Comment by hypertexthero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hypertexthero | Hacker News Reader

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> “The proximity of his workplace and his home is convenient, but there is a serious political motivation underlying it, too. When Steidl was a teen-ager, he spent several weeks volunteering at Auschwitz, clearing paths for visitors and sleeping in a former barracks. His father had served in the German Army, and Steidl participated in a program that had been established, he said, to show young Germans “what the parents had done. The experience helped him confront ‘the dark side of Germany.’ One thing that he contemplated was the ethics of separating one’s work from one’s domestic life. ‘I read about how the homes of the officers were outside the concentration camp, where they had a wife and children, and a little dog, and they were the nicest people you can expect,’ he told me. ‘And then they were going to work—they were shooting and murdering and sending people to death. So I also thought that it makes a huge difference when you are not isolated from your work, when working and living is a symbiosis. Normally, when you have a business and you produce something industrial, you have the plant somewhere and it makes a lot of dirt, and poison, and noise, and destroys the environment. You are working there all day, and then in the evening you drive home and you have your pleasant place to stay, with clean air, while poor people have to live with the dirt you are producing. I control my noise, because I am sleeping there, with an open window, every night.’”

—Gerhard Steidl

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/22/gerhard-steidl...

We're not actually trying to equate working on email products at Basecamp to working at Auschwitz are we? It's an interesting anecdote but it hardly serves a useful function here.

Try and look deeper. Sometimes an extreme example at the 99.9999th percentile can bound the problem. In this case, it demonstrates how well people can separate work from home.

I would say the quote does not demonstrate the delineation between work and non-work. It's about in-group vs out-group bias. If the quote were about Nazi's coming home and hanging out with ethnically diverse friends, that would demonstrate considerable work vs home culture.

I'm sorry, but I disagree

Substantiate it if you're going to comment.

I don't even know where to begin. How did you come up with in group vs out group? Who in this is the in group?

German nationals vs other. They’re suggesting OP is drawing a false analogy by framing the compartmentalisation through employment and ignoring the ethnic divisions.

It is also a complete inverse of the situation: it isn't the work being called into question, but whether or not everyone uniformly agrees in terms of their personal opinions and personal lifestyles.

I find the analogy above to be rather gross.

Basecamp is a small company, but Google was caught helping the US military, while most of the employees working for Google are not Americans. Even one of the cofounders and the current CEO are not American born, which means that they are asked to potentially do things agains their family.

Isn't that where you, the worker, draw a line and say which companies you will work for?

No, but for example I was working really hard under Google while Eric Schmidt was the CEO. Then in my last year working there I stopped caring about working hard enough to get a promotion, and just treated it as a workplace where I get money to invest. After a fatFIRE I never looked back.

> Normally, when you have a business and you produce something industrial, you have the plant somewhere and it makes a lot of dirt, and poison, and noise, and destroys the environment.

That’s... not how industry works anymore. The reason you don’t want to live in an industrial park is because they are bright, loud, and take up a ton of space so they destroy walkability.

To the larger point though. It’s a bit daft to compare not talking about politics to shooting Jews. The German guards most certainly discussed what they were doing and felt that it was the right thing.

If we’re going for melodramatic comparisons, political echo chambers in the workplace lead to the type of groupthink that result in real gas chambers.

I think this story actually proves the point. In this case, people were monsters at work and respectable people at home.

Therefore it works the other way around too: someone can worship Satan in a death metal band in his private life and work at a Catholic school.

The very definition of maturity is assuming the role appropriate to the situation. What I think might influence my decisions, but in my job is my duty to set aside what I think and act in the interest of my employer. Not mine.

Now we live in a time where your work identity an personal are conflated into one. Your work is who you are. There's no longer life beyond it.

Maybe is a good thing... But it's certainly exhausting to me. Everyone putting up their best behavior all the time.

People don't spontaneously decide that conducting murder in a concentration camp is a morally acceptable career path. The Nazis succeeded in the first place because they injected their politics into every aspect of life. Politics-free spaces create additional friction that impedes the rise of radical ideology.

That would be true if there was no difference between seeking equality and justice vs. scapegoating Naziesque goose-stepping grievances. I say this as someone who gets annoyed by politically active coworkers. Not all ideologies are created equally.

> seeking equality and justice

Equality of outcome or opportunity? That matters. I'd support one but not the other. I lived under Communism until 1989 and I know what equal outcome looks like after decades of having its run. There is no incentive to excel and all the incentives to conform because equality comes before merit. After some time the whole society slides into poverty.

What I don't like is to put ideology over humans, meaning to prefer abstractions and reifications over concrete realities and ignore those realities. Fighting for justice on a societal level can often be blind to personal details. It's usually us vs them and personal details don't matter, in that regard it's similar to war, dehumanising their opponents in order to make them legitimate targets.

Hello fellow Eastern European.

Yeah, a quest for societal justice can absolutely turn into an egg-breaking rampage with promise of a tasty omelette sometimes in the unspecified glorious future. We have seen it and are a bit sceptical.

The USA was spared this particular disaster. Perhaps we could point out the case of the Prohibition or War on Drugs to our American friends?

These, too, were/are moral crusades ostensibly led by the noblest of intentions, in practice steamrolling individuals without mercy and giving incentive to rise of brutal criminal organizations.

It’s disingenuous to blame all problems our countries had before 89 on socialism, while ignoring the constant blockade and attack from the Western European countries and the US.

A country the size of the USSR does not need resources from other countries to survive. If communism was effective, the blockades would have been irrelevant.

It did however need to protect itself from the constant threat of annihilation by the US. At one point US generals were proposing to preemptively nuke all of the USSR because their own losses would be acceptable.

So it didn’t help that a developing economy had to redirect a sizeable portion of its productive power towards defence. Nor did the constant less direct attacks from the US and its allies. Despite all of that, average workers had good conditions even when compared to the US itself.

You’re forgetting that the Nazis utterly ane completely destroyed the USSR, digesting an entire generation of men in every soviet state along with all of their infrastructure and resources.

In the end it was the sacrifice USSR which enabled USA and UK (lots of Uniteds here) to claim victory. As a thank you, the west invested considerable resources into rebuilding Germany and Japan while giving the USSR and China the middle finger and immediately treating them like enemies.

We really did kick Russia and China while they were down, repeatedly, then spit on them.

what about the part where Russia decided to continue occupying all the countries they’d fought the Nazis out of?

Just as we’ve seen with Israel and China, the bullied have a tendency to become the aggressors. It could have gone differently had we not decided to back the bad guys of ww2.(Germany and Japan)

Didn't the blockade work both ways?

I'm not blaming everything on socialism though. Russia was not very developed before the revolution, and it suffered terrible losses in WWII.

Several socialist countries tried to export the west, but it was always with the condition that they privatise, reduce worker wages and take on extortionate IMF loans.

I’m less familiar with the USSR’s policies on this, but I can tell you România tried to export to the west and took on an IMF loan to do so. Then we were blocked from actually selling our exports and the loan was required to be paid early and in full regardless. Since we were only allowed to export food for the most part, rationing had to be used for several years. This economic crisis, in addition to constant propaganda via radio and funding of fascists, is part of how the US and its allies made the 89 coup successful.

Was România free to buy everything the West was selling?

If nothing else, we were restricted from buying several foreign currencies at anything other than extortionate rates. A lot of trade deals also insisted on liberalising to some degree or other, which would have (and did, after 89) damaged the local economy. Without trade deals a lot of commodities are so expensive they might as well be banned.

Later on China and Vietnam did manage to negotiate an in-between position with some markets and some free trade (and in the case of Vietnam even IMF loans), but with workers as a class maintaining control of the state and significant parts of the economy continuing to be mostly planned by state-owned enterprises.

I support equality of outcome. Everyone should be poor. It builds character, and makes for better writers. A nation's progress should only be measured by the literature it generates, and then forces its children to read.

>Not all ideologies are created equally.

Then discourage all irrelevant politics from work and give even less leeway to the "bad" ideologies.

If democratic means are not sufficient to achieve political results you're happy with, then your fellow citizens are not ready for your interpretation of equality and justice. It is antithetical to leverage corporate resources to force your goal. If you happen to be politically vocal without abusing corporate power, then you'd make little political progress, so whether your ideology is good or bad matters very little. You'd just be creating more polarization either way.

> is antithetical to leverage corporate resources to force your goal

So, overturn citizens united, ban corporate PACs, and all corporate political donations? Or are you just trying to ban one side from leveraging corporate resources?

A lot of Nazi's really did believe that they were in the right. That Jew's really were an inhuman invader presenting an existential threat.

Of course that is an incredibly fragile idea to hold. There needed to be an institutional structure that tied those views to everyday practical and emotional needs. You hold those views because your power, prestige, money and family safety depended on holding those views. You suck up to you Nazi boss, whos suck's up to his boss in turn, all the way up to Hitler. And weirdly this is how a lot of companies act. Deep down everyone knows that the corporation is a lie. But slowly and surely your words turn into a stream of carefully crafted shibboleth's and cultural references. And you get a promotion and a new car. Your family is safe and your place in the pecking order confirmed. And every few years a new set of words enter the vocabulary that clear out a few oldies and cycle the structure.

The problem here is not politics per-se but top-down command structures that allow viewpoints to be weaponized for career promotion.

There's more truth to this than people want to admit. I would add a nuance that it wasn't just about injecting politics, but a certain brand, with no room for others. If we have politics with tolerance, it's a completely different outcome.

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