94% Enemy

When OkCupid is against you, there really is no point in carrying on. It's over. What am I talking about? Gay stuff. Specifically OkCupid's excellent middle finger to recently named Mozilla CEO and noted gaycist, Brendan Eich, who donated money to the Prop-8 people back in 2008 and is now ruing the day.

"Whoa, whoa, I'm not anti-gay, I'm just anti-gay marriage. There's a difference:
I don't care if gay people exist, I just can't stand the thought of them finding happiness."

-Brendan Eich, CEO of...what?

Ok, he didn't actually say that,

but I don't think I'm that far off

If you try to go to OkCupid today using Firefox, you'll get a letter from them asking you to please be so kind as to use some other browser (like Safari, which is totally gay) so as not to get Eich's grody homophobia all over their gay-friendly site:

"May your loins wither and bear no fruit,
may you mouth be covered in sores and
may your Q4 earnings fall by 20-no, 25%."

"Mozilla's new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid...Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it's professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame and frustration are our enemies and we wish them nothing but failure."

-OkCupid, standing up to homophobes

and possibly laying a curse on Brendan Eich

With that, the dating site joins, well, most of the internet in calling for Eich to step down but he's not going quietly. In this interview with cnet, he insists that not only is he the best person for the job, but that there will be dire consequences if he's forced out. Dire consequences!

Is 'walled garden' a computer thing?
Because it actually sounds kind of lovely.

"A world without Firefox and without Firefox OS and without our approach to putting the user at the center of cloud services instead of having users get pulled into walled gardens -- I think that would be a pretty dark world. I would encourage people to think about that, even if they have a hard time understanding me or meeting me at the Mozilla mission and working on a common cause."

-Brendan Eich, Mozilla CEO and all 

that stands between us and the darkness

So if Eich is asked to resign, Firefox will cease to be and the world will be plunged into a dark, nightmarish future of not being at the center of cloud services. I guess we'll all just have to use Chrome or something.

Above: The bleak, Firefox-less world that awaits us if Eich gets fired. 

Above: The thing Eich
is being hoisted by.

What he's getting at is that in asking him to resign because of the Prop-8 donation, his critics are striking at his company's philosophy of a user-controlled internet. He's like, the victim here, see? The logic being that if you believe that the internet should be controlled by people and not corporations then you should also support him in his freedom to be an asshole. Ok, fair point, but doesn't this door kind of swing both ways? Fine, great, donate to the Prop-8 people, but don't get all butt-hurt (should that be hyphenated?) when 71,000 people sign a petition to get your ass fired.

In the interview he also asserts that his personal beliefs are not relevant to his position as CEO, and I'm going to have to call bullshit on that too. I'll admit that I'm not really clear on what a CEO does (something about synergizing paradigms, I think?), but isn't getting people to work together part of the job? Isn't that kind of difficult if everyone hates your rancid, homophobic guts?

"Cheryl, listen, if you're planning on bringing Lana to the company picnic,
do you think you could keep a lid on the lesbo stuff? We're a family company." 

"Yessss...attention...I craves it..."

-Mike Huckabee

(actual quote)*

Obviously at some point Mike Huckabee is going to catch wind of this and latch on to Eich like some kind of parasite that feeds on hate and relevancy. He'll probably organize a 'We like Eich' day at Chic Fil-A and his supporters will sit around soaking up free wifi and arterial blockages while complaining about the gays and Obamacare, but in the end Eich's tenure as CEO is likely doomed. Thanks to him, Firefox is now the #1 browser among homophobes. No amount of re-branding, or thinking outside the box is going to shake that off.

Of course he could do the classy thing and resign. It'd save the company a lot of grief. It's sort of like when Worf accepted discommendation rather than allow the Klingon Empire to collapse into civil war. Yeah, you like that? I made this about Star Trek.

Of course Worf wasn't donating money to a bunch of anti-gay
 tools, so the analogy kind of falls apart. But still...Klingons...

*no, no it isn't.