As someone who lives outside America, 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.
From the outside looking in, American politics has long since ceased being about policy and idea's, it is now a contest of identity where it doesn't matter what someone stands for so long as they are on the team I support.
In this kind of climate, for a business or other entity to involve themselves in politics would be consciously choosing to more or less blacklist themselves from doing business with the other side or run the risk of having their brand tarnished via social media for whatever stance they take.
Finally, a business that takes a political stance does damage not just to themselves but to their employees as in the current political climate, both sides have no problems harassing a person or worse if they are viewed as not "on their team". Once a company takes a political stance, it doesn't matter if what that employee believes or does nor does it matter that said employee might be working for this company because they have a family to feed and don't have the luxury of quitting and looking for a new job, the very fact that they work for said company means that they should be treated as persona-non-grata.
Make it simple, a company can't vote, so a company doesn't have a political affiliation (unless of course, it is some kind of lobbying company etc).
> American politics has long since ceased being about policy and idea's, it is now a contest of identity
We have confused being politically active with being partisan.
Even this article conflates the two. Yet there is a world of difference between taking a policy stance and promoting a candidate or a party.
Companies have a legitimate stake in policy that commercially affects them. Nobody reasonably holds Uber and Lyft and DoorDash’s recent politicking in California against them. One may disagree, but it’s coherent. (Hobby Lobby taking a stance on gay rights, on the other hand, is incoherent.)
Companies must be politically active because nothing is apolitical. But companies shouldn’t be partisan. And when you are doing your work, the partisan affiliations of those around you should not matter.
> Nobody reasonably holds Uber and Lyft and DoorDash’s recent politicking in California against them.
What? I absolutely hold it against them, given how much of it was pure and unpunished chicanery like tricking drivers into agreeing to 'petitions' then used in published advertising.
You're conflating the rationale for their actions with the execution.
It was logical for those companies to take political action in those instances in order to maintain their business models. How they did so may have been unsavoury, but that's orthogonal to the justification.
The entire business model is unsavory. The basic theory is about atomizing the workforce until they have no power whatsoever, and more profits can flow upwards.
Abusing the app to force drivers to click "yes, i support this" under fear of a "no" click being recorded and held against them is just one small instance of the overall phenomenon.
>Nobody reasonably holds Uber and Lyft and DoorDash’s recent politicking in California against them.
Just as a customer, I hold it against a business when they too aggressively tell me how to vote. Campaign for whatever, but don't make me sit captive to it in order to do business with you.
> And yet we do because it's a real and useful concept, just like "apolitical".
Both unicorns and apolitical actions are unreal fantasies.
The only things that seem apolitical are the things that are so widely agreed on that their true political nature is hard to discern. Once you have disagreement, especially widespread disagreement, the political nature becomes clear. For instance, take the idea of marriage only being between a man and a woman and go back 100 years. Back then, it would have gone without saying, but now it's "political" because many people have other ideas. Nothing changed, except the level of consensus.
Nonsense, most things are apolitical. The people who deny that are trying to produce political action on their pet issues and think we can be coerced into supporting it if they claim, as George W. Bush did, that "you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists." It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now.
> The only things that seem apolitical are the things that are so widely agreed on that their true political nature is hard to discern
The disagreement is what makes things political. There isn't an inherent "political" quality sitting in things. Existentialist's motto was: life is meaningless until you give it meaning. By analogy, most things in the world are apolitical until quarrelsome people with pet issues show up and make them political.
> The disagreement is what makes things political. There isn't an inherent "political" quality sitting in things.
That's true in a sense (e.g. plate tectonics is not political), but it's false you start dealing with things that intersect with human society. For instance: anything to do with power over others, the makeup of society, or the kind of actions people are allowed, encouraged, or forbidden to do is inherently political.
> By analogy, most things in the world are apolitical until quarrelsome people with pet issues show up and make them political.
Not really, and that's just a pretty typical (political!) ad hominem argument made by people who want to maintain the status quo, whatever that is. Stated another way, you're saying the people who want change are troublemakers who should know their place.
> Stated another way, you're saying the people who want change are troublemakers who should know their place.
First, that's only the case if you assume that by "political" I mean bad. But "political" isn't necessarily bad.
Secondly, and more importantly, to make something political is often to imagine some unjust status quo to be overturned. But imagination has power of reifying fantasies to actual events. In other words, to make something political is often to exercise power at the expense of others and to justify it by portraying your action as serving to overturn a status quo. Even status quo can use this to further their power! Freedom isn't always the net outcome of politics.
>>> By analogy, most things in the world are apolitical until quarrelsome people with pet issues show up and make them political.
>> Stated another way, you're saying the people who want change are troublemakers who should know their place.
> First, that's only the case if you assume that by "political" I mean bad. But "political" isn't necessarily bad.
No, I assume that by "quarrelsome people with pet issues" you mean bad. I thought that was pretty obvious.
> In other words, to make something political is often to exercise power at the expense of others and to justify it by portraying your action as serving to overturn a status quo.
This is "speech is violence" level nonsense.
If someone challenges a status quo that you like ("makes something political" in your parlance), then actually defend that status quo. Don't gripe about how those quarrelsome people ruined your nice "apolitical day."
> If someone challenges a status quo that you like ("makes something political" in your parlance), then actually defend that status quo
Incidentally, that right there is a good illustration of how being apolitical is different from supporting the status quo.
Going to a protest to defend the status quo from change is defending the status quo. Not having an opinion about some particular detail of how society operates is being apolitical.
>> If someone challenges a status quo that you like ("makes something political" in your parlance), then actually defend that status quo. Don't gripe about how those quarrelsome people ruined your nice "apolitical day."
> Incidentally, that right there is a good illustration of how being apolitical is different from supporting the status quo.
> Going to a protest to defend the status quo from change is defending the status quo. Not having an opinion about some particular detail of how society operates is being apolitical.
Not really. You're trying to restrict "doing politics" to certain overt political rituals ("going to a protest"), which I think is false restriction.
However, you missed my point in your incomplete quote: the act of griping that things should be kept "apolitical" is itself a kind of protest for the status quo, just a disguised one.
Now you might have a point that someone's ignorance of an issue could make them in some sense "apolitical" in relation to it. However, once the issue has been articulated to them in a way they understand, they're no longer ignorant and have taken some position, even if that's tacit approval of the status quo.
The fundamentalist faith that is evangelical progressivism allows nothing and no one to fall outside its purview.
Every aspect of everyone's life must submit to its edicts.
> As someone who lives outside America, 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.
Statements like yours are very easy to make and sound fine at a superficial level, but quickly run into problems when you try to actually apply the rule. For instance: does a company that sells drugs that can be used off-label for executions of human beings have a "product [that] is directly related to politics?"
This problem is a lot like writing good requirements. Your rule above is a lot like a requirement of an HR system that states simply "the system will reject the resumes of all unqualified candidates." There's a lot to unpack there, and that requirement, as stated, doesn't even get you 1% of the way there.
You are making it intentionally over-complicated. There isn't much to unpack at all. A company becomes political by making a political decision, not by consequence of someone else using its products to make political decisions.
> You are making it intentionally over-complicated. There isn't much to unpack at all. A company becomes political by making a political decision, not by consequence of someone else using its products to make political decisions.
It's not that simple. If a gun store owner sells guns to people he knows are planning to commit a robbery, isn't he also guilty of a crime? Likewise, if a company sells materials for lethal injections to groups they know conduct executions, aren't they tacitly supporting a policy of capital punishment?
Also your comment leans very heavily on the definition of "political," which you leave totally undefined. Once you try to get consensus definition of that, you'll get into the same difficulty of unpacking it's meaning that I was referring to.
That you bring up a robbery example highlights that you don't understand what political is. Facilitating a robbery is illegal. Facilitating actions of a political group, as long as it is within the framework of a law, is called "living in a society." Your second example reduces to the following: "is it legal to sell materials to facilitate lethal injections?" If no, then it is a matter of criminal justice, not politics. If yes, the political actor is the group committing the lethal injections, not the group selling materials.
The kind of extreme "guilt by association" you derive cannot be considered a part of the political in terms of conscious action precisely because "the political" encompasses normal function of the society. Criminal activity, on the other hand, is not considered a part of normal function of a society, hence one can assume that everyone who "knows" a criminal but doesn't turn him in is also a criminal. In other words what you're doing is you are criminalizing normal para-political association---a characteristic of individuals with a totalitarian mindset. As a non-American, I have to say I am stunned to observe this attitude in the US.
> That you bring up a robbery example highlights that you don't understand what political is. Facilitating a robbery is illegal. Facilitating actions of a political group, as long as it is within the framework of a law, is called "living in a society." Your second example reduces to the following: "is it legal to sell materials to facilitate lethal injections?" If no, then it is a matter of criminal justice, not politics. If yes, the political actor is the group committing the lethal injections, not the group selling materials.
Actually, I'm pretty sure it's you who doesn't have a very good definition of politics. My sense is that you understand it to basically be whatever's covered in the politics section of a newspaper, and maybe a few hot-button issues besides.
Also, what you're saying is contradictory. For instance, you're treating "legality" and "politics" as different things, when the law is itself a creature of politics.
You also misunderstood my point. You seem to be thinking that commerce is neutral, and the market transactions somehow insulate the participants from each other, but that's just not the case. A market transaction can facilitate an immoral action, which in some cases may be legal and other cases not. This is well understood, and in the case of illegal immoral actions is even punishable. The only thing that I think could be actually insulating in a transaction is a lack of knowledge by one party of what the other party plans.
> The kind of extreme "guilt by association" you derive cannot be considered a part of the political in terms of conscious action precisely because "the political" encompasses normal function of the society.
Society is political, full stop.
> In other words what you're doing is you are criminalizing normal para-political association---a characteristic of individuals with a totalitarian mindset. As a non-American, I have to say I am stunned to observe this attitude in the US.
Oh please, I wasn't talking about criminalizing anything that wasn't already criminal. I'm kinda stunned that you managed to talk yourself into that bizarre conclusion. My second example is literally this: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/us/pfizer-execution-drugs....
Nearly every substance has an LD50. I wouldn't say they should be used for that, but trying to attack something like the death penalty at that level seems absurd given that there are so many alternate means.
> Nearly every substance has an LD50. I wouldn't say they should be used for that, but trying to attack something like the death penalty at that level seems absurd given that there are so many alternate means.
It's not, because the state isn't allowed to use literally any means to kill someone, so there's actually only a limited number of substances that are actually used.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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...
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.
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.
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 ?
> 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.
>Over the six-year period that had followed the passage of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, physicians sterilized perhaps 25% of Native American women of childbearing age, and there is evidence suggesting that the numbers were actually even higher.
> 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?
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.
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”.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Bandar helped negotiate the 1985 Al Yamamah deal, a series of massive arms sales by the United Kingdom to Saudi Arabia worth GB£40 billion, including the sale of more than 100 warplanes. After the deal was signed, British arms manufacturer British Aerospace (now BAE Systems) allegedly funnelled secret payments of at least GB£1 billion into two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington, in yearly instalments of up to GB£120 million over at least 10 years. He allegedly took money for personal use out of the accounts, as the purpose of one of the accounts was to pay the operating expenses of his private Airbus A340. According to investigators, there was "no distinction between the accounts of the embassy, or official government accounts [...], and the accounts of the royal family." The payments were discovered during a Serious Fraud Office investigation, which was stopped in December 2006 by attorney general Lord Goldsmith.[68][69] In 2009, he hired Louis Freeh as his legal representative for the Al-Yamamah arms scandal.[70]
A court affidavit filed on 3 February 2015 claims that Zacarias Moussaoui was a courier between Osama bin Laden and Turki bin Faisal Al Saud in the late 1990s, and that Turki introduced Moussaoui to Bandar.[72] Zacarias Moussaoui stated on oath and wrote to Judge George B. Daniels that Saudi royal family members, including Prince Bandar, donated to Al-Qaeda and helped finance the 11 September attacks. The Saudi government continues to deny any involvement in the 9/11 plot, and claims there is no evidence to support Moussaoui's allegations in spite of numerous previous intense investigations, noting that Moussaoui's own lawyers presented evidence of his mental incompetence during his trial. Leaked information from the redacted portion of the 9/11 Commission Report states that two of the 9/11 hijackers received $US130,000 in payment from Bandar's bank account.
> It's not about your feelings. If you facilitate their efforts, no matter how much you wish to disclaim responsibility, you have still facilitated their efforts.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
(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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>
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")
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
If you operate a delivery company, and a factory farmer approaches you to deliver to grocery stores nationwide, you suspect it might be used to transport their specialty, veal. If you say: “I’m not doing politics!” and decide to transport their goods, you are being complacent in the torture of sentient baby mammals, and therefor just did some (highly questionable) politics. If you deny them, you also did (morally correct) politics.
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Note the above is only partially tongue-in-cheek, but I do it to make two points:
1. To you, your political viewpoints are obviously "morally correct". But the whole point is many people disagree with what you consider morally correct. I used my veal example because I feel it's something a lot of people on HN wouldn't have much of a problem with, but to me it clearly is torture to these animals, and the only reason society at large doesn't have more of a problem with it is because how the animals are treated is mostly hidden from view.
2. My broader point is that virtually every company could sell some product or service that could be used to further an end that equal number of people on both sides could think is morally horrid or morally righteous. It's dangerous to think that your view is the only right one.
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).
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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.
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.
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?
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?”
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Obama ICE did separate families if parents were criminally charged with something. Evidence of this is so easy to find, even partisan hacks can do it. It's just that under Trump illegal border crossings became criminal, rather than civil, offences. You can't take your kids to jail with you even if you aren't Mexican, hence the "separations". This is super easy to avoid: don't cross the border illegally. The much publicized "cages", however, were built under Obama. Nobody gave a shit back then. About 1K people were deported daily. I predict that more people will be deported under Biden as well, because it's not "racist" or "xenophobic" for a democrat to deport 400K people a year.
The whole issue of crossing the border being a "misdemeanor" is idiotic IMO. I grew up in a country where it's a felony, and you'd be lucky to not get shot if you cross the border illegally in either direction. If a country is to maintain its sovereignty, that's how it has to be.
> It's just that under Trump illegal border crossings became criminal, rather than civil, offences.
The offense didn't change, it's just that the Trump administration started doing more Section 1325 prosecutions[1]. The original law has been on the books since 1929, and IIRIRA in 1996 added a stronger penalty for reentry.
For decades prior to 2005, this law was hardly used, but under the George W. Bush administration, "Operation Streamline," a DHS/DOJ program still in effect today, began to use it.
It was criminal under Obama too. No laws were changed under the Trump admin. People are just unrealistic and delusional about how to manage an immigration system, and certain politicians like to make disingenuous arguments for personal gain.
Most people complaining about family separation don’t even seem to be aware of the fact that it doesn’t apply if you’re a legal asylum seeker. It only applies if you’re caught breaking immigration law with some coyote (many of whom routinely traffic and rape children, or worse).
- Doing business with ICE during Biden, but not Trump is a political decision.
- Doing business with ICE during Biden and Trump is a political decision.
- Not doing business with ICE during Biden, but doing business with ICE during Trump is a political decision.
- Neither doing business with ICE during Biden nor Trump is a political decision.
If you are a business there will be a point where you make a political decision. Bailing out with a simple “I am being apolitical” is a cheap excuse for doing bad politics.
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.
"From the outside looking in, American politics has long since ceased being about policy and idea's, it is now a contest of identity where it doesn't matter what someone stands for so long as they are on the team I support."
It sure looks that way if you watch american news. Reality is pretty different. Most people leave politics at home, and most companies try to be politically neutral - or at least try to be an "agent for good" while avoiding controversy.
He means that politics about ideas would sound like, "Should we spend more money on infrastructure vs. health care vs. lowering taxes," whereas politics about identity is "Black vs White vs. Gay vs Straight vs Native vs Immigrant, etc." There is no discussion to be had in the latter. When people are divided that way, politics is strictly negative sum.
The problem is, those who don't do politics can still have politics done to them. This can take two forms.
One way is that the government makes decisions. Some of those decisions affect businesses. If the businesses don't give any input, the government still decides - they just decide in a vacuum. That could be sub-optimal for businesses. (I'm not talking about lobbying for special treatment - just sane policy as it affects your business.)
The second way politics can be done to you is that someone outside decides that you aren't active enough in supporting their political side, and therefore that you deserve to be destroyed. (At the moment, in the US, this seems to come mostly from the left, but that's not universal.) The only thing you can do to avoid that is try to move in lockstep with the most strident voices telling you what you should do... but I've never been a big fan of appeasement. My preferred approach is to ignore them - but then, I don't have to make a payroll, so it's really easy for me to say that.
I upvoted you as I think you make some interesting points, but I hope you don't mind me challenging them a little.
> I'm not talking about lobbying for special treatment - just sane policy as it affects your business.
I wonder what sort of policies a coal company would view as "sane", as it affects their business.
> and therefore that you deserve to be destroyed. (At the moment, in the US, this seems to come mostly from the left
Are you perhaps limiting the scope of your consideration to just "cancel culture"? I don't want to make a whataboutist response, but it's not good to cherry-pick a single mechanism of political oppression (which is disproportionately used by people with a certain political leaning) and miss out other sorts, such as business owners firing employees, or violence by the state against unarmed civilians, or attacks by politically-motivated armed extremists.
I completely agree, except this isn’t an American position and it isn’t actually about politics. It’s the culture of the valley, a tiny little geography in California and it’s about identity. Many there will form every imaginable excuse to conflate their employment with politics as a means of identity expression. Most people in the US find this subculture just as bizarre.
Where do you draw the line on what participating in politics means exactly? Is wearing a mask during a pandemic politics? Is calling someone by their preferred pronoun, or recognizing same sex marriage politics?
In practice having "no stance" means supporting the status quo
> Is wearing a mask during a pandemic politics? Is calling someone by their preferred pronoun, or recognizing same sex marriage politics?
IMO, no, no and no.
Where it becomes politics is when you start trying to force others to follow your preferred behaviours in those areas, over and above what the law requires. If you want to do that then you should vote and/or campaign to get the law changed, via the usual routes, and normally outside the workplace (unless directly related).
Over a decade ago, google used to offer benefits to their employees including those who were in a relationship that wasn’t marriage. In otherworldly gay couples. The policy was neutral and straight couples could take advantage of it.
Well irs policy doesn’t allow tax free benefits in this fashion. So employees had to pay extra income tax that was “imputed” from these taxable benefits. And google paid the employees extra taxes.
Is this a political position? Would it make sense for google to cheer for sale sex marriage which reduces their own financial burden? Is it the right thing to do?
Or consider immigration... many high tech companies have substantial immigrant work forces. The thin wedge of the “Muslim ban” in 2017 was a threat to their businesses.
So it makes total sense that a company would engage in politics. Since some of the hot button political issues today boil down to “who is human and who gets full rights?”, yeah that’s a fight that one cannot turn a back to, and many companies cannot.
I wouldn't consider paying extra taxes on behalf of employees political, no. Lobbying re immigration is a fair point though; I'd been considering this discussion in the context of companies pushing a political view onto their employees (per TFA) and lobbying is unrelated to that.
I'm not sure what issues you're referring to in your last para; I don't see any disputes over who's human. (I'm not in the US and am trying not to follow its politics too closely, in case it's contagious.)
Ah, OK, slightly confusing choice of word then. As I see it the crucial question re abortion is when a clump of cells becomes a person; I don't think there's ever a stage where it's not (biologically) human.
so, if a company had offices in NYC and Dallas (just making up an example) -- where the default reaction to masks are the opposite, is'nt the company not taking any stance at all the best option?
What the best option is depends on your perspective, and your goals. Focusing just on the short term bottom line, or being more progressive than the norm for the area, or more conservative could all have different effects.
Here are a few ways the role of a US corporation may not translate everywhere:
- Employers have a direct role in the social safety net, for example choosing health care and retirement savings options for their employees.
- Related to above, because there are limited gov't protections for things like vacation and childcare leave, and firing in general, employer policies form a bigger part of work/life tradeoffs.
- The US workforce has more diversity than most countries along several axes, including race, age, and immigration status, so employer policies about minority protections impact more employees.
Since stances on the policy areas above form the main battleground for American politics, companies make many decisions that are politically valenced.
Not really? The point I get from GP is that the way America is set up, corporations have a lot of say in (de facto) health care and employment policy. In most other countries, these things are decided democratically rather than though the market. We could have arguments all day on which is a better system, but it's hard not to admit that the American system makes corporations into more political actors.
They just listed off a standard set of "europe good, USA bad" talking points. The "everything is political" argument lets you tie any political issue you want to any company you want, so that you can pressure them into being more political about the issues you care about.
So do you feel that it is a politically neutral choice for an employer to decide that the health insurance they sponsor for employees cannot be used to cover an abortion?
Nobody's claiming perfect political neutrality. The claim is that it's bad for companies to get political in unnecessary ways. Inasmuch as Hobby Lobby decided to push their politics and religion on their employees via their healthcare package, then we shouldn't be surprised at the result.
Then it's worth noting that it is easier for a person to change which employer they work for than a business owner to change which government creates laws that apply to their business.
I accept, though, that corporations are artificial constructs that exist (ostensibly) to benefit humans, and therefore placing restrictions and duties on corporations is inherently preferable to placing them on humans themselves.
I wasn't trying to be clever, just explicit. Your atom sentence is true, as far as it goes. You can't build a factory without doing calculations some people would call physics, and you can't build an organization without making decisions some people will call political. What's the issue?
Elsewhere in the thread, you call these "Europe good, USA bad" points. I certainly don't think that's intrinsically true. It's just a different interface that puts more choices in the hands of employers instead of government. A side effect is that employers are going to get judged by employees, investors , customers and the public about how they make those choices.
> can't build an organization without making decisions some people will call political. What's the issue?
The issue is that when someone says "let's stay away from politics", it's pedantic and obtuse to start listing things that in some way involve politics.
It's clear what they meant: the more something is related to politics and unrelated to work, the more we should try to avoid it.
Your response does the exact opposite of that, bringing up a bunch of hot-button political issues tenuously related to work, which is a great way to bring more conflict about politics into the workplace.
People can disagree about what's related to work. They can do so in bad faith by starting fights for personal prestige, or by trying exclude topics just because they are served by the status quo. Or they can do so in good faith, because something impacts the working life or effectiveness of some people in ways that aren't obvious to others.
My list was about how the US has more issues requiring good faith discussion, which certainly opens the door to bad faith as well.
As far as using "let's stay away from politics" as a magic wand to shut down a topic, you are expecting people to agree with you about what belongs at work without discussion or judgement. I think companies and individuals can make things more efficient by clearly articulating a mission, and by proactively taking a stance about how hot-button issues relate to that mission or not. But nothing is going to exempt you from judgement when people disagree, and there's always the chance that you really are the bad guy. That's life with other humans.
> As someone who lives outside America, 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.
> From the outside looking in, American politics has long since ceased being about policy and idea's, it is now a contest of identity where it doesn't matter what someone stands for so long as they are on the team I support.
Yeah I have intentionally avoided the media and political nonsense of the last decade or so, and it just seems increasingly absurd. Everyone is a radical activist these days. And to radicals, there is no neutral position.
Much of the article talks about Coinbase, whose mission is to create “an open financial system for the world.” That’s inherently political, and if the CEO says not to engage with broader political and economic issues, he’s basically asking his employees to support the political stance that he is advancing.
> Coinbase, whose mission is to create “an open financial system for the world.” That’s inherently political, ... he’s basically asking his employees to support the political stance that he is advancing.
No one is joining Coinbase if they're opposed to Coinbase's financial system objectives. It's not a secret.
If someone was actively opposed to Coinbase's primary business objectives, how would they even be a productive employee of Coinbase in the first place?
It's a false equivalency to try to equate the company's core business with completely unrelated political topics.
> From the outside looking in, American politics has long since ceased being about policy and ideas, it is now a contest of identity
Lay political discourse (and especially partisan media) does frequently fit the description of identity banners and other tribal + value markers.
But it's also very, very wrong to say that politics has ceased being about policy and ideas. It is definitely true that there are marked differences between policy goals advanced by parties (and sometimes individuals within). And it's not exactly rare that you can find lay participants who have a policy or ideas that are important to them.
> From the outside looking in, American politics has long since ceased being about policy and ideas...
This was long the norm in Europe and North America. Western Europe seems to have less of it at the moment, and perhaps for the last 25 years; the US had a ~30 year stretch from the mid 50s. The current situation is quite bad, but has of course been worse.
Everything you do is political. Advertising on certain channels like MSNBC or Fox News will cause some customers to boycott you. Even trying to go carbon neutral is a stance. Show gay couples in your ads, that’s also a politely statement.
I'm am guessing you do not live in Hungary, Poland, Brazil or Turkey either.
Everything in the US is political now: face masks, 5G networks, vaccines, mail. Facebook dominates people's lives yet is an endless spam of politics. Google search is facing anti-trust because it is "liberal", while the ISPs and other monopolies are strangely un-molested. Every tech company, apolitical or not, is automatically suspected by half of the country mostly because of their address.
But just for clarity, the major US debate is whether the election was fraudulent or not which is considerably higher stakes than a contest of identity. You can hedge your corporate bets by having no opinion on the mater but necessarily one of those parties is directly subverting the democracy. For anyone ok with that, then silence is undoubtedly a profitable path: why cut your business in half and alienate half of potential customers/employees over mere democracy?
> why cut your business in half and alienate half of potential customers/employees over mere democracy?
I can foresee a near future where this becomes a very pertinent question. Suppose that, due to some underhanded dealings of the Electoral College (and/or SCOTUS), the current President were to be granted a second term. Further suppose that 70% of the country saw this process as illegitimate, but wanted to avoid any direct violent conflict.
My question is: Would big tech companies (or key employees within them) work together to implement a digital General Strike across the country?
This would be an extreme and probably criminal form of civil disobedience, although I imagine the perpetrators could be motivated by an expectation of receiving a presidential pardon if they were successful.
I'm sure that someone in the contingency planning departments of these big companies someone has gamed out what would happen if Apple and Google and Microsoft all pushed software updates to devices and online services which blocked certain activities (e.g. use by fossil fuel companies?) while controlling the media narrative by promoting messages from their side.
Even if what you described about current American elections was actually the case (it isn't), it's not the purpose of a business to defend democracy. If you were a businessman in Germany during WW2 you would not have been a brave warrior fighting to preserve democracy, you'd just have moved on with your life and kept running your business, as would have (and as did) most people.
Also, what does Brazil have to do with this? I live here. Are you under the impression that Brazil is under the rule of a dictator or something?
How long does the US need to stop thinking that they are still fighting WW2..? it seems the only way they can interpret politics is in the context of Allies vs the Axis powers..
I believe a significant number of people would answer “yes” to your final question, or at least complain that your leadership shows authoritarian tendencies, much like Victor Orban, Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, etc.
On your first paragraph it seems to me a reasonable argument that if all the chemical companies in Germany dragged their feet, obfuscated, and ideally just outright refused to supply the government with poisonous gases, once it became clear they were being used on people, less people would have died.
Your statement about authoritarian tendencies is interesting. While I don't doubt that leaders like Trump or Duterte have them, it's a tricky situation to base such a label on their intentions or words alone. The vast majority of political leaders work towards the maximization of their own power regardless of their speaking style or underlying government type (Trump's overtly bellicose manner vs. say, Obama's much more diplomatically toned engagement with the public, other government branches and media). Either way though, I ask that you or anyone name how someone like Trump actually exercises(d) executive power very differently from a leader like Obama:
Both engaged in many of the same drives towards furthering their own personal political agendas during their respective administrations and while Trump says many things more baldly, and certainly lies much more flippantly, I fail to see how either his executive decisions or administrative pushes were or are in any notable way actually more authoritarian than those of Obama.
Just because one leader speaks more blandly than another doesn't mean that their fundamental governing power is much different, or that the more bellicose sounding figure is somehow an authoritarian if he or she is still fully constrained by the rest of a democratic government apparatus.
Furthermore, many if not most of the tendencies towards much broader presidential authority that Trump currently enjoys were established by a whole history of executive expansion which came before his term, and some of those started under much less visibly aggressive presidents. Focusing on what the orange man says more than on the deeper dynamics behind his office seems to me like more an exercise in ideological labeling than sound analysis of what authoritarian leadership means.
>I believe a significant number of people would answer “yes” to your final question, or at least complain that your leadership shows authoritarian tendencies, much like Victor Orban, Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, etc.
Someone showing authoritarian tendencies does not mean the country is under authoritarian rule. I don't like Bolsonaro but he is very far from having any real power in the country. And I would say the same of Trump. I don't know anything about the others.
>On your first paragraph it seems to me a reasonable argument that if all the chemical companies in Germany
Why would they do that? Hitler was popular because he actually fixed a lot of problems in Germany at the time. Either way, my argument is still that businesses shouldn't support or not support any particular politician. They should just move on with their business impartially, even if "democracy" is being threatened or if their product is being used for evil. It's not your job to judge how people use your technology.
I really enjoyed and would recommend the Third Reich Trilogy [1], especially to anyone who thinks Hitler was “popular because he actually fixed a lot of problems in Germany at the time.” Hitler was never popular, he just appeared that way because he suppressed all opposition.
Yea, just like I'm sure Trump was never popular, he just appeared that way because of... fake news and misinformation! Yea, no thanks. The way history is rewritten around touchy subjects is very clear to anyone paying attention, and it's always the same thing. In the future a book written about our time will use fake news instead "suppression of opposition" as the reason for why Trump was never actually popular. I would tell you to go read actual sources of information at the time: newspapers, books written from German citizens during those years, that kind of thing. You'll get a much more accurate view of history that way.
Trump was never popular, at least if you define 'popular' as having positive approval ratings. Maybe in inauguration week. Not afterward[0]. He was obviously popular with some people, but not the country as a whole.
Not sure why reading a censored German press would give you an accurate view of public opinion, either; and the German citizens' writings will vary depending on which citizens you read, and how circumspect they were about writing.
Well, isn't it convenient that most of the information coming out of Germany isn't useful because the bad man had his hands on it? I'm sure in the future historians will also disregard most of the information coming out of Trump supporters as part of the misinformation campaign, conspiracy theories, etc, and only the official narrative will be regarded as valid, because that's how history goes.
No, it's extremely inconvenient that we can't straightforwardly compare public opinion in authoritarian countries with non-authoritarian ones. FWIW the consensus in political science is that the Trump white house has substantially increased levels of misinformation (though there has been a decent amount under previous administrations), and that his popularity is genuine and enduring, though balanced by a larger genuine and enduring unpopularity.
I didn't intend to recommend a book - the link is just a graph of Trump's approval polls over time - but I thank you for yours. I'm not a particularly big fan of 'official narratives', not least because I study issue frames and so many of them are self-serving.
> If you were a businessman in Germany during WW2 you would not have been a brave warrior fighting to preserve democracy, you'd just have moved on with your life and kept running your business, as would have (and as did) most people.
Different people have different opinions about right and wrong. A different set behaviors by a large number of people would bring about a different outcome. Left unchecked, the luxury of dissent becomes more and more painful for company and individual.
>a company as an entity should have no public stance on politics.
In the modern world with a weaponized/activist media this will not work. If you don't block the wrong-thinkers major media outlets will write article after article about how you platform Nazis or whatever, even though there's no Nazis in sight. If you stand up to them they will go after the advertisers. "Why are you advertising on a site that platforms Nazis?" And there's not really consequences. When Youtube, Paypal, etc. ban these people there's barely a blip in their business.
I agree, and this leads into a wider point about political discourse in the modern era.
To me, as a person who doesn't live in America, the US has gone absolutely crazy over this idea that policy doesn't matter so long as a person is on my team. This is an indictment of the media who have failed in their job at keeping the public informed in an unbiased manner, reducing complex macro-economics and geopolitics to catchy headlines and gotcha-questions.
Is my country any better? God no, most of our media is just a budget version of the American model, but it is America who infected the rest of the world with this.
When policy and idea's become the most important part of any election, that's when you can start addressing real social and economic problems like homelessness, LGBT rights, wealth disparity and the loss of jobs to offshoring manufacturing, because you'll have more time to discuss these things like adults now that politicians aren't reducing their job to 140 character hot-takes.
Correct. The point is that if you just try to go about your business without taking sides you will get the spotlight put on you and forced to take a side. You will either crush the minority customers in your business/platform or the majority will crush you. Being apolitical is no longer an option.
Do you have real examples of this? Any time I see someone complaining of political blow-back, it’s because they chose to air their thoughts on social media or donate to specific causes publicly.
The one person I know that felt put in this position, due to his lifestyle business, felt pressured by competitors to aim his thoughts, not by his customers. He only faced pushback when his thoughts, that his customers hadn’t asked for, came off as selfish and tone deaf. He shot himself in the foot.
Probably the largest incident in memory is when someone tried to use the customer-only restroom at Starbucks without making a purchase, refused to leave, and then was arrested. This was a national scandal that resulted in Starbucks closing its 8,000 stores for racial bias training.
Do you remember when Chic-Fil-A was getting boycotted and harassed for the owner's donations to evil homophobic charities? Those charities were The Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Seriously, that's who it was. The Salvation Army and youth sports. Not exactly top of anyone sane's list of "problematic" charities. Chic-Fil-A caved.
Every few weeks I see blue check Twitter going after some nobody to get them banned, but I don't keep track of those things.
> Probably the largest incident in memory is when someone tried to use the customer-only restroom at Starbucks without making a purchase, refused to leave, and then was arrested. This was a national scandal that resulted in Starbucks closing its 8,000 stores for racial bias training.
It's worth noting that the company's official policy was and is to allow people to stay as long as they like without making a purchase, and that witnesses to the event described white people in the store doing exactly that at the same time the black man was arrested.
A reasonable response would have looked like firing the at-fault employee, compensating the victims, issuing an apology, and sending a memo to other employees clarifying policy. This would have been an appropriate apolitical response to such an event.
Instead they closed 8,000 stores and put their employees through critical race theory inspired implicit bias training.
This would only work if, let's say, the video hosting market consisted of 10 competing companies having comparable shares. Different players would then take different sides, and the market forces would sort it out.
With the present-day monopolies/oligopolies it's different. If your financial well-being directly depends on Google listing your site, and Visa/MasterCard processing your payment, they can de-facto decide what is acceptable and what's not. And to force you to pretend that you share their views under a penalty of completely destroying your business.
For starters, the fact that nobody can agree on what a “fascist” even is these days. And when you have a generic term like that which essentially boils down to “people whose opinions I dislike”, then you’re advocating for the blacklisting of arbitrary groups of people. Not going to turn out well, especially when you yourself get included in one of those groups.
> American politics has long since ceased being about policy and idea's
I don't know how anyone can say this and be considered a serious person.
One American party denies climate change, downplays COVID19, tries to take healthcare from millions, tries to disenfranchise anyone not voting for them, limits legal immigration and asylum seekers, and refuses to admit there is a problem with systemic racism.
But by all means, remain "apolitical," since apparently this isn't about policy anymore. Wacky stuff man...
What exactly is wacky about limiting legal immigration and/or asylum if that is what the citizens want? IMHO, Those don't seem like insane ideas when there is crazy amounts of unemployment in the country.
Whatever your political views are, my point was that there is a clear delineation between parties.
Being apathetic to politics is consequential in and of itself.
As to your claim about immigration, I'm not interested in defending any particular policy position. But, there is some research that indicates immigration boosts overall labor participation [1].
>They're particular to the modern conservative party.
Many of my liberal friends believe in crazy stuff like russiagate or defending BLM looters/rioters or proudly voting for a political candidate that supported bombings in the middle east that lead to the death of countless civilians (including kids) while simultaneously villainizing Dubya for being a war mongering criminal.
You'll have to excuse me for not seeing your "clear delineation" - whatever that means.
I'm taking everything that is being proposed in good faith. There is a legal manner in which a country controls who gets to come in. Whether they have to modify treaties or not, I don't know - I'm not an expert on international jurisprudence.
> One American party denies climate change, downplays COVID19, tries to take healthcare from millions, tries to disenfranchise anyone not voting for them, limits legal immigration and asylum seekers, and refuses to admit there is a problem with systemic racism.
This doesn’t describe either party. Also, there isn’t a problem with systemic racism. And no, I don’t support the party that you think.
You know, you're not allowed to say that in a lot of American offices now. Even in a technical context where it has an established meaning and multiple alternatives are now jockeying for mainstream. It's "exclusionary", which is a new HR code word for "politically incorrect". The battle is over and lost. Everything is politicized now, and all anyone who doesn't like it can do is fall on their sword. Alone.
One of my favorite moments of 2020 was when coinbase stood up against the madness of people using the company as a vehicle to promote their irrelevant politics. Politics has its place but just gets in the way of doing work in the workplace. The only politics that should be promoted in the workplace is the politics that helps the company accomplish its specific goals. I predict that market forces will cause more startups to follow suit.
One of the things that made me quit my last job was the director frequently talking politics before meetings while waiting for everyone to join.
There's no winning. Agree and risk setting yourself at odds against your peers and future managers, or disagree and put yourself at odds with the person who holds the purse for your team.
Even worse, complain to HR, and risk politically disagreeing with them.
I stuck with that job long enough to find something better, and almost regret staying with it as long as I did.
Considering the hostility that can be shown to those of the opposite tribe, especially in tech companies, are you surprised that op wouldn't challenge the higher in position director on such basis?
Plenty of other commenters here would argue that doing so is really a political position (defending status quo), which would not at all be what I wanted to convey
It formed a hostile work environment, but not in a way that I wad legally protected from
The discussion wasn't simple honest debate or smalltalk, it was very much "did you see how team A person put down team B person last weekend? She was awesome!"
I should also make clear, this person wasn't my boss, he was director of the department- my boss's boss. He also had approximately 1 to 2 hours overlap in work schedule, as he lived practically on the other side of the globe (we had a world-wide team).
I understand, it is boss(or super boss in the case) responsibility to be able to encourage feedback and open conversation. There is big difference between making small talk and using that time to be on the soap box , no boss should need feedback for that line.
It is just that as a manager, I have been surprised how people think I would take offence on something and not mention it for a long time. I always considered it my responsibility to encourage my team even if they are 3-4 levels down to be able openly talk with me and tell me what I am doing wrong and how can i help them do their jobs better, if they are not able to do that, it is on me.
That is fair. Unfortunately, politics, like religion, can be deeply personal, and it is very difficult to predict how someone will react.
If the company had a proper feedback mechanism- whereby I could have left feedback for him anonymously (so that only his boss would see my name) I might have felt more comfortable bringing it up.
The other reason I totally agree with this is because there is always the unwritten rule that what a company can support politically is pretty much always in service to its bottom line. I mean, just look at Google, whose employees are known for being especially politically active. Except, that is, when it comes to the negative societal effect of large monopolies (there was a recent HN discussion about this). People at Google know what pays their (very large) salaries.
We don't get into politics until we need an emergency building permit approval at which point we will make a donation to the mayor's campaign even if he is a big Trump supporter and says things directly opposite of all the diversity meetings we have been going to over the past year.
What’s interesting about that case is that >5% of employees quit.
So these were people that coinbase decided, out of all available applicants—and as a well-known, hugely profitable company that is the only “in any way mainstream” success story of cryptocurrency-based businesses, there are a fair number of them—thought were the right fit. (That’s excluding the people who were given offers and didn’t accept, of course.)
And then greater than one in twenty employees (that’s a lot) heard what he said and were like, nope, this is not someone I want to follow.
Is that a success? Maybe! I can’t think of a time when we’ve seen that level of voluntary departure from a company and thought, “ah yes, this is good.” Or when we’ve seen something like that and thought, “ah yes, this is what leadership looks like.”
Maybe he’s right! I don’t know. We’ll see.
But when I look at America, with its staggering income inequality and tremendous corporate cash investments into political elections, I don’t personally think, “wow there sure is too much social accountability at companies.”
You know?
I don’t look at Facebook and think, “they should really just focus on being a data mining advertising business. This thing about fomenting extremism is distracting us from them as a corporate enterprise in a capitalist system.”
People leave jobs for lots of reasons. Coinbase was offering a very generous exit package for anyone leaving at the time. I am sure some split for reasons unrelated to leadership or these political policies.
The kicker here is that actual politics is prohibited by law. Companies can't be endorsing candidates or providing in-kind contributions without getting into trouble with the FEC.
So this is all about performative poses in the workplace, on the topic of politics, rather than being about actual politics.
Companies get involved with politics all the time, and policy in the US seems to be far more about keeping corporations and the shareholder class happy than keeping voters happy.
So it's more that companies can't do certain limited things, but companies - and CEOs particularly - can do plenty of others.
Sure, in terms of lobbying, contributing to PACs, etc. But that's very rarely aligned with what the social justice activists want.
What they get, instead, is a performative pacifier. Which IMO makes the problem worse as they realize how unsatisfying it is and demand more and more strenuous performance.
There is something to what you're saying, but politics isn't only electoral. The two poles of attraction are pro-labor and pro-capital, so if startups do real politics in the workplace, it won't be to the benefit of anyone that isn't in management.
If the workplace did not have its own issues I would agree. But, since, to take one example, sexism is a known problem in tech - and throughout corporate America and society, to be fair - in order to not have a sexist workplace, one would need to be proactive.
Broadly speaking. Point being, it's easy to not want "politics" in the workplace when the workplace works well for you. If you're someone whom the workplace doesn't work well for, like a person of color, a pregnant woman, new mother, or new father, for that matter, well, then it's a different story.
If you yourself believe that sexism/systemic racism aren't issues that show up (even inadvertently or despite the best intentions of individuals) in the workplace, well, then that's a different conversation entirely.
I think this is different from someone in a position of power promoting a particular candidate in the workplace. That is more complex and problematic. The 2020 election was obviously an extreme example, and, tbh, with things like global warming, I think we'll be seeing more politics like that in the workplace, not less.
Which, to me, means it's not an easy or one-size-fits all solution, but rather, a challenge which requires each of us to exercise care and our own judgement.
For example, personally, I would have liked to see Hacker News take even a small explicit step of endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement (such as putting 'Black lives matter' on the top of the homepage), seeing as how it's one of the major civil rights issues of our present moment. I can also understand their concerns around doing so, even though I disagree with them.
IMHO it's too easy for those of us doing well and making money to forget that the institutions we work for have a social impact and are a part of society.
Where I work the director has a monthly lunch with female employees so they can talk about their careers and how to advance and get promoted. I don't know, due to lack of experience, but I assume this is beneficial to one's career. Presumably benefiting careers is why they're doing it.
And yet, it feels like sexism to me. Women get an explicit benefit that men don't. Women are also explicitly privileged in the hiring process and higher ups are rewarded based on the number of women they employ, hire, and promote. This isn't a conspiracy theory but an explicitly articulated and documented process. Even before that, in college, we had events for women who code, women in STEM, career opportunities for women, etc.
I get that these things are all because women are underrepresented in tech and surely there are challenges for women and sexism against women. However, the examples above still feel like sexism to me. I am not all men, so the fact that men have better representation in upper levels is meaningless to me as an individual. The fact that my female peers have a monthly meeting with higher-ups to discuss how they get promoted and I don't get that isn't as meaningless.
On top of all that, I also know that if I were to ever suggest this was sexism or wrong in any way using my real name or at work, I'd fully expect to be fired and reviled by my coworkers as a deplorable sexist.
My point in writing all this is just to say that I would much prefer my company stay dispassionate and neutral and try to treat everyone fairly. I don't really support the company taking up political, social, or ideological agendas and using them to make decisions about what happens at work.
I feel like this is genuine take. I don’t know your age or anything other that what you wrote, so I’ll relate my experience.
I saw many of these same initiatives beginning as I was moving through high school and college. Being young and generally feeling like I treated people fairly, I assumed that most of the world treated others the same. Sexism seemed antiquated.
Fast forward a couple of decades and the women in my life still get second-guessed, mansplained, faced lowered expectations, and/or past over for promotions.
Some of it is blatant sexism. Some of it is sexism-light, where not being part of the boys’ club leaves them excluded from the power-clique. They still have a markedly different professional experience than I do, because they are women.
Is there a better way to handle this than what you described? Maybe. But I don’t think the need for such support mechanisms has expired yet.
The unfairness of the system you describe, also happens to other men who don't get promoted or don't have time for side projects, or comment on HN, and aren't in the same clique, etc. Maybe we should target the core problem, instead of making it about gender.
>the women in my life still get second-guessed, mansplained, faced lowered expectations, and/or past over for promotions.
My wife works for a non-profit. Her supervisor (a woman) was up for a promotion. She has worked at the place for 5 years. A guy who was newly hired 2 years back was also up for the promotion but he had more experience for the role (he had worked at a bigger firm and had done work at higher levels before, it's a legal nonprofit).
These were the only two up for the role. It's between work experience and time with the organization. Whichever you value more will probably determine who you choose. The big boss (a woman) ended up choosing the man over the woman for the job.
The woman was qualified. No doubt. For my wife and her supervisor, this was another example of sexism, women getting passed over for promotions again. But for the big boss (a woman) or for someone else on the outside, it's not so clear. Her leg up was her experience in the org. His leg up was his experience from other orgs.
When looking at a situation like this, how can you prove this is sexism? For someone it will be proof positive of sexism. For another it won't be.
Explicit, institutional sexism towards males is easy to spot out. Towards women, it takes this form, where you can't honestly say you 100% know it's sexism.
Over smaller sample size of 1 jumping to conclusions is not in good faith.
if the superboss has done this consistently in the past, then your wife's supervisor has grounds[1]. However with a sample size of 1 , it could be hundred factors and it is unfair to accuse anyone .
[1] Even when is there larger sample it is nuanced and tricky to really say, unless the superboss explicitly favours women there are inherent biases in the system against them, for example amount of mandatory maternity leave u.s. offers is pitiful, there are lesser women in STEM etc, the super boss selection criteria may be biased because of underlying biases not necessarily her own. Doesn't mean she should get a free pass, It should be investigated/reviewed before jumping to the conclusion of labelling someone sexist.
It all suddenly makes more sense if you allow a forbidden assumption that women are statistically less likely to flip out and start a competing company, instead of just being a cog in the machine. Or to feel superior to their boss, and do some political maneuvering to take over his position.
It also artificially limits the demand for men (lowering the salary costs) and normalizes dual-income families where 2 people have to work full-time to afford the same quality of life that the previous generation could get from a single salary.
The culture war is just a distraction, a divide-and-conquer strategy by the wealthy elites (who are isolated enough in their personal lives to be able to avoid all this noise) playing the masses to hate each other instead of hating and attacking the elites.
The best strategy is not to play, blend in and try to reach elite level yourself.
Sadly, not going to work. Assume work hard and reach some level of prosperity, enough to have a big house, and afford kids. You pass your values and knowledge to them, try to raise them according your understanding of what's best.
The very next moment the social justice kicks in. Your kids are labelled privileged. They will be demoralized at school and told to hate themselves. They will be penalized when trying to apply to top academic institutions, denied promotions at work, and constantly guilt-tripped.
Instead these positions will be split between those who get them via connections, and the "disadvantaged" people who will pose a much lower political threat to the "connected" group.
So unless you are a part of the hereditary elites, whatever wealth you have created, gets erased in the next generation.
It's better to see this as a conscious attempt to correct sexism than as sexism itself. It's a blunt instrument, to address a blunt injustice that occurs at all levels of society. Just because you aren't all men, doesn't mean you haven't had advantages that women are denied.
It's just that these advantages are normalized in the system, so they aren't as apparent as the corrective measures. It's really easy to miss them, just like, for example if you play a shooter on an easy mode first, you don't necessarily know how it would be harder.
That said, you want to talk to your director or learn about your career? Email them and ask them about it.
The problem I have with this, is the examples I gave of sexism are institutional, explicit, codified programs. "We will reward hiring and promoting women." "Women get an advantage in the hiring and interview process." "This career development process is explicitly for women." I could go on.
Girls aren't obviously disadvantaged in school. Girls outperform boys in every subject, science and math included, and have for decades[1]. Women are admitted more to colleges and graduate more[2]. Then there are structural programs at major companies to advantage women in hiring and career growth, as I mentioned.
It is true that women face the subtle kinds of discrimination referenced elsewhere. I'm not denying that. I'm saying that instituting programs which relatively disadvantage my career and opportunities due to my gender strikes me as unfair. I don't get a benefit because the executive leadership team is mostly men. They don't share the money and power with me because we are all men - so why am I disadvantaged because other men have achieved success?
Ah that's because the bias against women isn't codified or a program, it's systemic, and therefore can be found mainly from it's effects. They aren't obvious because bias isn't necessarily obvious.
For example, here's a study where candidates with the same cv differ only by name.
I gotta run, so I don't have time to cite it, but women, controlling for job qualifications and profession, earn 98% for every dollar a man earns. That may not seem like much, but the effect is enhanced by hiring and promotion differences and other effects of bias.
As to your question of not getting the benefit, how do you know that gender bias didn't help you get hired or affect your pay? Are you so sure that if you were a woman, you would have been hired, paid, and promoted just like you were now?
Regardless, policies are based on affecting the most good for the most people, not on helping you.
I disagree with the characterization of sexism against women as "systemic". That seems like exactly the wrong word to use. Systemic sexism would imply there is an organized system to disadvantage women. I think the organized system - going from the public education system (largely administrated by women) which favors girls (better grades, less punishment, better graduation rate for girls), to college (where girls are a majority of students and graduates) to employment (where there are organized systems to benefit women in terms of hiring and promotion) exhibits a preference based on gender for women rather than against women.
The kind of sexism that women encounter is not an organized system of oppression (e.g. being directed to hire fewer women) but rather it is the latent sexism of individuals not acting in an organized fashion. Individuals not taking a woman seriously, or being harassing, or not wanting to hire women etc. "Systemic" does not seem like an apt word for this kind of sexism.
Regarding your question over how I know I don't benefit from gender bias - clearly I can't know. Just like my female colleagues can't know if they benefit from gender bias. Maybe if I were a woman I would've got better grades in school, gone to a better college, retained my interest in programming, and been preferentially hired in an even better role. It's impossible to know.
1. A legal inequality from 100 years ago. My comments are about the US specifically, no doubt systemic sexism exists in other countries.
2. From your wikipedia link, one of the key arguments against the amendment was that it would imply women could be drafted - "Political scientist Jane Mansbridge in her history of the ERA argues that the draft issue was the single most powerful argument used by Schlafly and the other opponents to defeat ERA".
If you want to show a persuasive (to me) example of systemic sexism, I think you should provide an example that is current and that systemically disadvantages women. If the lack of an ERA does disadvantage women, please explain how.
If you are unwilling to understand the significance of it taking until 1920 for women to receive the right to vote, and the variety of reasons for resistance to the ERA, then, I don't know what to say.
If you haven't, talk with the women in your life you are friends with about sexism and discrimination in the work place.
I think it's a pretty low bar to ask for an example of a current systemic disadvantage that women have. I can point to multiple systemic disadvantages that men have right now - but your examples are from 100 years ago or are very vague. If the systemic oppression of women in the US is so vast as to necessitate laws that advantage or disadvantage individuals based on their sex, then I think it should also be pretty easy to point to.
As far as talking with women about the sexism they've experienced - I've never denied women experience sexism. I've explicitly acknowledged that multiple times. My point is that the sexism they experience is not an organized system of oppression (i.e. it is not "systemic"). There are multiple, explicit, and codified systems that disadvantage men and I have pointed to several of them.
No, it’s better to see this as what it literally is, and to recognize that it causes the same kinds of problems as what you’re trying to fix, as well as new ones.
This is classical dilema between affirmative action and meritocracy.
The argument for affirmative action goes that any special treatment only counters the biases and limitations you don't face and they do.
The argument against affirmative action is that it is very hard to remove preferential treatment once it is in place even if it no longer required. The other argument is that such affirmative action does not efficiently target the truly deserving or the underlying cause.
Dependent probability is never factored in, while it is true the number of women who get into STEM or programing is low, the biases in companies is considerably less once they are in. Over extending benefits in the workplace is not perhapa as important as getting education fixed in schools and colleges.
> The argument against affirmative action is that it is very hard to remove preferential treatment once it is in place even if it no longer required.
Once you educate yourself with fact-based historical information to understand how unfair the system has been, this actually is an argument in favor of affirmative action.
Point being that until very recently the biases has been extreme, so that despite positive changes in both culture and law, equality will not happen over night (as you said, things persist), and thus affirmative action is important even after the most pernicious source of discrimination has been removed.
Affirmative action is complex, no question, but your particular point is more of an argument for it than one against it.
I have no opinion what is the right approach, I merely presented both sides of the argument.
To elaborate on the why not:
The problem is rarely the intent of affirmative action .it is in the execution, same problems with big / small government , and the idea behind UBI or give cash instead of subsidy is sometimes bettee.
I grew up in a country where affirmative action is codified in the law and about 50 % of job openings, promotions university seats are reserved and has been for the last 70 years. Was it and still is there need for it ? Yes absolutely,
however the efficiency of allocation is a challenge , some groups who needed it 70 years back don't really need it anymore , however it is political suicide to even propose a reduction or a reallocation to reflect today's problems.
It doesn't mean we should not do anything, however to ignore the misalignment of incentives inefficiency of allocation and stickyness of any action is not good either.
That is absolutely sexism. It deeply bothers me that some people think tech must be exactly 50% male/female, and anything else is inherent sexism. It's anti-scientific to deny the possibility that biological gender can influence desired career paths.
If there are provable differences that effect performance, by all means cite them. But it's more likely that unseen bias affects hiring and promotions.
Girls and boys mathematical abilities are equivalent.
I don't have anything to say that directly relates to the evidences you have provided. But I'd take anything coming out of social science with a grain of salt, given that the amount politicization and acitvism going on. People have real incentives to hide evidences, design flawed experiments or conjure up misleading narratives. One of the most prominent doctrines provided social science is now being proven sham and has done great damage to the society https://www.thecut.com/2017/05/self-esteem-grit-do-they-real...
I think you are confusing the idea of individual people's incentives with the community as a whole.
Just as in our society individuals may have an incentive to do nefarious deeds like robbery or murder, but society as a whole has an incentive to stop it, so it is with science.
And having checked your link, A) the person's theory was overhyped and B) a meta analysis brought it back to earth. Which is evidence that the process of scientific inquiry works.
That's why we know that climate change exists, despite deniers, and that vaccines don't cause autism, despite anti vaxxers having been inspired by a now retracted paper that said it did.
Parent said "influence desired career paths", which is not the same as differences in performance. People choose a career path for many reasons besides ability, such as individual personality, ability in alternative jobs (note the quote in your first link which points out that "girls outperform their male counterparts on achievement tests in stereotypically feminine subject areas"), or even their experience being bullied in high school with regard to the job.
Furthermore, if you want to come to valid statistical conclusions about whether a discrepancy is due to a particular cause (and can't just do a RCT), it's not enough to just ignore plausible confounders until they are "provable". You need to systematically control for all possible confounders.
> What we found is that de-identifying applications at the shortlisting stage does not appear to assist in promoting diversity within the Australian Public Service (APS) in hiring. Overall, APS officers discriminated in favour of female and minority candidates. The practical impact is that, if implemented, de-identification may frustrate diversity efforts.
As a single data point, this is interesting: "GitHub's ElectronConf postponed because all the talks (selected through an unbiased, blind review process) were to be given by men."[0]
What's interesting, I suppose, is not that the selected speakers were all men (which could have happened by random chance), but the reaction by the conference organisers to that fact.
> Girls and boys mathematical abilities are equivalent.
I have to laugh my ass off. In reality, boys get 800 on the math SAT at over twice the rate that girls do. That article addressing this by stating "the SAT is hardly a random sample of all students" is complete nonsense.
The idea that smart males and females are produced at the same rate is ludicrous on its face, because female brains are made with the information from two X chromosomes and males with just the one.
> It's anti-scientific to deny the possibility that biological gender can influence desired career paths.
IMHO what is actually being claimed, and which there is academic consensus based on facts around, is that sexism has been such a pervasive cultural force, to such a degree that it's difficult to parse nature versus nurture.
Plus science is still working on nature vs nature - it's complex.
So. Simpler to start with the known, empirically verified problem in front of our eyes.
Well said. I think these D&I (wait, DEI now) practices are highly questionable and I'm really wondering when companies will get sued for discrimination.
> I get that these things are all because women are underrepresented in tech and surely there are challenges for women and sexism against women. However, the examples above still feel like sexism to me.
These two sentences contradict each other.
You also say "I am not all men", but, sadly, the issue with systemic biases (racism, sexism, etc), is that it's not about individuals.
You seem smart enough to be able to theorize about ways in which, as a man, you may have unknowningly benefited from systemic biases over the course of your education / career.
For one thing you don't have to worry about being sexually harassed or raped by a friend/coworker - the numbers are pretty bad.
We're supposed to be rational, work with numbers, etc - so even if we can't prove the effect of a systemic bias on an individual, our knowledge of the data and basic statistics should lead us to be able to make reasonable inferences about general cases, etc.
I guess what I'm saying is, be the bigger man, in both ways in which that phrase can be read. It's not all about you.
You seem to be arguing for laws that treat people differently based on their immutable characteristics - i.e. gender. I think that's wrong and people should be treated equally. It's true that most of upper management is male - but that fact only incurs a cost on me, not a benefit. The cost is: The upper management is incentivized to promote women (i.e. not me) to balance out their existing maleness.
I could be the "bigger man" by ignoring structural disadvantages against me and people like me, and in real life, of course I do ignore these disadvantages. The reason I ignore them is not because I think it makes me a bigger man, but because if I spoke out against them I would be fired and ostracized. People would hate me for raising or sharing these opinions.
For your point about sexual harassment and rape - this is not something specific to the tech industry and not something that is fixed by deciding to prefer women over men in hiring decisions. Is the idea that, because women are more likely to be sexually harassed or raped, outside of prison, they should get the compensatory prize of these career benefits I've described? That just seems like a non-sequitur to me.
> You seem to be arguing for laws that treat people differently based on their immutable characteristics - i.e. gender. I think that's wrong and people should be treated equally.
That's not what I am arguing. What I am saying is, if people were currently being treated equally then we would not have to have this conversation. The truth is that they are not.
I mean come on, have you ever heard of the Bedchel test?
"It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added."
You have to exercise a lot of mental energy to not see all the ways in which there is systemic sexism in our society and workplace.
You also have to decide that all these women must be, making this shit up?
You also have to be pretty ignorant, either deliberately or through circumstance having placed you in an unhealthy media environment. These days there are a lot of fact-based, data-supported history books, studies, etc, talking about systemic sexism both past and present.
To sum up, however good your tech knowledge may be, your knowledge - current, best-practices knowledge, so to speak, of history is weak. Or, you don't want to acknowledge the truth.
If you're not arguing for policies that treat people differently based on their gender, then we would be in agreement. Individuals should be treated as individuals and not as members of a monolithic group based on their immutable characteristics. i.e. I should not be penalized for being a man, a Chinese person should not be penalized for being Chinese, a blind person should not be penalized for being blind, etc.
This doesn't seem to be what you're advocating though. You're defending policies that explicitly favor people based on their immutable characteristics. I understand you think it balances historical inequality, but I disagree with that.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes data on job occupation and demographics of the workers[1]. You can see that many occupations are at approximate gender parity (i.e. ~50% women) and some occupations are majority women while other occupations are majority men.
Let's consider four occupations from this list written as Occupation title, percent women. Computer programmers, 20. Insurance underwriters, 51. Human resource managers, 75. Pre-school teachers, 98.7. Why are women only 20% of computer programmers? Is it because 100 years ago women weren't allowed to vote and because today women have relatively few lines of dialogue with one another in popular films? Well, why do those factors uniquely affect female computer programmers and not other career disciplines? I don't think I would have expected that prior to looking at the data.
If relatively few women are computer programmers because of systemic sexism, is there less systemic sexism among insurance underwriters? And how would you know that apart from looking at these percentages? As male as the profession of computer programming is, human resources managers are even more female - is that because of a prejudice against men? And that's not to mention the apparently staggering bias against male preschool teachers.
In other words, if the only way you can tell that computer programmers are systemically sexist and insurance underwriters are not is because of the portion of women in those respective fields, it seems like that same logic would also lead to there being massive system sexism against male human resources managers and teachers.
An alternate hypothesis, which I do believe in, is that men and women tend to have different interests. Women, for reasons that are an ineffable mystery, like to be around children as an example. That's why they are over represented among teachers, especially teachers of younger and younger children. I think it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that women, in aggregate, are less likely to be interested in computer programming, and this lack of interest is what leads there to be relatively few female programmers, not the Bechdel test or the history of women's suffrage.
Your post actually exemplifies why this is so fraught. The first part of your post is hard to criticize—every workplace has to think about how they’re accommodating and trying to foster quality amongst employees with different backgrounds. Companies should be talking about how their promotion practices affect working mothers, etc.
But your example of HN endorsing “Black Lives Matter” is different. Taken literally it’s a straightforward slogan, but it’s also the name of a specific political organization with a broad political agenda: https://thepostmillennial.com/exposed-blm-quietly-scrubs-ant.... It’s not just an articulation of a single problem. It identifies the problem as being a symptom of an entire system, and advocates radical changes to our whole society to solve that problem and others.
What part of the various political ideologies that could be deemed to fall within the umbrella of “BLM” are you asking HN to endorse? And what aspects of the platform do you think others will perceive HN as endorsing?
This is not a criticism of BLM—I go to a church that has a BLM banner and I understand what’s being conveyed and not conveyed in that context. But demanding this sort of expression of ideological alignment from organizations that aren’t ideological and activist to begin with is very problematic.
Doesn't this whole comment depend on me believing that organizations like the Go Programming Language are endorsing Marxism when they post "Black Lives Matter" banners? For that matter, all of my very-well-off Oak Park neighbors? Obviously, they are not doing that. Where does that leave your argument?
The link you shared - from the Post-Millenial - is troubling.
First, when reading it, to me, the language from the BLM site the article discussed did not line up w/what the article was accusing it of.
Second, the very beginning of the Wikipedia page about The Post-Millenial says this (and cites decent-looking sources for each point):
"The Post Millennial is a conservative Canadian online news magazine started in 2017. It publishes national and local news and has a large amount of opinion content. It has been criticized for releasing misinformation and articles written by fake personas,[1] for having unknowingly employed an editor with ties to white supremacist-platforming and pro-Kremlin media outlets,[2] and for opaque funding and political connections.[3][4]"
Simply put, Black Lives Matter, or BLM, is fundamentally about racist police violence and systemic racism in the justice system. That's at the core of it.
IMHO most critiques such as the one you raise seem to mainly be an attempt to obfuscate that simple fact.
You looked up the Wikipedia for post millennial, but couldn’t be bothered to double check archive.org to confirm the language referenced in the article was in fact on the BLM site until it was recently removed? See: https://web.archive.org/web/20190118185735/https://blacklive...
'We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.'
So what? There are tons of cultures in which child raising is communal. Including various parts of Western cultures at various times.
They're not saying "nuclear families suck." They're saying, "nuclear families are one approach among many which humanity uses to raise children, and it's not necessarily always the best."
'Disrupt' doesn't mean 'Destroy'.
They also said 'to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.' Meaning, IMHO, 'folks should make their own choices for their own families.'
Considering how incredibly destructive slavery was to any form of family institution (father sold or killed, mother sold, child not, etc), and how that has echoed down to the present day in the black community, I can understand why black folks would want to have that discussion.
Which is not just a discussion being had by black people, either.
I agree with the phrase "black lives matter". But I absolutely do not support the political group "BLM", which stands for a number of liberal ideas that have nothing to do with black people. For example their "what we believe page" states: "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable."
Frankly I think this idea has awful implications that BLM does not grasp.
If the issue directly hinders the company’s goals as determined by the leadership then it should be addressed, that could include sexism. Main point is that the issue has to be relevant to the company’s goals as determined by the leadership.
For sure. But right now we're in an era of change. Should addressing the existential threat of climate change be a goal for every company, or not? That's one example.
The Expensify CEO believed that democracy itself was on the line in the 2020 election, and that supporting democracy was relevant to the company's goal.
We can disagree with him but I respect him for exercising his judgement about the situation.
EDIT: I'd like to add, IMHO, workers should have more control over their own labor and see more of the profits of their labor, so, actually I'd like to see companies evolve to become less hierarchial institutions and thus decide priorities in a more democratic / consensus-based fashion.
I don't know how we'd do this. But I know we collectively are smart enough to figure out how to get closer than we are now : ).
I agree 100% politics should be a part of any company. I’d like to see time set aside to educate employees about their 2nd amendment rights and maybe the company can do a dollar for dollar match on NRA donations?
Oh wait, you meant you want to see your politics supported in the workplace. Not politics in general.
Google, which is not known as a bastion of right-wing thought, will indeed match dollar-for-dollar donations to the NRA. Up to a threshold, just like it does for any other charity.
The NRA Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that raises and donates money to outdoors groups and others such as ROTC programs, 4-H and Boy Scouts.
The NRA Foundation is a separate organization from the NRA. Obviously a related one, but the distinction is important because 501(c)(3) organizations can’t do political campaigning.
> Such talk has scared many young people. Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, a young Clinton volunteer named Zach was upset the Democrats failed to beat Trump. According to cbsnews.com, at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, Zach yelled at a senior official: “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”
> Do scientists agree with Zach? The federal government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment was released last November. Hundreds of scientists from 13 government agencies compiled the 1,500-page report. It finds no existential threat from climate change. Zach is likely to have a long life.
Fires, hurricanes, extreme heat, and drought are made more frequent & severe by climate change, and they certainly kill people. Climate change also disrupts food systems and will cause civil war and mass migrations. Millions will need to migrate just from coastal flooding, which I'd imagine will cause plenty of geopolitical strife and ultimately lead to many deaths.
"Existential threat" in my mind means humanity itself is threatened. The species will likely survive but millions if not billions will die due to climate change.
Current projections of the effect of an RCP 8.5 scenario (a “do nothing” approach) suggest severe impacts to the Florida and gulf coasts, creating significant migrations inland. But the projected GDP hit will be an estimated 5%—i.e. losing a few years of growth.
It will be bad and disruptive and many people will die. But based on what we know about the “science” it’s not going to be “existential.” For example the wildfires on the west coast killed 35-40 people. We could have a dozen of those a year and it wouldn’t threaten the existence of humanity or really even civilization as we know it.
“Existential threat” could also mean “something that threatens life as we know it.” Sea level rising above the entire country of Bangladesh certainly qualifies in my books.
Aside: Arguing the exact technical meaning of a term thrown around is kind of a bad faith argument. Maybe we don’t put the same meaning to the same term, which is entirely likely given that HN is an international community.
“Existential threat” means a threat that threatens the existence of something (civilization, humanity, etc). It doesn’t just mean “really bad.” If you have a different meaning, you’re using the term wrong.
And there is nothing “bad faith” about the argument. An “existential threat” warrants a different response than lesser threats. So establishing whether or not climate change is really an “existential threat” is really important to the debate.
Climate change isn’t “existential” even for Bangladesh. A third of the Netherlands is already under sea level. Technology compensates. Experts project that climate change could render 17% of Bangladesh under sea level in 40 years. 90% of Rotterdam is under sea level. The city was originally built using technology substantially more primitive than what Bangladesh might have in 40 years (when it is projected to be a middle-income country with a $3 trillion economy).
Most proposed anti-climate-change policies also threaten “life as we know it”. That’s literally the reason why e.g. the French were massively protesting gas tax hikes.
The HN banner idea would only antagonize the HN folks. In my childhood, parents made me eat tomatoes, because, you know, it's healthy. Since then I despise tomatoes, even though at a rational level I understand that my parents were right.
The techies types are knowledge first people. If you want to win their support, appeal to knowledge, make a rational case, but avoid trying to fool them, as the moment they notice a logical inconsistence in your ideas, they'll dismiss them entirely.
Most activism appeals to emotions, to feelings, because it matters a lot to most people. But techies put dry knowledge first and so needs to change your tactic.
Nevertheless, I'm upvoting your comment because I believe it presents an important viewpoint.
The any number of flame wars that techies have (like editor X vs Y, operating system A vs B) should put to rest any assertions of us privileging knowledge over emotions.
The subset of techies you are talking about like to think that about themselves like that. They're as emotional and biased as the rest of us mortals, proof of that for example is characterizing the comment as irrational just because it doesn't "feel" rational to you, other comments talking about feminist re-educations camps or how climate change isn't that big of a deal.
I'm not trying to be antagonistic but one should be careful of thinking that they are inherently a more rational person.
They're biased, but in a different way. Most people are steered by wrong feelings: they feel strongly about something, although don't quite understand it, and act on those feelings. Techies are less suspectible to feelings (they are deaf in some sense), but they often get trapped in mental illusions, i.e. elaborate mental structures and ideas that incorrectly describe the world.
This is also why techies dont make it far in power structures: they don't get that emotional aspect of human relationships.
What if you support the concept that black lives matter but do not support the actions of the organization Black Lives Matter (which is not just about racial equality).
Your posts take what may sound like a benign or reasonable position (civil rights are good, right?) and uses that as a means to assert that supporting BLM is the same thing. For some it is, for some it isn’t. And for some it’s green grocerism or a Kafkatrap.
Police brutality against Black people is a civil rights issue. BLM is a group of affiliated political organizations, and a slogan coined and popularized by those same organizations. Those organizations view the policing issue as just one symptom of a larger societal problem and advocates particular solutions not only to that problem, but to other problems that are, within their intellectual framework, related.
It’s the difference between “child malnutrition” and activist organizations that have particular explanations for and proposed solutions to that problem.
> Police brutality against Black people is a civil rights issue. BLM is a group of affiliated political organizations, and a slogan coined and popularized by those same organizations.
That's historically false. The slogan was popularized before the key organizations existed; the organizations were, in part, a response to the criticism that the movement united by the slogan lacked a clear and coherent agenda.
> Outraged and saddened after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the Florida man who killed a Black teenager in 2012, Oakland, California resident Alicia Garza posts a message on Facebook on July 13, 2013. Her post contains the phrase "Black lives matter," which soon becomes a rallying cry and a movement throughout the United States and around the world.
> In 2013, three female Black organizers — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — created a Black-centered political will and movement building project called Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter began with a social media hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin back in 2012.
> According to the Black Lives Matter website they were "founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.
> My understanding is that Alicia Garza and the other founders of the BLM organization coined the phrase itself
Yes, they created the slogan and hashtag in 2012 and the Foundation in 2013, and the Movement for Black Lives was founded in 2014. (Much of this is express in the excerpts you cite.) The organizations did not exist until well after the slogan was popularized, and the various organizations within the movement (even the big two) mentioned are not without disputes over both policy recommendations and priority between them; the slogan isn’t a sales technique for the programs of one organization or the other, the organizations are working to try to establish how to make the slogan concrete.
How is that responsive to my point? The folks who created the slogan built a political organization around it, and that organization has a specific political platform. Put differently, it’s not like the slogan was some pre-existing neutral concept that happens to be used by these organizations. There is a direct relation between the slogan and these organizations.
Demanding that people repeat and affirm the slogan, therefore, seems risks demanding they endorse the organizations.
At Northwestern, there were demands for former Dean Yuracko to recite the “Black Lives Matter” slogan. She released messages condemning the “horrific racial injustices faced by African-Americans on a regular basis” and developing an action plan for the school. But she was condemned for “not explicitly stating, ‘Black Lives Matter.’” (https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2020/7/9/21310596/nor...). And she was ultimately removed from her job.
I don’t know Dean Yuracko’s inner thoughts. But I suspect she has fairly progressive views given the nature of her research (gender equity) and that she believes “black lives matter” as a literal factual statement. But being pressured to repeat that statement, as the slogan, and the name of an organization with some fairly radical ideas, is a differently thing entirely. In America, we don’t go around forcing people to express solidarity with a political movement, no matter how meritorious the movement.
I think we're likely talking past each other. I agree that there is immense social pressure for individuals to endorse the slogan "Black Lives Matter".
What I dispute is the proposition that any reasonable person assumes such an endorsement also constitutes an endorsement of the Marxist beliefs of "BLM, Inc.", a name I'm introducing to capture the organization you're referring to.
I agree that BLM, Inc. is so hospitable to radical socialism that we might as well refer to it as a radical socialist organization.
I strongly disagree that such tendencies also apply to the slogan "Black Lives Matter"; BLM, Inc. has lost its hold on the slogan, and no longer owns it. That's what happens when a slogan succeeds so wildly it's on every bumper sticker and lawn in Oak Park.
(I think this is more or less what the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education has to say about BLM as well).
This is precisely what I’m talking about. You’re continuing to assert that if you support civil rights you must support BLM. Others have pointed out why this comes from a faulty assumption.
People make these claims about HN based on their own political passions, which lead to false feelings of generality. If you had the opposite politics, you'd notice opposite things and derive opposite conclusions [1]. Plenty of people do:
"if you say anything that doesn't align with the mainstream liberal consensus you'll be flagged and a mod will reprimand you for flaimbait" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353254
"anything critical of the Democratic party is instantly flagged [...] And the moderators don't give a fuck either because they're also in the main HN demographic of SV white liberal trash" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24990311
Sure, not everyone agrees on where HN leans politically. There is no all-encompassing autoritative data, and plenty of room for interpretation and debate. Everyone is entitled to their opinion on the topic and I have mine.
See my user name. I was being polite, what I was thinking was, imagine how fucking far left you have to be to think hackernews is right wing. ;) You’re right, it’s a matter of perspective and bubble.
> Their rethorical device for holding the moral high ground is to frame their political views as neutral and apolitical, while framing views they disagree with as divisive and “political”.
This I wish more people called out. There is a lot of going on this post. There is a lot of, whats called on reddit "enlightened centrism", they definitely come out in full force here to attempt to be clever. This fake argument needs a name and a better description.
Thread ancestor was hedging carefully with the word 'irrelevant'. I'm not drawing any instances to mind where someone argued that sexism was irrelevant to the workplace, only people arguing that the current crop of policies are unfair or counterproductive. Damore springs to mind, he had a section titled "Non discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap" and so it would be difficult to argue that he thought inaction was the goal.
What is politics is in itself political, but I expect there will be a fair majority of people who want corporations to focus on carrying out basic tasks effectively rather than devoting resources to experimental (or divisive) social reform. The risks of corruption and bad outcomes are real.
I another problem is this can also lead to not being involved in the local community.
In San Francisco, the collective "tech industry" has long been demonized for various things. IMO, some fair, some not. "Google Buses" taking space at MUNI stops was one for quite a while. Contributing to increasing housing costs is a long time favorite.
But a lot of these come from a culture where you build your company on top of the infrastructure provided by the local community and government. Then build a very successful business on top of that, but have minimal engagement with the local government and community. So you create a perception that you're just taking, and not actually part of the local community.
It seems to me that the Coinbase case just doubles down on this attitude.
In contrast, Salesforce has the largest building in San Francisco named after them, and a huge urban park. I don't see them getting dragged into the anti-tech sentiment. Because I think they've effectively engaged with the local community and given back a lot.
They have a culture of volunteer work, strongly encouraging employees to take time off to volunteer for local causes. They also donate to many local causes. Marc Benioff is certainly involved in politics, and advocating for specific ideas and policies. But because him and his company engage in various ways, and make substantial philanthropic contributions, they are usually respected for it.
> It seems to me that the Coinbase case just doubles down on this attitude.
It isn't just that attitude that's the problem, it's the insistence by Coinbase that they're apolitical, yet the company makes significant political contributions themselves[1].
Looking through these entries, I believe these are contributions made using Coinbase, not by Coinbase. I.e: political donations processed using cryptocurrency, not ones made by the company or its employees.
Just speculating here based on the repeated small dollar amounts.
I doubt it. There are a lot of $5k+ donations, and a $21k donation. The dozens of $2k and $5k donations are mostly to Brian Forde's campaign, famous for his Bitcoin connections[1]. Upon looking at the smallest donations, the majority go to Brian Forde, too.
They're not deceived, it just looks like a display error. If you open up an individual item, many have an "Open Image" button next to them that show the full filing document.
Salesforce doesn't get dragged into anti-tech sentiment because they build a b2b product. The Twitter activists who lead most of the anti-tech crusades don't know what CRM is or what it does because they
never interact with it because they are unemployed.
The people who do use Salesforce for the most part hate it. But you'll never see widespread outrage about Salesforce because the people who use it have jobs, families, and friends that prevent them from spending all day on social media.
What makes you think "twitter activists" lead most of the anti-tech crusades? If it's based on your observations of them on twitter, that probably says more about where you're looking than where they are. I don't know where anti-tech activism is centered, but twitter wouldn't be my first guess.
Maybe the quoted author was a bit flippant in their comment, but to put it another way, wouldn't you agree that if someone were to say "Salesforce is letting people spread fake news" or "Atlassian has a contract with ICE" that there would be relatively less interest and clicks on the headlines? The fact that the consumer-oriented tech companies are on peoples' minds makes a difference whether it's worth going after them.
I doubt that anti-tech people really discern different companies. Most likely Salesforce is not consumer oriented and therefore not really a name that springs to mind when it comes to tech.
To be frank from a North Eastern admittedly suburban perspective the "local community" manages to seem to be in the wrong here and sound very entitled. Reaching out for philanthropy is well and good and a positive thing, but the hostility and demands runs afoul of "minding your own business" essentially. It is one thing if they were say polluting or being an attractor of crime would be fair enough but complaining about high paying jobs seems downright spoiled and unpleasable. Essentially if the local government can't handle the issues with an increased tax flood the problem isn't the goose that lays the golden eggs.
I grew up in SF, and I'm a tech weanie, and I gotta say: We have been terrible neighbors. We have been like the guy that bought a condo in North Beach and then sued the church for ringing their bells, but 10,000x worse. We've kind of ruined the city.
As for Marc Benioff, he's the only billionaire who seems to actually, visibly give a shit. He's Jimmy James. (Even if that fwcking tower looks alternately like a phallus or a giant middle finger. Whatever, dude's cool.)
Any time SF wants, it can allow the supply of housing to rise to meet demand, which will drastically improve the city's culture, diversity, and affordability. SF voters don't want that, though, and they've not yet been overruled at the state level.
> Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.
> In the long run, San Francisco's CPI-adjusted average income is growing by 1.72% per year, and the number of employed people is growing by 0.326% per year, which together (if you believe the first model) will raise CPI-adjusted housing costs by 3.8% per year. Therefore, if price stability is the goal, the city and its citizens should try to increase the housing supply by an average of 1.5% per year (which is about 3.75 times the general rate since 1975, and with the current inventory would mean 5700 units per year). If visual stability is the goal instead, prices will probably continue to rise uncontrollably.
I think it would only take a few years (very few, as in low single digits) of 1.5% growth in housing supply to invalidate the extrapolations being used here.
As it stands now there's not enough construction capacity. Santa Rosa burns in a wildfire and you can't get a contractor to stucco a wall in SF that summer, eh?
> This new 22-unit project from local developer Patrick Kennedy (Panoramic Interests) is the first in the nation to be constructed of prefabricated all-steel modular units made in China.
An interesting detail: "Kennedy notes that the cost of trucking to Berkeley from the port of Oakland was more expensive than the cost of shipping from Hong Kong."
Clearly it's years of policy at the state and local level that got us here. I've read big chunks of the Environmental Impact Report for the major downsize that happened in SF in the late 70s. That EIR specifically called out that the downzone would make SF much more expensive in the future if we didn't shift to redeveloping much of the industrialized parts of SF.
That redevelopment didn't really happen, and now we're left with this result.
The really unfortunate thing is because of the artificially restricted housing supply (and commercial, thanks Prop M) it ends up creating these perverse incentives. I would think that normally if you have an industry that's growing really well, and creating tons of high paying jobs, you'd want them in your city. But, because we combined a strictly limited supply with great growth in high paying jobs, the reaction is to be hostile to those high paying jobs.
Of course, it's not just San Francisco, it's practically all cities in the Bay Area that strictly limit housing development but allow office construction.
Twitter and Zendesk and more have volunteering cultures and do their best to support the community. Nobody cares, except to criticize them as being insufficiently charitable when it happens to be noticed. I think Benioff gets a pass not because he visibly cares, but because he's got that local boy made good story.
Being a good neighbor in SF (or any other city in the inner Bay) is next to impossible. Anything that happens becomes your fault no matter how unrelated you are, even if it's fully self-inflicted. Like the tower, MUNIserable buses, or the housing shortage. Or SF General's billing practices, blamed on Zuckerberg after he gave... I don't even remember how many millions.
I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome. The best I can hope for is a grudging sufferance, so long as I hate myself enough for being the wrong kind of different.
And why should I care about a community that refuses to grant me membership? Whose life will be improved by my misery? Will I be thanked and appreciated for my generosity and sacrifice, or just attacked for not giving more?
> Twitter and Zendesk and more have volunteering cultures and do their best to support the community. Nobody cares, ...
...because their "volunteering culture" comes off as too little too late.
It was insane for Twitter to open their HQ in the middle of SF's skid row.
Let me point out one aspect that seems lost on a lot of downtown techies: They see you. The bums and druggies and wastoids see the kids with wealth and success and not-fucked-up-ness of life and they resent it and them. Right or wrong, it's human nature. So yeah, Twitter was never about solving Civic Center's outdoor Bedlam, so they're never going to get credit for saving the world when they are squatting in hell clearly not saving shit. Eh?
> Being a good neighbor in SF (or any other city in the inner Bay) is next to impossible.
> Anything that happens becomes your fault no matter how unrelated you are, even if it's fully self-inflicted. Like the tower, MUNIserable buses, or the housing shortage. Or SF General's billing practices, blamed on Zuckerberg after he gave... I don't even remember how many millions.
It's not impossible, but what you're talking about isn't "being a good neighbor" you're just complaining that people are blaming tech for their problems (whether it's true or not.)
(And don't get me started on Zuckerberg's gross purchased virtue signalling. He paid for a hospital, put his name on it so everyone would know, and now I can't talk shit about him and the problems his massive wealth and bewheemoth company are causing, because it makes me look like an ingrate!? Bullshit. Bull. Shit.)
> I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome.
Have you asked, "What can do to gain welcome?"
Before ~2001 or so SF was one of the most welcoming places in the whole of this planet of Earth.
> The best I can hope for is a grudging sufferance, so long as I hate myself enough for being the wrong kind of different.
Okay if that's what you're getting from SFians you are hanging out with the WRONG SFians. This is a city of love, not self-hate. (Insert off-color joke about Castro, gay culture, learning to overcome hate and self-hate to love yourself and others freely, etc. just as a reminder that this city has been so many things to so many people in it's brief and drama-filled life.)
> And why should I care about a community that refuses to grant me membership? Whose life will be improved by my misery?
Again, no one worth respecting wants you to be miserable or to hate yourself.
I don't know you or what you've personally experienced here, so I can't speak to that (I can't even figure out why most people don't like me.) If you came here since ~2001 you're already too late, the culture of welcoming was already thrashed by then. ("Dot-Com Boom", yeah?)
A lot of the community has been pushed out, and most of us who remain are wary of the new wave of techie folks, or yes, outright hostile.
> I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome.
So go somewhere else? I don't mean that in a mean or disrespectful way. I'm a proponent of the idea that just moving somewhere else can be an excellent way to solve problems. It's not a panacea, of course, but it often does the trick.
Maybe you're not weird enough to hang with the old skool SF crowd. It's not a reflection on you. SF has long been the city of crazies. This whole tech-Mecca thing is hella recent. Less than a generation.
The old joke: "All the crazy people in America move to California, and all the crazy people in California move to SF. (And if you're too crazy for SF you move to Berkeley.)"
- - - -
Benioff gets a pass because he supported Proposition C.
> It was insane for Twitter to open their HQ in the middle of SF's skid row.
I remember SF city government going out of their way to try to get actual businesses in there. Clearly Twitter made the egregious error of trying to play ball with the city government.
> Have you asked, "What can do to gain welcome?"
Yes.
The answers ranged from "fuck you" to "sell all your stuff, give all your money to charity, give your job to a QTPOC, and leave". None of them included kindness, compassion, or being a decent human being. None of them actually allowed for the possibility of welcome.
> Okay if that's what you're getting from SFians you are hanging out with the WRONG SFians
I don't hang out with them if I can help it. I just meet the ones who lambast millions of dollars to charity as bad (when it's people they dislike) and characterize SF's xenophobic policies as love. Who obsess over SF's supposed weirdness while resenting people who don't conform to their expectations. Who make excuses for treating migrants with hostility, and expect them to understand as they refuse to return the favor.
I cut them out of my life as quickly as I can, because I have very little tolerance for that kind of hypocritical xenophobia.
The old skool SF types seem to like me. I've got a kind of weird they appreciate. The new skool, on the other hand...
----
But I'll play along. What can I do to gain a welcome?
> I remember SF city government going out of their way to try to get actual businesses in there. Clearly Twitter made the egregious error of trying to play ball with the city government.
Sure but SF gov and SF culture aren't co-extensive. A lot of us were not happy with what City Hall did to make that deal go through.
Also, it's not a case of wily city officials tricking Twitter is it?
>> Have you asked, "What can do to gain welcome?"
> Yes.
> The answers ranged from "fuck you" to "sell all your stuff, give all your money to charity, give your job to a QTPOC, and leave". None of them included kindness, compassion, or being a decent human being. None of them actually allowed for the possibility of welcome.
Well,
> "fuck you"
Let's discount that one right off, eh?
> "sell all your stuff, give all your money to charity, ...
That is actually good advice, or at least similar to what Jesus said. But a bit extreme if you're not feeling it.
> "...give your job to a QTPOC, and leave"
Hmm, well that's back in the "discount right off" bin, eh?
> None of them included kindness, compassion, or being a decent human being. None of them actually allowed for the possibility of welcome.
Well then, who the hell are these folks? It may be that you're just talking to loud mouths and freaks.
> I don't hang out with them if I can help it. I just meet the ones who lambast millions of dollars to charity as bad (when it's people they dislike) and characterize SF's xenophobic policies as love. Who obsess over SF's supposed weirdness while resenting people who don't conform to their expectations. Who make excuses for treating migrants with hostility, and expect them to understand as they refuse to return the favor.
Yeah, to me it sounds like you've gotten an earful from some of the louder and less hip freaks. Ignore them, they're loud and ineffectual.
I once had a Marxist roommate who tripped a circuit-breaker by trying to move an external electric socket to let a bookshelf be set flush with the wall. She went at a live circuit with a screwdriver! This person was over fifty yet didn't know enough about home electrical wiring not to stick a screwdriver in a live socket, but somehow felt that she knew how a city or country should be governed!?
So yeah, pick your friends wisely, there are a lot of losers here (because this is the town you move to if you can't make it in Cleveland or wherever.)
Remember that Burning Man started here as a fire-on-the-beach birthday celebration, eh?
> The old skool SF types seem to like me. I've got a kind of weird they appreciate. The new skool, on the other hand...
So you are sharing and understanding the problem?
----
> But I'll play along. What can I do to gain a welcome?
> Before ~2001 or so SF was one of the most welcoming places in the whole of this planet of Earth.
JWZ's struggles with San Francisco about the DNA Lounge were quite legendary and that was prior to 2001.
SF was welcoming as long as you were buying shitty property in a shitty area and helping to gentrify it. Anything else and they fought you tooth and nail.
The difference now is that all the shitty property is gone.
Okay, I hate him now. (Just kidding. I will admit that I am not upset by this in the same way that Zuckerberg's thing makes me feel. FWIW, I'll examine that personally on my own time.)
> got a pass well before Prop C came along.
You mean he didn't suddenly become cool circa Prop C?
I find it slightly ironic that in one post you're complaining that when it comes to supporting the community "nobody cares, except to criticize", then a post or two later a dude's gifted a load of money to a children's hospital and you describe that as "buying his name on a hospital"
I was deliberating mirroring my interlocutor's phrasing to make a point. One was resented, and used as a point against the person. The other passed unremarked.
As a rhetorical flourish, it did it was intended to do and exposed an apparent double standard.
A better solution is to simply stop caring about the opinions of the entrenched SF special interest groups and simply go on with one's life, and ignore the attacks that are never going to go away.
Those entrenched groups are getting less powerful by the day, anyway. Their opinions can't be change, and they aren't going to matter much soon.
And the other, newer, techie focused groups are getting more influence.
There isn't much point in "negotiating" with the entrenched groups when they are never going to be convinced, and you can just usurp them instead.
> Being a good neighbor in SF (or any other city in the inner Bay) is next to impossible.
I used to live in an area where a nuclear power plant was being built.
For them, it basically meant the corporation handing out $$$$ - doubtless budgeted for in advance - on things like building swimming pools in public schools, sponsoring local sports teams, and so on.
Tech people in SF have not been terrible neighbors. People who shit in the street are terrible neighbors. People who steal bikes and smash car windows are terrible neighbors. People who do drugs in the open and leave needles on the ground are terrible neighbors.
Techies are basically the ideal denizens of a city. Young, educated, well-paid, law-abiding people. You could hardly ask for a better group to populate a city.
If that were true, where do the terrible neighbours come from?
Perhaps tech corporates may have something to do with the reasons these people are trying to survive on the street?
I wouldn't blame FAANG specifically, because of course the problem is more complex than that. But there's a certain complacency involved in being young, educated, and in-demand - which can be knocked out of you far more easily than you might think when the next bust happens and suddenly you are the one on the street being told you're a bad neighbour.
This is not hyperbole. It has happened in every dot com recession, and it will happen to people you know - possibly even to you - in the next one.
What really boggles my mind (I 100% agree with GP and left SF in part because of the actual bad neighbors) is that activists in SF harp on trump and call tech "invaders" or not welcome or whatever and don't see the irony.
The easiest way to shut up an SF-based activist or NIMBY ranting against tech invasion is to say smth like "it sounds like you are saying you want to keep them out, perhaps build that wall?" :D
It's an imperfect metaphor. In SF it would be like the "invaders" are bringing the wealth with them but not sharing it; while in the larger context the "invaders" are coming in from an effectively failed state in order to take advantage of the wealth in the "invaded" state.
But yeah, in general, by the time you're a capital-A "Activist" you're not well able to see your own foibles and ironies. The mote in your neighbor's eye occludes the plank in your own, eh?
> In SF it would be like the "invaders" are bringing the wealth with them but not sharing it
How would they share it though? The entire Bay Area is utterly resistant to anything that might change "neighborhood character" or "harm property prices". Prop 13 has caused housing development to ossify, causing widespread homelessness and misery, but residents find it convenient to blame a tiny fraction of the workforce for all their problems.
I don't think there's a realistic way for the tech wealth to be shared, I'm just explaining where the resentment comes from.
Most of the really cool folk in the city have already bounced (to the East Bay of further afield) so you're left with the desperate, the deeply committed, etc.
Really I have come to the conclusion that "localism" is essentially the socially acceptable outlet for left leaning xenophobic personalities. Racism, sexism, and homophobia are a path to be a pariah but outsiders to "the local community" are fair game as an outgroup and a place their anxieties and anger on an other outgroup.
This has been happening continuously since San Francisco was first settled by Spanish explorers and soldiers in 1776, displacing the Ohlone peoples who lived there. There are SF history articles in the library that go into great detail about the shift in neighborhood demographics since the initial Gold Rush.
When I first perused the source material back in the 1990s, I learned about the hidden history of San Francisco. Of particular note, was the Irish and Polish presence in the Mission in the early to mid-twentieth century, and the Scandinavian wave to Upper Market around the same time.
These waves of ethnic migration to the city influenced its development, brought people with new skills and culture, and greatly contributed to the multicolored tapestry of San Francisco. Many of these groups had organized meeting places and interest groups which directly benefited their districts, and they performed charitable work to improve the city in which they lived.
Reading posts like these make me wonder as an European what is the difference between this and the rural maga types? Both complaining about invaders taking their jobs, homes, replacing culture, bringing misery.
It's a sort of Yin/Yang mirror image. Lefties aren't perfected beings, eh?
One thing a lot of people seem to gloss over is that up until ~25 years ago SF was the weird city. It was like a refuge for all the freaks and weirdos (or if you were just gay and sick of taking shit for it) to come and hang out.
So all the "shiny happy people" with their nice jobs and no drug problems or social maladjustments come here and fuck it up for us.
It's like, you could go anywhere, why do you have to take my home and make it just like everywhere else?
(But as others on this thread have pointed out: THAT'S CALIFORNIA BABY! First the Spanish fucked the Indians, then the Americans fucked the Spanish, etc... The whole "Hey this is nice. Yoink! Mine now." thing is the theme of the thing.)
One is complaining about rich people moving in and increasing property values.
And the other is complaining about illegal aliens breaking the law by being here illegally, while either committing fraud by using someone's SSN or avoiding paying tax entirely, often unable to speak English, increasing competition for unskilled labor (construction, landscaping, cooks, dishwashers, etc.), putting downward pressure on wages of the working class.
One is lamenting supply and demand, and the is other upset about blatant illegality that has gone on for decades.
Friendly reminder: the US does not have a national or official language.[1] They only harm themselves by not knowing English and usually they try very hard to learn so as to not be at a disadvantage.
> while either committing fraud by using someone's SSN or avoiding paying tax entirely
If they use someone else's SSN, the payroll taxes are still being paid, so the taxpayer isn't losing out. In fact, it's free money for the SSA because they'll never have to pay out benefits to most of these people later. (Would you take the risk of claiming Social Security if you were here illegally?)
If they get paid cash under the table, there are two parties acting illegally - the employer is also to blame (and possibly, laundering money, which is an additional crime). I don't see much vitriol directed against employers though. I hear "Build the wall" but never "Shut them down" (for employers who illegally employ undocumented workers).
> Friendly reminder: the US does not have a national or official language.[1]
English is the de facto language of the US. All government business is done in English. Of course you know this, but are merely stating this as some kind of "gotcha". There is no reason for the US to take anyone who doesn't speak English in this day and age, not with a massive backlog of educated, English-speaking, law-abiding people waiting in the queue.
> They only harm themselves by not knowing English and usually they try very hard to learn so as to not be at a disadvantage.
If only they put as much effort into following the laws of this country.
> If they use someone else's SSN, the payroll taxes are still being paid, so the taxpayer isn't losing out. In fact, it's free money for the SSA because they'll never have to pay out benefits to most of these people later. (Would you take the risk of claiming Social Security if you were here illegally?)
They are criminals committing fraud. It's not a victimless crime. What do you think happens to the people who have their SSNs used?
> If they get paid cash under the table, there are two parties acting illegally - the employer is also to blame (and possibly, laundering money, which is an additional crime). I don't see much vitriol directed against employers though.
Then you may hear it right now, businesses that knowingly employ illegal aliens should be prosecuted for breaking the law.
> I hear "Build the wall" but never "Shut them down" (for employers who illegally employ undocumented workers).
Unfortunately in our current two-party system, the options are "Build the wall" or "Give them all free health care, and a path to citizenship".
Here in California, basically every government document have a Spanish counterpart and there's always Spanish speaking translators available. I can see how many Spanish speaking people can live in the US and never have to know an ounce of English.
> Of course you know this, but are merely stating this as some kind of "gotcha".
It wasn't meant as a gotcha, just a reminder that lack of English isn't quite the black mark you were making it out to be.
> not with a massive backlog of educated, English-speaking, law-abiding people waiting in the queue.
I don't see much support for reducing the backlog either.
> What do you think happens to the people who have their SSNs used?
I actually don't know. Can you tell me more please? It can't be identity fraud to open lines of credit. As you said, the migrants who use the SSNs are uneducated, relatively unsophisticated people who have very little knowledge of English.
> Then you may hear it right now, businesses that knowingly employ illegal aliens should be prosecuted for breaking the law.
It's admirable you say that, but it happens relatively rarely. Making an example (e.g RICO-ing assets) out of a few big fish, and performing consistent enforcement thereafter would provide a strong deterrent to hiring migrants illegally, and a strong disincentive to migrate illegally. It should also cost the government less money; fewer investigations to pursue, fewer government agents and less bureaucracy required. Ask yourself why this doesn't happen, why it's not part of any campaign platform, and who benefits.
> Unfortunately in our current two-party system, the options are "Build the wall" or "Give them all free health care, and a path to citizenship".
"Give them all free health care" (not actually free free, since migrants are also taxpayers) is internally consistent with "Health care is a human right". It may understandably be unpalatable to many, but at least it's honest. "a path to citizenship" appears to have widespread bipartisan support among voters, at least according to some polls I saw long ago, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
The problem is "Build the wall", isn't just less effective than "Punish the employers" at reducing illegal migration to help domestic workers, it's also inconsistent with smaller government. Policies such as the war on drugs, foreign interventions, weakening unions, opposing strong health and safety laws, or denying climate change (we're going to start hearing about climate refugees in North America in the next decade or two) also undermine domestic workers, increase illegal migration, and/or increase the size of the government. It's dishonest.
If rent control was more of a thing, and people were more open to have more buildings, then a lot of locals and culture would have stayed. Instead, everybody's rent went up, people were forced to quit, or got offered great sums of money to sell their place. It was a forced exodus due to stupid laws, and with covid19 we're seeing another exodus of engineers. Who will remain?
I don't see how Salesforce Park avoids getting demonized. It's a nice park, but it's literally above it all, set up in a way so that homeless people can't really do much.
In San Francisco, aren't people going to object to this, eventually? Symbolism seems to be what people care about, and the symbolism of being above it all seems unavoidable.
If you go to a random park in Seattle, you'll see there are two types of parks - the ones where homeless people don't do much (yet?), and the ones where nobody else can do anything whatsoever. So I think that is a plus... saying "your park sucks because people cannot camp and do drugs in it" also sounds like lunacy to most people, so it's extra nice because you cannot make it sound like it's a bad thing, like some other exclusion policies that can be twisted and made into a strawman.
I am not sure, I think none at all. The parks I am aware of that are still usable are large and/or somewhat away from points of interest like services or density (e.g. Ravenna park that is large and surrounded mostly by burbs, where you only get yelled at by crazy people in one spot).
Companies are collections of people, each of which are free to have their own beliefs, but that doesn't mean the company should officially share and support their individual beliefs. I see this only causing endless division within the company, instead of people being (more) unified in their pursuit of the company's vision.
Why not encourage employees to represent their beliefs individually, and off company time, by giving them more vacation and flexible working hours instead? Empower the employees to participate in politics without the company taking a side itself?
I'm tired of people pushing their political beliefs onto me at every opportunity, in every available setting, IRL and online.
You might be surprised. There are a lot of traditional liberals who are beginning to take exception to this sort of thing. Megyn Kelly had Matt Taibbi on her show recently to talk about this and it was quite odd to see them agreeing on something.
Matt Taibbi isn't a traditional liberal, and his current flavor of accelerationist contrarianism is very compatible with Kelly. Not for nothing, but this Taibbi trait was amplified by him being pretty persuasively MeToo'd a couple years back; he tried to fend off criticism of his work in The eXile, but again, Rule of Goats.
Honestly I think this says more surprising about Kelly than it does about Taibbi.
> Why not encourage employees to represent their beliefs individually, and off company time, by giving them more vacation and flexible working hours instead? Empower the employees to participate in politics without the company taking a side itself?
IMHO it's about power and the profits power leads to, and the desire of large companies to maintain their power and their profit.
IMHO on some level large corporations know that if they did this employees would get politically active and push more for their own interests to be represented in government over that of the large companies, resulting in less profit for said companies because government is investing in civil society and public infrastructure instead.
IMHO part of the reason the George Floyd protests were as big as they were is that folks had time on their hands, which is not the normal case for most folks in our system as it is today.
Encourage employees to represent their beliefs individually by giving them more holidays?
Looks like you're trying to shoehorn your belief, i.e. employees to have more vacation time, which is fine, but has nothing to do with "have more time to express themselves politically". That's a stretch.
I don't think it is that much of a stretch. As it is, most employees in the US barely have enough time to take a day off to vote, although that is getting easier with mail-in ballots. By giving employees more 'free time', they can spend it where they want, including political causes of their choosing.
The reason why politics used to be separated from business is that political processes must follow certain rules:
* If you wish to run a political campaign, you need to be very transparent about your sources of funding.
* If you wish to make certain idea into a law (that would force others to follow it), it must be approved by several layers of elected representatives, before it becomes mandatory.
* If someone believes that someone else does not comply with the law, they bring it to the court. Where the independent judiciary branch uses the due process to independently evaluate the situation and decide who wins the case.
These safeguards are put in place to counter abuse. They make sure that the laws (and their interpretation) serves the best interests of the general population.
Modern workplace politics completely bypasses these principles. If your activism fits a few select topics, you get to conduct it on your company's expense. You get to force people to follow the rules you set without any semblance of voting. You get to punish people you don't like without any due process. You can respond to any criticism of yourself with an accusation of one of the new deadly sins, and this immediately destroys your opponent politically and financially.
This is a somewhat tough problem for companies at this point in time. To executives focused on customers, sales, product - this is an even more interesting issue because it has really nothing to do directly with the company itself.
Most customer segmentation problems can be solved with an optional feature or a new product line - make both chunky marinara sauce and a smooth variety.
Most employee problems can be solved similarly - optional programs, different roles for different folks, etc.
But this problem is unique because a certain segment of the employee+customer base is asking the complete company to take their side in certain matters. Of course the company taking that stand alienates the other segment of the population.
However, rationally, it becomes much easier to deal with this than what Coinbase did.
It seems though that the vocal side (liberal) is vocal because they care about companies stances on these matters, while the silent (conservatives) are silent because they don't seem to care as much.
Therefore, rationally, companies generally take the liberal position or no position at all.
When conservatives listen to politically-left company seminars, see liberal company statements, etc - they mostly just ignore and move on with their day. I don't think many conservatives would be motivated to quit or boycott a company due to a liberal company seminar that they disagree with. I get the feeling (due to the walkouts, etc) that liberals are much more likely to sever relationships due to differences in political beliefs.
"conservatives are silent because they don't seem to care as much."
It's certainly the case that they don't seem to care as much, given that they're less outspoken, but is there any evidence that they actually don't care as much?
Another explanation for being less outspoken is that they're a small minority in these companies, so they lack the confidence to go against the grain, perhaps out of fear (whether valid or not) of alienation. Or conversely liberals are more confident to voice their opinion because they know they're in the majority opinion group and doing so isn't likely to stymie their career or cause stressful backlash.
Paul Graham tweeted out some survey evidence yesterday that supports the idea that conservatives are simply more afraid to speak their mind in these companies.
Is it that they're conservative, or that they know how their ideas will be received?
I've seen conservatives support things like trans rights, marriage equality, antifascism/antifa, and Black Lives Matter from conservative first principles. They would say the same about not feeling like they can share their views in places where a certain kind of conservatism is rampant.
Bigotry is not something inherent to conservative values.
Also, like most exercises of power, one has to have power in order to exercise it. Conservatives are usually more worried about not being fired for their views.
There's an interesting asymmetry between the liberal and conservative sides that isn't captured just by left/right: the liberals generally have some active change they want to make, and the conservatives don't - they just want to "conserve" what's currently being done. That means that if a company just takes the default position on things, it's already siding with the conservatives. So it's unsurprising, in that sense, that the liberals are more vocal: there's no real point in a conservative organizing a protest for "We should not extend our anti-discrimination provisions beyond what is legally required" or "We should be willing to sell to all customers that we can legally sell to" or whatever.
One example of that latter bit: Google rank-and-file protested against the executives' plan to run censored search in China, even though if you listen to the media, Google is "left" and it's the "right" who's worried about China and their authoritarianism and censorship and all that. The more elucidating explanation is that the disagreement was between the people who wanted to make money wherever legally permitted vs. the people who felt a sense of broader social responsibility regarding what they worked on, which is why you see the same fault lines (rank-and-file vs. execs) protesting against Google selling cloud services to ICE, even though that's a concern of the "left."
More generally, about which side finds itself being vocal, I recently ran across this passage from a Wikipedia article about a video game released in 2013:
> Following the announcement of a worldwide release, controversy arose concerning the impossibility of same-sex relationships. Nintendo stated, "The ability for same-sex relationships to occur in the game was not part of the original game that launched in Japan, and that game is made up of the same code that was used to localise it for other regions outside Japan." [...] Despite various campaigns from users, Nintendo stated that it would not be possible to add same-sex relationships to the game, as they "never intended to make any form of social commentary with the launch of the game", and because it would require significant development alterations which would not be able to be released as a post-game patch.
This game (Tomodachi Life) is in the same approximate genre as The Sims, i.e., the complaint wasn't about pre-programed characters with stories, it was that user-generated characters couldn't be in same-sex relationships. If a game like that launched today - in Japan or anywhere else - it would certainly not manage to avoid "any form of social commentary" by not having an option for same-sex relationships. It's just that at the time, that genuinely was the default, conservative option. If you were a conservative in Nintendo at the time, you hardly had to argue for this position. It only became controversial because public opinion had just started to shift. (And there are much fewer conservatives / right-leaning folks today who would feel the need to argue the same position against the new status quo.)
So I don't think it's true that companies "take the liberal position or no position at all." They start out taking the conservative position, and it's only through specific action - either the desire of management, or pressure from either the product's market or the labor market - that they end up with the liberal one.
This is just not true at all. Conservatives aren't looking at the status quo and saying, "Yes, more of this, please." I don't think you could find anybody who'd look at the current state of affairs, decide it should continue, and describe them as conservative.
Yes, the current order is a liberal order. Authentic conservatives want to undo all the damage that neoliberalism has inflicted upon the various so-called liberal democracies in which we live. Many (most?) republicans are actually liberals from a policy standpoint just to be clear, including Reagan and Trump.
By this logic someone who wants to change an existing game that allows same sex marriage to be one that doesn't is a "liberal" because they're advocating a change to the status quo.
But if we take this as a given then the original claim doesn't make sense anymore, because in the original claim "conservative" essentially means Republican, but the Republicans would be the "liberals" in many cases under your framework. And yet we don't really see employees pressuring companies to implement mandatory drug testing or to refuse to hire H1B workers or stop offering healthcare plans that cover abortion, even though those would all be divergences from the status quo in many companies.
No, they're a reactionary instead of a conservative. It's just that there are very few reactionaries in the world (or at least employed reactionaries), for some reason.
> When conservatives listen to politically-left company seminars, see liberal company statements, etc - they mostly just ignore and move on with their day.
Trump signed an executive order banning the government from doing business with vendors that do racial sensitivity training.
If you actually look into the text of the executive order, it bans very specific and very divisive behavior [0]:
>(a) “Divisive concepts” means the concepts that
>(1) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;
>(2) the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist;
>(3) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;
>(4) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex;
>(5) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex;
>(6) an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex;
>(7) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;
>(8) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or
>(9) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race. The term “divisive concepts” also includes any other form of race or sex stereotyping or any other form of race or sex scapegoating.
It is worth noting that the media trying to portray Trump's EO as fight against anti-racism is the same media that profits from creating divisive content in the first place.
>It is worth noting that the media trying to portray Trump's EO as fight against anti-racism is the same media that profits from creating divisive content in the first place.
I cannot agree with this more. Most of the bickering isn't bickering about a particular issue, it's bickering about a gross misrepresentation of an issue. Misrepresented for those sweet, sweet ad dollars.
I think, it's worse. I think, it's a deliberate distraction from a bigger problem that affects much more people.
The problem is that if you entered the workforce after 2008, and wasn't born into financial independence, you have no clear path to achieve a few important milestones that the previous generation had: property ownership, family (and passing your quality of life to your kids), savings and retirement.
These things have been taken away from the whole generation because we chose to not enforce antitrust laws, and bail out inefficient and corrupt behemoths. So the economic leverage that would normally go into the hands of new-wave founders, remained in the hands of big players. And now they want us to feel guilty for wanting all those things the previous generations had for granted.
Absolutely. We bicker about the topics that the powers that be wants us to bicker about. There are much larger issues that politicians don't want to touch for various reasons (paid not to, too hard, etc).
>The problem is ... entered the workforce after 2008 ... you have no clear path to achieve a few important milestones that the previous generation had: property ownership, family (and passing your quality of life to your kids), savings and retirement.
It goes back even further than that. It's been going on since companies decided to offshore manufacturing in the 70s. Rural America's small towns used to flourish and was absolutely devastated economically. Families used to get by on a single income, now it takes two full time parents to work just to make ends meet. The middle class and the lower class has been constantly choked out except for a select few occupations for the last 50 years.
But clearly just being status-quo isn't conservatism, at least if you think limited government is a fundamental aspect of conservatism, in which case that doesn't qualify really anyone in recent history.
Biden's spending plan of trillions of dollars isn't progressive? Give me a break.
>while the silent (conservatives) are silent because they don't seem to care as much.
Most of the conservatives I know are silent because they are busy. Busy raising and teaching their kids. Busy taking care of their property. Busy making their own life better. It doesn't mean that they don't care. They just believe that each person should be first and foremost responsible for their own well-being. If someone asks for help with a specific quantifiable problem, they will gladly help.
Most vocal liberals, on the contrary, are priced out of having a large enough property to take care of, or a large family that takes a lot of energy. Because they have extra time and energy, they tend to spend it on the causes that the media presents to them as important. Note that their salary expectations will be lower, compared to conservatives, since family, property and retirement plans are one's biggest expenses. I would dare say many of them feel jealous towards the conservatives and believe they got an unfair advantage.
In short-term, it's beneficial for companies to support political activism, because it keeps the employees busy with projects that don't increase their monetary demands. In long term, this ends up with tribalism, where people spend most of their energy attacking their peers over growing number of differences.
It is nonsensical to write the title as such, all tech startups (since we're talking about them, but not only) do politics. They just choose it to do it in different directions. Most often when someone says they don't want to involve themselves with politics they are alright with the status-quo, which is a political position in itself. Politics is not just about a vote at a presidential election, it's the how and why of everything you do and will do, be it in the tech startup or elsewhere.
99% of the time this just means: "If you are not doing something I want you to, I will call that inaction/indifference politics too so I can attack you and not being perceived as a radical"
But no, the guy who sells me nails (as long as he is complying with the basic regulatory framwework for his business) doesnt need to have a vocal opinion on Israel/Palestine, BLM or if the gender balance in Google is OK or not. I even prefer it that way.
Yes, I am not sure I want to discuss politics with anyone from a shop either, but the way that shop is managed is a political position. It doesnt need to be about voicing your opinion to your customers.
Also it is more relevant to tech startups because technology has that thing where it can greatly influence the world after it exists. There's more political decisions to make and positions to take when you do that.
> Yes, I am not sure I want to discuss politics with anyone from a shop either, but the way that shop is managed is a political position.
Or just it isnt, I have managed shops and I for sure was not thinking about Hayek or Marx, I paid my employees according to the law, paid my taxes and followed the rules. Not every action has to be a sociological treatise no matter what the enlightened crowd may think.
> Also it is more relevant to tech startups because technology has that thing where it can greatly influence the world after it exists. There's more political decisions to make and positions to take when you do that.
Nails have been more important for civilization than 99% of SV start-ups. You are giving your tribe too much credit. And I thought this pandemic taught us a lesson, it only goes to show how dumb I am.
> Not every action has to be a sociological treatise no matter what the enlightened crowd may think.
I didnt say that, you can take political positions unconsciously.
> Nails have been more important for civilization than 99% of SV start-ups. You are giving your tribe too much credit. And I thought this pandemic taught us a lesson, it only goes to show how dumb I am.
It's not about pretention or credit, I'm just being objective, tech has shaped the world in recent years, every so often a new technology causes us all to change our behaviors and ideas greatly whether we choose to welcome that technology or it just came to be and forced onto everyone.
> I didnt say that, you can take political positions unconsciously.
And yet, a more advanced being,enlightened if you want, will tell me what unconscious position I did take. Thanks god for those uber-menschen living among us mere mortals.
> Politics is not just about a vote at a presidential election, it's the how and why of everything you do and will do, be it in the tech startup or elsewhere.
That’s certainly not true, outside an extremely expansive definition of politics.
I still think it is true, when you choose to create some technology for example, the way you choose to design it will favor some things more than others, and that can have direct impact on society and people. Deciding how the technology will be is politics to me.
For example, say a tech startup is creating a crypto-currency like Bitcoin, choosing to create it like Bitcoin conveys anarcho-capitalist values. That is politics. Choosing to design consensus differently than on competition for something of value (PoW, PoS) like what FairCoin does might convey different political positions. Choosing not to create crypto-currency technology at all is also another one.
Technologies after they exist will favor the world becoming closer to some political ideas, tech startups like Uber convey liberal values with their driver recruitment model. iFixit another tech company rather choose to empower people to repair their things or open their own repair services, that's another political position. They could've started a very successful repair shop franchise and earn lots of money with some kind of monopoly on repair, yet they choose to share knowledge and encourage people to do so with their website.
Sure, but J.P. Morgan being inherently political doesn't mean it's a net positive for them to start to take public stances on cultural issues, and it only serves to conceal their real political impact.
I think there's a strong argument to be made that –– even given your premise of all startups being inherently political –– we're better off for them focusing on their tangible contribution to the world and not obscuring it with politics-as-PR.
And if their "contribution" has a primarily negative impact, political or otherwise, it's arguably even worse to be a culture in which they can reach for cover under cultural politics unrelated to their bottom line.
> Most often when someone says they don't want to involve themselves with politics they are alright with the status-quo, which is a political position in itself.
Or they just do not want to get involved in a complex, messy, and and potentially expensive social conflict.
The quoted post is talking about the benefits of non action(are more than the implicit cost) where I think you are saying the costs of the action are more than the benefits.
These seem really similar. Did you mean to say the same thing?
Yes, but spun in such a way as to frame not interfering with the status quo as the middle position to opposing it and furthering it. (Just to be clear no deliberate response is neutral here)
Everything else is fair game, even if it typically falls under a party.
For example: Gay stuff - it's typically democratic/liberal - although many would argue it's being supported more and more by the right. But one should be able to discuss and support gay agendas - as long as there's no specific party endorsement. Stick to specifics like bathrooms (for example) but don't mention "democrats support this too" or whatever.
Another example would be to around climate change. It's okay to discuss ways to reduce pollution, just don't endorse candidate or party X as the way that's going to happen.
So stop mentioning parties or candidates and shit - just issues.
This is a really binary view of politics and to me represents why we shouldn’t talk politics at work. People’s views on issues aren’t binary and people on the same side of the left right political divide can disagree on issues. How many leftists disagrees with Expensify’s promotion of Joe Biden? How many black people may not want to get into the nuances of Joe Biden’s support of the 1994 crime bill, even if they end up supporting him? Does a woman who just went through a difficult abortion want to be around people passionately supporting abortion rights?
The problem with discussing politics at work is that we are not all 100% free to be there. We depend on being at work and potentially being offended by people who we have to continue to work with for our livelihoods.
That being said it’s incredibly nuanced. People should be able to be unabashedly out at work. People should be able to talk about why they support having birth control as part of their health plan. Vulnerable and targeted populations should be able to talk about the struggle and discrimination they experience.
IBM recently apologized to one of its former computer scientists Lynn Conway whom it fired 50 years ago for being trans. When she was fired, she was a nobody and IBM felt that her transition would attract scandalous publicity. Now she's an accomplished award-winning professor. Is IBM playing politics? Was Conway playing politics when she decided to transition?
It sounds to me like IBM apologized for committing a wrongful termination, so no. Even the staunchest of conservatives would not consider it a "scandal" to have a trans employee in 2020. IBM is just trying to maintain a positive reputation in today's social climate, just like they were doing 50 years ago.
> Was Conway playing politics when she decided to transition?
Conway is a person, not a business, so I'm not sure what this has to do with the conversation about businesses engaging in politics.
Did I miss it, or did this article specifically leave out the paid leave packages Coinbase put together for the employees who wouldn't want to stay after his post?
You didn’t miss it. If you’re aware that these packages exist, the wording is extremely misleading. Hard to imagine someone reading the article with no prior context and guessing that employees who left received 3 months (IIRC) of severance. This type of of misleading framing is not uncommon at the NYT.
The answer to the question is no. Companies should not do politics.
Companies, however, will continue to do politics so long as it furthers their self-interest as there is a failure of separation of powers between government and corporations in the modern age.
There is some politics in every organization, because organizations are created with some mission in mind and people are going to disagree on how to accomplish it and how to balance it with other things.
The question is, can people concentrate on the mission and agree to disagree about many other things? Or are you going to try to limit the organization to people who agree on a lot of different political questions?
Why should there be a separation between corporations and government? I could see a valid argument for limiting their influence on government but they are an important stakeholder in society. So why shouldn't they have some influence (in particular on the legislative process)?
People are the stakeholders in society. The CEO, board, management, and investors of every company are people and are by and large residents of a democratic state they can vote in.
That should the extent of their legislative and electoral influence. As soon as corporations have any voice in government beyond that you are left with a facsimile of democracy where the amount of power and money you control directly correlates to your influence in the purported democratic institutions of your government.
A corporation involved in politics is exclusively behaving to the whims of its controlling interest which is almost always an investor class numbering between one and a hundred persons. Their interests are obviously and profoundly over-represented in the legislative agendas of practically every government on Earth and its due to the double edged sword of their personal wealth directly buying them political will and their ownership of business giving them a mouthpiece and apparatus to also influence politics through. Both are destructive to civilization, whose their influence has waxed and waned for half a millennia. Where their peaks often bore a prelude to catastrophic events in history.
Problem with companies doing politics is it's the corporate officers using shareholders money to do politics to push officers agenda not the shareholders.
The notion that "Not doing politics" is political position is a fairly recent fallacy. I believe that the individuals who parrot this sentiment verbatim have been reinforced with this idea from lobbyists and monied interests (including corporations and the media). The reason that I think this is as follows:
This notion helps to habituate partisan zealotry, which allows individuals to have their attention captured for profit, and makes them more manipulatable. If non-involvement in one facet of one dimension of life (politics for the benefit of corporations) is now not possible, then nobody is safe from the moral imperialism of political movements.
There are many spheres of life and influence within the world, and politics is but one of them. In modern times, however, the lines between different currencies of power are blurring, and there are clear channels for the transmutation of different types of power and capital to political power. For corporations, this is very appealing because democratic ideals, the environment, or individual rights might be at odds with their interests. Therefore, if they can convince you to give up your individualism in order to become politicized towards a cause that benefits the corporation, that is a wonderful way to circumvent democracy and concentrate power.
No it’s not. It’s an endorsement of norms about the role of political activism in relation to other aspects of society. But it’s not an endorsement of the status quo on particular substantive issues. It doesn’t necessarily even have the indirect effect of propping up the status quo.
Consider, for example, endorsements of political positions by Hollywood celebrities. The practice probably had a net negative impact on most of the substantive political positions they support. (E.g. Jane Fonda effect.)
This is the point that folks that repeat the line:
"It is a tacit endorsement of the political status quo.
reply
"
never seem to have an answer for.
Let's say I own a company and I'm not happy with the status quo, but I decide that the best way to enact change is via my agency as a private citizen instead of throwing my company brand and money after it. What gives someone the right to think that they can read my mind as to whether I'm ok with the status quo or not?
It drips with arrogance as it's just a cheap line to repeat instead of actual productive work.
Maybe I've decided that having me tackle it and not my company is more effective due to people seeing a company endorsement of a political message as a diluted bandwagon hopping exercise.
Everyone is so focused on making money that they're missing the foundations of that money-making collapsing underneath them. When the society no longer operates on rule-of-law, and people are impoverished, there is no market anymore.
This.
I cannot understand why so many people here want to "ban politics" from the workplace.
What are your working for at that workplace? Honest question. How to spend your hard-earned money when there is no society and market? Do you want your children to live in a peaceful, prospering world or a burning one (maybe with slightly more dollars in their account)?
I don't get this sentiment. Everything is politics nowadays and choosing to "ban" it just means egocentrically accepting that we are heading for a worse future.
(And no, "politics" doesnt mean that the company will become an echo chamber and different opinions should be silenced - the opposite is the case. But BS needs to be called out as what it is...)
>This. I cannot understand why so many people here want to "ban politics" from the workplace.
What 99% of people who want to "ban politics" from the workplace mean is that they want to ban progressive politics from the workplace, and more specifically any effect of progressive politics that would lead to negative consequences for their own politically incorrect behavior or views.
Or, in other words, they don't want a non-elected group of activists decide what views are politically acceptable, and then have unrestricted power to punish those, whos views don't fit.
They're not talking about whether companies should give money to politicians' campaigns, in hopes that the politician will then support their interests?
Those who think companies should under no circumstances "do politics", are you bothered by that too? That's the most popular form of "doing politics" across the entire economy I think, and it probably has an affect on legislation and policy that effects us all.
Basically, companies have an obligation to 'do the right thing' when it comes to universal human rights, but not beyond. The only exception is when it comes to their own industry where the companies have an obligation to share knowledge with the public / regulators.
I'd like to note that, if companies don't want politics, then maybe they should have less power in our system...! Activists only care because companies have a HUGE impact on government policy compared to normal citizens.
I would pay a premium for employees who can work with people whose opinions they strongly disagree with. If you're one these people please try to signal it somehow during the interview process.
In San Francisco? No one I ever met personally said that, but I heard plenty of "chatter" at BBQs where SF police officers were guests.
Where I grew up, in the "East Pacific Northwest", some were violent enough to actually say that out loud. I never knew anyone personally that murdered a black person, but I knew several who got into fights for this reason. These were kids in high school, police officers, elected political officials, etc.
I'm very happy to say I've never personally heard anything like that in a professional setting, but I'm sure it exists and I hope it'd be treated very seriously.
Maybe I spend too much time on discord, but I've met potentially hundreds of people who unironically believe that the value to life of non-white people is very low and that most do not deserve life.
Lots of actual crypto Nazis and fascists are there and they radicalize young and impressionable gamers...
Quite a few. I see prominent people on my own "side" calling for the genocide or isolation of entire states, one of which I'm in, because an election swung the wrong way by a few percent.
I think that perhaps we have not yet adjusted to the full implications of the democratization of speech. Extreme opinions, held by the tiniest, most unhinged minorities, get amplified precisely because they are so unusual. In other words, its not so much that violent, racist ideologies are on the rise, as much as we have access to the ramblings of the entire country and the ideas that most easily stand out in the noise are the horrific ones.
" In other words, its not so much that violent, racist ideologies are on the rise, as much as we have access to the ramblings of the entire country and the ideas that most easily stand out in the noise are the horrific ones."
Comforting theory and yes, surely the horrific opinions stand out. I remember visiting 4chan/pol the first time and how shocked I was. But now I know a bit more of the internet and I would rather say, that most of the things you see, are just the tip of the iceberg.
Such people can be found if you go looking for them, but that doesn't mean they are common. Even a few dozen of them in an industry of hundreds of thousands is enough to create a web forum with the appearance of popularity.
That they're easy to find online may be proof that search engines are effective, but I don't consider it evidence of their prevalence.
Well, no. I am not looking for them. I still find them. Like I said, I do gaming sometimes. On most servers racial insults get you kicked - and for a reason, this is highlighted. On servers without a admin online ... you see it.
But if you want numbers, here, one of the first results with a quick google search:
Refusing to work with people encouraging genocide is a bit different from refusing to work with a person who wants to reduce social benefits to the poor.
Does anyone actually advocate that? insane mis characterization of the other side is another reason politics should be avoided at work. People who would otherwise get along just fine become enemies because they are fighting the most despicable possible interpretation of the others position. It's nuts.
Yes and no. Politics has both procedural and substantive aspects. A company choosing not to participate in politics is taking a stand about the appropriate scope of political advocacy—where, when, and how politics should play a role in society.
Companies not choosing to participate in politics is not, as some urge, de facto support of the status quo. It’s quite possible that e.g. Twitter taking a stand on some issue actually sets things back, by creating a stronger opposition.
We're kind of collapsing "politics" down a little far, right? There's "not taking a stand on the capital gains rate", and then there's "not taking a stand on whether Black people are actual people". I understand the former more than the latter. There's a line to be drawn somewhere, right? At some point on the line where you draw it, your company is IG Farben.
Politics isn’t binary. “Whether or not black people are actual people” isn’t really what’s on the table: How many black people rolled their eyes when companies released statements in support of Black Lives Matter but did nothing inside their companies to change the actual lives of black people.
Yes, since you cannot not participate in politics in reality. What you can do is not participate in active politics if you are happy with the status quo.
What is far more popular is hiding your politics behind some more lofty words (like the linked article by the Coinbase CEO trying to hide his personal politics that "economic freedom" is the most important thing behind 'this is not politics' and 'this is our company mission').
There are reasons for not bringing politics into workplace other than "I support status quo". Such as wanting to get some work done, or being tired of endlessly debating the same things over and over again. (Or not wanting to get fired if it turns out that your opinion is somehow different from the majority, even if it does not support the status quo. There are more than two possible opinions.)
By similar logic, if you are not arguing about politics 24 hours a day, you spend the rest of your time defending status quo. Would you agree that this is a fair description of the moments you don't spend talking politics?
Is it, though? Because I see tremendous amount of virtue signalling in today's corporations, including Bay Area ones. How many social media woke campaigns? How many TV ads?
What's truly radical (and beneficial) today is what Coinbase is doing. And yes, Coinbase CEO is enacting a political approach (leave politics for your spare time), so employees are not compelled to do it by mob mentality.
I strongly disagree with this statement. A corporation (despite our current legal definition in the US) is not a person, and therefore shouldn't take sides in political matters, nor should it's representatives make overt political statements as though the company is a monolith. Companies are made up of people, and as individuals on their personal time and without conveying themselves as representatives of the company, should be able to to engage in politics.
If Silicon Valley executives are now going to be the arbiters of all that is good, we are in for a load of trouble. At best it's cringeworthy, at worst it's a load of limousine liberals wagging their fingers at the rest of us from their ivory towers.
"not participating in politics" is impossible, like another person in the thread stated[0], so simply not taking a side is taking a side, such as when deciding if your employees must wear a mask during work or if they can choose not to.
Sounds like "beatings will continue until the moral improves," but that's how it was at least for Europe. It needed to go multiple rounds of very brutal collective self-punishment for popular politics to kind of start minimally working.
Stopping doing politics, means to leave the status quo as is, and give the at the time "leading brand" of political though no contest.
History tells us, giving up on politics usually means to leave one group of political extremists uncontested by all others.
The danger in all this is that today's popular moral action is tomorrow's reprehensible mistake.
Ask John Cleese. Or Harvey Weinstein. Or any one of a thousand people who became drunk on the nectar of pop approval, only to find they didn't go far enough, or chose a decision that didn't align with the way things turned out.
I don't care what your politics are, nobody is going to take a position on controversial issues and be 100 percent correct. You're going to alienate a lot of people today, and significantly alient some more later.
Harvey Weinstein's alleged reprehensible mistake was allegedly sexually assaulting people. I don't think you're saying that was at one time a popular moral action, so I'm not sure what you mean about Weinstein learning that one day's popular moral action is the next's reprehensible mistake. Is there some position on controversial issues he took that I'm not thinking of, that at one point was popular but no longer is? Or what do you mean about Weinstein making a mistake by taking a controversial political stand?
I didn't articulate well on that one. (Also, the thought was half-baked.)
John Cleese was honestly a good man with good intentions, quite progressive a short while back. But time progressed in a way a little different than his ideas, and today he's sometimes blasted by those to the left of him.
Weinstein was a different kind of change story. He was running in circles that purported (at least publicly) to be 'pro women', even providing strong backing for a female US politician. Of course his private actions were 100% out of alignment with the spin being thrown to the viewing audience, something that caused collateral damage to some others in his one-time sphere.
Sorry for the mishandling of that response on my part. I have no excuse, not my best contributions to HN conversation.
I'm sorry, I'm genuinely confused here. Harvey Weinstein is a convicted rapist that has been sentenced to 23 years in prison. As far as I understand it, that's not a political talking point on account of it being a quickly-verifiable fact. Is the distinction between "alleged" and "convicted" a political one?
Again, not trying to start an argument or troll, but how would someone talk about this topic in a way that's "apolitical"?
oh i honestly wasn't paying attention and forgot he had been convicted already. I should not have said "alleged". But yes, I share your confusion. I don't understand how Weinstein is an example of someone who "learned that one days' popular moral action is the next's reprehensible mistake" and thus should "avoid politics". What was his "popular moral action" that became considered as a "reprehensible mistake"? I'm confused too, thus my question. Including Weinstein as an example here is extremely strange and rather disturbing.
Technically, I agree, but there is a sizable range of opinions where reasonable folks can agree to disagree, and produce good work. The set of people holding opinions in that range is larger than some of the commenters in this thread seem to believe.
That's another issue, my point is that this isn't new. Business have always had political postures and actions, the only different thing is that the illusion of Silicon Valley being "neutral" isn't working anymore.
I think that range ebbs and flows over time, to be honest. I'm not American, but it seems like there was less polarization in the US the 1950s than there was in the early 1900s, for example.
I don't think it's unfair to not assume some "happy median" will always be there or a certain size, especially as circumstances change over time.
Disclaimer: I'm the owner of a small start up based in Asia, some things may not apply to the US.
My startup mentor has always told me that to observe the trend and play to the crowd. In the age of social media, it is extremely risky to go against the accepted narrative in different parts of the world.
For example, many large entertainment firms display pro LGBT messages in the States. However, they choose to selectively remove those messages in Asia.
It's been established that knowing your audience, their political leanings, so that you can shape your narratives correctly is key. Publicly supporting an incorrect political agenda can often lead to damage to the brand's reputation.
Having an attitude like Coinbase is the way to go, in my opinion. That is to say, disinterest in politics while allowing employees to do whatever they want in their own time.
As for politics entering aspects of the company, such as right vs left wing healthcare plans, wearing or not wearing masks, etc, the decision should be towards the most scientific approach that helps the most number of employees.
For less scientific things, such as BLM or allowing/disallowing guns, where it's not related to any clear scientific purpose but to people's opinions, there should be no stance that the company should take, but it can encourage employees to support causes in their own time.
Yeah I know they've been politicized but people not believing in science is not my problem. If they don't want to wear masks that is their problem. If I ran a company I wouldn't care that masks for example are politicized, I'd just mandate that all employees wear them.
My guess is that even your below average computer scientist will have a reasonable respect for science. So, assuming that we’re talking about tech companies here, I think this is decent approach to policy.
All precious entities, realized that power will be used.
Politics is essentially the superior level of effective communication. For firms to exist and make their point of view heard they will engage in politics.
"Politics is essentially the superior level of effective communication. "
You mean, communicating, what other people are allowed to do and what not?
Politics is first about power (so the big companys were always involved in it). Not about communicating.
Effective communicating is surely important to power plays. But you can communicate all you want, if your opponent has the guns and firepower and you don't.
Politics is not just electing people. Politics includes advocating for issues, viewpoints.
Net Neutrality is politics.
Right to Repair is politics.
Broadband Initiatives are politics.
Internet Censorship is politics.
Section 230 immunity is politics.
APIs being copyrightable or not is politics.
Antitrust is politics.
At a more basic level, there are certain values that must be preserved for a company to have a fair chance for success. Neither fascism nor state run communism is a good environment for a startup.
So yes, companies can and should heed politics. They need not even donate to or endorse or promote people, they can endorse policies or come out against people who are against the policies they support.
People that want to keep politics out of the workplace ignore how a startup workplace is the intersection of politics and markets, of governance and growth.
Companies should take the long view, and advocate for what's best for themselves, but also their country and the world.
If the thing happens to be heavily politicized, how can a diverse organization possibly agree that it's the right thing? That's the Coinbase idea, as I understand it. If we can't all agree it's the right thing, it's just divisive for the organization to try to push it on employees.
It's impossible to agree on one thing if your group is large enough. Even on trivial things.
If Coinbase thinks it's the right thing to do: let them. If they are wrong, history will show. Why should outsiders judge that company? They aren't doing illegal things and it's their choice to make.
Startups who engage in CSR and virtue signaling are extremely cringeworthy. As an investor, I don't want my investments directing resources to BLM and other charities. Companies should focus on what they were meant to focus on: their product. Let non-profits focus on the other stuff. CSR is a misappropriation of funds.
I’d feel much more strongly about companies having policies asking people to stay out of politics if this meant money could go nowhere near politics.
If we allow
the money from those who control that money to be used as cudgels to sway politics, how can anyone imply with a straight face that the lowly employees can never speak about politics?
> Dick Costolo, a former chief executive of Twitter, tweeted that “me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business” would be shot in “the revolution.” He deleted the post after, he said, it set off violent threats and harassment
> One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left today pushes its ideology ever deeper into the private realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.
> Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game. “We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”
Ah yes, the opposite of "totalitarian" is "no questioning how society works at any level other than the political parties".
Makes sense, the totalitarians are always lax about having rules about what you can talk about. It was so much better when there was just "how things are done" and talk that was "unamerican", so much less political.
I'm not sure that justifying certain areas of debate or complaint being off limits to normies because "things get done" is an anti-totalitarian stance...
And by cancelled you mean people who previously couldn't/didn't critcize you now criticize you?
Like they start questioning your place in society after they questioned your beliefs/values and you re-affirmed them?
Sounds terrible, sounds like the dominant narrative is going to change during a time of economic uncertainty, massive structural failures and the exposure of that same dominant narrative to actual investigation and critique.
Can't have dominant narratives getting disrupted. Scary.
For every Dick Costolo there are 100 execs of small midwestern firms that hire exclusively from the protestant church/christian private school network. Even after Bostock people are still explicitly fired for being gay [1], and before Bostock it was extremely common. To say nothing of huge employers arguing
You literally can't get a job at many firms around Springfield, MO without attending the right (right-wing evangelical) church. And don't expect promotions into upper management if you're not part of the right small group at the right church. This is particularly true in accounting/finance, but it's also a problem in some of the region's tech shops.
Ironically, "politics seeping into the workplace is a left-wing problem" sounds totally insane to anyone who has spent significant time outside of the coastal/metro bubble. It's a huge problem on both sides of the political spectrum.
This comment was voted pretty far down, and I don't know, maybe it's a little incendiary? But the idea that hiring in mid-sized midwestern business is heavily conservative-political was news to me, and it's an interesting point.
I love the going-over-the-peak-of-a-rollercoaster feeling of these essays on the topic of whether and how America is tilting toward fascism. They start by discussing disinformation, authoritarianism, the perverse prioritization of loyalty above all else, marching in lockstep, and then... are they going to say that the problem is the guys marching in the street with swastikas saying “we are Nazis?” Or are the real Nazis the ones promoting “transgressive sexuality”?
We have had guys marching in the streets proclaiming to be nazis for decades. They’re scary, but they’re a known quantity. The ACLU has long represented nazis and protected their rights to have those marches, and things have been fine. Liberal democracy works. This other stuff is new.
The guys calling themselves Nazis haven't usually been having their marches in honour of the POTUS whilst the POTUS openly states his court appointees should set aside liberal democracy's verdict on his first term, or plotting to assassinate a state governor he's clashed with.
I'm not convinced that's actual totalitarianism either, but it takes an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance to argue that flourishing of alternative sexualities is the real alarming new development towards totalitarianism...
> I'm not convinced that's actual totalitarianism either, but it takes an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance to argue that flourishing of alternative sexualities is the real alarming new development towards totalitarianism...
It probably isn't your argument, but the author devotes enormous amounts of effort to arguing that 'transgressive sexuality' was a precondition to the Russian Revolution (meanwhile, when the actual authoritarians took charge, they wasted no time setting boundaries for relationships based on their concept of the state's needs) and doubles down on it with passages that start off with 'social justice warriors play a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks' and end it with corporate America no longer frowning on homosexuality. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the actual Bolsheviks had a somewhat different approach to bourgeouis institutions than convincing them that people of alternative sexualities were employees and customers they might wish to retain...
It's not insight from Arendt, it's a religious conservative arguing his laundry list of dislikes, from acceptance of homosexuality to -checks notes- mayors not crushing protests must be totalitarian because -spurious parallel-. Totalitarianism isn't bottom up social consensus, and it definitely isn't the mere absence of social consensus around one's own moral values.
That is not the argument the author is making at all. The portion of the article you’re referring to begins:
> Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality.
The author isn’t criticizing non-discrimination—which can be justified by reference to traditional “liberal principles.” He’s criticizing things like Mozilla’s firing of Brendan Eich for his political donations, or declaring judges unfit because they are members of Catholic organizations that reject abortion. Those efforts go beyond non-discrimination to trying to stamp out traditional beliefs in ways that are often at odds with liberalism.
As I said, your own views may not match the author's. One doesn't subtitle a passage 'the desire to transgress and destroy' and cite the 'sexual adventurism, celebration of perversion and all manner of sensuality' in great detail as an illustration of its relevance to the Russian Revolution to argue that Brendan Eich ought not to have felt the need to resign. If he was making a freedom of conscience argument rather than a decadence leads to totalitarianism argument he'd hardly be suggesting that it was lamentable that labourers were sufficiently far from village gossips and 'the church binding their conscience with guilt' to find comfort in sex.
If you are a US company, or have a US user base, politics is non-optional. How do you deal with "hateful" user-generated content? Hate is now politics. How do you deal with employees expressing thier opinions at work? Basic fashion is now politics (masks). Which health care plan do you adopt? There are right and left-wing plans (birth control etc). The holidays are comming. Do your employees say "merry christmas" or "happy holidays"? Dont think you can avoid that one. Letting them pick is still taking sides. What is your policy on weapons? Can guns be sold/discussed on your platform? Then politics comes knocking on the door directly. To which parties or candidates will you donate? Will you create special rules for well-connected users? (Facebook). Will you turn off a politician's account when it violates your rules? (Twitter). Will you accept a political party as a customer? What if they insist you then turn away a different party?
Politics cannot be avoided. It is part of the US tech landscape. The only option is to plan and engage thoughtfully.
Is a whiteboard political? If I buy a whiteboard from Staples, and draw a confederate flag and some hate speech it does not get erased automatically. Have the whiteboard manufacturers made a political statement because their products do not censor hate speech?
I'm skeptical of this claim they everything is political. A forum they hosted any and all content will definitely host political speech, but those are the politics of the users not the site. Your kind of rhetoric seems like an attempt to say that hosting something is equivalent to an endorsement of it. This is not at all the case.
If content is posted onto a site that is obviously hateful, the site has the choice to keep it up or take it down. The outcome of that choice is a political act (to not act is to act). The severity of the hate speech might matter, but ultimately regardless of which path they take, they've taken a path.
In your whiteboard analogy, if you were giving an interview to a candidate and walked into a meeting room that had a swastika on a whiteboard and opted not to erase it, as a candidate I would assume that was an endorsement.
Not taking a side is taking the side of whoever is being most aggressive. "I don't want to get involved" is getting involved.
Not getting involved is not getting involved. You might take this as an indirect endorsement of content. But by that logic, a site with no moderation simultaneously liberal, conservative, and centrist because all are allowed. I guess you can say that it's political, but because it allows all content it's political nature is all-encompassing. Calling a completely apolitical stance political is sort of like calling Atheism a religion. It's arguably correct but it's really the absence of religion.
Also, I think your whiteboard with a swatstika analogy demonstrates the shortsightedness of this sort of "inaction is endorsement" line of thinking. What about a candidate who's family was personally affected by the Holocaust and is so mortified to see the swatstika that they are too uncomfortable to even do anything about it? What about a South Asian candidate for whom the symbol doesn't elicit a reaction because of it's prevalence in South Asian culture? Or what about a candidate who thinks, "the people at this company definitely aren't Nazis, clearly this was part of diagram or something."
> But by that logic, a site with no moderation simultaneously liberal, conservative, and centrist because all are allowed.
We aren't (and haven't been) talking about political ideals, but hate speech. A website that doesn't take action on hate speech is allowing and condoning hate speech.
> Calling a completely apolitical stance political is sort of like calling Atheism a religion. It's arguably correct but it's really the absence of religion.
We're not talking about apolitical stances like "I like chocolate." We're talking about hate speech, which is implicitly political.
> Also, I think your whiteboard with a swatstika analogy demonstrates the shortsightedness of this sort of "inaction is endorsement" line of thinking. What about a candidate who's family was personally affected by the Holocaust and is so mortified to see the swatstika that they are too uncomfortable to even do anything about it?
Isn't this just even more evidence to suggest that an employee not taking action is an action itself?
What-aboutism is great, but it doesn't really matter in this context, right? "What about a candidate who's blind" etc etc. I defined a hypothetical scenario to prove a point in response to the above hypothetical scenario.
Reducing the scope to content you categorize as "hate speech" doesn't change the problems with trying to claim that refusal to remove content condoning that content. Say group X posts content proclaiming superiority over group Y. And group Y also posts content proclaiming superiority over group X. Say website does not take action on either instance of hate speech. It would follow that the website is condoning two contradictory views.
The reality is that hosting content is not condoning it. An approach of "we're treating this like a whiteboard, we are not going to be involved in taking action against particular content" isn't an endorsement of anything. Whatever objectionable content someone might post, another person could post the complete opposite.
Not getting involved is exactly that: not getting involved. Ultimately, this claim that refusal to take action against hate speech is the same "inaction with respect to _____ is condoning ______" rhetoric that's been trotted out time and time again. At best, it's a misguided effort to inspire opposition to harmful views.
People don’t change their opinions on the internet, so I’m not going to change your mind. This just such an upset tingly misguided stance it’s hard to even brush it off. I’m unsure what the negative side effect of suggesting opposition to harmful views, but that’s on you I guess.
There are entire books discussing whether inaction is action, so that debate is clearly not getting solved here. I just ask, how do you think Facebook’s stance (the same as yours) is working out?
> People don’t change their opinions on the internet, so I’m not going to change your mind. This just such an upset tingly misguided stance it’s hard to even brush it off.
I would say the exact same thing regarding your misguided claim that refusal to censor content amounts to endorsement of it.
> I’m unsure what the negative side effect of suggesting opposition to harmful views, but that’s on you I guess.
Where did I write that there are negative side effects of removing content? All I wanted to dispel is the false claim that lack of censorship is a political stance.
> I just ask, how do you think Facebook’s stance (the same as yours) is working out?
>Is a whiteboard political? If I buy a whiteboard from Staples, and draw a confederate flag and some hate speech it does not get erased automatically. Have the whiteboard manufacturers made a political statement because their products do not censor hate speech?
Considering that in that case you are the "moderator and owner" of that white board, yes it would be a political action if you decide to remove or not the confederate flag. That's without getting into the fact that the whiteboard didn't come from the ether and it's production, sale and all processes that compose the two are, also in some manner, political.
I am a policy person by trade, I will say that there is a quote “you cannot separate politics from administration” this is a public sector term but I think it applies to any admin functions of a business. I also think politics (more accurate policy, regulatory, and administrative law) would play a huge role in making a white board due to compliance requirements. But maybe not in the way you say.
As non-american... I don't get offended when somebody mentions halloween or that green thing day. If people ask how was the celebration, I've no issues telling that I don't participate in said holidays and maybe introduce to my culture and what we do instead. I'd expect same response from me telling "merry christmas".
As for political donations - one of the best things in my country is that non-personal political donations are banned, period. And personal donations are capped. There're safeguard to prevent bums from suddenly getting lots of money and donating that too.
Banning commercial donations is a good idea, but difficult in reality. How do you handle commercial speech? What if a corporation wants to express its opinion using its own money? That is common in the US. Can a company come out for/against a new law, a proposed project, a pipeline?
Specifically donations to political parties and individual politicians are banned.
If a corporation wants to run a media campaign on social issues - that's fine. But if an ad features a politician, especially leading up to election, that'd be treated as illegal political ad.
The legal way to do is through legal lobyist. Companies can pay them and certified lobyists can talk to institutions/individuals/parties. But meetings are semi-public and the public is +/- aware of what is lobying what. Lobyists can't give gifts to politicians, otherwise they risk their license.
There's a workaround though. Politicians love to establish NGOs, then corporations donate to NGOs and politicians go on speaking tour in the name of NGO to cash out. But at least that limits use of corporate money for over-the-top election campaigns.
> If a corporation wants to run a media campaign on social issues
Well the problem is that "running media campaigns" is the vast majority of what political donations are spent on. All the other stuff (campaign salaries, etc) fits easily into any candidate's totally-aboveboard-donations revenue account.
Not saying I approve of the current system; just that this is not a problem with an easy fix.
But that campaign cannot feature a party or politician. It can just coincidentally support same cause as party X.
Of course it's not a 100% fix. But it's a step in a correct direction.
edit: thinking more, it may be complicated in US where X always means party A and Y always means party B. Here we've a bunch of overlapping parties and there're multiple parties (or factions) behind pretty much any issue from any angle.
> The only option is to plan and engage thoughtfully.
FWIW, I feel that that begins with getting real clear on one's deepest values and motives. I think what we're seeing in the USA is kind of like when a kid from a small town goes to the big city for the first time. US culture even after WWII has always been kind of insular and provincial. (As a kid, my world was divided into SF, the East Bay, and the rest of it.) Now with the Internet everybody is up in each other's faces (also driven by those clicks, gotta get those clicks) and we're a bit shocked, collectively.
It's a bit weird from the outside, as a non-american. When I was growing up there was a very narrow window of acceptable ideas in the US, anything else was "unamerican". "The two parties are basically the same" was a cliche when I was a kid.
The reaction to a relatively tiny number of new acceptable ideas in the discourse has been pretty surprising, even to someone who thought they already had a low opinion of American culture.
And yeah, sure, the ad-generated enragement feeds don't help. But it is clearly mostly the small town kid getting exposed to more ideas thing, no question.
Heck, when I was growing up, just being a nerd was enough to catch flak. I was once literally called a "poindexter" by a shirtless yokel while travelling by train though the Midwest!
Granted, there's always been an undercurrent of counter-culture in America. The Puritans had their witches. But by the 50's at least it was all buttoned up tight, and then exploded in the 60's and 70's, recoiled in the 80's, then everybody took a decade off in the 90's, and somehow in the 00's and 10's we all lost our fwcking minds.
The thing about mainstream American culture is that it pretty much had been under the thumb of mass media and religion. That's why the whole "fake news" attack is so devastating: our news has been fake. I read Noam Chomsky at an impressionable age and I recall the realization that we (in the USA) were living in what I called a "media blackout". Anything "they" didn't want you to know was simply omitted. It worked so much better than the Russian system.
haha ... yeah, that's kinda "the thing" you don't mention to Americans because they get mad. It's incredibly apparent from just outside the bubble (or half-in it like in Canada).
Every country with a heavily controlled media, with a people indoctrinated with a nationalistic fairy tale is having the same problems with the internet breaking down the old singular media narrative. The heavier the controls were, the larger the societal shock now.
It's ... touchy. We have all learned in the last couple years how to empathize with our American friends who just learned about Tucson or the MOVE bombing or something we learned in school that they just learned about from a superhero show or an apology. It's fine to blame it on your schools, it is definitely a bad move to mention the actual cause.
most of this only applies to social media companies. there are business models, even in tech, that simply don't revolve around user-generated content. but yeah, if you host mass UGC and have moderation, you can't really escape the political implications.
> How do you deal with employees expressing their opinions at work?
have a policy that work comms are only for discussion of work-related topics. keeping politics outside the permanent record is probably beneficial for everyone, and people are usually less nasty in person anyway. you'll probably end up with only a handful of employees who routinely start arguments over non work-related topics. after a couple warnings, it's time to "separate" them from the company.
> There are right and left-wing plans (birth control etc).
this is currently not an issue for the company. per ACA, employers are required to cover birth control in their health plans.
> The holidays are comming. Do your employees say "merry christmas" or "happy holidays"?
I really don't believe many people care about this. I work with people of every major faith, and it has literally never been an issue. if you want to be extra neutral, you can get rid of company holidays and just give everyone a little extra PTO. this way the company doesn't have to play the delicate game of deciding which faith's holidays to recognize.
tl;dr: I don't think any of this stuff is terribly hard to sidestep. many tech companies choose not to; I suspect they feel they benefit from playing the game.
There are exceptions to the ACA mandate. Small/closely held corporations (most startups) can opt out if they have religeous objections. Last time i looked there was no price difference between such plans. So if you are a small business, by not opting out you are taking a side. The system abhores indecision and so will make them for you.
A lot of b2b firms deal with political issues - Axon, Microsoft, hosting companies, etc. many of them are in the position where they will be approached to do a function for a government entity at some point and their decision, if not compelled, will have political ramifications.
Then all political camps will be against you, as you violate each of their norms in turn.
Once at least one major (political) group calls views held by tens of millions of people hate speech, there is no way to avoid being in someone's black book. This is why many companies are aligning with one party - they can't have both, and it's better than none.
People shouldn’t care if trying to do the right thing makes you end up in someones black book. There will always be people who are on the wrong side of things. Just do what you think is best for our society.
But "the right thing" differs from person to person. A 10 person company [say, running a local grocery store] comprised entirely of conservatives will think it's right to allow customers to decide if they want to wear a mask, while the same company comprised entirely of liberals will think that it's right to make customers wear masks and otherwise refuse servicing them. Who decides which company is doing the right thing? You?
Then you'll have to withstand at least one party: twitter mobs, editorials, maybe employee protests or resignations. Both you personally, and your company. It's not surprising that many companies give in. They want to make a product and make money, not to make a political or moral stand.
That's also fine, Coinbase is doing that, and giving generous severence packages to leaving employees as well. There will always be detractors but most people won't really care.
Conveniently not mentioned in the article, though it saw fit to point out that "About 60 Coinbase employees, or 5 percent of the work force, have resigned,"
I’ve never gotten this quote. On the face of it it seems like a high priority that the law should not respect the station of a person. If a society has made something illegal it needs to apply from the least to the greatest, or the law is unjust.
I think what I would take from it is that it all though the laws are the same, they do not effect each person in the same way.
How likely is it for the rich to sleep I under a bridge, beg or steal bread? Those are crimes to punish those too poor to be able to afford anything else.
Or to put it another way, it’s a crime to be poor.
Isn't that just to say that murder is a crime both for the pacifist and the psycopath? If society deems something to be illegal it is illegal for both those who would never do it and those who could gain from doing it. That is fundamental for all laws.
It's one of those quotes you shouldn't think about too much, because it really makes no sense. It's meant to make people feel. Because feelings are easier to manipulate than thoughts.
I strongly disagree. It has a clear point, one you can understand quite clearly with your mind.
Laws against doing things that only desperate poor people do may appear equal, since they in theory apply just as much to the rich. But in practice they only affect the poor. And the way they affect the poor is to close off options, and thereby increase the desperation.
Sure, you should feel that. You should also understand it with your mind.
Any sort of bettering that is not globally experienced equally sustains inequity. To go to an absurd place the improvements I made to my garden this year sustain inequity since I now have and enjoy them and others do not, but they would if I had donated the same amount of time to a community garden. That alone should not be a compelling reason to act.
Not every entity (person / business) needs to have an opinion on every political topic. Nor do you need to tell people what your position is when the screaming hordes demand it.
I would find politics at work feasible if there weren't people who turned political opinions into issues of safety.
"You voted for Trump? Or, you voted for Prop 123XYZ? I don't feel safe working here anymore. You're putting at risk my existence and my validity as a human being."
How do we move past "I'm in real physical danger because you disagree on my party choice"? Are HR departments currently equipped to tell their employees that perhaps they're being hyperbolic and political disagreements aren't equal to threats of physical violence?
Like many others said here, we're making it more and more unacceptable for people who vote differently in private to work together, which of course leads to more polarization, tribalism, and the formation of echo chambers that self-radicalize.
It looks like a lot of americans companies think that if they focus on things that are not related to making money and adding value to their customers, it will somehow make them successful.
Atheism isn't a religion, but it is a position on religion.
An atheist may not believe in god, but all of them have a position on whether religion belongs in a science class, for instance.
You can opt out and say "I don't care if biology is taught using creationism or evolution", but opting out means you are ok with creationism being taught.
And if you're ok with that, fine (I mean, you're wrong, but you're entitled to an opinion). But you can't pretend you haven't taken a position on it.
Is it a joke? (I'm asking in earnest, I don't know who Rob Rhinehart is, is he a comedian? Is this satire?)
Edit: AH! It is a joke. The whole site is a wonderful parody, like "The Onion" but in the form of pitch perfect clueless privileged tech weanie.
- - - -
"Ideas for the Board of Coke"
> There is nothing better, than a Coke. It is the perfect product. It is so many things and all of them are wonderful. Coca-Cola is a beautiful, simple, quality, affordable, durable product that serves a real need, is available all over the world and appeals to pretty much every human alive, as well as many animals and single-celled organisms. It is liquid life.
I started to feel bad (for making fun of someone who might be having mental problems) but then I realized that being CEO of Soylent is consistent with my mental model of him as a brilliant performance artist/comedian.
(If he breaks character now he could be liable for some lawsuits, I imagine, so we may never know.)
No, the momentum of left-wing media covering Trump is going to swing to the other side with right-wing media covering Biden. It's a perpetual, cyclical attention grabber. It won't go away.
One of the great and durable things about America is that, for most people, it doesn’t. As someone who comes from a country where there are violent riots after every election, I have watched the last four years (starting with the 2016 protests and four years of “resistance”) with tremendous alarm.
Businesses were always involved in politics but you didn't really know the politics of your business or leaders as you do today. They did lobbying but it really wasn't something discussed openly and often-times had varied interests.
> “Anything less than a vote for Biden is a vote against democracy,” Mr. Barrett proclaimed.
To see a business say this nature of thing is really shocking. I have a hope that all of this behavior is a one-off to rid the world of Donald Trump, but I really doubt it. Judging by the respondents just on this thread, people aren't bothered by this.
> Businesses were always involved in politics but you didn't really know the politics of your business or leaders as you do today. They did lobbying but it really wasn't something discussed openly and often-times had varied interests.
> Dick Costolo, a former chief executive of Twitter, tweeted that “me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business” would be shot in “the revolution.” He deleted the post after, he said, it set off violent threats and harassment.
I reported this tweet to twitter. Twitter responded that it violated their policies and was removed.
I don't doubt that he was also subjected to threats-- after all, his own comments sets a tone where casual assault is, apparently, okay. It's not okay. It's not okay when he does it nor is it okay for people to do it in retaliation.
It’s hilarious that Dick Costello thinks that capitalists like him will be spared in “the revolution.” Costello is like the bourgeoisie in Russia that were sympathetic to Bolshevism and collaborated in their own executions.
This guy must be worth at least a million bucks. It's certainly weird to hear these ultra privileged people talking like they are far left wing revolutionaries or something... not realising they are the very establishment themselves. It's the purest example of "virtue signaling", because ultimately, it's all about clout.
I'd like these people to focus on privacy, open standards, ethical business practices in IT and so on instead of calling every business who isn't displaying a "BLM" banner on their websites "traitors"...
We went from "please join our righteous cause" to, "if don't ostensibly support our cause you're a f*cking bigot".
It's like the good ol' Bush II's "Either you are with us or you're with the terrorists".
I will never turn my company into a political cause.
I don't care what the cost is and my guess is that in February next year companies will realize that this is a bad move as their sworn enemy the big bad orange man is gone and all they can now do is turn on each other and they will finally start eating their own.
From the outside looking in, American politics has long since ceased being about policy and idea's, it is now a contest of identity where it doesn't matter what someone stands for so long as they are on the team I support.
In this kind of climate, for a business or other entity to involve themselves in politics would be consciously choosing to more or less blacklist themselves from doing business with the other side or run the risk of having their brand tarnished via social media for whatever stance they take.
Finally, a business that takes a political stance does damage not just to themselves but to their employees as in the current political climate, both sides have no problems harassing a person or worse if they are viewed as not "on their team". Once a company takes a political stance, it doesn't matter if what that employee believes or does nor does it matter that said employee might be working for this company because they have a family to feed and don't have the luxury of quitting and looking for a new job, the very fact that they work for said company means that they should be treated as persona-non-grata.
Make it simple, a company can't vote, so a company doesn't have a political affiliation (unless of course, it is some kind of lobbying company etc).