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Comment by awolf | Hacker News Reader

Travis Kalanick, Uber's CEO, made public statements indicating that Uber must work with the Trump administration. Four days later Uber stepped up as scrubs while the rest of the New York's taxi service protested Trump's deplorable racist actions. It's hard to pretend this is a coincidence.

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I have heard this called racist a few times and at risk of sounding like a pedant or an apologist I respectfully object.

Creating abusive policy targeted at people from certain countries seems xenophobic, isolationist, draconian, cruel, stupid.

Racism is a far more evil concept than any of those.

Abusing and rationalizing the abuse of people because you have made a generalization based on their geography, ideology or culture is certainly wrong.

Abusing and rationalizing the abuse of people because you believe they are genetically inferior is on a different level of depravity.

When we use "racism" as a catchall term for all bigotry and bias, we do it at the peril of diluting its power when that particular flavor of shitheaded thinking needs to be classified.

Question: when the USA refused to take in many Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany, was that merely isolationist and cruel? Or racist too? After all, anti-Semitism was rife in the 1930's USA--plenty of businessmen like Henry Ford were more than happy to republish the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which certainly played a role in American willingness to help the Jews.

Or does it even matter? I don't see how you can try to create a ranking of "minor evil" or "far more evil."

This is a strawman. People call Trump racist, but this is an unconstitutional action with clearly racial motives.

Arguing against this being called "racism" is completely missing the point.

What Trump is doing is unamerican and unconstitutional. Arguably an impeachable offense.

There is nothing in the Constitution that supports your assertion. You have been tricked--a radical, violent ideology, wrapped in a religion is out to harm all those who will not submit to it. How many Christians, non-believers, and generally alternative people have to be murdered until you figure this out? Also, Islam is not a race.

And please, un-American? Our self-preservation is now un-American?

"Abusing and rationalizing the abuse of people because you have made a generalization based on their geography, ideology or culture is certainly wrong." --

What kind of generalization is it though?

I'm not denying that, and I feel weird defending Uber at all, but then you'd also need to account for why they offered to compensate their drivers affected by this travel ban, and why would they lower their surge pricing. I'm okay with saying that they're trying to play both sides of this.

Which in the context of a strike, isn't possible. The purpose of these kind of labor actions is to force a clarification about with whom one holds solidarity, in this case refugees and immigrants.

Breaking the strike is breaking the strike. They did not hold with refugees and immigrants, even after the taxi drivers explicitly asked them to do so. Everything else is just trying to mitigate damage to the point where people forget/engage in apologetics to obfuscate the choice they made.

With us or against us is some bullshit logic. This is not a binary issue.

Get some free PR by condemning the EO while actually offering support to Trump administration by removing pressure by nullifying the strike.

Now that's being a hypocrite on a grand grand scale.

Turning off surge reduces supply. That's not "nullifying the strike" - quite the opposite. It's weaker than it could have been, but it's also exactly what Lyft did.

Well, I'm glad you said what you said even though, as you admit, you feel weird defending Uber. Actions are much more louder and substantive than words and if Uber does good things, I am glad that this forum still has members who will rightfully point that out (instead of it devolving into an echo chamber)

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