Saturday, April 5, 2014

Could Have Been a Great Explanation For OkCupid's Organizing of the Gaystapo...

I found myself wondering, because I have a wickedly dark and Machiavellian understanding of human nature: could OkCupid have organized the Gaystapo's successful campaign to get Brendan Eich fired to drive down Mozilla's stock price, and sell short?  It turns out that only a few years before Eich committed the unforgivable sin of backing a "one man, one woman" initiative, the founders of OkCupid backed candidates who publicly supported or voted for "one man, one woman" laws.  Curious, what?

It would rather like the way that in the medieval period, lower nobles would sometimes intentionally whip up mobs to burn out the Jewish section of town.  Because lending money at interest was an excommunicatable offense, Catholics were generally unwilling to do so.  Jews were obviously not subject to excommunication, and so much of medieval lending was by Jews.  What's the fast way to free yourself of debts?  Kill the people who hold those notes, and burn all the documentation that might be used later to collect those debts.

Now, if medieval European mobs had really understood Christian doctrine, instead of reviling the Jews as "Christ-killers" they would have realized that without Jesus' death, there would be no opportunity for Gentile salvation.  The medieval Church, unfortunately, was a bit too focused on rituals to get around to providing a proper grounding in Christian doctrine for the masses.  Widespread illiteracy also made it impossible for the vast majority of medieval Europeans to really understand Christianity -- hence, Protestantism's enormous focus on literacy, for both men and women.

But it turns out that Mozilla is not publicly traded.  This could not be the motivation.  But I do find myself wondering if there might be some other sneaky reason to whip up an extraordinarily emotional, rage-filled population into a medieval Holy Week frenzy equivalent with the goal of helping Mozilla shoot itself in the foot with a belt fed machine gun.

Of course, if there is some unclear objective behind this, such as to get an NSA-infiltrated browser more widely used, it does not take away any moral responsibility from the Gaystapo and the Fascist Firefox for their actions.  Nor does it excuse the incredible historical ignorance of the Gaystapo's defenders, many of whom do not know that the Nazis were helped into power by a largely homosexual-headed organization, the Sturmabteilung.

Hitler's "Night of the Long Knives" in which Ernst Roehm and much of the SA leadership was captured in flagrante delicto, and executed shortly thereafter, was driven not by Roehm's homosexuality (which Hitler had known about for years), but by a power struggle between the SA and the Wehrmacht.  The SA leadership's homosexuality was a useful excuse when Roehm and friends had become a political liability.  You wonder at what point progressives will decide that the Gaystapo will cease to be useful for their totalitarian pursuit of power -- and throw them to the Muslims.  I am guessing at about the point where Muslims draw up even with Christians as a voting block.  At the current rate of Muslim growth and Christian collapse, that could be in the next three or four decades.  And what then?  Perhaps Robert Ferrigno's increasingly plausible description in Prayers for the Assassin will come true.  But it will be a great party for gay people while it lasts.


3 comments:

  1. I would comment, but I am planning on being a CEO in 6 years. And I am not liking all the groveling that I will have to do.

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  2. The /simplest/ answer, if you need a financial motive, is that the software industry and the Google-Mozilla axis in particular is overwhelmingly left-leaning.. And while the H1B lobbying shows that the marginal worker is very low-value to these companies, the high pay and weird no-poaching agreements suggest that retaining specialists is worth a huge amount of money. And it's certainly the sort of industry where liking or at least respecting the employer as a person matters, given how common it is for tech CEOs to be industry or even household names.

    When Eich's known for being the man behind JavaScript, he's someone techies can run behind (well, mostly; the language has a lot of architectural issues). If /anybody/ knows that he's committed wrong-think -- and the topic had bubbled around on reddit and a few other tech-heavy spots of the web days before the OKCupid response -- then working for him is itself wrong-think. It's not hard to follow a chain of events where, as soon as Eich's personal beliefs became well-known, he had to be purged as soon as possible, lest Mozilla suddenly find itself with a brain drain of liberal-minded techs.

    I'm not sure you need a complex cause here, though. Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. Just as the recent #cancelcolbert idiocy wasn't related to economic or rational thought but on matters of ideology triggered by zeitgeist, there's just as plausible a story where progressives think they won during the Chick-Fil-A thing, and that the modern GLBT movement is in an environment of total war where one hesitation or compromise leads to a military coup and concentration camps.

    Given that I get to deal with the GLBT movement from the inside, and that I see people actually advocate the latter views...

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  3. I remember a few years when police in Connecticut or Rhode Island were enforcing laws against sex in public places on a beach, which was overwhelmingly gay men who were being charged, and one of the local gay activists compared it to Auschwitz.

    JavaScript and architectural issues: you are being a bit too polite, I think! (I have to write in JavasScript often.)

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