Tag: politics

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.

A failure of leadership

This is what happens when you buy into the tolerance trap and permit the lavender mafia entrance into your organization:

Employees and volunteers at Mozilla – the organisation which promotes open source software such as its Firefox browser – have called for new chief executive Brendan Eich to stand down because of his donations to political campaigns to ban gay marriage.

This week Mozilla named Brendan Eich as its new chief executive, following the resignation of Gary Kovacs which was announced in April last year. Eich was previously Mozilla’s chief technology officer and has a long history with the group dating back to before its formation from Netscape, having worked on the Navigator browser in the 90s and creating JavaScript in a marathon, ten-day programming session in 1995.

The controversy stems from a $1,000 donation he made in 2008 to support California’s Proposition 8, which opposed gay marriage. The donation was listed in a public database with Mozilla appearing next to Eich’s name as his employer. It caused controversy in the technology industry when it was uncovered in 2012.

Eich posted on his own blog to “express my sorrow at having caused pain” and promised an “active commitment to equality” at Mozilla. “I am committed to ensuring that Mozilla is, and will remain, a place that includes and supports everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, economic status, or religion,” he wrote.

But employees were unconvinced. Chris McAvoy, who leads Mozilla’s Open Badges project, took to Twitter last night to call for the new chief executive to stand down and said that he had been “disapointed” by his promotion. 

Eich is in over his head and clearly has no idea what he is dealing with here. He committed a major blunder with that statement; it’s rather like watching a gamma male shot down by a woman respond by supplicating even harder.

What he should have done is fired everyone who called upon him to resign and announced that anyone who would permit their political ideology to interfere with their work at Mozilla or Mozilla’s internal affairs would be fired. That would have brought the matter to a speedy close and prevented similar outbreaks of political insubordination. Instead, he poured gasoline on the fire by showing that he is vulnerable to ideological pressure.

When confronted by a pressure group, one should never apologize and never back down. Confront every challenger outside the organization and crush every challenger inside it. People respect strength and confidence in a leader, even when they disagree with him, because at least he shows that he is decisive and is capable of providing direction. Ironically, in his inept response to the attacks on him, Eich has shown that he is unfit for leadership because he is fundamentally a follower.

What he should have said is: “Like everyone else at Mozilla, I am free to donate to any political organization or cause I choose. It is no one’s business here to tell me to whom I can and cannot donate my money, in the past or in the future. I have donated another $10,000 to [some anti-homogamy outfit], fired Mr. McAvoy for cause, and I will fire any other Mozilla employee or volunteer who publicly demands that this organization to cater to his personal political or ideological beliefs instead of pursuing our corporate objectives.”

The Sad Puppy Hugo Slate

Larry Correia recommends the following slate to the registered Hugo voters:

Best Novel

Warbound, the Grimnoir Chronicles – Larry Correia – Baen

A Few Good Men – Sarah Hoyt – Baen

Novella

“The Butcher of Khardov” – Dan Wells – Skull Island Expeditions

“The Chaplain’s Legacy” – Brad Torgersen – Analog

Novellete

“The Exchange Officers” – Brad Torgersen – Analog

“Opera Vita Aeterna” – Vox Day – The Last Witchking

Best Fanzine

Elitist Book Reviews – Steve Diamond

Best Editor Long Form

Toni Weisskopf

Best Editor Short Form

Bryan Thomas Schmidt

Campbell Award

Marko Kloos

Frank Chadwick

It should be interesting to see how this all turns out. But after John Scalzi – how entirely unsurprising – laid the groundwork for the open politicization of the Hugo Award, it was inevitable that what had always been done quietly behind closed doors would come out in the open.

In addition to the Sad Puppy slate I am adding the following works:

Best Short Story
Port Call – Michael Z. Williamson – Baen
The Krumhorn and Misericorde – Dave Freer – Baen
Dog’s Body – Sarah A. Hoyt – Baen
Failsafe – Karen Bovenmyer – Iron Dragon Books

Best Related Work
Writing Down the Dragon – Tom Simon – Bondwine Books
On Training for War – Tom Kratman – Baen
A Terrible Thing to Lose:Zombie Science and Science Fiction in John Ringo’s
Under a Graveyard Sky – Tedd Roberts – Baen

Best Professional Artist
Kirk DouPonce

The problem of engagement

Toni Weisskopf, the Baen Books editor and one of the voices of sanity in traditional SF/F publishing, provides her perspective on the inevitability of war between the rabbits of Pink SF/F and the rationalists of Blue SF/F in a guest post at Sarah’s place:

The latest fooforaws in the science fiction world have served to highlight the vast cultural divide we are seeing in the greater American culture. SF, as always, very much reflects that greater culture.

It is also nothing new. When fandom was first starting there was the “Great Exclusion Act” when a group of young, excitable, fanboys attempted to spread their political/fannish feud propaganda at the first Worldcon in New York, and were not only prevented from doing so but not allowed back into the con. All fandom was aflame with war! (The fact that this line is a cliché is also a clue that fandom is not, and never has been, a calm peaceful sea of agreement.)

The reason we have a fandom to disunite now, is because calmer heads prevailed. Bob Tucker in particular, with intelligence and humor, led fandom to the idea that it ought have nothing to do with greater world politics, but should concentrate on the thing we all loved, that being science fiction. (Mind you, his sympathies were with the ones who were excluded, but he was able to overcome his own political inclinations for the best of fandom.)

The fact that fandom as an open culture survived more than seventy years is a testament to the power of that simple, uniting concept. That we are once again looking to be rift by a political divide was perhaps inevitable. But as fandom has grown, expanded and diluted itself, we may have won the überculture wars and lost our heart.  We have not been able to transmit this central precept to new fans. Geeks are chic, but somehow we’ve let the fuggheads win.

And, from my observations, this is an inevitable consequence of the creation of any kind of fandom, from tattoos to swords to us. There is a thing people like. Thing people make initial contact with each other to discuss things and thingishness. At some point a woman (and it’s usually women, no matter what the thing) organizes gatherings, and thing fandom grows bigger and better. At some point, the people who care not about things, but merely about being a big fish in a small sea, squeeze out the thing people. Sometimes thing fandom just dies, sometimes it fissures and the process is recreated. So the fuggheads always win. The only question is how long can we delay their inevitable triumph?

Forget delaying them. I agree with what she is saying about the inevitability of the attempted infiltrations, but I very much disagree that their triumph is inevitable. We don’t have to let them in. We don’t have to let them oh-so-helpfully volunteer to make things easier for us and take those weighty responsibilities off our shoulders.

And most of all, we don’t have to sit back and lament the fact that they’ve taken over and ruined the organizations and institutions that we used to love. We can walk away without looking back, leave them to their inevitable implosion, and build new and better ones. But we have to learn from the failures of our predecessors. When the bureaucrats and the activists and the whiners start in with their usual routine about access and fairness and reaching out, we need to kick THEM out, not foolishly listen to them and let in the destroyers.

Don’t throw pearls before swine. Don’t attempt to engage rationally with madmen and fools.

Divide, divide

It is precisely as Prechter predicted. Economic downturns are accompanied by political division and separation:

If you mention the word “secession” most people think of the South during the Civil War. But today, a new movement is gaining steam because of frustration over a growing, out-of-control federal government.

A number of conservative, rural Americans are taking about seceding and creating their own states, meaning a new map of the United States of America could include the following:

    A 51st state called Jefferson, made up of Northern California and Southern Oregon
    A new state called Western Maryland
    A new state called North Colorado

These are real movements gaining traction with voters across the country. Jeffrey Hare runs the 51st State Initiative in Colorado, an effort to fight an out-of-control legislature trying to ram big government policies down the throats of voters.

The smaller and less centralized the political entity, the more power the individual and the local people have. This is why it is resisted by the government bureaucracies and the progressives in the media and elsewhere.

But the economic downturn is barely beginning, and that’s why we’re only seeing the peaceful and political pursuit of self-determination. By the time we’re at the economic nadir, the European Union, the United States of America, and even the United Kingdom will all be in pieces.

This is one of the silver linings in the ongoing decline and fall of the USA. Secession, separation, and segregation are all part of a cyclical process; we have survived the swing of the pendulum on the backs of the greatest debt expansion in history. Don’t be surprised when it swings back to an equally impressive extent. Remember, Aristocracy is the next stage in the Ciceronian political cycle.

Bush vs Clinton redux

Actually, I tend to favor the bifactional ruling party presenting the tattered remnants of the nation with a choice between Clinton II and Bush III. Nothing could better illustrate the facade of “democracy” that misleads the American electorate.

Our meritocratic society seems increasingly nepotistic and dynastic. There was a Bush or a Clinton in the White House and cabinet for 32 years straight. We’re Bill Murray stuck at 6 a.m. in Harold Ramis’s comic masterpiece, “Groundhog Day.” As Time’s Michael Crowley tweeted on Friday, “Who else is looking forward to potentially TEN more years of obsessing about Hillary Clinton’s past, present and future?”

The Clintons don’t get defeated. They get postponed.

Just as Hillary clears the Democratic field if she is healthy and runs, a major Romney donor told The Washington Post that “if Jeb Bush is in the race, he clears the field.” Jeb acknowledged in Long Island on Monday, referring to his mom’s tart comment that “if we can’t find more than two or three families to run for higher office, that’s silly,” that “it’s an issue for sure.” He added, “It’s something that, if I run, I would have to overcome that. And so will Hillary, by the way. Let’s keep the same standards for everybody.”

It is impossible to listen to either the politicians or the corporate gatekeepers and conclude that we are living in anything that even remotely approximates a “meritocracy”. Best and brightest? Hardly. This is government by con men, rule by the most shameless.

Not so stupid after all

Tina Fey’s comments about the visibility of Russia notwithstanding, it appears Sarah Palin’s foreign policy perspective was, in some ways, more perspicacious than Barack Obama’s:

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin warned that if Senator Barack Obama were elected president, his “indecision” and “moral equivalence” may encourage Russia’s Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.

Palin said then: After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.

For those comments, she was mocked by the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine.  In light of recent events in Ukraine and concerns that Russia is getting its troops ready to cross the border into the neighboring nation, nobody seems to be laughing at or dismissing those comments now.

Hounshell wrote then that Palin’s comments were “strange” and “this is an extremely far-fetched scenario.”

“And given how Russia has been able to unsettle Ukraine’s pro-Western government without firing a shot, I don’t see why violence would be necessary to bring Kiev to heel,” Hounshell dismissively wrote.

That being said, the problem wasn’t Obama’s indecision, but rather the decision of the USA to support and encourage the anti-democratic revolutionaries who forced Ukraine’s democratically elected president to flee, thus handing Putin the international moral high ground and permitting him to send in Russian troops “to restore democracy” to Ukraine.

The real cost of the Obama foreign policy is that he has simply thrown away America’s second-greatest foreign policy asset; the credible claim that the USA held the moral high ground vis-a-vis its enemies. The Obama administration has never understood that even when one has overwhelming might on one’s side, the failure to establish at least a credible claim to the moral high ground means that those who might otherwise stay neutral will be forced into at least nominal opposition.

This is why Rome, in several centuries of world-spanning conquest, never fought a war that wasn’t “defensive”, and why Hitler went to the trouble of dressing dead bodies in Polish uniforms to excuse the Nazi invasion of Poland. The USA has gone from a global crusade for democracy to overthrowing multiple duly elected governments in a few short years, and this has not escaped the world’s attention.

Of course, President McCain would have been even worse, in foreign policy terms, than President Obama. Obama may have handed Putin an excuse to invade Ukraine, but at least he hasn’t started an open war with Russia… yet.