Concur. I'm likely sympathetic to whatever aakj is trying to get at, but the post could really, really use edits or a more coherently formatted repost.
668 karma · joined July 24, 2020
Not even close. Anything even close to political has a clear slant to it, from actual article wordings to allowed sources to build the articles off of.
Do they? A lot of the benefits of DEI policies are simply more quotas for people who were already well off and capable of gainful employment, where it's more inter-elite competition than anything.
But what of the actually underprivileged? I can't fathom a way in which forbidding teachers from keeping order in class (because discipline problems are unevenly distributed, and thus racist - I wish I was kidding) helps actual minority kids from genuinely underprivileged situations. Instead, the teachers are mandated to aid and abet the very dysfunctions that keep them down.
Or what's shown in this tweet? https://twitter.com/FreeBlckThought/status/17085822241767754...
Active recommendation that "Schools should NOT 'encourage students to change their behavior or families to do more things that were like white families do, like reading to their children or adopting a growth mindset'"
These are upper class ideologues adopting nice-sounding, feelgood ideas, inflicting them on genuinely underprivileged people, and won't themselves have to pay for the consequences of these beliefs. The poor black kids will pick up the tab.
A friend of mine commented on the video that: "People who really, actually hate minorities and want to destroy their children's futures must feel so frustrated that teachers' unions, Ed schools, and school bureaucracies have left them with nothing more to do. Clearly, the point of education is to keep kids doing what they were already doing that was working so well."
These very same education people will, if asked, swear that poverty causes dysfunctions and bad outcomes, but we should never ever try to drag people out of those dysfunctions.
This is what I meant above: The politics are the point, and this shit is a disaster, as far as I can tell. I couldn't imagine better policies to tear people down if I tried. And the teaching establishment gets lauded for it.
And this is just the stuff disguised as kindness, or born of misplaced kindness. It's not getting into the actively hateful side of their culture, because they have carte blanche to spread hate, if the target is right.
It's true rainbow activist types use sexual orientations and minorities as shields when their politics get criticized, as already seen above.
If people say "listen to gay people" they hardly mean say, UK writer Douglas Murray or the activist group Gays Against Groomers.
If people say to listen to black people, I'm quite sure they don't mean economist Thomas Sowell.
If they say transpeople, they definitely don't mean Scott Newgent of "What is a Woman?" fame.
All these people have the correct identity groups, but they're no-nos because they have the wrong politics. The DEI people clamoring for better representation definitely don't want offices staffed with Sowells and Murrays. Because the identity is just a shield, and the politics is the point, as eg. Rep. Ayanna Pressley put when she said they need "more black faces willing to be a black voice" - again, Sowell certainly is black and has a voice, but Pressley meant having the correct politics to count as representative.
Wanting less DEI is wanting less of a certain kind of politics, not wanting less people of whatever sexual orientation or skin colour. Because the politics is the point.
There's the difference: People didn't want to buy Bud Light anymore, so their sales tanked.
One feature of cancellation is that the cancellee usually has people who want to hear the cancellee and buy their stuff, but activists try to get them kicked off intermediaries so the cancellee and their customers can't conduct business.
If it was just about making the person unpopular, that'd be an entirely different matter.
"Don't like it? Build your own YouTube"
"Don't like it? Build your own payment processor"
"Don't like it? Build your own anti-DDOS"
"Don't like it? Build your own ISP"
"Don't like it? Build your own..."
They publish stuff with the gist of "did you encounter other politics on YouTube, how scary".
This one's more just a lack of product focus + pursuit of coolness, but the organization spends money on getting a sneaker designer to make time-limited color themes for their browser and writes a pile of copy about how cool it is that a sneaker designer painted the browser blue - sorry, I can paint the browser blue to show that I'm an activist.
> What does being "woke" or "based" mean when it comes to concrete issues you have using their products?
It doesn't necessarily have to reflect deeply on the product, just that the org itself feels the need to make its politics clear. Sometimes, it does show, like Mozilla being pro others shaping what I see in ways agreeable to them, which was the straw that broke the camel's back for me dropping them.
Meanwhile Mozilla the organization boots people for politics, wants "more than deplatforming" and uses as one of their examples organizations deciding what I should see on the Internet - preferring outlets that Mozilla themselves like, naturally. They publish stuff with the gist of "did you encounter other politics on YouTube, how scary".
Meanwhile the organization spends money on getting a sneaker designer to make time-limited color themes for their browser and writes a pile of copy about how cool it is that a sneaker designer painted the browser blue.
Meanwhile, Brave releases a user-customizable filtering function for their search engine so you, not someone else, can decide from what POV you see the Internet and added native vertical tabs to the browser.
One organization is blatantly political, the other just makes a good browser.
You can run a similar set of comparisons for Vivaldi, who are also clearly a much more product-focused organization and it shows. They have some more visible political leans as an org, but still far milder than Mozilla's, a lot of those leans being just being vehemently anti-crypto, with the biggest focus going to user control and privacy, as it should.
Can you elaborate? I don't really remember much about those kinds of things.
> - Nerfing the extension API.
This I think was necessary if you want a modern, secure browser. Wouldn't be against a more extensive extension API that double-checked with the user wrt access to more dangerous permissions, which is partly what the current ones do already.
Mozilla doesn't go about it in as upfront way as Brave does, IME, but stuff like VPN, Pocket and other browser-related services I mind not at all.
I have no sympathy to the current political shitfest that Mozilla is as an organization, but as makers of Firefox I feel like Mozilla is in an impossible bind: Their users expect a fairytale of an independent, donation-funded browser that people spontaneously adopt, and go nuts about stuff like the inclusion of Pocket. I know, I used to be one of those people back when Pocket was introduced. But reeing about Mozilla trying to have independent funding by giving people useful services is just strange. It's exactly what they should be doing, and Brave setting up revenue streams like Talk and Search is great. Especially because they operate in the normal money universe for those of us who aren't terribly enthusiastic about crypto.
What I mean is that year in, year out you'll see the same things about a bug in their Firefox Suggest-esque feature that got fixed within one day of being reported, the bad Rewards UI which got fixed without anyone losing their cryptocurrency in response to eg. Tom Scott's feedback being treated as a scam where Brave stole it from people and so on.
They're basically criticisms of first iterations of new things and assume maximum malice on part of the Brave team. The integrating crypto into the browser side is mostly unrelated, nobody denies it and few think it's unequivocally good.
At minimum both add an encrypted, independent sync service in lieu of Google's one. And of course a ton of useful new UI customizations, built in adblockers and other mere reskin stuff. I, too, hear "built-in adblocker written in Rust" and think "reskin".