Perfect example: Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla, who was perfectly competent but fired for having donated to a gay or non-gay cause (I don't remember which one). This kind of opinion dictatorship has to end.

I was actually supportive (in the "I upvoted and retweeted stuff" sense, because god forbid anyone gets out of their chair over politics) of the calls for his promotion to CEO being reversed at the time because it was my understanding that the decision was made against the will of many Mozilla employees and that they felt he could not accurately reflect the standards Mozilla tried to stand for due to his personal beliefs.

But the more I learned about it, the more I realized how the narrative was shaped by people outside of Mozilla being offended on behalf of others (although there were apparently one or two displeased employees).

That was also the last time I took online moral outrage serious. It doesn't matter whether it's SJWs shaming supposed racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia or the religious right shaming supposed anti-Christians/Satanists. The outrage is almost always overblown and rarely justified.

Sometimes there's some truth to a particular story but if the leading narrative paints someone as unambiguously evil, it's almost always a complete fabrication.

> This kind of opinion dictatorship has to end.

I agree. I am refraining from commenting elsewhere in this thread because I really just don't know WHO I would piss off, and this alias is tangentially tied to my IRL identity.

Self-censorship is a sneaky, evil, corrupting beast.

You do realize we fought a civil war, right? And it's universally agreed that the people who were pro-slavery, against the female vote, etc were total bigots who deserved to lose as soon as possible.

The fact that the bad guys can hold out for a while before losing doesn't cease to make them the bad guys.

We didn't fight a civil war to ban slavery, we fought a civil war because a bunch of states seceded from the Union.

They were seceding proactively to protect slavery which was in their mind threatened; we weren't fighting the war to ban slavery but to prevent them from leaving.

> And you know what? Eventually that changed. It takes time. The approach the left has been taking lately is to make sweeping changes that a lot of people aren't comfortable with RIGHT NOW OR ELSE YOU'RE A BIGOT AND YOU DESERVE TO HAVE YOUR LIFE RUINED. For a large portion of the population it was just too much, too fast and they had enough.

Originally ,that was what the conservatives side supposed to be about: consistent small changes to society that can be rolled back, to make sure that the result works.

Viewing in that lense, things like constitutional originalist makes sense since the justices are essentially just saying "if you to change things, go through the whole amendment process", which is slow and stable.

I'm not sure if the changes can be attributed to either the left or right, but the result is that the left is now trying to make sweeping changes, the right turned into a rose-tinted extreme that goes "past is better".

I can see what you're getting at, but I'm having a hard time seeing how allowing gay marriage would cause someone's life to be ruined.

I'm sorry I don't want to sacrifice my life and dreams because some people are slow learners. But it's OK, because the next generation will not suffer. /s

Give me a break.