FTT Off-Topic: Five Brief And Obvious Points About Brandon Eich Losing The Mozilla CEO Job Over His Anti-Gay Poltical Views

Not, Um, Very Scary

Not sports, and not caring. Read or roll.

So the hullabaloo is how The Gays (and The Gay Friendly) are all grown up and just as big and bad as the people that have been keeping them down all these years, because they've managed to get the scalp of a single tech CEO.

I'm going to let the dumbness of that sink in for a minute. Savor it, really. You don't really get that quality of dumbness very often.

And now the list...

1) Being CEO of a company that only succeeds if a great number of people choose to use your free product... pretty much means that you don't get to take politically divisive public stances. You just don't. And the reason why isn't because of intolerance or immorality; it's the simple freaking free market decision to not associate your mass market product with, well, just about any political viewpoint. You want to do that sort of thing, you funnel your cash through a third party. Seriously, how did Eich and Mozilla ever get so deep into their own dog food as to fail to realize this?

2) Having a board of directors that fails the capitalism test in picking a new CEO... tells you all that you really need to know about the quality of the advice that the board is giving the company. This really can't be understated. If you feel good about Mozilla's long-term prospects at fighting off Google and IE after this debacle, you are, um, nuts.

3) Look, even Chick-Freaking-Fil-A is smart enough to see which way the wind is blowing on this one, and to say "Um, we're smarter now and we're not doing the divisive thing anymore." There's just not enough money in obstinate asshattery.

4) There's no group of people quite so sensitive to bigotry as the people who have been doing the, um, bigotry. I hate to tell you, folks, but there's going to be some blowback coming your way when you are on the wrong side of a historically disgraced position, because when you make bad decisions that hurt people, it's not like everyone has a Get Out Of War Crimes free card. (Whoops, there I go, conflating the decision to lie the country into war with the decision to demonize people based on their sexual preference. Can't imagine why I do that!) One dipwit losing his job doesn't quite balance the scales.

5) Even if this were somehow true that The Gays have become intolerant wretch bombs... how, exactly, is achieving equality, warts and all, a bad thing?

Gay people aren't morally *better* than straights. They may tend to be better educated, because they gravitate towards coastal regions where education is more valued, and they may be more affluent, because they aren't spending big bank on quite so many kids, and education still has something of a reasonable lifetime ROI... but all of that is going to change with technology and changing social mores. In my lifetime, we're likely to see the eradication of preference for straights over gays in adoption, just like we're seeing the eradication of marriage inequality. If and when they marry, and if and when they raise the poverty spawn, they'll get to the same level of divorce and poor fashion choices and all of the other bourgeois burdens.

Including, well, political decisions that you might not, horror of horrors, agree with. And you'll get to disagree with those reasons not based on the reason they are a group, but just on the merits of the decision. Equality!