Include cuts off Y Combinator because Peter Thiel is a part-time investor there

But the make sure that the hidden premise is fleshed out: groups promoting inclusivity are promoting inclusivity for groups considered less powerful, less included, less accepted than is the norm. It's about elevating those who need it. Peter Thiel isn't powerless and doesn't need help getting what he wants.

The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.

Left, right or Trump, it's all about the money folks. The money people pick people with the right ideology to run things and it all trickles down though the company culture. Everyone would change what they believed in 5 minutes if it came down from on high and their job was on the line.

Heck, most people are living paycheck to paycheck and very close to living out of their car. They'll jump and down like a chicken to keep their job if need be.

Many people think Trump crossed a line at some point a while ago that points him in the same camp as extremist groups like white-nationalists, and outside of legitimate political discourse.

That is how most totalitarian societies punish their dissenters.

Scott Alexander explains it well:

"No One Expects The Spanish Inquisition, Especially Not In 21st Century America

People in ancient societies thought their societies were obviously great. The imperial Chinese thought nothing could beat imperial China, the medieval Spaniards thought medieval Spain was a singularly impressive example of perfection, and Communist Soviets were pretty big on Soviet Communism. Meanwhile, we think 21st-century Western civilization, with its democracy, secularism, and ethnic tolerance is pretty neat. Since the first three examples now seem laughably wrong, we should be suspicious of the hypothesis that we finally live in the one era whose claim to have gotten political philosophy right is totally justified.

But it seems like we have an advantage they don’t. Speak out against the Chinese Empire and you lose your head. Speak out against the King of Spain and you face the Inquisition. Speak out against Comrade Stalin and you get sent to Siberia. The great thing about western liberal democracy is that it has a free marketplace of ideas. Everybody criticizes some aspect of our society. Noam Chomsky made a career of criticizing our society and became rich and famous and got a cushy professorship. So our advantage is that we admit our society’s imperfections, reward those who point them out, and so keep inching closer and closer to this ideal of perfect government.

Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said “You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!”

Congratulations. You have found a way to criticize the government in Stalinist Russia and totally get away with it. Who knows, you might even get that cushy professorship.

If you “criticize” society by telling it to keep doing exactly what it’s doing only much much more so, society recognizes you as an ally and rewards you for being a “bold iconoclast” or “having brave and revolutionary new ideas” or whatever. It’s only when you tell them something they actually don’t want to hear that you get in trouble.

Western society has been moving gradually further to the left for the past several hundred years at least. It went from divine right of kings to constutitional monarchy to libertarian democracy to federal democracy to New Deal democracy through the civil rights movement to social democracy to ???. If you catch up to society as it’s pushing leftward and say “Hey guys, I think we should go leftward even faster! Two times faster! No, fifty times faster!”, society will call you a bold revolutionary iconoclast and give you a professorship.

If you start suggesting maybe it should switch directions and move the direction opposite the one the engine is pointed, then you might have a bad time.

Try it. Mention that you think we should undo something that’s been done over the past century or two. Maybe reverse women’s right to vote. Go back to sterilizing the disabled and feeble-minded. If you really need convincing, suggest re-implementing segregation, or how about slavery? See how far freedom of speech gets you.

In America, it will get you fired from your job and ostracized by nearly everyone. Depending on how loudly you do it, people may picket your house, or throw things at you, or commit violence against you which is then excused by the judiciary because obviously they were provoked. Despite the iconic image of the dissident sent to Siberia, this is how the Soviets dealt with most of their iconoclasts too."

That's just highschool-level bullying to me. If this loose connection would truly hinder them morally to work with YC, they could just stop doing that and be quiet about it.

Even if something is the right thing to do, which I don't think it is in this case, then bragging about it often destroys the whole effort and makes you look like the jerk.

Instead, he is paraphrased as having delivered this head-scratcher:

"Y Combinator president Sam Altman says that he is wary of terminating the group's association with someone merely for supporting one of the two major parties' presidential candidates, and he says that Thiel has endorsed Trump, but has not explicitly endorsed Trump's racist or sexist point of view -- a narrow distinction."

Sam Altman appears to agree with many republican members of congress that you can endorse someone with endorsing their views. Which, I'm sorry, is just a totally bogus and lawyerly excuse whose only function is to explain away bad behavior.

And considering Thiel's "speech" was mostly through money, and their "speech" is mostly through "no longer working with them", it seems they're pretty much doing the same thing.

Firing, in this case, would also be an embodiment of speech. (Although I'd argue there should be more stringent anti-discrimination laws to stop people from firing others for their political opinions (but I'd also argue that he's no employee of YC)).

I'm not saying that was a bad decision (SOPA, ugh ...), but sometimes who you don't invite says as much about your org as who you do invite. In this case, keeping Thiel involved at all means they don't give a shit about his support for a fear-mongering demagogue who appears to be punking the nation into electing a dictator.

For what it's worth, Voltaire never said that. It was a description, written by Tallentyre, of Voltaire's attitude towards De l’esprit after the book became a resouding success and everyone who hated Helvétius for writing it suddenly wanted to be his friend once he was a popular success.

> but I defend his right to express himself.

Sure, and he's expressing himself by giving millions of dollars to a man who, by his own account, thinks the president can and should behave as a fascist dictator.

Altman deserves attention for that reason: does Peter Thiel truly reflect the will and opinions of Trump supporters? That seems implausible at best. More likely Thiel is their opposite in many ways, but he sees an opportunity that he can get by aligning with Trump.

In other words, I don't believe that Thiel speaks on behalf of Trump supporters, or that his input really helps to target them at all, but rather his recent history has shown he is more likely behaving in his own selfish self-interest.

I think the core idea was that "it is a virtue to tolerate the outgroup" often means, in American middle-class culture, "if you are on Team Republican, do not stop associating with members of Team Democrat, no matter how much your friends and media tell you all those people are evil idiots" and vice versa.

This is an interesting normative take on what you might call the "filter bubble moral panic" of the 2000s, a growing fear that people who don't agree with each other are experiencing totally separate and disconnected realities.

The thing everyone's afraid of seems to be that in this new world, democracy will effectively become impossible because the ruling majority party will always be ignorant of (or totally unsympathetic to) the interests of the minority. Is the risk overblown? I dunno; how actually bad is a government shutdown, a half-year delay in Zika containment funding, etc.? Hard to say if these times are really worse and if "ignoring the other team" is really to blame.

Some other content in this vein that was interesting reading:

* The Shadow University -- a 1999 nonfiction book of essays about how, at American universities, concepts like "academic freedom" and "the marketplace of ideas" have entered a tension with other concepts (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060977728)

* The Five Geek Social Fallacies -- a 2003 essay influential among some software-as-a-lifestyle people I know, which argues most memorably that is is a popular fallacy to believe "ostracizers are evil", http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

I really think he actually wants to ban Muslims but he had to walk back a bit from that stance to appease people.

Likewise, the Mein Kampf and Capital analogies are inapt. It's not about refusing to read books.

Mr. Trump has decided to take many polarizing actions. We should not be surprised that they have caused polarization. It's a way to gauge how seriously one takes the issue.

Another analogy is boycotts and shunning during the South African apartheid era. Apparently uninvolved entities, like musicians and writers, were forced to either take a position against the apartheid state, or to tacitly admit the issue was not important to them. Eventually it became all but untenable to support the South African government policy.

It was posted to HN 167 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=projectinclude.org

I've also found a "hidden" inconsistency in his "philosophy": he claims to be a moral actor, and yet he founded Paypal. And – you know – gives millions to Trump.

The "certain" above is the problem, because it's hard to define: you cannot and must not isolate people from all consequences of their speech. Sometimes those consequences even come in the form of speech themselves (or something the Supremes would consider "speech"). I must have the right not to invite my mother-in-law to christmas when I just don't want to listen to her racist rants again all night.

On the other hand, there are some disproportional reaction that could create a problem for democracy. Lets say the top three mobile provides colluded to deny doing business with anyone donating to the green party. That's dangerous because those donations are probably not important enough for the individuals to stop using a phone, yet collectively they're enormously important for that democracy-thing we have going.

Similarly with employment: it cannot be right to fire a regular employee for their private opinions, as long as the employee does everything reasonable to keep them from interfering with life at the office.

Eich and Thiel are different in that their employment isn't quite as "regular". Firstly, "firing" is a lesser threat to them, because they have above-average chances of getting a different job (Eich), or the financial impact would be insignificant (Thiel). Secondly, their position in leadership makes their private actions more relevant to their businesses.