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Tim Cook Speaks Up

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Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#961
post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree it's a positive thing for him to talk about, I don't care much for the way he's phrasing it. What does it mean to be "proud" of something you are ? Isn't that what we criticize white supremacists and other bigots for? Take pride in the things you do, the things you create. My only reaction to someone who takes pride in his or her race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation is quizzical indifference.

Being proud of who you are and the eay you live is different from being proud of an arbitrary superficial difference between you and others. Proud to be White is leagues worse than proud to be American or Christian or Irish.

Sure, I'll go along with that. But sexual orientation is far more like skin color than it is like a country, religion, or sports team that you identify with for social purposes.

If there is a genetic (or at least embryonic) influence behind sexual orientation -- and I believe there is -- then why take "pride" in it?

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#963
post #951

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just the way white people saw native Indians as Savages it is easy for western eyes to perceive India as a very bad land While I somewhat agree with the gist of your post, you might want to reconsider this broad brush with which you're painting both modern "western eyes", and particular bunches of white people who genocided nearly an entire continent a few centuries ago. Substitute nazis/jews/"German eyes" if you d…

The specific generalization was being used to show people how it feels when it is used against them. Personally I dont have a black and white view of the world. Consider the California textbooks which paint Hinduism as worst savages. There is not even passing mention that the cool things like Yoga and Meditation are Hindu practices on the contrary outright false stories which I believe were put in my missionaries are…

I am in complete agreement with the views you have expressed about the state of affairs of Indian legal system and the practices and have upvoted your comments. However, when you say that the textbooks paint Hinduism as worst savages, I have to call out that hyperbole. That is a ridiculous exaggeration.

In fact I am in complete agreement with the following characterization, quoted from the wikipedai page you linked to.

  Dan Golden of the Wall Street Journal described the
  effort of the two Hindu foundations, as similar to those
  by Jewish, Islamic and Christian foundations. Each group,
  claims Dan Golden, vie for changes in texts for elementary
  and secondary schools to cast their faiths in a better
  light or in sensitive manner before children.
Those foundations are nothing but harbors of shills with a supremacist, political agenda and a wet dream of churchifying Hinduism under a central church.

I find a treasure trove of interesting things in the Hindu body of thought, yoga is not one of them, sorry. An over sold, over marketed artifact used to catch the gullible. To me striking things about its body of thought are its philosophical roots, the fact that they have been thinking deeply about such questions since antiquity, that not believing in any form of god is in complete harmony.

That said, for people coming from an Abrahamic religion, its a difficult thing to grasp. Hinduism is not 'a religion' if one goes by the notion of a religion in Abarahamic religions. It is worse than trying to map git commands to subversion. Its a very different beast, it is a meta religion (or more accurately a diverse collection of a very large body of thought and introspection, originating from a geographical region and built over time time, that visitors clubbed into a single pool because they werent sure what to make of it). It is more like a religion factory pattern for building your own religion that includes questions you should keep visiting in that process, and a more fundamental one, why at all (and when) should one even consider building one. It lays down thought processes, questions that one should consider and critique when one is forming ones own parameterized religion. People get confused whether they are talking about the polymorphic class or the object instance.

In context of its vast diversity and inclusiveness, Abrahamic religions would feel like that they are the same religion sans minor changes and all the fighting to be much ado about nothing.

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#964
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> homesexual agenda Agenda? People only use that term when they're trying to imply something is somehow pushing homosexuality on the weak minded.

>> Agenda? People only use that term when they're trying to imply something is somehow pushing homosexuality on the weak minded. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Most individuals have agendas, and all organizations have (or should have) agendas. We should all be able to talk honestly about various agendas without having to toe some manipulative lines concerning presumed hidden meanings. Just because many homophobes, rightwingers…

You're being pedantic, the term "(The) Homosexual Agenda" as distinct from any other use of the word agenda is what I was talking about. There are organisations representing homosexuals that have agendas, but that isn't the same thing.

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#965
post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree it's a positive thing for him to talk about, I don't care much for the way he's phrasing it. What does it mean to be "proud" of something you are ? Isn't that what we criticize white supremacists and other bigots for? Take pride in the things you do, the things you create. My only reaction to someone who takes pride in his or her race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation is quizzical indifference.

Being proud of who you are and the eay you live is different from being proud of an arbitrary superficial difference between you and others. Proud to be White is leagues worse than proud to be American or Christian or Irish.

But contrast this with black pride. E.g., James Brown's excellent "I'm Black and I'm Proud": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VRSAVDlpDI

That's hugely different than the white-pride loons.

Why? I think it's down to power and oppression. Black people in US society have been oppressed and marginalized for centuries. Decreasingly so, but it's still a big problem.

For me, black pride and gay pride are pushing for freedom. While the white-pride people are pretty explicitly pushing against freedom.

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#966

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brendan Eich is entitled to his opinion, and a large not for profit is entitled not to want someone with that opinion as a figurehead. As for who has done more for what — web browsers were going to have a scripting language. Is Javascript so astoundingly good that we can only assume any alternative would have been worse?

I don't believe in the cause that Eich donated to. But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing. If he had donated to a liberal cause and was forced out because conservative employees had a problem with it, the entire media would have come down on Mozilla like a ton of bricks. Instead his resignation was celebrated. Chilling political discourse by threatening the livelihoods…

> But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing.

That's a very poor framing of what he did. And you followed it with a lot of unsupported drama.

He didn't just donate to, say, a Republican candidate. He supported a campaign to strip gay people of the right to equal protection before the law. A successful one.

In the US, you can claim that gay people should not be full citizens and have that opinion protected under the first amendment. You can say the same thing about black people too, which is why we let the neo-nazis protest and even give them police protection when they do.

But the legal right to say something is not the right to freedom from social consequence. If he were a white supremacist and wanted to run Mozilla, a company with many non-white employees, would you really be outraged that people would fire him?

I'm hoping not. Free speech is an important right. But other people also get that right, and the right to freedom of association as well. If I were gay, I wouldn't want to work for a guy who believed I wasn't equal before the law. How could I trust him to treat me equally at work? And as a straight person, I wouldn't want to work for somebody like that either, so I'd take my freedom of association and walk right out the door. Why shouldn't Mozilla's board take account of whether or not people want to work for a CEO?

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#967
post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand your position correctly, then if there really was a prop to ban interracial marriage we should all be okay with that? I don't see any difference between a ban on gay marriage and a ban on interracial marriage. I just want to be sure I understand your calibration settings. If you think a prop on banning interracial marriage should be just as acceptable as what you seem to be saying for prop8, then I'm…

Since you linked xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1431/ It's easy to look down on interracial marriage bans from our oh-so-enlightened modern view, but it took a long time to even get there. You have to look at these ideologies in the context that they were formed in. If the graph is correct, then when Eich donated, same-sex marriage didn't have majority support. (Setting aside what California's specific numbers were.) This is…

> how do you know views you hold today won't be considered the vilest bigotry in 30 years

Ah, the classic argument: if we can't have perfect right now, then we obviously can't work toward the good.

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#968

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe in the cause that Eich donated to. But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing. If he had donated to a liberal cause and was forced out because conservative employees had a problem with it, the entire media would have come down on Mozilla like a ton of bricks. Instead his resignation was celebrated. Chilling political discourse by threatening the livelihoods…

> But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing. That's a very poor framing of what he did. And you followed it with a lot of unsupported drama. He didn't just donate to, say, a Republican candidate. He supported a campaign to strip gay people of the right to equal protection before the law. A successful one. In the US, you can claim that gay people should not be full citizens…

I generally agree with what you say.

> How could I trust him to treat me equally at work?

You could see what he's done whilst at work. Apparently he helped create and enforce policies that protected minority employees.

The reason I'm uncomfortable with it is what happens if we switch the positions: Joe Bloggs makes a private donation to a bill supporting gay marriage. Years later he is appointed CEO of some org but the customers run a campaign to veto him based on his private political donation.

Isn't this precisely why voting is anonymous[1]? While Eich's views are repugnant he should have been judged on what he did in the workplace.

The other point is that US style political campaigning is clearly fucked.

[1] of course voting isn't actually anonymous in the UK. Some people still aren't aware of that.

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#969

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? I hear about straight male CEO's relationships all the freaking time, probably more than I hear anything else about them. Here's just one example: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/16/business/la-fi-0416-... Do you really need a list? This is important because gay people have not been allowed representation or public acknowledgement. Until this month there were 0 openly gay CEOs but hundreds of openly straig…

I think the Sean Parker wedding was notable because of its extravagance and the somewhat douchey behavior he showed in its staging and execution. But, I agre otherwise with your point.

[deleted]

Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up

#970

Being in such a progressive community (i.e. young nerdy people), it's easy to forget that this is an enormous deal for some people. A friend of mine recently came out as transgender and the general response was "oh, cool, good for you". It's hard to fathom what it's like for people who aren't in such a supportive environment. There are undoubtedly many people who will no longer purchase Apple products because of this…

>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…

I think the issue was that although Tim Cook was not secretive about being gay, he had never publicly spoken about it. The CNBC guy got a lot of flak, but as many mentioned, there are several other places where Cook was identified as a gay man before that clip, so the backlash was a little unfair. It can be awkward to differentiate between public knowledge and "open secrets" when someone hasn't officially come out.
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