Apparently not our good friends at Yahoo. Shame.

Today, Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos accused Yahoo of acting like moral pygmies (NYT via SFist). While I respect the sentiment behind Lantos’ politically opportune statement, I wonder if he’s being fair to the pygmies?

Of course one shouldn’t knock Yahoo’s brand value without mentioning other tech leaders involved in helping the Chinese state to repress basic human rights. Let’s all take a sanctimonious moment to shame our friends at Google and Microsoft too.

I guess we should all remember that a freedom, once sold, becomes remarkably difficult to ever buy back.

PS: today is a good day for San Franciscans to vote.

Here’s an interesting thought:

“Our faith is that throughout the world, beside the impulse toward coercion and death that is darkening history, there is a growing impulse toward persuasion and life, a vast emancipatory movement called culture that is made up both of free creation and of free work.”

“Our daily task, our long vocation is to add to that culture by our labors and not to subtract, even temporarily, anything from it. But our proudest duty is to defend personally to the very end, against the impulse toward coercion and death, the freedom of that culture - in other words, the freedom of work and of creation.”

French writer Albert Camus in 1957.

You: dark hair, navy blue Mercedes station wagon, rushing to make a reckless left hand turn onto Valencia, at rush hour, you swerved into oncoming traffic to avoid running me down.

Me: red hair, on foot, waiting for the cross signal, walking cautiously through the busy intersection, wide awake, I screamed to get your attention at the last second.

Maybe you remember? Maybe we can do it differently next time?