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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

> the obvious answer to me is unless your product is directly related to politics, a company as an entity should have no public stance on politics.

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.

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> 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.

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"

to at least a ternary:

  - "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"

I find the binary exceedingly demanding and almost insane.

Yes, but that does not change anything. “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)” is still a political decision with almost the same effect as “I support what you are doing and will contribute to your cause”.

> is still a political decision

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.

The personal is political.

If everything's political, then nothing is

Exactly. Politics are nuanced. Nothing is clear cut. When you are a business the effect of your decisions grow exponentially with your scale. For you it might be a political decision not to eat meat, or it might be a personal decision because you simply don’t like the taste of meat. A business doesn’t have this luxury if it pervades through many peoples lives.

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.

The scale in this case is typically a minor amount of turnkey commodity business going to ICE.

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?

Whether he was justified or not, I think the point OP was making was that it is still a political decision.

This person means everything is a fucking ideological purity test, according to his or her own politics.

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.

Then you have to follow that to it’s logical conclusion. When you pay for a Caltrain boarding pass in the Bay Area you implicitly support Exxon/BP and everything they support because they provided train diesel to the company that you fully support.

This is why the did business with == “fully support” equivalence is so dumb.

I don’t agree with that assessment - I evaluate decisions based on what your alternatives are. Riding Caltrain is a much lower fuel intensive act than riding a Hummer, and since you had the choice to do either it reflects on your values.

You can’t possibly have the information that would be required to weigh his decision-making that way. First, there aren’t two alternatives, there are countless alternatives and all you’ve said with your example of the Hummer is that it’s better than a really bad one on a single metric. Second, you don’t know the reasoning behind the decision. Maybe someone else drives because they were assaulted on a train less than a year ago and can’t even stand on a train platform. You don’t know, but you’re judging their “values” as if you do. Third, none of us have perfect information on which to base every single decision of our lives. How many of us act or don’t act in ways that don’t reflect our values simply because of our own ignorance? You’re likely surrounded by thousands of individual artifacts with scant idea of how, where, and by whom they were sourced and manufactured. Are you vouching for every single one of those artifacts as a reflection of your values? Not likely.

Ah, the minimum effort approach to patting yourself on the back. Note that the least fuel intensive act is to not ride the train or the Hummer, but that would actually be disruptive. The correct answer was to use an electric car powered by solar (because the current zeitgeist doesn’t care about manufacturing). Thanks for playing though, you’ve been cancelled.

Lol it’s not like building a solar car has no ecological cost, the amount of times you’d need to ride the train to come close to equaling the environmental cost of buying an electric car alone is immense - probably long enough for Caltrain to become electrified and powered by renewables, but idk, Bay Area government always surprises me with its incompetence.

There is a fundamental difference between your personal chooses and the chooses of a workplace. When you are a business there will be a point where a decision you make is political, way more so then if you are a person of no fame nor power.

It depends on the severity of "your cause". I don't think you will get many complaints if your cause is lower taxes or increase minimum wage. If your cause is to to take away rights of a coworker, you can't really stay neutral. I wouldn't accept my employer being neutral on gay marriage for example if I was a gay person.

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.

What is it about “culture issues” that makes it particularly “tough to accept neutrality?” Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of the the Iraq War—is that sufficiently weighty to warrant people demanding employers to take a position?

Something like the Iraq War is a much more complicated and nuanced issue in which people can reasonably disagree. Many people aren't going to be willing to debate or compromise on issues like civil rights. You are either on their side or not.

Gay marriage is a question of, among other things, mundane issues like taxation, upon which people can very reasonably disagree. Should Alan Turing have been able to put himself in a lower tax bracket by filing jointly with his 19-year-old roommate? It is a nuanced question; your answer might depend on what regime of divorce laws you're operating under (e.g. are you in a community property state or not).

>Should Alan Turing have been able to put himself in a lower tax bracket by filing jointly with his 19-year-old roommate?

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.

An argument that is cogent, but that I disagree with, is that those fiscal elements are intended to incentivize childbirth and raising a child under wedlock.

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.

This argument also relies on an unstated bias against gay couples.

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.

Heterosexual couples can indeed get married without any plans to have a child, I agree.

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.

IVF wasn’t invented until the 1970s, and even in 1976, 2/3 of middle aged women had given birth to 3+ children.

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 societies that still don’t recognize same-sex marriage, there is a universal assumption, and intense social pressure, for heterosexual couples to have children. That is seen as the purpose of marriage, and life more broadly. And while the conceptualization of marriage has shifted away from that in the developed world, that is itself a contentious trend.

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.)

> Straight couples can get married without any plans to have a child. Why is is different for gay couples?

This is rather an argument for a change in taxation laws instead of gay marriage.

> If he could do that with a female roommate why shouldn't he be allowed do that with his male roommate?

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.

Why did you choose a famously persecuted gay man as the example of a man who might wed another man purely for tax avoidance?

Okay, but before you talked about the “severity” of the issue. Now it seems like something more along the lines of issues that have some sort of “moral clarity.” Apart from moving the goalposts, politics is a process for getting different stakeholders to agree through debate and compromise. If there is no room for debate and compromise, you’re not talking about a political issue, but a moral crusade. And moral crusades are great, but they’re different from “politics.”

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.

You didn't ask me, but:

(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 think the US is better because we have legalized same-sex marriage, and I’ve always supported it. But it’s hard for me to say that an issue is such that “reasonable people can’t disagree” with policies that differ between the US and Switzerland.

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.

So: I agree with you that there's a slippery slope here and it's worth being aware of.

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.

It isn't directly an issue of morals. I was speaking to the severity to the individual employee. Opposition to gay marriage is obviously a hugely important issue for a gay person. There is no way to really compromise on a civil rights issue like that. Either people have equal rights or they don't. Someone being excluding from those rights can't accept neutrality as an answer.

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.

I think you've just never been exposed to any counter-arguments, frankly. The media won't do it so you're left to believe anything you disagree with is completely irrational.

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.

If you go the pure capitalistic approach (I am only interested in money) it seems like a bad moral play for society in general.

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.

Isn't the point (or at least on of the most important points) of law and the justice system to protect from harm (and handle those who violate laws)?

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 whole point of politics is that the law does not and cannot fully capture what’s right and wrong. Just because something is legal, it doesn’t mean it isn’t wrong, and I don’t like the idea that companies ought to act as though that’s the case.

> The whole point of politics is that the law does not and cannot fully capture what’s right and wrong.

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.

Why can't a corporation have a moral imperative that says "I will not participate in acts of cruelty"?

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.

I don't think we want to foster a sense that we're okay with companies being completely amoral just because everyone's tired of politics. We need to draw lines on basis of basic decency, i.e not supporting slavery, child trafficking and such. Then the discussion comes back to "but where is the line" and bam, we're back into politics.

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.

Can't this be achieved through legal or properly political means? If child trafficking is outlawed then a company cannot engage in child trafficking. If petrol cars are outlawed, then a company cannot manufacture petrol cars.

I wish, but that is not the world we live in. Child separation is probably illegal under the universal deceleration of human rights (which the USA has ratified).

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.

You moved the benchmark from "child trafficking" to "child separation."

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.

Sorry about that, it is just that ICE were probably breaking the law when they engaged in child separation. The parent is asking if it couldn’t simply be the case that evil things would rather be illegal then up to a company. Unfortunately we demonstrably live in a world where evil things that are probably illegal are still done by a government sanction agencies. Child separation is the thing that they do which demonstrates this. That is why I moved the benchmark.

I don't see the link between:

> 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.

ICE didn’t just separate the family units during incarceration, they also failed to reunify them on release. They also forcibly sterilized other asylum seekers which is a whole another human rights violation. The USA has also signed—though not ratified—the 1989 Declaration of the Rights of the Child which has more explicit protections. I believe this was confirmed in US courts as they quickly issued an injunction of this practice.

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.

Is there evidence for that forced sterilisation claim? I found this Guardian story but it only details an allegation, which hardly cuts it for such a serious crime: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/17/ice-hy...

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-...

> I must admit it sounds like the stuff of paranoid fantasy.

For a country with a documented history of disrespect for bodily autonomy it seems entirely in line with expected behaviour to me.

> ICE were probably breaking the law when they engaged in child separation.

Didn't the Ninth Circuit federal court order ICE to follow this practice? See the Flores Consent Decree.

It doesn't matter if the court says it's okay - it can still be a crime internationally (which it quite obviously is in this case).

As I understand it, the reason for child separation is that they can't certify that the adult traveling with them is their actual parent, and given that child trafficking is a reality and much worse than potentially being temporarily separated from your parent, I can't see what other solution is at the table ?

There is also no such policy for legal asylum seekers. It’s easy to avoid.

> having children housed with whatever adult they cross the border with

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?

> 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.

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?

> We need to draw lines on basis of basic decency, i.e not supporting slavery, child trafficking and such.

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?

In what world does separating them from their parents, shipping them 2000 miles away and giving them away to evangelical groups a solution to any problem?

Kidnapping doesn't cease to be kidnapping just because it was done by a government official.

You’re doing politics.

No, the child separation policy I decry is the byproduct of the zero tolerance policy regarding illegal immigration on the current administration. It does not matter if there is suspicion of child trafficking or not. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/politics/family-separa...

What the thoughts behind it are doesn't matter. What the reality is does. The reality is terrible, so it should not be supported.

Don't the current laws define the lines on basic decency? That's what the companies should follow. And I believe many should strive for that instead: there's loads of companies doing illegal things to their employees!

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.

It's not about your feelings. If you facilitate their efforts, no matter how much you wish to disclaim responsibility, you have still facilitated their efforts. Thus the binary. "Can't we just choose to ignore it" does not magically mean that when they trade their resources for yours in a deal that they like, you are somehow not helping them achieve their goals.

It’s really not so black and white. By paying taxes you’re technically facilitating their efforts, so approximately everyone is complicit.

This is a political problem that can only be solved politically (by voting) not by some tech companies doing small scale boycott

> 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.

The question isn't if you can actually cause Google or another big tech company to refuse to provide services, the question is if you can actually change the results with it.

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.

From my reading of available publications by the airforce on maven, the calculus was actually that they had a fixed threshold for risk, and being able to analyze more data would allow them to act in more cases with that same risk level. To probably oversimplify, if they were ok with 25% innocent causalities, increasing efficiency 100x would just let them kill 100x more often at the same ratio. Disclosure: ex-google

> By paying taxes you’re technically facilitating their efforts, so approximately everyone is complicit

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.

Still complicit because income tax is not the only federal tax.

You have to pay taxes. You don't have to provide tech to the ICE.

Politics is a lot more than just voting, especially when you have a two-party system that is vulnerable to ratcheting and deception.

>You have to pay taxes.

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.

And if a suffice t amount of people were to decide to live as vagabonds, society would collapse, and you'd be complicit in the millions of deaths that would cause.

No such conclusion if everyone stops selling software to ICE until they stop their grossly inhumane actions.

You can live an agrarian sustenance lifestyle and society wouldn't collapse... That's what society was for thousands of years.

Again, you choose to make a taxable income; you choose to pay taxes.

> It's not about your feelings. If you facilitate their efforts, no matter how much you wish to disclaim responsibility, you have still facilitated their efforts.

Obeying the law is like that.

Remember that next time you use any form of transportation powered by fossil fuel.

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.

> 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?

Buying legal marijuana is the same as participating in any combined market. There are significant groups of people who buy both illegal and legal just because of previous connections or the inconvenience (driving across state lines to get the legal hookup). So if you buy legally, you are causing competition for the legal supply which can cause just enough shortage to push demand onto the illegal market.

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.

> Until people refuse to smoke illegal marijuana en mass, the markets are effectively the same.

Which will only happen when it's legalized, which is exactly my point.

Even when it’s legalized, that won’t be enough unless it’s so cheap that the cartel literally can’t compete. With how heavily legal weed is taxed, a ton of people will be tempted to continue buying from their dealers.

Do you want the obvious answer? Clearly I don't advocate high taxes that would leave room for the black market to undercut the price. I've had this exact argument so many times...

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.

The thing that’s hard to resolve is that in your ternary there is no practical difference between 1 and 2 since your motivation only exists in your head while the real world effects are the same.

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.

Exactly. Only those unaffected by a decision have the luxury of considering it entirely apolitical.

> there is no practical difference between 1 and 2 since your motivation only exists in your head while the real world effects are the same.

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?

> Is there a practical difference between someone choosing to join your cause and your coercing someone to join 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.

Thanks, but those questions were meant as exercises for the poster I replied to. ;)

> * Thanks, but those questions were meant as exercises for the poster I replied to. ;)*

That's not how discussions work around here. And, frankly, you sound a bit condescending.

> That's not how discussions work around here.

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!

> Yes, I know--offering obvious expository answers to obviously rhetorical questions is how discussions work around here. ;)

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.

So, according to 'adwn, it's "not okay" to ask rhetorical questions to make a point in a conversation, because 'adwn feels like he can read the intentions in my mind, and they're ignoble.

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.

He’s fine, I gave him permission.

> I find the binary exceedingly demanding and almost insane.

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?"

This is a terrible argument. Replace politics with religion to see why.

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.

So the issue that is becoming very apparent to me is that people are doing things like denying science, denying people of human rights, saying that everything that they don’t like is fake and calling it a political stance. That’s what “politics” means now unfortunately.

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.

What do you think Hobby Lobby was about?

I don’t think it was about anything, I know exactly what it was about. Thanks though.

Okay tell me what it was about.

You didn't ask but just to be cheeky: it's about what Kennedy said it was about, the Least Restrictive Means test: forcing a private company to directly fund specific reproductive health care services is more intrusive than simply having the government fund those services itself in the rare cases where it matters, which is what it had done in the past.

(I'm sure Alito thinks it means something else, but Alito is the only genuine nutbag on the court).

That’s what I thought too!

I fail to see how this relates. Religion may be pervasive in cultural norms and social mores, but by no means are they as pervasive into everything we do as public policy are.

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.

As much as political activists want to think the world revolves around them, it really doesn't.

Saying "but this other thing is vaguely political" (or religious) is no excuse to insist that your company get involved in your pet causes.

> Religion may be pervasive in cultural norms and social mores, but by no means are they as pervasive into everything we do as public policy are.

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.

> the fact that businesses generally, and in many ways are legally required to, let people do their jobs regardless of their faith

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.

You heard of Hobby Lobby because they promptly got sued for it.

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.

> You heard of Hobby Lobby because they promptly got sued for it.

Hobby Lobby filed the lawsuit that they are famous for. And they won the case? What an ignorant reply.

Fair enough, but beside the point, which is that "businesses ... are legally required to, let people do their jobs regardless of their faith". Hobby Lobby had to wage a very public lawsuit all the way to the supreme court over a single element of their healthcare package, because our country doesn't like companies forcing religious beliefs on us. As it turns out, many of us feel the same way about companies forcing their politics on us.

> 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.

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")

I'm confused what the point of your comment is. Yes, in America, the employer pays for healthcare.

I don't think any business should be forced to put a BLM flag in their window just because all their neighbors are doing it.

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.

I kinda agree with your sentiment. If not, then you have to be outspoken and vocal in other political issues in other countries like China, Israel, Palestine, India, Iran, Russia, France, UK, etc.

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.

Don’t worry. In the example I took, it is a business not a person being blamed. And the situation is such that the when everyone around you is doing a thing, and you are not, what is your reason?

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.

You make it sound simple, but it’s not.

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.

-----

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.

It is simple. Toolmakers are not responsible for moral arbitration. A convicted felon can legally buy a Craftsman wrench, even if he plans to bludgeon someone with it. Craftsman is not responsible for preventing the convicted felon from buying one of their products. And that's fine.

Selling to a general public is not the same as selling to targeted clients. If you sell computers in a store, and an evil foreign dictator buys it from there, you are not as responsible as if that same foreign dictator approaches you and asks for a delivery.

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.

The difference in this case is that a retailer has no reason to believe that a random member of the public is going to use merchandise to bludgeon someone. However if a person comes in the store and says they are stocking up for the murder they are planning, you should not aid them. This may even be criminally aiding and abetting!

Hard disagree. Not doing a thing is by no means a political statement (your BLM example). Now if they put up an All Lives Matter flag, then you have an argument.

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.

Not doing a thing is sometimes a political statement. Colin Kaepernick would certainly agree with that. Honestly if most businesses in the downtown building I worked at put up “all lives matter” flags and my business did not move from that building, I’d stop going to the office. For me the business deciding to stay in a building downtown with a bunch of bigots would be a political statement I could not accept.

But I don't think you'd be able to go to any office if you consistently applied such a totalizing view. What I inevitably see happen in practice is a laser focus on recent local political controversies. I have a decent number of friends who say that vocally supporting LGBT rights is very important to them - but are happy to vacation in Singapore, where it's illegal for men to be gay.

Because it's virtue signaling all the way down. Not to be hateful, but if you look how the groups align it makes little sense. Those who most seek to protect those ignorant people call terrorists, or illegals who need to be sent back, are also those who support gay rights, despite the fact those two groups historically and currently trend strongly against it. I'm not trying to ruffle any feathers, I'm just an observer fascinated with how things are playing out. But recently it seems these virtues we all must follow or die only apply to Americans, and that doesn't sit well with me.

Context matters. Visiting a foreign nation which criminalizes homosexuality is not the same as supporting it, nor is it the same as if your CEO donates to an anti-LGBTQ+ cause, or if you find out that the product you are working on is being sold with knowledge to government agencies who break human rights with knowledge of that workplace rulers.

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.

Saying all lives matter is literally not bigoted though.

In the context of Black Lives Matter, it very much is.

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.

According to the standards of the english language, no, it is literally not.

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.

If you deny them, you also did (morally correct) politics

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.

Exactly. It’s 2 sides where one romanticizes “the other” and one romanticizes “mine”. You can argue morality all you want but it’s a social construct in either direction.

Incorrect. If a company buys my services, they are free to do with that service what they please. We don't shut down hammer companies because some dude whacked another with 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.

1. Nobody is shutting down companies that are doing politics they don’t agree with.

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.

I don't know, we seem to have done ok about companies not being political a decade ago. It seems it's only recently companies, especially prominent ones, started getting dragged into political positions.

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.

idk. IBM selling computers to the Nazi regime in the 30s is often cited a poor political decision on their part.

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.

Things aren't black and white. Supporting an enemy of the state is quite a bit different from doing business with a legitimate arm of the government, or choosing to support or not the current social issue. You may disagree with policies, and many people will disagree with many policies. But there is a channel for that doesn't require said policies to permeate every aspect of life.

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?

The family separation program is implemented by a democratically elected government. If it's illegal, the courts are the place to challenge it.

You are being disingenuous. The question is not "is it illegal?" The question is"is if moral?"

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.

What's actually being disingenuous, pointing out the formal route for settling these issues or using terms like "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.

Right but the formal process isn’t the only way to affect change. It would be really weird if you were like “if you don’t like segregation you shouldn’t protest or have sit-ins, just contact your elected representatives.”

Yes, but the question is about whether or not companies should take stances on these things, and the inevitable moral complexity throws up obstacles given that companies are comprised of individuals with differing opinions.

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.

There is a good question as to wether it makes sense for companies to take stances on unrelated political issues where I think you can make a strong case about staying out of it.

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.

There are people who honestly and truly believe this applies to abortion and forms of contraception.

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?”

Why is the work place the appropriate venue for non-industry politics?

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?

No.

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.

If you shop at Trader Joe’s, and Trader Joe’s sells food to ICE employees that participate in the family separation program, you just took a supportive political stance.

Did you pay any federal taxes this year to support ICE instead if refusing to pay them? You just took a supportive political stance.

This is kind of a motte and bailey fallacy, the motte "everything is political" and the bailey of "what politics should corporations have, and for that matter its employees". That leads to some ominous answers as a corporation is purely in the business of making money, nothing more, nothing less. Anything else is simply internal policy for operating the organization, and can be done for any number of reasons. Ideology in work is for a privileged few, and the vast majority simply trade their labor for a paycheck. We would be better off recognizing this reality.

Your bailey makes no sense as it isn't a position.

Okay, to clarify, the bailey is "corporations and people that make up the organization are explicitly political".

These aren’t mutually exclusive. A corporation acting purely out of motivation to make money is still inadvertently making political decisions whether the company considered them or not.

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 exploitive or discriminatory practices exist, it's for our laws and courts to lay out the framework to address this and redress those impacted. If we have unaccountable agencies in government there should be mechanisms to dissolve them. I'm not saying this is what will happen, but the aim should be decentralizing power.

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.

> Businesses simply don’t have the option of not doing politics.

You are confusing a willful engagement of opinion for a contractual or procedural obligation.

> you are being complacent in the policy that ICE enforces, and therefor just did some (highly questionable) politics.

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.

You seem to not have read the sentence you quoted? In that case the product is directly related to politics.

They never made any statement about what the product Is, so how can we make a determination about how related the product is to politics?

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.

His point is that the product wasn't related by design, only by adoption. When e.g. Salesforce makes software for tracking workflows and ICE adopts it for managing detention centers, they are forced into making a political choice when they might not have intended to.

the hypothetical posed in the parent comment isn't really a hypothetical. it's the actual situation github found themselves in a while back. i don't think "directly related to politics" is really a description anybody would naturally apply to github's product, but they still ended up in the middle of politics.

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.

Can't seem to edit, I agree with the repliers this was a bad reply.

That's a very polar way of reasoning. It's not all politics. I can imagine several reasons to justify those decisions outside "doing politics"-reason.

Or please define "political decision".

Unless you only want to work for ICE but not for an emigration lawyer thats not a political choice thats an agnostic choice.

When Google employees decided who google should work for THATS political.

None of these examples you brought up are political in nature. Not one.

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.

> SaaS company is breaking no American laws and ICE isn't either

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 are suggesting private companies run their own immigration policy, which is insane.

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.

A company choosing whether to actively participate in US immigration policy is not the same thing as a company choosing to run its own immigration policy.

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?

All US companies actively participate in US immigration policy whether they like it or not, just as they actively participate in US transportation policy, interest rate policy, etc. That is what it means to be a law abiding business in a nation where the nation defines citizenship while individual businesses do not. You do not get to opt out and live in your own little bubble where you pretend you are a nation unto yourself with your own private immigration law.

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.

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