Is it OK to be proud to be a gay man? Is it OK to be proud to be a gay white man? If you answer one question with yes and one with no, there might be a problem.
Shorter _pmf_: Check your gay privilege.
Tim Cook Speaks Up
971–980 of 1001 posts
Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up
#972Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, what book of lies have you been reading, or writing.. I cannot even begin to tell you how far off you are. And you call her a myth. They say Jobs had a reality distortion field but you take the cake! Good luck with your fantasy world.
Here, educate yourself: http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/582913-mother-teresa-...
Ok, I'm going to 'educate' myself with some random link that you found from some random guy's blog who also has a personal vendetta against all Theists(Military Association of Atheists). I can find a thousand links to show the opposite. Have you done ANY research on her or read or talked to a member of the order she started? Thought not. When casting an opinion, always look at both sides before you talk, not just the one you want to believe. That's how you get to the truth. The real truth. Oh, by the way, thanks for the down vote. Really mature of you.
Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up
#973In case you think this is no big deal, here's the updated list of Fortune 500 CEOs who are openly gay: Tim Cook
Thank you for putting that in context. "No big deal" was my first thought too, but that's only because of the context in which I live. In his context it still is a big deal.
Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up
#974Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
It seems fairly obvious that "pride" simply isn't appropriate in either case. It only serves to cloud the issue with entitlement and expectations of privilege based on nothing in particular.
Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up
#975I am incredibly grateful to Cook for this, not least because of how it will affect young gay people. When I was a child, I felt generally good about myself. I was reasonably smart, well-spoken, curious, and so on, and I wanted to do something important with my life. Some nagging part of me suspected I was gay from very early on, but I resisted it intensely. I wasn't really afraid of being mistreated, although I proba…
are you single? ;-)
Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up
#976Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 t…
> You could see what he's done whilst at work.
It is the same person. If somebody wears a hooded sheet for evening rallies but a suit in the office, it is not unreasonable for black people to say, "Gosh, maybe I should work elsewhere." White people who are anti-racist might feel similarly. Freedom of association is also a right, and one you seem to be giving less weight. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
> 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.
That is not switching the positions. An equivalent position is, say, supporting a bill to strip Baptists of the right to worship. The sole point of Prop 8 was to remove a constitutionally guaranteed right, equal protection under the law, from gay people. If somebody was trying to strip a civil right from some right-leaning group, I'd say they also should not be running a large company containing those people.
> While Eich's views are repugnant he should have been judged on what he did in the workplace.
That might be another interesting world, but here people are judged on their out-of-work behavior all the time. Especially when that out-of-work behavior indicates something possibly relevant to work performance. Like, e.g., believing that a significant fraction of your employees are literally second-class citizens.
Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up
#977Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
It seems fairly obvious that "pride" simply isn't appropriate in either case. It only serves to cloud the issue with entitlement and expectations of privilege based on nothing in particular.
It seems fairly obvious? Your seems-obvious meter went off when you ran it over the screen?
Own your opinions. Cloaking them in false objectivity makes you look ridiculous and removes the opportunity for discussion. You think it's obvious. I don't. I do think it's obvious that you're playing the game on easy [1], though, which is why your seems-obvious meter is poorly calibrated.
[1] http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...
Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up
#978Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obama changed his mind and became an outspoken proponent of equality.
Yes, very convenient that he was always on the popular side of the issue.
Yeah, its almost like he's representing the populous. Should one not change their options in the face of new evidence? What's the point of debate or discussion otherwise?
Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up
#979Earlier quoted context omitted.
May I interject here with a heartfelt apology from at least some of the British. Partition was wholly cynical affair following the theory of divide and conquer, most of the negative effects of which were completely intentional and are going to echo for generations. We wanted the situation to be fucked both in and between Pakistan and India as we are following from the Roman theories on empire that fostering group enm…
I have to say that you can see similar dynamics in Mandatory Palestine. After the British troops left there was a civil war between the Jews and Arabs. Jews got their own state and the Arab residents there didn't. But the sheer number of people who are now considered Palestinian makes it difficult for any one nation to solve the refugee problem unilaterally. They are pretty much kept stateless by most countries in th…
The Palestinians are kept intentionally stateless by most of the nations in the area. It's not just about numbers.
The Arab league policy is that granting Palestinians citizenship or otherwise integrating them in the population would effectively give Israel carte blanche to depopulate Palestine by driving the population into exile, and so it's strongly frowned upon, with the result that Jordan is the only country who have granted citizenship to a large proportion.
Re: Tim Cook Speaks Up
#980Earlier quoted context omitted.
>that's sad that we're still at this point That said, public opinion is changing very rapidly. XKCD 1431 ( http://xkcd.com/1431/ ) offers an interesting visualization and comparison between gay marriage and interracial marriage. According to XKCD's source, interracial marriage didn't reach majority approval until 1995, while gay marriage already reached majority approval in 2011. Now obviously this rift could be the…
Isn't that a fascinating graph? What can one make of it? Maybe that although racial prejudice was common throughout the 20th century and is not gone today, there was always a sense of its wrongness that was evident to legislators and judges. In contrast, homophobia is still a very acceptable prejudice to a lot of people. I think one can also see in this graph the effects of the determined efforts by the American righ…
Consider that for interracial marriage, the US was lagging international opinion substantially. E.g. in large parts of Europe there either haven't been restrictions on interracial marriage, or they have been very limited and lifted earlier, and in many countries such as the UK, there is a history of interracial marriages going back centuries (e.g. many people married Indians that came to Britain after the establishment of the East India Company). Much further resistance evaporated when European countries had an acute shortage of men following World War I, that was filled by increased immigration from own colonies.
While that may not have had a direct impact, most of the arguments against interracial marriage were thus demonstrably false, by looking to other countries, and a substantial proportion of the population of the US had come from countries where interracial marriage was legal and somewhat accepted when they emigrated.
Further, with interracial marriages, the marriages had the support of a far larger amount of churches, and legalisation happened amidst a general major push for equalisation of rights that had rallied a lot of people.
On the other hand, many of the same countries that have been liberal about interracial marriages maintained laws targeting gay people far longer, and both domestically and internationally there was not nearly the same momentum for gay rights.
Again consider the UK, where it took until 1994 for a serious attempt to reduce the age of consent for male gay sex to the same as for straight sex (from 21 to 16; bizarrely the UK did not have an age of consent for sexual acts between females). It took until 2001 for that to become reality:
The first attempt was defeated; a court challenge to the European Court of Human Right forced the UK government to try again; it was defeated twice more, and then the House of Lords dragged its feet long enough that the government was able to use Parliament Act to push it through with only the support of the House of Commons in late 2000.
As late as then, people seriously used as an argument that we needed to "protect the children".