> Can someone explain to me how this is not cancel culture?
If the definition of the nebulous concept of 'cancel culture' is so broad as to encompass disassociating ourselves from a person we consider heinous, and encouraging others to do the same, then I'm not sure there's any value in the concept to begin with. It's hard to argue that we should all limit how we use our freedom of association so that someone else may occupy a position that they are not entitled to.
I don't see anyone talking about throwing away decades of his work. The good that he's done won't go away any time soon. But it's becoming more and more evident that the free software movement can't survive unless it continues to push past the rut in which people like RMS are content to remain.
I don't find that very convincing at all. 99% of apps I've ever used add no value beyond what a web interface could do, and most of those send me spammy notifications trying to draw me back into the app. App notification spam is a much greater problem for me and everyone I know than web notification spam, and apps pose a greater privacy and security threat.
> Just because you have a good use doesn’t outweigh the all the bad abuse.
Personally, this is how I feel about downloading apps to my phone for every individual service and product. I see no need to download a separate app for each individual service I'm interested in, as the potential for abuse is higher than getting the occasional notification from my browser app and visiting their website.
However, it sounds to me like the focus should be on minimizing the potential for any avenue of information delivery to be abused, not to remove or decline to add features for fear that they will be. From the user side, I'm not interested in being told by a developer, "download my app if it's so important to you." I'd probably never discover how useful a service can be if I would have to download another app to try it. From the developer side, I'm not interested in telling potential users, "you actually don't want that feature."
I'm confused by this question, aren't you essentially asking, "how can a problem exist if some people are presently taking actions that try to mitigate that problem?"
For smaller scripts, this is trivially resolved. For larger scripts, this is a bug, and the script should be updated with a more flexible solution that doesn't rely on hardcoded branch names.
> Italians also weren't considered "white" for a while in early US history, I believe.
I think this is more of a concept illustrating how arbitrary racial classifications are, rather than an actual reality. Historically, Italians in the Jim Crow era of American history were admitted to whites-only facilities and their marriages to people of British descent were not considered interracial, which I think shows handily that although they were mistreated based on their ethnicity, they were still considered white.
To follow up on this, there is no unified "black" identity either, but there is a distinct Black identity especially among African-Americans. This is in large part because of the way their identities, cultures, languages, and traditions were forcibly stripped away from them upon enslavement. African-American cultures thus distinguished themselves with combinations of cultural elements preserved from African nations, as well as elements of mainstream American cultures due to the extreme pressure to "assimilate," later immigration from places such as Caribbean nations, and newer elements developed uniquely by African-Americans.
Considering your use of euphemisms for white supremacy, such as "white advocacy," it sounds like people dismiss you as a Nazi because you are factually a Nazi. I encourage you to find the courage to advocate for your beliefs on your main account instead of registering throwaways to avoid negative consequences for your choices.
The headline shouldn't have been re-written, but I think that denial will, in fact, be effectively permanent. Parler's administration is fundamentally incompatible with markets that disallow the willful propagation of hate speech.
> The big difference between uber and taxis is that uber drivers have a direct incentive to improve via ratings.
I'm not sure this is true. There's a limit to how well any driver can perform their job; unless a driver is rude to me or drives unsafely, I rate them five stars every time because I can't think of any legitimate reasons to rate them lower. When minor annoyances do occur, my desire not to disrupt another person's livelihood pressures me to let it go and rate 5 stars anyway. If they went above and beyond, I'd still rate them 5 stars. For me, that means the rating system tends to homogenize all service quality ranging from average to amazing.
My impression is that the incentive is more fear-based: even a brief period of below-average performance might cost you your job.
I wonder what kind of regional variations there are on that; where I'm from, the anecdotal impression I've gotten is that sexual harassment is more common from Uber drivers than from drivers for local taxi companies. My guess is that, at least where I'm from, Uber employment is more volatile than local taxis; an Uber driver is more easily fired, but the barrier for entry is lower, so significant damage can be done before a harassing driver is let go.
From both a practical and ethical point of view, I find it more than acceptable to retain copies of email correspondence one is participating in, and to share that correspondence with one's legal representation. The alternative puts too much power in corporate hands.
I'm not the person you replied to and my perspective is pretty limited overall, but when I was younger, I found Visual Basic to be the easiest thing for a beginner. However, that's as much about the IDE as it is about the language. I remember when the Visual Studio express/community editions were first coming out. Visual Basic was a relatively simple, readable language, and the IDE itself made it simple to pick-and-place GUI components on to forms and write callbacks for them, even before I understood the concept of event-driven programming. I felt really empowered, making GUI applications that previously seemed to me like they would require years of study and experience to create.
I definitely would, since the response to Shkreli has been primarily online ranting. He's never been at significant risk for physical harm as a result of the public discourse as far as I can see. I don't consider negative public opinion and castigation for unethical behaviour to be unwarranted or undesirable, so I can't see that rising to the level of vigilantism either.
In my view, society would become severely dysfunctional if we are expected to withhold our negative views of someone's choices, from fear that too many people will share those views.
I really appreciate your reply, you've definitely got the gears turning in my head.
Something to clarify, I'm not really trying to say that people like that want to be evil. People like Shkreli make bad choices not because they like to be bad, but because they're indifferent to the indirect consequences of their choices. I'm extremely skeptical that someone in a position like Shkreli was would be in any serious risk of losing access to essentials like food and shelter if they were to behave more ethically, so I think it's important to set the standard that choosing a job like that when you have alternatives is wrong.
All that being said, I do agree with you that the primary problem by far is the exploitative structure that enables these people to exist in these positions, in the first place. If someone's analysis of the situation ended at Shkreli, I'd encourage them to think deeper. However, I do strongly believe that we don't have to choose between one or the other -- encouraging others to look down on those who choose to be a part of this system can have a significant influence by discouraging others from entering it, themselves. The more voices we have saying "this is not something to aspire to," the more pressure we can build to effect meaningful systemic change.
It seems poorly considered to characterize social pressure as a witch hunt. It is acceptable to encourage others to share your moral convictions, there is a vast gulf between that and a pitchfork mob.
I see what you're saying from a business perspective. From a social perspective though, I don't consider that a reason to withhold my ire towards people like Shkreli. Choosing to be a bad person because someone else might be worse is still a choice to be a bad person, so while your pragmatic reasoning might work well when it comes time to determine a legal response, I don't feel that encouraging people not to hate Shkreli is helpful in encouraging good social norms.
I made no statement about "objective" morality. I explained my own morals, and why I'm comfortable encouraging people to blame the wealthy for the harms they perpetuate. Could you please elaborate on how you think this reply is relevant to that?
As slow as it seems to be, my perception is that societal attitudes towards wealth have been shifting over the past few decades. I'm hopeful that one day, the tolerance for their misdeeds continue to dropbenough to inspire progressively more social and legal change, as you suggested.
"Don't hate the player" is the kind of thing you say about people scraping by at a day job, who hold no real power over the business practices. He wouldn't have gone hungry if he'd behaved acceptably, so he had a choice free of influence by the immediate need to survive. I wouldn't characterize Shkreli's moral failure as a symptom of "the game," but rather one of several root causes of its perpetuation to begin with. In my view, fixing the problem includes denouncing powerful people who fail to abide by the ethical standards that we want them to hold.
It seems misguided to suggest that deplatforming is not a constructive approach. Platforms which are tolerant of extremism enable extremists to more-easily connect with each other, develop more-unified messaging, and reach non-radicalized people at much lower social and financial costs. In effect, providing a platform for extremism is a divisive act.
The quality of the food really isn't a binary state, though. I think most people get the idea that delivery food isn't going to be as good as having it at a restaurant, but they're expecting a middle ground if the item is offered for delivery.
I think it's a matter of expectation more than anything. Someone who orders food from a restaurant might expect that the restaurant has recipes designed for delivery. I wouldn't expect a top quality restaurant burger when I order delivery, but I'd still be disappointed if it were a soggy mess instead of the 5-8/10 I've come to expect from decent delivery options.
> Men are not just physically stronger, but they are more vicious and ferocious to deal with. This is especially true the higher up you go. There's a reason that the vast majority of the richest people in the world are men.
These purely social barriers are slowly but surely being eroded as women rise higher in the economic hierarchies. I'd like to see that hierarchy destroyed, but if it has to exist, it must exist on more ethical terms.
> The rest of your argument is a strawman. Quit catering to toxic femenist propaganda.
I'm disappointed that you were unwilling to put your bigotry aside and approach this rationally. All the best.
> What's troubling to me is that people like you act like some kind of saviour for women yet you don't appear to have ever spoken to or really, really listened to one of them.
Your choice of words is curious. Unless you yourself are something that women need to be protected from, nobody is trying to be a saviour here. I'm not overly concerned if you want to dismiss me as a white knight, since it's not my own social abilities which are in question.
> They don't want to go to work. Who the hell would?
You won't find much argument from me that the modern working environment is inhumane. If this is the root of your argument, you can drop the sexual angle entirely -- we all want fulfillment, no matter our sex. Patronizing women and dictating their social roles to them will not bring us any closer to achieving that as a species, nor will falling into the trap of trying to wrap human social behaviour up in a nice little bow with overly simplistic biological hypotheses.
The vast majority of employment opportunities do not involve physical labour requiring strength on a level unobtainable by women. Even moreso intellectually and socially, the sweeping majority of employment opportunities are equally accessible on physiological grounds to any sex. Time and again, we find that the main impediments to women's success in the workplace are the social constructs built to keep men and women in their designated roles. You're leaning very heavily on a fallacious understanding of human biology to make unsupportable declarations regarding the nature of human social interaction.
It's troubling that you appear to believe women are inherently incompetent when working alongside men, and thus in need of protection from them. It's a given that I find that paternalistic view acutely misogynistic, but I'd also like to emphasize the disservice you do to men by painting them as brutish predators. I wholly reject any concept of manhood rooted in emphasizing social and physical superiority over women, such as this.
I would appreciate if you could make a more substantial comment instead of simply trying to use "feminism" as a dirty word. I invite you to revisit the comment I replied to and recognize the way it denies women's agency by presuming that the author understands women's aspirations better than they themselves do. Paternalistic attitudes about how women don't belong in the workplace for their own good are rooted in misogyny, and facile appeals to "brainwashing" don't make for a compelling statement to the contrary.
I think you should re-examine your opinion and address the misogyny inherent to the outdated and authoritarian concept that women shouldn't be doing important work unless it's related to child rearing. Women and men alike want to accomplish things in life beyond parenting.