If someone says "hey the guy that runs this company doesn't think you should be treated the same as others because of your sexual preference" I should ignore that because "who cares"?
I'm just not sure what the counter-argument is here... it sounds like "everything and everyone sucks, and you suck too, so stop paying attention and trying to improve anything"
Well, yes. But there's another angle as to what you vote for with it.
Voting for the creator's politics is one angle, but there's another one. Whether the creator puts politics into their product.
One of the main reasons I use Brave is because it doesn't do politics outside what matters for a browser. Eich may think whatever the fuck he wants, his team the same. But they seem very focused on building a privacy-respecting browser and standalone Internet services. I don't get politics outside privacy, user control and independent web services pushed to me by Brave. The politics that are there matter to a browser, and the stuff that's outside that scope is left as the people's own prerogative.
The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they also keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it.
I know I'll disagree on weighty matters by people making both products, but as far the browser matters, we all agree.
Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second, and they are not shy about inserting their extraneous politics into the browser.
We're more and more into a culture where everything under the Sun has to preach some sort of politics, and it usually detracts from making an actually good product, in my experience. I like to support organizations that focus on making good hammers and leave the politics to the parts of life where they belong. Life is far more civil that way.
It doesn’t make people _heretics_ to have a political disagreement.
You could cancel Brave because you think Eich hates the gays. You could cancel Apple because their phones are made in sweatshop conditions that drive workers to mass suicide. Cancel electric cars because the cobalt batteries are mined by African children who die of exposure. Cance Nike because despite their woke posturing they use sweatshops too. Don’t wear clothes because the factories collapse etc.
Nobody in our first world capitalist bubble is blameless, we are all fat and happy off the exploitation of the weak, so to get on a moral high horse against the inventor of JavaScript is laughable. Just chill out and drink your Starbucks and keep those sweet rent checks rolling in.
All of those seem like ... good things to me? (At least to the extent that I believe the factual claims.) Call me crazy, but I am not yet so cynical as to believe that I cannot with my actions make any difference in the world. To be clear, the problem is not so much Eich "hating the gays" as it is him collecting a ~7 figure salary and funneling money from that into right wing causes that hurt people in the real world.
Do you sincerely believe that your existence is a net negative to the world as a whole? Have you internalized that belief? I would quite literally not be able to live with myself if I believed that. I try to minimize the negative impacts my consumption has on others as far as I can. It's not about "cancellation", because that's become a stupid meme and lost any meaning it had, it's about being careful abut what I consume. I don't, for example, buy anything from Nestle.
> Nobody in our first world capitalist bubble is blameless, we are all fat and happy off the exploitation of the weak, so to get on a moral high horse against the inventor of JavaScript is laughable. Just chill out and drink your Starbucks and keep those sweet rent checks rolling in.
This is, at the end of the day, just pure cynicism.
Cool. But that isn’t really that cool. That one is easy. What makes you okay with buying products from Apple but not from Nestle? Is it that Nestle has enough competition that it’s a low cost protest? Is it that Apple is hurting people far away from you while Nestle is exploiting your more local environment?
What would it take to make you buy from Nestle again? If they somehow bought Apple’s laptop division?
Having no beliefs is more laudable than people who act on only the convenient beliefs.
what? laudable by whom? sure it’s lazy to only act on convenient beliefs, but it’s certainly more interesting than doing literally nothing
if my one belief is to cut those little six-pack pop rings before putting them in the trash to benefit sea turtles… how is not doing that laudable? because someone told you it’s cool to not care about anything?
My point though was more specific to the poster I replied to, they hand-waved the parent comment away (partially) by mentioning that they boycott Nestle. It rings hollow that all of the other points are less relevant because they boycott what is quite possibly the easiest company to boycott. I would have more respected a response of either “yeah, I pick and choose what I boycott based on both logically tangible and emotional reasons, so trying to find consistency is not only impossible but also foolish” or just to say “who I boycott and why is up to me. Maybe I boycott all of those companies, maybe none. I don’t boycott to be performative”
I'm sorry this makes you so angry. Maybe you have a convincing point to make, but the way you're trying to make it will be lost on anyone that doesn't already agree with you.
You're playing a lot of mental gymnastics here. Eich isn't anti-marriage, he specifically supported excluding gay people from marriage. He gave money to one of the most vocal prop 8 supporters and a group that fund-raised on prop 8 specifically. Where's the nuance?