Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It’s because he donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California’s state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
I want to try a thought experiment. Imagine that you observe this comment in reaction to the above:
I just don’t get why the author is so pissed about their political contributions. Guess what, people who are involved in big business are usually right-wing and support right-wing organizations. Shocking. Who could have known. I don’t even want to imagine how the author comes to the conclusion that this is some big conspiracy but I think we all know what political spectrum that guy belongs to.
What I just wrote is a mirror-image version of the top rated comment on that article from a few days ago about the Mozilla foundation funding left-wing organizations. Do you agree with one of those statements and not the other? If so, why?
It is one-sided to say that someone involved in Brave should only be “allowed” to do so if he doesn’t support anything conservative. Just as would be one-sided and wrong to say that Mozilla shouldn’t be “allowed” to support left-wing organizations. Flipping it around, and looking at the reaction when it’s the other way around, is an easy way to analyze your own internal reactions on it.
(Generally, I’m in agreement with the idea that you shouldn’t use Brave because of all these other shady things; just this one part jumped out at me as one thing that’s not like the others.)
Bro, if you can’t tell why people are happy about progressive policies that support the right to love each other, and upset about regressive conservative antics that attempt to shame them and wrong them just for being themselves by telling them that they are “other” and not allowed to participate in society by getting married just because you personally think it’s “icky” or against YOUR religion, then I honestly don’t know what to tell ya. And I blame you for that run-on sentence mess, thanks a lot.
Thank you. I’m tired of these people who think there are sides of equal good or equal bad. There a group of religious fascists that want to control all our lives and then there are the rest of us that sometimes begrudgingly are lumped together because we aren’t wacko nut jobs. Fact is there are very few liberal leaning organizations that I would care if a developer or ceo was apart of because they don’t threaten me for disagreeing.
Supporting politicians you like and supporting basic human rights being taken away on the basis of completely arbitrary factors outside one’s control are two very different things.
You’re not going to want to hear this, but this logic (i.e. “But MY side is the RIGHT one, so it’s different”) is exactly why the right wing thinks Trump shouldn’t go to prison and it’s okay when they cheat in elections.
I do agree with you that the left wing is the right side of history. That doesn’t mean someone who’s on the other side suddenly shouldn’t be an executive of anything.
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Your first point is predicated on a false equivalence. The very real problems Democrats have are not in the same league as the very real problems Republicans have. That Republicans and their supporters have chosen to manufacture outrage based on lies and hysteria does not put them on the same plane as being outraged at the loss of reproductive rights for women and the deaths already caused from that, the attacks on voting rights, the trans and drag show boogeyman that is going to lead to deaths if it hasn’t already, and etc and etc and etc.
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Your second point is arguing against what exactly? People are talking about things they don’t like about the CEO of a company. Some of those people are going to choose not to support that company as is their right. WTF business is it of yours aside from your freedom to make a different decision? That CEO doesn’t need your help, and doesn’t give a shit about you. Why would you be here finger wagging at people about it? If the claims were false that would be one thing, but even you don’t seem to be claiming they are.
Let the truth out and let people make up their own minds. If centrism is your thing (and it seems it is) I can’t imagine a more neutral position than that.
It’s not even about sides. There is no left wing party in the USA - the Democrats are a right wing party. The problem with the GOP is not that they are right wing, it’s that they are extremists. A lot of their “policies” are not policies, they are crimes against humanity. 'People who are demographic X shouldn’t have the basic human right of Y" is not an opinion, a policy or justifiable in any way.
And boycotting people as Eich is first and foremost an act of self-preservation.
- Eich is, evidently, a hateful cunt who invests into destroying the human rights of random people. By exposing your e-mail, bank accounts, your communications and your identity to him (by using his browser), you are inviting him to violate your rights as well.
- By using Brave’s shit, you giwe Eich money. Thot same money he later uses to fund the atrocities he and his peers commit. Thus, by using Brave’s shit, you are not only complacent in these crimes, but actively participating.
- Less relevant, but still, by using a Chromium-based browser, you help inflate Google’s oppressive market share in the browser space, letting them push shit like Mv3 or WEI. If Brave actually cared about making a private and secure browser and fighting Google’s monopoly, they’d base off Gecko or, better yet, build their own engine.
What does it matter? They just make up whatever they want. It doesn’t matter what anyone else says or does.
A CEO needs to use logic and reason, and being into Trump shows an utter lack of both, and id argue a similar mindset. Anyone in a position like is probably doing similar things.
Your argument has no merit because one side of the political aisle is actively endorsing a piece of shit draft-dodging criminal and encouraging states to strip the rights of a minority population as well as the bodily autonomy of women, and the other side wants to charge you more money on taxes to support social programs and help people. (I own many guns and live in a red state btw, I have a bias.)
Why don’t you take a guess on which side is being disingenuous?
You’re not going to want to hear this, but this logic (i.e. “But MY side is the RIGHT one, so it’s different”) is exactly why the right wing thinks Trump shouldn’t go to prison and it’s okay when they cheat in elections.
I do agree with you that the left wing is the right side of history. That doesn’t mean someone who’s on the other side suddenly shouldn’t be an executive of anything.
Gay rights are human rights and no one who can’t respect human rights should ever be put in charge of an organization full of humans.
Human rights are not a political issue, they’re a moral and ethical issue.
The two sides are not morally equal. Prop 8 was an awful, bigoted stain on California’s history and he was unrepentant. I am glad he no longer is at Firefox. And Brave is a sketchy company that makes clear it was a good decision to give him the boot. I can support companies with moral stances I agree with and not support companies that do bad things.
Right wing is the one that actively and openly hurts people, so yeah I do see a difference tbh
You’re not going to want to hear this, but this logic (i.e. “But MY side is the RIGHT one, so it’s different”) is exactly why the right wing thinks Trump shouldn’t go to prison and it’s okay when they cheat in elections.
I do agree with you that the left wing is the right side of history. That doesn’t mean someone who’s on the other side suddenly shouldn’t be an executive of anything.
Yeah, it’s one-sided. Prop 8 was stupid and CA rightfully rejected that shit later.
It’s good to be one-sided against stupid shit that is a crime against humanity. Gay marriage is now legal federally. Same as interracial marriage. Nazis got beat the fuck up in WW2. Slavery is over. Deal with it.
To your last point, Slavery isn’t really over. I recommend watching the documentary the 13th on Netflix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)
The fact that you would consider your counterfactual a mirror image is itself problematic.
In the case of the Foundation, it supports exactly what it purports to support. They’re like the EFF and other civil rights organizations. If you consider the EFF left wing, I think that says a bit more about where you stand.
The original article was outrage-bate blog spam, with random Capitalized Words and the prolific use of “scare quotes.” It doesn’t even say anything. No charges of misinformation. No citation of law. Just “They have a Billion Dollars!!” kinds of sentences.
On the other hand, the CEO of a company - particularly a small company - lends his personality to the company. It often makes sense to co-identify them, given that the CEO has an incredible amount of influence.
So if you are saying that libertarian software project : libertarian institutions :: conservative ideas : homophobic legislation, I guess you’re just really endorsing the position of judging the company by the politicians and politics it supports. If you see prop 8 as being as fundamental to the conservative position as internet freedom is to an organization specifically dedicated to preserving internet freedom, all I can say is that I hope more people start to see it that way.
The fact that you would consider your counterfactual a mirror image is itself problematic.
It’s definitely an imperfect mirror image, yes. One is a private person spending $1,000 of his own money contributing personally to a political campaign (for something fairly abhorrent, I agree.) The other is a public foundation spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of the money it’s been entrusted with on various things which don’t seem to line up with what I think most people’s idea of their mission would be (i.e. software). I glossed over the asymmetry in the analogy to make a point but they’re actually wildly different situations.
If you consider the EFF left wing, I think that says a bit more about where you stand.
What on earth are you talking about? I genuinely can’t even make sense of you got yourself to this leap of logic.
Mozilla I think is generally understood as a software organization. The EFF didn’t get their start by making a web browser called “EFF” which now has been rebranded as “EFF Firefox” and collects ad revenue for them through partnerships. I do realize that the Mozilla Foundation’s mission statement now says they support general internet activism – which, again, is fine – but how you got from there to thinking anything about what I think about the EFF is genuinely very weird.
Also, I’ve contributed to the EFF. Have you?
The original article was outrage-bate blog spam, with random Capitalized Words and the prolific use of “scare quotes.” It doesn’t even say anything. No charges of misinformation. No citation of law. Just “They have a Billion Dollars!!” kinds of sentences.
Did you dig into its sources? I did. I’m sort of in agreement with you that it smells of some kind of right-wing hit job (like “HOW DARE THEY give money to this woman when she’s on THE LEFT”), and I think I pointed out up above that obviously Mozilla has the right to support left-wing causes with their money if they want to, even if it makes some right wing person VERY upset. I would just think that Eich has the same right. Even if it makes you very upset. Doesn’t he?
Be that as it may, specific things that I went back to its original sources and verified were:
- They’re spending less money on software development
- They gave almost half a million dollars to a one-woman consulting outfit without much explanation of what got produced (for them or for the world at large) in return
It said some other specific things that I didn’t dig into enough (that it paid one executive around $5 million dollars personally, which seems like a lot) (that they’re claiming to people that they rely on people’s donations to keep operating when they don’t) (etc). But, I poked around enough to determine that at the very least the article passed the obvious-bullshit test.
On the other hand, the CEO of a company - particularly a small company - lends his personality to the company. It often makes sense to co-identify them, given that the CEO has an incredible amount of influence.
You know that this is the same type of logic that the right uses to claim that some company whose executives once gave $1,000 to Hillary Clinton now needs to be boycotted, right?
I know, I know, the left is correct, and the right isn’t, so it’s different. Look… I’m pretty sure I’m on your side, politically. I just think it’s weird to advocate avoiding a web browser because one executive affiliated with them once gave $1,000 to a political cause I strongly disagree with. I think flipping it around to the other way is a pretty clear way of explaining why it’s weird. That’s all.
