marriage is ok must be allowed to get gay married if they want, and the same applies to their churches.
Put differently, freedom of religion has to mean that my religion doesn’t trump yours. And especially that I can’t use the power of the state to force my religion on you. It’s that point that I think liberals haven’t hammered home in all this stuff with Eich.
Jay Schiavone
@EconWatcher: Cigarettes were much less expensive back then.
LanceThruster
The accompanying photo of the Southern Master Race is itself a wonderment.
patroclus
@300baud: I think I understand what you are saying, but I don’t really agree. I, as a matter of my moral code, believe that murder is bad and I feel fully entitled to act on that belief in the public square to enact and support enforcement of laws that criminalize murder. Equally, I, as a matter of my moral code, believe that marriage equality is good (and consistent with Christian principles and the 14th amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws) and feel perfectly entitled to make my case in the public square to establish marriage equality in all state and federal laws. To me, that’s what freedom of religion is. You have a utopian view that seems ungrounded in actual human history.
And to the troll – the Prop H8 contributor list is public knowledge under the California disclosure laws. I certainly wouldn’t want that on my resume and I hope that each and every contriubutor, in time, regrets it.
Mike G
@Frankensteinbeck:
This is why overt assholes like Rush, Hannity and O’Reilly are big right-wing media stars — Repukes love bullies and dream of inflicting punishment on the weaker.
Howlin Wolfe
@EconWatcher: Definitely snark.
moderateindy
The complaint by the right seems silly. Had this guy been an advocate for any other bigoted cause, say for instance he gave money to white supremacists, would there even be an argument that he shouldn’t suffer the consequences of his actions?
As far as the justificationthat “his advocacy of Prop 8 is OK because he is a devout Christian”, people need to learn their history. People cited the bible, and their religion, all the time to justify why they were against things like race mixing.
You have the right to say, and advocate for whatever you want in this country, but the only protection you have for that free speech is from government retaliation, not from your fellow citizens holding you responsible.
Juju
@Cervantes: Holy crap!! He looks old for 50.
Juju
@Cervantes: You are mistaken about the location in that photograph. I spent my last year of high school at Little Rock Central High School. That building is not LRCH.
jake the snake
@schrodinger’s cat:
Only relatively, compared to say Rick Santorum or Mark Steyn.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Penus: Or, as a consultant told my (non-profit) borad of directors, “non-profit is a tax status, not a business plan.”
Cervantes
@Juju:
No, it’s just that you are mistaken about what I said. Here it is again:
See the difference?
The photo was taken in Little Rock, at the state capitol. What the protestors are upset about is the integration of the high school.
Juju
I see the difference and I made a mistake in my reading of what you wrote. I was thrown off because the vast majority of the protests took place around the school, and the start of the integration crisis began in 1957. My wrong.
Cervantes
@Juju: No problem. Were you there in the late ’50s?
Juju
I graduated in 1979. Learning the history of the school is/was a big part of the deal of attending LRCHS. I learned more about the integration crisis in the one year I attended than I had in my pervious 16 years. I haven’t been back, so I don’t know if it is still part of the deal, but I suspect it is.
Matt McIrvin
Companies and nonprofits buckle under outside political pressure from right-wing groups all the time. I can’t shake the feeling that the reason so much outrage is operating in the Eich case is that it’s over the one and only political controversy of the past couple of decades on which liberals are obviously winning.
Ramalama
I started reading Sully back when W stole the election, trying to figure out what the deal was with conservatives. I thought perhaps I was missing something being so communister than thou on everything. He is an ok writer – better than George Will for genome’s sake – but a really messy and emotional thinker.
I’ve hated lots of stuff he wrote but then also liked a few stances he took – like the whole US is now torturing and Katrina Snafu. He had/has a big megaphone and drew lots of attention to it. He’s gay so I kind of felt for him getting the scores of DIE F0G emails.
But he’s so wrong on so many things and when he changes his mind on something he doesn’t announce it with nearly the same level of shrill and shriek as the former position garnered.
Plus – all these other serious media types were also wrong though not shrill, and as the noxious years farted through my life, I got fed up reading bullshit by lazy thinkers and decided I’d had enough.
I stopped reading Sully when Hillary ran and won’t go back.
But if you want to really annoy that fecker, I suggest a letter writing campaign extolling the virtues of Noam Chomsky. He’s made seriously false claims about NC through the years. I’ve emailed him a couple of times to ask him where he got his info – and I had an MIT address at the time and I also used to work for NC. Nary a word.
I think Sully aspires to be Christopher Hitchens, doggie paddling to keep his head above water and hoping that no one notices his prose is sinking him. Hitchens was an arsehole, but this piece is one of the best takedowns I’ve ever read. The Chorus and Cassandra.
AnneW
@Juju:
This is days old so you’ll likely never see it, but I too spent my senior year (1980-1981) at Little Rock Central High School. Although at first I was angry about having to leave McClellan High School, I grew to love Central. I met many fine people: teachers, students, others. I was in the chorus of the school play (Once Upon a Mattress) & marveled that the second romantic lead couple was interracial and that no one thought it unusual. I saw Jesse Jackson at a school assembly. He was on fire when he spoke, and I loved him for it.
I also had the good fortune to be working in the library when a class came in to learn about different methods of birth control, and I learned a lot just by listening.
My mother had graduated from Central (then Little Rock Senior High School) in 1949, and she kept a scrapbook about the integration crisis. The newspaper articles and pictures were brutal to see, but it gave me an early interest in civil rights.
There is now a small museum across the street from Central, with pictures and exhibits about the crisis. Take a look if you’re ever in the area.