If they are successful here, the activists will not declare “mission accomplished”. Nope. They will then search for other contracts to be cancelled. And then there will be infighting as to why one should remain and another cancelled as disagreements mount.
Don’t get into politics when you’re providing enterprise services. Stay away from it as far as you can.
Many here are slave to the money god and have a capitalism-derived definition of morality. It's a VC forum after all it isn't _that_ surprising :/
I am totally for the argument that enterprise services servicing specific entities is apolitical, and discussing the merits thereof. But I believe this is a slippery slope fallacy that weakens your argument and is hyperbolic.
A legitimate logical fallacy of the "slippery slope" variety is when one observes a transition from state S_0 to state S_1 via some step/action X taken, and without evidence or justification (!) assumes/claims that the step/action X will therefore be repeated indefinitely until the system evolves to state S_2, S_3, S_4, ... S_n (where S_n is presumably a state we all consider to be undesirable). The "without evidence or justification" part here is EXTREMELY important. If you actually have evidence or justification of a slippery slope, it is not a fallacy; it becomes a valid argument.
Tip: When you see what looks like a slippery slope fallacy at first glance, it's probably best to give the opposing argument the benefit of the doubt by asking for evidence/justification for the induction (S_0 -> S_1) -> S_N. In most cases, some evidence will be provided to justify. If you disagree with the justification, the debate continues in that direction (which is good, because this is productive).
It's the same on some level as freedom of speech. We "kinda" used to have a general standard about what we disallowed. But that's being challenged in recent years, and from my perspective, is only being driven by outrage rather than actual discussions to figure out a good and clearly defined common ground that acts in the best interests of our entire society.
Is it a slippery slope fallacy?
If we do A then B must happen and I think if we do A then B will happen are two different claims. The latter does not explain the reasoning and is thus not a slippery slope.
To give an example.
If we legalize same sex marriage, polygamy will become legal because of it.
This is a slippery slope slope because it is directly saying one will cause the other just because the first one will happen.
I think if we legalize same sex marriage, polygamy will eventually become legal. (Unsaid reasoning behind the opinion: Upon re-evaluating the existing laws in our push to legalize same sex marriage, combined with an existing acceptance of polyamory, we will see that there is no justifiable reason to keep 3+ adults who wish to form a family from doing so, and though the laws will be a bit more difficult to accommodate them, we will lose any sense of 'wrongness' that is used to justify the ban.)
This is not a slippery slope. The original claim is just not displaying their logic behind their opinion, but that does not mean their logic is a slippery slope.
The difficulty is that in the English language, the two can be written the same way and one won't know the intent without asking the author.
How can they avoid it? Refusing to take some action is still making a decision.
Just to use an absurd example, let's imagine an alternate universe where Hitler and the Nazis were in power in the U.S. here in 2019. Would it be acceptable, then, for Github to cancel their contracts? Or would that be playing politics too?
Please note: I'm not suggesting ICE is equivalent to Nazis. I'm simply suggesting there is a limit to your assertion that enterprise services should always avoid politics. It's easy to bucket politics as this thing that doesn't really matter. We're privileged as hell in the U.S. in 2019 that that is mostly true. But for the majority of world history, politics has dire consequences for major segments of the population.
With respect to ICE, they absolutely are violating some pretty fundamental human rights. I don't think it's beyond the pale for technology companies (often heavily reliant on immigrant labor) to take a stand here.
1. Release parents and children into the US regardless of legal status.
2. Keep children in jail with their parents.
3. Separate children by sending them back to their country.
4. Separate children by placing them somewhere in the US (either with family or social services).
5. Send the entire family back to their country they came from.
Keeping innocent kids in jail is not right. Separating kids is not right. Having open borders is not practical. Sending back people to their own country is not right.
There is no solution. Many people who make the same argument as you would say just let them into the US but it is not practical when you have a welfare system. Many who criticize the current system even Bernie Sanders [0] says you can't have open borders since it would cause too much strain with our welfare system.
So what is the solution?
[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/08/bernie-sanders-ope...
And yes, crossing the border Illegally is illegal by definition.
What else do they do to violate human rights?
The thing is while we disagree with those companies and their government, there isn’t a mechanism to address those issues. Just like there wasn’t a way to address the Gulags.
That has to be addressed by the people internally in that jurisdiction. It has to be addressed by the laws available. Fortunately the US is better at following our own system of laws that say China where on paper people might be better off than us, but sadly their constitution is simply a formality.
So your question is not answered very simply and does not have a simple solution. For example, we were not about to invade the USSR over the Gulags, we were not about to invade China over its multiple purges, despite the horrendous atrocities. I can think of Vietnam as the only country invading another to stop mass systemic purges when they went into Cambodia.
By your line of reasoning, no one in the west should’ve have supported divestment from South Africa during apartheid, even though that was a wildly effective strategy.
You don’t wait for power to grow a conscience, you force it into a corner with your own and the solidarity you build with others.
We do some of those things with DPRK, Iran and Russia, among others. Still, some countries are more resilient than others of more stubborn than others and will press on. Iran is a decent example. We sanction and apply other pressures, they go in killing and persevere despite all that.
Most everyone nowadays seem to wander around thinking their views are obviously correct, and the people who disagree with them are either ignorant, immoral, or arguing in bad faith.
Rationally that doesn’t make sense. No one knows everything, and everyone has blind spots. Most people are doing their best to have decent opinions.
So we have this kind of genius political and economic system that assumes everyone is going to be biased and small minded, and mostly just act in their own interests as they perceive them, and yet things mostly come out pretty ok.
With that in mind, it follows that corporations should mostly just pursue profits, even though that doesn’t sound right. But certainly they should not take stances on the “issues of the day” ... especially if they are publicly held companies.
Your scenario doesn’t make sense because our system is designed so that voting and legislating and regulating and so forth address the hypothetical Hitler problem. The corporation has a different role to play.
If corporations actually mostly pursued profits, there'd be nothing left but fire.
Rather, corporations should (according to an extension of your argument, which I don't necessarily agree with) pursue the goals of the people who make up the corporation. Except that doesn't really happen; corporations are rather a power-multiplier for those in charge of them, subject to the constraints of the corporate structure that forces those people to prioritise profit over their own goals.
Thus, it makes sense for people to lobby large companies en-masse; they can't use the corporations as force-multipliers, but they can use their ability to threaten the companies' profit sources (and so direct the companies' motivations) to their shared interest.
I glossed over a lot of steps in my hacker news comment about a specific context.
The context is some people trying to get github to take a stance, an opinion, about a department of the us government.
It’s hard to be creative enough to imagine a more partisan or divisive topic, where moral consensus is effectively impossible.
Within this context is is absolutely safe to describe the role of the for profit (public in this case) corporation - as opposed branches of the government, or non profit organizations, or unions, or groundswell movements or any of the various emergent structures you might want to throw in here - as seeking profit.
...at least, that's what IBM claims happened to its German subsidiary during WW2: https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss
(I think my favorite part of that book is learning that Hitler literally gave Watson a medal.)
That's good. Someone in Github will have to calculate the cost of doing business with such entities.
Up to this point, doing business with socially despicable entities had no cost--now it does. It's time for business to have to evaluate that cost.
That it furthers your goals is not relevant to Github's accounting.
Is it?
Are there not people that will prefer to do business with companies that don't engage with such despicable entities? Are there not companies that specifically want to do business with those who engage such despicable entities? (Hint: there are several funds and private equity groups that do just that.)
However, Github's current actions certainly give me pause as to whether I should continue doing business with them--especially for $50,000. Really. $50,000. That's a price to be celebrated with an entity that kills children?
Yeah, I think I avoiding github just jumped up my priority list--a lot.
Do ex felons get rejected? Does every Russian and Chinese national have to swear not to work for their governments?
No. Don’t get into that business. The people through politicians can set policies.
Corporations ARE political entities--at the state level, to boot. It's only recently that "corporations solely exist to make profit for shareholders" has perniciously taken root. Corporations used to have to at least acknowledge "the public good" in order to get a charter. People have forgotten this.
Perhaps it's time to bring it back.