Despite crypto layoffs, Kraken continues to hire

This is basic PR I would expect from even a college club, much less the CEO of a financial exchange: not getting on Twitter using laughing emojis and crying FUD.

A bare minimum of consideration of people who are different from you goes an astoundingly far way.

Similarly, my wife not taking my name upon our marriage was an implicit political act and my mom going by Ms. was as well.

At different points in time either of those acts could have brought ridicule to my wife and mother so that’s not a terribly good standard.

Personally, I view addressing people as they want to be simply polite but let’s not pretend that our view of “correct” isn’t a political act that is potentially outside the current norms.

not needing to have debates about the N-word has got to be the absolute definition of table stakes when it comes to competent management. this is the funniest Twitter thread I've read in ages.

edit: and this is the CEO's pitch for RECRUITING! this is clown shit on the level of Theranos, or when Coinbase was handling all its financial transactions through Mongo.

'Bring your whole self to work' is nonsense. If your whole self is at odds with acceptable workplace behaviour, it should stay at home.

You're not expected to work with anyone you don't work with.

To address the but-for in better faith than it deserves: as a cis white dude, I absolutely do not care what a tech leader says about much of anything. I do care what my co-workers say and believe, but my co-workers are not of a political, religious, or cultural persuasion that implies that I should be killed for being a cis white dude, and I would expect my employer to do something about it if that were the case.

Wouldn't you?

So, let's try again: queer people should be expected to work with those who believe that they should be killed for being queer. Yes or no?

This is the contention at hand. If you're going to participate in the discussion, you're going to need to grip it with both hands. I obviously think that it's a ridiculous statement, and nobody should be expected, either socially or contractually, to work with somebody who believes they should be killed. Do you?

> Leading questions may often be answerable with a yes or no (though not all yes–no questions are leading).

And specifically referencing your example, still from your article:

> Leading questions are distinct from loaded questions, which are objectionable because they contain implicit assumptions[3] (such as "Have you stopped beating your wife?"

That is to say: the question posed is not a leading question, and the article you linked as a citation in fact directly refutes your specific example.

Your article helpfully informs us that your example is a “loaded question,” and we can ask Wikipedia what distinguishes such a question:

> A loaded question is a form of complex question that contains a controversial assumption (e.g., a presumption of guilt).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question

Yet the original question still fails this new test: there is no controversial assumption, and certainly no presumption of guilt.

Unless, of course, you think it preposterous that anyone would hold a belief such as “queer people should be beaten to death for their sexual orientation.” Or that it’s unlikely or even impossible that one’s coworkers would hold such a belief.

Unfortunately, neither of those are exceedingly controversial - it is trivial to find ample evidence of outright calls for the execution of LGBT individuals in the past month, and I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

The most controversial assumption here is that such a person might be a coworker. And frankly, that just doesn’t rise to the level of a “loaded question.”

You just didn’t want to answer.

What a truly absurd take.

None of this is news to Kraken, whose CEO helped maintain a "more troll-ish than 4chan" group on their Slack. Professionalism simply isn't one of their company values.

At any rate: my point remains --- there's no apparent overlap between Kraken, where unprofessionalism and cultural activism is coming from management, not from activist employees, and progressive organizations, which is what the Intercept article is talking about.

I read it as him saying: the argument that "why can’t white people identify as black and say the n-word" is a troll argument, made in bad faith, and is disruptive to work culture and productivity, and people making that argument have no place in their culture.

I arrive at that conclusion because the heading starts "What are they upset about?" They are upset "whether someone can identify as a different race and be allowed to use the N-word." I dont really think someone parading against wokism would in good faith argue that somebody can identify as a different race. They would only do so facetiously. Three tweets above it, his SYN flood DoS analogy makes its pretty clear he is against people derailing good conversation with in bad faith arguments.

As an aside, I'm honestly a little concerned that basically every other commenter arrived at a different conclusion. We are all all over the place. Is our ability to connectively parse tribal language, in a consensual way, really this broken? Is what he wrote really that cryptic or unclear? EDIT: I guess he is the facetious bad actor.

To prevent this confusion, should have said nothing at all.

In my mother tongue there are no "words-than-must-not-be-named" and I struggle to understand the logic behind it. It reminds me of that Paul Grahams text "What you can't say" http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html:

"I can think of one more way to figure out what we can't say: to look at how taboos are created. How do moral fashions arise, and why are they adopted? If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to see it at work in our own time.

Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary fashions are. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when everyone imitates the whim of some influential person. The fashion for broad-toed shoes in late fifteenth century Europe began because Charles VIII of France had six toes on one foot. The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name of a tough mill town in Indiana. Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there's something we can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to.

The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas.

To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle."

And I don't agree with having someone else's taboos enforced on me.

(Which I'm sure some people will read as "I WANT TO BE ABLE TO SAY <<N**R>> AT WORK", but I don't think I can help those people other than ask them to re-read what I wrote)

John McWhorter would. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/opinion/john-mcwhorter-n-...

Or perhaps more pertinent to your question: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/opinion/use-mention.html

McWhorter thinks it's crazy that the word is such a profanity that even mentioning the word is taboo.

Part VI doesn't go in depth about firearms. In any case, it would be pretty alarming to me if a cryptocurrency exchange wasn't oriented towards freedom and against regulation. Cryptocurrency, like cryptography or firearms is fundamentally a freedom-enhancing technology so long as they're in the hands of individuals and not institutions.

Concerning part VII, It emphasizes the importance of tolerance of diverse ideas, and respect for co-workers. Generally speaking, I think that the "identity politics" (e.g. "inter-sectionalism") that characterize "woke-ness" are pretty untolerant and anti-productive, even for the pursuit of progressive/leftist causes. It would be wise for any group with pro-freedom goals to weed out these types from their organization ahead of time.