Sad things I notice in the world

Last week it was in the news that some people have set up a petition for people to pledge not to donate to Wikipedia because:

Wikipedia is widely used and trusted. Unfortunately, much of the information related to holistic approaches to healing is biased, misleading, out-of-date, or just plain wrong. For five years, repeated efforts to correct this misinformation have been blocked and the Wikipedia organization has not addressed these issues.

The petition goes on to state that people who might go to Wikipedia to read about “Energy Medicine, Energy Psychology, and specific approaches such as the Emotional Freedom Techniques, Thought Field Therapy and the Tapas Acupressure Technique” might get turned off after reading articles which are highly skeptically-slanted against these things.

I don’t think anyone would benefit from innacuracy or standards at Wikipedia which enable unjustified claims to be presented as simply true. Wikipedia is, after all, an encyclopedia and its actually a good thing that it is biased in a skeptical manner when it comes to entry content.

But I also feel that Jimmy Wales, in his response, really lost an opportunity. Instead of being graceful and understanding, he seemed to have sort of lost it and went off in the forum on the petition page.

Not only this, but all the ensuing comments that followed in articles covering this were all pretty much a really harsh pile-on against the petitioners and against a lot of alternative medicine in general.

I want to say that I think if people look at this more closely they will see a major reason why there are so few female contributors to Wikipedia and also why there are so few in tech. They way people responded – including Jimmy Wales – was gross and disgusting.

Life is about more than just who is the most accurate and piss-on-everything else. We are supposed to be nice to each other as human beings. We are supposed to at least try to understand where others are coming from, appreciate all our brothers and sisters in the world and what unique things they bring, and all try to work together to make this world a better, happier place.

Anyone who “wins” a dispute like this by being gross and disgusting, doesn’t really win. They lose. What Jimmy Wales and all the others who piled-on in forums should have done was seen this as a golden opportunity to present their view, and patiently explain it to those who were concerned, not just obliterate them.

I think it is the kind of “leadership” like this one sees in tech that is one major turn off to women, who think differerntly. Women don’t just dump shit on another group of people because of misunderstandings or wrong approaches or whatever. A woman would tend to take a more graceful approach and, even if she was convinced that her viewpoint was more accurate than others, would adopt a graceful way of working with people.

————————————————————————————–
Another thing in the news lately was about how there has been a huge backlash against the new chosen CEO of the Mozilla Foundation because, at one point in the past, he donated $1,000 to the Prop 8 ant-gay marriage campaign in California.

I’m really shocked and saddened reading about the reactions. Whatever happened to freedom?

To be perfectly clear from the outset, the CEO never broke a law. He never overtly made any inflammatory nor malicious statements. He only excercised his right as a human being to donate money to a political cause. In a free society, that should be his and only his business.

I truly find the indignation disgusting and totally undemocratic. Again, what has happened to grace in this world? No matter how much people might think that the CEO’s choice of political donation is bad, the way to win is not through this display of disgust, intimidation, threats, etc. There is no grace in that and its kind of myopically self-righteous and in fact bigoted to think that just because one is right about an issue then piss on freedom.

If the new CEO was someone like Eminem then I could totally see a reaction. But this is just some mild-mannered guy who felt at that point that that was what he wanted to support for his own reason. In a free society we have to respect others’ rights to their beliefs and also respect that others may disagree with us.