My late aunt (by marriage, not a blood relative) suffered from this. I’m sure that it partially contributed to her eventual loss of the will to live.
The Immigration Coalition
Cracks are forming in it.
Good.
Absence Of Evidence
Mozilla Burning
The fascists won a round:
What was the Chick-Fil-A battle about? It was about the company’s owner, Dan Cathy, stating his beliefs on marriage in an interview. Democrats tried to shut his company out of whole cities, to shun him and hurt him.
What was the Duck Dynasty battle about? It was about the Robertson family patriarch, Phil Robertson, stating his beliefs on life and marriage in an interview. Activists pressured A&E into taking him and his hit show off the air.
The fascists lost both of those battles, so they adjusted their tactics. The Mozilla battle saw a few employees within the company tweet their displeasure with Eich. No employees tweeted support for him or for the concept of free speech.
In both of those earlier cases, and in Eich’s, private citizens expressed their views, and the fascist mob tried to destroy them and their entire lives for it. The fascists lost the first two battles, but have won the third. Eich is gone and now Mozilla is radioactive to a large number of people. I deleted Firefox from my computers and mobile devices, and replaced it with other products. Many made similar decisions. Web browsers are easy to replace. I’m already happier with Epic and Dolphin browsers than I was with Firefox, which had become buggy and slow.
The progs don’t care what happens to Mozilla. It can live or die, they can’t be bothered about that. It doesn’t matter to them at all. They actively wanted both Chick-Fil-A and Duck Dynasty destroyed. They would probably be content to see Mozilla die too. But it doesn’t matter to them anymore. It did what they want. They will turn and attack some other target when the opportunity arises.
The objective was not to intimidate those of us in the pundit world. On that score, the fascists’ tactic backfired — same-sex marriage supporters have been rightly appalled by all of this.
@BrianSHall We are an org that believes in openness & that no one should be persecuted for the beliefs they hold, no matter what they are.
— Mozilla (@mozilla) April 3, 2014
Indeed. RT @Rand_Simberg: An astronomical lack of self awareness in that tweet, @texasbryanp. @mozilla
— Boss Tweet (@texasbryanp) April 3, 2014
Expressing opinion about SSM: Persecution Hounding someone out of a job for expressing opinion about SSM: Tolerance #MozillaNewspeak
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) April 3, 2014
And good for Andrew Sullivan:
Will he now be forced to walk through the streets in shame? Why not the stocks? The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.
Regardless of what you think about SSM, you should be appalled by the intolerant behavior of Eich's critics.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) April 3, 2014
The Steyn Countersuit
With his new attorneys, Mark has filed a motion to deny Mann’s motion to dismiss:
Mann’s lawsuit is not advocacy. It therefore does not even cross the statutory threshold. His misguided attempt to invoke the Anti-SLAPP law’s provisions to discourage Steyn’s counterclaims would defeat the very purpose of that law. That is so because Steyn’s counterclaims -– unlike Mann’s lawsuit — do not seek to interfere with a right of advocacy. Since Mann’s libel suit does not constitute “advocacy,” Steyn need not show a likelihood of success on the merits to defeat Mann’s motion.
Mann’s attempt to enlist the Anti-SLAPP law as a weapon to silence Steyn’s criticisms is perverse. It is contrary to the fundamental salutary purpose of that statute. It wrongfully seeks the imposition of costs and attorneys’ fees against Steyn in retaliation for his asserting and defending his constitutional right to speak out on a matter of great public interest.
No comment.
Amazon Fire TV
A review.
I bought a Sony Blu-Ray player around Christmas time that has a lot of streaming built in, and moved the Roku to the bedroom. Not sure the features justify an upgrade for me right now, but if you don’t have such a device, it looks pretty cool.
Asteroid Strikes
There have been several city-killer-class impacts since 2001. We were just lucky they didn’t hit cities. And Chelyabinsk really dodged a bullet last year. You should support the B612 Foundation. Don’t expect the government to do anything about this.
The History Of Navigation
Hiawatha Bray has what looks to be an interesting new book
Venezuela
It wants to spread the suffering:
As with the old lady and the fly, Venezuela’s government may be running out of encores. It can crack down on black-market activity, but that won’t make the shortages go away. It might redistribute the suffering a bit, but that’s not all it will do. The black market is often a sort of release valve for bad policy; shut it down, and you turn the formerly annoying into the totally intolerable.
There is, as Adam Smith once observed, “a lot of ruin in a nation.” President Nicolas Maduro seems determined to find out exactly how much Venezuela has left.
This is always how socialism ends. They’ve run out of other peoples’ money down there.
Al Franken
A whopping 40% of likely voters in Minnesota think he deserves re-election. That many?
He barely won the first time, and then only by “finding” votes at the last minute, as Democrats always seem to do in tight races.