Flooding and starving markets has an effect; however, you get diminishing returns when flooding a flooded market. So yes, with a flooded market, if you trickle a few things in, nothing changes.
If I dump you in the Atlantic ocean and then pour a pot of tea on top, the pot of tea is not responsible for you drowning, even if you inhale water molecules from the tea pot.
Bigotry, n.: intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself.
Bigotry, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Bigotry is the state of mind of a bigot: someone who, as a result of their prejudices, treats or views other people with fear, distrust or hatred on the basis of a person's opinion, ethnicity, evaluative orientation, race, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, socioeconomic status, or other characteristics.
People.
People.
People.
People.
Here are your working definitions of bigotry:
Bigotry, n.: The holding of opinions different from those held by others.
Bigotry, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Bigotry is the state of mind of a bigot: someone who, as a result of their prejudices, views certain concepts and ideals with fear, distrust or hatred.
Brendan Eich has always been supportive of people. He has been unsupportive of socio-government institutions which he believed would be harmful to people. Those beliefs may be incorrect, but they are not bigotry.
No, but Brendan Eich does, and therefor he finds the change bad for society. How can you morally not fight against a change which you believe will result in harm to society?
Right. This is also a reason not to hire anyone gay, or put a black woman in charge of a firm which caters to a more conservative crowd or operates out of a privileged white suburb, or what have you. It could legitimately harm your business.
Gentrification works by moving filthy poor people out and bringing in clean upper-middle-class money. It improves a city, rather than the people there.
Aside, I need like, ten or so fucking signatures on my petition for it to get listed. It'll probably be listed for 1 day, then deleted because I need 100,000 signatures in 1 month to get a white house response. Will somebody fucking sign it so we don't have to worry about this kind of shit anymore?
It's criminal. The AG of California can fine Mozilla Inc for being incredibly hostile. They did, however, put in every effort to keep him; three board members severed their relationship with the company, and so the company is not responsible for their actions. If other board members where threatening to do so as well, the company is tied to these people and may be responsible. So Mozilla Inc has a good defense, but Eich doesn't have to initiate the case against them.
So you are using a definition of bigotry that is not a part of the English language. I could call a large feline with stripes a dog as well. Or I could call you a pedophile for using computers.
It would be the owners of the store deciding to remove the CEO under pressure from their customers. The owners of the store should be free to have as their CEO whoever they want. They can listen to public outrage or ignore it. They can make good business decisions or decide to take a moral stand. This is what freedom is. This is the right to free association.
And that makes it right for us to publicly bash companies for having gay people, until they fire those gay people, such that gay people are not capable of participating in society in the same way as not-gay people?
We need RSVP. RSVP allows for reading at 400wpm with full comprehension, 800wpm with full comprehension after 1 hour of training. 1000wpm is a normal target, and speeds as high as 1200-1600wpm are doable. Some modified algorithms have produced 1800+wpm reading speeds, including Spritz and Sprint Reader methods where they align based on word length and provide context pauses. I've envisioned some more advanced techniques myself for the interleaving of information and context sensitivity, for example to show diagrams or to slow down when introducing new concepts or covering recent ones.
The future is not skimming. The future is high-speed immersive full-comprehension sequential visual presentation.
As in they fear a society where homosexuals are allowed to freely practice their homosexuality and where children will be influenced by these homosexuals into becoming homosexuals themselves. Like I said... bigotry.
This is like calling a fear of a society where we tax the rich at 100% and redistribute their wealth to the less fortunate "bigotry" against the poor.
You keep making ludicrous leaps of logic from "this man doesn't believe this social policy is good for society" to "this man is treating these people with fear and hatred". You also keep running through this logical disconnect where we are apparently not punishing someone by revoking their employment, where as a society we have stood up and said we don't want this person to be allowed to do these things that any other person is allowed to do and so he should be removed, pressuring a business into carrying out this execution of a person's individual freedom to participate in society.
If Safeway hired a gay CEO, millions of religious conservatives might clamor to protest Safeway's pollution of good Christian family values. Shop Gay, Shop Safeway. They may cry for a boycott. Then we could remove the CEO for being "bad for the company"--essentially, for being gay. This would be the same issue as removing Eich from his position at Mozilla Inc for his political view.
Accepted by whom? "It's accepted" (i.e. by someone) really doesn't mean anything. This is what I am talking about when I say the bans on same sex marriage have very vague justifications. Nobody can define exactly what it is that their worried will happen.
I already told you: people think this will lead to more exposure of sexuality to children, among other social changes, and that this is accepted as bad for society. That may be incorrect--either the model or the ideal that it's a bad outcome--but the ideal that such an outcome is bad is widely accepted, whether or not that concern is valid.
And yet you are not advocating banning butterflies from flapping their wings...
That's the stupidest thing you've said yet. The 'butterfly effect" is a fallacious generalization of the domino effect. A domino is a block of a given mass and dimension placed in a high-energy state--standing vertically--such that its transition to a low-energy state can initiate a transition in another high-energy domino. By placing dominoes close together as such, the dominoes experience a chain reaction.
The butterfly effect attempts to conjecture that this happens with every little thing, but it mistakenly adds amplification: a large, complex system will buff out small changes. Essentially, if a system is such that a component has high potential energy in multiple possible directions (i.e. can fall left or right), and you apply more energy than the system has in one direction (i.e. it's falling right with so much force from gravity, and you apply energy leftward enough to lift it back to start and then tip it that way), you can change it to another direction. This can lead to that part of the system changing, affecting other parts of the system. If the energy you apply is less, then the change is also small--smaller than the energy you put in. In extremely complex systems (the original butterfly effect was weather), the amount of energy is quickly spread across the whole system, and the final change is so small as to be effectively non-existent (in fact, at a certain threshold, we're talking about changes smaller than planck distance--physically non-existent).
A domino effect requires energy to set up and organize. The butterfly effect essentially applies this to unorganized chaos systems, which are by nature immune to the domino effect.
It is not unethical to fire people. He is not "getting the treatment he deserves". As a software engineer myself, I can see how a bigot software engineer can right perfectly good code. I can't see how a bigot CEO can be trusted to run a company that employs a significant number of people his bigotry targets (especially when they are aware of this).
The situation I described is not bigotry. Bigotry requires treating other people with fear, distrust, and hatred. Other *people*. Deciding that society is better without a specific social institution is not bigotry, and can be done without being fearful, distrusting, or hateful toward people who have a stake in such an institution. For example: we do not allow sex with small children; however, some people are exclusively attracted to people around 9 years old, or to young teens (12-15). In Europe, they treat these people with psychological counseling and give them libido suppressing drugs: instead of hating and attacking them, they consider them unfortunate and provide them with treatment, attempting to help them to integrate with society.
Eich appears to have decided we should not legally recognize homosexual marriage, but not decided to attack homosexual people. That's not bigotry; that's tolerance. He believes that particular aspect of a person's behavior is incorrect or harmful to society, but tolerates these people. On the other hand, we are not tolerant: we don't see this as a problem. If we "tolerated" this stuff, it would be because we find it something distasteful that we need to actively allow for.
Exactly what makes this opinion valid other than the fact that you are free to have whatever opinion you want?
There's a real lack of information there though. There is real lack of knowledge of how things will change, with a real high-probability that some social changes of a known model will occur. There is also an accepted ideal that such changes are harmful--it may be incorrect, but it's accepted. That makes these considerations valid. It is, effectively, an expression of a low risk appetite.
I am citing sociology, morality (morals aren't based on what's actually right and wrong, but rather cultural perception of such), risk management, and chaos theory in these analyses. Chaos theory particularly states that everything is deterministic, but that sufficient flux exists due to minor details, and that we have imperfect knowledge which correlates to what is perceived as "randomness". People naturally act with consideration to this via a fear of the unknown and a tendency to notice when something may make far-reaching, unpredictable changes.
In this case, there is a belief that these changes are potentially significant; that they are bad (moral, social); and that certain actions will increase the risk of these changes. The best way to reduce risk from a change (rather than risk from a non-change) is to delay the change, allowing the gathering of more knowledge and thus a greater understanding of what the change will do. This of course comes at cost (in this case, social cost) and can incur risk (in this case, it incurs no societal risk; however, it appears that supporting this type of risk management does incur individual social risk).
These concerns are usually expressed unintentionally and without that kind of knowledge. Mostly, people are scared of change, scared of the impact of change, and seek to prevent it. The more they understand the impact, the less they object to the change--if the impact is understood to be bad, then of course the push for such a change goes away. The above is simply a technical explanation of how that behavior also arises out of purely rational analysis, and thus why it is valid (anything not rational is invalid--yes I am a recovering sociopath).
I really don't know why you are bringing up liberals, democrats, Obama and the ACA, since I support none of those things.
Because, implementation details aside, these groups are considered the champions of forward-thinking policies. Their policies are often... either hasty or outright wrong... but they do seek to change society, ostensibly for the better. I support Unconditional Basic Income, which is essentially "Socialism Light": we cut a percentage of income off (as taxes) and redistribute it amongst everyone. If you make that percentage 100%, it's Marxism; if you make it 25%, it's essentially equivalent to our general welfare spending (social security, government pensions, general welfare programs, unemployment, etc.).
Although this is hugely different from implementing Marxism, it could easily get me branded as a Marxist/Communist, which at one point in recent American history would have been LETHAL. I concede that objections are valid, although my current understanding is obviously that objections come from either fundamentally incorrect understanding of the concept or from a preference to ride the destructive spiral down slowly instead of taking a sharp and painful burn to cauterize the wound and begin the healing process.
In the same way, my conclusions of Eich's behavior are that he believes that legitimizing homosexual marriage is harmful to society. I can understand how that opinion could come about, and I don't believe the correct way to handle his opposing view is to beat him with a cudgel until he reluctantly accepts that society is following a wrong-headed path and pretends to play along. Either allow him to keep his views but push through the opposition of him
There's no effective difference. The sky is almost certainly not purple outside right now. It could turn purple.
You have no concept of how decision making works if you don't understand that. You tried pulling out the "well, I mean, there's this statistics thing, and there's a 0.0000000000000000001% chance or something, you know, I mean, it could happen, so MAYBE people died because of us" argument. You know what the counter-argument is? The counter-argument is yes, you're right, and maybe your heart could explode with the force of 50 sticks of dynamite due to hydrogen gas build-up in your bloodstream. It's almost certainly not going to happen--which means it won't happen.
If they repeated FF a hundred thousand times, the most likely, near-certain result would be not one single situation where a criminal would have a firearm in which he wouldn't have a firearm if the Government didn't leak one. Trying to claim that "there's still a possibility" in this situation is idiotic. There's a greater possibility that FF is a coverup and that the operation was a humongous success, the people reported dead are actually retired eating caviar under a constructed identity, and we're primed now to do it again in a few years and continue to pretend it's a huge fuckup.
Replace "gay" with "black". Has anything really changed?
Yes. We have good, sensible explanations why homosexuality may be bad for society. They may be wrong, but they make sense. On the other hand, we're at a point where claiming the same of black people isn't simply a difference of conjecture over an unknown area of knowledge (the greater effects of gay marriage on society and its full psychological impacts are unknown, but now largely estimated benign). One of these arguments is actually ludicrous; the other is disagreeable.
It is a valid conservative policy to not recognize gay marriage as valid in society: the social impacts are probably large, and the overall long-term impacts are unknown. This WILL change the face of society. Enabling interracial marriage or "black marriage" was never going to change the whole of society in the same way; but at a time, it would have bestowed rights on a group which would have a large swing in society. The difference is we'd change a society to accept a different group of people there; whereas homosexuality is part genetic, part environmental ("choice", but not really--it's a false choice), and so this will have direct impact on people who are not a part of the target group.
In other words: People don't chose to be black, or half-black, or not black, and they aren't black growing up until they decide to be not-black, and they aren't more likely to decide to be black or to be black sometimes because black people are now acceptable. We do have people who are gay and there is absolutely no way to de-gay them; but then we also have people who are curious, bisexual, or who were gay in high school and then halfway through college became bi or just abandoned gay stuff altogether, or who identify as "straight" but still engage in gay sexual behaviors as a diversion (i.e. to get off, or for whatever reason), and so on.
Because of this, some people develop the valid opinion that we don't want to create this social shift in society. They conjecture that such a social shift will increase free availability of sexuality (i.e. dudes can always fuck around with their bro dude friends), leading to a decrease in puritan values, and then an increase in sexual behavior. This is conjectured to produce an environment where children are more exposed to sexual behavior, or where more diseases are transmitted, or family values break down, or whatever excuse these people use for "it's wrong"--up to and including "the bible says open sex is bad, not even considering open gay sex" or whatever religious morality they want to bring.
This is not necessarily wrong-headed thinking: they have a concern, it may not be valid, but it is as they understand the world and so they want to protect it from this estimated damage. There's even enough logical argument to say they have a fair, reasonable probability of being right; on the other hand, we quickly start questioning their reasoning (is sex that bad? Is it bad that children will have greater exposure to sexual behavior in society? Can't we improve sexual education and provide free clinical services for STD tests to reduce the transmission of STDs?) and, even if we accept it, we can develop an alternate view.
Is this really a difficult concept?
It is not just people on the internet. It was other Mozilla employees that started calling for his resignation.
This all started with OKCupid. It didn't start with Mozilla Inc. It didn't start with "Some Mozilla Inc employees have voiced these concerns, and we support them...". It started with a business stunt to draw more attention to OKCupid. It grew into a bunch of whining on forums. Mozilla employees have posted on here stating that they find this whole situation disgusting and that they have nothing against Brendan. Maybe they should resign as a statement that they don't want to be branded a part of the "Gay Mafia" or something stupid.
You purported that something has no negative effects; I purported that this is not necessarily true, from some standpoint. You have no sense of subtlety.
Well that's a stretch we could use to define e-mail as text messaging, or Instant Messaging since it's roughly instant. Hell, we could call Twitter Instant Messaging.
Instant messaging (IM) is a type of online chat which offers real-time text transmission over the Internet.
Instant Messaging was not replaced by SMS. Can you SMS if you don't have cell phones, but have a computer? Can you send IM if you have a cell phone without a computer data plan? Of course you can do either: you use gateways that allow you to get off the computer network onto other networks, the same way you can 'read Swahili' by using Google Translate.
You know, we could also call voice "instant messaging", because I can call you and then talk, and when I speak you instantly get my message! Alexander Grahm Bell invented the first instant messaging app!
Ultimately I think it matters why Eich voted to ban sex with animals. If he was an animal lover and felt that animals were being treated cruelly by allowing humans to have sex with them, then I don't think there is anything bigoted about this. If he didn't give a shit about the animals at all, but just thought beastiality was an abomination, and therefore people who engaged in it should be punished for being sexual deviants regardless of whether animals are harmed, then I would say this is bigotry, albeit to a very small percentage of people (much smaller than the percentage of homosexuals).
I think you're missing a point here, but we've found some progress methinks.
Maybe some people think homosexuality is "an abomination". And maybe they think we shouldn't go around attacking people for being gay; but that it is harmful to society--that it is very, very bad and does damage to real people--for us to enable them, to support them, to not just accept them with open arms as human beings with flaws but rather to call their homosexuality anything other than a flaw.
Think of it like a person who thinks drugs should be illegal, selling drugs should be illegal, but people having and using drugs should not be illegal. Or who think buying/trafficking child pornography should be illegal, and mucking about with children should be illegal, but receiving/possessing child pornography should not. These are people who believe that a certain thing is harmful to society, but that individuals should not be attacked for harming themselves. In fact, in both cases there would be institutions available for you to voluntarily get help--drug rehab, psychological counseling--if you decided to escape your self-destructive behavior.
Eich's behavior leads me to believe that he feels gay marriage is somehow wrong--that it's not a thing our society should support--but that he harbors no aggression or ill will toward any individual. He has not apologized for supporting Proposition 8 because, I would guess, he believes it was the right thing to do; but he also has supported individuals who are gay, has provided for them to not be treated differently than any other individuals, to be denied anything for being gay, because he appears to believe that this is also the right thing to do. You can't marry another person of the same sex; but you also can't be denied a job or pushed out of a social group or beaten to death for wanting to do exactly that.
I understand that some things are bad, and that individuals acting in that manner are not necessarily bad. For example: the corporate culture where I work is terrible, it's harmful to the people here and to the business; but it's a matter of group dynamics, not a matter of individuals who are terrible employees and need to be removed. No one is at fault here, and yet the problem is the behavior of everyone. It occurs to me that Eich may be following similar reasoning: he feels supporting a certain behavior is harmful, but individuals engaging in that behavior are not bad people and do not deserve harm or prejudice.
Of course that's all just conjecture from analysis of the publicly available behavioral indicators. The short version is, again, that I don't like the idea of not being able to participate in the political system because people don't agree with you. We already have a mechanism for that: the courts decided that the whole thing is bullshit and not valid, and that we can't vote this in as a law. If we voted in an overwhelming proposition with 92% support for putting all jews in concentration camps and working them to death, that wouldn't happen because the courts would claim the entire country is nuts and we're not allowed to do that. Our democracy has limits, and our society modifies those limits, and we have some controls to prevent us from doing anything too crazy without a lot of force. Unless you're actively trying to get people murdered or forced out of society, I don't have a problem with your political views.
And here we've had Eich forced out of society, in some small part. He's not allowed to be CEO of Mozilla Inc, by rule of what a bunch of assholes on the Internet have to say about it.
It was intended to be illustrative; and besides, you ignored the entire bit about instantaneous point-to-point transport and Larry Niven. Come back when you actually understand what's being talked about.
Should I give a competent response, or should i just say "whoosh"?
There are biracial people here--like the amazinglysexyblasians--but we're talking about a world without that. We're talking about a world where biracial doesn't exist, because every race has mixed, until there are no more mixes but just one race.
Imagine surveying every single person on the planet and they are all white people with dark hair. Seven billion white people. No black people. No asians. No mexicans. It would be like that, except they wouldn't all be white; they'd all be a single homogeneous mixture of all the lost races.
You are talking about kids having sexual experiences with other kids as if it is the same thing as an adult having sexual experiences with a kid.
The girl in question gave a blowjob to an 18 year old Subway sandwich artist in the bathroom at Subway when she was 13. She relayed this to me at 23. She also fucked her 40-something teacher when she was 15. A girl I nearly dated (one of very few I've actually pursued) told me she gave her first blowjob to her biology teacher--who was 24 at the time--when she was 16, at her instigation, and they dated for a while. Some dude told me one of the neighbors used to watch him when he was 9, and taught him how to give blow jobs. 24 vs 16, 18 vs 13, okay; but when we start pulling out 30 and 40 year olds with teenagers or preteens, something is amiss.
I also had a period where I realized every girl I knew was raped. One girl--18 at the time--called me to cry about a security guard at her job raping her while she was closing the store. A girl I met told me how she became a social worker: she wanted to help other people who experienced trauma, like when she dumped a boy when she was 15 and he raped her because "a baby will fix our relationship". It just kept happening. How the hell do so many girls get raped? I developed some enlightened view of pipe wrenches around that time--we obviously don't have enough of them.
I currently accept that we don't necessarily want to sexualize children, but I do keep myself open to analytically processing any research which either confirms or rejects whether the sexualization of children is actually harmful. To me it is an unknown with public policy driven by puritanical values, which leaves open a whole hell of a lot of interesting things in the future, most notably precise understanding of *why* it's harmful, or re-evaluation of *if* it's harmful as society's ideals about sexuality change, and of course how that affects strange activist groups like NAMBLA and the Teacher's Union. I hate making assertions I can't fully explain, and I find a lot of holes in the current model, so I want to see these holes resolved either by closing them and confirming the model is correct or by blowing them open and creating a new model--I don't care which, as long as the outcome is factually correct.
In the same way, I've come to understand that rape is not as harmful as we are told; however, it's pretty bad. A lot of the harm comes from societal pressure to *be* harmed, which makes recovery difficult since recovery feels wrong. Therapists like to repeat that "you've been through a horribly traumatic experience" a lot to rape victims, constantly reaffirming that we as a society believe they should feel hurt and damaged. It's an extremely opposite approach to "what happened to you is over, and now we have to help you heal from the pain you've suffered." People outright reject this view a lot, claiming that ZERO of the psychological response experienced by rape victims comes from external societal pressures.
This idea that "We don't think homosexuals are bad, we just think homosexuality is bad", is bullshit.
You create a dangerous argument here. Good people do bad things, and people with destructive interests are functional in society. Sometimes those interests represent a tangible threat. Your argument is, effectively, that if we believe people who engage in a certain activity are not inherently bad, then society should seek to legitimize that activity.
Some people, surprisingly, do believe that society should seek to not legitimize homosexuality. They believe it's an unacceptable behavior. We also like to arrest or ostracize people for giving blow jobs to horses. I've seen it explained that having sex with dogs is extremely harmful, and that rescued dogs have immense difficulty with recovering from the abuse because "the reward is a sexual reward". You do something, the animal likes it, and so you are harming the animal. I'm sorry but
Again: mexican cartels have ample access to firearms. Their current source is always a source of convenience; our ultimate goal is to make it a source of desperation--to trim down the black market until it's less than convenient.
You keep coming back to this "oh, we did this, and people died because of it." No. People died in situations that would have almost certainly occurred if we didn't do this, but did do everything else responsible for the situation (you know, like following these people, sending agents on that day, etc.). It happens to be that the gun they got was from here, and not from some other source where they would have gotten a gun anyway.
Let's talk about "almost certainly". You know this girl, and she goes to a party and gets gangbanged by like 30 guys, and ends up pregnant. If we removed one of the guys--he never made it to the party--then she got gangbanged by 29 guys, and almost certainly would have gotten pregnant anyway. it's possible that some motion caused her to ovulate a day early, or experience an extra ovulation, and that it was triggered specifically by events which would not have occurred nor equivalent if that one guy wasn't there; but if I tried to pin the blame on that one guy based on this possibility, you would tell me I'm retarded. Because it's stupid.
The sun could get hit by a comet approaching from the blind side that we haven't been able to detect, and then explode. We're not preparing for the sun to explode and kill us all tomorrow because that's stupid. Our sun almost certainly isn't about to get hit by a comet and then explode, killing us all, tomorrow.
If you say, "People died because the mexicans got these particular guns", you are almost certainly wrong. To make that argument makes you either a con man or an idiot.
The fact that you don't understand this, means you probably are very limited in your understanding of how people use computers in general.
Word processing, e-mail, instant messaging (is now dead), Facebook, iTunes/spotify, Amazon.
I have always considered specialized programs as a non-common use case. PC games are not PC users; they are DIY console users. I understand that games run better on Linux--I've been there with Linux release games, I've run on dual-boot Windows/Linux and I always found that even the same game run on Linux runs much better (hit-and-miss if you're running Wine instead of i.e. native Doom 3, Quake 4, etc., but sometimes it DOES run better than Windows). But many of these things are on Windows and not on Linux, and that's why gamers use Windows.
Graphics designers. You can use a lot of graphics apps on Linux. Same with audio, video editing, and so on. If your software is Windows-only, you use Windows or you do some magic bullshit with Wine that I don't expect engineers who are not computer engineers specifically to figure out--they don't have the domain knowledge to solve abstract system administration problems.
I've always found Windows inadequate. Getting software for Windows is difficult; there is so much software just available for Linux that does what I need, like digital music collection management. Even where it's available on Windows, it's either not as good (feature-wise or has a shitty UI) or it's not as easy to install and/or keep updated (nothing is as easy as a package manager--Ubuntu Software Center is fucking amazing, it's the next iteration of package management). Doable, but irritating. And Linux just works better and provides a desktop UI for me that works and then gets the fuck out of my way; Windows provides a clunky shit heap.
People want familiarity, which is why we say people don't know what they want. They want GNOME 3 or something, but all they get is Windows 8. They've been exposed to Windows 8 so much that they can immediately use it much better than GNOME 3; but GNOME 3 is fundamentally better and, with some use, will make their daily computer use much more comfortable. That's not to say it's perfect: I fucking hate the alt-tab behavior because it is highly unintuitive and requires extra keystrokes much of the time (it's legitimately wrong, not better-but-unfamiliar), and I believe we need a next-generation hybrid floating-tiling window manager. But it's better than single-panel with start menu and tray.
It's not a "Windows is just better at this" thing. It's a familiarity thing. Linux is suited to replace a lot, but also falls short for things requiring specialized software that doesn't run on Linux. It's as suited as OSX, really: some people have arbitrarily switched because Windows was nothing special and they had no specialized needs tying them to Windows, and the vast majority of those who haven't are in that group and just have not switched because they are not interested in putting out the effort to re-learn human-computer interaction.
Slashdot Mirror
Flooding and starving markets has an effect; however, you get diminishing returns when flooding a flooded market. So yes, with a flooded market, if you trickle a few things in, nothing changes.
If I dump you in the Atlantic ocean and then pour a pot of tea on top, the pot of tea is not responsible for you drowning, even if you inhale water molecules from the tea pot.
Bigotry, n.: intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself.
Bigotry, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Bigotry is the state of mind of a bigot: someone who, as a result of their prejudices, treats or views other people with fear, distrust or hatred on the basis of a person's opinion, ethnicity, evaluative orientation, race, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, socioeconomic status, or other characteristics.
People.
People.
People.
People.
Here are your working definitions of bigotry:
Bigotry, n.: The holding of opinions different from those held by others.
Bigotry, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Bigotry is the state of mind of a bigot: someone who, as a result of their prejudices, views certain concepts and ideals with fear, distrust or hatred.
Brendan Eich has always been supportive of people. He has been unsupportive of socio-government institutions which he believed would be harmful to people. Those beliefs may be incorrect, but they are not bigotry.
No, but Brendan Eich does, and therefor he finds the change bad for society. How can you morally not fight against a change which you believe will result in harm to society?
Right. This is also a reason not to hire anyone gay, or put a black woman in charge of a firm which caters to a more conservative crowd or operates out of a privileged white suburb, or what have you. It could legitimately harm your business.
Mostly we'd be making it illegal for your company to staff assholes.
Gentrification works by moving filthy poor people out and bringing in clean upper-middle-class money. It improves a city, rather than the people there.
Aside, I need like, ten or so fucking signatures on my petition for it to get listed. It'll probably be listed for 1 day, then deleted because I need 100,000 signatures in 1 month to get a white house response. Will somebody fucking sign it so we don't have to worry about this kind of shit anymore?
It's criminal. The AG of California can fine Mozilla Inc for being incredibly hostile. They did, however, put in every effort to keep him; three board members severed their relationship with the company, and so the company is not responsible for their actions. If other board members where threatening to do so as well, the company is tied to these people and may be responsible. So Mozilla Inc has a good defense, but Eich doesn't have to initiate the case against them.
So you are using a definition of bigotry that is not a part of the English language. I could call a large feline with stripes a dog as well. Or I could call you a pedophile for using computers.
It would be the owners of the store deciding to remove the CEO under pressure from their customers. The owners of the store should be free to have as their CEO whoever they want. They can listen to public outrage or ignore it. They can make good business decisions or decide to take a moral stand. This is what freedom is. This is the right to free association.
And that makes it right for us to publicly bash companies for having gay people, until they fire those gay people, such that gay people are not capable of participating in society in the same way as not-gay people?
The majority of people accept that exposure to children to sexuality is bad.
We need RSVP. RSVP allows for reading at 400wpm with full comprehension, 800wpm with full comprehension after 1 hour of training. 1000wpm is a normal target, and speeds as high as 1200-1600wpm are doable. Some modified algorithms have produced 1800+wpm reading speeds, including Spritz and Sprint Reader methods where they align based on word length and provide context pauses. I've envisioned some more advanced techniques myself for the interleaving of information and context sensitivity, for example to show diagrams or to slow down when introducing new concepts or covering recent ones.
The future is not skimming. The future is high-speed immersive full-comprehension sequential visual presentation.
As in they fear a society where homosexuals are allowed to freely practice their homosexuality and where children will be influenced by these homosexuals into becoming homosexuals themselves. Like I said... bigotry.
This is like calling a fear of a society where we tax the rich at 100% and redistribute their wealth to the less fortunate "bigotry" against the poor.
You keep making ludicrous leaps of logic from "this man doesn't believe this social policy is good for society" to "this man is treating these people with fear and hatred". You also keep running through this logical disconnect where we are apparently not punishing someone by revoking their employment, where as a society we have stood up and said we don't want this person to be allowed to do these things that any other person is allowed to do and so he should be removed, pressuring a business into carrying out this execution of a person's individual freedom to participate in society.
If Safeway hired a gay CEO, millions of religious conservatives might clamor to protest Safeway's pollution of good Christian family values. Shop Gay, Shop Safeway. They may cry for a boycott. Then we could remove the CEO for being "bad for the company"--essentially, for being gay. This would be the same issue as removing Eich from his position at Mozilla Inc for his political view.
Accepted by whom? "It's accepted" (i.e. by someone) really doesn't mean anything. This is what I am talking about when I say the bans on same sex marriage have very vague justifications. Nobody can define exactly what it is that their worried will happen.
I already told you: people think this will lead to more exposure of sexuality to children, among other social changes, and that this is accepted as bad for society. That may be incorrect--either the model or the ideal that it's a bad outcome--but the ideal that such an outcome is bad is widely accepted, whether or not that concern is valid.
And yet you are not advocating banning butterflies from flapping their wings...
That's the stupidest thing you've said yet. The 'butterfly effect" is a fallacious generalization of the domino effect. A domino is a block of a given mass and dimension placed in a high-energy state--standing vertically--such that its transition to a low-energy state can initiate a transition in another high-energy domino. By placing dominoes close together as such, the dominoes experience a chain reaction.
The butterfly effect attempts to conjecture that this happens with every little thing, but it mistakenly adds amplification: a large, complex system will buff out small changes. Essentially, if a system is such that a component has high potential energy in multiple possible directions (i.e. can fall left or right), and you apply more energy than the system has in one direction (i.e. it's falling right with so much force from gravity, and you apply energy leftward enough to lift it back to start and then tip it that way), you can change it to another direction. This can lead to that part of the system changing, affecting other parts of the system. If the energy you apply is less, then the change is also small--smaller than the energy you put in. In extremely complex systems (the original butterfly effect was weather), the amount of energy is quickly spread across the whole system, and the final change is so small as to be effectively non-existent (in fact, at a certain threshold, we're talking about changes smaller than planck distance--physically non-existent).
A domino effect requires energy to set up and organize. The butterfly effect essentially applies this to unorganized chaos systems, which are by nature immune to the domino effect.
It is not unethical to fire people. He is not "getting the treatment he deserves". As a software engineer myself, I can see how a bigot software engineer can right perfectly good code. I can't see how a bigot CEO can be trusted to run a company that employs a significant number of people his bigotry targets (especially when they are aware of this).
The situation I described is not bigotry. Bigotry requires treating other people with fear, distrust, and hatred. Other *people*. Deciding that society is better without a specific social institution is not bigotry, and can be done without being fearful, distrusting, or hateful toward people who have a stake in such an institution. For example: we do not allow sex with small children; however, some people are exclusively attracted to people around 9 years old, or to young teens (12-15). In Europe, they treat these people with psychological counseling and give them libido suppressing drugs: instead of hating and attacking them, they consider them unfortunate and provide them with treatment, attempting to help them to integrate with society.
Eich appears to have decided we should not legally recognize homosexual marriage, but not decided to attack homosexual people. That's not bigotry; that's tolerance. He believes that particular aspect of a person's behavior is incorrect or harmful to society, but tolerates these people. On the other hand, we are not tolerant: we don't see this as a problem. If we "tolerated" this stuff, it would be because we find it something distasteful that we need to actively allow for.
Exactly what makes this opinion valid other than the fact that you are free to have whatever opinion you want?
There's a real lack of information there though. There is real lack of knowledge of how things will change, with a real high-probability that some social changes of a known model will occur. There is also an accepted ideal that such changes are harmful--it may be incorrect, but it's accepted. That makes these considerations valid. It is, effectively, an expression of a low risk appetite.
I am citing sociology, morality (morals aren't based on what's actually right and wrong, but rather cultural perception of such), risk management, and chaos theory in these analyses. Chaos theory particularly states that everything is deterministic, but that sufficient flux exists due to minor details, and that we have imperfect knowledge which correlates to what is perceived as "randomness". People naturally act with consideration to this via a fear of the unknown and a tendency to notice when something may make far-reaching, unpredictable changes.
In this case, there is a belief that these changes are potentially significant; that they are bad (moral, social); and that certain actions will increase the risk of these changes. The best way to reduce risk from a change (rather than risk from a non-change) is to delay the change, allowing the gathering of more knowledge and thus a greater understanding of what the change will do. This of course comes at cost (in this case, social cost) and can incur risk (in this case, it incurs no societal risk; however, it appears that supporting this type of risk management does incur individual social risk).
These concerns are usually expressed unintentionally and without that kind of knowledge. Mostly, people are scared of change, scared of the impact of change, and seek to prevent it. The more they understand the impact, the less they object to the change--if the impact is understood to be bad, then of course the push for such a change goes away. The above is simply a technical explanation of how that behavior also arises out of purely rational analysis, and thus why it is valid (anything not rational is invalid--yes I am a recovering sociopath).
I really don't know why you are bringing up liberals, democrats, Obama and the ACA, since I support none of those things.
Because, implementation details aside, these groups are considered the champions of forward-thinking policies. Their policies are often ... either hasty or outright wrong ... but they do seek to change society, ostensibly for the better. I support Unconditional Basic Income, which is essentially "Socialism Light": we cut a percentage of income off (as taxes) and redistribute it amongst everyone. If you make that percentage 100%, it's Marxism; if you make it 25%, it's essentially equivalent to our general welfare spending (social security, government pensions, general welfare programs, unemployment, etc.).
Although this is hugely different from implementing Marxism, it could easily get me branded as a Marxist/Communist, which at one point in recent American history would have been LETHAL. I concede that objections are valid, although my current understanding is obviously that objections come from either fundamentally incorrect understanding of the concept or from a preference to ride the destructive spiral down slowly instead of taking a sharp and painful burn to cauterize the wound and begin the healing process.
In the same way, my conclusions of Eich's behavior are that he believes that legitimizing homosexual marriage is harmful to society. I can understand how that opinion could come about, and I don't believe the correct way to handle his opposing view is to beat him with a cudgel until he reluctantly accepts that society is following a wrong-headed path and pretends to play along. Either allow him to keep his views but push through the opposition of him
There's no effective difference. The sky is almost certainly not purple outside right now. It could turn purple.
You have no concept of how decision making works if you don't understand that. You tried pulling out the "well, I mean, there's this statistics thing, and there's a 0.0000000000000000001% chance or something, you know, I mean, it could happen, so MAYBE people died because of us" argument. You know what the counter-argument is? The counter-argument is yes, you're right, and maybe your heart could explode with the force of 50 sticks of dynamite due to hydrogen gas build-up in your bloodstream. It's almost certainly not going to happen--which means it won't happen.
If they repeated FF a hundred thousand times, the most likely, near-certain result would be not one single situation where a criminal would have a firearm in which he wouldn't have a firearm if the Government didn't leak one. Trying to claim that "there's still a possibility" in this situation is idiotic. There's a greater possibility that FF is a coverup and that the operation was a humongous success, the people reported dead are actually retired eating caviar under a constructed identity, and we're primed now to do it again in a few years and continue to pretend it's a huge fuckup.
Replace "gay" with "black". Has anything really changed?
Yes. We have good, sensible explanations why homosexuality may be bad for society. They may be wrong, but they make sense. On the other hand, we're at a point where claiming the same of black people isn't simply a difference of conjecture over an unknown area of knowledge (the greater effects of gay marriage on society and its full psychological impacts are unknown, but now largely estimated benign). One of these arguments is actually ludicrous; the other is disagreeable.
It is a valid conservative policy to not recognize gay marriage as valid in society: the social impacts are probably large, and the overall long-term impacts are unknown. This WILL change the face of society. Enabling interracial marriage or "black marriage" was never going to change the whole of society in the same way; but at a time, it would have bestowed rights on a group which would have a large swing in society. The difference is we'd change a society to accept a different group of people there; whereas homosexuality is part genetic, part environmental ("choice", but not really--it's a false choice), and so this will have direct impact on people who are not a part of the target group.
In other words: People don't chose to be black, or half-black, or not black, and they aren't black growing up until they decide to be not-black, and they aren't more likely to decide to be black or to be black sometimes because black people are now acceptable. We do have people who are gay and there is absolutely no way to de-gay them; but then we also have people who are curious, bisexual, or who were gay in high school and then halfway through college became bi or just abandoned gay stuff altogether, or who identify as "straight" but still engage in gay sexual behaviors as a diversion (i.e. to get off, or for whatever reason), and so on.
Because of this, some people develop the valid opinion that we don't want to create this social shift in society. They conjecture that such a social shift will increase free availability of sexuality (i.e. dudes can always fuck around with their bro dude friends), leading to a decrease in puritan values, and then an increase in sexual behavior. This is conjectured to produce an environment where children are more exposed to sexual behavior, or where more diseases are transmitted, or family values break down, or whatever excuse these people use for "it's wrong"--up to and including "the bible says open sex is bad, not even considering open gay sex" or whatever religious morality they want to bring.
This is not necessarily wrong-headed thinking: they have a concern, it may not be valid, but it is as they understand the world and so they want to protect it from this estimated damage. There's even enough logical argument to say they have a fair, reasonable probability of being right; on the other hand, we quickly start questioning their reasoning (is sex that bad? Is it bad that children will have greater exposure to sexual behavior in society? Can't we improve sexual education and provide free clinical services for STD tests to reduce the transmission of STDs?) and, even if we accept it, we can develop an alternate view.
Is this really a difficult concept?
It is not just people on the internet. It was other Mozilla employees that started calling for his resignation.
This all started with OKCupid. It didn't start with Mozilla Inc. It didn't start with "Some Mozilla Inc employees have voiced these concerns, and we support them...". It started with a business stunt to draw more attention to OKCupid. It grew into a bunch of whining on forums. Mozilla employees have posted on here stating that they find this whole situation disgusting and that they have nothing against Brendan. Maybe they should resign as a statement that they don't want to be branded a part of the "Gay Mafia" or something stupid.
Would voting for
You purported that something has no negative effects; I purported that this is not necessarily true, from some standpoint. You have no sense of subtlety.
Sounds like they're trying to copy Python, but mash some Bash in there.
Well that's a stretch we could use to define e-mail as text messaging, or Instant Messaging since it's roughly instant. Hell, we could call Twitter Instant Messaging.
Instant messaging (IM) is a type of online chat which offers real-time text transmission over the Internet.
Instant Messaging was not replaced by SMS. Can you SMS if you don't have cell phones, but have a computer? Can you send IM if you have a cell phone without a computer data plan? Of course you can do either: you use gateways that allow you to get off the computer network onto other networks, the same way you can 'read Swahili' by using Google Translate.
You know, we could also call voice "instant messaging", because I can call you and then talk, and when I speak you instantly get my message! Alexander Grahm Bell invented the first instant messaging app!
Ultimately I think it matters why Eich voted to ban sex with animals. If he was an animal lover and felt that animals were being treated cruelly by allowing humans to have sex with them, then I don't think there is anything bigoted about this. If he didn't give a shit about the animals at all, but just thought beastiality was an abomination, and therefore people who engaged in it should be punished for being sexual deviants regardless of whether animals are harmed, then I would say this is bigotry, albeit to a very small percentage of people (much smaller than the percentage of homosexuals).
I think you're missing a point here, but we've found some progress methinks.
Maybe some people think homosexuality is "an abomination". And maybe they think we shouldn't go around attacking people for being gay; but that it is harmful to society--that it is very, very bad and does damage to real people--for us to enable them, to support them, to not just accept them with open arms as human beings with flaws but rather to call their homosexuality anything other than a flaw.
Think of it like a person who thinks drugs should be illegal, selling drugs should be illegal, but people having and using drugs should not be illegal. Or who think buying/trafficking child pornography should be illegal, and mucking about with children should be illegal, but receiving/possessing child pornography should not. These are people who believe that a certain thing is harmful to society, but that individuals should not be attacked for harming themselves. In fact, in both cases there would be institutions available for you to voluntarily get help--drug rehab, psychological counseling--if you decided to escape your self-destructive behavior.
Eich's behavior leads me to believe that he feels gay marriage is somehow wrong--that it's not a thing our society should support--but that he harbors no aggression or ill will toward any individual. He has not apologized for supporting Proposition 8 because, I would guess, he believes it was the right thing to do; but he also has supported individuals who are gay, has provided for them to not be treated differently than any other individuals, to be denied anything for being gay, because he appears to believe that this is also the right thing to do. You can't marry another person of the same sex; but you also can't be denied a job or pushed out of a social group or beaten to death for wanting to do exactly that.
I understand that some things are bad, and that individuals acting in that manner are not necessarily bad. For example: the corporate culture where I work is terrible, it's harmful to the people here and to the business; but it's a matter of group dynamics, not a matter of individuals who are terrible employees and need to be removed. No one is at fault here, and yet the problem is the behavior of everyone. It occurs to me that Eich may be following similar reasoning: he feels supporting a certain behavior is harmful, but individuals engaging in that behavior are not bad people and do not deserve harm or prejudice.
Of course that's all just conjecture from analysis of the publicly available behavioral indicators. The short version is, again, that I don't like the idea of not being able to participate in the political system because people don't agree with you. We already have a mechanism for that: the courts decided that the whole thing is bullshit and not valid, and that we can't vote this in as a law. If we voted in an overwhelming proposition with 92% support for putting all jews in concentration camps and working them to death, that wouldn't happen because the courts would claim the entire country is nuts and we're not allowed to do that. Our democracy has limits, and our society modifies those limits, and we have some controls to prevent us from doing anything too crazy without a lot of force. Unless you're actively trying to get people murdered or forced out of society, I don't have a problem with your political views.
And here we've had Eich forced out of society, in some small part. He's not allowed to be CEO of Mozilla Inc, by rule of what a bunch of assholes on the Internet have to say about it.
It was intended to be illustrative; and besides, you ignored the entire bit about instantaneous point-to-point transport and Larry Niven. Come back when you actually understand what's being talked about.
Should I give a competent response, or should i just say "whoosh"?
There are biracial people here--like the amazingly sexy blasians--but we're talking about a world without that. We're talking about a world where biracial doesn't exist, because every race has mixed, until there are no more mixes but just one race.
Imagine surveying every single person on the planet and they are all white people with dark hair. Seven billion white people. No black people. No asians. No mexicans. It would be like that, except they wouldn't all be white; they'd all be a single homogeneous mixture of all the lost races.
You are talking about kids having sexual experiences with other kids as if it is the same thing as an adult having sexual experiences with a kid.
The girl in question gave a blowjob to an 18 year old Subway sandwich artist in the bathroom at Subway when she was 13. She relayed this to me at 23. She also fucked her 40-something teacher when she was 15. A girl I nearly dated (one of very few I've actually pursued) told me she gave her first blowjob to her biology teacher--who was 24 at the time--when she was 16, at her instigation, and they dated for a while. Some dude told me one of the neighbors used to watch him when he was 9, and taught him how to give blow jobs. 24 vs 16, 18 vs 13, okay; but when we start pulling out 30 and 40 year olds with teenagers or preteens, something is amiss.
I also had a period where I realized every girl I knew was raped. One girl--18 at the time--called me to cry about a security guard at her job raping her while she was closing the store. A girl I met told me how she became a social worker: she wanted to help other people who experienced trauma, like when she dumped a boy when she was 15 and he raped her because "a baby will fix our relationship". It just kept happening. How the hell do so many girls get raped? I developed some enlightened view of pipe wrenches around that time--we obviously don't have enough of them.
I currently accept that we don't necessarily want to sexualize children, but I do keep myself open to analytically processing any research which either confirms or rejects whether the sexualization of children is actually harmful. To me it is an unknown with public policy driven by puritanical values, which leaves open a whole hell of a lot of interesting things in the future, most notably precise understanding of *why* it's harmful, or re-evaluation of *if* it's harmful as society's ideals about sexuality change, and of course how that affects strange activist groups like NAMBLA and the Teacher's Union. I hate making assertions I can't fully explain, and I find a lot of holes in the current model, so I want to see these holes resolved either by closing them and confirming the model is correct or by blowing them open and creating a new model--I don't care which, as long as the outcome is factually correct.
In the same way, I've come to understand that rape is not as harmful as we are told; however, it's pretty bad. A lot of the harm comes from societal pressure to *be* harmed, which makes recovery difficult since recovery feels wrong. Therapists like to repeat that "you've been through a horribly traumatic experience" a lot to rape victims, constantly reaffirming that we as a society believe they should feel hurt and damaged. It's an extremely opposite approach to "what happened to you is over, and now we have to help you heal from the pain you've suffered." People outright reject this view a lot, claiming that ZERO of the psychological response experienced by rape victims comes from external societal pressures.
This idea that "We don't think homosexuals are bad, we just think homosexuality is bad", is bullshit.
You create a dangerous argument here. Good people do bad things, and people with destructive interests are functional in society. Sometimes those interests represent a tangible threat. Your argument is, effectively, that if we believe people who engage in a certain activity are not inherently bad, then society should seek to legitimize that activity.
Some people, surprisingly, do believe that society should seek to not legitimize homosexuality. They believe it's an unacceptable behavior. We also like to arrest or ostracize people for giving blow jobs to horses. I've seen it explained that having sex with dogs is extremely harmful, and that rescued dogs have immense difficulty with recovering from the abuse because "the reward is a sexual reward". You do something, the animal likes it, and so you are harming the animal. I'm sorry but
Again: mexican cartels have ample access to firearms. Their current source is always a source of convenience; our ultimate goal is to make it a source of desperation--to trim down the black market until it's less than convenient.
You keep coming back to this "oh, we did this, and people died because of it." No. People died in situations that would have almost certainly occurred if we didn't do this, but did do everything else responsible for the situation (you know, like following these people, sending agents on that day, etc.). It happens to be that the gun they got was from here, and not from some other source where they would have gotten a gun anyway.
Let's talk about "almost certainly". You know this girl, and she goes to a party and gets gangbanged by like 30 guys, and ends up pregnant. If we removed one of the guys--he never made it to the party--then she got gangbanged by 29 guys, and almost certainly would have gotten pregnant anyway. it's possible that some motion caused her to ovulate a day early, or experience an extra ovulation, and that it was triggered specifically by events which would not have occurred nor equivalent if that one guy wasn't there; but if I tried to pin the blame on that one guy based on this possibility, you would tell me I'm retarded. Because it's stupid.
The sun could get hit by a comet approaching from the blind side that we haven't been able to detect, and then explode. We're not preparing for the sun to explode and kill us all tomorrow because that's stupid. Our sun almost certainly isn't about to get hit by a comet and then explode, killing us all, tomorrow.
If you say, "People died because the mexicans got these particular guns", you are almost certainly wrong. To make that argument makes you either a con man or an idiot.
The fact that you don't understand this, means you probably are very limited in your understanding of how people use computers in general.
Word processing, e-mail, instant messaging (is now dead), Facebook, iTunes/spotify, Amazon.
I have always considered specialized programs as a non-common use case. PC games are not PC users; they are DIY console users. I understand that games run better on Linux--I've been there with Linux release games, I've run on dual-boot Windows/Linux and I always found that even the same game run on Linux runs much better (hit-and-miss if you're running Wine instead of i.e. native Doom 3, Quake 4, etc., but sometimes it DOES run better than Windows). But many of these things are on Windows and not on Linux, and that's why gamers use Windows.
Graphics designers. You can use a lot of graphics apps on Linux. Same with audio, video editing, and so on. If your software is Windows-only, you use Windows or you do some magic bullshit with Wine that I don't expect engineers who are not computer engineers specifically to figure out--they don't have the domain knowledge to solve abstract system administration problems.
I've always found Windows inadequate. Getting software for Windows is difficult; there is so much software just available for Linux that does what I need, like digital music collection management. Even where it's available on Windows, it's either not as good (feature-wise or has a shitty UI) or it's not as easy to install and/or keep updated (nothing is as easy as a package manager--Ubuntu Software Center is fucking amazing, it's the next iteration of package management). Doable, but irritating. And Linux just works better and provides a desktop UI for me that works and then gets the fuck out of my way; Windows provides a clunky shit heap.
People want familiarity, which is why we say people don't know what they want. They want GNOME 3 or something, but all they get is Windows 8. They've been exposed to Windows 8 so much that they can immediately use it much better than GNOME 3; but GNOME 3 is fundamentally better and, with some use, will make their daily computer use much more comfortable. That's not to say it's perfect: I fucking hate the alt-tab behavior because it is highly unintuitive and requires extra keystrokes much of the time (it's legitimately wrong, not better-but-unfamiliar), and I believe we need a next-generation hybrid floating-tiling window manager. But it's better than single-panel with start menu and tray.
It's not a "Windows is just better at this" thing. It's a familiarity thing. Linux is suited to replace a lot, but also falls short for things requiring specialized software that doesn't run on Linux. It's as suited as OSX, really: some people have arbitrarily switched because Windows was nothing special and they had no specialized needs tying them to Windows, and the vast majority of those who haven't are in that group and just have not switched because they are not interested in putting out the effort to re-learn human-computer interaction.