Re:US Intel exec ‘actively responsible’ for driving anti-LGB...
by blagie on Friday July 07, 2023 @07:30PM
(#36639638)
Consultative status is not consulting status. Was this a typo, a misunderstanding, or something else?
Do you understand what consultative status means? If so, can you explain it in plain English? I'm reading online, but it's not really clear.
A lot of these programs are (intentionally and should be) run on RAND terms. A lot are not. For the ones on RAND terms, it's often critical to protecting minorities whom the majority disagrees with, and making processes open and transparent. A majority of minorities we disagree with are wrong and get in as a result of this, but that's an okay price to pay for (1) the sake of the ones who we disagree with who are right (or just different) (2) checks-and-balances on governance and transparency (which the UN lacks otherwise). It often takes just one bad actor as a pretext to kill policies like these, and we're all worse off.
I'm not really sure what FWI's relationship to the UN is. If there's an intentional partnership with bad actors, they should be cut off. If it's an open program, the costs of keeping it open almost always outweigh the benefits of excluding bad actors.
There are also intermediate terms, such as making clear that being part of a program does or does not imply endorsement, and how a name can be used in advertising. The UN's name should not be used in misleading ways.
This claims an antagonistic relationship with the UN. I don't see the UN doing anything wrong on a quick skim, but rather this describes FWI abusing their relationship with the UN.
There is also the (much more vague and less specific):
Which is a FWI guide to the UN, but can't be confused for a UN document. Through the game of telephone, this somehow became referenced as if it were in publications attacking FWI.
At least on 5-10 minutes of clicking, I can't find any specific, primary reference to the UN doing anything wrong.
Last time I testified at a major public hearing, the person before me ranted and raved about brains and electromagnetism from household electronics. Were they crazy? Batshit crazy. Did everyone dismiss them? Yes. Did they have a right to do that? Absolutely.
As a footnote, unfairly cutting crazy people out of conversations has two problems:
1) You can't talk to them and convince them otherwise. Conversations are two-way streets.
2) It gives them a huge soapbox. If a person ranting about EM waves impacting brains was shut out of public comments and unfairly oppressed by [corporations / government / etc.], if anything, that oppression would support their argument.
Re:US Intel exec ‘actively responsible’ for driving anti-LGB...
by blagie on Friday July 07, 2023 @07:22PM
(#36639572)
I hate this article.
People can be wrong -- even very wrong -- without what they say being 'propaganda' any more than people who are right.
Anger and hate aren't effective tactics. A lot of the anti-LGBTQ sentiment in Africa is inflamed by former imperialist powers shoving what feels like a foreign pro-LGBTQ agenda down their throats.
You can be right, and it can still be propaganda.
This article is worth printing, but it should be written without the angry, dishonest language.
I'll also ask a serious question: Pretend for the moment that everything were 100% spot on, and an Intel employee were doing something which we all agreed was wrong. For example, the year is 1980, and they are in a homosexual relationship, or the year is 2020, and they're opposed to homosexual relationships.
* What should the employer do about it?
* Should the response differ by level (e.g. executive versus line employee)?
* Are closeted views better than public ones or vice-versa?
* What should the public do about it (e.g. boycotts / campaigns? ignore it?)
Those are non-rhetorical questions. I'm curious what people think.
(As a footnote, comments like this typically get -50 on most web sites, presumably either due to poor reading comprehension, or due to reading in a subtext which isn't there. Anger and hate aren't effective tactics even if you're right and they're wrong, any more than the other way around)
Re:US Intel exec ‘actively responsible’ for driving anti-LGB...
by Supermancho on Friday July 07, 2023 @08:32PM
(#36640064)
> Are closeted views better than public ones or vice-versa?
Morality vs Capitalism. In Africa, it's beneficial for the corporation to hold closeted progressive views (and secret relationships) because of the business, legal, and cultural norms that currently exist.
How to achieve progressive goals, within this reality? That's not directly relevant, but it's safe to say that the plan is to trade the struggle of personal loss vs existing culture, that moves the normative view forward, slowly. Is a corporation interested in that? No. Corporations will behave in their best interest, until there is rationale for dispensing with the short term benefits.
> What should the employer do about it?
A corporation will betray and punish individuals for personal behavior (generally if the details will be or have been made public), if it fits their economic goals. What should they do? That's a bigger question around the benefits that the industry provides. The more liberal the industry's purpose (like prophylactics or planned parenthood), the less likely the company is to open workers to persecution, so the answer is almost always "stop being assholes to your workers". eg NIKE, Apple, Disney - who is also an asshole corporation, although their industry is not as liberal in purpose, as their marketing department pretends.
> What should the public do about it (e.g. boycotts / campaigns? ignore it?)
Boycotts, campaigns, hit pieces, etc. Standard fare for attacking a capitalist corporation, where they will undoubtedly have to buy/suppress media in addition to the grassroots efforts.
I wouldn't do business in Africa if I had to deal with this stuff, because I'm never going to be more than a small time player in industry X, so that's what I think. If I were a C level asked to go manage a factory, I would probably look for another job and take a salary hit, because I can't be part to that kind of suffering.
Re:US Intel exec ‘actively responsible’ for driving anti-LGB...
by tdeck on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:56PM
(#36640967)
> Anger and hate aren't effective tactics.
Anger and hate are two different things. You're attempting to conflate them to garner sympathy. Anger has historically been an invaluable motivator, including when fighting back against oppression. As for hate being effective, these people got a "kill the gays" bill passed in Uganda, so it seems that was pretty damn effective.
> I'll also ask a serious question: Pretend for the moment that everything were 100% spot on, and an Intel employee were doing something which we all agreed was wrong. For example, the year is 1980, and they are in a homosexual relationship, or the year is 2020, and they're opposed to homosexual relationships.
Is their homosexual relationship in 1980 trying to get millions of people beaten and/or killed? These are in no way equivalent and the juxtaposition seems to be implying that if we're OK with one we need to be OK with the other.
Re:US Intel exec ‘actively responsible’ for driving anti-LGB...
by blagie on Saturday July 08, 2023 @11:12AM
(#36645157)
> Anger and hate are two different things. You're attempting to conflate them to garner sympathy
I am not. The word "and" isn't the same as "equals."
> As for hate being effective, these people got a "kill the gays" bill passed in Uganda, so it seems that was pretty damn effective.
It is really? Uganda is being ostracised as a result. Did this law convince anyone, or merely galvanize the opposition?
> These are in no way equivalent and the juxtaposition seems to be implying that if we're OK with one we need to be OK with the other.
If be "we," you mean "society" or "governments" (as opposed to individuals), I am, indeed, implying this, and that's almost my entire point.
The basic problem is -- at least on at a societal level -- that we have deep-held moral values, but we have no way of knowing when we're right and when we're wrong. There is no algorithm, policy, or law which can distinguish between views of homosexuality circa 1980 from those of 2020.
The basic value here is “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” or the more recent (in the historical scheme of things) and more eloquent “I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”
The way we make progress is by tolerating outliers. The majority of those will be wrong in small or horrifying ways (flat earth, kill the [insert minority group], anti-vaxxers, etc.). The next major group will have different values (e.g. a Muslim living in a Christian country or vice-versa). A tine minority will be challenging the status quo and be pushing us forward.
Unless you have a clear rule for distinguishing between those, eliminating the bad means eliminating the good, as there is no oracle to distinguish between the two.
Keeping that tiny minority which pushes us forward (as well as tolerating different values, at least in a pluralistic society like America) is far more important than crushing the bad actors. Otherwise, as in this example, we'd still be stuck with 1980 views of homosexuality.
Re:US Intel exec ‘actively responsible’ for driving anti-LGB...
by tdeck on Saturday July 08, 2023 @02:17PM
(#36647174)
> It is really? Uganda is being ostracised as a result. Did this law convince anyone, or merely galvanize the opposition?
It convinced the legislature to pass a law intended to kill gay people and convinced the president to sign it. What kind of person do you have to be to not see this as a setback for human rights?
Re:US Intel exec ‘actively responsible’ for driving anti-LGB...
by blagie on Sunday July 09, 2023 @08:49AM
(#36654071)
I don't think the results they were trying to achieve were "a setback for human rights." They're a non-profit investing their time and money to try to make the world a better place. There is disagreement on what makes for a better place, but no one believes setting back human rights makes the world better. In their words, the results they want to achieve are to protect the family by:
- preserving and promoting traditional marriage;
- safeguarding parental rights;
- defending human life;
- upholding religious liberty; and
- protecting the health and innocence of children
I would guess their intended goal here aligned most with "preserving and promoting traditional marriage." Do you think they
1. made progress in this direction, winning hearts and minds? or
2. made progress in making people who hold these views look like fascist, extremist wackos everyone normal wants to distance themselves from?
Before things like this, a person could hold views like "sex is for having babies" or "the family unit is for the purpose of raising kids" and be seen as reasonable. There is an ideal of having healthy, happy families which consist of two parents, married for life, with a group of kids. It wasn't viewed as a crazy ideal until things like this began. Once things like this started happening, by expressing anything even closely aligned, one risks being viewed as a hateful bigot.
As a footnote, advancing the opposition's agenda this way happens just as much on the liberal side. I live in a far left-wing city which constantly passes stupid laws designed to send left-leaning messages which do an incredible amount to discredit the left and push the nation right.
Re:US Intel exec ‘actively responsible’ for driving anti-LGB...
by dagmx on Friday July 07, 2023 @09:16PM
(#36640377)
So adopted children are against family values? What should we do with orphans? Unless you mean generated by anyones sexual congress. So would children of affairs be family values then?
What about Jesus himself? He was canonically generated without sexual congress.
Everything they stand for seems to run counter to helping the populace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Watch_International?wpr...
They’re essentially extremely regressive missionaries.
Do you understand what consultative status means? If so, can you explain it in plain English? I'm reading online, but it's not really clear.
A lot of these programs are (intentionally and should be) run on RAND terms. A lot are not. For the ones on RAND terms, it's often critical to protecting minorities whom the majority disagrees with, and making processes open and transparent. A majority of minorities we disagree with are wrong and get in as a result of this, but that's an okay price to pay for (1) the sake of the ones who we disagree with who are right (or just different) (2) checks-and-balances on governance and transparency (which the UN lacks otherwise). It often takes just one bad actor as a pretext to kill policies like these, and we're all worse off.
I'm not really sure what FWI's relationship to the UN is. If there's an intentional partnership with bad actors, they should be cut off. If it's an open program, the costs of keeping it open almost always outweigh the benefits of excluding bad actors.
There are also intermediate terms, such as making clear that being part of a program does or does not imply endorsement, and how a name can be used in advertising. The UN's name should not be used in misleading ways.
The Wikipedia article mentions a few UN events they’ve spoken at.
It’s one of the things that has allowed them to have so much reach and credibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Watch_International
Which references:
https://politicalresearch.org/sites/default/files/2018-10/Co...
This claims an antagonistic relationship with the UN. I don't see the UN doing anything wrong on a quick skim, but rather this describes FWI abusing their relationship with the UN.
There is also the (much more vague and less specific):
https://politicalresearch.org/sharon-slater-going-global-wit...
Wikipedia makes bold statements from very tentative language. Clicking through references here turns up documents like:
https://familywatch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2017/05/R...
Which is a FWI guide to the UN, but can't be confused for a UN document. Through the game of telephone, this somehow became referenced as if it were in publications attacking FWI.
At least on 5-10 minutes of clicking, I can't find any specific, primary reference to the UN doing anything wrong.
Last time I testified at a major public hearing, the person before me ranted and raved about brains and electromagnetism from household electronics. Were they crazy? Batshit crazy. Did everyone dismiss them? Yes. Did they have a right to do that? Absolutely.
As a footnote, unfairly cutting crazy people out of conversations has two problems:
1) You can't talk to them and convince them otherwise. Conversations are two-way streets.
2) It gives them a huge soapbox. If a person ranting about EM waves impacting brains was shut out of public comments and unfairly oppressed by [corporations / government / etc.], if anything, that oppression would support their argument.
People can be wrong -- even very wrong -- without what they say being 'propaganda' any more than people who are right.
Anger and hate aren't effective tactics. A lot of the anti-LGBTQ sentiment in Africa is inflamed by former imperialist powers shoving what feels like a foreign pro-LGBTQ agenda down their throats.
You can be right, and it can still be propaganda.
This article is worth printing, but it should be written without the angry, dishonest language.
I'll also ask a serious question: Pretend for the moment that everything were 100% spot on, and an Intel employee were doing something which we all agreed was wrong. For example, the year is 1980, and they are in a homosexual relationship, or the year is 2020, and they're opposed to homosexual relationships.
* What should the employer do about it?
* Should the response differ by level (e.g. executive versus line employee)?
* Are closeted views better than public ones or vice-versa?
* What should the public do about it (e.g. boycotts / campaigns? ignore it?)
Those are non-rhetorical questions. I'm curious what people think.
(As a footnote, comments like this typically get -50 on most web sites, presumably either due to poor reading comprehension, or due to reading in a subtext which isn't there. Anger and hate aren't effective tactics even if you're right and they're wrong, any more than the other way around)
Morality vs Capitalism. In Africa, it's beneficial for the corporation to hold closeted progressive views (and secret relationships) because of the business, legal, and cultural norms that currently exist.
How to achieve progressive goals, within this reality? That's not directly relevant, but it's safe to say that the plan is to trade the struggle of personal loss vs existing culture, that moves the normative view forward, slowly. Is a corporation interested in that? No. Corporations will behave in their best interest, until there is rationale for dispensing with the short term benefits.
> What should the employer do about it?
A corporation will betray and punish individuals for personal behavior (generally if the details will be or have been made public), if it fits their economic goals. What should they do? That's a bigger question around the benefits that the industry provides. The more liberal the industry's purpose (like prophylactics or planned parenthood), the less likely the company is to open workers to persecution, so the answer is almost always "stop being assholes to your workers". eg NIKE, Apple, Disney - who is also an asshole corporation, although their industry is not as liberal in purpose, as their marketing department pretends.
> What should the public do about it (e.g. boycotts / campaigns? ignore it?)
Boycotts, campaigns, hit pieces, etc. Standard fare for attacking a capitalist corporation, where they will undoubtedly have to buy/suppress media in addition to the grassroots efforts.
I wouldn't do business in Africa if I had to deal with this stuff, because I'm never going to be more than a small time player in industry X, so that's what I think. If I were a C level asked to go manage a factory, I would probably look for another job and take a salary hit, because I can't be part to that kind of suffering.
Anger and hate are two different things. You're attempting to conflate them to garner sympathy. Anger has historically been an invaluable motivator, including when fighting back against oppression. As for hate being effective, these people got a "kill the gays" bill passed in Uganda, so it seems that was pretty damn effective.
> I'll also ask a serious question: Pretend for the moment that everything were 100% spot on, and an Intel employee were doing something which we all agreed was wrong. For example, the year is 1980, and they are in a homosexual relationship, or the year is 2020, and they're opposed to homosexual relationships.
Is their homosexual relationship in 1980 trying to get millions of people beaten and/or killed? These are in no way equivalent and the juxtaposition seems to be implying that if we're OK with one we need to be OK with the other.
I am not. The word "and" isn't the same as "equals."
> As for hate being effective, these people got a "kill the gays" bill passed in Uganda, so it seems that was pretty damn effective.
It is really? Uganda is being ostracised as a result. Did this law convince anyone, or merely galvanize the opposition?
> These are in no way equivalent and the juxtaposition seems to be implying that if we're OK with one we need to be OK with the other.
If be "we," you mean "society" or "governments" (as opposed to individuals), I am, indeed, implying this, and that's almost my entire point.
The basic problem is -- at least on at a societal level -- that we have deep-held moral values, but we have no way of knowing when we're right and when we're wrong. There is no algorithm, policy, or law which can distinguish between views of homosexuality circa 1980 from those of 2020.
The basic value here is “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” or the more recent (in the historical scheme of things) and more eloquent “I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”
The way we make progress is by tolerating outliers. The majority of those will be wrong in small or horrifying ways (flat earth, kill the [insert minority group], anti-vaxxers, etc.). The next major group will have different values (e.g. a Muslim living in a Christian country or vice-versa). A tine minority will be challenging the status quo and be pushing us forward.
Unless you have a clear rule for distinguishing between those, eliminating the bad means eliminating the good, as there is no oracle to distinguish between the two.
Keeping that tiny minority which pushes us forward (as well as tolerating different values, at least in a pluralistic society like America) is far more important than crushing the bad actors. Otherwise, as in this example, we'd still be stuck with 1980 views of homosexuality.
It convinced the legislature to pass a law intended to kill gay people and convinced the president to sign it. What kind of person do you have to be to not see this as a setback for human rights?
- preserving and promoting traditional marriage;
- safeguarding parental rights;
- defending human life;
- upholding religious liberty; and
- protecting the health and innocence of children
I would guess their intended goal here aligned most with "preserving and promoting traditional marriage." Do you think they
1. made progress in this direction, winning hearts and minds? or
2. made progress in making people who hold these views look like fascist, extremist wackos everyone normal wants to distance themselves from?
Before things like this, a person could hold views like "sex is for having babies" or "the family unit is for the purpose of raising kids" and be seen as reasonable. There is an ideal of having healthy, happy families which consist of two parents, married for life, with a group of kids. It wasn't viewed as a crazy ideal until things like this began. Once things like this started happening, by expressing anything even closely aligned, one risks being viewed as a hateful bigot.
This video is a nice guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
As a footnote, advancing the opposition's agenda this way happens just as much on the liberal side. I live in a far left-wing city which constantly passes stupid laws designed to send left-leaning messages which do an incredible amount to discredit the left and push the nation right.
The article is about an (anti-LGBTQ) agenda not something thar is anti-(LGBTQ agenda).
https://archive.is/BNBWP
"Is there any lgbtq agenda in Africa to begin with?"
A family consisting of a “cis” man and a “cis” woman, raising children generated through sexual congress.
What about Jesus himself? He was canonically generated without sexual congress.