Google Donated To A Senator Who Voted Against Gay Conversion Therapy Ban
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Google should never have talked about "pride" or "our shared values". It's very clear that they inherited that stuff from universities, where garbled nonsense about "safety," "this is our home," and "no place for hate" have become institutionalized. Mature companies led by adults know to avoid this minefield.
All of that aside, the attitude evinced by this post is counterproductive. Politics is about persuasion. If you want to persuade (and not just preach to the converted), you have to understand the other perspective. If all you can do is dismiss people as "indefensible," you don't understand them, and you won't convince them. You'll come off as nasty, entitled, arrogant, and ideological. You know, the kind of person who commits code to push their political agenda, spies on their coworkers, or spams some lawyer they disapprove of with emails.
That's a weird assumption to make.
What I would assume is that the Senator has any other position that Google finds more profitable than an alternative Senator. It would be kind of crazy to think Google is directly supporting conversion therapy, or that anyone on this forum would.
Supporting a politician financially who also happens to support conversion camps in the end is still supporting all those policies, whether or not that was the initial intent.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
To my knowledge, the "ten things we know to be true" is the only "shared values" that have been stated, & it is more a way of operating guide than a system of what to believe in, a system of values,
https://www.google.com/about/philosophy.html
"Do no evil" for a while was about as universal a claim to shared-values as they could have, but that too was removed over 18 months ago. I disagree that Google should not have talked about pride, or shared values. To me, I think having a moral backbone would have been far preferable & instructive & guided them to a better place than the backbone-less philosophy of innovation that steers so far clear of the moral & value based philosophy of helping the world that would have constituted a real value system, that would have prevented them from throwing fealty dollars to such low-brow crass bastards of the the American political system, for corporatist experiency.
I don't have much to register your anti-causes with. I don't see "safety" or "this is our home" or "no place for hate" as any particular rallying or anti-rallying cry. People who get off on anti-cause are at least as bad as those who would try to speak for something, for cause, to me, but perhaps I haven't seen the bad side of the cause, or the right side of the anti-cause. But to say that this is a minefield to be avoided, well, I think that's a petty view. One that deliberately wants to sabotage, blow up, subvert, excuse, free itself from facing the moral questions of our times. I think people ought be better than that. I'm sorry if it's a minefield, but corporations as philosophy-free zones is a bullshit cowardice pathetic excuse for having accountability. And anyone who would protest or speak against work like what this thread is, of pointing our moral cowardice in corporations, in pointing out either the malice or cowardice or cow-toe'ed-ness of the politicians a corporation backs: it's against what scant few basic principles companies like Google can offer, even in their relatively value-free stances.
These posts do what Google purports to do: to make the factual information accessible & useful. I'm sorry that you want to hide some mask, that you feel this shows a need to convince. It does not. Most good people already believe what is shown here is bad. Very bad. Awfully bad. These are bad people being given money to. These posts aren't trying to argue that this is bad. They are trying to show the information. We- the good people, with hope & belief in one another, trust in the diversity & variety of humankind, are on our own when we judge these single-minded, particular biases that these politicians have espoused to be bad. You too should see that these politicians who have worked to deny others legitimacy are the ones holding radical & un-shared values against others. You too should see that it is political actors who deny others rights for who they are are the ones trying to convince, to sell, to dismiss, persuade. The good people of this planet want to accept, want to be free of these anti-accepting forces, free of these anti-persuaders.
You have twisted what this thread is about. This thread is about revealing the persuaders, revealing those with biased, unaccepting, un-understanding, perhaps even "nasty, entitled, arrogant, & ideological" backgrounds for the limited, pathetic, incapable, unfeeling things they are. These politicians have been revealed. For what they are. And you protest it! You protest the mere revelation of fact! You are the biased one here. You are the one who backs exclusionary unaccepting values, that refuse to share with others. Damn. I was doing so well. I think you deserve this vilifcation, I think I have called you out right, or identified a cowardice or flaw in what drove you to your posting, but in discussing how this thread is one of revelation, against those who would not share, would opt not to coexist: that seems clear. Clear as day. Whatever your motives, the exclusionary & choosey, particular, non-universalized bias of these politicians is clear from their actions, and showing those actions and showing who the company is donating to is just a matter of fact. Your attempt to stir up moral quandary is beside the point. This is not about the companies values. This is about clear & radiant truth, about showing those politicians who make their agenda one that refuses others, refuses to share, & how corporations would back those who pick divisiveness & derision & degradation to win favor. That is as unshared a value as is possible, & one which ought be reported as the factual & actionable information that it is: and that is Google's still stated purpose.
My apologies for going so so so far over the top, but I would truly love a a rebuttal, if you would be so kind as to manage it, amid my harsh cries.
The values upon which civilizations are founded are the kind that have been purchased with blood. Values like "give me liberty or give me death," "all men are created equal," and "I have a dream". Platitudes of the kind spoken to third graders don't qualify.
We have a formula for civil rights in the United States. People who want to complete that work should adopt the language of the civil rights movement, which saw itself as an extension of the revolutionary values that founded the United States, rather than as a departure from those values.
Or you can keep calling people evil and keep losing elections.
To head off some comments that always come up:
1. Like most corporate PACs, Google gives fairly evenly to politicians in both parties. I don't think donations to Democrats "cancel out" donations to indefensible figures like Scalise, or Nunes, any more than giving money to the NAACP cancels out a donation to the KKK.
2. Google's giving is not indiscriminate, but tactical and highly targeted. In particular, they don't just give to everyone across the board like the sugar lobby.
3. The dollar figures are small because they are capped by statute. At most, Google can give one politician $10,000 in an election cycle. This is absolutely dwarfed in size by Google's D.C. lobbying operation, which can't contribute directly to campaigns but finds many ways to be influential.
4. This money is donated by employees who opt in, but is allocated by the company. Googlers have no input into the targeting and timing of these donations; it's decided by the office of public policy.
5. An American corporation can do fine without a PAC. Apple and IBM don't have one. Microsoft won a giant Pentagon cloud computing contract while its political giving was suspended.
With that said, some further threads:
November 2019: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1197253535735267328
August 2019: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1164031478897901573
June 2019: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1152245502361997314
April 2019: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1119751992597835776
Google will donate to whatever terrible person will further their interest and we only care because they pretended to not be evil a decade a go.
yeah, and look and what a good job they're doing -- user-agent discrimination like the good old IE days, and talk of ongoing anti-trust probes.
Yes, the monopoly and censorship stuff is very worrisome but on the tech side they are undeniably better than Microsoft.
Why do they opt in? If they wanted to donate to a politician, they always can. Why this setup?
'Google donates to cause I don't like! Let's name and shame! Boooo!'
'Famous senior engineer at Google donates to cause I don't like! Let's name and shame! Boooo!'
This basically means you want Google to donate solely to the Dems and nothing for the Republicans, or at least greatly skew the ratio. And that would mean Google would be officially coming out as putting its grubby hands on the scale for the 2020 election.
And since everything on the internet goes through Google, this means they get to play kingmaker.
Is this the precedent you want to set? Is this the world you want to live in? Choose carefully.
I think you would find that this is the exact outcome that many people on 'your side' are hoping for.
I can't help it if we're in a polarized environment where the Democratic party doesn't elect climate denialists, homophobes or white nationalists to office too. Maybe next year.
I would set up a dedicated department whose entire job is to watch Google - and only Google - like a hawk. Same with FB.
Alas, I am not actually running the show, so for now I would just like people to realize that we're all in a big hole here and they should stop digging.
I’d be okay with this as long as you also banned these companies from assembling, allowing all employees to telework.
Though a company playing kingmaker wouldn't be bad, necessarily.
It was some great shitposting.
For example, 'tptacek threatening to post more Eric Raymond quotes unless a donation goal was reached:
Plus a bunch of other internet-plumbing stuff that everybody uses. It really should not have a political opinion, but not because it's technically infeasible. It is feasible and easy to create a slant. And if done right nobody will even know.
Shaming someone for a specific vote on a specific bill (taken out of context; surely you're aware that people vote against bills for all kinds of reasons) and "terrible people" and bringing up the KKK is exactly the kind of character assassination we expect from the shallow partisan media outlets that are destroying the possibility of political discourse. I would have expected better from you.
This would be more impactful if Google was one of the only large companies that donated.
It's half the legal maximum from a PAC (this was from a Google PAC; Google per se can't legally donate anything).
The ex-Mozilla CEO donated to an anti-gay marriage SuperPAC; the entire existence of that SuperPAC was 100% dedicated to opposition to gay marriage.
Google donated to a candidate that has voted on hundreds of different bills; less than 1% of his votes are under scrutiny in this Twitter thread.
He donated a very small amount of personal money as opposed to an entire company making donations.
It's a hedge bet strategy focused in risk management: the hope is to have influence over whoever so happens to be politically popular at any given time.
All of them, including Google, because they are legally prohibited from it.
Google's PAC donates, but not with Google funds, because corporate PAC donations can't come from corporate treasury funds.
There are some large companies that lobby but don't operate PACs (IBM and Apple for instance.) It's debatable whether this is better or not, but it's certainly a different shape of political engagement.