To do politics or not do politics? Tech startups are divided
nytimes.com
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From the outside looking in, American politics has long since ceased being about policy and idea's, it is now a contest of identity where it doesn't matter what someone stands for so long as they are on the team I support.
In this kind of climate, for a business or other entity to involve themselves in politics would be consciously choosing to more or less blacklist themselves from doing business with the other side or run the risk of having their brand tarnished via social media for whatever stance they take.
Finally, a business that takes a political stance does damage not just to themselves but to their employees as in the current political climate, both sides have no problems harassing a person or worse if they are viewed as not "on their team". Once a company takes a political stance, it doesn't matter if what that employee believes or does nor does it matter that said employee might be working for this company because they have a family to feed and don't have the luxury of quitting and looking for a new job, the very fact that they work for said company means that they should be treated as persona-non-grata.
Make it simple, a company can't vote, so a company doesn't have a political affiliation (unless of course, it is some kind of lobbying company etc).
In the modern world with a weaponized/activist media this will not work. If you don't block the wrong-thinkers major media outlets will write article after article about how you platform Nazis or whatever, even though there's no Nazis in sight. If you stand up to them they will go after the advertisers. "Why are you advertising on a site that platforms Nazis?" And there's not really consequences. When Youtube, Paypal, etc. ban these people there's barely a blip in their business.
The one person I know that felt put in this position, due to his lifestyle business, felt pressured by competitors to aim his thoughts, not by his customers. He only faced pushback when his thoughts, that his customers hadn’t asked for, came off as selfish and tone deaf. He shot himself in the foot.
Do you remember when Chic-Fil-A was getting boycotted and harassed for the owner's donations to evil homophobic charities? Those charities were The Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Seriously, that's who it was. The Salvation Army and youth sports. Not exactly top of anyone sane's list of "problematic" charities. Chic-Fil-A caved.
Every few weeks I see blue check Twitter going after some nobody to get them banned, but I don't keep track of those things.
(Also, they are neither homophobic nor anti-homeless)
It's worth noting that the company's official policy was and is to allow people to stay as long as they like without making a purchase, and that witnesses to the event described white people in the store doing exactly that at the same time the black man was arrested.
Instead they closed 8,000 stores and put their employees through critical race theory inspired implicit bias training.
My purchasing power says otherwise. I'll take my business to the company that sticks to its job and doesn't preach at me.
With the present-day monopolies/oligopolies it's different. If your financial well-being directly depends on Google listing your site, and Visa/MasterCard processing your payment, they can de-facto decide what is acceptable and what's not. And to force you to pretend that you share their views under a penalty of completely destroying your business.
To me, as a person who doesn't live in America, the US has gone absolutely crazy over this idea that policy doesn't matter so long as a person is on my team. This is an indictment of the media who have failed in their job at keeping the public informed in an unbiased manner, reducing complex macro-economics and geopolitics to catchy headlines and gotcha-questions.
Is my country any better? God no, most of our media is just a budget version of the American model, but it is America who infected the rest of the world with this.
When policy and idea's become the most important part of any election, that's when you can start addressing real social and economic problems like homelessness, LGBT rights, wealth disparity and the loss of jobs to offshoring manufacturing, because you'll have more time to discuss these things like adults now that politicians aren't reducing their job to 140 character hot-takes.
As opposed to non-American companies who never expose their preferences to leaders?
I think they could manage it by, stick with me here, not lobbying. Especially on issues unrelated to their core business.
You make it sound simple, but it’s not.
If you operate a SAAS company, and ICE approaches you to buy your service, you suspect it might be used in the family separation program. If you say: “I’m not doing politics!” and decide to sell them the service, you are being complacent in the policy that ICE enforces, and therefor just did some (highly questionable) politics. If you deny them, you also did (morally correct) politics.
If your workers use open source software and ask if they can contribute back upstream, but you deny them on grounds of intellectual property, you just did politics. The same if you allow them. If you pay your workers above market rate, allow them to unionize, have a liberal vacation policy, or force them to work on-site, you are doing politics. Albeit on a more personal scale then in the previous example.
If most of the other offices in your downtown building where your startup resides put a BLM flag in their window, but you opt not to, you just made a political decision. If an employee puts a prominent Palestinian flag on their desk, and you ask them to take that down, you do so on a political basis.
I hope you get the point. Businesses simply don’t have the option of not doing politics. The power dynamics involved simply prevent that from being a possibility. “Not doing politics” is more often then not simply an excuse for doing highly questionable politics.
When Google employees decided who google should work for THATS political.
The example product could be like Trello, but using the boards to organize their family separation programs. It's not directly a political product, but it's a tool that can be used to further some political policy.
What about a SaaS product that provides facial recognition services for any usecase? It's not Directly political, but could definitely be used that way.
if your definition of directly connected to politics extends to having customers who are political entities, then there's not really such thing as a business that isn't directly connected to politics.
Even selling to a general public is nuanced, as selling toothbrushes is not the same as selling automatic rifles. even though both can be used to kill people, one is optimized for keeping your teeth clean, while the other is optimized for causing injuries.
You can try to be clever by listing ways religion might relate to business, but that doesn't change the fact that businesses generally, and in many ways are legally required to, let people do their jobs regardless of their faith. It works just fine.
Everyone knows it's possible to make things more political. Being apolitical means doing the opposite. It's a very simple concept from kindergarten, "more" and "less".
Drawing some strained connection to politics doesn't magically make it impossible for us to say "try to have less politics at work".
If I followed you around all day complaining that you're not vegan enough, you'd suddenly regain the ability to notice that some things are more political and more related to your job than others.
And we can’t really afford not to be involved in politics if that’s what it has devolved into. This isn’t about whether fiscal conservatism works or some foreign policy. We literally just elected people to the House who believe Trump is a savior combatting a Democratic ring of pedophiles who eat children. These people are showing up with assault rifles at places of business (see: Pizza Gate).
I think the most likely scenario here is that people who are pushing for their startups to take a stance are those who believe in science and human rights, and can’t stand to watch as the rest of the country buys into the madness. Because you can be sure that the people peddling this disinformation are absolutely fine with their businesses having a political stance.
See Koch brothers, Hobby Lobby, Chik Fil A, the police with their thin blue line flags and blue lives matter slogan.
If you want to ban talk about political discussion on economic policy from your business, fine, no one cares. But realistically thats not what this is about.
(I'm sure Alito thinks it means something else, but Alito is the only genuine nutbag on the court).
Yes, it may be hard, or it may be easy, to leave religion out of the workplace. Depending how religious you are, and how pervasive religious practices are in your culture. But it is in a totally different scale as leaving politics out of the workplace, or keeping politics out of the business.
As an example. If you make a strict separation of religion and the workplace, you just made a political decision. An employee who’s religion dictates they prey every morning, and you ask them to do so outside of the workplace, then you are doing politics.
The power dynamics involved in running a business and having workers means that you must make political decisions at some point. It is not like being an atheist because: a) a business is not a person, b) a religious decision usually does not affect people other then you self, and c) often being “apolitical” and not taking a stance, is simply taking a stance with the status quo. Not doing your morning prayer is not this nuanced.
Saying "but this other thing is vaguely political" (or religious) is no excuse to insist that your company get involved in your pet causes.
Not that long ago religion WAS public policy (and depending where you live on the globe it still is; it's a spectrum).
We slowly segregated religion out of the business mattering for everyday life, but that just left a void what got filled by the same social and psychological mechanism that underpins religions.
While I believe it's incorrect to state that the current identity based political climate is just religion in disguise, it does share a hell lot of characteristics to dismiss the ties.
Businesses take political and religious actions all the time.
Hobby Lobby refused to pay for any health insurance plan that covered contraception because they believed them to be abortifacients and contrary to the christian values of the corporation.
The difference today is that now it is employees rather than owners pushing for a certain stance.
Nobody's claiming that work is completely unrelated to religion or politics. That's just the inverse of the stupid claim that because work sometimes involves those things, we might as well do them as much as we want.
Hobby Lobby filed the lawsuit that they are famous for. And they won the case? What an ignorant reply.
This is rather an argument why not the employer, but the employee should pay for the health coverage. As they say in Germany:
"Wer zahlt, schafft an."
("who pays, commands", where the verb "anschaffen" (which I translate with "command" here) has the undertone of "giving sexual orders to a prostitute that she has to follow")
Is there a way to go back from your binary opposition:
- "I support what you are doing and will help you"
- "I oppose what you are doing and will fight you"
- "I support what you are doing and will contribute to your cause"
- "I don't care what you are doing and will sell you the same services as to anyone else (I am only interested in your money)"
- "I oppose what you are doing and will do what I can to impede your cause"
When you say "political decision", what do you mean? I suppose it is possible to regard every decision one makes (eating at McDonalds, buying a MacBook, driving a car, riding a bike, doing sports, watching news, going to college, etc.) as political. It's almost certainly not how people prefer to think.
Not everything a business does is political, but when a business chooses to remain apolitical on an issue which effect the lives of other people—especially those who work for the business or who’s lives are affected by the customers or the product of that business—they are making a political decision. And more often then not a rather poor one.
I prefer to test principles by inverting the politics and seeing if I still agree: what about the gay wedding cake guy? Was he justified in refusing a commodity average cake to a gay couple?
And you aren't good enough (and never will be).
This kind of ignorant, childlike approach to politics is why the Democrats are going to lose so hard in 2022... and God forbid the Republicans stumble onto their version of Barack Obama... 2024 will be a nightmare.
When I eat at Chick-fil-A, I'm not making a statement that I want gay people to be eradicated, I just like goddamned pressure fried chicken sandwiches. When I buy something from a company that produces their goods in China, I'm not saying I want Uyghurs to be slaughtered en masse.
In fact, in every single one of these instances, I'm not actively giving a shit - or making a statement - about either of those things... I'm doing it because I haven't eaten since 6 a.m., or because I need a USB-C cable, not because I hate gay people and Chinese Muslims.
This is why the did business with == “fully support” equivalence is so dumb.
As the culture war has become a bigger part of politics, like the grandfather comment suggest, more of these issues fall into that second bucket in which it is tough to accept neutrality.
If he could do that with a female roommate why shouldn't he be allowed do that with his male roommate? It isn't reasonable to object to gay marriage on a technicality like that while also being fine with the laws regarding straight marriage.
I personally think that this is outdated, and that we should incentivize such things in more direct ways if we should at all, but this is a reasonable point of disagreement prima facie.
Straight couples can get married without any plans to have a child. Why is is different for gay couples?
Gay couples can also have a child either through adoption or biologically with a surrogate or sperm donor.
And at the same time, it is true that a gay couple can have children through adoption, or biologically.
It is for both of these reasons that I disagree with the argument.
That being said, at the time when the argument was relevant, the overwhelming majority of married heterosexual couples did have children, and gay adoption as well as IVF were not really a thing.
But nowadays, of course, anyone making this argument would be making it from bias. In the framing of the thread, which was the 1940s, it is more reasonable.
There is also the scientific question of whether sexual orientation is innate or a preference. For a long time, the science was wrong. Key research was done on that in the 1990s and early 2000s, and that filtered into the public conscience over time. Even as late as 2013, only 40% of Americans recognized that sexual orientation was innate. But once that premise became accepted, support for legalizing same-sex marriage quickly followed.
In the context of the US, your arguments are compelling, but they show exactly why the issue isn’t “morally indisputable.” It’s worth reading carefully through Obergefell. It spends a great deal of time establishing several things. First, that sexual orientation is innate and immutable: “Only in more recent years have psychiatrists and others recognized that sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable. See Brief for American Psychological Association et al. as Amici Curiae 7–17.” Second, that the understand of marriage had in fact changed to deemphasize children. Third, that new studies had shown that large numbers of same-sex couples were in fact raising children together. All of these established why same-sex unions should be protected as part of the fundamental constitutional right to marriage. Other approaches were possible and had been advanced. Some on the left wanted a broader rethinking of traditional marriage as a social institution. Obergefell could have treated marriage as just some government tax benefit, which was the libertarian view. Instead, it doubled down on the fundamental importance of traditional marriage, and the government’s legitimate interest in recognizing and promoting that institution, while expanding it to same-sex couples. It was very much the product of political debate and compromise amongst a variety of positions.
And in the end, this debate was ultimately a good thing because the political process fostered understanding and consensus. Same-sex marriage has become accepted quite rapidly. (Abortion rights, by contrast, remain highly contentious and no consensus has ever developed.)
This is rather an argument for a change in taxation laws instead of gay marriage.
Didn't I already give the reason? Because it could be used as a loophole in the tax law, that men and women in temporary relationships didn't exploit, even if divorce is instant and the high earner can keep all the wealth that had been taxed at a lower rate. (Because women generally don't let themselves get used like that.) On the other hand, in a community property state, with no pre-nup, that loophole is closed.
It's also generally reasonable, as a structural concept, to object to the idea that laws should treat men and women equally, or men/women and men/men pairings, as some kind of universal principle. California's legislature adopts this stance: it outlaws same-sex boards (at least all-male ones) in publicly traded companies.
Similarly, it's reasonable to examine the question of same-sex relationship laws with more nuance than saying everything should be the same as marriage because equality. Maybe the divorce and taxation laws should be different, because the straight ones ought to be written with children and rapidly declining female fertility in mind. Maybe the "next of kin" definition or inheritance laws should be adjusted, when it comes to extended family. Maybe gay marriage should have a fine-grained series of check boxes to opt in to each of the privileges and duties and consequences, because that's just good customer service for gay citizens, but straight marriage should be all or nothing, for good reasons.
Also, what is the scope of what people can “reasonably disagree” about? You mention same-sex marriage, but that’s illegal in most countries, including Switzerland. Are people in Switzerland, and India, and every single Muslim country in the world, for the most part not “reasonable?” And even in countries where it is legal, laws on related issues like surrogacy or religious exemptions vary. I’m talking about very socially liberal countries like France and Germany, where surrogacy is banned.
(1) Yes, bigotry against LGBT people makes Switzerland, India, and Indonesia less reasonable.
(2) The United States is generally underrated when it comes to moral clarity. We get a lot of stuff distinctively right and should pat ourselves on the back more often than we do.
(3) There clearly is a threshold past which we can refer directly to moral clarity, and can't hide behind the ambiguity of politics. It's been 73 years, and a lot of people on this thread don't have to Google "IG Farben", or, for that matter, to consult Wikipedia to know what I mean when I allude to IBM's complicity in the early 20th century. Some issues just are clear.
I agree there are some issues that are beyond politics. But there is an impulse to expand that category beyond what fairly fits in it. The debate and compromise attendant in politics is how societies achieve consensus, and prematurely stifling it creates problems.
But I disagree with you that reasonable countries can debate discriminating against gay people. The countries that do that are, in that way, lesser than the countries that don't. Seems pretty simple to me.
Also I want to point out that I specifically called the argument unreasonable and not the people. I meant "unreasonable" as a synonym to illogical. There is no real logical consistency to any arguments that there should be added legal benefits for straight couples that don't apply for gay couples. All the arguments fundamentally come down to some sort of bias against gay people which can be ideological or spiritual but are never based on reason or logic.
The rational/logical argument for opposing gay marriage has two strands:
1. Marriage != civil unions. You can have equal legal rights without the religious concept of marriage being involved, and many countries already had that, so the effort to go further in many places didn't involve doing anything beyond upsetting religious people. It didn't make the lives of gay people better in any specific legal ways. You seem to be conflating the two.
2. The historical taboo against homosexuality is because such couples don't produce children, and thus must be supported in old age or times of famine etc by the wider community who may not feel any particular loyalty to them. In a world where the family is the primary unit of support, such couples can end up with nobody to support them, and moreover, don't contribute to creating the next generation.
The concerns in (2) may seem parochial given the existence of the welfare state and contemporary concerns about over-population. But although it's a sad and scary prospect, it won't be a huge surprise if homophobia comes back in future generations because the demographic deficit is enormous and nobody's talking about it. The welfare state and pension schemes depends critically on a growing and strong economy to support it, which boils down at some level to having enough people. Yet birth rates are far too low to sustain those systems over the long run. If pension funds start drying up because there aren't enough workers, then gay couples might end up being hit by a doubly whammy of (a) not having children who can support them if the state fails to do so and (b) popular resentment against them for contributing to the problem of a declining population.
Of course, neither problem would be their fault. They didn't choose their orientation. However, people certainly knew that centuries ago and the taboo existed and was propagated because society needed families and a growing population to be stable. If pension funds are in as much trouble as demographers claim, we may see a return to that world, and it won't be entirely irrational.
Why can't a corporation have a moral imperative that says "I will not participate in acts of cruelty"?
Corporations have a lot of power in our society and it seems having a moral guideline here would be beneficial to society as whole. Yes I know this can but both toward liberal and conservative ideals but overall I think it's a better position to have.
Thus, if it's legal then the company is doing nothing wrong. If they're harming someone then laws should change - which is what the democratic/legislative arm is for - and law suits should be filed.
I'm not against a company having a moral stance but to implicate all those that don't as bad moral actors when they system is set up the way it is seems a tad invidious.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Legislators work to try and capture what is right for now and the future, and in common law jurisdictions a claimant may (sometimes) sue and not have to wait for legislation. As I wrote, I'm not against anyone taking a positive moral stance but since there's no way to know or even agree on what is moral, to say that it's immoral to take no stance other than to work within the law (which is a already a very extensive moral code) would seem invidious.
Because it won't be consistent about it.
Lockdowns are the heart of cruelty. Mass, evil incarceration of entire populations without any evidence they work, such that millions of people have had to go without vital life saving cancer screenings, they've been losing their jobs, there have been suicides, etc. Incredibly cruel policies. So surely every corporation is going to be totally anti-lockdown, right?
Oh, what's that? There are tradeoffs, you disagree, etc.
Well, yeah. And that's why institutions of any kind shouldn't adopt such vague, naive, poorly thought out slogans. Even defining "acts of cruelty" is hard. Look at this thread. Some leftist immediately dragged it into the standard tirade against US immigration control. Why is the cruelty there being inflicted by those who enforce the laws rather than the parents who take their children on an adventure of illegal immigration, knowing full well what the consequences may be? You can slice it both ways, depending on perspective.
That's why smart firms stay out of these debates, unless they were specifically founded to take a position on one of them. But it seems Valley tech firms are increasingly not so smart. That's OK, it'll be good to have a free competitive edge over them.
The American family separation thing the person above you mentioned, for instance, falls into the line of unacceptable for me, but for some people it's an acceptable response to illegal immigration. This is, indeed, very, very hard.
Article 16 (3):
> The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
When a government sanctioned agency engages in something that is probably illegal (and definitely immoral) and you still think they are worthy of your business, you are complicit in their actions.
Many would argue, correctly or not, that the policies of not having children housed with whatever adult they cross the border with is in service of avoiding child trafficking.
> The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
and:
"children and their parents must be housed together when incarcerated"
That clause (perhaps the entire UN declaration of human rights) seems incredibly ambiguous. Reading the whole declaration seems like it, perhaps, means protection of the specific enumerated rights of part 16 sections 1/2 which seems basically like the right for anyone to marry or not anyone they want and for that person to terminate the marriage when they choose.
There is also the issue of why they are incarcerated in the first place. They have committed no crime, migration and seeking refuge is protected under international law.
The UN universal declaration of human rights is written to be easily accessible and understood by the general public. And given that it was written 75 years ago I think they did a good job. I actually recommend everyone to read it entirely in your native language, as it has probably been translated into it and will only take a few minutes. A beautiful document indeed.
The important thing here though is not how rigorously defined these rights are, but the spirit of the law is clearly saying that the family is a fundamental unit of society. Separating the family unit is a failure to uphold that principal.
I must admit it sounds like the stuff of paranoid fantasy.
Update: this from Channel 4 seems reasonably calm and balance. I had to hunt through a lot of clickbaity headlines to find it: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-were-mass-...
For a country with a documented history of disrespect for bodily autonomy it seems entirely in line with expected behaviour to me.
Didn't the Ninth Circuit federal court order ICE to follow this practice? See the Flores Consent Decree.
What is the threat model here? If the adult they are crossing with is trying to sell the child in the US, then having the adult and child detained together still prevents this.
Also, at $250 for a paternity test, wouldn't a cost-benefit analysis make it rational to do that rather than risk the (more expensive) harm of separating a child from their parent?
Until the detention is over and then you release them together?
One threat model is child abuse. Detaining them together enables abuse. Another threat model is deceiving the government about the child trafficking. Separating the child and the adult allows investigators to question them separately without the adult coaching the child when investigators are not present.
> Also, at $250 for a paternity test, wouldn't a cost-benefit analysis make it rational to do that rather than risk the (more expensive) harm of separating a child from their parent?
This is a good point but not all children are biological offspring of their legal parents. When you suspect trafficking and the adult claims the child is adopted what do you do?
You do know that the very child separation policy you decry was implemented specifically to prevent child trafficking and keeping children away from people that can’t be verified to be related?
Kidnapping doesn't cease to be kidnapping just because it was done by a government official.
So, being political at a company level means defining a morals for companies that transcends de jure laws. Which is, basically, another set of uber-laws but without any real oversight nor finesse.
In the end refusing selling a computer to ICE should be like refusing to sell a soda to a black person: a clear case of discrimination. And companies should be threatened with dissolution if so; moral focused groups can then just create foundations or churches instead.
This is a political problem that can only be solved politically (by voting) not by some tech companies doing small scale boycott
Yet, big companies have had boycotts internally and that lead to the company changing its course. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/google-will-not-renew-a-cont... And, yeah, sometimes the efforts only work for a short period but they still had an effect.
Voting is nice but - most often - you don't get a real choice with voting. You choose one corrupt politician for another because more money == more speech. The uninformed masses who are more concerned with their own daily lives (divorce, family deaths, their children, etc.) are what are making large decisions for the rest of the informed. The cycle perpetuates.
Project Maven continues, now run by Palantir. Google's refusal to continue the project did nothing but slow down the project by a few months.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-14/palantir-...
In fact, considering the goals of Project Maven (roughly making sure you're blowing up what and who you intend and avoiding collateral damage), if you consider Google a leader in AI, you could make the perverse argument that you're actually killing people by reducing the effectiveness and delaying the timeline of the program. I'm not saying I've researched this enough to say that this is a correct or even plausible argument, merely that it is possible.
You're only complicit if you pay taxes.
Refuse to pay or reduce your income below the taxable threshold and you will no longer be complicit.
Politics is a lot more than just voting, especially when you have a two-party system that is vulnerable to ratcheting and deception.
Not really, no. You don't have to make money. You're able to live a life free of income and taxes, live like a vagabond.
You choose to earn enough income that you have to pay taxes on it. If you decide to get a job that pays you enough that you have to pay taxes, you're complicit.
No such conclusion if everyone stops selling software to ICE until they stop their grossly inhumane actions.
Again, you choose to make a taxable income; you choose to pay taxes.
Obeying the law is like that.
Remember that any time you support the marijuana market (legal or illegal) as a purchaser and indirectly add demand to the curve that feeds the cartels in Mexico.
I hope you support drug legalization, otherwise this attitude is massively hypocritical.
And please explain why buying legal marijuana supports the cartels? Are people buying Mexican brick weed from dispensaries now?
Until people refuse to smoke illegal marijuana en mass, the markets are effectively the same.
> hope you support drug legalization, otherwise this attitude is massively hypocritical.
This is completely orthogonal to legalization. As long as the cartels still get it into the country at a competitive price to local growers (legal or illegal), the cartels are being supported.
Which will only happen when it's legalized, which is exactly my point.
BTW, I'm not misleading you in the other thread. I know no one wants to believe that their own government could do that, but unfortunately they did. It's an "open secret", something like NSA spying was circa 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud
Bandar helped negotiate the 1985 Al Yamamah deal, a series of massive arms sales by the United Kingdom to Saudi Arabia worth GB£40 billion, including the sale of more than 100 warplanes. After the deal was signed, British arms manufacturer British Aerospace (now BAE Systems) allegedly funnelled secret payments of at least GB£1 billion into two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington, in yearly instalments of up to GB£120 million over at least 10 years. He allegedly took money for personal use out of the accounts, as the purpose of one of the accounts was to pay the operating expenses of his private Airbus A340. According to investigators, there was "no distinction between the accounts of the embassy, or official government accounts [...], and the accounts of the royal family." The payments were discovered during a Serious Fraud Office investigation, which was stopped in December 2006 by attorney general Lord Goldsmith.[68][69] In 2009, he hired Louis Freeh as his legal representative for the Al-Yamamah arms scandal.[70]
A court affidavit filed on 3 February 2015 claims that Zacarias Moussaoui was a courier between Osama bin Laden and Turki bin Faisal Al Saud in the late 1990s, and that Turki introduced Moussaoui to Bandar.[72] Zacarias Moussaoui stated on oath and wrote to Judge George B. Daniels that Saudi royal family members, including Prince Bandar, donated to Al-Qaeda and helped finance the 11 September attacks. The Saudi government continues to deny any involvement in the 9/11 plot, and claims there is no evidence to support Moussaoui's allegations in spite of numerous previous intense investigations, noting that Moussaoui's own lawyers presented evidence of his mental incompetence during his trial. Leaked information from the redacted portion of the 9/11 Commission Report states that two of the 9/11 hijackers received $US130,000 in payment from Bandar's bank account.
It’s an extremely common philosophy that if your actions aren’t politically motivated then you’re being apolitical but I don’t think that works in the real world because those actions have real political effects/consequences regardless of whether you considered them or not.
Is there a practical difference between someone choosing to join your cause and your coercing someone to join your cause?
Is there a practical difference between someone choosing to remain uninvolved and someone choosing to join the opponents of your cause?
Yes, in that one involves coercion, which in itself has a moral weight.
> Is there a practical difference between someone choosing to remain uninvolved and someone choosing to join the opponents of your cause?
Yes, in that those are different actions and as such will produce different outcomes.
I assume that those two hypotheticals were intended as counterexamples to the principle that being involved in activity that produces or contributes to harm is wrong even if you don't specifically intend the harm.
It's not as if e.g. buying a kidney on the black market is morally equivalent to kidnapping a person and surgically removing it from them (presuming that that is how the vendor acquired it). But it's more absurd to pretend that you can engage in that transaction, proclaim "I didn't intend and don't condone any harm ensuing from the acquisition of this organ" and thus absolve yourself of any guilt.
That's not how discussions work around here. And, frankly, you sound a bit condescending.
Yes, I know--offering obvious expository answers to obviously rhetorical questions is how discussions work around here. ;)
> I assume that those two hypotheticals were intended as counterexamples to the principle that being involved in activity that produces or contributes to harm is wrong even if you don't specifically intend the harm.
That's not the principle in question. The claim, AIUI, is that to not participate in a certain political cause--to remain neutral--is equivalent to joining with the opponents of the cause. IOW, "inaction is action," "you're with us or you're against us," etc.
> And, frankly, you sound a bit condescending.
Wow, two thought-provoking questions and a friendly statement, and I've already condescended. How dare I, right?
Keep HN'ing, mate!
That's not the point. It's okay to pose rhetorical questions, and it's okay to address a specific user with genuine questions. It is not okay, however, to ask a specific user rhetorical, leading questions, because that makes it seem like you want to "win" this discussion.
Pretty sure that reading my mind and accusing me of bad faith is a violation of The Guidelines. Maybe you should take a leave of absence from the HN Volunteer Police Department.
Classic HN... "Can't you just let me rake in all this cash without the guilt trip over all the bad things I'm doing?"
All kinds of atrocities have been committed with the full force of the law behind them. It doesn't make them any less of an atrocity.
"Is it moral?" is a complex question in many cases and that's partly why the courts exist - to help transform those moral questions with subjective answers into actionable objective ones.
Discussion of that complexity and those obstacles is not helped by simplistic condemnation of those who don't share your (general "your") point of view either on the political topic itself or the more abstract argument of corporate stance generally.
But it doesn’t answer the question of what to do when a company’s actions in the natural course of business will end up taking a stance even if that stance is the status quo.
These people are honestly and in good conscience saying “that is legal, but extremely immoral and my conscience refuses to allow me to participate.”
There is currently a case before the SCOTUS regarding whether adoption agencies can discriminate against gays and lesbians.
Again this is by people who have thought deeply about the issue, and decided that public policies is immoral. They are refusing to support it because they honestly believe it’s immoral.
Can’t the government say “you’re entitled to your beliefs, but you’re not entitled to act on them in the public sphere?”
This doesn’t mean that companies have to change their tune but it doesn’t mean that they are absolved of the consequences of their decisions.
If there are failings in government, it's best to address the problems there. I'm not saying corporations won't expand its power over government if given the ability to do so, it's absolutely in its best interest to do so. The issue is they shouldn't be able to in the first place. A corporation is in essence an absolute dictatorship, and really shouldn't be given the power to exert an ideology over anything other than the purview of running the organization.
Further, I'd argue selling a service or product with no judgement of the buyer is also nonpolitical, even ICE. I'm not sure what the opposite side of ICE is, if it exists, but as long as you'd be willing to sell to that entity also, it can still be politically 'neutral.' Only when you decide to refuse or discontinue something have you made a stand, which is what many said about Cloudflare's semi recent takedown and why it was murky.
You cannot live your entire life on principle, some hills just aren’t worth dying on. This is really clear for the issue of the climate disaster. There is only so much a person can do, and industry has very much taken advantage of it and sold us the illusion of green consumerism. While people were busy buying energy savings light bulbs, industrial scale polluters simply kept on polluting. If the failure to tackle the climate disaster has taught me anything it is that living by principal is quite often a distraction.
Now back to the office building where all the businesses flag bigoted flags. Here is a hill that for me personally is to much for me to handle, unless my workplace would publicly denounce these bigoted views and at least publicly shame the neighboring offices, I would not want to be seen near there. If they did nothing I would interoperate that as complacency with bigotry and I could not accept that my workplace has those view (even though not directly stated).
(I’m ignoring what you say about terrorists and illegals [sic] as I don’t think I fully understand what you mean there).
---
EDIT: I know this sounds contradictory to my ancestor where I say that selling your service to ICE is a political decision, but it is not. What a person does is not nearly as significant as what a business does, and should not be judged by the same standards.
It’s not that you are wrong when you say “All lives matter”, heck I might find my self saying exactly this when I speak out against death penalty or bomb manufacturers.
But when you say this as a response to BLM you are being an asshole. You are saying that I can’t emphasize the importance of black people’s right to life in a society that seemingly to me treats them as lesser.
No, when one says it in response to BLM, they’re neither being an asshole nor or they saying you can’t emphasize anything. You can say whatever you want obviously. When people say it, they mean it literally, and they believe that the divisive rhetoric is harmful. Which seems to be supported by the evidence.
The slogan itself was born of a lie and a false narrative, which they continue to perpetuate. There’s no reason to continue allowing its use as a political weapon.
BLM is a cause. It's OK to care about other causes too. Is it racist of my company to buck the norm and put up a flag or fliers supporting an environmental cause like recycling or composting instead?
You're right, though; politics cannot be completely avoided. I just hope my friends don't assume I'm racist because I'm not constantly publicly shepherding racial equality and civil rights. A person should be allowed to have other hobbies and interests. A person should not be required to be vocal and outspoken. Neither should businesses.
As an employee, I'd prefer if my company did its part in hiring diverse candidates and fair pay, but I don't want to work at a place where I feel compelled to join in political discussions and movements that aren't really part of my job description.
One can argue that we can limit our political activism inside US (btw, I'm not an American). Fair enough. But even if we do that, there are a lot of political issues in US. Let's say one employee cares about racism issue, then there is another employee who cares more about environment causes, and finally there is another employee who cares more about censorship. At one point, the resources of the company will be spread too thin to support all of these causes.
In my example I purposely created a situation in which the business is forced into making a decision. And that decision will be made on a political basis.
If you operate a delivery company, and a factory farmer approaches you to deliver to grocery stores nationwide, you suspect it might be used to transport their specialty, veal. If you say: “I’m not doing politics!” and decide to transport their goods, you are being complacent in the torture of sentient baby mammals, and therefor just did some (highly questionable) politics. If you deny them, you also did (morally correct) politics.
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Note the above is only partially tongue-in-cheek, but I do it to make two points:
1. To you, your political viewpoints are obviously "morally correct". But the whole point is many people disagree with what you consider morally correct. I used my veal example because I feel it's something a lot of people on HN wouldn't have much of a problem with, but to me it clearly is torture to these animals, and the only reason society at large doesn't have more of a problem with it is because how the animals are treated is mostly hidden from view.
2. My broader point is that virtually every company could sell some product or service that could be used to further an end that equal number of people on both sides could think is morally horrid or morally righteous. It's dangerous to think that your view is the only right one.
You think you are on the moral high ground here, which is why you are taking such a strong stand.
Also, I think you were looking for "complicit", not complacent. You are also wrong there as well. We are voters, that is how we approve or disapprove of government actions. Not everyone has a high paying job and can afford the luxury of ignoring new clients or stopping business because of some holier-than-thou nonsense. People have bills to pay.
2. Selling hammers to the general public is not the same as catering a service to a single client that engages in human rights abuse.
3. Working for a company is not the same as controlling a company that engages in bad politics.
Some idiot chooses to try to make it political in nature and a bunch of other equally uninformed idiots believes the original idiot or takes up the cause.
Example 1: SaaS company is breaking no American laws and ICE isn't either. The fact you even think its morally correct to deny them service screams how ideologically possessed you are. Here's a hot fuckin' take for you... don't illegally come to America.
Example 2: I don't know enough about intellectual property and open source contributions to have an opinion.
Example 3: Maybe you're not doing politics, maybe you're just not a shitbag.
Example 4: Maybe you don't give a shit and just want to be left alone.
Example 5: You're just a controlling asshole, not politically against Palestine.
I would say, "I hope you get the point", but you won't... because its clear just from these examples alone you're so politically motivated that you can't see the world from any other vantage point.
That doesn't make it apolitical. Politics is more than just what's legal and what's not. ICE is a political organization, and there are different political stances that support it or don't. A company doing business with ICE supports it in some way, and is therefore political.
> The fact you even think its morally correct to deny them service screams how ideologically possessed you are. Here's a hot fuckin' take for you... don't illegally come to America.
Sounds like you have your own political stance on ICE and the work they do, and whether it's okay for a company to provide services to them. This only proves the parent's point.
> Maybe you're not doing politics, maybe you're just not a shitbag.
These are not mutually exclusive, in fact they are often closely related. The example the parent gave about worker pay, unionization, etc, are political issues - they are associated with political stances, and have been since the beginning.
You may think something is immoral, but we live in a nation with agreed upon processes for setting laws. You can't opt out of that and create your own private immigration law based on your own opinion.
You are free, however, to lobby and convince others to change the immigration laws. That is doing politics. You are free to even advocate for open borders if you want. It's a legitimate view. Reasonable people hold this view, although the same people understand you can't have a welfare state with porous borders. But it's not a view that most people agree with. Most prefer the generous welfare state and border control. Most people are perfectly fine with removing those who enter illegally back to their home countries.
If you think this is the embodiment of evil, then lobby to have the law changed, but don't try to enforce your own private immigration law. That's not doing "politics", that's throwing a tantrum. Politics involves working with the political system to convince a majority coalition to back your views. Throwing a tantrum is saying "ICE bad!! No business with ICE". Decide whether you want businesses to act like adults or like emotional children.
Is your defense of IBM’s work in Germany in the 1930s also that they were just following the law and were therefore (as you’re implying) politically neutral?
You do not, however, have to participate in another nation's immigration policies. This lack of understanding of jurisdictions may be why you think IBM cooperating with a foreign nation such as Germany is equivalent to IBM, an American firm, obeying American laws, working with American legal frameworks and participating in the American lawmaking process. If you are in a situation, say IBM Germany, where you think it's immoral to participate in that regime, then your only option is to shut down the business entirely and relocate to a jurisdiction you can work with. Then you will be working in that nation's laws. But in no universe do you get to create your own immigration policies. Why this is so hard to understand for some people is truly baffling. It's like they don't grok what a nation is, which might be why they don't understand the role of borders.
It's morally correct in your opinion.
This is the crux of the problem - corporate bodies taking a single stance while being comprised of multiple individuals with differing takes on the (often complicated) issues at hand.
Atheism is not a religion.
Bald is not a color of hair.
Not collecting anything is not a hobby.
Not putting the BLM flag out is not politics.
You are confusing a willful engagement of opinion for a contractual or procedural obligation.
Did you pay any federal taxes this year to support ICE instead if refusing to pay them? You just took a supportive political stance.
Maybe this is an extension of cancel culture; you're either with us or against us. If you don't believe what we believe then you're evil and we must do everything we can to drown you out. The statement here even has it. If you work with ICE you're morally incorrect and highly questionable. Never mind that it's legal and supported by ~50% of the population.
I’m not saying society hasn’t gotten more partisan, but businesses have been doing politics as long as they have been so powerful that their behavior can affect other people significantly. Perhaps there is another reason for this appearance of increased political activity by businesses. Possible explanation include:
- Businesses are doing worse politics now then before.
- News outlets are better at covering when a business is doing politics.
- Public opinion has shifted in what constitutes as bad politics.
- Public opinion is better reflected through better journalism.
But regardless, I don’t buy it when you say that “people were OK about companies not being political a decade ago”. Ten years ago we were in the middle of the great recession, companies were getting unfounded government bailouts and rich CEOs were being payed massive bonuses despite this. The general public was not happy about this. Receiving government bailout in a middle of a recession is very much participating in politics, we would perceive as such today, and people did so a decade ago.
What's the end state of companies being political? There is a huge number of issues at play at any given time. Do companies have to take a stance for every single one of them? Then can companies only appeal to the intersection of all those dimensions where there is a strict match between consumer and company stance? Do we have a list of pro BLM and not pro BLM companies? Then within each of those pro Palestine and not pro Palestine companies? Where does it end?
Lobby groups, human rights associations, charities and polticial groups would gladly take your ICE funded profits and work for your goals.
The requirement for bosses and employees to be personally calling political shots in their personal and professional lives makes me think the corporations would prefer to be divided so they can make the call on their own terms.
We know ICE can get SAAS services elsewhere so what consequence is really being prosecuted here?
Or please define "political decision".
Disagree. Family separation for illegal border crossings was an Obama-era policy that only became considered an important issue by the left when when the government changed. This is a matter of optics, not ethics.
I don't know how anyone can say this and be considered a serious person.
One American party denies climate change, downplays COVID19, tries to take healthcare from millions, tries to disenfranchise anyone not voting for them, limits legal immigration and asylum seekers, and refuses to admit there is a problem with systemic racism.
But by all means, remain "apolitical," since apparently this isn't about policy anymore. Wacky stuff man...
Being apathetic to politics is consequential in and of itself.
As to your claim about immigration, I'm not interested in defending any particular policy position. But, there is some research that indicates immigration boosts overall labor participation [1].
http://giovanniperi.ucdavis.edu/uploads/5/6/8/2/56826033/per...
It doesn't help your case when you lump arguable, but sane positions with denying climate change.
They're particular to the modern conservative party.
Many of my liberal friends believe in crazy stuff like russiagate or defending BLM looters/rioters or proudly voting for a political candidate that supported bombings in the middle east that lead to the death of countless civilians (including kids) while simultaneously villainizing Dubya for being a war mongering criminal.
You'll have to excuse me for not seeing your "clear delineation" - whatever that means.
This doesn’t describe either party. Also, there isn’t a problem with systemic racism. And no, I don’t support the party that you think.
- Employers have a direct role in the social safety net, for example choosing health care and retirement savings options for their employees.
- Related to above, because there are limited gov't protections for things like vacation and childcare leave, and firing in general, employer policies form a bigger part of work/life tradeoffs.
- The US workforce has more diversity than most countries along several axes, including race, age, and immigration status, so employer policies about minority protections impact more employees.
Since stances on the policy areas above form the main battleground for American politics, companies make many decisions that are politically valenced.
And/or did the government decide to push their politics and religion on Hobby Lobby via their healthcare legislation?
(edit: not endorsing either the government's position, just saying that yes, government is exactly where we see politics being forced on things)
I accept, though, that corporations are artificial constructs that exist (ostensibly) to benefit humans, and therefore placing restrictions and duties on corporations is inherently preferable to placing them on humans themselves.
Elsewhere in the thread, you call these "Europe good, USA bad" points. I certainly don't think that's intrinsically true. It's just a different interface that puts more choices in the hands of employers instead of government. A side effect is that employers are going to get judged by employees, investors , customers and the public about how they make those choices.
The issue is that when someone says "let's stay away from politics", it's pedantic and obtuse to start listing things that in some way involve politics.
It's clear what they meant: the more something is related to politics and unrelated to work, the more we should try to avoid it.
Your response does the exact opposite of that, bringing up a bunch of hot-button political issues tenuously related to work, which is a great way to bring more conflict about politics into the workplace.
My list was about how the US has more issues requiring good faith discussion, which certainly opens the door to bad faith as well.
As far as using "let's stay away from politics" as a magic wand to shut down a topic, you are expecting people to agree with you about what belongs at work without discussion or judgement. I think companies and individuals can make things more efficient by clearly articulating a mission, and by proactively taking a stance about how hot-button issues relate to that mission or not. But nothing is going to exempt you from judgement when people disagree, and there's always the chance that you really are the bad guy. That's life with other humans.
Everything in the US is political now: face masks, 5G networks, vaccines, mail. Facebook dominates people's lives yet is an endless spam of politics. Google search is facing anti-trust because it is "liberal", while the ISPs and other monopolies are strangely un-molested. Every tech company, apolitical or not, is automatically suspected by half of the country mostly because of their address.
But just for clarity, the major US debate is whether the election was fraudulent or not which is considerably higher stakes than a contest of identity. You can hedge your corporate bets by having no opinion on the mater but necessarily one of those parties is directly subverting the democracy. For anyone ok with that, then silence is undoubtedly a profitable path: why cut your business in half and alienate half of potential customers/employees over mere democracy?
Also, what does Brazil have to do with this? I live here. Are you under the impression that Brazil is under the rule of a dictator or something?
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13301372676801863...
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13304872462360289...
https://twitter.com/LizRNC/status/1330186217355350020
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13303679886215946...
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13305556452134830...
> If you were a businessman in Germany during WW2 you would not have been a brave warrior fighting to preserve democracy, you'd just have moved on with your life and kept running your business, as would have (and as did) most people.
Different people have different opinions about right and wrong. A different set behaviors by a large number of people would bring about a different outcome. Left unchecked, the luxury of dissent becomes more and more painful for company and individual.
On your first paragraph it seems to me a reasonable argument that if all the chemical companies in Germany dragged their feet, obfuscated, and ideally just outright refused to supply the government with poisonous gases, once it became clear they were being used on people, less people would have died.
Someone showing authoritarian tendencies does not mean the country is under authoritarian rule. I don't like Bolsonaro but he is very far from having any real power in the country. And I would say the same of Trump. I don't know anything about the others.
>On your first paragraph it seems to me a reasonable argument that if all the chemical companies in Germany
Why would they do that? Hitler was popular because he actually fixed a lot of problems in Germany at the time. Either way, my argument is still that businesses shouldn't support or not support any particular politician. They should just move on with their business impartially, even if "democracy" is being threatened or if their product is being used for evil. It's not your job to judge how people use your technology.
Not sure why reading a censored German press would give you an accurate view of public opinion, either; and the German citizens' writings will vary depending on which citizens you read, and how circumspect they were about writing.
[0]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/...
Since you recommended me a book, I recommend you this book in return https://www.amazon.com/Human-Smoke-Beginnings-World-Civiliza...
I didn't intend to recommend a book - the link is just a graph of Trump's approval polls over time - but I thank you for yours. I'm not a particularly big fan of 'official narratives', not least because I study issue frames and so many of them are self-serving.
Both engaged in many of the same drives towards furthering their own personal political agendas during their respective administrations and while Trump says many things more baldly, and certainly lies much more flippantly, I fail to see how either his executive decisions or administrative pushes were or are in any notable way actually more authoritarian than those of Obama.
Just because one leader speaks more blandly than another doesn't mean that their fundamental governing power is much different, or that the more bellicose sounding figure is somehow an authoritarian if he or she is still fully constrained by the rest of a democratic government apparatus.
Furthermore, many if not most of the tendencies towards much broader presidential authority that Trump currently enjoys were established by a whole history of executive expansion which came before his term, and some of those started under much less visibly aggressive presidents. Focusing on what the orange man says more than on the deeper dynamics behind his office seems to me like more an exercise in ideological labeling than sound analysis of what authoritarian leadership means.
I can foresee a near future where this becomes a very pertinent question. Suppose that, due to some underhanded dealings of the Electoral College (and/or SCOTUS), the current President were to be granted a second term. Further suppose that 70% of the country saw this process as illegitimate, but wanted to avoid any direct violent conflict.
My question is: Would big tech companies (or key employees within them) work together to implement a digital General Strike across the country?
This would be an extreme and probably criminal form of civil disobedience, although I imagine the perpetrators could be motivated by an expectation of receiving a presidential pardon if they were successful.
I'm sure that someone in the contingency planning departments of these big companies someone has gamed out what would happen if Apple and Google and Microsoft all pushed software updates to devices and online services which blocked certain activities (e.g. use by fossil fuel companies?) while controlling the media narrative by promoting messages from their side.
We have confused being politically active with being partisan.
Even this article conflates the two. Yet there is a world of difference between taking a policy stance and promoting a candidate or a party.
Companies have a legitimate stake in policy that commercially affects them. Nobody reasonably holds Uber and Lyft and DoorDash’s recent politicking in California against them. One may disagree, but it’s coherent. (Hobby Lobby taking a stance on gay rights, on the other hand, is incoherent.)
Companies must be politically active because nothing is apolitical. But companies shouldn’t be partisan. And when you are doing your work, the partisan affiliations of those around you should not matter.
What? I absolutely hold it against them, given how much of it was pure and unpunished chicanery like tricking drivers into agreeing to 'petitions' then used in published advertising.
It was logical for those companies to take political action in those instances in order to maintain their business models. How they did so may have been unsavoury, but that's orthogonal to the justification.
Abusing the app to force drivers to click "yes, i support this" under fear of a "no" click being recorded and held against them is just one small instance of the overall phenomenon.
Uber therefore qualifies.
What they invented was a business model that empowers capital and disempowers (some classes of) labor.
I hear their microservice architecture employs a lot of SWEs, though, so they've got that going.
If driving for Uber is worse than being a cab driver, why didn’t the vast majority of Uber drivers drive cabs before?
You don’t need to create completely innovative greenfield technologies in order to generate value.
If nothing was apolitical then we wouldn't have a word for it.
Both unicorns and apolitical actions are unreal fantasies.
The only things that seem apolitical are the things that are so widely agreed on that their true political nature is hard to discern. Once you have disagreement, especially widespread disagreement, the political nature becomes clear. For instance, take the idea of marriage only being between a man and a woman and go back 100 years. Back then, it would have gone without saying, but now it's "political" because many people have other ideas. Nothing changed, except the level of consensus.
The disagreement is what makes things political. There isn't an inherent "political" quality sitting in things. Existentialist's motto was: life is meaningless until you give it meaning. By analogy, most things in the world are apolitical until quarrelsome people with pet issues show up and make them political.
That's true in a sense (e.g. plate tectonics is not political), but it's false you start dealing with things that intersect with human society. For instance: anything to do with power over others, the makeup of society, or the kind of actions people are allowed, encouraged, or forbidden to do is inherently political.
> By analogy, most things in the world are apolitical until quarrelsome people with pet issues show up and make them political.
Not really, and that's just a pretty typical (political!) ad hominem argument made by people who want to maintain the status quo, whatever that is. Stated another way, you're saying the people who want change are troublemakers who should know their place.
First, that's only the case if you assume that by "political" I mean bad. But "political" isn't necessarily bad.
Secondly, and more importantly, to make something political is often to imagine some unjust status quo to be overturned. But imagination has power of reifying fantasies to actual events. In other words, to make something political is often to exercise power at the expense of others and to justify it by portraying your action as serving to overturn a status quo. Even status quo can use this to further their power! Freedom isn't always the net outcome of politics.
>> Stated another way, you're saying the people who want change are troublemakers who should know their place.
> First, that's only the case if you assume that by "political" I mean bad. But "political" isn't necessarily bad.
No, I assume that by "quarrelsome people with pet issues" you mean bad. I thought that was pretty obvious.
> In other words, to make something political is often to exercise power at the expense of others and to justify it by portraying your action as serving to overturn a status quo.
This is "speech is violence" level nonsense.
If someone challenges a status quo that you like ("makes something political" in your parlance), then actually defend that status quo. Don't gripe about how those quarrelsome people ruined your nice "apolitical day."
Incidentally, that right there is a good illustration of how being apolitical is different from supporting the status quo.
Going to a protest to defend the status quo from change is defending the status quo. Not having an opinion about some particular detail of how society operates is being apolitical.
> Incidentally, that right there is a good illustration of how being apolitical is different from supporting the status quo.
> Going to a protest to defend the status quo from change is defending the status quo. Not having an opinion about some particular detail of how society operates is being apolitical.
Not really. You're trying to restrict "doing politics" to certain overt political rituals ("going to a protest"), which I think is false restriction.
However, you missed my point in your incomplete quote: the act of griping that things should be kept "apolitical" is itself a kind of protest for the status quo, just a disguised one.
Now you might have a point that someone's ignorance of an issue could make them in some sense "apolitical" in relation to it. However, once the issue has been articulated to them in a way they understand, they're no longer ignorant and have taken some position, even if that's tacit approval of the status quo.
You've got black and brown lives right there, they're getting screwed. What, are we saving our powder?
Just as a customer, I hold it against a business when they too aggressively tell me how to vote. Campaign for whatever, but don't make me sit captive to it in order to do business with you.
No one is joining Coinbase if they're opposed to Coinbase's financial system objectives. It's not a secret.
If someone was actively opposed to Coinbase's primary business objectives, how would they even be a productive employee of Coinbase in the first place?
It's a false equivalency to try to equate the company's core business with completely unrelated political topics.
Lay political discourse (and especially partisan media) does frequently fit the description of identity banners and other tribal + value markers.
But it's also very, very wrong to say that politics has ceased being about policy and ideas. It is definitely true that there are marked differences between policy goals advanced by parties (and sometimes individuals within). And it's not exactly rare that you can find lay participants who have a policy or ideas that are important to them.
It sure looks that way if you watch american news. Reality is pretty different. Most people leave politics at home, and most companies try to be politically neutral - or at least try to be an "agent for good" while avoiding controversy.
This was long the norm in Europe and North America. Western Europe seems to have less of it at the moment, and perhaps for the last 25 years; the US had a ~30 year stretch from the mid 50s. The current situation is quite bad, but has of course been worse.
In practice having "no stance" means supporting the status quo
same with the other two?
IMO, no, no and no.
Where it becomes politics is when you start trying to force others to follow your preferred behaviours in those areas, over and above what the law requires. If you want to do that then you should vote and/or campaign to get the law changed, via the usual routes, and normally outside the workplace (unless directly related).
Well irs policy doesn’t allow tax free benefits in this fashion. So employees had to pay extra income tax that was “imputed” from these taxable benefits. And google paid the employees extra taxes.
Is this a political position? Would it make sense for google to cheer for sale sex marriage which reduces their own financial burden? Is it the right thing to do?
Or consider immigration... many high tech companies have substantial immigrant work forces. The thin wedge of the “Muslim ban” in 2017 was a threat to their businesses.
So it makes total sense that a company would engage in politics. Since some of the hot button political issues today boil down to “who is human and who gets full rights?”, yeah that’s a fight that one cannot turn a back to, and many companies cannot.
I'm not sure what issues you're referring to in your last para; I don't see any disputes over who's human. (I'm not in the US and am trying not to follow its politics too closely, in case it's contagious.)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/animal-news/orangutan-granted-l...
Voting "remain" in Brexit was supporting the status quo. Voting "leave" was opposing it. Having no stance on Brexit means having no stance on it.
We're allowed to not have opinions on everything.
You know, you're not allowed to say that in a lot of American offices now. Even in a technical context where it has an established meaning and multiple alternatives are now jockeying for mainstream. It's "exclusionary", which is a new HR code word for "politically incorrect". The battle is over and lost. Everything is politicized now, and all anyone who doesn't like it can do is fall on their sword. Alone.
Trying to remain neutral doesn’t work.
It's like the smartass kid who acts like he doesn't know what "clean" means because there might be a molecule of dirt somewhere.
One way is that the government makes decisions. Some of those decisions affect businesses. If the businesses don't give any input, the government still decides - they just decide in a vacuum. That could be sub-optimal for businesses. (I'm not talking about lobbying for special treatment - just sane policy as it affects your business.)
The second way politics can be done to you is that someone outside decides that you aren't active enough in supporting their political side, and therefore that you deserve to be destroyed. (At the moment, in the US, this seems to come mostly from the left, but that's not universal.) The only thing you can do to avoid that is try to move in lockstep with the most strident voices telling you what you should do... but I've never been a big fan of appeasement. My preferred approach is to ignore them - but then, I don't have to make a payroll, so it's really easy for me to say that.
> I'm not talking about lobbying for special treatment - just sane policy as it affects your business.
I wonder what sort of policies a coal company would view as "sane", as it affects their business.
> and therefore that you deserve to be destroyed. (At the moment, in the US, this seems to come mostly from the left
Are you perhaps limiting the scope of your consideration to just "cancel culture"? I don't want to make a whataboutist response, but it's not good to cherry-pick a single mechanism of political oppression (which is disproportionately used by people with a certain political leaning) and miss out other sorts, such as business owners firing employees, or violence by the state against unarmed civilians, or attacks by politically-motivated armed extremists.
Statements like yours are very easy to make and sound fine at a superficial level, but quickly run into problems when you try to actually apply the rule. For instance: does a company that sells drugs that can be used off-label for executions of human beings have a "product [that] is directly related to politics?"
This problem is a lot like writing good requirements. Your rule above is a lot like a requirement of an HR system that states simply "the system will reject the resumes of all unqualified candidates." There's a lot to unpack there, and that requirement, as stated, doesn't even get you 1% of the way there.
It's not that simple. If a gun store owner sells guns to people he knows are planning to commit a robbery, isn't he also guilty of a crime? Likewise, if a company sells materials for lethal injections to groups they know conduct executions, aren't they tacitly supporting a policy of capital punishment?
Also your comment leans very heavily on the definition of "political," which you leave totally undefined. Once you try to get consensus definition of that, you'll get into the same difficulty of unpacking it's meaning that I was referring to.
The kind of extreme "guilt by association" you derive cannot be considered a part of the political in terms of conscious action precisely because "the political" encompasses normal function of the society. Criminal activity, on the other hand, is not considered a part of normal function of a society, hence one can assume that everyone who "knows" a criminal but doesn't turn him in is also a criminal. In other words what you're doing is you are criminalizing normal para-political association---a characteristic of individuals with a totalitarian mindset. As a non-American, I have to say I am stunned to observe this attitude in the US.
Actually, I'm pretty sure it's you who doesn't have a very good definition of politics. My sense is that you understand it to basically be whatever's covered in the politics section of a newspaper, and maybe a few hot-button issues besides.
Also, what you're saying is contradictory. For instance, you're treating "legality" and "politics" as different things, when the law is itself a creature of politics.
You also misunderstood my point. You seem to be thinking that commerce is neutral, and the market transactions somehow insulate the participants from each other, but that's just not the case. A market transaction can facilitate an immoral action, which in some cases may be legal and other cases not. This is well understood, and in the case of illegal immoral actions is even punishable. The only thing that I think could be actually insulating in a transaction is a lack of knowledge by one party of what the other party plans.
> The kind of extreme "guilt by association" you derive cannot be considered a part of the political in terms of conscious action precisely because "the political" encompasses normal function of the society.
Society is political, full stop.
> In other words what you're doing is you are criminalizing normal para-political association---a characteristic of individuals with a totalitarian mindset. As a non-American, I have to say I am stunned to observe this attitude in the US.
Oh please, I wasn't talking about criminalizing anything that wasn't already criminal. I'm kinda stunned that you managed to talk yourself into that bizarre conclusion. My second example is literally this: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/us/pfizer-execution-drugs....
It's not, because the state isn't allowed to use literally any means to kill someone, so there's actually only a limited number of substances that are actually used.
> From the outside looking in, American politics has long since ceased being about policy and idea's, it is now a contest of identity where it doesn't matter what someone stands for so long as they are on the team I support.
Yeah I have intentionally avoided the media and political nonsense of the last decade or so, and it just seems increasingly absurd. Everyone is a radical activist these days. And to radicals, there is no neutral position.
There's no winning. Agree and risk setting yourself at odds against your peers and future managers, or disagree and put yourself at odds with the person who holds the purse for your team.
Even worse, complain to HR, and risk politically disagreeing with them.
I stuck with that job long enough to find something better, and almost regret staying with it as long as I did.
Many times managers are just unaware that their actions cause discomfort, and feedback could help and it is on the manager to encourage that process.
On a side note: small topics are always tricky , even sports can alienate co workers.
I shouldn't have had to
I didn't want to be "that guy"
Plenty of other commenters here would argue that doing so is really a political position (defending status quo), which would not at all be what I wanted to convey
It formed a hostile work environment, but not in a way that I wad legally protected from
The discussion wasn't simple honest debate or smalltalk, it was very much "did you see how team A person put down team B person last weekend? She was awesome!"
I should also make clear, this person wasn't my boss, he was director of the department- my boss's boss. He also had approximately 1 to 2 hours overlap in work schedule, as he lived practically on the other side of the globe (we had a world-wide team).
It is just that as a manager, I have been surprised how people think I would take offence on something and not mention it for a long time. I always considered it my responsibility to encourage my team even if they are 3-4 levels down to be able openly talk with me and tell me what I am doing wrong and how can i help them do their jobs better, if they are not able to do that, it is on me.
If the company had a proper feedback mechanism- whereby I could have left feedback for him anonymously (so that only his boss would see my name) I might have felt more comfortable bringing it up.
Broadly speaking. Point being, it's easy to not want "politics" in the workplace when the workplace works well for you. If you're someone whom the workplace doesn't work well for, like a person of color, a pregnant woman, new mother, or new father, for that matter, well, then it's a different story.
If you yourself believe that sexism/systemic racism aren't issues that show up (even inadvertently or despite the best intentions of individuals) in the workplace, well, then that's a different conversation entirely.
I think this is different from someone in a position of power promoting a particular candidate in the workplace. That is more complex and problematic. The 2020 election was obviously an extreme example, and, tbh, with things like global warming, I think we'll be seeing more politics like that in the workplace, not less.
Which, to me, means it's not an easy or one-size-fits all solution, but rather, a challenge which requires each of us to exercise care and our own judgement.
For example, personally, I would have liked to see Hacker News take even a small explicit step of endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement (such as putting 'Black lives matter' on the top of the homepage), seeing as how it's one of the major civil rights issues of our present moment. I can also understand their concerns around doing so, even though I disagree with them.
IMHO it's too easy for those of us doing well and making money to forget that the institutions we work for have a social impact and are a part of society.
The Expensify CEO believed that democracy itself was on the line in the 2020 election, and that supporting democracy was relevant to the company's goal.
We can disagree with him but I respect him for exercising his judgement about the situation.
EDIT: I'd like to add, IMHO, workers should have more control over their own labor and see more of the profits of their labor, so, actually I'd like to see companies evolve to become less hierarchial institutions and thus decide priorities in a more democratic / consensus-based fashion.
I don't know how we'd do this. But I know we collectively are smart enough to figure out how to get closer than we are now : ).
“Science” does not agree that climate change is an “existential threat.” https://www.mcall.com/opinion/mc-opi-climate-change-existent...
> Such talk has scared many young people. Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, a young Clinton volunteer named Zach was upset the Democrats failed to beat Trump. According to cbsnews.com, at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, Zach yelled at a senior official: “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”
> Do scientists agree with Zach? The federal government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment was released last November. Hundreds of scientists from 13 government agencies compiled the 1,500-page report. It finds no existential threat from climate change. Zach is likely to have a long life.
"Existential threat" in my mind means humanity itself is threatened. The species will likely survive but millions if not billions will die due to climate change.
It will be bad and disruptive and many people will die. But based on what we know about the “science” it’s not going to be “existential.” For example the wildfires on the west coast killed 35-40 people. We could have a dozen of those a year and it wouldn’t threaten the existence of humanity or really even civilization as we know it.
If you don't quantify that, it's meaningless in relation to somebody's life expectancy.
If you look at wage income as a share of (wage income + corporate profits) it hovers between 85% and 90%. How much higher do you think it needs to go?
See some relevant charts here: https://taxfoundation.org/walkthrough-gross-domestic-income
Oh wait, you meant you want to see your politics supported in the workplace. Not politics in general.
But your example of HN endorsing “Black Lives Matter” is different. Taken literally it’s a straightforward slogan, but it’s also the name of a specific political organization with a broad political agenda: https://thepostmillennial.com/exposed-blm-quietly-scrubs-ant.... It’s not just an articulation of a single problem. It identifies the problem as being a symptom of an entire system, and advocates radical changes to our whole society to solve that problem and others.
What part of the various political ideologies that could be deemed to fall within the umbrella of “BLM” are you asking HN to endorse? And what aspects of the platform do you think others will perceive HN as endorsing?
This is not a criticism of BLM—I go to a church that has a BLM banner and I understand what’s being conveyed and not conveyed in that context. But demanding this sort of expression of ideological alignment from organizations that aren’t ideological and activist to begin with is very problematic.
First, when reading it, to me, the language from the BLM site the article discussed did not line up w/what the article was accusing it of.
Second, the very beginning of the Wikipedia page about The Post-Millenial says this (and cites decent-looking sources for each point):
"The Post Millennial is a conservative Canadian online news magazine started in 2017. It publishes national and local news and has a large amount of opinion content. It has been criticized for releasing misinformation and articles written by fake personas,[1] for having unknowingly employed an editor with ties to white supremacist-platforming and pro-Kremlin media outlets,[2] and for opaque funding and political connections.[3][4]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_Millennial
IMHO that invalidates your critique.
Simply put, Black Lives Matter, or BLM, is fundamentally about racist police violence and systemic racism in the justice system. That's at the core of it.
IMHO most critiques such as the one you raise seem to mainly be an attempt to obfuscate that simple fact.
'We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.'
So what? There are tons of cultures in which child raising is communal. Including various parts of Western cultures at various times.
They're not saying "nuclear families suck." They're saying, "nuclear families are one approach among many which humanity uses to raise children, and it's not necessarily always the best."
'Disrupt' doesn't mean 'Destroy'.
They also said 'to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.' Meaning, IMHO, 'folks should make their own choices for their own families.'
Considering how incredibly destructive slavery was to any form of family institution (father sold or killed, mother sold, child not, etc), and how that has echoed down to the present day in the black community, I can understand why black folks would want to have that discussion.
Which is not just a discussion being had by black people, either.
What exactly is your beef here?
What is politics is in itself political, but I expect there will be a fair majority of people who want corporations to focus on carrying out basic tasks effectively rather than devoting resources to experimental (or divisive) social reform. The risks of corruption and bad outcomes are real.
And yet, it feels like sexism to me. Women get an explicit benefit that men don't. Women are also explicitly privileged in the hiring process and higher ups are rewarded based on the number of women they employ, hire, and promote. This isn't a conspiracy theory but an explicitly articulated and documented process. Even before that, in college, we had events for women who code, women in STEM, career opportunities for women, etc.
I get that these things are all because women are underrepresented in tech and surely there are challenges for women and sexism against women. However, the examples above still feel like sexism to me. I am not all men, so the fact that men have better representation in upper levels is meaningless to me as an individual. The fact that my female peers have a monthly meeting with higher-ups to discuss how they get promoted and I don't get that isn't as meaningless.
On top of all that, I also know that if I were to ever suggest this was sexism or wrong in any way using my real name or at work, I'd fully expect to be fired and reviled by my coworkers as a deplorable sexist.
My point in writing all this is just to say that I would much prefer my company stay dispassionate and neutral and try to treat everyone fairly. I don't really support the company taking up political, social, or ideological agendas and using them to make decisions about what happens at work.
Girls and boys mathematical abilities are equivalent.
https://psychcentral.com/blog/myth-busted-girls-cant-do-math...
Blind hiring increases diversity in hiring
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/is-blind-hiring-...
This one says it doesn't: https://www.pmc.gov.au/news-centre/domestic-policy/beta-repo...
> What we found is that de-identifying applications at the shortlisting stage does not appear to assist in promoting diversity within the Australian Public Service (APS) in hiring. Overall, APS officers discriminated in favour of female and minority candidates. The practical impact is that, if implemented, de-identification may frustrate diversity efforts.
What's interesting, I suppose, is not that the selected speakers were all men (which could have happened by random chance), but the reaction by the conference organisers to that fact.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/6f8u2s/githubs_...
I have to laugh my ass off. In reality, boys get 800 on the math SAT at over twice the rate that girls do. That article addressing this by stating "the SAT is hardly a random sample of all students" is complete nonsense.
The idea that smart males and females are produced at the same rate is ludicrous on its face, because female brains are made with the information from two X chromosomes and males with just the one.
Furthermore, if you want to come to valid statistical conclusions about whether a discrepancy is due to a particular cause (and can't just do a RCT), it's not enough to just ignore plausible confounders until they are "provable". You need to systematically control for all possible confounders.
Just as in our society individuals may have an incentive to do nefarious deeds like robbery or murder, but society as a whole has an incentive to stop it, so it is with science.
And having checked your link, A) the person's theory was overhyped and B) a meta analysis brought it back to earth. Which is evidence that the process of scientific inquiry works.
That's why we know that climate change exists, despite deniers, and that vaccines don't cause autism, despite anti vaxxers having been inspired by a now retracted paper that said it did.
IMHO what is actually being claimed, and which there is academic consensus based on facts around, is that sexism has been such a pervasive cultural force, to such a degree that it's difficult to parse nature versus nurture.
Plus science is still working on nature vs nature - it's complex.
So. Simpler to start with the known, empirically verified problem in front of our eyes.
It's just that these advantages are normalized in the system, so they aren't as apparent as the corrective measures. It's really easy to miss them, just like, for example if you play a shooter on an easy mode first, you don't necessarily know how it would be harder.
That said, you want to talk to your director or learn about your career? Email them and ask them about it.
Girls aren't obviously disadvantaged in school. Girls outperform boys in every subject, science and math included, and have for decades[1]. Women are admitted more to colleges and graduate more[2]. Then there are structural programs at major companies to advantage women in hiring and career growth, as I mentioned.
It is true that women face the subtle kinds of discrimination referenced elsewhere. I'm not denying that. I'm saying that instituting programs which relatively disadvantage my career and opportunities due to my gender strikes me as unfair. I don't get a benefit because the executive leadership team is mostly men. They don't share the money and power with me because we are all men - so why am I disadvantaged because other men have achieved success?
1 - https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/04/girls-grades
2 - https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...
For example, here's a study where candidates with the same cv differ only by name.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/06/07/new-study-fin...
I gotta run, so I don't have time to cite it, but women, controlling for job qualifications and profession, earn 98% for every dollar a man earns. That may not seem like much, but the effect is enhanced by hiring and promotion differences and other effects of bias.
As to your question of not getting the benefit, how do you know that gender bias didn't help you get hired or affect your pay? Are you so sure that if you were a woman, you would have been hired, paid, and promoted just like you were now?
Regardless, policies are based on affecting the most good for the most people, not on helping you.
The kind of sexism that women encounter is not an organized system of oppression (e.g. being directed to hire fewer women) but rather it is the latent sexism of individuals not acting in an organized fashion. Individuals not taking a woman seriously, or being harassing, or not wanting to hire women etc. "Systemic" does not seem like an apt word for this kind of sexism.
Regarding your question over how I know I don't benefit from gender bias - clearly I can't know. Just like my female colleagues can't know if they benefit from gender bias. Maybe if I were a woman I would've got better grades in school, gone to a better college, retained my interest in programming, and been preferentially hired in an even better role. It's impossible to know.
1. Women couldn't vote until the 1920s in the U.S. The 1940's in France.
2. In the U.S., the Equal Rights constitutional amendment, guaranteeing legal equality between men and women, still hasn't been fully ratified/passed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment
That's the tip of the legal iceberg.
If those aren't examples of a system, i.e., the U.S. government, granting less legal rights to women than to men, i.e., systemic sexism, then what is?
2. From your wikipedia link, one of the key arguments against the amendment was that it would imply women could be drafted - "Political scientist Jane Mansbridge in her history of the ERA argues that the draft issue was the single most powerful argument used by Schlafly and the other opponents to defeat ERA".
If you want to show a persuasive (to me) example of systemic sexism, I think you should provide an example that is current and that systemically disadvantages women. If the lack of an ERA does disadvantage women, please explain how.
If you are unwilling to understand the significance of it taking until 1920 for women to receive the right to vote, and the variety of reasons for resistance to the ERA, then, I don't know what to say.
If you haven't, talk with the women in your life you are friends with about sexism and discrimination in the work place.
As far as talking with women about the sexism they've experienced - I've never denied women experience sexism. I've explicitly acknowledged that multiple times. My point is that the sexism they experience is not an organized system of oppression (i.e. it is not "systemic"). There are multiple, explicit, and codified systems that disadvantage men and I have pointed to several of them.
In fact we have a word for that and that word is “culture”. No one explicitly organizes it.
You use knowledge and reason, not to seek truth, but to occlude it for your own ends, driven by your own insecurities and fear.
It also artificially limits the demand for men (lowering the salary costs) and normalizes dual-income families where 2 people have to work full-time to afford the same quality of life that the previous generation could get from a single salary.
The culture war is just a distraction, a divide-and-conquer strategy by the wealthy elites (who are isolated enough in their personal lives to be able to avoid all this noise) playing the masses to hate each other instead of hating and attacking the elites.
The best strategy is not to play, blend in and try to reach elite level yourself.
The very next moment the social justice kicks in. Your kids are labelled privileged. They will be demoralized at school and told to hate themselves. They will be penalized when trying to apply to top academic institutions, denied promotions at work, and constantly guilt-tripped.
Instead these positions will be split between those who get them via connections, and the "disadvantaged" people who will pose a much lower political threat to the "connected" group.
So unless you are a part of the hereditary elites, whatever wealth you have created, gets erased in the next generation.
I saw many of these same initiatives beginning as I was moving through high school and college. Being young and generally feeling like I treated people fairly, I assumed that most of the world treated others the same. Sexism seemed antiquated.
Fast forward a couple of decades and the women in my life still get second-guessed, mansplained, faced lowered expectations, and/or past over for promotions.
Some of it is blatant sexism. Some of it is sexism-light, where not being part of the boys’ club leaves them excluded from the power-clique. They still have a markedly different professional experience than I do, because they are women.
Is there a better way to handle this than what you described? Maybe. But I don’t think the need for such support mechanisms has expired yet.
My wife works for a non-profit. Her supervisor (a woman) was up for a promotion. She has worked at the place for 5 years. A guy who was newly hired 2 years back was also up for the promotion but he had more experience for the role (he had worked at a bigger firm and had done work at higher levels before, it's a legal nonprofit).
These were the only two up for the role. It's between work experience and time with the organization. Whichever you value more will probably determine who you choose. The big boss (a woman) ended up choosing the man over the woman for the job.
The woman was qualified. No doubt. For my wife and her supervisor, this was another example of sexism, women getting passed over for promotions again. But for the big boss (a woman) or for someone else on the outside, it's not so clear. Her leg up was her experience in the org. His leg up was his experience from other orgs.
When looking at a situation like this, how can you prove this is sexism? For someone it will be proof positive of sexism. For another it won't be.
Explicit, institutional sexism towards males is easy to spot out. Towards women, it takes this form, where you can't honestly say you 100% know it's sexism.
So what do you do then?
if the superboss has done this consistently in the past, then your wife's supervisor has grounds[1]. However with a sample size of 1 , it could be hundred factors and it is unfair to accuse anyone .
[1] Even when is there larger sample it is nuanced and tricky to really say, unless the superboss explicitly favours women there are inherent biases in the system against them, for example amount of mandatory maternity leave u.s. offers is pitiful, there are lesser women in STEM etc, the super boss selection criteria may be biased because of underlying biases not necessarily her own. Doesn't mean she should get a free pass, It should be investigated/reviewed before jumping to the conclusion of labelling someone sexist.
The argument for affirmative action goes that any special treatment only counters the biases and limitations you don't face and they do.
The argument against affirmative action is that it is very hard to remove preferential treatment once it is in place even if it no longer required. The other argument is that such affirmative action does not efficiently target the truly deserving or the underlying cause.
Dependent probability is never factored in, while it is true the number of women who get into STEM or programing is low, the biases in companies is considerably less once they are in. Over extending benefits in the workplace is not perhapa as important as getting education fixed in schools and colleges.
There are no easy answers
Once you educate yourself with fact-based historical information to understand how unfair the system has been, this actually is an argument in favor of affirmative action.
Point being that until very recently the biases has been extreme, so that despite positive changes in both culture and law, equality will not happen over night (as you said, things persist), and thus affirmative action is important even after the most pernicious source of discrimination has been removed.
Affirmative action is complex, no question, but your particular point is more of an argument for it than one against it.
To elaborate on the why not:
The problem is rarely the intent of affirmative action .it is in the execution, same problems with big / small government , and the idea behind UBI or give cash instead of subsidy is sometimes bettee.
I grew up in a country where affirmative action is codified in the law and about 50 % of job openings, promotions university seats are reserved and has been for the last 70 years. Was it and still is there need for it ? Yes absolutely,
however the efficiency of allocation is a challenge , some groups who needed it 70 years back don't really need it anymore , however it is political suicide to even propose a reduction or a reallocation to reflect today's problems.
It doesn't mean we should not do anything, however to ignore the misalignment of incentives inefficiency of allocation and stickyness of any action is not good either.
These two sentences contradict each other.
You also say "I am not all men", but, sadly, the issue with systemic biases (racism, sexism, etc), is that it's not about individuals.
You seem smart enough to be able to theorize about ways in which, as a man, you may have unknowningly benefited from systemic biases over the course of your education / career.
For one thing you don't have to worry about being sexually harassed or raped by a friend/coworker - the numbers are pretty bad.
We're supposed to be rational, work with numbers, etc - so even if we can't prove the effect of a systemic bias on an individual, our knowledge of the data and basic statistics should lead us to be able to make reasonable inferences about general cases, etc.
I guess what I'm saying is, be the bigger man, in both ways in which that phrase can be read. It's not all about you.
I could be the "bigger man" by ignoring structural disadvantages against me and people like me, and in real life, of course I do ignore these disadvantages. The reason I ignore them is not because I think it makes me a bigger man, but because if I spoke out against them I would be fired and ostracized. People would hate me for raising or sharing these opinions.
For your point about sexual harassment and rape - this is not something specific to the tech industry and not something that is fixed by deciding to prefer women over men in hiring decisions. Is the idea that, because women are more likely to be sexually harassed or raped, outside of prison, they should get the compensatory prize of these career benefits I've described? That just seems like a non-sequitur to me.
That's not what I am arguing. What I am saying is, if people were currently being treated equally then we would not have to have this conversation. The truth is that they are not.
I mean come on, have you ever heard of the Bedchel test?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test
"It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added."
You have to exercise a lot of mental energy to not see all the ways in which there is systemic sexism in our society and workplace.
You also have to decide that all these women must be, making this shit up?
You also have to be pretty ignorant, either deliberately or through circumstance having placed you in an unhealthy media environment. These days there are a lot of fact-based, data-supported history books, studies, etc, talking about systemic sexism both past and present.
To sum up, however good your tech knowledge may be, your knowledge - current, best-practices knowledge, so to speak, of history is weak. Or, you don't want to acknowledge the truth.
Those are facts.
This doesn't seem to be what you're advocating though. You're defending policies that explicitly favor people based on their immutable characteristics. I understand you think it balances historical inequality, but I disagree with that.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes data on job occupation and demographics of the workers[1]. You can see that many occupations are at approximate gender parity (i.e. ~50% women) and some occupations are majority women while other occupations are majority men.
Let's consider four occupations from this list written as Occupation title, percent women. Computer programmers, 20. Insurance underwriters, 51. Human resource managers, 75. Pre-school teachers, 98.7. Why are women only 20% of computer programmers? Is it because 100 years ago women weren't allowed to vote and because today women have relatively few lines of dialogue with one another in popular films? Well, why do those factors uniquely affect female computer programmers and not other career disciplines? I don't think I would have expected that prior to looking at the data.
If relatively few women are computer programmers because of systemic sexism, is there less systemic sexism among insurance underwriters? And how would you know that apart from looking at these percentages? As male as the profession of computer programming is, human resources managers are even more female - is that because of a prejudice against men? And that's not to mention the apparently staggering bias against male preschool teachers.
In other words, if the only way you can tell that computer programmers are systemically sexist and insurance underwriters are not is because of the portion of women in those respective fields, it seems like that same logic would also lead to there being massive system sexism against male human resources managers and teachers.
An alternate hypothesis, which I do believe in, is that men and women tend to have different interests. Women, for reasons that are an ineffable mystery, like to be around children as an example. That's why they are over represented among teachers, especially teachers of younger and younger children. I think it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that women, in aggregate, are less likely to be interested in computer programming, and this lack of interest is what leads there to be relatively few female programmers, not the Bechdel test or the history of women's suffrage.
The techies types are knowledge first people. If you want to win their support, appeal to knowledge, make a rational case, but avoid trying to fool them, as the moment they notice a logical inconsistence in your ideas, they'll dismiss them entirely.
Most activism appeals to emotions, to feelings, because it matters a lot to most people. But techies put dry knowledge first and so needs to change your tactic.
Nevertheless, I'm upvoting your comment because I believe it presents an important viewpoint.
I'm not trying to be antagonistic but one should be careful of thinking that they are inherently a more rational person.
This is also why techies dont make it far in power structures: they don't get that emotional aspect of human relationships.
I'd argue "deaf to feelings" actually means more susceptible, just unconsciously so, and to different feelings.
The issue is big enough where it's OK to use the slogan - everyone will know what you mean.
Frankly I think this idea has awful implications that BLM does not grasp.
It has since been deleted, but can be found here https://web.archive.org/web/20200816155814/https://blacklive...
So these were people that coinbase decided, out of all available applicants—and as a well-known, hugely profitable company that is the only “in any way mainstream” success story of cryptocurrency-based businesses, there are a fair number of them—thought were the right fit. (That’s excluding the people who were given offers and didn’t accept, of course.)
And then greater than one in twenty employees (that’s a lot) heard what he said and were like, nope, this is not someone I want to follow.
Is that a success? Maybe! I can’t think of a time when we’ve seen that level of voluntary departure from a company and thought, “ah yes, this is good.” Or when we’ve seen something like that and thought, “ah yes, this is what leadership looks like.”
Maybe he’s right! I don’t know. We’ll see.
But when I look at America, with its staggering income inequality and tremendous corporate cash investments into political elections, I don’t personally think, “wow there sure is too much social accountability at companies.”
You know?
I don’t look at Facebook and think, “they should really just focus on being a data mining advertising business. This thing about fomenting extremism is distracting us from them as a corporate enterprise in a capitalist system.”
Yikes.
People leave jobs for lots of reasons. Coinbase was offering a very generous exit package for anyone leaving at the time. I am sure some split for reasons unrelated to leadership or these political policies.
But yes it's a success if you want to run a company that really shouldn't be taking sides.
So this is all about performative poses in the workplace, on the topic of politics, rather than being about actual politics.
So it's more that companies can't do certain limited things, but companies - and CEOs particularly - can do plenty of others.
What they get, instead, is a performative pacifier. Which IMO makes the problem worse as they realize how unsatisfying it is and demand more and more strenuous performance.
While prostrating themselves about how much they care about intersectional social justice to keep their employees happy. Pure performance.
In San Francisco, the collective "tech industry" has long been demonized for various things. IMO, some fair, some not. "Google Buses" taking space at MUNI stops was one for quite a while. Contributing to increasing housing costs is a long time favorite.
But a lot of these come from a culture where you build your company on top of the infrastructure provided by the local community and government. Then build a very successful business on top of that, but have minimal engagement with the local government and community. So you create a perception that you're just taking, and not actually part of the local community.
It seems to me that the Coinbase case just doubles down on this attitude.
In contrast, Salesforce has the largest building in San Francisco named after them, and a huge urban park. I don't see them getting dragged into the anti-tech sentiment. Because I think they've effectively engaged with the local community and given back a lot.
They have a culture of volunteer work, strongly encouraging employees to take time off to volunteer for local causes. They also donate to many local causes. Marc Benioff is certainly involved in politics, and advocating for specific ideas and policies. But because him and his company engage in various ways, and make substantial philanthropic contributions, they are usually respected for it.
As for Marc Benioff, he's the only billionaire who seems to actually, visibly give a shit. He's Jimmy James. (Even if that fwcking tower looks alternately like a phallus or a giant middle finger. Whatever, dude's cool.)
Any time SF wants, it can allow the supply of housing to rise to meet demand, which will drastically improve the city's culture, diversity, and affordability. SF voters don't want that, though, and they've not yet been overruled at the state level.
Let's get the diagnosis right first.
https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme...
> Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.
> In the long run, San Francisco's CPI-adjusted average income is growing by 1.72% per year, and the number of employed people is growing by 0.326% per year, which together (if you believe the first model) will raise CPI-adjusted housing costs by 3.8% per year. Therefore, if price stability is the goal, the city and its citizens should try to increase the housing supply by an average of 1.5% per year (which is about 3.75 times the general rate since 1975, and with the current inventory would mean 5700 units per year). If visual stability is the goal instead, prices will probably continue to rise uncontrollably.
However, we could do it: "Prefab housing complex for UC Berkeley students goes up in four days" Aug., 2018 https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-compl...
> This new 22-unit project from local developer Patrick Kennedy (Panoramic Interests) is the first in the nation to be constructed of prefabricated all-steel modular units made in China.
An interesting detail: "Kennedy notes that the cost of trucking to Berkeley from the port of Oakland was more expensive than the cost of shipping from Hong Kong."
So yeah, if we really had the political will we could build arcologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
That redevelopment didn't really happen, and now we're left with this result.
The really unfortunate thing is because of the artificially restricted housing supply (and commercial, thanks Prop M) it ends up creating these perverse incentives. I would think that normally if you have an industry that's growing really well, and creating tons of high paying jobs, you'd want them in your city. But, because we combined a strictly limited supply with great growth in high paying jobs, the reaction is to be hostile to those high paying jobs.
Being a good neighbor in SF (or any other city in the inner Bay) is next to impossible. Anything that happens becomes your fault no matter how unrelated you are, even if it's fully self-inflicted. Like the tower, MUNIserable buses, or the housing shortage. Or SF General's billing practices, blamed on Zuckerberg after he gave... I don't even remember how many millions.
I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome. The best I can hope for is a grudging sufferance, so long as I hate myself enough for being the wrong kind of different.
And why should I care about a community that refuses to grant me membership? Whose life will be improved by my misery? Will I be thanked and appreciated for my generosity and sacrifice, or just attacked for not giving more?
...because their "volunteering culture" comes off as too little too late.
It was insane for Twitter to open their HQ in the middle of SF's skid row.
Let me point out one aspect that seems lost on a lot of downtown techies: They see you. The bums and druggies and wastoids see the kids with wealth and success and not-fucked-up-ness of life and they resent it and them. Right or wrong, it's human nature. So yeah, Twitter was never about solving Civic Center's outdoor Bedlam, so they're never going to get credit for saving the world when they are squatting in hell clearly not saving shit. Eh?
> Being a good neighbor in SF (or any other city in the inner Bay) is next to impossible.
Ask Rainbow Grocery. https://rainbow.coop/ No one blames them for anything.
> Anything that happens becomes your fault no matter how unrelated you are, even if it's fully self-inflicted. Like the tower, MUNIserable buses, or the housing shortage. Or SF General's billing practices, blamed on Zuckerberg after he gave... I don't even remember how many millions.
It's not impossible, but what you're talking about isn't "being a good neighbor" you're just complaining that people are blaming tech for their problems (whether it's true or not.)
(And don't get me started on Zuckerberg's gross purchased virtue signalling. He paid for a hospital, put his name on it so everyone would know, and now I can't talk shit about him and the problems his massive wealth and bewheemoth company are causing, because it makes me look like an ingrate!? Bullshit. Bull. Shit.)
> I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome.
Have you asked, "What can do to gain welcome?"
Before ~2001 or so SF was one of the most welcoming places in the whole of this planet of Earth.
> The best I can hope for is a grudging sufferance, so long as I hate myself enough for being the wrong kind of different.
Okay if that's what you're getting from SFians you are hanging out with the WRONG SFians. This is a city of love, not self-hate. (Insert off-color joke about Castro, gay culture, learning to overcome hate and self-hate to love yourself and others freely, etc. just as a reminder that this city has been so many things to so many people in it's brief and drama-filled life.)
> And why should I care about a community that refuses to grant me membership? Whose life will be improved by my misery?
Again, no one worth respecting wants you to be miserable or to hate yourself.
I don't know you or what you've personally experienced here, so I can't speak to that (I can't even figure out why most people don't like me.) If you came here since ~2001 you're already too late, the culture of welcoming was already thrashed by then. ("Dot-Com Boom", yeah?)
A lot of the community has been pushed out, and most of us who remain are wary of the new wave of techie folks, or yes, outright hostile.
> I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome.
So go somewhere else? I don't mean that in a mean or disrespectful way. I'm a proponent of the idea that just moving somewhere else can be an excellent way to solve problems. It's not a panacea, of course, but it often does the trick.
Maybe you're not weird enough to hang with the old skool SF crowd. It's not a reflection on you. SF has long been the city of crazies. This whole tech-Mecca thing is hella recent. Less than a generation.
The old joke: "All the crazy people in America move to California, and all the crazy people in California move to SF. (And if you're too crazy for SF you move to Berkeley.)"
- - - -
Benioff gets a pass because he supported Proposition C.
https://abc7news.com/marc-benioff-salesforce-prop-c-homeless...
I remember SF city government going out of their way to try to get actual businesses in there. Clearly Twitter made the egregious error of trying to play ball with the city government.
> Have you asked, "What can do to gain welcome?"
Yes.
The answers ranged from "fuck you" to "sell all your stuff, give all your money to charity, give your job to a QTPOC, and leave". None of them included kindness, compassion, or being a decent human being. None of them actually allowed for the possibility of welcome.
> Okay if that's what you're getting from SFians you are hanging out with the WRONG SFians
I don't hang out with them if I can help it. I just meet the ones who lambast millions of dollars to charity as bad (when it's people they dislike) and characterize SF's xenophobic policies as love. Who obsess over SF's supposed weirdness while resenting people who don't conform to their expectations. Who make excuses for treating migrants with hostility, and expect them to understand as they refuse to return the favor.
I cut them out of my life as quickly as I can, because I have very little tolerance for that kind of hypocritical xenophobia.
The old skool SF types seem to like me. I've got a kind of weird they appreciate. The new skool, on the other hand...
----
But I'll play along. What can I do to gain a welcome?
Sure but SF gov and SF culture aren't co-extensive. A lot of us were not happy with what City Hall did to make that deal go through.
Also, it's not a case of wily city officials tricking Twitter is it?
>> Have you asked, "What can do to gain welcome?"
> Yes.
> The answers ranged from "fuck you" to "sell all your stuff, give all your money to charity, give your job to a QTPOC, and leave". None of them included kindness, compassion, or being a decent human being. None of them actually allowed for the possibility of welcome.
Well,
> "fuck you"
Let's discount that one right off, eh?
> "sell all your stuff, give all your money to charity, ...
That is actually good advice, or at least similar to what Jesus said. But a bit extreme if you're not feeling it.
> "...give your job to a QTPOC, and leave"
Hmm, well that's back in the "discount right off" bin, eh?
> None of them included kindness, compassion, or being a decent human being. None of them actually allowed for the possibility of welcome.
Well then, who the hell are these folks? It may be that you're just talking to loud mouths and freaks.
> I don't hang out with them if I can help it. I just meet the ones who lambast millions of dollars to charity as bad (when it's people they dislike) and characterize SF's xenophobic policies as love. Who obsess over SF's supposed weirdness while resenting people who don't conform to their expectations. Who make excuses for treating migrants with hostility, and expect them to understand as they refuse to return the favor.
Yeah, to me it sounds like you've gotten an earful from some of the louder and less hip freaks. Ignore them, they're loud and ineffectual.
I once had a Marxist roommate who tripped a circuit-breaker by trying to move an external electric socket to let a bookshelf be set flush with the wall. She went at a live circuit with a screwdriver! This person was over fifty yet didn't know enough about home electrical wiring not to stick a screwdriver in a live socket, but somehow felt that she knew how a city or country should be governed!?
So yeah, pick your friends wisely, there are a lot of losers here (because this is the town you move to if you can't make it in Cleveland or wherever.)
Remember that Burning Man started here as a fire-on-the-beach birthday celebration, eh?
> The old skool SF types seem to like me. I've got a kind of weird they appreciate. The new skool, on the other hand...
So you are sharing and understanding the problem?
----
> But I'll play along. What can I do to gain a welcome?
It's too late: you're already one of us. Welcome.
JWZ's struggles with San Francisco about the DNA Lounge were quite legendary and that was prior to 2001.
SF was welcoming as long as you were buying shitty property in a shitty area and helping to gentrify it. Anything else and they fought you tooth and nail.
The difference now is that all the shitty property is gone.
You're conflating SF Gov with SF culture.
Mayor London Breed didn't support Prop C, eh?
I guess Benioff represents SF culture, while Breed doesn't?
It's perhaps worth remembering that Benioff - who also bought his name on a hospital - got a pass well before Prop C came along.
In re: Prop C, yes.
> It's perhaps worth remembering that Benioff - who also bought his name on a hospital -
Really? Which one?
Huh, so he did: https://www.ucsfbenioffchildrens.org/
Okay, I hate him now. (Just kidding. I will admit that I am not upset by this in the same way that Zuckerberg's thing makes me feel. FWIW, I'll examine that personally on my own time.)
> got a pass well before Prop C came along.
You mean he didn't suddenly become cool circa Prop C?
;-P
Well met Kalium.
As a rhetorical flourish, it did it was intended to do and exposed an apparent double standard.
A better solution is to simply stop caring about the opinions of the entrenched SF special interest groups and simply go on with one's life, and ignore the attacks that are never going to go away.
Those entrenched groups are getting less powerful by the day, anyway. Their opinions can't be change, and they aren't going to matter much soon.
And the other, newer, techie focused groups are getting more influence.
There isn't much point in "negotiating" with the entrenched groups when they are never going to be convinced, and you can just usurp them instead.
I used to live in an area where a nuclear power plant was being built.
For them, it basically meant the corporation handing out $$$$ - doubtless budgeted for in advance - on things like building swimming pools in public schools, sponsoring local sports teams, and so on.
Tech people in SF have not been terrible neighbors. People who shit in the street are terrible neighbors. People who steal bikes and smash car windows are terrible neighbors. People who do drugs in the open and leave needles on the ground are terrible neighbors.
Techies are basically the ideal denizens of a city. Young, educated, well-paid, law-abiding people. You could hardly ask for a better group to populate a city.
I wouldn't blame FAANG specifically, because of course the problem is more complex than that. But there's a certain complacency involved in being young, educated, and in-demand - which can be knocked out of you far more easily than you might think when the next bust happens and suddenly you are the one on the street being told you're a bad neighbour.
This is not hyperbole. It has happened in every dot com recession, and it will happen to people you know - possibly even to you - in the next one.
It isn't just that attitude that's the problem, it's the insistence by Coinbase that they're apolitical, yet the company makes significant political contributions themselves[1].
[1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
Just speculating here based on the repeated small dollar amounts.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-08/bitcoin-s...
Here's a random example: https://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/fecimg/?201811269133824807
Includes the individual's name & his employer, which isn't listed as Coinbase.
In San Francisco, aren't people going to object to this, eventually? Symbolism seems to be what people care about, and the symbolism of being above it all seems unavoidable.
The people who do use Salesforce for the most part hate it. But you'll never see widespread outrage about Salesforce because the people who use it have jobs, families, and friends that prevent them from spending all day on social media.
"Twitter bad. Don't use." is a much easier sell than "Salesforce bad. Other company uses Saleforce so it's transitively bad. Don't use other company."
What makes you think "twitter activists" lead most of the anti-tech crusades? If it's based on your observations of them on twitter, that probably says more about where you're looking than where they are. I don't know where anti-tech activism is centered, but twitter wouldn't be my first guess.
Why not encourage employees to represent their beliefs individually, and off company time, by giving them more vacation and flexible working hours instead? Empower the employees to participate in politics without the company taking a side itself?
I'm tired of people pushing their political beliefs onto me at every opportunity, in every available setting, IRL and online.
Honestly I think this says more surprising about Kelly than it does about Taibbi.
IMHO it's about power and the profits power leads to, and the desire of large companies to maintain their power and their profit.
IMHO on some level large corporations know that if they did this employees would get politically active and push more for their own interests to be represented in government over that of the large companies, resulting in less profit for said companies because government is investing in civil society and public infrastructure instead.
IMHO part of the reason the George Floyd protests were as big as they were is that folks had time on their hands, which is not the normal case for most folks in our system as it is today.
Looks like you're trying to shoehorn your belief, i.e. employees to have more vacation time, which is fine, but has nothing to do with "have more time to express themselves politically". That's a stretch.
* If you wish to run a political campaign, you need to be very transparent about your sources of funding.
* If you wish to make certain idea into a law (that would force others to follow it), it must be approved by several layers of elected representatives, before it becomes mandatory.
* If someone believes that someone else does not comply with the law, they bring it to the court. Where the independent judiciary branch uses the due process to independently evaluate the situation and decide who wins the case.
These safeguards are put in place to counter abuse. They make sure that the laws (and their interpretation) serves the best interests of the general population.
Modern workplace politics completely bypasses these principles. If your activism fits a few select topics, you get to conduct it on your company's expense. You get to force people to follow the rules you set without any semblance of voting. You get to punish people you don't like without any due process. You can respond to any criticism of yourself with an accusation of one of the new deadly sins, and this immediately destroys your opponent politically and financially.
Most customer segmentation problems can be solved with an optional feature or a new product line - make both chunky marinara sauce and a smooth variety.
Most employee problems can be solved similarly - optional programs, different roles for different folks, etc.
But this problem is unique because a certain segment of the employee+customer base is asking the complete company to take their side in certain matters. Of course the company taking that stand alienates the other segment of the population.
However, rationally, it becomes much easier to deal with this than what Coinbase did.
It seems though that the vocal side (liberal) is vocal because they care about companies stances on these matters, while the silent (conservatives) are silent because they don't seem to care as much.
Therefore, rationally, companies generally take the liberal position or no position at all.
When conservatives listen to politically-left company seminars, see liberal company statements, etc - they mostly just ignore and move on with their day. I don't think many conservatives would be motivated to quit or boycott a company due to a liberal company seminar that they disagree with. I get the feeling (due to the walkouts, etc) that liberals are much more likely to sever relationships due to differences in political beliefs.
Not to mention the months-long propaganda campaign claiming that Big Tech was silencing conservatives on social media.
Also, conservatism is basically supporting the status quo. Why would conservatives have labor protests against the status quo?
what’s more status quo than Joe Biden?
Biden's spending plan of trillions of dollars isn't progressive? Give me a break.
It's certainly the case that they don't seem to care as much, given that they're less outspoken, but is there any evidence that they actually don't care as much?
Another explanation for being less outspoken is that they're a small minority in these companies, so they lack the confidence to go against the grain, perhaps out of fear (whether valid or not) of alienation. Or conversely liberals are more confident to voice their opinion because they know they're in the majority opinion group and doing so isn't likely to stymie their career or cause stressful backlash.
Paul Graham tweeted out some survey evidence yesterday that supports the idea that conservatives are simply more afraid to speak their mind in these companies.
I've seen conservatives support things like trans rights, marriage equality, antifascism/antifa, and Black Lives Matter from conservative first principles. They would say the same about not feeling like they can share their views in places where a certain kind of conservatism is rampant.
Bigotry is not something inherent to conservative values.
Most of the conservatives I know are silent because they are busy. Busy raising and teaching their kids. Busy taking care of their property. Busy making their own life better. It doesn't mean that they don't care. They just believe that each person should be first and foremost responsible for their own well-being. If someone asks for help with a specific quantifiable problem, they will gladly help.
Most vocal liberals, on the contrary, are priced out of having a large enough property to take care of, or a large family that takes a lot of energy. Because they have extra time and energy, they tend to spend it on the causes that the media presents to them as important. Note that their salary expectations will be lower, compared to conservatives, since family, property and retirement plans are one's biggest expenses. I would dare say many of them feel jealous towards the conservatives and believe they got an unfair advantage.
In short-term, it's beneficial for companies to support political activism, because it keeps the employees busy with projects that don't increase their monetary demands. In long term, this ends up with tribalism, where people spend most of their energy attacking their peers over growing number of differences.
Trump signed an executive order banning the government from doing business with vendors that do racial sensitivity training.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/22/915843471/trump-expands-ban-o...
>(a) “Divisive concepts” means the concepts that
>(1) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;
>(2) the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist;
>(3) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;
>(4) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex;
>(5) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex;
>(6) an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex;
>(7) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;
>(8) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or
>(9) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race. The term “divisive concepts” also includes any other form of race or sex stereotyping or any other form of race or sex scapegoating.
It is worth noting that the media trying to portray Trump's EO as fight against anti-racism is the same media that profits from creating divisive content in the first place.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
I cannot agree with this more. Most of the bickering isn't bickering about a particular issue, it's bickering about a gross misrepresentation of an issue. Misrepresented for those sweet, sweet ad dollars.
The problem is that if you entered the workforce after 2008, and wasn't born into financial independence, you have no clear path to achieve a few important milestones that the previous generation had: property ownership, family (and passing your quality of life to your kids), savings and retirement.
These things have been taken away from the whole generation because we chose to not enforce antitrust laws, and bail out inefficient and corrupt behemoths. So the economic leverage that would normally go into the hands of new-wave founders, remained in the hands of big players. And now they want us to feel guilty for wanting all those things the previous generations had for granted.
>The problem is ... entered the workforce after 2008 ... you have no clear path to achieve a few important milestones that the previous generation had: property ownership, family (and passing your quality of life to your kids), savings and retirement.
It goes back even further than that. It's been going on since companies decided to offshore manufacturing in the 70s. Rural America's small towns used to flourish and was absolutely devastated economically. Families used to get by on a single income, now it takes two full time parents to work just to make ends meet. The middle class and the lower class has been constantly choked out except for a select few occupations for the last 50 years.
One example of that latter bit: Google rank-and-file protested against the executives' plan to run censored search in China, even though if you listen to the media, Google is "left" and it's the "right" who's worried about China and their authoritarianism and censorship and all that. The more elucidating explanation is that the disagreement was between the people who wanted to make money wherever legally permitted vs. the people who felt a sense of broader social responsibility regarding what they worked on, which is why you see the same fault lines (rank-and-file vs. execs) protesting against Google selling cloud services to ICE, even though that's a concern of the "left."
More generally, about which side finds itself being vocal, I recently ran across this passage from a Wikipedia article about a video game released in 2013:
> Following the announcement of a worldwide release, controversy arose concerning the impossibility of same-sex relationships. Nintendo stated, "The ability for same-sex relationships to occur in the game was not part of the original game that launched in Japan, and that game is made up of the same code that was used to localise it for other regions outside Japan." [...] Despite various campaigns from users, Nintendo stated that it would not be possible to add same-sex relationships to the game, as they "never intended to make any form of social commentary with the launch of the game", and because it would require significant development alterations which would not be able to be released as a post-game patch.
This game (Tomodachi Life) is in the same approximate genre as The Sims, i.e., the complaint wasn't about pre-programed characters with stories, it was that user-generated characters couldn't be in same-sex relationships. If a game like that launched today - in Japan or anywhere else - it would certainly not manage to avoid "any form of social commentary" by not having an option for same-sex relationships. It's just that at the time, that genuinely was the default, conservative option. If you were a conservative in Nintendo at the time, you hardly had to argue for this position. It only became controversial because public opinion had just started to shift. (And there are much fewer conservatives / right-leaning folks today who would feel the need to argue the same position against the new status quo.)
So I don't think it's true that companies "take the liberal position or no position at all." They start out taking the conservative position, and it's only through specific action - either the desire of management, or pressure from either the product's market or the labor market - that they end up with the liberal one.
But if we take this as a given then the original claim doesn't make sense anymore, because in the original claim "conservative" essentially means Republican, but the Republicans would be the "liberals" in many cases under your framework. And yet we don't really see employees pressuring companies to implement mandatory drug testing or to refuse to hire H1B workers or stop offering healthcare plans that cover abortion, even though those would all be divergences from the status quo in many companies.
Not taking a political stand IS political stand. And it is on the side of the status quo.
Also, like most exercises of power, one has to have power in order to exercise it. Conservatives are usually more worried about not being fired for their views.
Or they just do not want to get involved in a complex, messy, and and potentially expensive social conflict.
These seem really similar. Did you mean to say the same thing?
My comment was intended to argue that there are three bins. Oppose, support, and those who don't want to fight either way.
That’s certainly not true, outside an extremely expansive definition of politics.
For example, say a tech startup is creating a crypto-currency like Bitcoin, choosing to create it like Bitcoin conveys anarcho-capitalist values. That is politics. Choosing to design consensus differently than on competition for something of value (PoW, PoS) like what FairCoin does might convey different political positions. Choosing not to create crypto-currency technology at all is also another one.
Technologies after they exist will favor the world becoming closer to some political ideas, tech startups like Uber convey liberal values with their driver recruitment model. iFixit another tech company rather choose to empower people to repair their things or open their own repair services, that's another political position. They could've started a very successful repair shop franchise and earn lots of money with some kind of monopoly on repair, yet they choose to share knowledge and encourage people to do so with their website.
But no, the guy who sells me nails (as long as he is complying with the basic regulatory framwework for his business) doesnt need to have a vocal opinion on Israel/Palestine, BLM or if the gender balance in Google is OK or not. I even prefer it that way.
Also it is more relevant to tech startups because technology has that thing where it can greatly influence the world after it exists. There's more political decisions to make and positions to take when you do that.
Or just it isnt, I have managed shops and I for sure was not thinking about Hayek or Marx, I paid my employees according to the law, paid my taxes and followed the rules. Not every action has to be a sociological treatise no matter what the enlightened crowd may think.
> Also it is more relevant to tech startups because technology has that thing where it can greatly influence the world after it exists. There's more political decisions to make and positions to take when you do that.
Nails have been more important for civilization than 99% of SV start-ups. You are giving your tribe too much credit. And I thought this pandemic taught us a lesson, it only goes to show how dumb I am.
I didnt say that, you can take political positions unconsciously.
> Nails have been more important for civilization than 99% of SV start-ups. You are giving your tribe too much credit. And I thought this pandemic taught us a lesson, it only goes to show how dumb I am.
It's not about pretention or credit, I'm just being objective, tech has shaped the world in recent years, every so often a new technology causes us all to change our behaviors and ideas greatly whether we choose to welcome that technology or it just came to be and forced onto everyone.
And yet, a more advanced being,enlightened if you want, will tell me what unconscious position I did take. Thanks god for those uber-menschen living among us mere mortals.
I think there's a strong argument to be made that –– even given your premise of all startups being inherently political –– we're better off for them focusing on their tangible contribution to the world and not obscuring it with politics-as-PR.
And if their "contribution" has a primarily negative impact, political or otherwise, it's arguably even worse to be a culture in which they can reach for cover under cultural politics unrelated to their bottom line.
Everything else is fair game, even if it typically falls under a party.
For example: Gay stuff - it's typically democratic/liberal - although many would argue it's being supported more and more by the right. But one should be able to discuss and support gay agendas - as long as there's no specific party endorsement. Stick to specifics like bathrooms (for example) but don't mention "democrats support this too" or whatever.
Another example would be to around climate change. It's okay to discuss ways to reduce pollution, just don't endorse candidate or party X as the way that's going to happen.
So stop mentioning parties or candidates and shit - just issues.
The problem with discussing politics at work is that we are not all 100% free to be there. We depend on being at work and potentially being offended by people who we have to continue to work with for our livelihoods.
That being said it’s incredibly nuanced. People should be able to be unabashedly out at work. People should be able to talk about why they support having birth control as part of their health plan. Vulnerable and targeted populations should be able to talk about the struggle and discrimination they experience.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/21/business/lynn-conway-ibm-...
It sounds to me like IBM apologized for committing a wrongful termination, so no. Even the staunchest of conservatives would not consider it a "scandal" to have a trans employee in 2020. IBM is just trying to maintain a positive reputation in today's social climate, just like they were doing 50 years ago.
> Was Conway playing politics when she decided to transition?
Conway is a person, not a business, so I'm not sure what this has to do with the conversation about businesses engaging in politics.
Companies, however, will continue to do politics so long as it furthers their self-interest as there is a failure of separation of powers between government and corporations in the modern age.
I wouldn’t say there should or shouldn’t be.
I look at it like this... do you have a job to do? Is that job directly tied to a political position? If not, do your job.
Don’t talk about politics or religion (if they’re even a different thing anymore) at work. You are just going to offend someone for no reason.
That should the extent of their legislative and electoral influence. As soon as corporations have any voice in government beyond that you are left with a facsimile of democracy where the amount of power and money you control directly correlates to your influence in the purported democratic institutions of your government.
A corporation involved in politics is exclusively behaving to the whims of its controlling interest which is almost always an investor class numbering between one and a hundred persons. Their interests are obviously and profoundly over-represented in the legislative agendas of practically every government on Earth and its due to the double edged sword of their personal wealth directly buying them political will and their ownership of business giving them a mouthpiece and apparatus to also influence politics through. Both are destructive to civilization, whose their influence has waxed and waned for half a millennia. Where their peaks often bore a prelude to catastrophic events in history.
The question is, can people concentrate on the mission and agree to disagree about many other things? Or are you going to try to limit the organization to people who agree on a lot of different political questions?
Consider, for example, endorsements of political positions by Hollywood celebrities. The practice probably had a net negative impact on most of the substantive political positions they support. (E.g. Jane Fonda effect.)
"It is a tacit endorsement of the political status quo. reply "
never seem to have an answer for.
Let's say I own a company and I'm not happy with the status quo, but I decide that the best way to enact change is via my agency as a private citizen instead of throwing my company brand and money after it. What gives someone the right to think that they can read my mind as to whether I'm ok with the status quo or not?
It drips with arrogance as it's just a cheap line to repeat instead of actual productive work.
Maybe I've decided that having me tackle it and not my company is more effective due to people seeing a company endorsement of a political message as a diluted bandwagon hopping exercise.
This notion helps to habituate partisan zealotry, which allows individuals to have their attention captured for profit, and makes them more manipulatable. If non-involvement in one facet of one dimension of life (politics for the benefit of corporations) is now not possible, then nobody is safe from the moral imperialism of political movements.
There are many spheres of life and influence within the world, and politics is but one of them. In modern times, however, the lines between different currencies of power are blurring, and there are clear channels for the transmutation of different types of power and capital to political power. For corporations, this is very appealing because democratic ideals, the environment, or individual rights might be at odds with their interests. Therefore, if they can convince you to give up your individualism in order to become politicized towards a cause that benefits the corporation, that is a wonderful way to circumvent democracy and concentrate power.
True, but it is one that permeates all others. You cannot remove politics from any sphere and it is a fallacy to believe you can.
And as you've pointed out, whatever about leaving politics out of <insert sphere here>, politics is inherently linked to the corporate world.
What are your working for at that workplace? Honest question. How to spend your hard-earned money when there is no society and market? Do you want your children to live in a peaceful, prospering world or a burning one (maybe with slightly more dollars in their account)?
I don't get this sentiment. Everything is politics nowadays and choosing to "ban" it just means egocentrically accepting that we are heading for a worse future.
(And no, "politics" doesnt mean that the company will become an echo chamber and different opinions should be silenced - the opposite is the case. But BS needs to be called out as what it is...)
What 99% of people who want to "ban politics" from the workplace mean is that they want to ban progressive politics from the workplace, and more specifically any effect of progressive politics that would lead to negative consequences for their own politically incorrect behavior or views.
Those who think companies should under no circumstances "do politics", are you bothered by that too? That's the most popular form of "doing politics" across the entire economy I think, and it probably has an affect on legislation and policy that effects us all.
Basically, companies have an obligation to 'do the right thing' when it comes to universal human rights, but not beyond. The only exception is when it comes to their own industry where the companies have an obligation to share knowledge with the public / regulators.
I'd like to note that, if companies don't want politics, then maybe they should have less power in our system...! Activists only care because companies have a HUGE impact on government policy compared to normal citizens.
If Silicon Valley executives are now going to be the arbiters of all that is good, we are in for a load of trouble. At best it's cringeworthy, at worst it's a load of limousine liberals wagging their fingers at the rest of us from their ivory towers.
Companies not choosing to participate in politics is not, as some urge, de facto support of the status quo. It’s quite possible that e.g. Twitter taking a stand on some issue actually sets things back, by creating a stronger opposition.
What is far more popular is hiding your politics behind some more lofty words (like the linked article by the Coinbase CEO trying to hide his personal politics that "economic freedom" is the most important thing behind 'this is not politics' and 'this is our company mission').
By similar logic, if you are not arguing about politics 24 hours a day, you spend the rest of your time defending status quo. Would you agree that this is a fair description of the moments you don't spend talking politics?
Is it, though? Because I see tremendous amount of virtue signalling in today's corporations, including Bay Area ones. How many social media woke campaigns? How many TV ads?
What's truly radical (and beneficial) today is what Coinbase is doing. And yes, Coinbase CEO is enacting a political approach (leave politics for your spare time), so employees are not compelled to do it by mob mentality.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201122160535/https://www.nytim...
Sounds like "beatings will continue until the moral improves," but that's how it was at least for Europe. It needed to go multiple rounds of very brutal collective self-punishment for popular politics to kind of start minimally working.
Stopping doing politics, means to leave the status quo as is, and give the at the time "leading brand" of political though no contest.
History tells us, giving up on politics usually means to leave one group of political extremists uncontested by all others.
Ask John Cleese. Or Harvey Weinstein. Or any one of a thousand people who became drunk on the nectar of pop approval, only to find they didn't go far enough, or chose a decision that didn't align with the way things turned out.
I don't care what your politics are, nobody is going to take a position on controversial issues and be 100 percent correct. You're going to alienate a lot of people today, and significantly alient some more later.
It's smarter to avoid it.
Again, not trying to start an argument or troll, but how would someone talk about this topic in a way that's "apolitical"?
John Cleese was honestly a good man with good intentions, quite progressive a short while back. But time progressed in a way a little different than his ideas, and today he's sometimes blasted by those to the left of him.
Weinstein was a different kind of change story. He was running in circles that purported (at least publicly) to be 'pro women', even providing strong backing for a female US politician. Of course his private actions were 100% out of alignment with the spin being thrown to the viewing audience, something that caused collateral damage to some others in his one-time sphere.
Sorry for the mishandling of that response on my part. I have no excuse, not my best contributions to HN conversation.
I don't think it's unfair to not assume some "happy median" will always be there or a certain size, especially as circumstances change over time.
My startup mentor has always told me that to observe the trend and play to the crowd. In the age of social media, it is extremely risky to go against the accepted narrative in different parts of the world.
For example, many large entertainment firms display pro LGBT messages in the States. However, they choose to selectively remove those messages in Asia.
It's been established that knowing your audience, their political leanings, so that you can shape your narratives correctly is key. Publicly supporting an incorrect political agenda can often lead to damage to the brand's reputation.
As for politics entering aspects of the company, such as right vs left wing healthcare plans, wearing or not wearing masks, etc, the decision should be towards the most scientific approach that helps the most number of employees.
For less scientific things, such as BLM or allowing/disallowing guns, where it's not related to any clear scientific purpose but to people's opinions, there should be no stance that the company should take, but it can encourage employees to support causes in their own time.
Science like https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817 ?
How about the Leninists who had armies of scientists and professors willing to tell us that communism was "scientific"? Does that deserve our respect?
I respect apolitical scientists; I was one. My respect is theirs to lose.
All precious entities, realized that power will be used.
Politics is essentially the superior level of effective communication. For firms to exist and make their point of view heard they will engage in politics.
And they will get good at it.
You mean, communicating, what other people are allowed to do and what not? Politics is first about power (so the big companys were always involved in it). Not about communicating.
But the more I see of what underpins politics, and it’s at essence the highest level of communication.
It’s signaling status, credibility, threat, etc.
Nothing is done which isn’t a message or resource for future messages to achieve better negotiating outcomes.
So while earlier I saw it fundamentally about power, I now see that the mechanism of politics as the ultimate evolutionary form of communication.
I hope that shows how our points aren’t exactly in opposition.
Net Neutrality is politics. Right to Repair is politics. Broadband Initiatives are politics. Internet Censorship is politics. Section 230 immunity is politics. APIs being copyrightable or not is politics. Antitrust is politics.
At a more basic level, there are certain values that must be preserved for a company to have a fair chance for success. Neither fascism nor state run communism is a good environment for a startup.
So yes, companies can and should heed politics. They need not even donate to or endorse or promote people, they can endorse policies or come out against people who are against the policies they support.
People that want to keep politics out of the workplace ignore how a startup workplace is the intersection of politics and markets, of governance and growth.
Companies should take the long view, and advocate for what's best for themselves, but also their country and the world.
If Coinbase thinks it's the right thing to do: let them. If they are wrong, history will show. Why should outsiders judge that company? They aren't doing illegal things and it's their choice to make.
If we allow the money from those who control that money to be used as cudgels to sway politics, how can anyone imply with a straight face that the lowly employees can never speak about politics?
(1) https://www.robrhinehart.com/why-i-am-voting-for-kanye-west/
Reminds me of this: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/america-is-...
> One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left today pushes its ideology ever deeper into the private realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.
> Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game. “We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”
You literally can't get a job at many firms around Springfield, MO without attending the right (right-wing evangelical) church. And don't expect promotions into upper management if you're not part of the right small group at the right church. This is particularly true in accounting/finance, but it's also a problem in some of the region's tech shops.
Ironically, "politics seeping into the workplace is a left-wing problem" sounds totally insane to anyone who has spent significant time outside of the coastal/metro bubble. It's a huge problem on both sides of the political spectrum.
[1] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/scott-maxwell-commen...
Makes sense, the totalitarians are always lax about having rules about what you can talk about. It was so much better when there was just "how things are done" and talk that was "unamerican", so much less political.
We managed to get a lot of stuff done that way.
Like they start questioning your place in society after they questioned your beliefs/values and you re-affirmed them?
Sounds terrible, sounds like the dominant narrative is going to change during a time of economic uncertainty, massive structural failures and the exposure of that same dominant narrative to actual investigation and critique.
Can't have dominant narratives getting disrupted. Scary.
I'm not convinced that's actual totalitarianism either, but it takes an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance to argue that flourishing of alternative sexualities is the real alarming new development towards totalitarianism...
That’s not what’s being argued.
It's not insight from Arendt, it's a religious conservative arguing his laundry list of dislikes, from acceptance of homosexuality to -checks notes- mayors not crushing protests must be totalitarian because -spurious parallel-. Totalitarianism isn't bottom up social consensus, and it definitely isn't the mere absence of social consensus around one's own moral values.
> Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality.
The author isn’t criticizing non-discrimination—which can be justified by reference to traditional “liberal principles.” He’s criticizing things like Mozilla’s firing of Brendan Eich for his political donations, or declaring judges unfit because they are members of Catholic organizations that reject abortion. Those efforts go beyond non-discrimination to trying to stamp out traditional beliefs in ways that are often at odds with liberalism.
Politics cannot be avoided. It is part of the US tech landscape. The only option is to plan and engage thoughtfully.
Consistently. Whatever you policies, apply them as consistently as possible.
Once at least one major (political) group calls views held by tens of millions of people hate speech, there is no way to avoid being in someone's black book. This is why many companies are aligning with one party - they can't have both, and it's better than none.
Careful with those metaphors!
But never stop trying to do what you thing is right because it's unpopular in certain circles. You'll be very unhappy if you do.
-- Anatole France
Should discrimination be applied to achieve "equity"?
If so, how is that fair to those being discriminated against?
Discrimination has long been applied to achieve inequality. I'm willing to try the opposite as a countermeasure.
How likely is it for the rich to sleep I under a bridge, beg or steal bread? Those are crimes to punish those too poor to be able to afford anything else.
Or to put it another way, it’s a crime to be poor.
Oh wait, footgun...
Generally the opposite is true. Consider, say, sumptuary laws.
Laws against doing things that only desperate poor people do may appear equal, since they in theory apply just as much to the rich. But in practice they only affect the poor. And the way they affect the poor is to close off options, and thereby increase the desperation.
Sure, you should feel that. You should also understand it with your mind.
Less fancy.
Consistency is not perfect but it is better than dictators picking favorites.
(I'm not "that guy" myself, but I bet he'll show up. edit: There we go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25179187 Thank you zabhi. )
- - - -
> The only option is to plan and engage thoughtfully.
FWIW, I feel that that begins with getting real clear on one's deepest values and motives. I think what we're seeing in the USA is kind of like when a kid from a small town goes to the big city for the first time. US culture even after WWII has always been kind of insular and provincial. (As a kid, my world was divided into SF, the East Bay, and the rest of it.) Now with the Internet everybody is up in each other's faces (also driven by those clicks, gotta get those clicks) and we're a bit shocked, collectively.
The reaction to a relatively tiny number of new acceptable ideas in the discourse has been pretty surprising, even to someone who thought they already had a low opinion of American culture.
And yeah, sure, the ad-generated enragement feeds don't help. But it is clearly mostly the small town kid getting exposed to more ideas thing, no question.
Granted, there's always been an undercurrent of counter-culture in America. The Puritans had their witches. But by the 50's at least it was all buttoned up tight, and then exploded in the 60's and 70's, recoiled in the 80's, then everybody took a decade off in the 90's, and somehow in the 00's and 10's we all lost our fwcking minds.
The thing about mainstream American culture is that it pretty much had been under the thumb of mass media and religion. That's why the whole "fake news" attack is so devastating: our news has been fake. I read Noam Chomsky at an impressionable age and I recall the realization that we (in the USA) were living in what I called a "media blackout". Anything "they" didn't want you to know was simply omitted. It worked so much better than the Russian system.
But only until the Internet hit...
Every country with a heavily controlled media, with a people indoctrinated with a nationalistic fairy tale is having the same problems with the internet breaking down the old singular media narrative. The heavier the controls were, the larger the societal shock now.
It's ... touchy. We have all learned in the last couple years how to empathize with our American friends who just learned about Tucson or the MOVE bombing or something we learned in school that they just learned about from a superhero show or an apology. It's fine to blame it on your schools, it is definitely a bad move to mention the actual cause.
As for political donations - one of the best things in my country is that non-personal political donations are banned, period. And personal donations are capped. There're safeguard to prevent bums from suddenly getting lots of money and donating that too.
If a corporation wants to run a media campaign on social issues - that's fine. But if an ad features a politician, especially leading up to election, that'd be treated as illegal political ad.
The legal way to do is through legal lobyist. Companies can pay them and certified lobyists can talk to institutions/individuals/parties. But meetings are semi-public and the public is +/- aware of what is lobying what. Lobyists can't give gifts to politicians, otherwise they risk their license.
There's a workaround though. Politicians love to establish NGOs, then corporations donate to NGOs and politicians go on speaking tour in the name of NGO to cash out. But at least that limits use of corporate money for over-the-top election campaigns.
Well the problem is that "running media campaigns" is the vast majority of what political donations are spent on. All the other stuff (campaign salaries, etc) fits easily into any candidate's totally-aboveboard-donations revenue account.
Not saying I approve of the current system; just that this is not a problem with an easy fix.
Of course it's not a 100% fix. But it's a step in a correct direction.
edit: thinking more, it may be complicated in US where X always means party A and Y always means party B. Here we've a bunch of overlapping parties and there're multiple parties (or factions) behind pretty much any issue from any angle.
I'm skeptical of this claim they everything is political. A forum they hosted any and all content will definitely host political speech, but those are the politics of the users not the site. Your kind of rhetoric seems like an attempt to say that hosting something is equivalent to an endorsement of it. This is not at all the case.
In your whiteboard analogy, if you were giving an interview to a candidate and walked into a meeting room that had a swastika on a whiteboard and opted not to erase it, as a candidate I would assume that was an endorsement.
Not taking a side is taking the side of whoever is being most aggressive. "I don't want to get involved" is getting involved.
Also, I think your whiteboard with a swatstika analogy demonstrates the shortsightedness of this sort of "inaction is endorsement" line of thinking. What about a candidate who's family was personally affected by the Holocaust and is so mortified to see the swatstika that they are too uncomfortable to even do anything about it? What about a South Asian candidate for whom the symbol doesn't elicit a reaction because of it's prevalence in South Asian culture? Or what about a candidate who thinks, "the people at this company definitely aren't Nazis, clearly this was part of diagram or something."
No.
> But by that logic, a site with no moderation simultaneously liberal, conservative, and centrist because all are allowed.
We aren't (and haven't been) talking about political ideals, but hate speech. A website that doesn't take action on hate speech is allowing and condoning hate speech.
> Calling a completely apolitical stance political is sort of like calling Atheism a religion. It's arguably correct but it's really the absence of religion.
We're not talking about apolitical stances like "I like chocolate." We're talking about hate speech, which is implicitly political.
> Also, I think your whiteboard with a swatstika analogy demonstrates the shortsightedness of this sort of "inaction is endorsement" line of thinking. What about a candidate who's family was personally affected by the Holocaust and is so mortified to see the swatstika that they are too uncomfortable to even do anything about it?
Isn't this just even more evidence to suggest that an employee not taking action is an action itself?
What-aboutism is great, but it doesn't really matter in this context, right? "What about a candidate who's blind" etc etc. I defined a hypothetical scenario to prove a point in response to the above hypothetical scenario.
The reality is that hosting content is not condoning it. An approach of "we're treating this like a whiteboard, we are not going to be involved in taking action against particular content" isn't an endorsement of anything. Whatever objectionable content someone might post, another person could post the complete opposite.
Not getting involved is exactly that: not getting involved. Ultimately, this claim that refusal to take action against hate speech is the same "inaction with respect to _____ is condoning ______" rhetoric that's been trotted out time and time again. At best, it's a misguided effort to inspire opposition to harmful views.
There are entire books discussing whether inaction is action, so that debate is clearly not getting solved here. I just ask, how do you think Facebook’s stance (the same as yours) is working out?
I would say the exact same thing regarding your misguided claim that refusal to censor content amounts to endorsement of it.
> I’m unsure what the negative side effect of suggesting opposition to harmful views, but that’s on you I guess.
Where did I write that there are negative side effects of removing content? All I wanted to dispel is the false claim that lack of censorship is a political stance.
> I just ask, how do you think Facebook’s stance (the same as yours) is working out?
Where do you get the idea that Facebook doesn't remove hate speech? Their content policies are easily found via Google: https://m.facebook.com/communitystandards/hate_speech
Considering that in that case you are the "moderator and owner" of that white board, yes it would be a political action if you decide to remove or not the confederate flag. That's without getting into the fact that the whiteboard didn't come from the ether and it's production, sale and all processes that compose the two are, also in some manner, political.
> How do you deal with employees expressing their opinions at work?
have a policy that work comms are only for discussion of work-related topics. keeping politics outside the permanent record is probably beneficial for everyone, and people are usually less nasty in person anyway. you'll probably end up with only a handful of employees who routinely start arguments over non work-related topics. after a couple warnings, it's time to "separate" them from the company.
> There are right and left-wing plans (birth control etc).
this is currently not an issue for the company. per ACA, employers are required to cover birth control in their health plans.
> The holidays are comming. Do your employees say "merry christmas" or "happy holidays"?
I really don't believe many people care about this. I work with people of every major faith, and it has literally never been an issue. if you want to be extra neutral, you can get rid of company holidays and just give everyone a little extra PTO. this way the company doesn't have to play the delicate game of deciding which faith's holidays to recognize.
tl;dr: I don't think any of this stuff is terribly hard to sidestep. many tech companies choose not to; I suspect they feel they benefit from playing the game.
"You voted for Trump? Or, you voted for Prop 123XYZ? I don't feel safe working here anymore. You're putting at risk my existence and my validity as a human being."
How do we move past "I'm in real physical danger because you disagree on my party choice"? Are HR departments currently equipped to tell their employees that perhaps they're being hyperbolic and political disagreements aren't equal to threats of physical violence?
Like many others said here, we're making it more and more unacceptable for people who vote differently in private to work together, which of course leads to more polarization, tribalism, and the formation of echo chambers that self-radicalize.
Let us know how it works out for you guys..
Kind of like saying atheism is a religion.
An atheist may not believe in god, but all of them have a position on whether religion belongs in a science class, for instance.
You can opt out and say "I don't care if biology is taught using creationism or evolution", but opting out means you are ok with creationism being taught.
And if you're ok with that, fine (I mean, you're wrong, but you're entitled to an opinion). But you can't pretend you haven't taken a position on it.
Edit: AH! It is a joke. The whole site is a wonderful parody, like "The Onion" but in the form of pitch perfect clueless privileged tech weanie.
- - - -
"Ideas for the Board of Coke"
> There is nothing better, than a Coke. It is the perfect product. It is so many things and all of them are wonderful. Coca-Cola is a beautiful, simple, quality, affordable, durable product that serves a real need, is available all over the world and appeals to pretty much every human alive, as well as many animals and single-celled organisms. It is liquid life.
ROFL! THis is priceless! Cheers!
https://twitter.com/soylent/status/1322588020185341952
https://soylent.com/blogs/news/update-from-soylent-ceo-demir...
(If he breaks character now he could be liable for some lawsuits, I imagine, so we may never know.)
Too bad we can't just randomly pick candidates 2 months before the election, they couldn't possibly be worse than the previous ones.
> “Anything less than a vote for Biden is a vote against democracy,” Mr. Barrett proclaimed.
To see a business say this nature of thing is really shocking. I have a hope that all of this behavior is a one-off to rid the world of Donald Trump, but I really doubt it. Judging by the respondents just on this thread, people aren't bothered by this.
This is very dystopian.
This is the dystopian part.
I reported this tweet to twitter. Twitter responded that it violated their policies and was removed.
I don't doubt that he was also subjected to threats-- after all, his own comments sets a tone where casual assault is, apparently, okay. It's not okay. It's not okay when he does it nor is it okay for people to do it in retaliation.
"Don't be a dick" has always been good advice.
I'd like these people to focus on privacy, open standards, ethical business practices in IT and so on instead of calling every business who isn't displaying a "BLM" banner on their websites "traitors"...
We went from "please join our righteous cause" to, "if don't ostensibly support our cause you're a f*cking bigot".
It's like the good ol' Bush II's "Either you are with us or you're with the terrorists".
well well... such a deep far left anti capitalist revolutionary he is, isn't he?... who the hell is he kidding?
I will never turn my company into a political cause.
I don't care what the cost is and my guess is that in February next year companies will realize that this is a bad move as their sworn enemy the big bad orange man is gone and all they can now do is turn on each other and they will finally start eating their own.