It would be nice if FB held the same standards because then I wouldnāt have been outed as trans at the law firm I used to work at. It was seriously only an account to talk to family, and held barely anything, but still there was a picture from before I transitioned, and that was enough to make my life a living hell, and get accosted in a bathroom by the maintenance dude.
Iām in the US, where issues are fairly minor, to be honest, but better privacy control that is freaking idiot proof would be safer.
Yes, thatās a very good point. Any minority group, whether race, sexuality, creed, religion, or opinion, has a special understanding of the power of privacy and tolerance. (One reason why the LDS dislike Trump so much.)
Itās also a reason why LGBTQ people should be horrified at Mozillaās treatment of Brendan Eich, and should be understanding of desires for for freedom of association. However, people behave differently when theyāre the despised minority than when theyāre the majority. Itās understandingly especially hard to be consistent and merciful when the new minority was the majority not too long ago and showed little consideration themselves. (And, societies and the world being heterogeneous, a minority in one place or situation can be a powerful majority in another.) Turnabout always feels like fair play.
Nothing in the FBI case will change anything. If Apple can do it, thatās a big if, theyāll have to when a FISA warrant forces them to do so or already has. The DOJ case will go to the Supreme Court and will go on for years of appeals. During that time, legislation could change or peopleās attitudes can.
I also sincerely doubt that Appleās services work in places like China, UAE and Saudi Arabia without them co-operating with government surveillance. Every communications service either has to give them access or be banned. iMessage and iOS are freely sold in all these countries.
this is not about the capacity to do so.
Of course they can. And in some places they must.
This is about whether or not The U.S.A. is, from a legal precedent standpoint, one of those places
It would be, literally, unprecedented in this free nation of free people.
Hmmmmā¦ No. Publicly donating money to a cause that is actively oppressing peopleās rights is very different than, say, privately saying to a friend that you donāt support gay marriage, or privately voting in favor of a proposition removing gay peopleās rights. If he had done either of the latter, you might have a better case.
But what do us petty little LGBTQ people know? Itās clearly more about how this āturnaboutā āfeelsā for us than, say, the parental rights or hospital visitation or healthcare or any of the other incredibly important rights that go alongside marriage.
Dudeās already public donation in support of oppression was further publicized and people reacted saying āfuck you oppressor!ā.
His privacy was never violated.
Mozilla dropped him like a hot potato because his public support of oppression and denial of civil rights (and the shitstorm that followed) was contrary to their interests.
He chose to be on the wrong side of history, and nobody violated his rights. He had the right to express his opinion in words and with his money, but he has no right to freedom from the consequences of his speech.
I know several Transgendered folk of one stripe or another and Iāve heard stories. Sorry you got outed.
Here, behind the Iron Curtain, before the Revolution, there was a joke.
We had the freedom of speech.
We didnāt necessarily have freedom after the speech.
You could also reasonably frame it as
āPeople who understand math vs the FBI.ā
or
āPeople who donāt want to live in a surveillance state so pervasive that it would make the Stasi cream their pants vs the FBI.ā
As long as you allow data from place X to place Y, you canāt really break end to end strong encryption. It is just a bunch of 0s and 1s. iCloud can clearly be read with a warrant, but if a person chooses not to use iCloud to backup, then it canāt be read.
Which this particular terrorist clearly knew to avoid, at least with his work iPhone.
Which is the usual problem:
If you have a smart criminal/terrorist, breaking onto his/her phone is likely useless anyway, because theyāre concerned thereās something they donāt know about the NSA.
If you have a dumb criminal/terrorist, breaking onto his/her phone is probably not necessary.
Iāve never really understood the tempest about Brendan Eich. If heād donated to the KKK, I think a lot less people would have caredāa person who is not merely racist, but so racist that he gives money to support the cause of racism, is clearly not someone who can be expected to fairly administer a multiracial group of employees. Why is it different when the target is a sexual minority instead of a racial one?
False equivalence is false.
I meanā¦ or you could let people discuss the more specific and troublesome issues that LGBT people face in relation to this issue. Iām going to wildly guess, given the USās history, itās possible we have different experiences than the larger group of āPeople who understand mathā.
I wasnāt trying to be dismissive, and Iām sorry I came off that way.
What I was getting at is that thereās a lot of groups on the right side here, and itās kind of shocking that all of those groups together still donāt seem to have a majority. Even if you include everyone who even cares whether LGBTQ people are persecuted, it still probably doesnāt add up to a majority, because of overlap between the groups.
Iām going to go out on a limb here and guess white christian male?
One thing Iāve noted (not being either a white christian male, or LBGQT) is that 1) If LBGQT became the āmajorityā some time in the recent past, nobody told me. Sure thereās more support/empathy than there was in even the recent past, but society has a long way to go still before even basic equality is reached (much less this fantasy of being a āmajorityā in power). And 2) One of the favored positions (also a fantasy) is that white christian males in the US are somehow now a downtrodden minority. Yes, as a group, their power is no longer absolute, but theyāre still sitting pretty at the top.
Iām in no way some keyboard SJW, but it pisses me off when I see groups that still dominate and hold power over others bitch and moan that theyāre being oppressed. āoh noes! someone wants rights equal to those Iāve always had! That threatens me because Iām no longer the sole party that enjoys those rights! Iām being oppressed!ā. Whatās really up is that the previously uber dominant group is a little sad that their power is a wee bit less than it formerly was and that they have to share privilege with the previously subordinate. Iām sorry that you donāt get to exercise total control over the rights of others anymore, and that those others may have rights near or equivalent to yoursā¦
But then I guess there are still a lot of butthurt people in the south complaining about the loss of white privilege and who are openly and fervently dreaming of the day āwhen the South will rise againāā¦
I am both of these as well as southern and I am quite happy when the balance starts to shift away from the group I belong to having implicit authority and a blank check to do as they please to other people.
That isnāt authority or power, that is xenophobic smallmindnedness and it needs to stop.
Plus I donāt want a world like what I grew up in to be the world my niece grows up in where she gets to make a third less, racism is alive in well, half the time if someone is raped she was āasking for itā and a million other dipshit things that happens in the world. All I generally see (beyond a few folk that donāt quite get the ramifications of what they say or not caring that simply twisting thigns around wonāt make things right) is everyone else going 'oi, stop steppin on my face, and us white guys are havign to comply, preferably before said face gets stepped on to begin with.
Not such a bad thing to want really, fair and even treatment.
seem really is the key word there, isnāt it?
Couldnāt agree with you more.
But I will note that there is a big difference between āfair and even treatmentā and āability to freely actively work towards the suppression/destruction of the rights of others without any consequenceā. @johnthacker doesnāt quite seem to get the difference between the two.
And itās not by any means that being a white christian male doesnāt mean that you canāt hold more of a socially enlightened view. Not all white guys are neo-naziās, but most neo naziās are white guysā¦ (and someone can probably find evidence of non-white neo-naziās, but you get the point).
It seems like very often when thereās any push back from minorities of any stripe the conversation somehow turns into āwhite males are the new minorityā or āChristians are so persecuted in the USAā etcā¦ These things simply arenāt true. It may feel like it at times because these two groups in particular are losing their carte blanche to do whatever they want to whoever they want, but losing the ability to persecute others isnāt the same as being persecuted oneself.
Now, making sure that the pendulum doesnāt swing beyond āfair and equalā to āpreferential treatmentā is important, but may require an outside viewpoint to establish just where the lines lieā¦
