Given the current climate, I find it incredible that a cloud storage company would be involved with someone who actually wiretapped members of the UN Security Council. It's almost like they're saying "thanks for all the data, oh and f* you".
Dropbox provides a space to explain why you're leaving. I said Rice's actions resulted in the unnecessary death and injury of many thousands of innocent people, and I will not entrust my data or my money to a company with such a person on the board.
I'm sure my small action won't make any difference, but maybe by making this visible we achieve collectively what we can't achieve individually.
This being said, having a spymaster that previously worked towards questionable goals (on a scale rarely before seen) as your new director of a data storage company? Not a good idea.
You realize that is part of the reason we have the NSA, right? Only in a fantasy world do the other members not attempt to spy on the US. The reason why the NSA spying issue is wrong is because they were violating the consitutional rights of US Citizens. The German Chancellor is not a US Citizen and we have every reason to spy on her, the same goes for every other country in the world.
This is so wrong.
If you don't think there's any cost to being caught spying, I welcome you to try spying on someone, anyone. Then you can answer the question of "Is it worth it?" which leads directly into "Is it a good idea?"
I would contend that the Hollywood blacklist of the 1940s and 1950s is comparable with what is we see here; then as now, a group of people with certain political and social views are being excluded and ejected from jobs solely because of their activities outside of the job being denied to them.[1] Those blacklisted in the 1940s and 1950s had "freedom of speech", but not "freedom from social and business consequences". It is difficult to make a principled distinction between what we see happening now, and the 'McCarthy-ist' wave of the 20th century, which is oft described as ideological intolerance.
But I also think this backlash comes from people being reminded about the fundamental reality of Dropbox. It's always been a centralized technology with a controller that's free to do whatever it pleases with your data, either for their own gain or simply out of expediency - any sane hacker should have been recommending avoiding Dropbox and its ilk this whole time. Appointing someone who's directly associated with facilitating and justifying hostile acts reminds everyone of this inconvenient truth, which makes those in denial uncomfortable.
The issue here isn't just about someone's personal beliefs. Eich and Rice both operate at very high levels within their organizations and that means they both have a leadership role and are representatives of those companies to the larger public. When people have a problem with those people's actions and point of view, they most certainly have a right to voice that disagreement.
It is important to note that a personal belief which is discriminatory (Eich) does not make that belief legitimate. Why exactly should Eich be defended at all? Support of legalized discrimination against groups of people is morally reprehensible, even if you think marriage isn't that big of an issue. In the case of Rice, a track record of getting people tortured and killed is horrifying and this person should not be supported.
When a business selects someone to join a C-level position or its board of directors, they are endorsing that person completely, including the unseemly things they do or endorse that do not directly relate to the company. You can't separate the two, a company is empowering a person to a degree when they get that position and that is a form of direct support of that person.
Not saying that is my opinion, or that marriage is currently perfectly designed for that goal (after all, childless couples can marry too and get some benefits). But I can understand if people feel "if I am paying for other people's marriage, I want to pay for more children being brought into the world in my country" - or something like that. Then I think it would be acceptable to oppose (gay) marriage on that ground.
Just an example - I am not big on the theory of gay marriage, just saying that there can be reasons to oppose it.
It's not a question of denying people the right to be together, but a question of what the community should pay for.
From my European perspective it seems much less ethical to deny people health care (talk about basic human rights), yet I am sure many who support gay marriage are opposed to public health care for a variety of reasons (they don't want to live in a socialist country or whatever).
Marriage is not a subvention. You are not granted a cash bonus for being married. You access differences in tax consideration, yes, but that is not the same as getting direct payment. Moreover, there are a variety of legal rights that are available to married couples vs. non-married couple and non straight couples deserve access to those rights just the same as anyone else.
> So I suppose you could argue that the subventions are really for promoting families with the ultimate goal of having children. Even though gay families can adopt, you could argue that promoting gay marriage does not bring more children into the world.
> Not saying that is my opinion, or that marriage is currently perfectly designed for that goal (after all, childless couples can marry too and get some benefits). But I can understand if people feel "if I am paying for other people's marriage, I want to pay for more children being brought into the world in my country" - or something like that. Then I think it would be acceptable to oppose (gay) marriage on that ground.
Marriage isn't granted or denied to straight people based on their ability to have or not have children, this argument does not hold water. Also, marriage is not strictly about reproducing anyway. Biology-based arguments of this kind is highly discriminatory in general and shouldn't be allowed as the basis for law.
> It's not a question of denying people the right to be together, but a question of what the community should pay for.
This is not a question of what the community should pay for, the community would pay less if more overall couples and families were stable, this is a question of discrimination of the most basic kind.
> From my European perspective it seems much less ethical to deny people health care (talk about basic human rights), yet I am sure many who support gay marriage are opposed to public health care for a variety of reasons (they don't want to live in a socialist country or whatever).
That there is a bigger problem compared to gay marriage doesn't negate the fact that some people are still being denied the ability to marry and access the rights that come with that status.
Of course it is. The public pays money for it.
"Moreover, there are a variety of legal rights that are available to married couples vs. non-married couple and non straight couples deserve access to those rights just the same as anyone else."
As I said, I am not against it. I would argue that those rights are also a subvention.
"Marriage isn't granted or denied to straight people based on their ability to have or not have children, this argument does not hold water"
I'm aware of that - my point is that I can understand if people think about it that way. Also I think there have throughout history been special rules for marriage if a couple can't get children. For example it might have been legal to get another wife, things like that. I don't think you can argue that children have no bearing on marriage whatsoever.
Especially since presumably the "right to adopt" is the main issue people have with gay marriage. Don't know about the US, but where I live, the only other significant right married people get is bringing their spouses into the country (giving them citizenship). Things like "visit your spouse in hospital" or "split your income for tax reductions" can be arranged in other ways.
"this is a question of discrimination of the most basic kind."
That is just hate speech, not an argument.
"That there is a bigger problem compared to gay marriage doesn't negate the fact that some people are still being denied the ability to marry and access the rights that come with that status."
Of course not - my point is that many who now feel like "good people" because they support gay marriage at the same time fight for denying people health care. I just wanted to illustrate that things are not always as obvious as people think.
"Being together"?
That isn't the right gay Americans are asking to have equal access to.
But specifically to this issue, my views and Rice's views on privacy are diametrically opposed. When it comes down to it I simply do not trust her with my data. So it's not so much that I dislike her politics, it's that I think her decisions could have a direct impact on me as a customer.
I know dropbox has terms and conditions on what they will do with my data, but once again, my take is that Rice has a history of weaseling out of those kind of things.
Does anyone in a position to know, by which I mean that they've actually been in politics at the national level, care to tell me whether I'm right?
Rice seems to have gone far far wider than that (beyond democracy). But of course you could argue that she nevertheless remained true to her beliefs or whatever. So at the end of the day, it's a personal decision...
It may be unpopular in certain circles, but the majority of California first voted yes on Prop 22 and then again on Prop 8. Hard to get more mainstream than that.
But then again, Bush won a 2nd term as well. I guess we can only conclude that democracy doesn't work because the masses are stupid.
In any event, I think your problem is you took the wrong position on Eich -- first, there was no "lynch mob" -- being denied a high profile, well-paid job as head of a non-profit is not the same as being lynched. Second, no-one forced Eich to donate to prop 8, and the outcome was quite foreseeable. Isn't a bit of judgment an important job skill for the CEO of a non-profit?
I'm definitely switching over from Dropbox. I was planning to do it anyway. I know this sounds bad but - the fact that I can't store illegal files just bugs me to no end.
[1]MaidSafe is launching it's token sale (Safecoins) effort in 10 days and I will switch my business over to them completely. I know it's not as slick or developed as Dropbox but it's private, decentralized, anonymous and free(I know it sound ridiculous but that's what you get when you combine the concepts of a distributed systems network and Bitcoin)
Not to mention that I have the chance of participating in something great as the possible birth of a decentralized and anonymous internet with a built in payment network.
Eich's stance was (and is) personal, and I'm pretty sure it would have stayed that way. I would have kept using Firefox because of the Mozilla position on privacy and openness, and despite its CEO position.
On the other hand, Dropbox is a private company. They don't stand for you, they stand for themselves. They are their own first priority. Having someone as important as Mrs Rice on board is certainly not something that will be beneficial to the public. If she's not there for the public but for Dropbox, then yes, we must fear the worst.
I think that political contributions are (and should be) fundamentally public acts. You can think all the reprehensible things you want, but once you start materially supporting reprehensible campaigns, it's a different thing altogether.
(I also disagree with Eich's view on gays, but that's outside of the scope of this conversation)
You make the call.
Eich didn't torture and murder people.
Which puts Condi in a large group of people: nearly every member of a US administration in the last century.
Edit: Jesus. A lot of people missed the point of what I said. All I did was argue the issue is more nuanced than "[Condi Rice] tortured and murdered people"
My mistake for trying to broaden a Hacker News discussion.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice#Role_in_author...
>Role in authorizing use of controversial interrogation techniques
>A Senate Intelligence Committee reported that on July 17, 2002, Rice met with CIA director George Tenet to personally convey the Bush administration's approval of the proposed waterboarding of alleged Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah. "Days after Dr Rice gave Mr Tenet her approval, the Justice Department approved the use of waterboarding in a top secret August 1 memo."[62]
>Waterboarding is considered to be torture by a wide range of authorities, including legal experts,[63][64][65][66] war veterans,[67][68] intelligence officials,[69] military judges,[70] human rights organizations,[71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78] the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder,[79] and many senior politicians, including U.S. President Barack Obama.[80]
>In 2003 Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General John Ashcroft met with the CIA again and were briefed on the use of waterboarding and other methods including week-long sleep deprivation, forced nudity and the use of stress positions. The Senate report says that the Bush administration officials "reaffirmed that the CIA program was lawful and reflected administration policy".[62]
>The Senate report also "suggests Miss Rice played a more significant role than she acknowledged in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee submitted in the autumn."[62] At that time, she had acknowledged attending meetings to discuss the CIA interrogations, but she claimed that she could not recall the details, and she "omitted her direct role in approving the programme in her written statement to the committee."[81]
At the very least she should have SAID something about it. But no, politicians stay quiet instead of rocking the boat so that they can keep all "buddy buddy" with their fellow ruling-class members.
"Well it's a BIG group and it would be REALLY hard to go after all of them so lets just fine them and parade that around as win while the criminals responsible go free"
This is so insanely hyperbolic I don't even know where to begin. We're now using the term "lynch mob" for a situation where people a) boycotted the product and b) wrote a lot of things about how what Brandon did was wrong and how he is the wrong choice for CEO. So, lynch mob, which means, "a mob that kills a person for some presumed offense without legal authority" is used for a situation where there was zero violence, zero murder and everyone was perfectly within their legal rights. Want to reconsider?
Furthermore, your use of "crusade" makes no sense either. The thing you described was you deleting your dropbox account. How is this anything other than a normal rational thing. I'm really worried that people now seem to view "people opposing an idea in a nonviolent way" as a lynch mob and deleting your account for a web service is a crusade. Isn't this just you exercising the same freedom of expression that you believe Brandon deserves but his opponents don't?
The shrill mob attacking Eich could be characterised as a lynch mob - they were out for his downfall. It's abundantly clear, given that there has been very little in the way of pro-Mozilla followup to counter the extremely negative points made against them before Eich stepped down. The mob was specifically out for Eich's downfall, not for strengthening Mozilla against unpleasant ethics.
That you demand that 'lynch mob' only be referred to as a mob about to hang an individual is definitely hyperbole on your part. If your significant other says "Sorry about the mess in the kitchen, it's a bit of a disaster area", do you chide them because it's nothing of the sort - no property damage, no maimed or dead people, where are the aid personnel, so on and so forth? If someone describes their new sweater as "itchy as Hell", do you berate them because Hell is not depicted as being an itchy place, referring to the relevant religious dogma about the actualities of Hell?
No, of course not. It's a turn of phrase, not a literal statement, just like 'lynch mob' above. Suggesting that the OP meant in any way a literal lynch mob is your hyperbole.
So because people have been constantly misusing a word in an attempt to exaggerate the wrongs of their opponents, someone is being hyperbolic to even ask that we stick somewhere remotely close to the actual definition of the word?
It doesn't really accomplish anything more than calling your opponents "literally hitler". It means nothing, its an insane, irrational exaggeration and the only reason you would say it is to make your opponents look bad in lieu of having an actual, rational argument to make your opponents look bad.
At least you seem to get that your point was pretty bad.
Peace.
If you want to, that is. I'm not advocating anything.
Eich had opinions based on mythology. And his impact on people's lives, in terms of health, security and happiness, was orders of magnitude less.
Do I want to drink a beer with Eich? Looking at his donation record - no. Will his contribution improve the Mozilla product? Looking at his history as a technologist with Mozilla and JavaScript - probably yes.
Do I want to drink a beer with Rice? Looking at her career history - no. Will her contribution improve Dropbox? Looking at her career history - can't imagine any positive effect, probably negative, especially in the privacy area.
Definitely going to try some Dropbox alternatives now.
Now put the shoe on the other foot. Think about all those people that feel as strongly about gay marriage as you do about the Iraq War. Their belief that they should protest against Mozilla doesn't feel that much different than your own protest, does it?
> Unlike Eich, Rice went far beyond simply holding beliefs and making donations. She held real power and used it in unconscionable ways.
All I can say is that personally I find Eich and Condoleezza to be worlds apart. Nor do I think it is hypocritical to feel stronger about the Iraq War than about gay marriage. People will have different priorities.
The hypocrisy isn't in that the OP feels stronger about the Iraq War than gay marriage. The hypocrisy is because he thinks it's okay to boycott Dropbox because they chose someone for the Board of Directors that he disagrees with, but he thought it was wrong that people boycott Mozilla because they chose a CEO that they disagreed with.
Also Eich's donation was $1000, Rice's War was several billions and massively haemorrhaged US Economy.
If I believe that cars are causing global warming, I have the right to boycott the uses of cars and to publicize it. If I believe that eating meat is wrong, I have the right to boycott meat and to publicize it. If the CEO of a company supports a campaign that I believe infringes on human rights, I have the right to boycott that product and to publicize it. If the company of a product I use adds a person who was involved with what I believe was an unjust war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, the I have the right to boycott them and to publicize it.
Rice's issue (about data, not the others) is directly related to the core of Dropbox's product.
Rice is not a direct member of the management team of Dropbox, and her past experience is not related at all to Dropbox's product.
And I guess we'll just have to disagree that her past experience has nothing to do with maintaining private data security.
1. Everyone gets a clean slate the moment they change jobs and
2. Supporting your beliefs with a $1000 donation is the equivalent of going to war, supporting torture, and illegal wiretapping.
Get real.
I don't know, there's something that feels just wrong about having a political figurehead mixed in with a company that is (arguably) one of the success examples of Silicon Valley. It just... difficult to describe with words.
But there's a separate question to that, which is the moral ethics of a person who would do things (even in good faith) that they know will result in hurting others. Will Rice make decisions at Dropbox that she knows will hurt people, even if it's the right "business" decision?
With regard to the warrantless wiretaps, it's clear that if there was an actual terrorist that she was trying to put in jail, a warrantless wiretap may help accomplish that goal. She would in effect be acting in good faith while trying to accomplish the goals of her job. But at the same time, she's violating someone's privacy and potentially violating the law. If a similar situation came up at Dropbox, where violating someone's privacy could help the business, would you still want that person employed?
People should put more effort into holding their politicians accountable while they are in office- not for settling idealogical scores after they reenter private life.
We the people have no one to blame but ourselves for this. It is the voter's fault that these people are able to flourish. If we don't take our civic responsibilities seriously, then these kinds of campaigns are petty and destructive.
Americans that act in these kind of thought police exercises instead of actually investing in the system should be ASHAMED of themselves. Is what she did illegal? Nominate politicians that will instill FBI leaders who will prosecute crimes. WORK FOR IT. Don't just talk. You need to do more than vote.
Yeah, many of us did exactly that back in 2007/2008. We nominated and worked hard to promote and to get elected a politician we believed -- based on our candidate's deeply-persuasive statements -- who would be "different". We did much more than vote. We built amazing software systems for our candidate, went door-to-door in places that almost got us shot, worked 80 hour weeks at the grass roots level, and in some cases estranged ourselves from our families. And of course we voted for him.
And look how things turned out.
So don't go fucking blaming the victims here. Our political system is deeply flawed and heading toward a cliff -- with both parties at the helm.
I think the "more than vote" really means "more than getting a candidate elected". (Or, to use Obama's own campaign catchphrase, "Be the Change".)
There may have been people who didn't understand that a bottom-to-top transformation of society with constant engagement was going to be required to realize the vision presented by the campaign even if Obama was entirely truthful on every point (a point on which I do not wish to comment either way at the moment, since its irrelevant to the point I'm making), but anyone that wasn't aware of that wasn't paying much attention to the campaign itself.
Are you trying to imply that you are a victim, just because you naively believed that investing a great deal of power in another politician, who you thought was 'your man in Washington' would lead to better results? It is hard to be sympathetic to someone who pursued such poorly thought-out objectives. It is not the political system that was at fault; in fact, if anyone is to blame, it is all the conceited individuals who believed that the politician they picked would be 'better' than the 'opponents'.
But back to the question at hand: if we, the people, are somehow supposed to right out ship by doing more than just voting, how exactly do we choose our candidates? In Obama's case, we went on his statements, biography (community organizer, law professor) and (admittedly limited) past voting record. Do you have any recommendations for those us us who don't have your finely-attuned bullshit detector on how we can pick a good candidate?
I certainly don't trust my own political judgment anymore. So I no longer vote in national elections.
I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of victimhood, however. Am I understanding correctly your assertion, which is that if a target of a conman or aggressor is sufficiently naive, that person is no longer a victim?
I invest my energies in divesting the government of power, to reduce the impact of abuse and poor decisions; but you may find a different way to change the system for the better, and I hope you do.
It was.
Coincidentally, I read Koestler's essays when I was a teenager, along with some of Orwell's writings with the same theme (Homage to Catalonia for one). Wish I'd paid a bit more attention to the underlying message.
But I think some things you have to experience to learn.
>I invest my energies in divesting the government of power, to reduce the impact of abuse and poor decisions;
I do the same now. I'm a very different person politically than I was back in 2007. And lack of trust in my own political instincts is only one of the reasons why I no longer vote in national elections. As proof, I'd show you all my commits to open source projects that at least partially aim to reduce government power by promoting privacy and peer-to-peer interactions, but I wish to remain at least somewhat anonymous.
I think this whole thing has to come to a head at some point- and I just see too many americans who don't even put a fraction of the effort into politics that you have.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agorism
Unfortunately, back in 2007, I wrote off any libertarians as wacky, selfish geeks with very little political sophistication.
Since then, I've come to meet some of the least selfish and most politically sophisticated individuals I've ever met, who are also libertarians. And none of them are particularly fond of Ayn Rand (to name another one of my 2007 biases).
We basically only flip tables when we feel really oppressed.
People who live in cities seem to feel oppressed, but they also seem to really believe in bureacracy as a concept, so they instead blame the bad guys in the other party, rather than seeing the system as failed. If the bad guys are basically in both parties, you pick your team based on marketing.
Long story short- I don't see these options as viable alternatives to violence, unfortuntately. I'm glad you're practicing them over the alternative- but I'm going to hang on to engaging more instead.
He's kept a lot of his promises: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/
Not to mention major wins in healthcare, Iraq, and avoiding the major impending economic collapse that was in place when he took office.
He's no saint, and I'm as pissed as anyone about the illegal wiretapping that happened under his administration. But keep in mind that no major politician will agree 100% with your views. And no president can or will keep 100% of his promises considering this shifting political climate and his limited powers in our government.
Yes, yes I am. And if I thought I had any chance of convincing someone who still promotes Obama's "wins" at this point in his presidency, I'd argue it with you. But I don't.
I will leave you with one thought, which is that it's not even the blanket surveillance of the American people that's been Obama's most horrific failure, it's this:
1. http://www.salon.com/2010/04/07/assassinations_2/
2. http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/obama-assassin...
Finally, I'd like to point out that I'm not the one downvoting you (since you're making points I disagree with in good faith).
Every president in the modern context has been and will be awful, even if to somewhat varying degrees. The problem is not the people in office, it's the office itself. It's important that the media emphasize personalities and the infinitesimal differences between them, so the average citizen can make-believe that some presidents are better than others.
i agree with your stance that action needs to be taken, but completely disagree that we have "no one to blame but ourselves".
Could you be more specific? It doesn't help to berate me for not doing more without actually telling me what I can do. Because I feel pretty helpless here and I have no idea what I can do besides vote and talk to people.
We need to recognize that the world runs on PACs and that if we don't have a PAC to advocate our position, we're not going to get the outcomes we want.
I think we've been raised to believe there's some holy power in our vote- but this is a distraction. Unless we fund our efforts & win in politics, this is all for naught.
I also think that we have to accept when we lose in politics. This campaign is absolutely the opposite of that value. I share many of the opinions about this woman, but I find the campaign to be shameful in light of my previous opinions.
If you claim to value democracy and then execute this kind of witch hunt when democracy doesn't deliver the outcome you hoped for, there is a problem.
"Democracy for me but not for thee"
Run for office? That's too much of a sacrifice to ask. It's not a job I want, by far. If I ever managed to get nominated, I'd do my best to sabotage my own campaign so as not to get elected. No wonder politicians are all weird, no normal person could ever want to be one.
Is not "accept when we lose" completely contradictory to the rest of what you're saying? You say that we should get out and do things to fight for what we believe, and then you turn around and say we should just let it go. This isn't some pointless notion of vengeance, it's a real concern over what her involvement with Dropbox could mean for the company and our data in the future.
Personally, if you claim to value democracy and then call it anti-democratic when there's a completely non-violent grassroots campaign against a political figure, then you're completely off your rocker. Nothing could possibly be more democratic. Even if you disagree with the campaign, how can you call the very idea a bad thing? What could possibly be a better way to exercise your political views than to vote with your wallet and encourage others to do the same? Are we supposed to just shut up and ignore it all? Are we supposed to vote with our own wallet but never talk to other people about it? How does that fit in with "volunteer, donate, run for office, the world runs on PACs"?
This is the price of democracy. Not everyone disagrees with you for malignant reasons. They can have legitimate, ethical reasons for disagreeing with you.
"You say that we should get out and do things to fight for what we believe, and then you turn around and say we should just let it go."
I appologize if that's what it sounded like. I'm saying we have to accept democracy's outcomes if the democracy is actually functioning (i.e. no ballot stuffing). If you don't like the outcome of a vote, continue to work within the democratic process. Lobby for an idea through Publicity. Lobby your congress critters. Keep working within the political system.
Keeping tallies of the thought-infractions of citizens in the private sector is not healthy though. I see no difference between that and the assassination of the jesuit priest in Syria last week.
A healthy society should be supportive of and accepting of diversity of opinions and lifestyle. That means more than just being nice to LGBT folks. Even people with religious beliefs you find abhorent have the right to prosper to the best of their ability, as long as they are not violating our laws.
edit My point is ultimately proven.
OK, seriously, what the fuck. You see no difference between a public campaign to switch away from Dropbox because of someone on their board of directors and an assassination?
This conversation started out bad and has now become complete shit. I'm not going to continue. I don't understand why, but something about this topic has turned half of the HN commenters into drooling morons.
(I know that this sort of language is not supposed to be used, but personally I think it's justified in the exceptional situation where someone declares a nonviolent internet campaign to an assassination. Sometimes you have to call a spade a spade.)
And thank you for the wonderfully engaging insults. Enjoy your bigotry.
This is because it's a matter of looking at whether there's a conflict between their stated beliefs and the way I'd like their companies to be run.
In Eich's case, he was opposed to marriage equality. While I disagree with him, this does not affect his work because (thankfully) private corporations don't issue marriage licenses.
In Rice's case, she supports warrantless wiretaps. This attitude (that government requests can and should be responded to even if they lack warrants) is directly applicable to the decisions and policies she'll guide for Dropbox. My privacy will be directly compromised.
It's a matter of applicability and impact, not politics.
If you disagree with the board of a company and you want to stop using them, thats fine. Doesn't matter if it's Eich or Rice. Don't like them, stop using their products/services.
What isn't right is personally attacking either of them. Don't like Rice, that fine, you can post a blog or say whatever you want. Crossing the line is harassing them and sending death threats.
If the whole Eich thing would have stayed with people talking about how they don't like him, I wouldn't have a problem. When people started harassing him and it became popular to harass him it crossed the line. So far I haven't heard of anyone harassing Rice. (Maybe people do and they "disappear", I don't know.)
It's another thing to subvert our system of government via deception, surveillance and/or intimidation, either by taking action outside the bounds of legal limits, or working to redefine those limits to suit your own purposes. There's a fair argument that these two situations are not comparable, regardless of how you feel about Eich's donation.
Politics vs Ethics. "I think marriage equality is politically correct" vs "I think someone who violated their own country's privacy law and had a hand invading a foreign country which resulted in the deaths of thousands shouldn't own my data".
One is inherently a political issue - state-issue marriage licenses. States can say "yes this marriage is valid." The other is non-political, a bigger question of human-kind and what is always correct.
Bravo, I say. Machiavellian!
I'm quite fond of boycotts. I'm just afraid that the passions will get to the point where boycotts are used to imply that a difference in opinion is unacceptable. I don't have a huge problem with boycotting Condi per se, that's just fine. I'm just afraid of the swell of power of the mob mentality over people's thinking.
If this is really about the big guy vs the little guy (or gal, here), are you ready to protest if Eric Holder joins the board of Dropbox? If you are, then I can get behind it.
EDIT: I would cite Jon Stewart, I suppose, at the big speech at the end of his rally a few years back. His point is that we all get things done outside of Washington. Sure, we may disagree a lot and our disagreements may be a fundamental threat to each other. However if we let that decide who we engage in commerce with, we lose out on a lot of the benefits of commerce, and it doesn't really solve our differences anyway. I rather prefer boycotts over actions. Chick Fil A was a boycott (iirc) over a policy of the company. Even if it was in response to something that the president said, he's an acting president as he's saying it, a boycott there makes some sense.
But it's not cut and dry. If Hitler joined the board of Dropbox I could probably get behind a boycott.
Um.. what? We don't settle political disputes in a civil society by boycotting entities who choose to associate with actors we believe are immoral?
That's silly. I don't think it gets much more civil than this.
Seriously, what the hell is with all these idiots lately saying that we're not supposed to even vote with our wallets anymore? I apologize for my harsh language but I'm just so flabbergasted, and it's such a stupid thing to say that I think "idiots" is justified. Do you really think that we should limit the expression of our dissatisfaction to the ballot box and the internet comment box? Why shouldn't we change how we do business to make a point?
The way some people react to this stuff, you'd think we were talking about assassinating political opponents, rather than criticizing them and taking our business elsewhere.
I think I mentioned above that I disagree with basically every decision Dr. Rice ever made while acting as a public official. The Iraq war was a huge disaster, and that was obvious before it even started. But there's a reason we have legal doctrines like qualified immunity: it's detrimental to a public official's ability to perform his or her duties if he or she has to view every decision as a question of personal liability.
Upon further reflection, this isn't nearly as bad as last week's Mozilla witch hunt. You could probably make a legitimate argument in the context of privacy and government surveillance. But given the "success" of that purge, I'm worried that we'll be seeing three more of these campaigns every week. The fact that I've taken a karma beating for (completely earnest) posts I've made in this thread just reinforces my fear that we're becoming a community that finds it harder and harder to brook dissent. And I really thought the kind of person that reads HN was smart enough to see the inherent dangers in that.
Thanks for not calling me an idiot this time. Really made my day.
Is it tasteless? Maybe. Shortsighted? I don't see how, but I won't argue it strenuously. Hypocritical? Maybe, but I don't really find hypocrisy objectionable in general. Even if I grant all of those, that is a far far far cry from "this is not how we settle political disputes in a civil society." "Civil society" does not mean that we must go around being absolutely and completely polite to each other at all times. It means that we solve our disputes nonviolently. Far from being an abrogation of civil society, this action is a shining example of it.
I'm honestly puzzled at what you're saying because it just doesn't make sense to me. I assume you're not against things like public street protests against a sitting president, but the only difference I can see is purely quantitative. Is it that you think it should stop once they leave office, or what?
This sort of intimidation (of Dr. Rice and anyone who associates with her) may not be violent, but it _is_ coercive. That sort of climate is anathema to "civil society," no matter how narrowly you attempt to define the term. (You didn't need to provide a working definition, by the way; it's obvious you don't think it has anything to do with decorum.)
And yes, there is absolutely a distinction between Congressional, journalistic, judicial or even private oversight of a sitting public official, and public hounding of that person once he or she returns to private life. There's also a difference between airing one's grievances (i.e. protest) and making threats if your demands aren't met. Maybe if you disagree with something I've said, you should try to get me fired, too.
If refraining from doing business with a company and encouraging other people to do the same is "coercive" then you've redefined the word to the point where it has essentially no meaning.
Boycotts, strikes, protests, and other non-violent actions have long and proud histories as part of "civil society".
Given that the "threats" being made here are merely that of switching services, I see no difference between this and a peaceful protest, where the implied threat is "we will vote for somebody else".
Seriously, what do you think people should do here? I assume we can rule out violence. Stopping your use of Dropbox just because you disagree with them is apparently not allowed. Talking about it with other people doesn't seem to be OK with you. You seem to basically be saying that you can disagree as long as you shut up about it and don't do anything with your opinion. Is that not true?
This assertion ('I admittedly don't understand the context, but I'll gladly render judgment on a single tenet of it!') may seriously have just given me an aneurysm.
Can you cite one boycott or strike that history looks fondly upon that centered around calling for a specific person's head? These tools have traditionally been used to advance policy changes and improve living conditions for whole groups of people, not exact revenge on someone you don't like.
There's nothing wrong with voicing dissatisfaction in, well, basically anything. There's also nothing wrong with terminating a business relationship with an entity who has done something you don't like. Or even tweeting form letters at a company's CEO. That's all beside the point.
I think sometimes, the appropriate recourse is to realize that you're overreacting to something, calm the hell down, and go on with your life.
My problems with this specific situation:
- Trying to organize a popular campaign targeting a specific person's reputation and/or livelihood while refusing to divulge your own identity is incredibly gutless. If you're sure enough of your convictions to take that kind of action, why are you not sure enough to sign your name to it?
- Social tools like boycotts and protests become less effective the more frequently they're used. In isolation, this doesn't really apply. In light of the Brendan Eich mess, it seems like the start of a dangerous (and frankly annoying) trend. Are we going to see boycotts every time an organization makes a decision that someone with basic HTML skills disagrees with?
- When waging any kind of social crusade, there's a line of conduct that you can't cross without abandoning any claim to the moral high ground. You seem to agree with me that violence is on the wrong side of that line. I'd argue that trying to get specific people fired from private industry for essentially unrelated conduct (during their time as a public official, no less) is, as well. Especially when the whole thing really seems to be more about punishment than effecting future change.
- You're still trying to equate declining to vote someone into public office with trying to organize a movement to get someone fired. Those things aren't even close to equivalent.
- You're missing something about the nature of boycotts. They're not designed to demonstrate your disagreement. They're designed to coerce their target to accede to your demands, lest they suffer financial harm. I'm not saying they're innately bad, but they are much more coercive in nature than protests, whose nature I also think you're mischaracterizing. By your definition, there would be no point in protesting any action carried out by any politician in the last term of a term-limited office, right?
- Editing to add one more. The reason we have qualified immunity is that, in theory, you want the best possible people occupying important public positions. (Obviously, things don't often work out this way, but I think it's still important for the incentives to align properly.) When it becomes clear that anyone who holds one of these offices may have to fend off angry mobs for the remainder of his or her professional life, you're making public office less attractive for anyone else who might ever be considering accepting an appointment to it. Which will probably, in the aggregate, make these positions less attractive to the people most qualified for them.
You're also mischaracterizing the nature of the boycott: the target whose behavior it's trying to change isn't Rice, it's Dropbox. And the goal is their policies around privacy, surveillance, and government cooperation. Rice is a seed that these issues can crystallize around, but anything that happens to her personally is sort of collateral damage.
At least that describes some principled support for this campaign. There may also be some that want her to personally suffer and don't care about Dropbox's policies.
I was still fairly outraged over the Eich lynching when I wrote all these posts. I still don't think it's a great precedent to set, boycotting a company over appointing someone to a mostly ceremonial position. (Something that I still think is terribly gutless to do anonymously, no matter who you're targeting.) But I do actually buy the privacy argument. And I have to admit, it's really disconcerting to be put in the position of defending the actions of Condoleezza Rice (or any other prominent Bush 43 official).
Anybody else feel conflicted and have some insight? I'm still probably going to cancel my Dropbox membership simply because I have free 100gigs google drive that I got when I bought my chromebook [1] and this gives me a great excuse to transfer over and save some money. But I don't know that I can go on the same kind of crusade for which I faulted the Eich lynch mob.
[1] Free 100 gigs google drive when you buy a chromebook, which if you install crouton makes for a cheap, decently powerful linux machine (great deal!). I recommend the hp chromebook 14 with 4 gigs ram since it comes with free 200mb 4G tmobile internet every month for life.