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Comment by scrumption | Hacker News Reader

Came here for this.

Imagine being so dead inside you feel perfectly fine, even proud of working for Chic-fil-A, lol

This was not helpful. Sometimes people take jobs just to survive; I know I have.

Yeah, me too, but at least I wasn't writing Medium articles about how cool it was that I was generating revenue to be funneled directly into conversion therapy youth camps.

This person[0] seems to have found a way of engaging the CEO in dialog. I, personally, think this is the best way of discussing differences.

[0] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/shane-l-windmeyer/dan-cathy-c...

We also have an open dialog with Kim Jong-un; doesn't mean we should applaud the people that work and support him or feel sorry for those workers. They're traitors to the human race, in just the same way that Chick-Fil-A workers are directly responsible for what the company does.

Really? You're equating the "workers" of CFA to Kim Jong-un?

Nothing changes with attitudes like that.

No I'm equating the CEO Dan T. Cathy to Kim Jong-un. This guy's a scumbag who loves nothing better than commanding the world to follow his hypocritical commands, and his staff are personally responsible for supporting this behavior by going along with it. I can't say I have any respect for him, his company or the people who work for him. The US should simply outlaw his antisocial policies because that's the right thing to do.

HN loves to talk about how CS needs ethics courses - this is a great example :|

At least we aren't quite to the point of HN articles praising the cutting edge technology being implemented at Raytheon and Northrop Grumman

If you're going to complain about the ethics related to Chik-Fil-A, it would probably be better to start with the fact that they raise and kill a billion chickens every year rather than that they have donated $120,000 to organizations like the Salvation Army (example from above article).

Eh, regardless of my personal thoughts on the topic, the ethics of eating animals are a lot more controversial among the HN crowd than LGBTQ rights.

Chik-Fil-A is not an arbiter of LGBTQ rights. Their small 6-figure donations to organizations that focus on other issues do very little in the grand scheme of things.

Do you really think Chik-Fil-A is directly causing more suffering by donating to a few charities in amounts this small than by raising in captivity and then killing billions of chickens? I see no way to reasonably argue that.

Again, regardless of my personal beliefs:

If I thought Chick-Fil-A shouldn't be supported for either their treatment of animals or for their anti-LGBTQ corporate giving, and wanted other people to stop supporting the business, I would focus on the latter in my messaging, because I suspect it would be more effective on the audience. Attempting to draw conclusions about which of their behaviors I personally think cause more suffering from this is not a good use of your time.

If your audience cares significantly about the charitable donations and not at all for animal suffering, and your goal is to only to convince them to be against the company, then sure, go for it.

But any effective altruist should have their goals set higher than this, at actually reducing the insane amount of suffering that's created. It does very little good if everyone stops supporting Chik-Fil-A only to flock to another chicken company, which will be the same in almost every way, possibly minus some donations, possibly one which treats animals even worse. Effective altruism is a very different beast than simply appealing to or signaling the crowds' most popular views on ethics in order to persuade.

Chick-Fil-A is just the service provider, if not for Chick-Fil-A people would get their chicken elsewhere. If they were raised in a place that felt less like captivity, that would probably be worse for the environment, in terms of using more natural resources per pound of chicken produced. There are trade-offs to everything.

Chick-Fil-A isn't really in the meat business, they're in the restaurant business, and given that they aren't in a very tiny niche, their menus feature meat. They sell plenty of soft drinks and fried potatoes which reduce the amount of meat as a percent of the total calories.

Finally if you're going to get people excited about animal rights, it's probably better to mention cows than chickens. To me, Chick-Fil-A's ads suggest eating chicken as a lesser of two evils, without ever saying that eating chicken is evil. We also don't have a separate word for chicken meat like we do for cow or pig meat, which I think serve as euphemisms.

Most effective altruists would agree with you (and thus disagree with a possible takeaway from Chik-Fil-A's advertising) that eating chicken is better than cows, as cows provide significantly more meat than a chicken, with ratios being up to 50 chickens per every 1 cow, as far as quantity of meat for normal portions go. In other words, someone eating only chicken may kill X chickens, but someone eating only cows may kill 1/50X cows. Of course there are other variables involved like weighing the differences between these animals, their treatments, lifespans, etc., but it is nonetheless a point with notable weight. Although this isn't quite the area I was getting at, just that the most significant things should be looked at first, all else constant.

> Finally if you're going to get people excited about animal rights, it's probably better to mention cows than chickens. To me, Chick-Fil-A's ads suggest eating chicken as a lesser of two evils, without ever saying that eating chicken is evil.

I posted this article to our company #random channel and that was the first reply- better chicken than beef!

pretty sure the ads are just a joke to not eat hamburgers, but to eat chicken whether it be nuggets or sandwiches or whatever which is essentially the menu for Chick-fil-A.

You may well already know this, but the separate words for meat and animal are likely because of the Normans; the richer French speakers cooked and ate the animals, so they got French names; the poorer "English" raised the animals and called them by their English/Germanic names.

We do have a word with a French root for chicken, by the way: poultry. As to why the separate name didn't catch on, I can only speculate that it's because chicken are cheap to keep and so the English may have eaten them themselves.

Not all languages have separate words for meat - German perhaps being the most famous. It's slightly disconcerting to walk around a supermarket and see schweinefleisch being advertised.

The "other issues" that organizations like Focus on the Family are concerned with are just a reprehensible as their anti-LGBT bigotry.

Not... really...

Chik-fil-a is only a useful example in so far as how well the ethical throughlines match things we've seen many times before, the media has taught us to care about, and how much time and effort political interest groups have spent highlighting those to the public. Ethical thinking on this topic will not be engaged, people will take the opinion their political affiliation and chosen memes have predestined them to take, and they'll act like it's serious thinking.

Parent poster said "Imagine being so dead inside you feel perfectly fine, even proud of working for Chic-fil-A, lol." Substitute in Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft or Twitter, and you might be approaching an interesting statement.

Where the ethics gets engaging are the day-to-day business model at any currently big or hot software company. Only a small subset of people have the background to comprehend the issues. And the people saying "let's stop and think about the consequences of this" gets steamrolled by the status quo that has money to make. That's where all the good examples live.

But it's a bit harder to come to terms with when the focus hits close to home. So we have whipping boys like Chik-fil-a. "At least I don't work THERE"

I agree that there are many important ethical questions that are bypassed in the day-to-day of those companies for sure, but at the same time I think there is an attitude here of "who cares what happens with the company's money once it leaves my area, they are solving interesting problems and the people working for them are doing intellectually engaging work".

Imagine feeling the bizarre compulsion to turn every discussion about technology on HN into yet another tedious political argument.

The company themselves chose this political stance, not the community around them.

No, the grandparent's political stance is to be outraged at anybody he/she disagrees with and has an unhealthy obsession to blurt it out on discussions that aren't political.

All discussions are political. The only question is whether or not the politics at hand affect you.

And to quote Chick-fil-a's CEO: "Jesus had a lot of things to say about people who work and live in the business community … Our work should be an act of worship. Our work should be our mission field." So he sees everything they do as political as well.

Not political. Religious. For those of us who are Christians, our politics are driven by our religion, not the other way around.

The Heidelberg Catechism sums it up well:

> Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

> A. That I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

Was funding a lobbying group to reinstitute the death penalty for homosexuality in Uganda a reflection of their religious principles or their political ones?

monocasa,

HN won't let me reply to your next comment, but regarding:

> a reflection of their religious principles or their political ones

This is actually a common misunderstanding and what I'm trying to explain. "Religious principles OR political principles" means there are actually (at least) TWO categories of ideas a person holds, with specific items (homosexuality, death penalty, etc.) falling inside one of those categories.

That's a secular worldview, and it isn't how Christians think. We have one category: God. God is sovereign, he owns everything including me. As Thomas Aquinas said "all truth is God's truth". When we're being consistent (key caveat), we approach all issues as "what does God want me to do?". Political activities follow from there. We often disagree about those secondary conclusions (what God wants from us regarding issue X), but not the core starting point (ultimate allegiance is to God alone).

> This is actually a common misunderstanding and what I'm trying to explain. "Religious principles OR political principles" means there are actually (at least) TWO categories of ideas a person holds, with specific items (homosexuality, death penalty, etc.) falling inside one of those categories.

> That's a secular worldview, and it isn't how Christians think

And yet literally the previous comment you say

> Not political. Religious.

So which is it?

I was responding to scope of the statement:

> So he sees everything they do as political as well.

Obviously we have political views, but they're a only subset of religious views. By analogy, geometry exists and is a legitimate field of study. But if you said "all mathematicians think about is geometry" that would be false because it's too narrow in scope. If he's consistent in his Christian worldview "he sees everything they do as religious as well" would have been true.

There's nothing Christian about the board at Chick-Fil-A

> All discussions are political.

Nonsense. A certain subset of our society insists on making everything political.

Most of us don’t like it because it ruins otherwise interesting conversations.

Or... your privilege allows you to ignore the political consequences of most conversations.

What do you think politics is? Like an actual definition.

> Or... your privilege allows you to ignore the political consequences of most conversations.

What political consequences are there to most conversations?

Once again, define 'politics'.

Why is their stance deemed as political and not humanitarian?

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