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by Paul-Craft 48 days ago
I can certainly imagine such a world. I don't use Brave because I don't want to support Brendan Eich.
2 comments

If he showed up in the Epstein files I'd stop using Brave. Until then, I'll keep on rolling my eyes whenever someone brings up this stuff from... 2008.
Indeed. I wonder if the folks rejecting Brave have also vetted the political beliefs of everyone that delivers their packages, manufactured their phone, and grown their food.

The injection of politics into absolutely everything is so arbitrary and harmful.

Why should they have to vet everyone? If I learn that the people who deliver my packages, manufacture my phones, or grow my food support practices that I deem fundamentally harmful to society, I change my behavior accordingly. Where does this weird idea come from that I have to vet literally everyone for my rejection of Brave to be valid?

> The injection of politics into absolutely everything is so arbitrary and harmful.

Are you referring to Eich, or the people who react to his political choices?

You're probably going to want to take a look at how your smartphone battery is made. You're taking a principled stand on the basis of not using a browser from a company cofounded by a guy that voted differently than you, but it sounds like you're willfully ignoring the child slave labor used to create the device you're using to type that opinion.

Do as you please, but it makes no sense to me, and doesn't strike me a principled at all: it's basically virtue signaling. But then again, I don't view people that hold different political views as my enemy. They're just people I disagree with, and they can still make a great browser, even though we disagree on some things.

Sorry, but if you think that the issue is that Brendan Eich "voted differently than" me, you're either not understanding or willfully misrepresenting what this discussion is about.
I'm not sure what you're so upset about. He gave a thousand dollars to a political campaign that was in favor of outlawing gay marriage in California. This is standard political stuff that people can agree or disagree on.

What's being misrepresented?

What technical difference do the social opinions of the people who write your software make? Genuinely curious.
What exactly is a "technical difference", and why is only that relevant? I am more than my interactions with software and companies, just like every other human. Why should I focus on an arbitrary subset of factors when making decisions?
Because the technical factors are what you experience when you interact with software written by a company/person?
So instead you use, what, Chrome because you want to support Sundar Pichai??
You are literally on a thread about Firefox, and you think someone saying they don't use Brave must be using Chrome?
You are literally in a thread where 90% of the discussion is surrounding chromium and you think this isn’t a connected idea?

Edit: also crazy that someone who doesn’t want to support the Brave guy would support the browser using the Brave guy’s stuff, but I guess I see lots of chick-fil-a haters shopping in Amazon these days, so who am I to question what’s in vogue?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47900153

> Brendan Eich didn't personally write the code, and he doesn't benefit from Firefox using it. If anything this hurts him, since Firefox is catching up to an advantage of Brave without investing their own development resources.

> No matter from what angle I look at this situation, your complaint makes no sense.

Don't assume the positions of people who disagree with you are not thought out. It is a dangerous line of reasoning to go "if only they thought it through for more than five seconds they'd agree with me".

Right, it still doesn’t make sense. You’re still using a product created by a company run by the guy you supposedly hate, why would you the decide to use a product that came from them if you wouldn’t use their product in a manner that doesn’t enrich them at all?

Remember, this isn’t based on like, logic or functionality or power or visibility or anything related to the product - it’s based on an emotional view of someone related to the product. It actually doesn’t matter if you could theorize a way that he gave away his core tech just to screw his ow company over. It’s arguably irrelevant to the conversation.

Avoiding just about any company for ethical reasons without avoiding the vast majority is performative or something most people can ignore because it’s insanely personal.

I don’t think you spent more than 5 seconds thinking about this if you thought my only POV was “he’d believe me if he thought about this for a few seconds”. I don’t think it’s obvious, I just think it’s significant.

And if you spent more than 5 seconds thinking about this you'd realize that 99% of Firefox users don't know or care who Brendan Eich is. The only one making any moral argument here is you.
If only there was another browser option that was the first word of this thread's title!
Well the guy running Brave must’ve had absolutely nothing to do with Brave’s Adblock engine going into Firefox, so I can see why you’re acting so smug. After all, why would the guy involved with Brave be involved with Brave’s thing going somewhere other than Brave? Maybe it’s just random evolution! Excellent point, friend. I can tell you thought it out.