13thLetter

Fair enough, then, thanks. I suppose I'm just automatically suspicious of this sort of cheerleading, even in a situation where it ultimately makes economic sense.

I wish them good luck with that, considering that the reputation of the GOP as uniquely obstructive in comparison with previous Congresses is purely a construction of media propaganda and is therefore not going to be overturned merely by their good behavior.

(A Democratic Senate slow-rolled or blocked innumerable Bush judicial nominees, some for several years, and the Democratic Congress shut down the government several times under Reagan. Both sides have the power to do these things, and have exercised them freely in the past, and somehow the world continued to turn.)

> This seems to make sense but it is the Supreme Court's responsibility to drag society forward when society's inertia is at odds with the Constitution.

I don't see where it says that in Article III of the Constitution. Can you point it out to me?

Why, it's almost as if they are a different political party altogether!

Yes, yes, nature and trees, that's all very nice but I'd like to know how much electrical power generation was lost by demolishing these dams and, if it's a significant amount, how that power generation is being replaced. We didn't build dams just for fun.

> See, I'm inclined to believe it. If for no other reason than it just seems intuitive. Women who go into technology know it's an uphill battle.

Or at least they've been told repeatedly that it's an uphill battle, by news media and activists with an ideology to push and clicks to farm.

I have to second that. Twitter really does provide negative societal value, given that it's almost perfectly designed to drive outrage storms and incoherent, ingroup-pleasing snark in place of journalism. If Twitter suddenly vanished tomorrow, the quality of public debate in the United States would skyrocket.

> But that doesn't mean that something isn't also broken at the hiring end of the pipeline.

It also doesn't mean that something is also broken at the hiring end of the pipeline.

And so is, for example, your average white man from Appalachia.

> In an industry that's somewhat hostile to women...

You're saying this in response to a study that showed the industry being less hostile to women, at least on this particular axis.

I don't see how that's relevant in the grand scheme of things. In particular, it doesn't justify what the mob did, or make it good that we have these mobs.

That assumes rational, good-faith listeners, though, who aren't just looking to enforce their political views. Opalgate permanently poisoned that well.

> So again I ask, what would you propose we do about it?

How about for starters, "we" stop getting people fired for holding unpopular political opinions? That said, I don't have a good idea of how to persuade everyone to change this disastrous course we're on, if that's what you were asking.

> At what point does it become unacceptable, and unacceptable to whom?

Unacceptable to people who realize that in a large nation full of people with wildly different lifestyles and cultures, a level of tolerance is required so that we can all go about our business as opposed to murdering each other in the street.

This doesn't mean that you don't speak your mind, advocate for your cause, and criticize those idiots over there who are clearly wrong; it does mean that you acknowledge those idiots still should be able to earn a living and argue for their own causes, no matter how wrong they are.

> Both Eich and Mozilla characterize his leaving as voluntary. Now whether that's the case is somewhat disputed, but there's no evidence to suggest any other conclusion.

Voluntary, in the sense that when you get mugged you can choose between your money or your life? For some reason I suspect Eich did not leave the position he had just taken because he wanted to spend more time with his family. And "voluntary" or not, somebody leaving a position in a private industry because of a mob that's intolerant of his unrelated political views is nothing to celebrate: in fact, it's a symbol of the wild polarization that is destroying this country.

> Society has decided that denying people basic rights is what's "unacceptable" and chooses to punish those that act in that fashion.

"Society" has decided this, has it? When did that happen? Last I heard, there was a lot of arguing going on about that very point.

> And it's not like there's any other explanation for the donation either... the group he donated to was a single purpose lobbying campaign.

And as I stated previously, "you can hold any opinion you want as long as you don't tell anyone about it" is unacceptable.

And they also make it OK for me to criticize the people who are criticizing Mozilla, and for those people to criticize me for criticizing the people who are criticizing Mozilla, and etc. So now that we've gotten that out of our system, we can realize that there's a difference between being criticized and losing one's job because of one's political opinions, and a society where the second thing happens is a society that has real problems.

So people are allowed to have unpopular opinions as long as they don't, you know, tell anyone else about them or anything? Sorry, but that's unacceptable.

I'll give you that our State Department's grotesque levels of incompetence and stupidity don't exactly make it hard for the foreign press to smear the United States; I find it entirely plausible that the same people who couldn't be bothered to put bulletproof glass on a consulate in Libya would try to turn a European ally's capital into an armed camp. That being said, I've still too often seen stories in foreign papers painting perfectly anodyne American actions as the height of villainy to have any more faith in their reporting than I do in American papers'.

I don't recall hearing that much in the context of Eich, but it certainly is a common go-to argument more recently among those who want to see people punished for having incorrect political views. It came up a lot when Strangeloop kicked out Curtis Yarvin, for example.

Sure, but that emphatically does not mean abandoning principles of merit and equality and letting bullies and shakedown artists run your companies, as Github and too many others are doing.

> I'd love it if racism were to just disappear too. But wanting it to happen doesn't make it happen.

The point being made here is that making the system even more racist is going to make the problem even worse. It's bad to assume Neal DeGrasse Tyson is a shoplifter because of the color of his skin. It's also bad (it may or may not be worse, but it is in no way good) to assume a person will discriminate against others because of the color of his skin.

> But how do they know Watson would find the expected value of these things positive? Maybe Watson would be a republican.

Easy enough. If Watson turned out to be a Republican they would start tweaking the parameters until it became a Democrat.

More accurately, 80% of them have no idea how the foreign media portrays the way their government represents them abroad. Don't make the mistake of assuming that your giant government-associated news corporations full of hard-ideological reporters and editors are any more trustworthy than Americans'.

> Why aren't we talking about those implications?

Are you kidding? Frankly, people never shut up about them. Even that famous "We Are All Americans" article after September 11th, 2001 went on about how the attacks were blowback for past American misbehavior.

> This is still trying to force a private institution to conform to your wishes.

I'm curious what your opinion is of our current advocacy campaigns attempting to "force" tech companies to hire more women, or "force" movies and TV to to have more characters who are ethnic minorities.

> The HRC, GLAAD, and etc never demand that Liberty University (socially conservative institution) let say Dan Savage speak at their university.

Maybe they should! They'd certainly be well within their rights. Although I'd be interested to learn more about a situation where someone like Savage was prevented from speaking at Liberty University, as I hadn't heard of that.

> Yet free speech advocates are all for forcing private institutions to open their platforms to any and all speech.

No, they are not in favor of forcing them to do so. You are making the unfortunately common mistake of confusing advocating something with making it legally required. These are not the same thing, and you'll be a more convincing advocate for your side once you really get that.

What free-speech advocates are stating is that while private universities are legally allowed to ban speakers, because as you correctly state they have no obligation to provide a platform to anyone or anything they don't want to... that this is illiberal behavior, not in the spirit of freedom of speech, and these universities are not living up to their claimed principles when they do it.

Which it is.

"It seems you want minorities to listen to any and all bigoted opinions without protest..."

Nobody was "forcing" any person to listen to anything, so this critique has pretty much gotten off on the wrong foot right at the start.

I am not implying anything. I am straight up stating that if you don't throw the bastards out, they will never learn.

If you actually care about policy instead of about avoiding the hated outgroup, your relationship with politicians needs to be transactional. If they don't deliver, find another one, even if said politician is (gasp! shock!) not a Democrat. I would recommend the same, by the way, to Republicans who are upset that the Congressional GOP isn't cutting spending. Vote them out of power, it's the only way to get your point through.

Attention, Americans in this comments section: even though you're complaining now, if you guys obediently line up to re-elect the party doing this come November, you are part of the problem.

I dunno. What's the use of anything, really?

"which always spied on each other mainly because US interests in the middle east almost always directly oppose the ones of Israel"

True. And it's rather sad that they do, given that Israel's interests in the middle east are generally about not having their citizens murdered in the street.