Contra Mozilla

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Maureen Dowd

The great progressive fear (and thus, the insult which they optimistically turn against their opponents) is of being on the wrong side of history. I forget who coined the phrase "the dustbin of history," but might I suggest that I'd rather end there than be the kind of useful idiot who is ultimately unfit to even be placed among the refuse.

In related news, Pope John Paul the Great will soon be a canonized saint. Somehow, these are the kinds of people who refuse to remain in the dustbin now matter how hard others try to put them there.

TMM: Women and Wages in the Workplace

It is considered a blasphemy against the secular sensitivities to say anything against women in the workplace. Allow me to therefore make a brief contrarian observation. While I don't oppose a woman's "right to work" (that's a job for labor unions), I do question whether an integrated workplace is necessarily a good thing. The progressive party line, parroted by so many "free-thinkers," is that equality is a good thing, and thus that it must be encouraged wherever possible, and sometimes forced when impractical.

And, to the extent that this leads to equality of opportunity, it is mostly a good thing. Where it fosters commutative justice, so much the better. The problem is that more often that not, equality is less about commutative justice and more about quashing distributive justice. Thus, for example, there was a time when a "living wage" had been established for American men--and was dis-established by the outcry it caused among feminists [1]. It is debatable as to whether the abolition of this built-in wage difference brought about commutative justice--the progressive, feminist line is that it did, which must be why they now spend so much time whining about the myth of income inequality--but it is certain that the result was a reduction in distributive justice.

Men could not be the guaranteed breadwinners for their families, even when they were gainfully employed. Of course, in some families this task now falls to women, but in many more, particularly poor families, the result is the loss of a breadwinner.


[1] Source: Donna Steichen's essay on Feminism in Disorientation: The 13 "Isms" Which Will Send You to Intellectual La-La Land.

Friday, April 11, 2014

About That Secular Inquisition

I've already mentioned the unsettling development of the secular Left's inquisition, and how they will begin ferreting each other out for being insufficiently dedicated to the progressive ideology. They will of course drop any quarrel to go after us first. Lest that seem an overstatement, we have Exhibit B (Eich being A): the public outcry against Dropbox for its hiring of Condeleeza Rice. One of my friends had about the right reaction to this: "Seriously? The left is out of control. They become outraged when conservatives get jobs now."

That does seem to be about the shape of it. To be fair, there are some legitimate reasons for concern, and many of the people involved voice those concerns, specifically that it does not bode well for privacy/security to appoint the woman who oversaw the expansion of the NSA to the board of a file-sharing/cloud storage service. This is, however, just one of four major complaints against her listed by "Drop Dropbox." The others are that she supported the Iraq War (as did a large majority of Americans at its beginning, according to most major polls), she supported torturing prisoners, and she was also on the board of directors at Chevron. In other words, the reason why we should be outraged by Dropbox's hiring of her is that she is a Republican, a part of the Bush Administration, and she happens to have been a board director for a big oil business.

I don't necessarily agree with all of the things she's done, and I consider some of these complaints to be legitimate reasons why she should not be trusted with high political power. Some of these are at least legitimate enough as reasons that reasonable people could disagree whether to vote for her in a hypothetical election. None of these save for the wiretapping is a reasonable reason why she should not be hired by any company as a board member; and wiretapping seems to be the least of her offenses (greater only than being a board member at Chevron), if "Drop Dropbox" is listing here "offences" in order (let alone by the written content of each grievance). Further, there is little evidence that her authorization (and use) of wiretapping as a member of the Bush Administration will necessarily lead to her violating user privacy/security as a board member for Dropbox.

Of course, the leftist might respond that he is only targeting people who are being hired to high-level positions in a company, or only targeting the people who are directly involved in a given "bad" issue. He is only targeting Mr. Eich, because Eich was to be made CEO and he donated a substantial sum ($1000) to the non-progressive side of a major issue. He is only targeting Dr. Rice because she was an actual member of the Bush Administration, was actually in charge of implementing or was directly involved in implementing some of these policies, and is now being hired to the board of directors. The Leftist might excuse himself by saying "We're only going after top people," meaning people who have a direct and measurable impact and who are being hired to top-level leadership positions.

This is already problematic as-is. It essentially says that you can dissent from the Left, as long as you do it quietly and as long as that dissent is impotent, even in the short-term*. Alternatively, you can still freely oppose the Left's "progress", but in so doing you become a second-class citizen. You might after being beaten be allowed to live--to make a living--to find such employment as you will, but there will be a ceiling** on how high you can rise. The old glass ceiling has long since been shattered, but the progressives want to replace it with a new one.

Of course, it's a very small step from arguing that a person can't be ever allowed to hold top leadership, to excluding them from middle management and then from entry-level positions. It's also a small step from barring those who visibly work for or contribute to a cause or candidate--political, social, cultural, moral, whatever--to barring those who somehow supported it in any way at all. Today, it's those who helpd implement the Wars in the Middle East; tomorrow, anyone who supported the Iraq (and Afghanistan, for that matter) wars under Bush***. Today, it's anyone who donated to the pro-marriage (and therefore anti-"gay marriage") bill in California; tomorrow anyone who at any point in time voted for a similar bill in any state. Today, it's any member of Bush administration; tomorrow, it's anybody who voted for Bush.



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*Impotent: the progressive Left is always bragging about being  on the right side of history, whereas their opponents are "on the wrong side of history." If they really believed that, then all dissent is ultimately impotent, though it may slow the tide of history for a short time.

**Ceiling: in honor of "income equality day," which was sometime this week. The usual tired (and blatantly false) 77% statistic was trotted out, most prominently by the President. This is the same president who pays his own female staffers 88% of what he pays his male staffers, presumably for the same reasons why women--averaged over all careers at all level of experience--make on average less than men averaged in the same way. 

***Under Bush: the wars have been going very badly under Obama--with far more casualties in Afghanistan than were suffered under Bush. We've just stopped hearing the daily reports now that it's Obama and not Bush who is in charge of the war.

Contemplating Switching Blog Platforms

We only launched this blog a little under a year ago, and now we are considering moving it again. We both like the blogger interface, but it would be nice to divest ourselves of Google to the largest extent possible. Part of this is because of the while tracking thing: there are a number of "service" providers (meaning, provides browser, email, blogs, etc) which do not track and collect information to the extent that Google does. Furthermore, Google likes to see itself as being on the forefront of the progressive movement--both with its calls to "expand gay rights. This means on the one hand legalizing "gay marriage" and thus further throwing the institution of marriage into disarray, and on the other ultimately causing any actual rights which come into conflict with this to contract.

Second, we have suspicions that Google may have played some part in the dismissal of Eich as CEO of the company which he helped to found over his one-time support of traditional marriage. They obviously did not publicize this, but size the lion's share of Mozilla's profits come via Google, and given that Google has been very outspoken in its support of "gay marriage" and other supposed "gay rights," that they played a part (and a significant one at that) in Eich's ouster would come as no surprise.

We'll keep blogging here for now, especially while we look for some other provider to blog with. We are leaning towards WordPress though we haven't made any final decisions yet. Whatever are their opinions of "gay marriage" and "gay rights" and for that matter abortion as opposed to religious freedom, the rights of conscience, and the right to life, they have largely kept those opinions to themselves.

Speaking just for myself, I will probably have to keep a gmail account to continue using Google drive, which is unfortunate but borderline necessary, in particular with my career. I prefer Dropbox because of the fact that they are not Google, but it seems like its increasingly difficult to get by with just Dropbox. I don't know of their corporate values, but in some ways this is better than with Google. To not know means that they are keeping politics out of their supposedly non-political organization, unlike Google. However, I currently have multiple gmail accounts, in large art because I have to have one to write this blog, which is itself a "semi-anonymous" blog, meaning that I have a second one for "work" purposes; I suspect my co-blogger can say the same.  Suffice it to say that I am also looking into alternative (though reliable) and free email providers--gmx looks promising, as do these folks, though I want to try out their services before actually recommending them.

Leave us a line with your thoughts and suggestions.

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Tolkien's Warning about Mordor Still Applies

A few months ago I warned that we shouldn't get too excited whenever Moloch and Satan bicker. Tolkien's warning from Return of the King should suffice as warning to us:

The big orc, spear in hand, leapt after him. But the tracker [orc] springing behind a stone, put an arrow in his eye as he ran up, and he fell with a crash. The other ran off across the valley and disappeared.

For a while the hobbits sat in silence. At length Sam stirred. 'Well, I call that neat as neat,' he said. 'If this nice friendliness would spread about in Mordor, half our trouble would be over.'

'Quietly, Sam,' Frodo whispered. 'There may be others about. We have evidently had a very narrow escape, and the hunt was hotter on our tracks than we guessed. But that is the spirit of Mordor, Sam; and it has spread to every corner of it. Orcs have always behaved like that, or so all tales say, when they are on their own. But you can't get much hope out of it. They hate us far more, altogether and all the time. If those two had seen us, they would have dropped all their trouble until we were dead.'
I bring this up, because it is a rather frequent occurrence. A more recent example might be this hit piece by the progressive rag Mother Jones. The gist of the article is that the CEO of OKCupid--one of the organizations which played most prominently in getting Brendan Eich to resign over his $1000 donation to support California's Proposition 8 ballot in the 2008 elections--was himself a political donor to a pro-life and pro-family Congressman from Utah. Said CEO, Sam Yagen, has since fired back that the donation was purely political, since the man in question was a the time the ranking Republican on the House committee overseeing the internet and intellectual property.

Needless to say, Mother Jones considered this a bad thing, though the hit piece masks the contempt for his having donated to a pro-life and pro-family politician by masquerading behind a concern for fairness and consistency:

Of course, it's been a decade since Yagan's donation to Cannon, and a decade or more since many of Cannon's votes on gay rights. It's possible that Cannon's opinions have shifted, or maybe his votes were more politics than ideology; a tactic by the Mormon Rep. to satisfy his Utah constituency. It's also quite possible that Yagan's politics have changed since 2004: He donated to Barack Obama's campaign in 2007 and 2008. Perhaps even Firefox's Eich has rethought LGBT equality since his 2008 donation. But OkCupid didn't include any such nuance in its take-down of Firefox. Combine that with the fact that the company helped force out one tech CEO for something its own CEO also did, and its action last week starts to look more like a PR stunt than an impassioned act of protest.
Indeed. And, if this is the extent of Mother Jones' interest--they did print an excerpt of a response from Mr. Yagen whose apparent point is to exculpate him of the charges of having supported a pro-life/pro-family politician 10 years ago--then that's a good thing, I suppose. But I suspect that consistency and fairness are merely the more convenient tools at hand for bludgeoning a man whom fell afoul of the progressive party line--and this, many years before it was official progressive dogma.

What we are witnessing is a secular, progressive inquisition. But unlike the supposedly religious inquisitions--whether run by Catholic monarchs in pursuit of heretics, or Protestant magistrates in pursuit of recalcitrant Catholics, or Puritan in search of witches--the progressive, secular inquisition will not offer the chance for "repentance", whether past nor present. It is enough to have at some point openly supported the other side.

A Catholic understands a heretic to be somebody who obstinately persists in a distortion or outright rejection of a truth (e.g. dogma) after the issue has been settled by the Church. For the progressive, the heretic may be a person who held the wrong opinion before the "right" opinion was ever settled. While the Protestant might in principle allow for an error in judgment, especially one which has long since been quietly abandoned, the progressive inquisitor will demand public abjurement of private opinion. The supposedly conservative (because republican and anti-Communist) McCarthy went after people believed to be communists, and the supposedly liberal (because progressive and "pro-gay") modern inquisitors will ferret out the ordinary citizen who acts--or has at some point acted--with what he believes to be the best interests of the country, or indeed of the civilization, in mind.

It has long since been true that the Leftists do not believe in tolerance. Increasingly, they don't even believe in acceptance. Soon, celebration of the cause du jour will not suffice: the fact that it wasn't supported or celebrated thoroughly enough from an early enough stage will be enough to be called before this inquisition. Repenting and recanting may not be sufficient to buy leniency from their tribunals, even if both have been undertaken long before any suspicion of heresy--let alone the trial for such--has occurred. I always anticipated there to be purges on the Left, though I had fully expected those to come after they had destroyed the lives and livelihoods of those of us who opposed them from the start.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Leave Mozilla a Comment

You can apparently leave feedback for Mozilla here. Let them know what you think of their products--or how they treated their co-founder and now-former CEO, Brendan Eich. I left them a short and not necessarily eloquent comment:
This isn't a comment about your products themselves. I like Firefox, and Thunderbird has been my main email client. However, I can't help but be appalled by how you treated your now-former CEO. The man was made to resign over a $1,000 contribution to Prop. 8, a proposition which not only won a majority vote in the state at the time, but was supported by a majority of people across the country (based on opinion polls and actual statewide votes as of the time). This was an action from 6 years ago and frankly has no effect on his ability to run an organization.

Ridiculous. How would all of those calling for his resignation have liked it if he, as company CEO, had simply fired them and replaced them with people whose views were more in line with his own? Shame on Mozilla for acting in such a childish manner and punishing a man for his privately held opinions. Perhaps those calling for his head should have simply resigned themselves instead, if the thought of working for someone with whom they disagreed on a political issue is such a problem for them. Good luck to them in finding a person whose political, ethical, and/or moral principles are 100% in line with their own to take over his position.

It looks like most of the reactions lately are pretty unhappy with their mistreatment of Mr. Eich. As well they should be: their forcing him to resign over a political opinion smacks of a secular inquisition. Since it has been done in the name of tolerance*, it is also outright hypocrisy, in the truest sense of the word. It is also worrisome that this kind of political persecution is not limited to just one issue (bad as that would be); rather, any dissent from the Left now leaves potential for punishment. The "gay rights" movement may be the worst offenders (rivaled really only by the pro-abortion movement), but they are by no means the only ones.

The movement which once claimed to be about equality and freedom is now identifiable with fascism.

I should end by adding that there is no word of where we can leave feedback for President Obama's (corrupt, frankly Orwellian) IRS for leaking this private information. I hope that Mr. Eich sues them and wins big, since political donations of this sort are in principle private and not public knowledge. It also suggests that we should be wary of what we report as donations to the IRS. A small tax break now may not be worth losing a job in a decade.


Update: While you're at it, why not leave Mozilla. Here are some alternatives which are similar to Firefox, using basically the same source code--though I think that SeaMonkey may still be by Mozilla, so not all of these are true alternatives. And here is a longer list of alternatives, courtesy of Wikipedia.


*I'm noticing that tolerance as a buzzword is even becoming a thing of the past on the Left. The idea has been dead for decades, but even the words is being used more by those of us who criticize them than by "progressives" and other Leftists themselves.

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Worth 1000 Words

This pciture is certainly worth a thousand words:


And here are almost 1000 words by David Warren on that picture.

TMM: Cop-Killing Laws

It's kind of old(ish) news, but I'm only now hearing of it: Indiana passed a law to make it legal for citizens to shoot cops who enter their homes illegally:
Self-defense is a natural right; when laws are in place that protect incompetent police by removing one’s ability to protect one’s self, simply because the aggressor has a badge and a uniform, this is a human rights violation. Indiana is leading the way by recognizing this right and creating legislation to protect it.

Of course cops have already begun to fear monger the passage of this bill, “If I pull over a car and I walk up to it and the guy shoots me, he’s going to say, ‘Well, he was trying to illegally enter my property,’ ” said Joseph Hubbard, 40, president of Jeffersonville Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 100. “Somebody is going get away with killing a cop because of this law.”

Instead of looking at the beneficial aspect of this law, which creates the incentive for police to act responsibly and just, Hubbard takes the ‘higher than thou’ attitude and is simply worried about himself.

How about questioning the immoral laws that you are enforcing in the first place? Or how about sympathizing with the innocent people whose pets and family members have been slain, due to police negligence?

I think this kind of thing goes under the same general heading as the (long-since vetoed) Arizona bill which was meant to protect (or grant) religious liberties to those who wanted to opt out of participating in in "gay marriages." Namely, the intent of the law is probably good, but the fact that we even have to consider such laws is a sure sign that our nation (and civilization) is in decline. Actually, we need look no further than some of the comments in the article I linked about the cop-killing law.

In general, I am basically now in favor of this kind of law, for the simple reason that many police (individuals as well as entire departments) abuse their authority. The no-knock entry seems like a good idea, until it is used against petty criminals--or worse, innocent victims whose house is invaded by accident when the police get the wrong address.

A frequent complaint on gun-owners' rights sites (and forums, threads, etc) is that thanks to these no-knock entries and occasional wrong houses, the innocent home-owner now has to waist precious time ensuring that the people invading his home aren't police officers. This is time which might be costly in the event that the invader is a dangerous criminal [1]. Actually, since the police are increasingly likely to harm (or even kill) the occupants of the home regardless of whether or not they are guilty would suggest that they should be treated like average criminals whenever entering a home. A better law would almost certainly be to ban the no-knock entry (and no warrantless entries whatsoever), with automatic civil and criminal penalties against any officer who enters a house without permission or who harms any of the occupants therein.

But all of this goes back to my earlier point--made in the context of the Arizona bill--that we are increasingly living in a country in which rights must be spilled out in the law or they become nonexistent. Prudence is a dying virtue, whether among the citizens, the police, or the legislators and judges. It is a simple matter of common sense that people have a right to self-defense, in particular when they are at home. That is true whether the aggressor is hiding behind a badge or not.



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[1] Speaking of which, the question might be raised as to which is more likely: the entrance of a dangerous criminal, or of the police. If the former, then time is being wasted in what is more likely than not a dangerous scenario. If the police are more likely to enter this way, then the law becomes even more obviously relevant, since this would tend to indicate that the polices' irresponsibly entering a home is an all-too-frequent occurrence.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

On Sticking it to the NCAA

I enjoy watching college sports (in particular, football) as much as the next guy, but I really hate the NCAA. Therefore, I enjoy watching stuff like this:

Thank God for local affiliates.