.
4/5/14, "Eich," Richard Fernandez, PJ Media
"Much of the shock following the removal of Brendan Eich
from the position of Mozilla CEO came from the realization that, in a
manner of speaking, America was now at war. True it’s a culture war, not
a physical conflict. But if you were waiting for the moment when the
Cold Civil War actually begins, this might be it.
Not that anyone should have been taken aback. After all, Larry Summers
was sacked as president of Harvard following his criticism of Cornell
West’s rap album and as a result of a 2005 speech in which he suggested
that the under-representation of women in science and engineering could
be due to a “different availability of aptitude at the high end”.
Mark Steyn, National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute are being sued for defamation by Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann for criticizing the theory of Global Warming. The Gannet newspapers
declared open season on gun-owners by publishing a map showing the
names and addresses of registered New York gun owners, as a kind of
dinner bell for burglars. “Come and rob … me”.
In fact, the Wall Street Journal
points out that a similar database was used to ferret out Eich. “Eich’s
support for Proposition 8 became public knowledge because of a
California law requiring disclosure of personal information–name,
address, occupation and employer’s name — of anybody who gives $100 or
more to a campaign for or against a ballot initiative. The secretary of
state’s office is required to post this information online, and, as HotAir.com’s “AllahPundit” notes, the Los Angeles Times made it available on its site as an easily searchable database.”
To continue: in 2012, “American fast-food chain Chick-fil-A was the
focus of controversy following a series of public comments made in June
2012 by chief operating officer Dan Cathy opposing same-sex marriage”.
For those who still remember it (along with the forgotten episode of the
Benghazi consulate), the 2013 IRS scandal was all about investigating
people who held the wrong political views.
It might be mentioned, though it hardly seems relevant, that Proposition 8 actually won by 52.24% to 47.76. Irrelevant because unacceptable, as James Surowiecki of the New Yorker explains:
"The obvious point to make about Eich’s resignation is
that it shows how much a part of the mainstream that support for gay
rights has become, particularly in the technology world. Eich’s problem
wasn’t that he took a political stance: Amazon.com’s C.E.O., Jeff Bezos,
has weighed in on gay marriage, too, by donating more than $2.5 million
in support of it. The problem was that Eich’s stance was unacceptable
in Silicon Valley, a region of the business world where social
liberalism is close to a universal ideology. At this point, a tech
company having a C.E.O. who opposes gay marriage is not all that
different from a company in 1973 having a C.E.O. who donated money to
fight interracial marriage: even if there were plenty of Americans who
felt the same way at the time, the C.E.O. would still have been on the
wrong side of history. And since the role of a C.E.O. as a public face
of an organization is more important than ever these days, Eich’s
personal views were inevitably going to shape his ability to run the
company."
Yes, the culture war has been raging for a long time, except people
didn’t notice it because it seemed to take place on the edges or in
fringe settings. All the Eich affair did was make it obvious.
Ironically many people, even in the homosexual community, don’t want
this culture war and are dismayed by the Eich witch hunt. They don’t want
it not only because … but I’ll get to that in a moment … especially
since the Eich affair is not about gay marriage, except incidentally,
any more than the Summers affair was about racism or feminism; or that
Steyn’s suit has anything to do with warmism or denialism or the
gunowners map was about school safety; or still less that the 2013 IRS
persecution of Tea Party groups was to do with Citizen’s United.
The removal of Eich is about fascism. It’s about one group of people
forcing everyone else to bow to their hat on a pole; it s about book
burning, compelling obeisance to, as Jame Surowiecki put it, “a
universal ideology” in a manner so bald that even those who might gain
politically in the short term from it are horrified by its crudity.
Perceptive gays understand now, if they hadn’t noticed before, that a
whole mechanism now exists for persecuting people whose views are
deemed unacceptable. Today it is directed against Eich; once it was
directed against Summers; on other occasions it was employed against
Clarence Thomas. But sooner or later, probably sooner, they understand
it will be directed against them — or us — or someone. And if it can
get a corporate CEO who is widely regarded as the father of Javascript
it can get pretty darned anyone.
Peter Burrows at Business Week quotes
Joseph Grundfest, a law professor at Stanford University who says “this
is a particularly fascinating situation, because it involves an
illiberal reaction from a very liberal community. It’s fair to say
that this could have been handled differently and better.” But
Grundfest misses the point. It was the late Gerald Ford who really put
his finger on the problem, which to paraphrase Ford, is that ‘any
instrument of social coercion big enough to give you everything you want
is an instrument big enough to take away everything that you have.’
Build the bonfire and you too can be torched at the stake. Or as Brian
equivalently put it to Max in Cabaret: “do you think you can still control them?”
One person who doubts the fire is under control is Senator Rand Paul.
He along with Eich, recently made a stir in the Bay Area in a speech at
Berkeley arguing that all this time we’ve been building the apparatus
that will soon be turned against us. And by us, he means everyone,
including gays.
Paul used an example from Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 to explain how power can be retasked to any purpose and how the liberal can become illiberal. If firemen can become book-burners than anything is possible, which is the brilliance of Bradbury’s metaphor....
And wasn’t there a time when tolerance meant tolerant and the IRS was
meant to collect taxes from everybody without favor and the NSA was
meant to spy on America’s enemies? As many nightmares start with”wasn’t
there a time” as fairytales begin with the phrase “once upon a time”.
And the correlation is not coincidental. The difference between a
fairytale and a horror story is in the details....
Prince Charming’s Castle is architecturally identical to the Tower of
London. And tolerance of the right sort of intolerance is of course,
tolerance."
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among comments
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"
It's not enough to note that there is a war. It is necessary to plan counter-attacks and to not be very nice about it."
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Comment: This is what happens when a large country has only one functioning political party. A dictatorship happened because only one side was fighting, the radical left democrat. The GOP was eager for dissent to be abolished. That's why they offered no resistance to the radical left taking control of schools, Hollywood, the media. They believe we have no choice but to accept this.
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In 2003, the radical left believed in Freedom of Speech. Hillary Clinton said Americans have a right to debate and disagree:
"I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you
disagree with this administration somehow you're not patriotic. We
should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate
and disagree with any administration."
===================
The radical left initially sold itself as peace and flowers:
1967, "...there's a whole generation...with a new explanation." Scott McKenzie, lyrics
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