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Tim Cook Speaks Up

businessweek.com

171–180 of 1001 posts

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#171
While this is already known, this does show us the world is not black and white. Tricky the whole thing.

Mozilla as a company fights for privacy and creates a lot of free software for the general good. But people couldn't stand it's CEO being anti-gay. Now we have the most dangerous (imo) company of all time whose CEO is gay.

Ah, good times.

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#172
post #122
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I for one know very little about the important persons in , gay or not. We might all know about the terrible fate of Alan Turing, but I don't expect non-cs people to know. (Thanks to gpvos for the correction of faith->fate. )

*fate (at least I hope you mean that)

Maybe he meant the bad faith shown towards Turing by the British Establishment.

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#173
post #97
post #20

I wonder how carefully crafted this line was: ... I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me. It seems a particularly odd thing to slip in, on so many levels.

An odd thing to slip in? He is, as far as I've gathered, a deeply religious gay man. If his point is to imply those things are not at odds, then I don't think this sentence's inclusion is odd at all.

Gay people aren't stereotypes who fit into one mold. I used to live next to a gay couple who were the among most conservative people I've ever met. I think that's the exact point of the sentence, to say "we're not all the same; it's just one thing about me" without sounding like an angsty teenager.

That said, it wasn't exactly a secret that Tim Cook is gay. Though it was always handled as more of a "this is something that can inform your understanding of him as a business leader" as opposed to "omg it's a scandal! He's gay and running the biggest company in the world!" His sexuality is probably a bigger deal among Alabama boosters than the tech community though.

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#174
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not. I'm an atheist, anti-theist in fact, and I know perfectly well the history of the bible how it was written, and that it is not the word of imaginary god etc. I am just saying what the religious people say it is. And this is the irony.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but your ignorance of religion and monotheism is astounding. Reading your comments it is very apparent that you take any mention of a belief in God to mean a follower of the American branch of reformist protestant Christianity with biblical literalism. That is a very broad brush, as the fundamentalists literalists are a tiny part of Christianity and of broader monotheism. They make up abou…

You know I don't really care if people are literalist fundamentalist bible thumpers or unitarians, muslims or even deists. They are all wrong, and they all believe in things unsupported by evidence or completely debunked lies. I only care about what is true, and I don't have any reservations about telling people what they believe isn't true, esp. when they bring it out to the open and implicitly invite the discussion on it.

There are two kinds of beliefs. One is based on evidence, logic, reason, testable repeatable experiments. Rational mind has no option but to accept their truthfulness (sometimes after laborious examination of evidence or step by step verification of logical deduction). You could go on and deny obvious truth, but that leads to cognitive dissonance and is rather mentally taxing. The other belief is opposite, it is not based on any evidence at all and it is called faith. You are believing things without having sufficient or any evidence for it. Note also that all religions are faith based. If they were based on evidence, religion would be a branch of science, it would be a scientific theory (which is the highest pedestal a scientific hypothesis can be placed upon, only mathematics has theorems).

There is now strong evidence that theistic gods i.e. gods that care about human beings, that interfere in their lives, that tell you what you should do, what you should eat, on what days, who you may sleep with and in what position, gods who break the known laws of nature for their people, god who stops the motion of the sun around earth so certain people in the Bible can finish their work, god who takes "our" side in a war, a god that gives itself body so it can kill it to save the humanity are man made invention.

Religion comes to us from other human mammals who not only know there is a god, but they also know his mind what he wants us to do. And how do they know? Revelation of course, god told them something often times contradictory what he told others. And the religious never even seek evidence for their extraordinary claims. But revelation is useless and unreliable as a way to discover truth

Revelation can only ever be relevant to the person to whom something is revealed. As soon as that person shares and relates the revelation to someone else, it becomes a testimony at that point. And then it becomes a matter of trusting that person for the claim they are making. Also, the person to whom something is revealed should be apprehensive and wonder which is more likely that laws of nature have been bent in their favor no less, or if perhaps they are under apprehension.

Revelations are dime a dozen. Numerous people have claimed that something has been revealed to them. Even worse different people have claimed same god has revealed things that are contradictory to the things god has revealed to other people. In Christianity god reveals himself as a human, he dies on the cross, and resurrects. In Islam, Jesus is not only not the son of god, he never died on the cross and never resurrected. Believing otherwise will have you condemned to hell. In Christianity god says love your enemies, in Islam he says kill your enemies and apostates. Yet it's the same god, and both sides claim divine revelation for the "wisdom" they preach.

Content of revelation paints a picture of a god who is quite frankly incompetent, stupid and has morals lesser than average decent human being today. And most importantly he leaves it to chance what you will believe about him and if you will be damned to eternity.

What religion you get indoctrinated into has very little to do with its truthfulness, but everything to do with where you were born. If you were born in Saudi Arabia for example you would be a Muslim defending Islam right now. Yet both Islam and Christianity and Judaism (the three desert dogmas) all claim to posses the true and perfect words of the creator of the universe.

And isn't it incredibly stupid of a supreme, intelligent, omnipotent, omnipresent being to demand belief in him without evidence? God would presumably know that people would invent scientific method as the only sure way to discover truth. Yet he leaves such important things as if you will be damned for eternity to belief without evidence leading to three desert dogmas that teach completely opposite things about him. Yahweh himself besides being stupid is rather evil god. Look how he behaves exactly as you would expect the people of that age that invented him to behave (he orders genocide of neighboring tribes that worship other gods, enslavement of women and children etc, just read random book of old testament). By the way he was never meant to be god of all, he was meant to be a god of a single tribe (otherwise a lot of stuff god says and orders makes no sense). Evolution of competing religions and the fact we have multiple religions like this is exactly what you would expect to see if religion were man made.

All metaphysical claims and especially all physical claims made by religion were proved to be wrong. And would you expect it any other way really? Religion was our first approximation of cosmology, medicine etc. But like all first approximations it proved to be completely wrong. Jesus casts out demons to heal people, he heals lepers instead of healing leprosy, no germs ever mentioned in the Bible (naturally no germ theory of disease either).

But now we know better. We know how solar systems are formed, we know how planets are formed, we know how life evolves, we even know how a universe can plausibly come from nothing. We really don't need god to kick off any of these things any more. Besides positing an intelligent god capable of creating universes, god that always existed, or that spontaneously came into being is assuming a lot more than assuming the same about the universe itself i.e. dumb matter. Occam's razor cuts him out of existence as superfluous assumption that does not explain anything.

I for one am really glad there is absolutely no evidence for this at all. Wishing this to be true is wishing to live under dictatorship. If it were true it would be a worthy goal to fight against this ghastly god figure.

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#175
This is good, well done Tim Cook. A good event for gay people everywhere, like any other prominent figure coming out publicly.

"It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros"

And doubly well done for rejecting the skincare regime stereotypically associated with his sexual orientation.

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#176
post #8

I wish we lived in a society where people weren't pressured into "publically acknowledge" their sexual orientation just because it's different than the norm. You don't see heterosexual CEOs publically acknowledging they are banging their wife, why should it be different for other sexual orientations? Just let everyone be.

Heterosexual CEOs have wives...

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#177
post #122
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I for one know very little about the important persons in , gay or not. We might all know about the terrible fate of Alan Turing, but I don't expect non-cs people to know. (Thanks to gpvos for the correction of faith->fate. )

*fate (at least I hope you mean that)

Of course. Terrible mistake!

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#178

>I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me. Americans are so weird.

One of the things my father told me when I was very young was, you should not be proud of things you cannot control (birthplace, sex, race, etc.). He also told me that God (or gods) do not exist. I have not found a reason to discard those two.

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#179
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where the homesexual agenda in Disney movies? I'd prefer specific examples rather than just handwavey nonsense.

IMO it's going a bit far with the interpretation, but Elsa in the movie Frozen has been fairly widely speculated as being an allegory on coming out.

It's funny because Frozen was a massive hit in Japan by all accounts. There it had nothing to do with coming out. Instead women really loved the women power and could relate to having to conform to a certain image etc. So perhaps that's the greatness of Frozen. Each culture makes it their own.

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#180
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are undoubtedly many people who will no longer purchase Apple products because of this I disagree. First, I think it was widely assumed that he was gay, and if it wasn't, he was accidentally outed during a live TV broadcast a few months ago by a CNBC reporter [1]. Second, the people that think this way probably already avoid Apple products, as both Tim Cook and Apple have been vocal on gay rights for quite som…

Wow. That doesn't sound like an accident - you don't say someone "is fairly open about being gay" unless you're damn sure they are. What an unpleasant person.

If your job was to blather on air day after day for however many hours you'd probably say a couple dumb things too. Everyone has "known" Tim Cook was gay forever so it's not a hard mistake to make.
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