kcarbotte :
g-thor :
Let's put the shoe on the other foot. How would devs feel if Luckey announced that any pro Hillary supporters would not be allowed to market their software on the Rift? Do citizens of America believe in free speech, freedom of thought, freedom of association or not? It's your Constitution that really sets you apart from so many other countries in the world. Don't forget how important the principles it enshrines are to your national character.
Boycotting and denouncing something you don't agree with is part of that freedom.
The problem I see is what happens if everyone did that? What happens if
everyone boycotts whatever they don't agree with? Society falls apart because nobody can interact with each other anymore, because nobody exactly agrees on everything.
In engineering, you have stable and unstable systems. There is a specific point at which a system turns from being stable to unstable, corresponding to when an infinite series switches from convergent to divergent. I see this as a similar system. If your threshold for boycotting social interactions is "I disagree with them" then the system will go divergent and all of society blows up. There has to be a higher threshold. Exactly how high I don't know, but "disagreeing" is not high enough.
As tempting as it is to want to not tolerate intolerance, that in itself is intolerance and strips you of the moral high ground. Once you take that step, everyone is intolerant, they just disagree on what not to tolerate. The only system that maintains the moral high ground is to tolerate intolerance, and hope that the youth of the world are smart enough to see that you are making a different, better, moral choice than those who are intolerant, and they will thus follow in your footsteps.
To be clear, the developers that have denounced Oculus thus far, have been clear to point out the racist memes that this organization promotes, not the fact that Luckey supports Trump.
Did Oculus fund this organization? No? Then they should be denouncing Luckey, not Oculus. He may be the founder and still works there, but he's no longer the owner. Facebook owns it, and the company has about 100 other employees. Do they deserve to be maligned and their livelihoods jeopardized simply because they happen to work at the same company he does?
Basically what going on is extending the target of your criticism by one degree of separation. If you apply that same principle to other things, you get the following wonderful consequences:
- You can be boycotted from working somewhere because of something your parent or child did.
- You can be boycotted because of something the company you work for did.
- You can be boycotted because of something done by someone you used to hang out with.
Is that really the kind of world you want to live in?
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