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David Knowles reports at Bloomberg that former Hewlett-Packard CEO and potential 2016 presidential candidate Carly Fiorina called out Apple CEO Tim Cook as a hypocrite for criticizing Indiana and Arkansas over their Religious Freedom Restoration Acts while at the same time doing business in countries where gay rights are non-existent. “When Tim Cook is upset about all the places that he does business because of the way they treat gays and women, he needs to withdraw from 90% of the markets that he’s in, including China and Saudi Arabia,” Fiorina said. “But I don’t hear him being upset about that.”
In similar criticism of Hillary Clinton on the Fox News program Hannity, Fiorina argued that Clinton's advocacy on behalf of women was tarnished by donations made to the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments where women's rights are not on par with those in America. ""I must say as a woman, I find it offensive that Hillary Clinton travels the Silicon Valley, a place where I worked for a long time, and lectures Silicon Valley companies on women's rights in technology, and yet sees nothing wrong with taking money from the Algerian government, which really denies women the most basic human rights. This is called, Sean, hypocrisy." While Hillary Clinton hasn't directly addressed Fiorina's criticisms, her husband has. “You’ve got to decide, when you do this work, whether it will do more good than harm if someone helps you from another country,” former president Bill Clinton said in March. “And I believe we have done a lot more good than harm. And I believe this is a good thing.”
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday April 06 2015, @08:08PM
WRT circumcision:
Male circumcision has arguments in it's favor, as well as against it. It does, e.g., offer a measure of protection against some diseases. It's not profoundly disabling. (There are those who claim a minor decrease in sensitivity, but I doubt that there can have been reasonable comparison studies, so I feel free to doubt them.)
OTOH, other similar practices, e.g. subincision, or when circumcision is performed in a non-sterile environment, etc. really are difficult to accept. I understand their historic rationale, but I still find them hard to accept. Also I'm assuming that circumcision is performed under an anesthetic (local).
Even so, this is a matter that is ... I have difficulty accepting it as desirable. I just don't consider it horrible. Perhaps if I had not been circumcised as an infant I'd have a different feeling. I doubt that it would be more positive.
Still, I don't think that it's correct to lump circumcision in with the other abominations committed by those Churches and Ministers that, without much contradiction, call themselves Christian. But do note that many Christian Churches and Ministers don't accept the abominations that you recite as valid Christian behavior. And certainly the New Testament gives them scant grounds for acceptance.
The Muslim situation is a bit different. Their primary source book was written by a Religious leader engaged in armed struggle for dominance, and it reflects that. There has been a great Muslim civilizations that did not consider those an essential part of the teaching (at least the fragmentary records seem to indicate that), but it was wiped out by the Mongols. The survivors were from the fringe, and again needed to practice the military virtues, and ignore the military vices. This has created a quite unfortunate religion that the planet would be much better off without, but there's no obvious reasonable way to get from here to there. The ideal way would be to de-emphasize the effects of religion in communal life, but many people seem to have an inbuilt need for some "great sky father", however unreasonable that may be. And certainly there are plenty of reasons to not trust those who are guided by non-religious emotions. They are often merely power seekers, and have no care for ethics. (I'd say "or morals" but too many people read that as sexual, which is only vaguely related to what I'm talking about.)
Please note: One shouldn't whitewash the vile Christian behaviors on a wide scale just because it is currently restricted to relatively powerless groups. But the New Testament doesn't give them valid religious grounds for their behavior. So that is probably more a matter of "the love of power entices the corrupt, and further corrupts those it entices", and ANY group that seizes power on that scale should not be trusted. No matter HOW they got it. The Catholic Church became powerful through largely peaceful means, if you exclude things like the forcible conversion under Constantine and Charlemagne. And you will have to excuse me if I consider that more a means of shrewd amoral politicians seeing a path to power. Then, of course, it was powerful, and embraced the amoral corruptions of power rather then attending to the actual religious message. But do note that as soon as the Christians became powerful, rather than abolishing the arena they started sending Pagans to it. (And I must admit that even in this case I'm avoiding such things as the massacre of the Nazarenes under a Christian general of a Roman army. This lead to the destruction of those maintaining (as near as can be told) the original Christian belief...whatever it was. The New Testament is a grossly unreliable source in this matter, being mainly that which the Christian group at Rome found acceptable and desirable. Much was censored long before the Council of Nicea, but nobody is quite sure what it said. That it may well have been radically different is shown by how different the Gospel of Thomas (from the Coptic Church) is from the others. but this doesn't mean it was like that, either. All of the "official documents" were preserved by some group with a particular ax to grind. The variation from different sources (and forgive me if I count the standard New Testament as being from only one source, but it came under the power of the Church of Rome. I believe that the Nazarenes has a quite different set of beliefs, just judging from fragmentary records I've encountered. The Byzantine Church and the Church of Rome made various agreements as to what should be included, so their general agreement doesn't count for much. And both gave clear evidence that they were more interested in power than in purity of doctrine (unlike the Jews arguing over the meaning of the Torah, who seem to have given priority of purity of doctrine, even if they seem to have occasionally gotten it wrong).
FWIW, most Muslims seem concerned with purity of doctrine. If I thought more highly of their doctrine than I'd approve of this more. And with most doctrines different groups hit on different parts as the most important. So many Muslims actually are peaceful, and see their religion as peaceful, despite the literal reading of the scripture if you give equal weight to all parts. Unfortunately, there are enough parts encouraging violence that purity of doctrine doesn't provide any shield against the more violent desires that some people have.
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