Thanks so much for linking that. This is 1000% on point and I'm so confused with what mozilla has been doing the past few years. It's like the organization as a whole suffered a stroke, and the result is this flowery meaningless prose.
As JRRM wrote, "any man who must say 'I am king' is no true king at all."
Any browser who constantly reminds you how private and user-empowering it is, is probably neither.
Add to that a vaguely liberal-sounding rethoric that could be right out of Ron Desantis' worst "woke lib" stereotypes - without even actually being liberal.
Like, not that I'd see the browser an appropriate location for that, but if they actually wanted to commit to a liberal political view, I'd at least have expected "diverse voices" somewhere. But I have no clue what "independent voices" is supposed to mean.
As Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll wrote, "If your thoughts incline ever so little towards fuming,” you will say “fuming-furious;” if they turn, by even a hair's breadth, towards “furious,” you will say “furious-fuming;” but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious.”"
...to add something of more topical substance, I generally agree with the perfectly-balanced opinion above, in that it's a surprisingly mealy-mouthed justification for what is pretty clearly awful behaviour. I'd respect the hustle a lot more if the response hadn't been so verbally Corporate Memphis.
As an aside, I’ve started adding Lewis Carrol, mainly Alice, quotes to the bottom of my weekly status reports and gotten some weirdly positive feedback on this.
It's not just Mozilla. Western society as a whole is transitioning from one where discourse and consensus is based on reason, to one where it is based on feelings.
Listen to some prominent politicians today. Politicians have always had to speak in convoluted and stupid ways to conceal or deflect the truth, but generally they were coherent, the sequence of words had some meaning you could understand even if it was wrong or they were lying. Now it's just complete gibberish with feel-good words sprinkled in.
It's primarily being driven by a transition to low engagement media, such as social media and cable news, being the primary thought drivers of society. The average person was always pretty unwise, but they typically had to engage with their community in a productive way and would know an elder who was vaunted for being kind, fair, and intelligent, and who could be consulted when difficult situations were encountered. Now our society has been horrifically fractured into small atoms, so when people encounter confusing situations, they have a talking head (who's primary motivation is high viewership) explain something in a way that emotionally makes sense but doesn't actually encompass the complexity of a topic.
and worse than that, it is loaded with all the latest "current things" that are deemed unattackable, or any mainstream powers will label you one or more "ists", and work to silence you at best, or get you blacklisted from any work using bully methods
Western society has had discourse on feelings for hundreds of years (see nationalism/imperialism in the 19th century and authoritarian ideologies in the 20th)
You misunderstand. I didn't say western society had no discourse on feelings. On the contrary, the fathers of reason in the west like Aristotle talked extensively about feelings, far longer than just hundreds of years ago.
I said based on reason. It's quite possible to reason about feelings.
Anyway, what's this "discourse on feelings" that was related nationalism/imperialism and authoritarianism you're talking about? I've never heard of it, it sounds interesting.
Anyway, what's this "discourse on feelings" that was related nationalism/imperialism and authoritarianism you're talking about? I've never heard of it, it sounds interesting.
The KdF movement might be considered an example (Kraft durch Freude, Strength through Joy). Rearming Germany after WWI required the Nazis to rally the population by means ranging from technical to emotional to spiritual. From Wikipedia:
>Hitler's architect and Minister for Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, said in his final speech at the Nuremberg trials: "Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man..." [11]
If you can read that without feeling a chill at the base of your spine, well, maybe it's just me.
And of course, any appeal to religion is ultimately an appeal to feelings, since there's nothing objective behind it. A Wehrmacht soldier who started to question his role in the war needed only to look down at his belt buckle to remind himself that God was on his side.
It's all very interesting to consider, but it doesn't have much to do with Mozilla (I hope).
This is why Mozilla lost a lot of volunteers, too, including me.
I did not wish to contribute to a political organization. I wished to contribute to a browser. It’s not possible to do one without the other at Mozilla, although it used to be.
When people oppose "Politics" they usually mean politics they don't agree with. The politics they do agree with aren't "politics" to them, that's just a normal part of everyday life and it's crazy that other people try to claim that's "politics".
If you have a broader understanding of what politics is in the first place you're not going to object to an organisation having "politics" because of course it does, it's composed of people, it exists to further somebody's goals or else it wouldn't exist, it's not like organisations can spontaneously wish themselves into existence.
My understanding to people opposing politics in certain things, is typically about opposing unrelated political messaging in said thing.
For a free open source web browser, obviously there is will be politics somewhere. FOSS is political in nature. Web standards involve politics, with multiple parties wanting to influence them for their own reasons. Hell, challenging a multi-billion corporation monopoly is inherently political.
Having political messaging about "celebrating voices making the world a better place" is odd and misplaced political messaging, orthogonal to the politics of a free open source web browser, and will alienate part of the people that are not interested in something this unrelated, irrespective to their agreement to said messaging.
I am personally in favor of universal health care. I wouldn't like to see messaging about it in a web browser, just to give a silly example.
Precisely why I abandoned Tor and shut down my relays. It went from a technical project that solved an interesting problem to a "human rights" project that wanted to shape the world in a liberal Western fashion. That's a no-no from me.
If your parent is like myself, as I have gotten older, the perceived delta between "close to a decade" and "past few years" has converged to approximately nothing.
I know. I am old from pre-Netscape era. Generally speaking I use few years as 3-4 years. Close to a decade as ~8 years. But in this case, worth considering Firefox ( Or Phoenix ) was established 20 years ago. 5 years is quarter of its life time.
