Watching the drama around kagi unfold and it has me wondering how much you take into consideration a creator’s view on things like homophobia, sexism, racism, etc. when deciding to use a product. I think most of us have a bar somewhere (I would imagine very few on this website would ever consider registering on an altright...
Honestly, there is so much art and so many services and tools out there, that I try to avoid sending money towards ones made by shitty people.
I loved HP as a kid, but I’m not going to support JKR’s dullard takes on trans people. It’s clear she knows literally nothing beyond what her transphobic friend and their wine club “LGB Alliance” of straight white women tell her, but she still feels the need to parrot it online in front of millions of people. And guess what? There are other books about magic out there.
In terms of my judgement criteria, it’s not some fixed system, but my 2 main considerations are:
How much does a bad person benefit financially from the product?
How much are bad people responsible for the creation of the product?
Generally-speaking, if either of those can be answered with “A lot”, I avoid it.
So for instance, in the case of Hogwarts: Legacy, while JKR wasn’t responsible for making the product almost at all, she publicly indicated that she was making a lot of money from it, so I did not purchase it.
Ditto for AWS; once I was able to afford a cheap refurb server, I shut down my AWS accounts and been self-hosting everything.
In recent years, China’s LGBTQ+ community has been swept up in the Chinese Communist party’s broader crackdown on civil society and freedom of expression. In May 2023, a well known LGBTQ+ advocacy group in Beijing announced it was closing due to “unavoidable” circumstances. Last February, two university students filed a...
Being in the infosec space and seeing her blow up back in 2017-2019, I’m shocked it took the CCP this long to come down on her. She always kept any political criticism at arm’s length, but her not being the Beijing-approved image of femininity was always going to make her a target in Xi’s China.
As I have repeatedly said… Just because Biden has repeated the US company line of unequivocal support for Israel, etc etc (Because even among democrats it’s political suicide to say anything else). That doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been trying the entire time to get Israel to stop the bullshit. This is more or less a...
Biden has pushed for supplemental aid, and he doesn’t have to. He can signal that he’ll veto any additional aid. He can certainly put pressure on Democrats to repeal already-appropriated aid, and he’d even pick up a number of Republicans on that. I also seem to remember a thing where Trump was blocking delivery of approved aid to Ukraine (with the illegal part being that it was for a quid-pro-quo), so stopping aid is certainly possible for a president.
But instead he’s pushing for more aid to Israel’s military. So once again, performative.
How much does a creator's worldview influence whether you use their tech or consume their media?
Watching the drama around kagi unfold and it has me wondering how much you take into consideration a creator’s view on things like homophobia, sexism, racism, etc. when deciding to use a product. I think most of us have a bar somewhere (I would imagine very few on this website would ever consider registering on an altright...
‘It’s difficult to survive’: China’s LGBTQ+ advocates face jail and forced confession (www.theguardian.com)
In recent years, China’s LGBTQ+ community has been swept up in the Chinese Communist party’s broader crackdown on civil society and freedom of expression. In May 2023, a well known LGBTQ+ advocacy group in Beijing announced it was closing due to “unavoidable” circumstances. Last February, two university students filed a...
Biden "running out" of patience with Bibi as Gaza war hits 100 days (www.axios.com)
As I have repeatedly said… Just because Biden has repeated the US company line of unequivocal support for Israel, etc etc (Because even among democrats it’s political suicide to say anything else). That doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been trying the entire time to get Israel to stop the bullshit. This is more or less a...