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Comment by wallace_f | Hacker News Reader

Gab's founder, the Trump-supporting Andrew Torba, was also kicked out of Y-Combinator's network. It was because, if not officially, probably also for his politics.

Recently a popular thread here discussed a child murderer whom had been admitted to Harvard, but they later renegged. Many people echoed the argument that: 'if someone isn't allowed to participate in society like a normal person, then why even let them out of prison, because it only otherwise encourages them towards crime?'

What should we do about people who are not allowed to participate in society like normal people, but have committed no crime? If we want to remain logically consistent, shouldn't we lock up the Trump supporters with the baby killers?

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This is the pretty much why I oppose no-platforming people.

If someone is going to get punished and excluded anyway, why would they care about the fine points of what gets called "racism" and adjust their behavior to stay in line? Once people aren't following the rules, the rules cease to be an effective way to modify behavior. Drug dealers don't pay taxes, and alt-right pariahs don't care about how offensive they are.

There's two sides of this. The too-quick-to-blacklist one you mention, which is extremely concerning to me—I grew up in Evangelical schools watching the people around me become increasingly reactionary and paranoid, dominated by an us-against-them mentality, and if you didn't toe the party line on things like abstinence, swearing (especially in music), and drinking, you were quickly condemned. Now I see the same thing happening to my social liberal friends, and it's worrying, because once you start thinking in such closed-off ways, it's hard to dig out of that.

But there's also the impact of anonymity and zero-cost (dollar wise) widely-spread speech. Both of these are major recent changes compared to how things had been for decades previous. Maybe you're expressing it in the most extreme terms in part just for the reaction—this is obviously generally not productive from a societal perspective, but used to be restricted to a much smaller set of people who didn't mind the public blowback. Now you can do it for free with a throwaway identity. This also contributes to moving people further and further away from each other.

That is not, in fact, why Torba was removed from the YC network. He was removed for hostile trolling of other YC founders.

The thread that immediately precipitated his removal is still online; you can just go look at it:

https://www.facebook.com/garry/posts/10102671732962523?pnref...

(It's buried under Anisa Mirza's reply).

Unless it's your claim that trolling is a political stance deserving of protection, in which case we can all just agree to disagree about our definitions and move on, his support for Trump was not the problem here.

OMG, that's really bad. He does not even try to make a point. He's just repeating "build the wall" and calling other people cucks.

Being proud of "meme"-ing Trump into office, wow. Torba repeats how his right on free speech is violated, but is an outright dick to everyone around him because they have another view on some topic...

I can't use your link b/c I don't have a FB account.

>He was removed for hostile trolling of other YC founders.

Precisely, the words used by YC were "threatening and harassing" comments. To my knowledge this is the exact comment YC cited:

>All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.

>I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.

I certainly see how this speech can be viewed as rude and disagreeable. But I don't really know how you can say that he made any serious threats or was honestly harassing anyone.

No, that is not the extent of the thread or the allegation.

It's probably not worth litigating this further, though.

Ok well settle your case if you wish. But that was what YC themselves claimed, according to this: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/12/pro-trump-ceo-gets-booted-...

I don't believe that link supports your claim.

Here is the exact text from the article. It states exactly what I already said it does:

>While Torba paints this as a free speech issue, YC told BuzzFeed that he was kicked out for “for speaking in a threatening, harassing way toward other YC founders” — particularly in this Facebook comment:

>All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.

>I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.

That TechCrunch article cites BuzzFeed as its source for the claim that YC said that they kicked him out particularly for that comment, but I don't see that in the linked BuzzFeed article [1]. It says that he was kicked out "for violating its harassment policy", and that this occurred after the Facebook comment, but I don't see any statement in the BuzzFeed article that YC mentioned that comment in particular. I may be missing it, though.

[1]: https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/trump-supporting-startu...

I think we're talking past each other. I agree that's why YC banned him. I agree that he said that thing on the Facebook thread. But he said other things as well, and, apparently, other things prior to that Facebook thread.

Even speaking as an ardent free-speech supporter, there's some pretty clear evidence out there of Torba being kicked out not strictly because of his politics.

He was doing a pretty good job of not being particularly nice to someone in the screenshots I saw. I won't go out of my way to witch-hunt him or anything but implying he was kicked out strictly because of his political viewpoint is a really tall claim to make without evidence.

He was intentionally being confrontational in order to become a right wing martyr and gain noteriety. Looks like it worked.

Well, we could start by not comparing Trump supporters to child murderers. It's one of those comparisons that might be useful in conversation but ends up demonizing them.

Andrew was kicked out among other reasons for saying "Build the wall" to a YC alum who was expressing concerns about Trump's proposed ban on immigrants (and how the ban might affect their life directly).

Your point is an important one and worth serious discussion. Ultimately, people have always demonized some subset of the population; it's what people do no matter the century. It's certainly traumatic, but what's to be done? Even scientists give up, and they're a stubborn bunch: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376

> If we want to remain logically consistent, shouldn't we lock up the Trump supporters with the baby killers?

No, we should let them participate in society. Political discrimination is the same as religious discrimination: bad.

What is the difference between these two statements?

1) Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to run social apps

2) Republicans shouldn’t be allowed to run social apps

Same shit different religion.

Who you pray to doesn't affect me. Who you vote for does.

Organized religion is primarily a form of politics though. Before we had the left and the right, we had various religiouns jostling for political supremacy. The concept of separation of church and state is fairly modern and not fully implemented yet.

Case in point: US imagery invokes a lot of God stuff and Germans still pay church taxes. Most religions in most of the modern world are also tax exempt organizations etc.

So what's the moral argument we've come to here? Lock people up who negatively affect you? Is that just?

I don't really see how you could draw that conclusion. No. I'm saying this it makes more sense to shun people based on actions that negatively impact you, than to do so for views that are totally irrelevant.

What if who you pray to affects who you vote for?

I doubt that's the case for anyone, much more likely that it's who you pray with.

Well who you pray to affects who pray with, which in turn affects who you vote for. Doesn't it?

They're correlated perhaps, but there is a huge variance in political views, at least among the major religions.

This is especially true with economic policy, which really has little to do with religious belief, but even with a lot of social policy its true.

That is, while there probably aren't many devout Catholics who support late stage abortion, the opinions on things like LGBT rights, the environment, refugee and immigration policy, homelessness, access to education, and more will vary wildly between devout Catholics. That second part is also true for devout Protestants and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists.

Sure the means might not sit in exactly the same places, but that's very different than the political spectrum in the US, which is essentially bimodal.

Many people echoed the argument that: 'if someone isn't allowed to participate in society like a normal person, then why even let them out of prison, because it only otherwise encourages them towards crime?'

He murdered a child. If Harvard doesn't want to allow a child murder into their institution, it's not a crime against that person. That person can have a normal life, just at Grand Junction State (or I'm sure there's a million other colleges other than Harvard that will accept him).

There are consequences to actions. If the consequence of murdering a child is you don't get to go to Harvard, it's not a tragedy. Go do something useful with your life, other than going to Harvard or killing kids, yeah?

Interesting that you assumed it was a "he". It was the child's mother: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/opinion/harvard-michelle-...

Thanks, that's a crazy story.

> It was because, if not officially, probably also for his politics.

That's a serious claim to make without evidence. Perhaps you have evidence and you're not sharing it. If that's the case you should ask yourself why you're not comfortable sharing that evidence, and if that discomfort should apply to making the claim at all.

Alternately and more likely, you have no evidence, in which case you should certainly not make such a claim.

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