Paul Biggar removed from CircleCI board for pro-Palestine blog post | Hacker News Reader

Paul Biggar removed from CircleCI board for pro-Palestine blog post

hachyderm.io

97 pointsdmazin20 comments

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I assume this is the post in question: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645523 [flagged] - 124 points, 81 comments

It reads like he knew what he was getting into. He chose to have a clear conscience and damn the consequences.

That shows strength of character, which is a commendable quality.

Thanks.

I wonder whether this line was 50% of the reason for dismissal (and Palestine things being the other half):

> Secondly, don’t make money for investors who whitewash genocide, namely partners at Boldstart, DCVC, Harrison Metal, Redpoint, Bessemer, Sequoia, or First Round.

(I.e. call for boycott. Very uncapitalist)

Boycotting is simply choosing to vote against a company's principles or actions with your wallet, which is the essence of capitalism.

In that HN discussion, one of his suggested solutions was for Israel to "pull back 50 miles from Gaza for a number of years" [1]

East-to-west, Israel is only 71 miles at its widest point [2] and is mostly much narrower than that.

Meanwhile the Gaza Strip is only 7.5 miles wide at its widest point. [3] Yet he's calling for a 50-mile pullback to bring about peace, among many other things.

Is he ignorant about the region's basic geography? Or is he fully aware of this and is nonetheless seriously calling for Israel to abandon a sizeable chunk of the country?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38654221

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Israel

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip#Geography

Frustrating to see this story flagged already. Can we not even talk about censorship of pro-Palestinian voices in the tech world? Is this story not news worthy?

It is. But angry evil people tend to equalize discussion of should talking about their decisions be allowed with actually supporting the opposite decision.

This doesn't seem to be welcome, since this submission at 1 hours old, 37 points and 7 comments just completely disappeared from the first 10 pages of HN without even having flagged status.

While that's fair, since this likely to devolve into an emotional political debate, in the context of this story it leaves a bad aftertaste.

Edit: And now it's [flagged] too.

Instead of simply flagging, I wish people would suggest an appropriate place to discuss these topics -- zombie twitter, reddit, facebook etc. or their clones are not at all usable for me, and I would guess not very pleasant for the majority of people interested in genuine discussion.

Besides that, why are tech leaders "cancelling" anyone who speaks out against mass killing of humans? I genuinely do not understand what is happening.

What I found surprising was how militant and extreme so many in the venture capital community were about Israel. The vast majority of people I know are very pro-Palestinan and see Israel as an oppressive cold war relic that needs to go the way of South Africa. On October 7th we woke up to an industry where the financiers were very much at odds with the market, staff, world population... and it seems like they've done nothing but double down since then. It's really upsetting, especially since we've seen 20k civilians killed and vcs are still cheering on Israel.

Do these topics even get discussed? Even here, a place that is calmer than most, people are already calling people that disagree with them horrible names.

I always thought about the public discourse regarding wars in general

Let's say the majority of the population is simply 'anti war' and focus on these people.

Is it not sufficient to support this message?

Does not with with us = against us actually apply to wars (or maybe this particular war)

Wonder what your thoughts on this are.

Firstly, this is not a war, it is a genocide against unarmed civilians. Anyone saying anything else is absolutely evil.

Secondly, if anti-war is a synonym for anti-violence, which I believe it is in this case, then the cold reality is that Palestinians have tried peaceful protest before, and they were simply gunned down by laughing IDF monsters. Some regimes will only be defeated by violence. This Zionist regime seems to be one such.

Lastly, silence in the face of such atrocities is violence, as the cliche has it.

Just because you flagged this story doesn't mean it didn't happen.

The headline pushes the myth that losing sleep over the death of civilians is pro-Palestine and not anti-genocide and pro-human.

[dupe]

More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38741160

Few remaining tall people in tech.

Any further details? Hard to extract info from dialogue.

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