Tag: politics

An appeal to reinstall Firefox

I was asked to reconsider my position on uninstalling Mozilla products and refusing to use them in the future:

You are probably here because you have been advised to consider reinstalling Firefox. You may, in fact, have uninstalled Firefox as a result of a recent campaign protesting either Brendan Eich’s being appointed CEO of Mozilla, or his supposedly being fired or forced by Mozilla to resign from that position as a result of a donation he made in favor of proposition 8. Brendan Eich did, in fact, resign; however, he did was not fired or forced to resign by Mozilla. Mozilla does not discriminate based on an individual’s personal political or religious beliefs. If you have been told otherwise, I encourage you to evaluate the evidence for yourself. First of all, I would like to point you to Mozilla’s official FAQ on Brendan’s resignation. I realize that some people will insist that this is just a cover story and that he was really forced to resign, in spite of whatever Mozilla may say to the contrary. So I would like to share some additional corroborating evidence. There are many inside sources who corroborate this, but the one I find particularly credible and compelling is Gervase Markham. He is in a unique position as an outspoken Christian and supporter of traditional marriage who works at Mozilla. Gerv has stated that he has it from sources he trusts that Brendan did step down of his own accord and was not forced out. You can read his full statement on his blog. Finally, I want to remind you of what Mozilla, and Firefox, truly stands for.

If you are still not convinced, I’d like you to consider one more thing. Consider for a moment, the possibility that Brendan really did step down of his own accord and is not interested in coming back. What more can Mozilla possibly do that would persuade you? Is there any further evidence that would change your mind? It makes sense to treat them with a good faith presumption of truthfulness unless and until there is evidence to the contrary. Why? Because if your mind can not be changed by anything, then they may as well ignore you anyway. There are always people who cannot be swayed by reason or any amount of evidence. Since their minds can’t be changed anyway, we all might as well ignore them and focus on those who can be persuaded by reason. If you are not open to any reasonable evidence, then you make yourself irrelevant to the debate. Don’t be do that. Evaluate the evidence fairly, and when in doubt, treat others with a good faith presumption of truthfulness. Then if evidence persuades you to change your position, it will mean something.

I read this. I read Markham’s piece. I have evaluated the evidence and I am fully informed concerning the relevant facts. And my answer is a staunch and resounding no. I reject Mozilla. I reject what it now stands for.

I am aware Eich stepped down of his own accord. I am aware he was not fired, that his resignation was not demanded by the Mozilla Board, and that fewer than 10 Mozilla employees publicly demanded his resignation.

I am also aware that Mozilla’s executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker issued this official statement on April 3rd: “Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves. We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast
enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry.
We must do better.”

For what is she apologizing, precisely? To whom is she apologizing?

I am aware that Mozilla claims to “support equality for all.” This is a blatant lie on multiple levels. Mozilla might as reasonably proclaim that it supports unicorns for all or a chicken in every pot. Mozilla clearly does not support the Constitutional right of free association or the right of free speech on the part of those harboring views it considers incompatible with its mission statement.

I am aware that “Mozilla Supports LGBT Equality”. I don’t and I will not support any organization that claims to do so.

I am aware that Mozilla has ignored tens of thousands of negative comments from current and former Firefox users and has refused to provide any statement in response to them. I am also aware that it responded quickly and publicly to a much smaller amount of criticism that threatened much less damage to the corporation.

A supporter of the move to ostracize and oust Brandon Eich declared: “I do think that any individual is free to choose to resign their own job
or otherwise not conduct business with someone whom they know has taken
an action that they consider unjust.” I agree. That is precisely why I no longer want anything to do with Mozilla and I continue to recommend that everyone #uninstallfirefox.

Prior to the #uninstallfirefox campaign began, Mozilla Firefox represented 34 percent of the total pageviews here. That percentage is currently down to 20 percent, so based on last year’s traffic, Mozilla can expect to lose at least 1,835,637 pageviews from the readers here on this site alone, in addition to the pageviews those readers generate on all other sites and whatever pageviews my household machines generate on an annual basis.

Dogmatic and dishonest

Ross Douthat points out the moral defect being exhibited by a corporation and a university in the New York Times, which happens to be identical to that previously demonstrated by a writer’s organization:

In both cases, Mozilla and Brandeis, there was a striking difference between the clarity of what had actually happened and the evasiveness of the official responses to the events. Eich stepped down rather than recant his past support for the view that one man and one woman makes a marriage; Hirsi Ali’s invitation was withdrawn because of her sweeping criticisms of Islamic culture. But neither the phrase “marriage” nor the word “Islam” appeared in the initial statements Mozilla and Brandeis released.

Instead, the Mozilla statement rambled in the language of inclusion: “Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness. … Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions. …”

The statement on Hirsi Ali was slightly more direct, saying that “her past statements … are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” But it never specified what those statements or those values might be — and then it fell back, too, on pieties about diversity: “In the spirit of free expression that has defined Brandeis University throughout its history, Ms. Hirsi Ali is welcome to join us on campus in the future to engage in a dialogue about these important issues.”

What both cases illustrate, with their fuzzy rhetoric masking ideological pressure, is a serious moral defect at the heart of elite culture in America.

The defect, crucially, is not this culture’s bias against social conservatives, or its discomfort with stinging attacks on non-Western religions. Rather, it’s the refusal to admit — to others, and to itself — that these biases fundamentally trump the commitment to “free expression” or “diversity” affirmed in mission statements and news releases.

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, that fill their ranks with ideologues and then claim to stand athwart bias and misinformation, that speak the language of pluralism while presiding over communities that resemble the beau ideal of Sandra Y. L. Korn.

It was precisely the same pattern of behavior with the SFWA. The rhetoric was fuzzy and muddled, and the accusations were incoherent. No actual reason was ever given for the purging of the nameless member; if I had not announced the identity of the expelled member on my blog, no one outside the inner circle of the organization would have even known who had been successfully targeted for removal by the SFWA president and his obedient Board.

The reason for the deceit is twofold; it is first necessary to preserve the self-conceit of the individuals involved. They do not wish to admit that they are hypocrites who are failing to live up to their professed ideals. It is no different than the reason priests who commit child abuse, teachers who have affairs with their students, and con men who perpetrate frauds are reluctant to confess to their misdeeds even after they are caught red-handed; they are ashamed of their idealistic failures and seek to hide those failures from the knowledge of those who will judge them for it.

And second, the self-deception is vital because admitting their failures means sacrificing the moral high ground in criticizing other organizations and losing their ability to hold other organizations accountable for doing the same thing they are doing.

Both reasons are why it is vital to continue to flaunt their actions in their faces, without mercy, until they admit what they have done and make an open and public choice between their supposed ideals and their ideological dogma. SFWA thought it was marginalizing me by purging me from its ranks, but instead, they elevated my stature, increased my readership, delineated the ideological lines in SF/F, and handed every critic of their dishonesty and dogma an effective weapon to use against them until they either a) come out of the closet concerning their ideology, or b ) correct their self-destructive course.

I think the interesting question to ask here is not why these organizations are behaving in this morally defective fashion, but rather, why now?

The benefits of interventionism

Strangely enough, we’re not hearing so much about those wonderfully inspiring purple fingers in the lead-up to the coming Iraqi elections:

Children in Iraq could be legally married before the age of nine under sweeping legislation tabled on Tuesday that introduces new religious restrictions on women’s rights. As almost its last act before elections at the end of the month, the Iraqi parliament looks likely to pass new marital rules for its majority Shia community with a draft law criticised by human rights activists as “legalised inquality”

The legislation has been approved by the governing coalition in an effort to attract support from Shia Muslims in the April 30 vote.

Current Iraqi law sets the legal age for marriage at 18 without parental approval and states girls as young as 15 can be married only with a guardian’s approval. It does not allow for special provisions according to sect. But the legislation, known as the Jaafari law, introduces rules almost identical to those of neighbouring Iran, a Shia-dominated Islamic theocracy.

That’s certainly an effective way to reduce the rate of illegitimate births by teenage mothers. Remember, we are reliably informed that representative democracy is the best possible form of government for all human population groups and sub-species. And since all morals and cultural norms are relative, on what basis can anyone complain about six-year old girls getting married, especially anyone living in a degraded culture where men can “marry” men, women can “marry” women, and female children are permitted to obtain contraceptives and abortions without parental consent.

It’s democratic progress, ergo inevitable. Relax and enjoy it.

A tale of two responses

Obviously the Firefox Input tool is not the only way in which people communicate their dissatisfaction with Mozilla. But by any measure, it should be readily obvious that the firestorm of criticism directed at Mozilla for forcing Brandon Eich’s resignation and the #uninstallfirefox movement, which is growing by the day, is considerably greater than the criticism aimed at the organization in response to Eich’s promotion to CEO.

It is both remarkable and telling that while Mozilla’s board and its employees were quite willing to speak out when their new CEO was supposedly a tremendous PR disaster, they have remained silent in the face of considerably greater public outrage. This is despite the Happy/Sad metric registering all-time highs and the number of messages running nearly 10x higher than normal and nearly all of them being negative.

Mozilla has made it clear that its values directly contradict those of Christians as well as everyone who believes in the separation of work and politics. As John C. Wright said: “No lover of liberty will continue to use Firefox after this day.”

If you haven’t switched yet, I encourage you to do so. Pale Moon works very well, and if that doesn’t work for you or if you are looking for greater privacy, I would recommend giving Epic Browser a look.

On this blog, Firefox use is already down by more than one-fifth, from 34 to 27 percent of readers. On Alpha Game, it is down by exactly one-fifth, from 30 to 24 percent.

Short-sighted GOP rules lawyers

In their efforts to force the unelectable Mitt Romney on the Republican grass roots in 2012, the rules lawyers of the Republica Party elite have created a serious procedural problem for the party’s nomination process in 2016:

Led by Romney loyalist and pitbull GOP lawyer Ben Ginsberg, the RNC made changes in the rules that would not only insure an orderly convention for the front-runner in 2012 but would make it extremely difficult—if not completely impossible—for an intra-party challenge to be mounted against a President Romney in 2016. Apparently, it never occurred to the majority of the Rules Committee that there might not be a President Romney in 2016  to protect….

Rather than only requiring a candidate to have a plurality of the delegates from five states in order to have one’s name placed into nomination, the rule was changed to require a candidate to have a majority of delegate votes in at least eight states as a prerequisite to nomination.

Under the new rule, only Mitt Romney would meet the test for nomination assuring that there would be no Ron Paul problem.

While this might worked out nicely for those controlling the GOP convention in 2012, the amended rule now poses a serious change in how the game is to be played in 2016. What’s more, given that the rule cannot be changed until the next round of delegates arrive at  the convention in 2016 and the Rules Committee convenes to establish the new rules of the convention, the Republicans are stuck with what they have wrought in 2012.

And that represents a very significant problem for anyone who believes the voters should have something to say about their party’s nominee or those who don’t favor a convention where the bosses and delegates get to decide who is the nominee, irrespective of what home state Republicans might have to say.

Based on the RNC issued memo in 2011 ruling that ‘winner-take-all’ elections will only be permitted when a candidate receives a majority of the votes cast in the primary battle, and given the deep bench of candidates likely to seek the 2016 GOP nomination, it seems unlikely that there are going to be a whole lot of states producing majority wins for candidates.

Thus, a Republican candidate who receives 49 percent of the vote in a “winner-take-all” state will not be permitted to get 100 percent of the state’s delegates. And that means it is an almost certainty that there will not be a candidate walking into the GOP convention with the requisite eight states producing a majority of delegates supporting a candidate now required to have one’s name placed into nomination.

And you think that these breathtakingly dishonest idiots are going fix everything that Obama has wrought? Or anything, anything at all? The odds are very good that they’ll make things considerably worse, as was the case with the Bush administration. Don’t vote Republican if you value freedom, small government, or the Constitution. Don’t be under the illusion that Republican rule will make things any better at all. Republicans are every bit as guilty of the destruction of the United States of America as their Democratic partners in crime.

Day by Day

I was a little surprised to see that. I already knew that a fair number of people whose names you might recognize have the blog in their regular rotation, as sometimes they send me email, but I had no idea that Chris Muir did.

And speaking of the new intolerant standard for American business, here is a way to let Mozilla know your opinion directly on their feedback page. As per Conservative Intelligence Briefing: “If Mozilla was hoping to avoid controversy by edging out former CEO Brendan Eich, the company has most certainly failed. The graph below comes from the feedback page on their site. This chart goes back to when the comment system was adopted, and the highest number of “sad” comments is today, by a factor of about two. The second highest number came yesterday.”

A sample of the comments posted:

  • Im still in disbelief at Mozilla inane and intolerant decision to have
    its CEO step down. Apparently they value the opinion of LGBT over the
    first amendment. Shame 
  •  Gay folks didn’t struggle to come out of the closet just so that
    christian folks could now be shoved into it. I’ve uninstalled Firefox
    after many years of using it and I will never recommend your product to
    anyone ever again.
  •  THOUGHT NAZIS will soon reap what they sew … Uninstalled on 23 work
    and home computers. This is just the beginning you FASCISTS!!! 
  •  Giving in to the thought police is unnaceptable. The guy didn’t TREAT
    any homosexual badly, just donated a modest sum (for an executive) to a
    campaign that even BARACK ‘GOD OF THE LIBERALS’ OBAMA supported. This
    isn’t “progress”, this is medieval persecution. Wolf in sheep’s
    clothing, you are. F*ck you. 
  • It has been great riding with you since 1994. Good luck in your future endeavours.
    I have uninstalled Mozilla Firefox, Nightly, and Thunderbird
    No longer willing to support or associate with your products.
    Thanks.  

It will be informative to see how long it takes before Mozilla shuts down their feedback page. Like many supporters of the gay rights agenda, they appear to have badly miscalculated the demographic math.

Mailvox: breaking the ceasefire

Gara demonstrates that he doesn’t understand the difference between legal right and common practice:

Gara: So many people bitching about the whole Mozilla thing. One would expect a self described libertarian like Vox would understand that this is eactly how the free marketplace of ideas is supposed to work. Firefox’s CEO approves of discrimination against same sey couples. And other individuals and companies such as OKCupid responded by exercising their right of free association, declining to support a CEO who holds a viewpoint they found abhorrent. This is how democratic persuasion always operates guys. If you are so angry about it, then try with all means to make your OkCupid boycott work. See if you can get even half the influence they have.

Toby: Free marketplace of ideas involve demanding another person to step down from a position/quit from work because of his/her ideas? Gara, are you crazy?

Gara: Yes it does. You have all the right to say “If Mr X does not quit his position, I won’t have anything to do with your company anymore”. And the company can they react as they see fit. Liberals have the right to do things like that as much as conservatives do.

What we have here is a left-winger and a right-winger talking past each other. Gara is absolutely right in one sense. OKCupid and the various Mozilla employees were perfectly within their LEGAL rights to behave as they did. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has accused them of criminal activity or called for them to be prosecuted.

However, Toby is equally correct to observe that it was absolutely crazy for OK Cupid and the various Mozilla employees to exercise their legal rights in that manner. Because while it is LEGAL for employers and businesses to discriminate on the basis of political beliefs and affiliations, it has most certainly not been the ACCEPTED PRACTICE for them to do so openly.

Indeed, one of the great complaints about the universities and the media is that they secretly impose political litmus tests concerning who is permitted employment in their institutions, and the danger of this practice becoming open knowledge was so great that to this day the universities and media corporations still deny what is statistically undeniable and readily obvious to even the most casual observer.

But now, thanks to the Eich affair, political employment discrimination is overt, and what was previously only legal is now PUBLIC AND ACCEPTED PRACTICE. It is purge or be purged time. So, if you are an employer in many states, you can now feel free to stop employing every non-critical employee who voted for Obama or is known to be a member of the Democratic Party. And you can impose a political litmus test on your new hires; contact DH for his new service if you don’t want to bother surfing Facebook for incrimination evidence of inappropriate politics.

What Gara has failed to realize is that there had been a de facto political ceasefire in the corporate world. The Mozilla debacle broke the ceasefire and now the political Right has the ability to return fire with impunity. I doubt it will do so openly yet, but I have no doubt that there will be more than a few unexpected dismissals quietly taking place over the next few months now that corporate executives understand what the new reality is.

Most conservatives in the corporate community have prided themselves on being “colorblind” with regards to the political spectrum. I suspect that many of them will, sooner or later, understand that they have to abandon that position as being no longer tenable or intellectually justifiable.

And in keeping with the end to the ceasefire, I have removed Mozilla Firefox from my various systems and devices. I have replaced it with Pale Moon, about which more anon. #uninstallfirefox.

UPDATE: the ceasefire is observably over:

The director of corporate giving for Google Inc. has resigned in protest from the board of a Christian aid organization after the charity reversed its decision to hire employees in same-sex marriages. As the Associated Press reported Thursday, Jacquelline Fuller said in an email Wednesday to AP that while she remains a “huge fan” of the group’s work on behalf of the poor, she resigned Friday “as I disagreed with the decision to exclude gay employees who marry.” 

If people are more concerned about homogamy or equality than with helping the poor or basic Christian principles, they should certainly resign from any Christian aid organization. Indeed, they should not be involved with the group in the first place.

The easiest boycott

It would be hard to recommend a boycott of OK Cupid given that I have no need of it an I don’t know anyone who is so unfortunate as to require using:

Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience.

Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.

Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there’s a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we’re asserting ourselves today. This is why: we’ve devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we’ve worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it’s professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.

If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site.

However, we urge you to consider different software for accessing OkCupid:

This is possibly one of the dumbest business stunts that I have seen in a long time. But, on the off chance that you are a Christian or even a secular person who doesn’t believe in the politicization of business, I would encourage you to consider using a different web site for the purposes of meeting members of the opposite sex.

Not on your side

Kevin Williamson appears to think that a pragmatic appeal to the lesser evil is going to work again after six years of the Obama adminstration:

Republicans
now have the opportunity to effectively bring the Obama
administration’s legislative program to an early end this November by
eliminating the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, which would also give
them a much stronger hand in keeping the worst of his appointees out of
office, safely quarantined in whatever dank recesses of academia
currently housing them. And while one should never underestimate the
Republicans’ ability to blunder their way into missing a political
opportunity or the fickleness of our bread-and-circuses electorate,
there is a very good chance that that will happen. (Knock wood, salt
over the shoulder — pick your own prophylactic.) But conservatives all
too often seem to have failed to learn the lesson of the heavy losses we
have suffered during the Obama years: The differences among us are
minor compared with the differences between us and them, which are
fundamental.

Conservatives had an opportunity to put
the Obama administration not to an effective end but a literal one in
2012, but we blew it. Mitt Romney improved on John McCain’s vote total
(barely), fared better in every battleground state save Ohio, and even
won independents. The election in the end was decided by 334,000 votes
in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and New Hampshire. Even with Barack Obama’s
edge among newly registered minority voters and an unusually high
turnout among overwhelmingly Democratic black voters, only 57.5 percent
of eligible voters actually showed up. That left a lot of room for
conservatives to make a difference. But we did not take the opportunity.

The
three most important words in politics are: “Compared with what?” And I
am more than a little sympathetic to conservatives’ complaints about
the failures of elected Republicans in Washington, who consistently
disappoint us even when they are in the majority. I am also sympathetic
to the view that our situation may have deteriorated to the point that
even a unified Republican government under the leadership of principled
conservatives may not be enough to turn things around. And though I
reject the notion that Mitt Romney wasn’t good enough for true-believing
conservatives, let’s say, arguendo, that that was the case. Unless you
are ready to give up entirely on the notion of advancing conservative
principles through the ballot box, you might consider looking at things
this way: Even if you do not think that it matters much whether
Republicans win, it matters a great deal that Democrats lose.

No,
no, and no again. A thousand times no.  Mitt Romney wasn’t good enough.
John McCain would have actually been worse than Obama. Failing a little
more slowly, destroying the country a little less spectacularly, is not
and will never be a solution. It cannot be a solution.

At
this point, the die is cast. There is no one in American politics, now
that Ron Paul is retired, who is even potentially interested in the
policies that need to be implemented to salvage what is observably a
failing empire. There is not a single candidate in either party who will
even attempt to fix the financial system, deport the millions of
invaders, and end the foreign wars.

It is better to be
openly attacked by confirmed enemies than repeatedly betrayed by false
friends. The Republicans have proven that they are no friends to
freedom, small government, or traditional America and it is a
fundamental error for anyone who values freedom or small government or
traditional America to support them.

Mr. Williamson says: “I am coming around to the view that I’d rather be disappointed by
Republicans who periodically fail live up to their principles than have
my country pillaged and hobbled by Democrats who consistently live up to
theirs.”

That’s a false choice. Mr. Williamson should
know better. The Republicans don’t “periodically fail to live up to
their principles”. They predictably, and reliably, fail to live up to
their pretended principles.

White liberal racism

It’s fascinating to see how white liberals the way in which make a habit of denying the undeniable whenever it contradicts their narrative. From the woman who calls herself “Pox Vay” on Twitter:

You’re not a person of color. You’re a white guy who shares genes with people of color. But you don’t share the life experience.

It’s hard to argue with this. After all, there are so few People of Color who are NCAA Division One 100-meter sprinters, right? Or study economics in Tokyo, neh?

She’s not the only one. Carrie Cuinn, a white racist who is one of SFWA’s extremist pinkshirts, specifically rejected my inclusion on her list of Hispanic science fiction writers, never mind the fact that I am probably one of the best-selling Hispanic science fiction writers after Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt. Interestingly enough, neither of them were on her list either, although I suspect their omission was more out of ignorance than white liberal racism.

Surely this woman is a reliable expert on who is, and who is not, Hispanic….

This is a longtime pattern with the Left. I remember a feminist professor at my university openly declaring “Margaret Thatcher is not a woman” due to her ideology. The Left not only arrogates to itself the right to disqualify anyone as it sees fit, but observably believes that its narrative supersedes science, sex, and human genetics.