Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

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Sargon of Akkad told a group of white neo-nazis they were a bunch of "n-words," ironically, in the context of accusing them of having the same poor behavior they attempt to associate with black people. If you're familiar with the entire rest of his body of work, he is a vehement liberal in opposition of any such identity politics. He said this on somebody else's channel, not only off of Patreon, but off of his YouTube account altogether.

But all that being said, it's all irrelevant. Let's say he said the n-word maliciously and was a racist, is it the role of MasterCard to prevent that person from being able to pay for a burrito? To get a paycheck from their legal employment? Why can't the expectation be that MasterCard is neutral up until the point of legality? There is a really bad authoritarian trend on the left wing to go after absolutely every neutral cog in the machine. If Reddit doesn't ban /r/The_Donald, Reddit is right wing. If Twitter doesn't ban TERFs, Twitter is right wing. Now payments? Are we going to get mad at the government for letting Been Shapiro drive on their neutral roads?

Deciding 'whether to do business with someone or not' is one of the kinds of freedoms capitalism is supposed to protect.

Outside of a standard set of specific reasons for which it is agreed to be illegal to refuse business (race, sex, orientation etc..), no business is supposed to be able to be compelled -by the government- to associate or transact with another. Instead, boycotts are used by the public themselves (rather than via government strongarming) or by company-to-company action to persuade companies to adjust their behaviour to meet expectations of what is ethically appropriate.

In arrangement, the expectation is not that companies are 'neutral' but that they are sufficiently moderated by public will. This freedom not-to-transact is what allows things such as boycotts of Apartheid South Africa, boycotts of companies that abuse their workers or run sweatshops etc.

There are plenty of ways to rearrange things outside of a Capitalist model, but once you decide to have Capitalism but 'prevent boycotting on political grounds' you're basically suggesting that Capitalism ought to be stripped of one of its extremely few mechanisms for ethical feedback. The implications of that ought to scare you.

Where did I say that it should become legally mandated that MasterCard associate with anybody? Not only do I not think capitalism does/should compel them to do that, I think that capitalism explicitly doesn't compel anybody to do anything.

What I'm asking is if we as a public really want our payment processors to be making these moral judgements? That doesn't mean I think they should be compelled to do anything, but I certainly think it's cause for concern, and call for an alternative that IS willing to behave as a neutral party. I don't want the noise of what is effectively a pipe to be making arbitrary political judgements when deciding what is allowed to pass through.

Now, publicly funded banks, that's a different question. I absolutely expect neutrality within what is legal from our government institutions.

> What I'm asking is if we as a public really want our payment processors to be making these moral judgements?

If this action was completely unprompted, sure, but I think we're talking about payment processors choosing not to associate with people who have already been the subject of boycotts on their previous platform.

A better example would be WikiLeaks which enjoyed a fair amount of public support at the time Visa etc declined to process their payments, as we have reasons to suspect that the pressure on Visa to do this may have been from the U.S. Government.

By contrast, there have already been numerous public protests against people hosted on the SubscribeStar platform.

> What I'm asking is if we as a public really want our payment processors to be making these moral judgements?

Apparently we do, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it.

> Where did I say that it should become legally mandated that MasterCard associate with anybody

I'm pretty sure that if you're in position of quasi-monopoly, it should be illegal

No, we just shouldn't let companies capture entire markets, we should break them up.

See: AT&T after "we" did, Microsoft after "we" didn't.

The one big issue you're ignoring here is that the effective monopolization of various industries is opening the door to governmental action without the necessity of law. Consider something like Visa and Mastercard both deciding to block donations to Wikileaks. Was this an organic action or was it the government aiming to attack perceived enemies by exerting their clout behind the scenes? It needn't be some grand or secretive action by the government either. Imagine a single individual, perhaps a senator or an influential former secretary of state, phones up Mastercard's chair and simply tells him they'd be quite grateful if Mastercard would cut transactions to Wikileaks. What are they going to do?

This is the big problem with both the massive scale of certain businesses, their extensive interweaving with government, and of course monopolization.

I do think that's a very important problem, and yes I agree it is more than likely the US Government was responsible for that. In cases like that I think the government should be dutybound to make its actions public. It's possible the govt announced it at the time, but if so then I am unaware.

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