If everything in the world turns into a political boycott, you effectively don't have free speech either. There is always some cause people feel strongly for or against, and consider it a violation of their fundamental rights. It's completely valid to not go nuclear on every single political issue.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7526663" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7526663</a>
"I keep hearing people saying that gay marriage is more than just a political view, but so is every other political view.
Don't support welfare? You're against poor people. Support welfare? You're against the working man. You're pro-choice? You're against babies. You're pro-life? You're against women."<p>You know what's different? Because this particular issue has a clearly decisive split in this country.<p>If you want to play the ostracism game, don't ostracize a majority of a society (a majority of Californians back then).<p>Ultimately it's all about fitting in to your tribe - if you had donated to Planned Parenthood as the CEO of a Southern family restaurant chain, people would say it's the exact same thing. Abortion is not a "political view", it's murder of unborn children, and you deserve to lose your CEO-ship because of it. If you disagree, you are "completely wrong" and unworthy of time.<p>The lofty rhetoric about unacceptable and "political views," bigotry, offensiveness is the same as tribalism - the Silicon Valley tribe agrees that you must accept gay marriage, the United States tribe in 2014 agrees that you must accept gay marriage. At a different culture in a different country in a different time, the standards may be completely different.<p>It's actually perfectly understandable to feel loyalty to your tribe. Just understand that some principles are in fact not universal.<p>In the end it might be about lines in the sand and certain things crossing from the realm of acceptability or unacceptability, depending on tribe. The winning group CAN ostracize Eich for it, in 2014, so they are. The winning group couldn't do a thing like that in 1999 when Eich was busy founding Mozilla.<p>Anyone can play the game and Paul Graham's essay deals with precisely this form of thought limitation: <a href="http://paulgraham.com/say.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/say.html</a>