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gaur

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A key point that I was making (and a point which your rewriting of my comment completely erases) is that parenthood can be planned ahead for (or avoided) to a much greater degree than other situations that require family leave. I could have made some anodyne choice of words that obscures this fact, but I didn't because I wanted to make the point that if we are giving people support for voluntarily taking on extra family burdens, then it's absolutely inexcusable that we don't extend the same support to people who have had similar burdens thrust upon them involuntarily.

Yet again, people who have family responsibilities through no fault of their own (e.g., taking care of a sick parent or sibling) are ignored while companies fawn over people who (largely) choose to pop out more mouths to feed. I'm not saying parental leave is bad, but it's entirely eclipsed the other reasons why someone might need to take time off work to help family.

Saying "I want 20 weeks paid leave and $35,000 to provide hospice care for my brother" would probably result in derision and maybe a pink slip at many companies, even ones that have generous parental leave.

The creation of Maine from Massachusetts shows that there is a way to redraw the borders of a state already admitted to the union. It may not be an efficient or repeatable process, but evidently it can happen regardless of how many times you say "states, not provinces!".

Stallman’s Law 10 years ago

You've explicitly rewritten it as "if X, then maybe Y", exactly as I said.

"If corporations write the laws, then maybe they will restrict or mistreat their users." That's not a law.

Stallman’s Law 10 years ago

No, you can't just take a statement and call it a "law", even in a facetious sense.

Murphy's law, Betteridge's law, or other facetious laws are at least roughly formulated as "if X, then Y" (or sometimes "Y happens"), which mimics the structure of actual scientific laws. Stallman's statement is formulated as "if X, then maybe Y" (or "Y could happen").

The post you replied to was talking about white supremacists, with no mention of Trump voters.

You are the one who brought up Trump voters at the first mention of alt-right white nationalists, which is ironic since you insist that the former has nothing to do with the latter.

The reddit admins allow subreddits that loudly promote white supremacism. Comment editing is not the most pressing ethical failing of that site.

Maybe for you this is some abstract problem for which you enjoy dreaming up an endless stream of meandering questions. For me it's a matter of "are the people above me in management going to fuck me over because of my sexuality?". And if I have evidence that they might, either they need to go or I need to go. And if I like my job, I'd rather it be them than me.

So for the sake of LGBT Mozilla employees, I'm glad Eich was shown the door. I'm not interested in entertaining a bunch of fluffy questions about heuristics, expression of opinion, what "purging" really means, or whatever. That's just noise.

there was nothing reprehensible at the time

Lots of people knew proposition 8 was reprehensible and protested accordingly. Eich chose not to listen.

if we purge people based on their political opinions, why bother with democracy

Purging people based on political opinions is exactly how democracy is supposed to function. We regularly vote politicians out of office because of their political opinions. What other criterion should a democracy use to select leaders?

It's a form of cultural terrorism, where one's private ideas can get them killed.

49 people were massacred this year for going to a gay nightclub, but Eich was a victim of terrorism because he was fired? What are you smoking?

Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla, fired for a donation,

Fired for a donation that supported enshrining discrimination in a state constitution. It was a good firing.

Support nasty causes, win nasty prizes.

Is there an ethical question regarding the computer-assisted manipulation people's perspectives, however ignorant and wrong they may be?

Yes, but why did you pick a temporary one-man experiment as your hill to die on rather than a persistent, large-scale manipulator like Facebook?

If you're actually concerned about the ethics of manipulation, why didn't you say anything in any of the several HN submissions about Facebook's fake news issues?

Playing nice has its reward in the long term.

Being put on a registry because of your religion isn't a reward, and historically that kind of thing has been followed by extermination. I absolutely will not play nice.

unfairly singles out the alt-right movement -- one can't say that they are wrong in their dogmatic mistrust of the media

A lot of alt-righters distrust the media because they think it's controlled by Jews. That's a regular theme on alt-right websites.

So yes, you can say they are wrong in their dogmatic mistrust of the media.