What a bummer that workers are publicly demanding this, and (presumably) seeking press attention on it.
I'm no fan of ICE – a very large percentage of my friends in the US are immigrants, and I generally want my country to be a welcoming one. ICE has certainly committed unethical and probably illegal acts (probably true of most federal agencies).
But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy. It'd attract extreme negative attention from the rest of the government, and great fear from all paying customers that an internet mob could separate them from their code at any time.
We should absolutely be lobbying hard for changes to immigration law, the restrictions placed on ICE, and justice for their wrongdoings.
But I can't see how this helps improve immigration, and it certainly seems likely to cause a lot of negative consequences for GitHub. The employees are putting their employer in a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" situation.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I love the vision of a world where executives don't take actions their workers will protest. I think that in order to get there, the protests need to be reasonable, and I think this one isn't.
EDIT DISCLAIMER: I own a small amount of MSFT stock, which was not on my mind as I wrote this. I use GitHub's free service and have no other relationship I can think of with MSFT or GitHub.
> But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy.
Um, think you've got this backwards. Private entities shouldn't have to take on anyone they don't want as customers (for whatever reason - do you have to justify who you do or don't want in your livingroom?), but publicly-funded institutions shouldn't be able to deny service on political grounds.
That is true – businesses are legally allowed to refuse service to anyone (apart from protected classes like race or political affiliation, but that probably does not apply here). It's an important right, and probably many businesses would be more profitable and happy if they exercised that right more often.
It's still politically dangerous, and would earn a company a lot of enemies and mistrust (as well as some allies, though they may be the type to just ask for more, as others on this post have mentioned).
> It's still politically dangerous, and would earn a company a lot of enemies and mistrust
Yes, doing the right thing often is dangerous and earns you hatred from other people doing bad things who love the freedom of hiding amongst a herd of other equally guilty people.
The reason we have so much respect for people who take stand and do what they believe is right is because doing so is so hard. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
If you're going to risk your business's livelihood to bravely take a stand, it should be in a situation where you can win. Where your bold action will be the turning point towards victory of righteousness. And where the magnitude of that victory is commensurate with the risk of your business's failure.
Denying the use of racially biased facial recognition software is a much clearer example where the risks are lower and the impact much, much greater.
It's much less clear that a source code repository is the fulcrum that enables 40 children to be jammed into a room without hygiene. Maybe if you worked for a critical supplier for ICE you could have an impact (which I would much encourage).
> If you're going to risk your business's livelihood to bravely take a stand, it should be in a situation where you can win.
I fundamentally disagree with this. Your argument is akin to stating that there should never be any casualties in a war. There is no way to effectively win a war without sometimes sending some troops into situations where you know they will die.
Compared to soldiers who knowingly lay down their lives in losing battles to help win the war, choosing a moral course of action that merely ends a company seems like a pretty cheap sacrifice.
I think a better way to look at it is that workers should be able to protest working on a machine they find morally wrong. The world might be a better place if people directing resources were required to stop and think "Are the workers going to willingly do this?" before making decisions.
What if developers find it morally wrong to automate away jobs? Do they get a say?
Is it within their moral rights for backhoe operators demand manual ditch digging too because that will benefit their friends who lost jobs to powered equipment?
In that case they probably should quit and join a different company. I mean, if they don't agree with the core function of their job, why are they working there?
Regardless, if enough people think it is wrong that the company goes out of business, so be it. I don't think that is likely, but ok. Automation is going to continue to happen no matter what.
To some extent, yes. The economy exists for the benefit of humanity and not the other way around.
The question is: does the automation help us build things that were impossible before, or does it exist for the sole purpose of cutting jobs and funneling more money to the executives?
That kills the whole purpose of automation. Automation is preferable because it is supposed to be cheaper while providing equal benefits as traditional production of goods and services.
My personal choice here would be a tax for practices that are provably automatable but not yet automated. The result is the same, we are funding a UBI but now businesses are also incentivized for innovation to escape from the tax. I'm probably missing hundreds of reasonable concerns with my simplistic view point though.
> That kills the whole purpose of automation. Automation is preferable because it is supposed to be cheaper while providing equal benefits as traditional production of goods and services.
That's the capitalist enrich-the-owners purpose. In my mind, the real purpose of automation is to relieve humans the need to do work so they can live lives of leisure and personal enrichment. Unfortunately, I don't expect us to get there within my lifetime, if ever at all.
Well, some companies seem to end up with weird incentives where it makes sense to be less productive. For example, a dev might create some script that eliminates some data processing roles. The CEO might decide to not implement it solely to save a few jobs. If there’s a tax for not automating then the organization will immediately respond in a more economically rational way.
In this case, the existence of a proof means that its application is universal. You may believe that the automation of one process could be easily generalized to another process, but you haven't proved it until you've automated the second process.
How exactly are you going to measure what is automation? Even something as basic as making a function rather than copy-pasting code is automation.Where do you draw the line? Who is going to measure this?
> Is it within their moral rights for backhoe operators demand manual ditch digging too because that will benefit their friends who lost jobs to powered equipment?
This seems like an unfruitful digression.
OP already agreed that the actions of ICE are immoral and that this action is within the moral rights of the workers.
The main question is about efficacy. That isn't elucidated by introducing a thought experiment where you believe the moral rights of developers are not as clear cut.
For most Americans and, I’d guess most citizens of most countries, enforcing immigration laws isn’t a big debate and enforcement is routine and companies don’t question enforcement by their government.
So the question is can employees who have diverging moralities have direct input on what a company considers moral and immoral outside the common take of the population at large?
> For most Americans and, I’d guess most citizens of most countries, enforcing immigration laws isn’t a big debate and enforcement is routine and companies don’t question enforcement by their government.
At least for Americans you are wrong on all three counts, and that may be where the confusion is coming.
The workers (and as I already stated, the OP) all agree that there are actions done by ICE that are not only unethical but morally reprehensible. One of the (only) two major parties officially agrees as do a large portion of their constituents.
So your question about views "outside the common take" is interesting but not relevant to this discussion.
Should they? Well, one hardly can force someone to work for one's self nowadays.
Companies aren't democracies. Why should "the population at large"'s opinion matter in anyway? Most people don't even know Github exists, let alone what it's for.
This just seems like a weird, ineffective way to put pressure on ICE to stop detaining people excessively, inhumanely, or lethally.
It might very well be, and it's worth debating how much giving business support to an organization whose policies you (possibly vehemently) disagree with is a kind of implicit support of those policies. But, it's also worth asking: if protest by workers to put pressure on their employees to stop giving business support to organizations whose policies they vehemently disagree with is "disappointing," what kind of protest isn't?
It seems to me that when we're talking about corporations, who you do and don't sign contracts with -- who you buy from, who you sell to, and what charities you support -- is far and away the strongest signal you can send. If you're sending a signal of support to Black Lives Matter protests, it's nice if you send out a few tweets and update your home page, but it's better if you donate money, services, and/or employee time. And the group you donate those things to is going to send a signal: donating to Colin Kaepernick's "Know Your Rights Camp" is in some sense a more specific, stronger message than donating to the ACLU.
So it certainly seems reasonable that asking the corporations you work for (and perhaps work with) to put their money where their PR is in terms of who they do business with also sends a message. No, it's probably not in and of itself going to put much pressure on ICE, but it is a statement of values.
Yes exactly! There are lots of more effective ways to take action (and changing your twitter pic likely isn't a big one). Donating to BLM causes, employee time, lobbying, etc, as you have mentioned.
Personally I think $500k is a bit small, and if I were Nat Friedman in this situation, maybe I would have announced a few extra paid leave days for employees engaging in protest, strikes, visiting elected officials to lobby for change, etc.
Nat Friedman's quote on this particular request from employees is "Picking and choosing customers is not the approach that we take to these types of questions when it comes to influencing government policy."
> Anger and outrage are valuable, and it's important that we channel them in the right directions.
It's important to channel them in all directions that could have impact. You never know for sure which 'direction' matters to the group you are trying to impart change on.
Even if there is no direct impact (such as another supplier stepping in) an individual choosing to avoid directly, supporting an organization they cannot morally abide has personal moral value. Probably not in a utilitarian sense, but that isn't the only basis for moral action in humans - see the trolly-problem for the canonical example.
> I think ICE needs reforms, but I don't believe a pressure should be put on them to impose changes
I'm in one of those weird moods where I want to see if I can argue something that sounds weird at first. If that's not your thing just ignore this post.
Putting pressure on ICE isn't going to change anything. Institutions cannot be trusted to reform themselves. In fact, it's going to be worse than doing nothing. The people involved will feel like they have "done their part" and will do fewer useful things in the future than they would have otherwise, mostly because they wasted their time on this thing.
Pressure has to be put on congress to reform ICE. Anything that distracts from that, or makes people feel a sense of accomplishment without furthering that goal is worse than useless.
ICE doesn't make the law. Yes, there have been actions worthy of investigation. But blaming ICE for doing its job? Is it's ICE's fault there are 12 million undocumented immigrants? That was no accident.
How would businesses be more profitable if they exercised the right to refuse service more? You also realize the people who exercise this right the most do it for reasons you likely don't agree with.
Simple: some customers are more expensive to serve than others.
Maybe they use a lot of a free service you provide that costs you money. Maybe they require too much customer support. Maybe they return most of the products they buy from you. I've looked at a few datasets where profitability by customer varied pretty widely, including many that were clearly in the red. Most companies just don't break out their costs by customer enough to see it.
Spot on. I’ve worked for companies that have “fired” customers for being more trouble than they’re worth. Generally, it was because of unreasonable support or product demands (e.g. “we need this boutique feature added now,” filing countless tickets for outstanding issues we were working on and had communicated as much to them, etc).
If more companies were forced to pause and consider whether taking on certain customers would cause their workers to revolt, we’d all be better off.
I am strongly against a private business being able to refuse service to a person/organization on political grounds, even when the "victim" may seem to be performing evil actions, as long as it is not breaking any laws. One should not discriminate on the basis of race, political orientation, gender, origin or religion. Refusing service is clearly a form of discrimination. When you aim that towards your own Government, it may look like a heroic action to your supporters, but to those who are not, you're performing discrimination on the grounds of political affiliation against an organization that is following, as it is obliged to, the law of the Land. If you think the ICE is doing terrible things, you should lob the Government to take action and bring them to justice, but given the Government is, as I understand it, actually mandating such terrible things, you're aiming your fury at the wrong place. You should be protesting against the Government who is mandating these terrible things.
Imagine for a moment that things change completely, and the ICE starts refusing to follow the orders of the Government - but now the Government is leaning towards the far-left, and wants the ICE to open borders to all. The ICE would no doubt have a lot of supporters, but disobeying the Government in such case would ALSO be wrong because in a democracy, the Government represents the people - by not following the orders of the Government, you're basically advancing anarchy. In both cases, the correct attitude is to fight for a Government change. It's not democratic for a Government organization to take its own stance on a topic despite the Government's policies.
ICE is not a person. ICE does not have a "race, political orientation, gender, origin or religion." It is a social construct and a very recent one at that.
Denying service to ICE the organization isn't even remotely comparable to denying service to actual human beings.
“Creed” [0] is a protected class and it will be interesting to see a legal determination if this is discrimination based on the creed of the organization. Namely, carrying out its congressional mandate.
I think that social constructs could be discriminated against based on race, religion, sex, etc if it was discriminated against because its members were part of a protected class.
Religion isn't a person either. That's a social construct. And I keep reading people claiming gender is a social construct too, so I guess discriminating against people on those grounds is fine then.
Denying service to ICE the organization isn't even remotely comparable to denying service to actual human beings.
Is ICE staffed entirely by robots? How is it not denying service to actual human beings?
A government agency cannot be a victim of discrimination, at least not in any way that matters. It is not a person, and does not have rights.
A government agency refusing to follow its orders is in no way parallel or analogous to a private company refusing to serve a particular customer. In the first case it's an illegal act, where the result will be the firing/jailing of the offenders (with the removal of their access that enables them to disobey), while in the second case it's just a normal, legal, expected outcome of business sometimes.
> the correct attitude is to fight for a Government change
Private entities refusing to do business with certain parts of the government is an aspect of fighting for government change. GitHub refusing to do business with ICE is a collective way for GH's employees and executives to lobby the government for change.
This is not an absolute truth, and many countries would disagree with your interpretation of discrimination.
For instance in France regarding B2B sales:
"Constitue également une discrimination toute distinction opérée entre les personnes morales sur le fondement de l'origine, du sexe, de la situation de famille, de la grossesse, de l'apparence physique, de la particulière vulnérabilité résultant de la situation économique, apparente ou connue de son auteur, du patronyme, du lieu de résidence, de l'état de santé, de la perte d'autonomie, du handicap, des caractéristiques génétiques, des mœurs, de l'orientation sexuelle, de l'identité de genre, de l'âge, des opinions politiques, des activités syndicales, de la capacité à s'exprimer dans une langue autre que le français, de l'appartenance ou de la non-appartenance, vraie ou supposée, à une ethnie, une Nation, une prétendue race ou une religion déterminée des membres ou de certains membres de ces personnes morales."
This clearly states that you cannot refuse to sell a product or to a company on political grounds, just like you can't refuse to sell to a Jewish association because they are Jewish, or to a Italian company because you don't trust Italians.
>One should not discriminate on the basis of race, political orientation, gender, origin or religion. Refusing service is clearly a form of discrimination
It looks like you're trying to imply that discriminating based on political orientation is as bad as as discriminating based on race, gender, origin or religion, but that's wrong. At least when it comes to the law, political orientation isn't a protected class. Race, gender, origin or religion are.
When it comes to US law, under the qualification of "most states", then political orientation is not protected. Some states however do protect it in some circumstances just like any other discrimination. Discrimination laws in the US is a mix between federal and state law.
In the EU under human rights, discriminating based on political orientation is just as bad as discriminating based on race, gender, origin or religion. Religion and political beliefs are equivalent under the rule of law.
The UN also recognize discriminating based on political orientation under their human right declaration: "Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status"
I think that there is a good midway solution to this.
For example in many countries you need to "register" political advertising[1]. One could say that it is perfectly reasonable not to help political opponents, but then it would be reasonable to declare your business as politically oriented.
Similarly to how even private universities in the US must uphold free-speech rights is they declare free-speech friendly.
This is not a complete solution, but it does not need to be all or nothing.
[1] in the Uk there was some conversation about Ryanair's showing pro-stay slogan on a plane behind a press conference during the Brexit campaing
You're correct regarding the law, but I wouldn't be so quick to claim it's not as bad. Suppose a business refused to serve union activists? Environmentalists? Feminists? Suppose many large businesses did so?
I also think discrimination based on political grounds is a bad idea. In NZ political opinion is protected. Human Rights Act 1993, 21 Prohibited grounds of discrimination (1)(j) "political opinion, which includes the lack of a particular political opinion or any political opinion" [An exception is made for employment of a political nature, see section 31]
I think that's a better situation than the U.S. model which essentially foments society-dividing political warfare by cancelling people from different political viewpoints. It just serves to divide your country even further.
If you disagree, answer me this: Are you okay with the fact that a racist employer can fire you for not being racist enough? Are you okay with the fact that a Christian employer can fire you for supporting LGBT rights.. (they cannot fire you for being gay, but they can fire you for supporing gays)? Are you okay with the fact that an employer can fire you for supporing BLM? If political opinion is not protected, you'd better hope your employer has the same political opinions that you do... or else you'd better stay very quiet (chilling effect).
Discrimination against an arm of the government itself (ICE) seems to me to be an advanced stage symptom of a systemic societal sickness. I have no idea how it will resolve, but I wish you all the best. Hang in there.
This goes way too far in limiting freedom IMO. It makes sense to not let people discriminate on things that are immutable (like skin color), but it's crazy to not let discrimination happen on things that are a choice.
Just like I can decide not to let people not wearing shoes or shirts into my business, why shouldn't I be able to deny entry to a neo-Nazi? What if I'm losing black customers because I have racists regularly visiting my store?
Religion is a protected class, so the question is moot under US law.
In any case, I confess I'm always a little suspicious of this method of argument. Bob says, "I will ban neo-Nazis from my forum," and people chime in with, "Well, what about banning Catholics? Vegetarians? People who admit to liking Nickelback?". Is the principle really that if we find one single case where Bob would admit "I don't think banning that group makes any sense," then Bob needs to just give up and let neo-Nazis on his forum? Personally, I don't think that's a very good principle. An argument about where we (and Bob) should draw the line is reasonable, but I'm not convinced an argument about whether lines are intrinsically evil is.
I was directly addressing the notion that "It makes sense to not let people discriminate on things that are immutable (like skin color), but it's crazy to not let discrimination happen on things that are a choice." Religion is not an immutable characteristic. It's not a slippery slope argument, but rather a direct counterexample of the principle given.
Not drawing a line is a simple solution to the problem of where to draw the line.
Catholicism is an organization that as one of its main tenets is homophobic. How is that better (or is it worse) than being an Confederate flag-waver or a neo-Nazi or a Black racial separatist or ? I'm sure the answer is obvious to you, but only because of your personal idiosyncratic preferences.
Evil is not an objective spectrum. It's a subjective high dimensional manifold.
I find this form of argument extremely exhausting as well.
I don't think many people would argue that we need a forum where people can advocate for pedophilia and child porn. We've clearly decided that sort of thing is bad. But saying we're going to ban child porn is not the same thing as saying we're going to ban vegetarians.
Certainly reasonable people can disagree on what types ideas deserve platforms. I imagine some (misguided but well-intentioned) people might think that providing neo-Nazis a platform to advocate for their position is a good and fair thing to do, even if they disagree with the neo-Nazi message. But it doesn't mean that people who don't think that's ok are somehow anti-free-speech fascist dictators who want to have control over every kind of speech.
I also get exhausted when people trot out the slippery-slope argument at every opportunity in order to shut down discussion. Not everything has to be a slippery slope! People are actually capable of making decisions in a nuanced, fine-grained way!
And why not? If you say you are very religious and pray to your god before you push your branches I would look at you very weird, I am sorry... Maybe I am a bad person but...
And more over, everyone can register a religion these days, look at Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption... So if someone wakes up one morning and starts a religion out of a joke I should be forced not to discriminate against him?
But replace John Oliver with Jewish religion and now this argument sounds different.
But that is the problem with context... I don't like blanket laws making me do things.
You've gotten downvoted for some reason, but I think you're right. The religious people I know could no more choose not to believe than I can choose to believe. Religious belief or non-belief comes as a response to life's experiences, heavily influenced by the level of indoctrination inflicted by parents when we're young.
When I was 11 or 12, I realized I didn't believe in god (I didn't know the term "atheist" at the time). My parents were Catholic, and I was forced to attend CCD weekly during the school year (the Catholic version of "Sunday School") in addition to weekly Mass. I tried so hard to believe in a god because I didn't want to disappoint or anger my parents, and I wanted to fit in with my peer group. I was trying to make a choice to believe, but that's just not a choice you can make. You either believe, or you don't.
In hindsight I'm glad I failed to choose to believe, but at the time I agonized over my non-belief daily, thinking there was something wrong with me.
By that same logic corporations should be forced to do business with parts of the government doing things completely in contrition to their mission right? A peace advocacy group would be expected to allow contracts with the military or a right wing think tank would have to sell its services to the Peace Corp?
>I am strongly against a private business being able to refuse service to a person/organization on political grounds, even when the "victim" may seem to be performing evil actions, as long as it is not breaking any laws
If a government was committing acts of genocide, do you believe private enterprise should be compelled to be complicit in these acts?
If a government is committing genocide private enterprise would be coerced into cooperation. The government would have gone rogue.
Besides, GitHub probably does offer services to the Chinese government bodies and it will be no surprise to anyone if it turns out they are committing acts of genocide against the Uyghurs. They are probably hosting code related to research and commercialisation of the facial recognition programs that various governments will be implementing.
To draw the line at Ice but not withdraw services from the Chinese mainland showcases the level of myopic politicisation that is being lobbied for here. They are a platform, they should act like one.
GP didn't say they should be required to work with certain entities, only that it could jeopardize their stance with other, less controversial, entities.
> could jeopardize their stance with other, less controversial, entities
That would, of course, be a terrible and illegal abuse of power and essentially be the government policing political speech by private individuals. What an indictment of our government (and I don't mean a single person, but of the system itself) that this seems to be an uncontroversial statement. Because I agree, it's true, and it's the mark of terrible corruption.
I’m not sure it needs to even be as nefarious as that. If I’m in charge of deciding what technology to use for another, less controversial, arm of the government and I see that one of the companies I’m considering has decided to stop doing business with another I might feel less confident in deciding whether or not to use them. What if they decide they don’t want to do business with me at some point in the future?
That might be overly naive and I agree that there’s great potential for corruption here as well.
Or not even an arm of the government. The same reasoning would be applied by other companies buying services. Vendors with a reputation for stopping service to clients because of bad news coverage are a risker bet.
Explain all the businesses built on YouTube, then. YT is "free" to most consumers (paid for by ads), but there are literally people who make their livings as YouTube personalities.
No, read it again. According to me, many people are unwilling to build a life on sand, it weighs negatively in their choices. The fact that some are observed to take the gamble proves nothing. (And the fact that some of those got nasty surprises of being de-monetized proves that they should have been concerned.)
OP wasn't specific, but I interpreted it as government threatening action against the company -- such as the IRS opening an investigation of their taxes.
But let's take your example, since you aren't the only one who interpreted it that way. That would be covered by the scope of the government contract being awarded during the normal bidding and contract process. The contract would stipulate the terms by which one party could pull out of the deal. What would be illegal would be for political influence to discourage the awarding of that contract.
Why would that be an abuse of power? The company has demonstrated that they are an unreliable government partner.
It's wholly different to not accept a contract in the first place, but to unilaterally end it for any reason, political or otherwise, is grounds to consider that service provider unreliable.
The contract was brought to an end - but did the company prove they were an unreliable partner or did the government? These calls to end government association aren't coming from no where - these government acts don't have majority support and it's gotten to the point where individuals are feeling the need to take on personal risk to ensure that the government is actually aligned with the citizenry.
> but did the company prove they were an unreliable partner or did the government?
The company.
You can support the employees without needing to twist reality. There is no question that ending service on non service related grounds makes a company unpredictability unreliable.
The likelihood of a potential vendor to actually be able to supply what they say they will has long been a consideration for government agencies. The novel thing here is that "political winds may change" is not normally considered a good reason to have that doubt for a US based company.
Source code is a company’s Crown Jewels. Who can take the risk that their business will be shut down because an employee tweeted something 8 years ago that is now out of favour? At least Git by it’s very nature protects you but you would still have your issue tracker and CICD pipeline held to ransom.
Well, I don't know. Freedom of speech is also a principle. Public accommodation and non-discrimination are also principled. We don't need laws to see these as a public good. We shouldn't parse these ideas into orthogonal pretzels just because wokeness.
> We don't need laws to see [freedom of speech] as a public good.
I think it's very easy to refute this statement by looking at any country where freedom of speech isn't guaranteed by law. The most populous country in the world is a glaring example.
I'm not sure what the argument is, then? Either we need or don't need laws in place to ensure freedom of speech (clearly we do). If that's not what we're talking about, what is a law "recognizing free speech as a public good"? That... isn't a thing?
In societies that have full respect for private property, I should be able to refuse to do business with you for any reason, including the color of your shoes, the kind of music you listen to, or your marital preferences. Whether it is wise or rationally self-interested to do so is a different question.
Nope - in free societies you should be able to refuse service on any grounds, including those things. Otherwise you're permitting the government to forcibly compel you to allocate your time and resources to ends they define.
In free societies, governments should only be able to forcibly compel people not to do things (murder, threaten, steal, etc.) - see the concept of "negative rights."
In a your version of a free society, what happens when everyone refuses you EVERY single service because random-reason? They sure as heck aren't murdering, stealing, nor threatening you. They're just refusing to sell you anything because of random-reason, forever. Those services include sales of any food, water, shelter.
Taking it further, what if a majority of businesses gradually decide to be racist and refuse all services just because they can? Not serving minorities wouldn't really impact their bottom line all that much. The minorities would literally die off.
It's easy to talk about "rights" as if they exist in a vacuum i.e. my rights are mine and they do not affect anyone else, ergo my rights should be absolute. They are not, and should not.
Reality is usually a tenuous balance of rights (usually tilted towards the majority) that people participating in civil society share.
> what happens when everyone refuses you EVERY single service
If I'll ever find my self in a situation like this - I'll pack my things and run. I'm not going to be happy in a place like this even if government will force those people to tolerate me.
> if a majority of businesses gradually decide to be racist and refuse all services just because they can
That means anyone entrepreneurial enough will have access to an underserved niche market.
Unfortunately, packing your things and running is basically impossible for most people anywhere close to that situation because borders are enforced and countries will find any excuse possible to avoid granting refugee status. The "you could've slept in a forest, never interacted with anyone, and foraged for plants for survival" kind of excuse that LGBT folks fleeing from countries where they're likely to get murdered get.
An underserved niche market of people who have significantly less money because they can't find work - and your company won't hire them because your other customers who actually have money will boycott you - isn't worth much.
I think your parent comment is neither here nor there on actually leaving, but rather just using hyperbole to demonstrate that this isn't a problem easily fixed with laws.
A food establishment forced to serve you might serve you food that's gone bad, a mechanic might not fully tighten the nuts on your brake pads, or any other variety of horrible things that people could do to harm you while leaving room for plausible deniability.
At least if they can legally deny service to you, you know that the ones serving you aren't a risk to your wellbeing. And to that end, I think it's a bit unfair to suggest that less money means there would be no businesses to serve that group of people. If every restaurant is discriminating, the singular restuarant that serves the less wealthy group would have plenty of business, simply due to the lack of competition.
The "pro-regulation" argument is valid with regard to a less commoditized market though, which is interesting. For example, I wouldn't want the only company that makes a life-saving drug to be able to legally discrimate who they sell it to.
It's a challenging problem and I certainly see both sides. My gut goes to regulations affecting large businesses but not smaller ones. It feels like there are probably some difficult edge-cases within there though.
> At least if they can legally deny service to you, you know that the ones serving you aren't a risk to your wellbeing.
Assuming that refusal-of-service is a sort of relief valve is wildly optimistic.
Overt but relatively passive forms of racism effectively give pervasive comfort and encouragement to those who would engage in more active acts. Indirectly, this is also why "dog whistle" speech is so dangerous.
Per your example, in an environment where simply refusing service to you was common and widespread, you might find that someone who does agree to serve you is doing so just for the opportunity to spit in your food (at best).
> If every restaurant is discriminating, the singular restuarant that serves the less wealthy group would have plenty of business, simply due to the lack of competition.
Depends on how spread out the population is - black folk, maybe (but I don't have a simulation on me to work it out for sure and in what situations that theory might collapse), the subset of trans folk who're still working out how to blend in and not be seen as such in a rural area, not so much.
There's entire countries where some products are just not available commercially due to the lower income meaning nobody wants to put in the effort to work out how to provide them cost-effectively.
> running is basically impossible for most people anywhere close to that situation
AFAIK there is no strict control on US state borders, citizens are allowed to move freely. In many cases running away is as easy as purchasing Greyhound bus ticket. It's great that you deeply care about prosecution of LGBT people in places like Middle East, but it's not really relevant to a discussion of anti discrimination laws in US.
> isn't worth much
You don't have to be big to be successful. This scenario means that you have very low barrier to enter this market and will have to spend close to nothing on advertising. But what's more important - this scenario is unrealistic. If you live in a country where it's possible to pass anti-discrimination laws - you don't need those laws, since majority of your country already finds discrimination unacceptable.
US states share significant amounts of culture, including attitudes towards minority groups, and moving between them doesn't make as much difference as you'd expect if they did not.
The majority of a country finding discrimination unacceptable isn't necessary to pass anti-discrimination laws - just that most people don't care whether someone gets discriminated against or not. If you don't care (or need the job to survive yourself), you'll do whatever your boss tells you to do, and you're hardly going to boycott a store for discriminating against someone else, which means a subset of the population has disproportionate impact.
> I'm not going to be happy in a place like this even if government will force those people to tolerate me.
This is an important point that those in disagreement with these kind of arguments often under-emphasize or ignore entirely. When a government makes it illegal to behave in a racist way, the racists don't go away, and they might even be amplified within those communities in a similar way to the Streisand effect.
If everyone in a community is racist, you can't simply make it illegal to be racist to fix the problem. They have to make that decision on their own - anything else is fundamentally authoritarianism, which doesn't have a great history of long-term success.
In this fictional scenario every single community member has become a racist but the government legislative and enforcement bodies are immune from this trend?
Making something illegal may feel good, but if 100% of the population (by the terms of your scenario) are against it, legislation is hardly going to move the needle.
I would actually suspect that in this kind of society -- the state isn't there to enforce discrimination, but it's also not there to redress it -- there would still be civil rights movements, and protests would probably be pretty vigorous. Businesses that discriminate would find themselves, their customers, and their suppliers put under a great deal of pressure. Sit-ins. Blockades. Rallies painting them, specifically, as villains.
As an aside, the relative absence of that kind of movement in libertarian thought experiments has always bemused me; I think there's a somewhat utopian "everything gets better when you take the state out of the equation" notion at play. Everything doesn't automatically get worse, but it doesn't automatically get better, either. If the society still has discrimination, prejudice, and unequal justice, it's still going to face pressures to reform; most of us would rather see where we live be made "better" in our understanding of the term than be forced to move somewhere else to find that "better," even assuming we have the resources to make such a move.
I mean this in the nicest possible way; have you ever faced discrimination based on the colour of your skin, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities or anything else which is protected by law in most civilised countries?
If, like a significant portion of the HN audience, you are straight, white, middle class and male it's probably easier for you to dismiss the right to fair treatment than it might be for individuals in those categories.
I have. And you know what, civil rights laws did jack all to protect me. I'm much happier knowing that the people that operate that business were racist jerks (instead of, say, them being forced to serve me and spit in my food, which would be a health concern), and I have dissuaded probably on the order of a hundred people from going to that place, and that was in the era before social media.
> I have. And you know what, civil rights laws did jack all to protect me.
I'm not you, and I can't imagine what your situation is, but I'll bet whatever precious little civil rights laws that are enforced wherever you are has probably has helped you more than you know.
Some people thought pandemic response teams are a waste of money, until a pandemic happened, then they realized perhaps there wasn't a pandemic previously because that team was doing their job.
In the mid 80s, My parents took me to a diner, specifically BOB AND EDITH's on columbia pike, in Arlington VA. During the 80s, Asian Americans were very rare in the Washington DC area, and moreover, there was a trade war going on between the US and Japan. It was fashionable at the time for short fiction to feature dystopian US futures where the active currency was the Yen. We arrived at the diner, and sat at the diner for three hours before leaving without having been served. I'm not sure that I would have preferred being served and had my food spat in, which I know happened, because friends in high school told me stories of that kind of stuff happening in the food services industry.
What else do you want to know? Do you want to know that while working for the federal government, my Father was basically ignored and had zero work friends except for the only Jewish coworker, and so I grew up in the DC area observing Jewish holidays and attending Bar and Bat Mitvahs?
Do you want to know that I was rejected for admission to MIT, despite having gotten AP CS and Calculus scores of 5 in the 9th grade, and placing at the International Science Fair, though someone else at my school (a friend, btw) got lower grades than I did and did get admission to MIT [0]? Do you want to know that my father pressured me to ask a family acquaintance (who happened to be the chair of the House Science and Technology Committee, I carpooled with his kid to elementary school) but I told him not to (and thus don't owe anything to the author of the PATRIOT act?)
Do you want to know that my father was passed over from promotion "no leadership potential" within that same government unit (the Veterans Administration) despite, in his part-time job with the US Navy, he rose to the rank of captain (O6) and in his last stint was in charge of a group of programmers (despite not being one himself) who implemented the US Navy's first fully-digitized inventory database, ahead of schedule and underbudget?
Do you want to know that while working for the VA, he identified that asian american veterans in hawaii, some of whom were medal of honor recipients, disproportionately did not seek the benefits they were entitled to and initiated outreach to them (via his personal desk) make sure they got the care they were entitled to, then was slammed for being racist, despite the fact that his personal outreach also helped black, white, and latino veterans in Hawaii? Is it also ironic that this was brought down by Democrat appointees and he found redress and correction of the situation by a Republican appointee?
Do you want to know that my father identified elder neglect and a dangerous health situation (black mold) at a veterans facility (long before the very public scandals at Walter Reed, btw), and instead of having the issue dealt with he was rubber-roomed into a windowless room in the same veteran's facility, exiled across the campus from the main office where decisions were being made?
Honestly for all of the secondary effects that systemic racism had on my dad, and indirectly, on the stress it put on our relationship, I at least got some solace when a (white, not that it matters) marine corps colonel that I'd never met before got up at his funeral and gave a fire and brimstone speech about how my dad was a victim of low grade corruption and racism in the federal bureaucracy and in was ultimately a hero in the American spirit, in his military job and more importantly in his activism in his civilian job as a bureaucrat.
Look, the primary issue of racism that Asian Americans have to deal with is not the same as the racism that African Americans have to deal with, which is that to get what we want we have to work twice as hard. That's not in the same league as worrying about not coming home because of an asshole cop. But we do face similar situations in the "not being served" at private establishments. And having to work twice as hard, or, for African Americans, "having to code switch", or for both our classes, being taken seriously in leadership roles, is not something any legislation is going to correct.
And forgive me for having low trust that this is a problem that government can solve, since quite literally government can't get its own shit straight.
[0] there's a good chance thinking "oh there weren't any extracurriculars, this guy just looked like every other Asian American candidate" but also I performed on stage with the Washington Shakespeare company and directed/produced a full-length play.
Imagine if in addition to all you also couldn't even live in the place you do, because until recently it was legal to write on a deed of property that said an Asian-American couldn't own that property or live there.
The fact that racism exists doesn't mean that civil rights protections are useless to you.
You've listed an impressive set of adversities associated with being Asian American, some of which I can also relate to as an Asian American, but then the motivation behind your posts becomes clear with:
> Look, the primary issue of racism that Asian Americans have to deal with is not the same as the racism that African Americans have to deal with
and then making the following wholly unsubstantiated statement:
> which is that to get what we want we have to work twice as hard
How do you know how hard an African American has to work to get the the same place as you? How do you know how hard it is to work against the type of racism that is so much greater than that faced by Asian Americans, that it is in your own words "not in the same league".
I'm not saying you've had it easy by any stretch, but your attempt to blur the lines between the experiences of Asian and African Americans in an attempt to cast aspersion on efforts to provide protection under the law for African Americans' human rights - which is what Black Lives Matter is advocating - seems to show that you value "freedom from legislation" more than you value their human rights.
I'm saying we have to work twice as hard as white people, not African Americans.
You're missing my point. I'm saying that I don't trust government to make "black lives matter". There might be a chance that government can self intervene and stem the bloody police abuse against African Americans (I'm also not terribly optimistic about this since cops are abusive to plenty of non African American citizens, too, e.g. Kelly Thomas, albeit at much lower relative rates). In general, if we want black lives to matter, we have to do the hard work in communities and among individuals, and, separately IMO, asymptotically with racial admixing to make the whole thing pointless, not paper it over with legislative interventionism, though at least in the realms where government tries to regulates itself I'm not opposed to giving it the old college try, as they say.
Look what I'm saying is scary right? I'm saying there is no easy "just make racism illegal" solution to racism. Well so let's get to work on it.
> I'm saying we have to work twice as hard as white people, not African Americans.
The point still stands. How do you know you have to work twice as hard as white people? Which white people? Wealthy who got admitted to elite Private universities on legacy? How about working class white people with non college educated parents?
This question does not deny it all that there is workplace discrimination against Asian Americans, and that depending on educational institution, admission may have a higher bar, but your use of blanket hyperbole doesn't help advance a critical discussion of whether or why that should be the case.
> Look what I'm saying is scary right? I'm saying there is no easy "just make racism illegal" solution to racism.
That's a straw man. Nobody is suggesting "making racism illegal", because it is impossible for legislation to achieve. Racism itself is a cultural issue.
What people are suggesting is removing legal protections that allow law enforcement to disproportionately violate the human rights of African Americans. That is very possible. That is exactly how you get started on tackling the problem of racial injustice in policing.
I think if you read what I wrote carefully and with a clear mind, you will see that I very much support efforts by the government to self regulate and reduce violence against African Americans, even if I'm pessimistic that it will work in the case of police violence. Indeed, I've been following the subject for over a decade now and have also put my money where my mouth is on this subject.
It's government regulating private citizen's racism that I abjectly disagree with because I think there will be very bad unintended consequences for a strategy that will not work.
So summarizing, a waiter was terrible 30+ years ago, and your dad ran into tons of politics in the VA, and you didn't get into the school you think you should have in your otherwise extremely privileged upper middle class life that had you interacting with high level government officials as a child, so protected classes were a mistake?
I have had the same experience (although it was not race-based discrimination). Theoretically there were laws to protect me, but, practically, asserting my rights under those laws would have been too costly and time consuming to be worth it.
My claim is it didn't. You don't think black people were discriminated against in private locations well past the 1960s? What absolutely worked in the 1960s, was the banning of government REQUIRING segregation in private entities by law (which by the way, many companies absolutely chafed at, because quite frankly segregating your business is a cost-sinking pain in the ass to arrange and enforce). Nobody is disputing that CRA I and CRA II were much needed reforms.
If that were the case, then de facto segregation wouldn't be increasing even to this day. Without the government enforcing segregation, people started separating themselves physically. Schools for instance are more segregated than they were in 1975.
Segregation wasn't a case of the government pushing these ideas on to unwilling populace.
This could actually be because of forced busing of whites to black schools.
Many parents want to send their kid to the best school and were willing to move to avoid their kids going to worse schools.
White parents were more likely to be able to afford to move which resulted in them leaving. Minorities tended to be poorer and could not leave and stayed in the areas with the worse schools. Kids who go to worse schools are less likely to get out of poverty so they stayed in the same poor areas and had kids in the same area repeating the cycle.
Since schools are typically given money based on property tax it meant that the schools in poor areas tended to receive less funding. There are also issues with teachers getting lower pay if they were in a poorer school. I think these issues are fixed in some states but there are still issues related to this in various states.
I don't agree with discrimination, and would never seek to engage in that myself.
With that being said, in the private sector, there really is no "right to fair treatment" with exceptions for anything required by law for affirmative action. By forcing fairness (where a business must provide service to someone it doesn't want to), you are simultaneously removing the freedom of association [0].
[0] While not explicitly stated in the US constitution is argued to be a fundamental human right.
>Nope - in free societies you should be able to refuse service on any grounds, including those things.
You know, in free societies, there is society. That is very different from "wild reign of every impulse going through the head of an individual", which of course would be impossible anyway as an individual is itself permanently full of conflicting impulses.
Not to do things and do things is only a matter of wording. Forbidding to kill people is equivalent with compelling to do something: people are compelled to repress their possible will to kill other people. Accepting to follow an interdiction is doing something. Only something that doesn't exist won't act in any way or an other.
> In free societies, governments should only be able to forcibly compel people not to do things
Well, how about "don't discriminate"?
I am not saying it is the perfect solution, but if you want to refuse a service you can always terminate your commercial venture. I do not necessarily see this a clear cut case of positive/negative right.
Similarly to how the state can compel you to get a driving license to drive. You can just give up on driving.
HOw do you reconcile not forcing someone to do something with depriving another of life & liberty? The entire reason for protected classes is to prevent the majority from harming the minority.
>> forcibly compel you to allocate your time and resources to ends they define.
...as has been SOP in even the most permissive of societies throughout history. I'm all for classical liberal ideals influencing the world, but these extreme libertarian rules and values have never existed outside the minds of their most zealous believers and you don't have to get too far into the details to see their contradictions.
You are completely right. In a free society you should have the liberty to do business with whomever you want (no matter how politically in-correct your reasoning is).
The great thing about this, is that someone else will realize there is now an under-served market, and create a business to fulfill that need.
> is that someone else will realize there is now an under-served market, and create a business to fulfill that need.
That is a childishly simplistic understanding of how free markets work. There is no way a retail business would be established to service the needs of 2% of the population who are wheelchair users for example, when they could easily make their stores considerably more efficient by making the aisles a little narrower.
> There is no way a retail business would be established to service the needs of 2% of the population
Slow down there, you're going to need more evidence than that to claim that an underserved segment of the population isn't an attractive commercial target.
I agree that wheelchair users might be comparatively expensive customers, but if that 2% stat is correct they would be profitable to someone. A business with 2% of the market as a captive audience is going to be profitable.
Based loosely on 1.2 million wheelchair users in the UK for a population of 50 million it's in the right ballpark.
Honestly, I think the claim that the free market would solve this is so outlandish that the burden of proof is on those who believe it.
Maybe, just maybe, in a dense population centre like London their needs would be met by a few specialist 'accessable' stores. But what about some rural town of a few thousand people?
In the global pandemic recently, I spent a week not leaving my apartment even once. I had no trouble getting goods and services because everything was delivered to my door.
It isn't that outlandish that the market will sort it all out. I doubt anyone is going to be unhappy if business get a bit of a prod to remind them that wheelchairs exist, but the idea a free market would ignore 2% of their potential customers is just not true. Greedy capitalists have incentives to be thorough; 2% of the market changing hands is enough to get the attention of any CEO.
Most businesses would notice 2% of their customers disappearing, let alone 2% of the broader market.
Your argument from first-principles makes sense, but I just don't think a lot of us are comfortable living in a world where disabled people have to pay twice as much (or whatever the additional cost would be) for groceries. The fact that there's no movement to repeal the ADA would suggest most people feel that way.
Honestly, the alternative is just absurd. In this version of reality do employment protections still exist for disabled people or do they all magically earn there living in multilevel marketing from the comfort of their living rooms in their bespoke built homes (because most homes aren't build with accessibility in mind because the free market will fix that...).
Disability protection law uses the idea of "reasonable accomodation", which mediates between the tensions in this issue.
So disabled people don't get an automatic job, say. But an employer can't just decide not interview someone because "it's inconvenient to interview you due to your disability".
Another: It's not acceptable to say "sorry we can't interview you if you can't climb stairs, because there is a staircase between our interview room and the downstairs offices", because there is a reasonable accomodation possible, namely interviewing in a different room.
A shop is required to make reasonable accomodations, such as provide an entry ramp if that makes sense, and a wheelchair compatible toilet if that makes sense (i.e. it has other toilets).
That prevents shops from saying "we don't care about the 2% so we can't be bothered with a ramp even though the cost is negligable to us".
On the other hand, reasonable is relative. An organisation with no funds would not be required to do the same things as an organisation with plenty of funds. A club open to the public is expected to do more than a private gathering of people where nobody in the group has particular needs. And accomodation doesn't always have to be pre-emptive. For a public facility, anticipating needs of a broad spectrum people is expectecd, but for a small, private workplace it may suffice to react to the particular needs of individual people as needed.
(Note, disability is complicated because there are so many kinds, many of them invisible but cause much difficulty for the persons affected, and people without experience do not recognise the signs. I've used wheelchair here because everyone recognises that, but even with those, a lot of people seem to not understand that if a person can stand up and walk a bit, it doesn't mean they don't need a wheelchair.)
> I agree that wheelchair users might be comparatively expensive customers, but if that 2% stat is correct they would be profitable to someone. A business with 2% of the market as a captive audience is going to be profitable.
That is true, but it most likely leaves wheelchair users paying a premium on goods and services for the privilege of even being able to enter the establishment, and probably having a smaller selection of lower quality to choose from to boot.
That is what generally happens with captive markets, you know.
Whether it's the kind of discrimination the store is obliged to deal with is going to come down to principles of reasonable accomodation.
So, say you had an extremely boutique store up some rickety stairs, where the way it's used is you go up the stairs and meet the chef who will take your order for a wedding cake and you can collect the cake next week.
I would expect, in that case, if the chef is willing to meet you at your home or another place with a menu of options and discuss your order, and then have it delivered next week, that would meet the bar of reasonable accomodation for someone who couldn't use the rickety stairs.
On the other hand, a large grocery store, where browsing the goods is part of the experience and is also significant to product discovery, and maybe pricing and access to better fresh ingredients and different bargains, and where the only obstacle is that the store does not replace one door type with another that a wheelchair user can enter, and the store can reasonably afford the cost, that is clearly inadequate of the store; they have no good excuse and could reasonably accomodate by changing that door.
On another hand, the same large grocery store may find it difficult to accomodate people who cannot tolerate bright illumination (that other people need, to see clearly), and large numbers of people moving around them. In that case, it is not at all obvious that the store can do much to accomodate. I would expect that if the store also provides online ordering with delivery, that it has performed reasonable accomodation for that situation.
> where the only obstacle is that the store does not replace one door type with another that a wheelchair user can enter, and the store can reasonably afford the cost,
It wouldn't be the only obstacle. Let's take wheelchair-accessible parking spots for example. We have to convince the store that sacrificing regular-sized parking spots (and the ones closest to the store, at that) in order to make room for a smaller number of larger parking spots that are reserved for 2% of their customers (and not exactly the most profitable 2%, either) is a reasonable accommodation.
Bear in mind that some of those spots we're asking them to convert might already be reserved for the store manager, some senior employees, and the employee-of-the-month as perks, rather than for customers. You will have a lot of convincing to do, and should expect significant pushback from the local chamber of commerce.
I don't think it's fair. But I also believe that people should run their businesses how they see fit, and that freedom of association is a human right.
I bet most businesses would make their stores accessible (within reason) since you need room in isles for carts, etc.
> The great thing about this, is that someone else will realize there is now an under-served market, and create a business to fulfill that need.
Except that every other business can now refuse to serve that business services, because that business serves people nobody else likes.
Given even time and systematic discrimination, that business owner and everyone they serve will be driven to destitution and cease to be a meaningful market segment. They, along with the people they serve can't afford to buy anything anyways.
Should society should just let them die because of the magic of capitalism and (???) rights?
If this type of situation happens, I think these would be symptoms of a much larger issue.
I think there will always be places that exist that help everyone. First in mind are churches, who often will help people even if the people they help have differing views.
Unless, say, they're trans, in which case plenty of those will turn them away.
At some point you will run down all these dead-end alleyways and you will realize that the perfect spheroid does not exist. For your moral sake I'd hope it's sooner than later.
If public property (streets, society built around cars, tax incentives) is being used to provide access to your business, for the mutual aid of both your business and the public, then you should not be allowed to deny access to the public for anything other than a business reason.
That is completely true, indeed the purpose of the law ought to be not to compel respect, but to allow vulnerable individuals access to society.
The intended outcome is not that people that want to discriminate stop existing (well, long term also...) but that non-discriminatory interactions can be allowed to flourish.
Sexuality is getting closer and closer to being a fully-protected class, so they are going to have to suck it up, just like the bakers who didn't want to serve black people decades ago.
They can deny service to anyone, so long as it does not run afoul of discrimination laws. ICE is not a protected class.
I think this comment is reasonable if they're simply saying that it's plausibly true that not everyone who is gay is born gay - some choose to live their life that way, others are born that way.
I think this is a fair read on sexuality especially given the "spectrum" understanding of sexual preferences. If you're born 50% interested in men and 50% interested in women, you can very well choose to live your life (and identify) as a straight person or a gay person (or a bisexual person!).
That doesn't mean that others aren't born with a 0/100 ratio (one way or the other), though.
I vouched for this comment for a very specific reason:
Civil rights of for the LGBT should not predicated on "being born that way", they should be predicated on the fact that it is an acceptable and dignified way to be human.
Simple: anti-discrimination laws only apply if you're being discriminated on the basis of being in a protected class. being gay is a protected class. Being ICE isn't.
In some jurisdictions being gay is a protected class, in others it is not. Even the USSC ruling today doesn’t create a new protected class; it simply (and correctly) determines that discrimination based on gender nonconformity (whether sexual orientation, gender identity, or other) is discrimination based on sex, which is already a protected class.
Of course you can. One rule for me another for you because I think these two things are different is easily understood by two year olds. Lawyers are perfectly capable of coming up with justifications for anything they like and if the judges feel sympathetic the power of the state will enforce it.
> Private entities shouldn't have to take on anyone they don't want as customers (for whatever reason - do you have to justify who you do or don't want in your livingroom?)
Actually that one is illegal in many jurisdictions, e.g. when it's a store refusing service to gays and lesbians.
> (for whatever reason - do you have to justify who you do or don't want in your livingroom?)
In most casts that results in discriminatory civil suits. Imagine a restaurant, who has even greater leverage to test the for whatever reason mentality, asking a black family to leave without stating a reason. In most places in the US restaurants have the legal right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.
This is a wholly invalid comparison. Ethnicity is a protected class of citizen and is illegal to refuse service based on it.
Federal agencies are not protected classes of citizens. In fact it is quite literally illegal to force a company to do business with the government if it doesn't want to.
The reason is only lawful if you can prove that discrimination is not solely due to that protected class. In the case where a group can refuse service for any reason and is not required to provide that reason this is impossible to prove even if clearly obvious.
not exactly comparable, but business denial of service was the cause of action in masterpiece cakeshop, a colorado civil rights case that appealed up to scotus
conscientious objection is a different case where you can fulfill your legal obligations in a way that's compatible with your religious or moral obligations -- if we created legislation requiring businesses to serve government agencies, there might be an implied right moral objection where use of force is concerned
Isn't that what the status quo in the US is? AFAIK outside of discrimination in a few specific industries (e.g. insurance rates), there is very little discrimination protection for customers.
> What a bummer that workers are publicly demanding this, and (presumably) seeking press attention on it.
They have a problem with their employer, and are being heard in the court of public opinion. Why is that "a bummer"?
I don't have a particular opinion on whether or not what they are doing is an effective way to accomplish their aims. But workers speaking out for any reason, ranging from unethical wage suppression to insufficient toilet breaks to disagreement with company policy, should always be cause for rejoicing.
Employers in the US hold a wildly disparate amount of power (with health insurance being tied to employment, and no social safety net) – so employees that speak out tend to help tilt that balance a very tiny bit back to the side of the employee.
> They have a problem with their employer, and are being heard in the court of public opinion. Why is that "a bummer"?
The court of public opinion doesn't have a good track record, for one. It's decisions are often based on fashion more than any kind of ethical principles.
A classic exploration of this phenomenon is contained in the novel The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.
Really all you need to do is google "twitter mob".
The most common cases involve people who did something bad, but where the punishment meted out was totally disproportional to the crime itself.
Justine Sacco is the classic case, who made a bad joke and had her life turned upside down.
Then you have the cases where people are so full of emotion that they get basic facts wrong.
James Damore is a good example of this, who many media outlets falsely claimed had written in his infamous memo that women were inferior to men in terms of software engineering ability.
Just go on twitter or facebook and take a look at how issues are being discussed. Even here on hacker news it's sometimes difficult to have sense making discussions because people are in such a rush to judgement.
I'm guessing you got that impression by reading between the lines since he certainly did not say so literally. Since the memo is pretty short, could you go back over it and offer up a justification for that assertion? Is it possible that you rushed to judgement and heard what you wanted to hear?
As I said, "It's the classic groundwork for an argument of scientific sexism". Yes, it's reading between the lines, but the implication is there and clearly intended to be there. Not only is he implying it, he is implying it using the exact same arguments that have been used in neuro circles for years. There is an explicitly sexist context for these arguments that is not present in the memo but which nobody making those arguments could have been completely unaware of.
> I'm guessing you got that impression by reading between the lines since he certainly did not say so literally.
It’s called a dog whistle. Damore knew exactly what he was saying, who it would appeal to, and how to attempt to cover himself when the whole thing blew up in his face.
Who was he dog whistling to? The secret google cabal of sexist software engineers? This strong claim borders on conspiracy. It flies in the face of the fact that the memo was not originally posted for the whole company to see, but in response to a request for feedback on bias training.
> The secret google cabal of sexist software engineers
Go back and read the comment threads here when the story broke. The population of sexist software engineers extends far beyond Google and isn’t a secret to anyone.
The memo called into question the diversity effort's efficiency and methods, because it pointed out that it seems that the effort had no rational grounding, therefore it was succeeding at best as an expensive PR (or Corporate Social Responsibility) stunt and worst it hurts Google.
Does this sound like a truthful and faithful assessment to you?
> Can you provide some examples supporting the claim that the "court of public opinion" doesn't have a good track record?
Does the regular outcome of popular votes in favour of shafting minorities, restricting human rights etc. rather than general fairness and dignity for all persons regardless of background count?
"Popular" votes often differ substantially from actual public opinion due to things like gerrymandering, the two-party system, absence of ranked-choice voting, voter suppression, and the the like.
Counterargument: stopping lynchings. Perhaps the problem is bigger than "what the public thinks at a given time" and that public opinion can be correct or incorrect given external circumstances?
Yeah, that's a good question. I think that's why this case upsets me. I want to live in a world where, as another commenter put it, executives will think twice before taking actions that they know their employees won't like. Because they should know that employees have power, and a voice, and must be listened to.
In this case, there's no way the executives can sanely take the requested action. It'd be terribly damaging to their business. (I may be wrong about this, but it's what I would think if I were an executive).
So now if I'm an executive, I have to roll my eyes at the protesting employees. They lose credibility. I'll know that next time I do something they ask for, they'll just ask me for something I can't do.
So not to go all Godwin, but take an extreme example...
Do you think a company in 1930s Germany should have ethically refused to provide software that was used in concentration camps? [In fact, there was a bit of "IT" then, used for such, but it was provided by IBM. But to make the analogy closer, let's imagine a hypothetically Germany company].
("Companies" don't do anything by themselves, so I guess the question is if the decision-makers in such a company should refuse to sell software to the German government for such purposes, and if the employees should try to pressure the decision-makers to).
If we agree that in that case the ethical choice is to refuse to supply the software, and that it would in fact be unethical to sell software for such a purpose...
Then we already agree that there is some case where a company should refuse to provide services for 'political' reasons, even to a government agency of the country it's located in.
So it's no longer a question of if a company should ever be "expected"to do this -- but if they should in this case, if this particular scenario is such an example. People can disagree on that, can think that obviously this is unlike the Nazi example, that this example does not rise to that level. I'm not trying to insist that this is definitely a "Nazi-like" example.
But once we agree there is at least one such case, it's not a categorical dispute about whether business decisions should be "politisized" ever -- it's a debate about the particular ethics of the specific situation we (or github) finds themselves in, if this example is one that requires us to ethically refuse cooperation or not. Very particularly. I think that is a fine debate to have. I think the debate about whether a company should ever do this sort of thing is not so much, because really we should all be able agree there are some lines that should not be crossed there, there are some cases where, yes, a company should be expected to refuse service to it's own government, once we examine the historical examples that are obviously beyond the lines.
For me, I think it’s completely inappropriate to equate ICE with 30s nazi germany state.
I think its appropriate to refuse to work with nazi germany, apartheid south africa, khmer rouge, etc. But I don’t think ICE is anywhere near those regimes.
If GitHub staff equate them, then I question the logic of any organization that makes those comparisons. Mainly because it they aren’t operating rationally then perhaps next is DEA, NRA, non-GPL contributors, etc.
I don’t see any good where companies try to work or not work with specific organizations based on very niche boycott campaigns.
Different people have different thresholds for “Abusive behaviour that is sufficient to break ties”. This is a subjective question of morals. You can’t say “If this organisation has X units of badness”.
You realize that not everyone in an organization would have agreed with not working with Nazi Germany either?
IBM literally sold them information retrieval technology they used to keep track of concentration camp inmates. So clearly the important decision-makers did not agree.
I guess it is like any other question of what an organization should do. Those with the power to make decisions will decide based on some combination of their own ethical standards or (more likely) what think they is "good for the business", where PR as well as employee morale are components of that. The employees without the power to decide directly can organize to try to convince those with the power to make decisions of the correct ethical choice, or of what's good for the business, or to try to change the calculus of what's good for the business by effecting PR and employee morale etc.
I mean, this is kind of just a description of how human organizations or collective decision-making works....
I personally think that what ICE is doing is absolutely immoral and unethical, putting people, including asylum seekers, into (yes I think it's appropriate language) concentration camps, without a trial or hearing or access to a lawyer, in unsafe conditions (covid makes this even more extreme), separating children from parents, etc. If we looked for an external arbiter of this, I think it also clearly violates international law and agreements on the rights of migrants and refugees, so that could be another argument, don't sell software to organizations that will use it to violate international law.
I personally wouldn't at this point call for github (or anyone) to avoid business with the federal governmetn entirely -- just to avoid your products being used for the programs that are violating international human rights. That is, avoid doing business with ICE, for sure. Maybe with DHS in general, or particular programs/units in DHS.
I can't make you agree. People disagree, this is part of human life. But if I were in github, I'd be working to convince other co-workers of this, and to convince decision-makers leaders of it, as those in the article are presumably doing (I still can't read the article because paywall, so I'm only guessing as I think most commenting are!) This is how humans in organizations work.
I think this is an important distinction that needs to be resolved in some legal means. many people have differing opinions on this, so having some systematic process is useful so we don’t end up wasting energy on a very loud minority.
This is a complex issue and it’s something that companies should be good at. In this case, having some systematic way of making this decision public is helpful to me in planning who to purchase services from. Some generic statement that the decision was “based on company values” (that can change at any time) makes it hard to predict future decisions.
This ambiguity over how products are run is a big part of how I struggle to predict what Google products will continue or be, arbitrarily to me, discontinued.
However pretending that a vocal minority trying to push an agenda isn't bypassing democratic decision making is ludicrous.
Of course decision making in companies is not democratic, but if as a partisan employee you're trying to impose your opinion instead of trying to implement some kind of democratic process to consult other employees anonymously then you are no different than any authoritarian movement.
I'm having trouble understanding your perspective on what's "anti-democratic".
As you note, neither github nor hardly any company has any kind of "democratic decision-making" at all. It's just not how companies work in America. So I don't understand hwo you can be "bypassing" something that doesn't exist.
When the executive and other decision makers at a company make decisions with no democratic decision making whatsoever, do you think that is "no different than any authoritarian movement"? Personally, I think saying it's "no different" is a bit much, it's a differnet in a bunch of ways -- but I think it's not great, I think we should work to put democratic decision-making in all companies. Do you agree?
In the meantime though, we don't have that. So what are people who want to have impact on the decision-making supposed to do? Even when there is democratic decision-making, it's considered normal to try to convince your fellow-decision makers of things. I don't understand where you are drawing the line between allowable ways to effect decision-making and "like an authoritarian movement". I mean, nobody's threatening anyone with violence, are they? What means of persuasion or pressure are according to you allowed, and what means are not?
It doesn't help that I don't think either of us has actually read the article, because it's behind a paywall? So I actually have no idea what methods or persuasion or pressure they are using. Do you know more than me? If so, feel free to tell me (ideally with a link to another article so I can get it from the source), and explain why you think those methods have crossed the line into "authoritarian"?
Since I don't know specificcally what they are doing, I can't really defend it specifically. Like, if they were beating people up who didn't agree with them, I'd definitely agree that's something authoritarian movements do! (I still don't think I'd agree it's "no different", there are always differences, that's a kind of lazy thing to say, "no different"). But I don't see any reason to think or assume they are doing that? Do you have more information than me? I'm confused why you are assuming they are using unethical methods, or even what you think those methods they are using are. Are you saying just that going to the press makes it "no different than any authoritarian movement", but if you just talked about it quietly inside the company that would be okay? That would seem an odd distinction to me.
I agree with you but what I'm trying to explain is that complaining about a topic instead of trying to implement a democratic system to do so is the same as ignoring other people's opinion because they weren't loud enough.
If they want their opinion to be taken seriously, they should setup democratic vote among employees to collect votes anonymously about the issue at hand.
Proceeding otherwise is simply trying to convince colleagues but also removes the possibility for other employees to have their voices heard anonymously.
That's just not how it works in the real world. Saying the only valid option for exerting pressure on your employer is "setting up a democratic vote" is basically saying you should give up on exerting pressure on your employer.
Fortunately, in fact, plenty of organized people have been taken seriously, and have effected change, through other means.
By possibly bypassing the majority's opinion.
Also called authoritarianism.
Putting pressure in a non-democratic way is silencing people's opinion and similar to censorship.
GP isn't literally equating ICE with Nazis. But it's pretty realistic to expect (extrapolating from current trends) that if left unchecked, ICE will get more and more abusive, eventually matching Nazi level.
That is an interesting assumption. Given how few Nazis there are and how plentiful the non-Nazis orgs are that do something the level of ICE, I don’t think there’s an “entropy drift” towards becoming Nazis.
Or perhaps the checks are very common and don’t usually result in public letters and whatnot.
ICE hasn’t even been accelerating in their harm to people. If anything they’ve plateaued or declined. I’m not sure how to best measure fascism in ICE, but long term internment, death, and mistreatment is probably a start. The death rate has dropped, despite many more detentions [0]. I tried to figure out some metric around number detained, but I think that may also be influenced by number of crossings and not straightforward to risk of becoming Nazi Germany.
How do you think we can better measure this risk within ICE?
I definitely think this line of reasoning pays off well, and is isn't really an "extreme example". The point is to establish the "sometimes it's the right thing to do", to unequivocally prove that the discussion should be re-framed.
I've posited the same argument around violence. Most people, in my experience, wouldn't fault a Jew for violently resisting the Nazis. In fact, many resistance groups are held in very high regard. So immediately the questions necessarily moves from "is violence sometimes allowed?" to "when is violence allowed?". Which, if nothing else, is very much a more interesting discussion to have.
It doesn't seem like a very interesting argument to have on HN, though. People don't get that when "protesting" doesn't work (also "advocating", and "voting”), what's left is essentially "rioting." This is in spite of the fact that people here love the 4 boxes of democracy: the soap box, ballot box, jury box, and ammo box. I've got news for you: if you're reaching for the ammo box, you're "rioting."
I think you are misunderstanding my argument.
My argument is you (and github employees) should feel free to raise that about the Chinese Government vis a vis the Uyghurs too.
If we agree that there are any circumstances where a company is ethically required to refuse selling it's software to a national government, then we can look at the particulars of any specific instance and decide if we think that's such a case, but we don't need to argue about whether it's appropraite to "to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity," becuase we've all agreed that there are at least some circumstances where it is.
What is in fact inappropriate is to argue that a company should never be expected to deny service to a government, no matter what they do.
Yeah, thanks, you make good points here and I agree. Companies should certainly refuse service to government entities in certain cases on ethical grounds.
I think there's a moral component and a practical component. The latter becomes very difficult when taking a stand against a government entity in your home jurisdiction, since the offending government may put you out of business or something.
For example, in Nazi Germany (which I agree is a useful example to reference), a company that refused service to the Nazis would have had its executives murdered and been taken over by the state within a day. (My guess based on my recent read of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but I may be off).
On the other hand, refusing service to North Korea (sanctions aside) is a clearly ethically correct thing and offers little practical risk for companies based in the West.
The (ilegitimate) China government should under no account be permitted to buy anything high tech from the US so long as they are the oppressive regime that they are.
However that is a dicussion that is, at most, tangential to this one.
> But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy.
It really isn't. Private institutions are under no obligation to collaborate with public agencies unless explicitly required by the Defense Production Act[0]. Please remember that the government is meant to serve us, not the other way around.
I don't think OP meant it's lunacy because of any legal obligations private companies have to a federal organization, but rather due to the message it would send to current and future customers.
I think that message could be extremely productive, if refusing a government contract means not assisting questionable or immoral or even unsupported actions by _any_ agency.
True - I'm not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with it. It will send a good message to some people and a bad one to others.
To other government agencies, they may see github as a liability and end up leaving github altogether - I think that's the 'lunacy' part from a business perspective.
Corporations know there's always a chance that they'll get an internet pitchfork mob going after them for some (justified or unjustified) reason, and the last thing they want is for their cloud providers to pile on and further add to the fire.
> the message it would send to current and future customers
What exactly is that message? Maybe:
"If you make your money by separating families, putting kids in cages, and deporting asylum-seekers to places where they're in danger, then we don't want your money."
> But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy.
Most of the comments here seem to indicate that what was said, and proposed to be done, is political, and politics are bad. This seems to rest on the assumption that one, institutions like ICE are politically neutral, and/or two, simply doing business with a political organization is necessarily "apolitical." It also relies on the assumption that anything that can be identified as political is off limits to businesses, and that many businesses are capable of avoiding being "political" altogether.
Businesses can be largely nonpartisan, but they almost certainly cannot avoid "politics." It is very difficult to be consistently "neutral" on issues like racial justice and equal opportunities for LGBTQ folks. Is hiring a trans woman "political?" Is simply doing business with a political campaign entirely apolitical? When we look to issues of the past, is/was supporting the Civil Rights Movement political? It certainly seems like a totally different type of politics than the kind where you take a partisan stance on economic policy.
IBM rightfully faced backlash for doing business with government institutions in the 20th century that were clearly not neutral on the issue of racial justice. The IBM example isn't to compare that situation to the current, but to demonstrate that you cannot justify an apolitical position in all contexts, and that "apolitical" positions may not be quite as neutral as it appears on the surface (hopefully that avoids a Godwin's Law violation.) Similarly, while to a lesser degree, ICE as it exists today can clearly be identified as an agency carrying out a specific political agenda that has a negative effect on racial justice. If doing business with an institution furthers that organizations' goals, and those goals are not neutral on the issue of racial justice, it certainly can be argued that your continued business with that institution furthers that organizations' goals. To argue otherwise puts one into a position where it seems they'd have to defend IBM in the aforementioned example for logical consistency.
Civility has already broken down because of the US government’s actions. Schools and other parts of the government are ending their contracts with police. People all over the country and looking hard at their actions and the actions of those companies or other entities they associate with.
When the government is acting this badly the social contract gets weaker and begins to fall apart.
This is just a reaction to those larger forces. Until those larger problems are addressed and the government starts acting more civilized there is no reason to expect or hope that business as usual will continue.
The U.S. Government does not have police contracts with schools. Police are state, county, or local. The last few weeks have made it clear to me very few people understand our system of gov.
The U.S. Government has had (under the last few Presidents, but not the current one) Consent Decrees to force the police to follow certain ethics guidelines. Obviously, we have always had some problem with police brutality, but at least doing something to reduce it was better than doing nothing while encouraging more of it.
"Part of" certainly does not mean "controlled by". Powers are generally enumerated or reserved to the states. Plus and minus lots of interpretive scotus precedents.
The US government has a lot of dimensionalities to it. HUD, the Post Office, the parks service, and the US military are all parts of the of even the purely federal government without one "controlling" another, and have fairly different polices between them. State and local orgs fit into the same scheme just fine.
Both sides are so convinced of their moral superiority that they just can’t empathize with the other or anticipate their reaction. God save this country
> But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy.
In a working society, maybe. In a properly functioning government it's the job of the executive branch to find some kind of compromise and operate the government for the benefit of and according to the priorities of a reasonable approximation of all the citizens.
But that's not possible with ICE. Right now there's a large fraction of society that supports inhumane mass deportation, human rights disaster camps across the border, family separation policies (though that got rolled back, thankfully), no-knock armed police raids for visa violations etc....
And there's another large fraction of society, including the Github workers, who find that hateful and immoral. And those folks have no ability to affect policy absent waiting to vote again. Their desires and needs simply aren't being heard.
In previous administrations, that kind of hyper-partisan policymaking by the executive branch simply wouldn't have happened. Either because it's bad politics or because of some sense of order on the part of the policymakers. But it's not true now.
The root cause, basically, is that one political party in the US decided to make an "enemy" out of a population (hispanic immigrants) in order to gin up votes from people that don't like them. And the resulting skew in civic priorities has made a big mess. This is how you get civil unrest, which we're seeing right now in all sorts of contexts.
But the mess isn't the fault of the protestors or the github folks, really. You can't run a country according to the parochial needs of your half of the electorate and tell everyone else to fuck off. They start flipping tables.
I'm a minority who is tired of people using that term without any distinction. Please be more specific because "minorities" are not being randomly killed. We’re doing just fine.
Also the ban is for one year. Amazon’s plan is to suspend selling while the public opinion is against it. Once this issue is forgotten, they will begin selling Rekognition again to the government .
> But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy. It'd attract extreme negative attention from the rest of the government, and great fear from all paying customers that an internet mob could separate them from their code at any time.
Why is this lunacy? If government entities suddenly are under the impression that they'll have a difficult time finding business partners if they're consistently caught doing human rights violations.. seems like a win-win. If anything it would attract negative attention for the next company willing to do business with them.
> We should absolutely be lobbying hard for changes to immigration law, the restrictions placed on ICE, and justice for their wrongdoings.
We're doing that too. There's no reason only one form of action should be followed.
> But I can't see how this helps improve immigration
It helps by making ICE expend their resources on finding new businesses to provide hosting services they need, or if they can't find any, rolling their own.
I see that some commenters are suggesting that github should use its position to influence ICE and maybe that's contributing to some confusion. This was never about improving ICE -- the goal is to cripple and dismantle them.
> But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity
This is easy to fix: just exclude Microsoft from participation in any federal tenders. Either you do business with all of the federal government, or you don't. It's pretty straightforward. Right now, the situation is pretty absurd: Microsoft will sell dual use tech to China (which, let me remind you, runs concentration camps for Muslims), and to countries which literally throw gay people off the roofs, but US federal law enforcement is somehow not quite good enough to deal with. This is extreme hypocrisy, but it's pretty typical overall. I would encourage Microsoft to be consistent, and sever its business ties with countries where the human rights are not respected at least to the extent they are in the United States.
I am bummed that you are making what are in effect, velvet fascist statements. This is literally one of the freedoms we have left, in that the businesses we run don't have to support things that we don't believe in.
Disclaimer: I am jewish, and found that accusation offensive.
After Trump took office, I began reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, to be on guard – I was afraid. The ICE camps are evil, scary, cruel, and probably illegal, but not indicative of the sort of fascism we saw under the Nazis. After all, they functioned similarly under the previous US president, who did not seem to have fascist tendencies. As others have mentioned, the detainment of the Uighurs rings much, much closer to Nazi Germany. In some ways scarier.
We have the freedom to leave work and sit in front of courthouses in protest until those responsible for ICE atrocities are prosecuted. We have other similar such freedoms.
Demanding your employer to take a foolhardy action which will register as a minor inconvenience in the target's IT department is... just silly. It's grasping at the closest power center you can find instead of making the effort to find a relevant one.
> to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy.
I'm having trouble understanding the linchpin of your argument. Government agencies don't have any inherent right to your business and you are free to deny them service for reasons political or otherwise.
I think it's great that employees can direct this kind of business decision.
It's also unfortunate (I am assuming) that the employees have much less of a stake collectively than other shareholders.
There's a good chance they would make more informed decisions if they were to fail or be successful based on those decisions.
For what it's worth, I think the employees would still make these demands, it would just be nice to be able to show that it was also the right business decision.
Why does it matter if it's the right business decision? Don't moral considerations have precedence over business considerations? It should be expected of a company to take a profit hit if it is the only way to uphold a moral standard. Regular people do it all the time, why should corporations be held to lower standards?
That's a fair point, but it's often hard to find a single agreed upon moral compass at an entire company.
Also, I would bet that a review of this from a business point of view might make a moral stance moot. If that's the case, it seems like an easier way to avoid a minefield.
The private sector should actively refuse interactions especially with government! Especially when they serve multiple governments. I don't advocate companies taking social stances on politics, I am all against it. The people should be doing that, companies need to stay out of politics.
That said, this isn't mere politics. Actual humans can and are dying including children, the individuals at github/microsoft must excercise their conscious and act accordingly. Same applies to war. This isn't akin to refusing service to democracts or republicans but more like refusing service to organized criminals who also happen to be a government agency. All companies have a right and an obligation to refuse cooperation with a government agency that willfully causes death,torture and imprisonment without due process of innocent civilians. That is not a political stance.
I don't see the connection between supporting black lives matter and enforcing our immigration laws. If they want completely open borders, then they need to come out and say that, but demanding ICE lose contracts and technical software access is absurd.
As we are about to see in minneapolis, just like defund the police doesn’t mean no law enforcement, abolish ice doesn’t mean an open border. It means ICE is a structure that is harming american values (liberty, justice, due process).
And the idea here is to apply pressure any way possible. Maybe losing github doesn’t practically change much, but if I was working somewhere and companies started cancelling contracts due to the unethical actions of my workplace... i would start looking for another job.
Should GitHub employees refuse to work on legal related matters to put pressure on the government to prosecute BLM protesters that recklessly put lives at risk during a pandemic?
1. Given that black lives are disproportionately effected by covid (well documented) it seems like it’s more their risk to take than yours to criticize. But whatever the risk created by protesters, the teargas and “crowd dispersal” methods used by police forces will be responsible for way more spread than a bunch of people marching wearing masks.
2. If we had not been devaluing black lives and letting off murdering cops for hundreds of years, we would not be seeing protests in the streets. This was entirely preventable: just dismantle systemic racism, like yesterday.
3. If the majority of github’s employees shared your skewed view of the blm protests, they might apply pressure on their employer, yes.
> But I can't see how this helps improve immigration, and it certainly seems likely to cause a lot of negative consequences for GitHub.
I think I would rather work for a company where they do the right thing, even if it does cause negative consequences.
I understand that you're not convinced that banning ICE from their platform is the right thing, or will even do anything useful around immigration. I don't agree with that point of view, and I expect GH's employees don't either. Ultimately it's up to the company's management to decide who they'd rather to piss off: the US government, or a portion of their own employees.
To me one of the issues is if companies have to toe political lines, then every new change of administration potentially means disruption. The alternative is the government doing more things in-house which pushes up costs.
So in the end this is posturing (aka signaling).
Can Boeing see a conflict of interest via a vis a military conflict and say, no to the DoD because they like some baddie the USG might tangle with? Now in reality this wouldn’t happen because of USG buying power... but put that aside.
I sometimes wonder why the world is in such a pity state. A lot of improvements seem obvious, but nothing gets done while a lot of those things are not really opposed by anybody. Why can multi-national corporations essentially exploit people in poorer parts of the world? Why can authoritarian regimes run freely and profit from exploiting people or attack democratic institutions?
I think this line of thinking (whether applied to corporations or people) is a reason. It can be applied very, very broadly and essentially result in doing nothing if a corporation/country/whatever doesn't not hold up to your ethical standard and while formally complaining about some violation. The company doesn't care and you can feel better. There's some truth in "actions speak louder than words".
There's a point where some kind of real action is required to have an impact. And it will more often than not result in a situation that's financially worse. One can't usually follow ethical standards and get the maximum profit at the same time. It's obvious and one should calculate with it. The freedom to choose also implies responsibility to choose.
I am not totally idealistic, some things would result in economic suicide and some would not really help the cause. But one can weigh them and I am not convinced that Github runs a huge risk by denying ICE service. Although I have to admit that I am not sure what ICE is doing wrong. I am not an American. But I really don't like this style of reasoning where the negative financial consequence is just accepted as a reason without really questioning whether it's justified. Amazon already banned the police from using Rekognition, so it can't be total lunacy.
How would you feel if you know your work is being used to facilitate what is described in this video: https://youtu.be/mRUxDNE8uzc?t=36 ?
They're incarcerating newborns and forcing unrelated 5 year old detainees with no relation to them to take care of them. They smell, they're covered in lice, bodily fluids, they're denied personal hygiene, food, water. They are forced to drink water from toilets.
Kids that are too active are sedated and some of them, left unsupervised causing them to smash their heads against the floor causing them permanent brain damage.
The facial recognition case is a terrific counterexample. That's totally the right thing to do, and much less dangerous.
Note that MSFT isn't denying the use of Microsoft Office or Outlook to the FBI et al. That's essentially what GitHub's employees are asking for. They're denying the use of a tool which can be directly used to do harm, until they're sure it'll be used appropriately.
If a tech company were supplying software that was a key enabler for ICE's cruelty (such that ICE's cruelty would be significantly hampered without the tool), by all means they should stop the sale.
You touch on an interesting point on the continuing amassing of power around corporations. ICE was created by people who were voted on by the populace. A corporation refusing to work with a legal entity really shows just how much power corporations now have.
Github refuses to work with ICE today and hypothetically tomorrow will only host code for Democrats? I'm certainly no fan of ICE, but I'm also not sure I like ceding even more control to corporations. Perhaps I'm naive in thinking we can still fix the US through voting.
>Github refuses to work with ICE today and hypothetically tomorrow will only host code for Democrats?
I don't believe that political organisations are considered a protected class so yes, GitHub could decide to only host code for Democrats.
Your point seems to be "This is a slippery slope. Where do we draw the line?"
I think it is entirely reasonable that there _should_ be a line.
To take your example to the disturbing extreme, consider this: "Github refuses to work with ICE today and hypothetically tomorrow will refuse to build crematoria in extermination camps?"
There must be a line _somewhere_. Finding the best place to draw that line is a major challenge that requires significant and likely fraught discussion but it is something that must be done.
> hypothetically tomorrow will only host code for Democrats
I can imagine a more disturbing (possible) hypothetical: the activists are successful, and Github terminates it's ICE contract. Nobody else will host their code. ICE still has source code that needs to be hosted, so they hire more developers to maintain their own internal source-code repository. Those developers are subsequently blackballed from future employment opportunities due to their past association with ICE.
> ICE was created by people who were voted on by the populace.
This is a highly debatable opinion.
> A corporation refusing to work with a legal entity really shows just how much power corporations now have.
Not really, everyone has always had a choice. It's just sometimes a choice that they cannot refuse. And, as far as choosing to only host "democrat" code, where would we like that line? At Chinese code? How about NK? What about environmental activists that US oil interests don't like? The scope of this argument is larger and pertains to how we would like to structure our means of production and about what actors we care to dis-incentivize and why. Since ICE systematically abuses its power over vulnerable people, I'd say "stop it by any means necessary, save further harm." If the corporation is a spear, then throw it; if the law is a sword, swing it. If people are being egregiously harmed in it, it is the duty of the people to end it.
> It'd attract extreme negative attention from the rest of the government, and great fear from all paying customers that an internet mob could separate them from their code at any time.
Using Microsoft as your canonical code repository is already a meaningful risk to your business. It's nice that more companies are recognizing this.
They're building nice new features with their ecosystem, too, in traditional Microsoft embrace-extend style.
Right, storing your code anywhere presents risk (including self-hosted on a FOSS stack). With GitHub/MSFT, that risk includes "they decide they don't like you anymore" amongst others. How high is that risk? You'll think it's a lot higher if GitHub were to kick off ICE.
(disclaimer: I hold a small amount of MSFT stock, though this was not on my mind when I wrote my original post - thanks for the reminder).
Microsoft isn’t kicking off ICE. They’ve backed our government at every opportunity, including pentagon contracts.
Fixing democracy should be done democratically, it’s not the job of tech companies - and Nadella understands that.
Replace ICE with "the SS" and see how your comment reads. I was working on a DHS contract and quit the second I found out they were putting children into cages. I'm under no obligation to work at a company that contributes in even a tiny way to an atrocity.
A company I work for is free to take the contract, and I'm free to tell them I don't want to work for them any more because of it.
Let's say you're, say, IBM in the 1920s. At what point does the SS become an organization with which you refuse to do business? They didn't start off running concentration camps, after all.
If you’re referring to the Nazi movement in general, probably the point where they openly campaign against the concept of liberal democracy or use street violence (roughing up opposing groups, smashing windows, attacking/commandeering government facilities) as a means of social protest. Those are all pretty big warning signs that were present in the Nazis long before they seized power let alone built concentration camps.
No I'm referring to the German law enforcement agency that eventually ran the death camps. At what point in their journey toward the gas chambers do you say enough is enough. I would suggest that separating families and putting children in cages is far enough.
Trump repeatedly asked his followers to rough up protestors 4 years ago.
> No I'm referring to the German law enforcement agency that eventually ran the death camps.
You placed your question in the 1920’s. The SS was founded as a bodyguard unit for NSDAP leaders in 1925 and remained purely an organ of the party until 1933 when Hitler became chancellor and the Reichstag passed the Enabling Acts. Up to that point, most of the political violence was carried out by the SA, which was likewise an organ of the NSDAP rather than the government. After the Enabling Acts, the Nazi government deliberately blurred the lines between the German government and the NSDAP, but that is well outside the timeframe you suggested.
To answer your question, I would probably not do business with any part of NSDAP starting in the 1920’s on account of their history of street violence and their platform of abolishing democracy. I would similarly refrain from doing business with the German government as soon as the Reichstag abolished democracy and outlawed every political party other than NSDAP. This would extend to the SS although the SS itself was not especially involved in any of these events.
As you can see, this isn’t a particularly relevant analogy.
> I can't see how this [denying ICE access to Github service] helps improve immigration … great fear from all paying customers that an internet mob could separate them from their code at any time
You've proven your point. Paying customers would be afraid of doing things ICE is (in)famous for, lest they are “separated from their code”. i.e. Denying ICE means people will act nicer in general!
The issue I take with your argument is, politics in the United States aren't "normal". Maybe they never were "normal". But I think the notion is, this is more than a "political" disagreement over whether the tax rate should be 23% or 25%. We're in the midst of a fundamental moral disagreement about whose lives matter.
> It'd attract extreme negative attention from the rest of the government, and great fear from all paying customers that an internet mob could separate them from their code at any time.
I work in an organization where people prefer “on prem” solutions that they have complete control over. Unless there’s a legal injunction or law, I can’t imagine how much of a pain this is going to be to argue.
Why can't you see this helping? Can you not see the rally that is happening in the corporate world in favor of the BLM movement? Even if corporations are posturing this stance with no real action at the moment, if bigger entities make real actions like this, it will catch on, and then it will trickle down to smaller businesses, and it will seep into lobbying circles. This has leaderships around the world forced to make visible, impactful actions. Fear of disruption keeps the status quo in place.
Your movement hit at a bad time. The corporate world has to grip with a few critical issues around staying in business, shifting to remote and it will increasely feel a pressure to move manifacturing onshore.
I would focua on what changes you can make with police forces before the second covid wave hits and pushes your issue to remember when status.
Arguably if it wasn't for the weakness of corporate world right now this never would have happened. Indeed, the average American is much too busy with work in order to achieve this level of political engagement.
(Edit: Removed “people are lazy”, poor choice of words) People feel despair, hence pushing on Github instead of the political process. I’m all for unconventional leverage, but Microsoft is a trillion dollar org and has shareholders; this isn’t some VC funded dual class share startup where the founder has a blank check to do whatever they want.
Edit: Can’t give up on the political process, that’s where the change happens. Continue to apply pressure, your opponents eventually give up or die out.
You've got this backwards. What is happening here is the real political process - people congregating and trying to achieve their political goals through organizations they can actually influence. Organizing to convince your employer, or your local government, or your school board or whatever organization you can to push things in some direction is the political process. Sure, voting is one aspect of it, but it is by no means the be-all, end-all of politics and democracy.
I don’t believe I’ve got it backwards. If Github/Microsoft won’t serve ICE, someone else will. If you want to fix ICE, the political process is what fixes that, not feel good efforts on a single business.
As someone with entities that are registered to do business with the federal government, I’d provide services to ICE, because ICE isn’t the problem: how they’re regulated is the problem. Not providing services to ICE doesn’t solve that.
If Github/Microsoft publicly refuse to serve ICE, they will directly make it harder for other companies to serve ICE, through bad PR and through inspiring workers in other corporations to pressure their own companies to do so.
It is to some extent a symbolic gesture, but symbolic gestures have power in our world, especially when they are done by the powerful.
And of course ICE is part of the problem. Sure, the way they are regulated is also part of the problem, and that also needs to be changed, but the boots on the ground and their direct managers are not blameless. And they are likely to hold full responsibility for some of the horrendous acts being committed, not everything is commanded from on high. Not to mention the criminal negligence displayed in cases like losing track of people's children - that was not an order from somewhere, that is some bureaucrat who should be held personally accountable for failing to do their job right with catastrophic consequences.
What about personal responsibility? It's possible to be realistic and principled at the same time. "Sure someone else will do it, but it damn well won't be me!". If nothing else it's applying friction to the process of whatever you're disagreeing with.
Apologies if you believe there’s a conflict in my belief system. I don’t. We’re just arguing over the “how”. If you’re shooting for impact, make sure it’s exceptional.
"If I don't mug this person wandering lost & alone at night, someone else will." - 'someone else will' is not a very good argument or justification for your actions.
Attributing this to laziness is absolutely wrong, IMO. The political process and system is deeply broken and people realise that they cannot make their voices heard through it. So they find alternatives.
No private company is obligated to accept a contract from a federal agency. To expect them to do so would be the inverse of the supposed freedoms we supposedly value in America. Specifically the first and third amendments to the Bill of Rights, but that's just scratching the surface of how un-American that would be. Worst case, the government can set up its own infrastructure, and that probably wouldn't be a bad thing anyway. Some people talk about privatization of government resources as if it's an inherently good thing that saves taxpayer money, but if anything the last 40 years has shown the opposite, especially WRT to the likes of Blackwater and private prisons. In many cases privatization is more expensive and simply serves to put public money in private hands without oversight to reward corruption.
Also it's misleading to refer to it as a "political reason". There are two different things people mean by the term "political". One is through the lens of party tribalism. Like, if a restaurant owner put up a big sign out front that said "I only serve registered Democrats, the rest of you can GTFO." That's about the shittiest and most indefensible form of "bringing politics into it" that I could possibly think of. Probably wouldn't be illegal but obviously I wouldn't think too highly of the restaurant owner and I would hope he quickly went out of business because everyone (left and right alike) would think he's a douchebag.
That's one meaning of "political". The other meaning is simply, "reacting to current events", independently of tribalism or political parties. If someone is actually acting based on moral convictions rather than party loyalty or tribalism, that's very different. I realize that an anti-ICE POV and pro-immigrant POV is strongly correlated with Democrats and the opposite is strongly correlated with Republicans, but if we start casting every single moral conviction or political belief in terms of party loyalties then we have freaking lost as a nation. Party-based tribalism is always bad, full stop, but people acting on moral convictions are as good as the coherency of their moral convictions.
Like, if the US government started rounding up folks by ethnicity and putting them in camps based on obviously racist motivations, like they did to Japanese-Americans in WW2, and it was based on bills passed by Democratic politicians, and the Republicans, bless their hearts, decided to fight tooth and nail against it because Democrats, I would honestly hope that all businesses, regardless of their owner's or employee's political leanings, would ignore the party politics aspect of it and only make decisions based on moral convictions. The parties fight each other all the time but we can't fall into the trap of thinking that political parties are anything other than an unfortunate reality of our system of government. Many of their conflicts are fights they pick with each other to rally their base, whereas if they were actually interested in responsible governance they would try to find common ground and try to negotiate something that actually helps the country.
Some people just have a tribal mentality though. They can't formulate thoughts on any issue through any lens except that of party politics. They think of themselves as "this type of person, not that type of person", and their first cut at bucketizing the population is lumping them in with one party or another. That's not democracy, that's about the stupidest freaking tribalism imaginable. Keep in mind that it wasn't until 1994 (or 1996?) that "bipartisan" and "compromise" became dirty words in political coverage, specifically to the Republican Party thanks to Newt Gingrich, but to a lesser degree to the Democrats as well as they circled the wagons in response. It's only been the last 26 years that parties themselves have become more important to some Americans than America itself, or Americans as a whole.
Besides, what possible negative consequence could GitHub suffer from this? Besides losing the ICE contract? Does anyone seriously think that other government agencies or companies would be so butthurt about GitHub's position on ICE, that they wouldn't want to do business with them? That only makes sense through the lens of the two political parties defining the totality of what it means to be an American, and if that's where people are at, America deserves to crash and burn because it's lost whatever soul it may have once had that elevated it. George Washington's farewell address was on this very topic. He thought the poison pill of the Constitution was that it set up a system whereby people would naturally form voting blocs, and before too long voting blocs would coalesce into two diametrically opposed political parties, and then the system (and America) is screwed. Which is exactly what happened. But it doesn't have to be that way. But the election process itself would have to be reformed into a less antiquated, non-FPTP-based system.
My problem with this argument is that it (if applied uniformly) means that you couldn't hold IBM culpable for their role in the Holocaust. After all, "all they did" was help create a computerised census system for the democratically elected German government[1]. In reality, their computerisation of the census allowed the Nazis to far more efficiently catalogue and track Jewish people throughout the Third Reich.
And before anyone invokes Godwin's Law, ICE has been recently discovered to have literally poisoned detainees by using toxic cleaning chemicals in close proximity to detainees without giving them any protection or sufficient ventilation[2].
But even if you think it is unreasonable or overblown to call ICE nazis or fascists, I still question the premise that companies should not be held morally responsible for the people they knowingly and willingly do business with. If GitHub was selling software to known terrorists, you'd better believe that the American government (and hopefully most people) wouldn't see it as being fair game.
I agree that the lasting way to stop the abuses by ICE is through legislative and administrative changes, but I disagree with the argument that "refusing to sell software to ICE won't stop them from committing abuses, so I'll just sell them software anyway" is ethically justified. Now, GitHub is obviously free to do whatever they like but the public should also be free to point this out whenever they try to take the moral high ground.
Not too long ago the company where I worked was having a similar debate concerning services provided (through an intermediary) to ICE.
One particular facet in the discussion that stuck with me more than the rest was a comment by a co-worker who was visiting from the Berlin office.
They talked briefly about small monuments on the street by their home marking the spots where people were arrested and taken to concentration camps as their time and place of death. They pointed out that in many cases those dates are in the mid 1930s. Up to 10 years before the discovery and liberation of the death camps.
Calling ICE nazis (while still hopefully hyperbole) is not necessarily an unfounded comparison.
There are tens of thousands of them now, every one of them installed by the artist who originally came up with the idea.
They are installed in front of their last place of residence. So it's really decentralised, and the realisation that the Holocaust happened in your street (or even to people living in the house you now life in) is powerful.
If ICE becomes a nazis then America will have also have become the same. I don't think it's fair or makes sense to single them out. Anyway, dealing with illegal immigration has popular support.
> dealing with illegal immigration has popular support.
You presume that "dealing with illegal immigration has popular support" is the same as "the public broadly supports arbitrary cruelty to illegal immigrants".
The US population (~80%) appears to think "dealing with illegal immigration" should mean "provide a path to citizenship" [1]
> I don't think it's fair or makes sense to single them out.
ICE has earned all of the scrutiny they get. ICE does not seem to care about the welfare of the people in its care [2]. It does not seem to care about US immigration law [3]. Or the rights of legal immigrants [4]. ICE employees say ICE prioritizes rounding up law abiding families over criminal investigations [5].
> We should absolutely be lobbying hard for changes to immigration law, the restrictions placed on ICE, and justice for their wrongdoings.
Whenever people make appeals like this, I wonder where it is exactly they think the political power to do so comes from. Historically, organized labor, like what’s happening at Github, is the what drives pressure for these kinds of changes and funds politicians and campaigns that implement them.
If you want a more immediate example, look at what is happening across the country right now with how cities are rapidly implementing changes to police in response to protests. If you actually want these changes, this seems exactly the kind of stuff to be doing.
Private agencies are the only field in which we have any real democratic say. This is the part of Capitalism that is good, when we can vote with our dollars.
IMO, if it wasn't for anti-competition lobbyists and government contracts, it would be much much easier to get private companies to take a stand every once in a while.
There is also a contradiction in calling for more economic equality for minorities in the US and picking on ICE. Illegal immigration applies a downward pressure on wages of low skill workers, which is precisely where minorities are over-represented in the US.
Immigration enforcement is literally the use of force to maintain a larger economic inequality than the downward pressure you referred to.
Not in some subtle way. Enforcing politically decided inequality is literally the purpose of ICE.
It makes people uncomfortable to talk of it in those terms, but when you get down to it, a lot of people want to see enforced inequality, and vote for it.
They couch in terms like "downward pressure" to abstract things away from the people's lived experience, to make it palatable to make one group of people worse off so that another group of people can be better off.
The economics abstraction has the added bonus that we avoid mentionining the lived reality: the perpetual fear, lack of humanity and so forth that come with, say, splitting up families, and preventing them from having any reasonable avenue for leaving an ordinary life. (I've known too many immigrants who cannot find a way to solve the bureaucracy problem, and cannot even determine their legal status, or in some cases if they did try to find out they risk being split from their own immediate family, so perpetual fear and avoidance of authority is their only realistic option for living.)
The charitable interpretation of immigration enforcement is that it ensures a nation does not get overwhelmed by people entering the nation -- in terms of its economy, bureaucracy, etc. I can see that argument that enforcing immigration maintains the economic inequality between individuals in the US and, for example, individuals in Guatemala, but controlled immigration ensures that a nation is capable of growing and supporting the immigrants that come in in the first place. After-all, immigrants are coming to a given country because of perceived advantages of that country, if too many immigrants come at a single time, those advantages may disappear.
>> I can't see how this helps improve immigration,
In many ways it does the opposite, for reforms to work you need to build coalitions from all political segments of society, vilifying political opponents (the ones that believe in some kind of immigration control and do not support fully open borders) does not build that coalition that is need to fight the unethical and illegal acts. Instead it puts people on the defensive and further divides the nation ensuring no reform can happen at all
Today it seems if you believe in anything other than fully open unrestricted borders then you are considered to be a racist authoritarian from mid 1940's Germany
> vilifying political opponents (the ones that believe in some kind of immigration control and do not support fully open borders)
The only vilification happening here is your misrepresentation of the critics of ICE, many of whom do not advocate for "open borders".
ICE is not equivalent to "border security", which should be obvious when you consider that this agency was only created in 2002.
ICE doesn't even work at the border. That's the Border Patrol (and customs, and the Coast Guard).
ICE exclusively works within the US. Since illegal immigrants have little protection, it acts much like any unchecked police force, at least according to its critics.
There were 1,200 complaints of sexual assault in ICE custody[0], for example. Less than 2% of these were investigated[1], proving the point about them acting "largely unchecked" that I somehow felt the need to qualify with "according to its critics", above, before looking this up.
From 2012 to early 2018, ICE wrongfully arrested and detained 1,488 U.S. citizens, including many who spent months or years in immigration detention.[2]
Since it isn't particularly hard to find illegal immigrants in the US, ICE also has a lot of liberty to decide who to go after. That's a recipe for arbitrary enforcement, and there have been complaints about individuals, families, neighbourhoods, or cities being targeted or a variety of reasons, none of which fit most people's idea of justice, from shakedown collecting money from individuals in exchange for sparing them harassment to cities being targeted after incurring the wrath of the current government.
>>misrepresentation of the critics of ICE, many of whom do not advocate for "open borders".
Almost all the vocal critics of ICE I am aware of are Social Democrats that want Open border, Free Everything for Everyone, and curtailment of capitalist systems. They use ICE as an easy target to push their other agenda which is replacing capitalism with Socialism and open borders
>ICE exclusively works within the US.
Actually they work in 53 nations, and has a active role at many ports of entry but that really is not relevant
>>Since illegal immigrants have little protection, it acts much like any unchecked police force
Given the context around this discussion I would be hard pressed to pain ICE any worse than every day police
Law Enforcement in this nation need MASSIVE reforms, ICE include, as do every level of Law Enforcement.
Police Abuse is rampant and not simply a domain of illegal immigration enforcement.
>>There were 1,200 complaints of sexual assault in ICE custody[0], for example. Less than 2% of these were investigated[1]
lol, your "2 sources" are all the same source... They all reference the same intercept story which is very biased and highlights the problem with Wikipedia today
Further The Intercept does not claim that only 2% of the reports were investigated it says that the OIG only shared investigations on 2% of the cases with intercept as s result of the FOIA request, that does not mean there were not investigations on the other 98% only that the investigations were not released under FOIA. That can be for a number of reasons.
>From 2012 to early 2018, ICE wrongfully arrested and detained 1,488 U.S. citizens, including many who spent months or years in immigration detention.
I would like to know the actual total that spend months or years in detention "many" is a subjective term used to incite an emotional reaction. Not a data driven analysis to understand the scope of the problem
That said 1 is too many as as I have said before we need police reform
Unfortunately we are at a political impasse for any-kind of real accountability reform because the Social Democrats block any reforms that do not involve complete amnesty and open borders including full access to tax payer funded social welfare for all immigrants. That is a non-starter for most people. I will support open borders in the absence of social welfare, or I will support social welfare in the absence of open borders but I will never support both at the same time as that is not economically feasible.
If you are in favor (or in the process) of putting large groups of people who have not directly harmed anyone in concentration camps, separating them from their families, keeping children in cages etc, THEN you are considered a racist authoritarian almost akin to mid 1940's Germany.
What alternative proposals do you have for dealing with people who've unlawfully crossed the border? If your answer is "let them live freely in the US", I think it's fair to characterize that as a a call for open borders.
Personally, I don't think open borders are unthinkable, but I am not necessarily for them either.
However, the deportation process must be humane. You can detain people who are to be deported in conditions that respect their human rights. You can allow parents of small children with US citizenship to take their children with them (assuming both parents are deported), or to make other arrangements.
The two alternatives are not (1) open borders or (2) concentration camps for illegal immigrants.
Sure, and I think you can get most people on board with the principles of "people in deportation holding should have good conditions", and "parents should be able to keep their kids in deportation holding". But such moderate reforms won't satisfy most people who talk about concentration camps; many people (including multiple in this very comments section) mean that it's simply intolerable for illegal immigration detention centers to exist.
My position on immigration has been the same for decades.
1. All persons that are not a danger to others and can prove financial viability (i.e they have a job sponsorship, or other means of self support with out needing social welfare) should be allowed to immigrate on a temporary basis
2. The Immigration process should be limited to only establishment of ID to clear a person from known dangers (i.e medical, criminal or other things that pose a danger to the US population) and financial viability
3. Social Welfare programs should be limited to Citizens Only. Persons can apply for Citizenship after they have lived here for 3 yrs under the temporary immigration program.
As far as Separating a person from their family. We do that to citizens every day. If you break the law you will be separated from your family. That argument does not hold any weight with me, nor does it make a person a racist.
Do you believe people with children should be immune from criminal prosecution?
As to "keeping children in cages" I have been opposed to those programs for as long as they have existed, which is going on at least 3 different presidents now. Where were you when Obama as doing this? Or are you going to pretend that these ICE conditions just magically appeared under Trump like most democrats try to?
I am not a US citizen or resident (I am just an interested observer), and I was in college for much of Obama's presidency. I did look up to him at the time, but have since learned more of the reality behind the PR and have completely turned my opinion against him. He was around as bad as all presidents have lately been, on matters of immigration, external politics and so on (going so far as assassinating one of his own citizens for suspicion of terrorism).
And related to breaking the law and separation from your family, the kinds of crimes you need to commit for that to happen are usually much worse than immigration without a permit. Also, I wasn't thinking of the general idea of deporting someone who has children, but specifically to the cases of families who immigrated illegally, had a child in the US, and are now being deported while leaving a small child without care and with little hope of ever reconnecting with their parents. And the solution is not necessarily to let the parents stay, but to allow them to take their child with them.
Otherwise, your immigration policy sounds pretty nice. I am assuming you would also carve out exceptions for asylum seekers, but apart from that, it sounds positively utopian compared to anything like current practices, from what I've read.
> 3. Social Welfare programs should be limited to Citizens Only. Persons can apply for Citizenship after they have lived here for 3 yrs under the temporary immigration program.
How to you handle underclass, i.e. people who become disabled or injured, move into a recession, can't meet the initial requirements, or some reason to not comply. With your requirement #1, #3 seems cruel. In most countries a work permit gets you basic access to the same welfare and worker protections (usually statutory retirement, unemployment insurance, health care) for this exact reason.
> If you break the law you will be separated from your family
Really depends what law you have broken, doesn't it? Under US immigration law crossing the border at the wrong place is punishable by $250 fine (8 U.S.C. Section 1325, I.N.A. Section 275). Many traffic violations have stricter penalties.
In early 2017 the Trump administration stopped accepting asylum applications at ports of entry and required asylum seekers to apply in the country (contrary to law). In April 2018 ICE started separating families of asylum seekers who had committed the grievous act of a) crossing the border b) requesting asylum from the first US official they encountered (a condition explicitly allowed in US asylum law)
> keeping children in cages ... 3 different presidents now
I think that's a false equivalency. The fucked up stuff ICE got away with under Obama is not the same as the fucked up shit Trump has given the green light to. The Trump admin is actively violating US immigration law to for no other apparent reason than a simple desire to be cruel to asylum seekers. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/688/the-out-crowd
Separating parents from their kids is one thing. Neglecting kids and denying them water, food, and not facilitating any form of basic hygiene is another thing.
Children covered in lice, bodily fluids, without showering for weeks to months. Newborns being taken care of by 5 year old detainees with no relation. They are denied food and water. They are forced to drink water from toilets. They're scared to ask for food and water [1].
Then, let me introduce you: The Mexican Repatriation Act of 1929.
If your argument is that citizens need to be protected, I remind you that in 1929, the US government took US-born children of Mexican heritage (technically, US nationals), put them in buses, and sent them to Mexico. In total, up to 4,000,000 Mexicans and their US born descendants were victims of this.
It is possible that some the families being detained and separated are descendants of US citizens. But nobody cares, you know why? because it's not about citizenship and immigration. It has never been about that. It's about making bullshit excuses for racism and ethnic cleansing. Before the Mexican annexation it was done to the Native Americans, and for them there were other excuses as well.
The US has set a strong precedent about not giving a flying fuck about borders, immigration and sovereignty. What did American immigrants in Tejas, Mexico do? or Alta California, Mexico? or the Kingdom of Hawaii? or countless other territories? They were given land grants and instead of being grateful, they revolted, declared independence and then joined the Union because they were not allowed to have slaves, or because they saw themselves as entitled to those lands. Lands that they had no connection to whatsoever.
Before the US existed, their predecessors, the British empire, had other races to discriminate. Basically every other nation including other nations in the British Isles. That mentality led them to invade 99% of the planet and kill millions of people through wars, famine, etc.
In contrast, the ancestors of the families being detained are the populations that have inhabited North America for 10,000 years. Not a couple of centuries. 10,000 fucking years.
I guess this is the reason lot of corporates try to stay out of politics. Because once you set a precedence then people will use that as to push their own political agendas. I personally don't like the slippery slope argument since it's very lazy and justifies inaction in many cases. But at the same time when I see news like this, I just wonder how long it will take two different subgroups trying push their own conflicting agendas and how the company should react in such a case.
We are going through a very strange and extreme period in US History. Corporations are a huge part of the political landscape. Of course workers who are powerful will demand things of their workplaces.
All corporations are political. By accepting the ICE contract previously it was political. Now by reversing they would be changing sides. They were already in the political fray.
The idea that all corporations are political is obviously quite true, especially insofar as potentially-everything is political.
What's interesting is erosion of the norm that corporations should not be particularly political (picking and choosing customers based on politics, touting allegiance to one specific side). This was once a somewhat stronger (political) norm that has fallen by the wayside as the nation has grown more bitterly divided.
I would be happy to see it come back somewhat; I am not convinced that corporate CEOs having an outsized influence on politics is going to take our nation to a healthy place in the long term, either politically, economically, or intellectually. I also expect that the demands of the new orthodoxy will get much, much worse before the situation gets any better.
> This was once a somewhat stronger (political) norm that has fallen by the wayside as the nation has grown more bitterly divided.
Just a thought: what if the nation's divide comes from companies taking more political stances, instead of the opposite? As an example to entertain the thought, when Nike takes a political position through their advertising on social platforms, people react to it by taking side. If done at a scale big enough, with enough companies pushing their customers to take a side, would that be enough to result in visible divide in the country?
I think the hyper politicization of just about everything definitely contributes to polarization, and particularly the “cancel culture” approach to politicization is a blunt instrument that seems very likely to push people to take sides against each other, and see differing beliefs more as opponents that must be defeated rather than neighbors with different priorities.
I think this ultimately comes down to where individuals see effective levers for expressing political opinions at a policy level.
There is very little trust across the entire political spectrum that the US government is an effective policy maker and enforcer. It often feels like our representatives at the state and federal levels no longer represent individuals, and so we've turned to corporations and US government suppliers looking for leverage to force change instead.
Corporate CEOs have always had an outsized influence on politics, it's just now that said influence is not all pro-right-wing (because many of the right's social stances are completely intolerant), Republicans have started wringing their hands, and clutching their pearls, and predicting bedlam, cats and dogs living together, etc, etc.
Were the outsized influence limited to run-of-the-mill pro-corporatism politics (Or anything that aligned with their social agenda, as in the case of firms like Hobby Lobby), we wouldn't be hearing a peep from that camp on the subject. (As if that's somehow apolitical.)
Providing standard, regular service to anyone willing to pay for it is almost always the "default" non-political way of doing business. Do you want an ideological purity test to buy a bagel or a car? Refusing to provide a service when you have the capacity to provide it is a much stronger political act because it essentially implies "I hate you so much that I'm willing to harm myself (foregoing profit) in order to thereby harm you."
There is almost no such thing as standard contracts in b2b and especially business-to-government segments. You'd best believe that ICE has a special contract that it negotiated with GitHub/MS, and it would not be out of the ordinary for the terms to have been influenced by political favors at some level of the negotiation.
I'm sorry, but with power comes responsibility. The poor little CEOs are going to have to recognize that their decisions have consequences, and those consequences must be thought through. They don't just get to play Capitalist without any repercussions because they call themselves non-political.
If you have power, you are responsible for what happens with it. It's not just free money.
And if you don't get your way, what's next? Shutting off ICE employee's water, electricity, and telephone service? And why not kick them out of their apartments too since sheltering an ICE officer helps enable them.
ICE as an institution doesn’t even know what Github is, and they won’t blink an eye if suddenly it goes away. It’s ICE engineers lives which are suddenly miserable because they would have to deal with setting up new systems and processes for source control and bug tracking on top of whatever else they were working on.
Cutting off GitHub access to ICE engineers is like sitting outside their offices banging pots and pans together for a few weeks. A lot of people are generally worse off for a short while, GitHub revenue goes down, maybe they lay off a few engineers who were supporting that customer, a few news articles are written alternatively praising another step towards corporate activism or bemoaning cancel culture.
The most important part of convincing GitHub to cancel ICE to those who are rooting for it isn’t so much ICE losing access to GitHub, but another drop in the bucket toward normalizing the politicization and disruption of basic services to deplorable customers.
This isn't about me getting my way. I'm just very, very opposed to the idea of someone wielding massive amounts of power without it being a burden. Power is burdensome because it means responsibility. If you just want just the power but not the responsibility, you're being a parasite. It's not okay.
I find that completely absurd. I work at a large bank. If my employer provides services to ICE am I practicing politics by showing up to work? Is my employer practicing politics by providing loans at the standard rate and standard anti-discriminatory process equally to all applicants? To be free of politics should my employer stop providing loans to everybody?
At what point does this make sense in an objectively measurable way?
Demonstrably and rather obviously untrue. They're violating the law in many instances, including but not limited to the cases of asylum seekers and current green card holders; it's just they're following the evil, xenophobic whims of the current political leadership, who are failing to hold themselves or ICE accountable to the rule of law, so they are, for the moment, getting away with their lawlessness. I hope we can change this with voting in new leadership, but I fear it may be too late.
Aside and personal observation: it's interesting how the same people so vigorously crying for "law and order" are rather particular about which laws they care about enforcing, and which they're willing to overlook. Of course I'm not the first to make this observation.
Given that the pictures of kids in cages came from before our current president was in office, this is the first time I've heard anyone call president Obama both evil and xenophobic.
Every leader the country has had is trash. That doesn't detract from the fact that the current leadership has managed to lower and re-lower the bar. Consistently widening the window of what outrageous behavior is acceptable.
At this point the office of the president is a no holds barred free-for-all and whoever occupies it next will be doing so with a precedent no near zero actionable oversight.
I disliked the Obama administration’s stance on several policy issues, including immigration and his fondness for using drones, executive orders, and the secret powers of the state.
All of which and much more are significantly worse under the vile, toxic, xenophobic current administration.
But nice try at attempting to derail the conversation with some good old-fashioned whataboutism! Better luck next time!
This omits the important fact that ICE arrests steeply decreased year–over–year for seven out of Obama’s eight years in office, while arrests have increased year–over–year for two of Trump’s three years [0]. That doesn’t exonerate Obama, but it does say something about the administration that a new president inherits.
And who writes the laws of the land? Slavery and Jim Crow were also laws at certain periods of American history. I'd hope it's pretty uncontroversial to say that those laws were also very divisive political issues at the time.
Correct. Not all laws are good or morally acceptable, and they need to be changed.
If Github was to pull out, ICE could simply find someone else willing to sign a contract with them, except it will make things worse, as that other provider will not be as diligent or reliable (if it was just as good, it would have been picked in the first place instead of Github).
When you see an unjust law, it should be pushed to get changed. Back when gay marriage was illegal, it made more sense to push for its legislation, instead of providers refusing service to state governments where it was illegal. People need to protest, call their elected officials, sign petitions, etc. Most importantly, people need to regularly vote, not just during general presidential elections.
That has nothing to do with Github. As a customer, I want to be confident that my service won't get terminated for some arbitrary reason, as long as I obey terms of service and don't break any laws. Giving providers the ability to cancel my service due to random whims in their workforce isn't something that I want to see in tech.
Would you have held the same opinion if you were around in the US in the 1930s and discovered that IBM was developing a new-fangled census system for the newly-elected German government[1]? Or after the news of the death camps was made public, you discovered that IBM had continued to maintain the system they'd created to help track people for the Nazis? Would you have worked for IBM at the time, knowing this was going on?
If you would've spoken out, then you agree with the principle but don't agree that ICE is "bad enough" to warrant this treatment. If you wouldn't have spoken out but wouldn't have worked for them, then you agree that working on these systems is clearly unethical (and thus IBM was acting unethically) but feel that ethics are less important than not disrupting the freedom of a company to sell their services to whoever they like. If you would've worked for them and wouldn't have spoken out, then we have very different views on ethics and I'm not sure we're going to agree on anything.
Yes, laws should be changed but businesses should be held accountable for who they do business with. You'd better believe that the US government wouldn't have the same rosy outlook you do if they discovered that GitHub was selling software to known terrorist groups.
That's a stretch. Many think what they are doing is not legal. And I doubt that everything they do is spelled out in law. There is a lot of policy to what happens in ICE.
I think that a large part of the issue is that ICE is violating human rights on a massive scale. Where they might be executing some laws, they're violating others.
And just a reminder, "just following orders" brings up some scary historical context that a lot of people don't want to help recreate.
How is it political to accept business from a federal agency? One could argue it’s more political to pick and choose which federal agency to work for - or whether to do it at all - based on whether you agree with that agency’s mission. This is really getting out of hand. Now businesses have to let the world (and mostly people who are not customers) know where they stand by choosing customers based on where those customers stand on various issues? This is insanity.
>All corporations are political. By accepting the ICE contract previously it was political. Now by reversing they would be changing sides. They were already in the political fray.
This is only the case if you can find a substantial number of customers Github has turned away. As long as the stance was "as long as it's legal," they stayed out of politics. They were willing to take ICE on as a customer, and they would have been willing to take on organizations fighting against ICE (if for some reason they needed software). That's impartial.
Trying to say that taking on the contract is a political decision just sounds like your forcing your political stances on Github itself... Github had never implied they took politics into account when taking on a customer.
Over most of the last few decades, most corporations' politics were limited to things like United Way drives, etc. Right or wrong, the situation today is very novel, and we may discover why companies were loath to get involved in this sort of thing in the past.
Personally, I'm finding it a significant distraction in my organization. It does leave me wondering if I shouldn't leave for a more neutral one.
You're right, and it goes much deeper. These corporations effectively own enough of our data to trivially deanonymize and target people. An organization of people who believe they are morally justified in they cause are liable to abuse such information, regardless of which side they belong to.
That's the most terrifying part to me as a dev. We don't even need neural networks to search petabytes of social media content for keywords. If we allow corporations to become politicized then we open ourselves up to unprecedented abuses.
You're right that Internet-ish companies are a special risk. But even run-of-the-mill organizations seem to be drinking the Kool-Aid these days. I sat today in an all-hands anti-racism videoconference. It was bland enough, though it would at one time have made a good SNL skit. (It was a bunch of woke white women declaiming our failures.)
Committees were proposed and also the hiring of (even) more D&I consultants and personnel. As usual, no actually useful action was proposed, but we have once again checked the box.
GitHub has banned repos that they don't like (not even talking about breaking ToS). It's not the same as refusing a paying customer, but it's close enough. They've already chosen to be political.
I guess when they start administering ideological purity tests at the bagel shop, I'll know who to thank. After all, providing any type of sustenance or service to a person with the wrong political beliefs helps enable their wrong-ness, doesn't it?
The other is that it usually takes serious labor and negotiation to land a government contract. It's not like ICE went to some Web UI and bought GitHub Enterprise with a company credit card, and now we're asking GitHub/MS to ban them from the e-store.
Are you thinking about the consequences of your breathing? Because every breath grants you the oxygen that your body needs to metabolize the food you eat into useful energy for you to fight the power. So even breathing is political!
Again, it's a meaningless statement. We deliberately draw the line somewhere, partly to avoid incessant infighting over pedantic "political" but not actually political things.
Do you want to know how to turn an entire generation of people against your cause? Impose your politics onto them at work and facilitate a culture of suppression and targeting for anyone critical. This is happening all across society right now and the pendndulum is already starting to swing back and when ivory tower CEOs impose their views onto people who just want to do their jobs, the swing only builds momentum
Your sarcasm is not appreciated. This is a serious matter, and that fact that you can't bring yourself to empathize with people being brutalized reflects very poorly on your ethical code. It's not meaningless at all to point out that actions have consequences, and in this case they are measured in human suffering.
If folks at GitHub believe they offer a product of value (which I suspect that they do), then the necessary corollary is that by offering that product to an agency responsible for a reprehensible abrogation of human rights makes it easier, cheaper, and/or faster for that agency to degrade humanity. To stick one's fingers in one's ears and claim that it is "apolitical" to continue to do business with such an agency is embarrassingly similar to the defenses that IBM executives must have made in the 1930's.
>This is a serious matter, and that fact that you can't bring yourself to empathize with people being brutalized reflects very poorly on your ethical code
1/3 of my people were subject to genocide infamously by oven, more recently than slavery, but I'm not expecting people to remove any reference to fire or pizza from my life, that would be absurd. So is this. None of the people coding were slaves, I guarantee it, and they can move past it just like all other populations move past various atrocities that they experience. This focus on blacks is a fad, you can arbitrarily define a near infinite number of "marginalized" groups if you carve up 360MM people.
But what does make it difficult is being told all your life that you are a victim, held back by something about yourself that you cannot change; that's how you breed weakness and teach learned helplessness.
For what it's worth I was talking about ICE tearing apart families and laughing at people dying in their custody.
Treating other humans with respect is a core value of mine. I try as much as I can to listen to their concerns and be mindful of them. I'm truly sorry that you seem to only see this long-awaited reckoning with America's deep white supremacist roots as a "fad".
This isn't people pushing their own political agenda; this is a consequence of the political stance they took. When a company takes a political stance, they should be held accountable for it.
You can support BLM without having a stance on ICE, because BLM is part of a complex venn diagram of political beliefs and affiliations.
This is normal: Just because some republicans think evolution is a hoax, doesn't mean every republican does. Every large political organisation is actually a coalition of people with different beliefs that overlap enough to put them on the same side for now.
Hypothetically, maybe GitHub don't know much about racism, but they're very much opposed to police cruisers intentionally driving into pedestrian protesters.
That would mean they support the current protests, but as long as ICE aren't deliberately driving cars into people, they're not yet opposed to ICE.
And that's exactly why most business don't(use not to) take public activist stances at first place, rightfully so.
Although right now since everybody is afraid to get cancelled on a whim, corporations are opening themselves to, and you are right in your logic, criticism for their lack of political activism.
How is protesting against police brutality is same as protesting against ICE? That sounds like partisanship. If you support one issue then you will also have to support other issues.
GP may have been referring to the political stand of taking on ICE as a customer. GitHub brass can pretend they're being apolitical, just as IBM did...
Sure, and they're welcome to clarify how the police should be held accountable when applying force to citizens but should not be held accountable for applying force to non-citizens.
Or how certain human rights can be maintained for one group and not the other.
ICE inflicts something that seems an awful lot like police brutality on a large number of people. The Kafkaesque horrorshow that legal asylum seekers are subjected to is one of them. The conditions in which they hold people, in general, is another.
The lies and high pressure tactics they use to force people to sign away their rights are also concerning.
It's really not that different of an issue (black lives matter but Latino lives don't?); I think the word you're looking for is not partisanship but intersectionality.
> appeal to authority is not a fallacy when the authority is indeed an expert.
Sure it is.
The point of the fallacy is that an argument should stand on its own merit, and has nothing to do with the person making it. Guess what - experts can be wrong too (e.g. hand washing).
An expert can be wrong, but a layperson is more likely to be wrong. "Experts are wrong" is sometimes common knowledge, but "I know better than experts" is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
Appealing to an expert should not be an instant win, but an argument can be valid and useful without being sufficient to end the discussion.
I was worried it was going to be like the salmonella thing where it turned out washing a chicken* is terrible advice because it spreads it everywhere and so it turns out that every time I wash my hands after handling deliveries, I'm now covering my kitchen with Covid sauce. I'm very happy that's not the case.
* I've never washed a chicken, but I've definitely seen and heard the advice before.
In one case I am declaring that something needs to be true, in the other I am declaring that I believe something as true.
The authority fallacy is that a certain position cannot be challenged as some expert are infallible. Similarly to how you believe 2 + 2 = 4 you also believe Aristotle was the arbiter of truth. As an argument it exposes no attack surface because you do not admit criticisms of the position.
It is not a fallacy if you are simply making an assumption of a fact (eg that rats are born out of rotting plants) that can be separately proven or disproven.
Sort of how a dictionary is used, it is not that the dictionary must be true we understand that it is possible for it to be wrong, it is just that we agree not to contest it in most cases for ease of conversation.
> In one case I am declaring that something needs to be true, in the other I am declaring that I believe something as true.
Those are not as different as you seem to believe.
> Sort of how a dictionary is used, it is not that the dictionary must be true we understand that it is possible for it to be wrong, it is just that we agree not to contest it in most cases for ease of conversation.
That is not how dictionaries are used. Dictionaries document how language is used in the recent past by a sufficiently large number of people. They are a trailing indicator of how language is used.
If you description was actually accurate, there would be no new slang (e.g. yeet) and words would not change their usage (e.g. "they" is now also a gender neutral singular).
Dictionaries are a form of consensus, a descriptive consensus rather than normative. In particular the usage of a dictionary (eg in law) is to justify your choices of wording.
In a sense the power of a dictionary is that you are allowed to use those meanings (indeed they mostly contain positive information and rarely what words do not mean)
> If you description was actually accurate, there would be no new slang (e.g. yeet)
Completeness ad accuracy are different.
> words would not change their usage (e.g. "they" is now also a gender neutral singular)
Speech can be sometimes accurate and sometimes less accurate. As a medium the value of speech is what you can express with it, it is in general not a form of art per se.
>> In one case I am declaring that something needs to be true, in the other I am declaring that I believe something as true.
>Those are not as different as you seem to believe.
I indeed believe they are quite different, 2=2 must be true in terms of the statements I understand it to be. Evolution on the other hand is something that I simply believe.
I cannot even fathom[1] what a proof of "not 2=2" could be, as in even if you had one I would be unable to understand it or believe it.
Evolution is something that instead can be disproven, even more than that a huge chunk of why scientist believe it is because experimental result could disprove it but instead keep confirming it.
[1] this is an important logical concept: for a statement of facts to be (at the very least) well formed you must be able to understand what it would be required for a proof and/or a confutation.
Appeal to authority is a fallacy, because "authority says X is true doesn't imply X is true". If an expert says "X is true", it's not true because they're an expert, it's true because they provide evidence that shows that X is true.
Appeal of authority is a logical fallacy, even if an expert is use to argue.
That alone doesn't mean that the expert is wrong, nor does invalidate the argument, as not all the arguments need to be strictly logical (logic <> truth).
can someone be a considered authority without being an expert.
edit:
I am using authority from the example in wikipedia
"One example of the use of the appeal to authority in science dates to 1923,[20] when leading American zoologist Theophilus Painter declared, based on poor data and conflicting observations he had made,[21][22] that humans had 24 pairs of chromosomes. From the 1920s until 1956,[23] scientists propagated this "fact" based on Painter's authority"
Painter presumably was an expert. So not sure why you are saying why its ok if the person is an expert.
Some political appointees could probably be considered an authority by title and not a subject expert. That might hold true for some ambassadors. I guess it really depends on what exact definition of authority you are using.
Parents, older siblings, managers/bosses, almost any TV personality. Also you might have someone who has a profession in the topic at hand, but isn't an expert. Like your older cousin who is a first-year Comp Sci major probably isn't the hacking/security expert you should be appealing to.
One side gets de-humanized and shown the door. I'll let you guess which side that is.
This is why I think good people prefer a-political companies.
It is sad, that there are people who have commitments/families, and they are taken hostage by this.
This must clearly be an oversight, since "good people"—one would hope—think about how their words and actions might impact others, and work to address those impacts in an open and vulnerable way free from judgment.
I'm sure they just can't edit the post because it's been too long.
> I guess this is the reason lot of corporates try to stay out of politics
Literally everything a corporation does is politics. Every hiring decision, every office they open or close, every client they take on, every vendor they ditch, every ad they publish. It literally all has political implications and messaging. Why is there an expectation on companies to "not be political" whenever one of those inherently political decisions intersects with something that happens to be a hot-button issue? Like wtf does that even mean?
> You should know that the most notable politicians to use that phrase were Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, and George W Bush.
I dunno, I think Cicero is at least as notable as Bush, if not Mussolini or Lenin. Orwell—who used it to describe a fundamental fact of the nature of war, always and everywhere—wasn’t a politician, but certainly a notable figure. The uses of perhaps the greatest significance are in the Bible, both in Joshua and by Christ in the Gospels.
But perhaps the most relevant to the immediate situation are figures like:
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”
Elie Wiesel: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented,”
John Stuart Mill, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing”.
Or the form written as confessiom from the side complicit by complacency, Rev. Martin Niemöller:
---
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
---
> It is the hallmark of extremism.
The recognition that inaction is a choice with consequences, and that complacency is acquiescence is very much not limited to those espousing extremism.
I think many of the commenters would openly embrace the label of complacency. That's part of living in a country with a diversity of views; sometimes, when you see people doing something terrible, you have to accept that they don't see it that way rather than going on a warpath to exclude them from polite society.
Non-complacency is totally different from "with us or against us" mentality. Like the Bush example, you can simultaneously stand in opposition to terror and extremism, and also be in opposition to the invasion of Iraq. You don't have to agree with 100% of the principle of someone who you share _some_ principles with.
I think the slippery slope argument is actually quite relevant here. In my opinion it is about how you argue things. If the CEO or who has power just says "I decided to drop this client because of my personal advocacy" then there is no slippery slope, if they say "this client is too immoral we cannot support them" then you are very easily open to direct comparisons.
I do in fact agree with you, but I'm coming from the opposite side of the spectrum.
Companies do in fact involve themselves with politics quite a bit. It's called lobbying. I do think that lobbying is the single most important threat to Democracy, in the US and everywhere else. I do wish that companies stayed out of politics in that way.
I also think that when one side is literally putting children in cages it's not a "slippery slope".
Corporations are most definitely NOT staying out of politics. All of them are actively lobbying the government for numerous different kinds of policies, from immigration and trade to environmental control and taxes. In fact, corporations are the main driving force behind almost all policy decisions in some way or another.
Usually token action is taken ahead of time in the form of donations and community service work instead of hurting bottom-line profit. IMHO this is an irresponsible rookie CEO not knowing that he’ll have to fold to future political movements if he folds to this one.
There is no such thing as "staying out of politics". Everything involving people is a political act, and if you don't notice it it's because you have status quo politics.
> I just wonder how long it will take two different subgroups trying push their own conflicting agendas and how the company should react in such a case.
Probably side with the one arguing that we should not commit atrocities.
> then people will use that as to push their own political agendas
It's always a very small number of very loud people too. Worse yet, these people have mastered the art of silencing dissent from their colleagues by using kafkatraps.
There are tons of republicans and libertarians in tech, but in the average office, you wouldn't know that given how effectively such people have been silenced for fear of being accused of thoughtcrime and heresy.
> There are tons of republicans and libertarians in tech, but in the average office, you wouldn't know that given how effectively such people have been silenced for fear of being accused of thoughtcrime and heresy
Have they tried growing as people to not be so horrid that people would recoil if they knew what was really inside their heads?
“Thank you for the question. Respectfully, we’re not going to be reconsidering this,” he said on the videoconference call. “Picking and choosing customers is not the approach that we take to these types of questions when it comes to influencing government policy.”
Sounds reasonable. Imo GitHub should be a neutral platform rather than trying to deny service to those they don't agree with. I'm sure electricity and internet companies have lots of contracts with the ICE, no one criticizes that because those are utilities which aren't expected to descriminate based on the views and actions of their customers. I think there is value in having platforms like GitHub with the same approach, you shouldn't have to worry about your code being taken down because it doesn't match the values of a private company. Once you start denying certain customers based on their actions, you implicitly support the actions of all of your other customers, which quickly becomes a very difficult position to be in.
I agree that making decisions like this puts the company in a bad position and is risky for them. But it's not like GitHub can suddenly pull the plug on ICE and instantly delete all their code; no data will be lost. There are plenty of alternatives to GitHub so ICE doesn't have to worry about their code being taken down, beyond the small cost of migrating to another service. You can't say the same about the traditional utilities which are normally granted a monopoly.
Doing cheap PR moves like blacking out logos or posting Twitter "support" posts from CEO accounts or announcing the end of default branches named "master" is, as I said, cheap. The real issue is dealing with the elephants in the room, such as the aforementioned ICE contract of GitHub.
It is about time that corporations, with GitHub here as an example, noticed that backing this or that or another minority or "trying" to solve some medial issue only where it suits them PR-wise is simply abusing that minority in yet another way; it is a means of using that minority, and all the people who constitute that minority, as a tool for public relation stunts and political "but we support X, see?" newspeak that brings no actual change.
I'm genuinely curious if GitHub does support Black and Brown people enough to actually make that support noticeable for everyday lives of these folk.
While I may not totally agree with you on the politics, I do totally agree that I have a large discount for words made by corporations when it is the popular thing to do and when there are few negative consequences of them doing it. Yes, words of support matter, and I see nothing wrong with wanting to rename blacklist->blocklist and whitelist->allowlist, but I also can't help but roll my eyes a little when I see a LinkedIn post about this terminology change with 40 responses commending how great an action that was. It feels like the ultimate in slacktivism to me.
For example, at an individual level, there is a lot of good research about how housing segregation is one of the largest continuing drivers in systemic racism in the US. So if you have a bunch of BLM posters in your yard, but at the same time fight tooth-and-nail against any increased density in your neighborhood that might actually lower housing costs where you live, well you should just STFU, or at least realize the underpinnings of your blatant hypocrisy.
To be honest the whole master / slave discussion is laughable because:
1. Most humans have ancestral past as slaves, be it serfdom or thraldom.
2. Etmologically the master branch is associated with the concept of a master copy, not a whip lashing plantation owner.
3. Slavery is pretty much a thing of the past, accept from certain parts of the middle east and africa. And let us not forget, the producers of our consumer goods in asia...
Sold by the same companies that foregive to care jackshit about anything. LOL!
Actual systemic progress happens through legislative changes. Social pressure is used by the public to show which issues they care about, and what politicians should be working on. The protest are one strong signal here.
Support by major companies, while admittedly less effective, is another signal that helps. Claiming that it's useless is false and claiming it's cheap is ignorant - the OP clearly demonstrates that a good deed never goes unpunished.
To quote myself from a different comment, I did not mean to imply that the visibility of these issues hasn't changed; it's quite obvious that these issues are much closer to the surface of everyday discourse than they were earlier.
The visibility alone does nil, though, when it comes to everyday practical effects. The mere fact that this issue is visible did not change the death counts. Death statistics during police interventions can be considered one such standard. It's a good first step that needs to be followed by further steps.
The point is that the visibility is the best way to drive legislative change. Those changes will then have real-world impact. You're right that this is a slow process, but it's still the best we have in our current system.
In reality, police brutality is nothing new. Politicians should have made changes to keep police accountable years ago, but have consistently failed to do so. Now we've reached a tipping point where the public at large demands change, which needs to come from politicians, and the protests are the manifestation of this.
Does a Tweet from a CEO immediately fix the issue? Of course not. But that's like saying any individual is not going to make a difference when protesting, so they shouldn't bother. Obviously this will only lead to complacency, which will only cause the problem get worse. Democracy, in this case, means as much public pressure as possible so that politicians can no longer ignore the issue without fear of being voted out of office.
Every single bit of additional pressure helps the cause, and whether or not it's also good PR is irrelevant.
I really dislike labeling any recognition of an issue as "cheap".
It was not that long ago that any positive recognition of even gay people existing in modern media outside of farce, recognition by corporations was seen as a HUGE step forward as far as making people or concerns SEEN.
Maybe some CEO's out there are all Snidely Whiplash and putting out all their messaging for free PR, but I'm not going to assume that and I think the recognition is of value.
I understand the position, but nowadays Twitter is full of #BlackLivesMatter posts, pride flags can be seen commonly, all while, to bring the two most currently visible things that haven't changed, the sex/race pay gaps are still there, and Black folk are still much more likely to die during police interventions.
I guess I'm glad that the recognition and posts from CEOs is there, but posting rainbow flags and "Black Lives Matter" on Twitter has simply become fashionable now. It's possible to do that and do nothing else in order to announce a success and go, "hey, we support minorities" while ignoring problems that have people mispaid, misjudged, locked up for statistically longer, or just plain outright killed.
That's the elephant in the room I've mentioned, and unless these Twitter statistics and CEO or corporate recognition you mention translate into daily reality of these minority groups, they're not of much actual and practical use. They're not the goal, they're the means.
EDIT: in other words, if one of your Black friends gets shot "by accident" during a random police intervention - oh goodness, it's really sad, Alexa play some jazz music. But hey, #BlackLivesMatter is trending in social media, that must means that things are good for the Black folk, right?
/s
EDIT2: The word "cheap" is there because such a stunt is very far from being "expensive". It costs little to nothing, it can be done without other actions or at minimal costs, it does not require changes of management or company course or internal rules. It is, therefore, by definition, cheap.
I don't buy into the theory that "things haven't changed" and thus discounting visibility.
Protests happened in the past too? Do we discount that?
It's all cynicism and divisiveness these days about how someone isn't doing enough, even among folks who share values ... in favor of I don't know what standard ...
OK, that's correct; I might not have expressed myself clearly. Slightly edited my post up there. Thanks.
I did not mean to imply that the visibility of these issues hasn't changed; it's quite obvious that these issues are much closer to the surface of everyday discourse than they were earlier.
The visibility alone does nil, though, when it comes to everyday practical effects. The mere fact that this issue is visible did not change the death counts. Death statistics during police interventions can be considered one such standard. It's a good first step that needs to be followed by further steps.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the stats say the opposite is true, but it really depends who's using the statistics to paint _their_ picture.
In this study run by Harvard professor Roland Fryer, it was found that African-Americans are 20% less likely to be shot and proportionally more likely to see use-of-force against them.
From Significance, right at the top: "(...) Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men."
The fact is that police shootings of unarmed African-Americans are still only 0.1% of all African-Americans killed. There are studies that find that no racial differences in lethal uses of force: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399.pdf
I try to do my best to assume good faith, but sometimes comments like this make it really hard.
In any case, here's two links. One's from Drexel University, the other is a meta-composition of resources by an organization connected to the Kennedy School at Harvard. Educate yourself.
The reason why this is contentious is because it relies on how you are defining 'a police intervention.' Very few people I see debating this issue dispute that blacks are killed at 2.5x the right whites are by the police. What they dispute is that this disparity exists because of police officer bias, and they point to differing crime and geographic factors that cause the disparity. In that case, blacks and whites might be shot at the same right within the context of a given police interaction, but what that specific context is and the frequency of that context between black and white populations differs.
The 2.5x number isn't really disputed, it is the reason for it & the policy that is proposed because of it that is contentious.
I don't know if it's one of the studies you linked to, but I read a study a week ago that showed that black men were 2.5 times more likely to be killed by a cop, but 2.1 more likely to kill a cop (compared to whites).
ICE does support Black and Brown people by keeping illegal immigrants from flooding the market. Wages in many restaurants/building sites in NYC, LA, Florida, Texas are lower than other parts of the country because illegal labor gives an alternative to hiring black employees that rightfully require at least a minimum wage.
This seems to be a consequence of the de-professionalization of corporate Tech. “Bring your whole self to work” and all that.
While it seems good natured in this specific case, it can very quickly turn into a small percentage of squeaky politically-minded wheels turning a non-political company into an monoculture activist one.
Personally, I wish we just went back to a professional/private distinction. Keep your politics out of the workplace. Otherwise, I don’t see this ending well.
Our medium sized company created a simple policy in early 2016 -
No religion - no politics in the office.
I never dreamed that policy would pay dividends so profoundly. The distraction of having activists within your company trying to actively pressure the company via public channels - I mean it's almost unbelievable that this is the new norm. ...an I am so very thankful we seemed to have sidestepped it.
Don't celebrate too early. It took less than 5 years for this 'thing' to go from college campuses to big companies... What will you do when a twitter mob comes for your company because you're "oppressing your workers ability to speak out about injustice and human rights" or "remaining silent, which is violence"?
This is the real threat we should all be talking about. It’s so sad to me that it’s barely discussed. These new religions and their witch hunts are great at silencing discussions out of fear.
Personally I wouldn't want to work for a company actually detaining people, but call me terrible but I'm not sure I'd feel the same about letting them pay to host some code...
1. You provide tools to a group.
2. You believe (in a informed way) that the group intends to act immorally.
3. Your tools will make the group more effective at acting immorally.
Lot's of people seem to think so. Masterpiece Cake shop was a supreme court decision around, essentially, that question, that upheld the right for the private entity to discriminate.
So yes I think everyone would agree you have some responsibility (otherwise no one would care about the outcome of the case, why request the right to discriminate if you don't feel that you have any responsibility for the resulting acts?)
It was more specific than that: a cake shop participates directly in the creative effort with the client in the way a software service provider does not.
Features, yes. Are those features directly connected to those clients' work, or is it a more general feature that has to do with the execution of the service?
I will agree that it's dubious that that nuance is reflected in the rulings on the Masterpiece case. I'm trying to follow the same lines set there, though, in my argumentation.
Let me rephrase to see if it answers your question:
Would the added features be useful in another context? Would they be useful regardless of the type of work being done? Are they merely enhancements of the platform, or are they specifically tailored to the client's domain?
FWIW, in my work I've seen both. But I'm sort of asking things at a higher level. If a client is asking you to prioritize a generic enhancement over others, they are presumably doing so because they believe that generic enhancement will have the greatest value to their work.
So if ICE asks github to prioritize better native CI support for Windows, or something, they're doing it because it is of maximum benefit to ICE.
It is still debatable how much this has to do with the matter at hand. It is completely possible that github only utility is to process applications faster so that people will stay detained for shorter times. Or that it serves a completely unrelated purpose that has no influence on the issue.
If the client is large enough, it does. Same as with a cake shop. Someone buying a slice of cake doesn't participate as someone asking for the design of a cake at a much higher cost.
In both cases, you very clearly have some responsibility. In an incredibly straightforward and unambiguous way.
I'm struggling to see how this is intended as a counterexample. Is it because disapproving of homosexuality is wrong? That doesn't at all change the entailment of responsibility by the conjunction of foreknowledge of consequences with uncoerced action.
If you walk out into a public street and fire a pistol around you randomly, you are clearly responsible for any death or injuries thereby caused (given that you were aware of the likely outcomes), even if it is through negligence or indifference rather than deliberate intent.
Well, I disagree. I have more of a "live and let live" or "golden rule" type philosophy. I wouldn't want someone denying me service because they disagree with my beliefs (and by extension, actions), so I don't deny service to people who have beliefs (and by extension, actions) I disagree with.
"Live and let live" and "golden rule" are great philosophies to live by.
But you still have responsibility when you assist others in doing things, whether you agree or disagree with those things.
Otherwise you are ignoring the "let live" part of your own philosophy.
For example, someone comes to you asking for your services to help them kill a third person.
If you believe in the "let live" part of your philosophy, you cannot assist in depriving someone of life in that way.
Same applies to the golden rule. It's easy to say you don't want to be denied assistance from others, so you won't deny it to them. But that's the easy scenario. Consider, when Alice is asked by Bob to help damage you, do you think the golden rule tells Alice to deprive you of life and liberty? I don't think it does.
You are over-complicating it. Evil people might use my software on GitHub to help kill people. I'm okay with that. I'm not going to try to prevent it; it's impossible. Their blood is not on my hands any more than the blood of Nice France victims is on the truck company's hands.
Sure, I wouldn't want anyone denying me service because they disagree with how I dress or other actions that are otherwise harmless. That being said, there is an incredibly wide divide between "I casually disapprove of your actions, but I will serve you anyway" and "your actions serve to strategically terrorize, harm, and silence minorities and those without the ability to effectively defend or represent themselves, and I will serve you anyway despite knowing that my service will strengthen your ability to do so."
People who oppose abortions (at least the vocal ones) don't "casually disapprove" of abortions. Some of them call it baby-murder. They could add that it harms and silences babies and those without the ability to effectively defend or represent themselves.
The CCP's position seems to be that anything vaguely resembling disrespect of the CCP or their leader will lead to revolution, and therefore must be suppressed with whatever means necessary.
It's generally possible for people to see small, seemingly-harmless, and sometimes-unintentional actions as being part of / enabling / normalizing some terrible threat, which must therefore be burned down, and anyone who opposes such burning must themselves be burned too. I think this happened with the Inquisitions, for example.
It doesn't solve the issue to say "the different political factions will judge for themselves which infractions against their beliefs are harmless". People are very capable of inflaming their own political passions to cast any issue as being the first step towards the end of the world. It only works if there is some common, overarching framework that the different factions agree on. If the common foundation is democracy, then I think that framework would probably be "that which the law allows is permissible; peacefully advocating your policies is permissible; if you think the law is wrong, advocate to change the law". Civil disobedience is a step outside that framework, but (by design) one of the most harmless.
Well in this case since they showed me video evidence of murder, I would call the police (assuming I don't live in a CHAZ zone).
This is bogus though. Will Home Depot allow me to buy some rope if I declare to a random employee that I plan on using it to do a lynching on my local colored neighbors? Yes, they will. Does that make Home Depot an immoral organization? Nope.
> if I declare to a random employee that I plan on using it to do a lynching on my local colored neighbors? Yes, they will. Does that make Home Depot an immoral organization? Nope.
I'd hope (and expect!) that home depot employees would ask you to leave if you made those statements while trying to purchase rope.
They might, but I doubt it. Especially if I made the comments in jest. "What's all that rope for?" "A lynching wink"
Home Depot (the company) will not make any effort to ban me from using their chain even if an employee did make me leave the premises. I could just go home and order it online from HomeDepot.com and have it shipped right to me.
You're sort of moving the goalposts here: when/if you have knowledge that someone is going to do something immoral, there may be an expectation to avoid supporting it. If you can't reasonably have been assumed to have knowledge of the bad thing, then there can't be an expectation to have done anything different, because you couldn't have known.
So, much as after you kick someone out of your store they could order on the home depot website, they could also just go to Lowe's and say nothing. Neither company is really to blame in that case. On the other hand, I wouldn't say that you shouldn't escalate to law enforcement if someone is threatening to go lynch someone in your presence.
You've avoided the question. Suppose that they'd already been on trial for it, found guilty and served their time. Do you sell them the gun, knowing that they intend to use it for violence?
If you showed Home Depot sufficient evidence that you intended to lynch someone with it, and it was Home Depot's policy that we sell rope even if it's used for murder, then yes. I think the issue in your example is that you haven't made the corporate policy clear and you haven't made it clear that the employee is convinced of what you're about to do.
> Suppose that they'd already been on trial for it, found guilty and served their time
Ok, so I'm supposing a convicted felon is trying to purchase a gun, which is illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1).
> Do you sell them the gun, knowing that they intend to use it for violence?
No, I do not sell them the gun, because it would be illegal to do so.
===
Bottom line, I believe in "innocent until proven guilty." I don't deny services or tools to someone legally able to purchase it because I think they might use it to commit a future crime. I might report them to authorities if my suspicions are backed by evidence, but it's not my job to prevent future crimes. If I work at a glass blowing shop and someone wants me to create a custom bong for them, I wouldn't deny them because they might use it to smoke illegal drugs. Who knows, they might be scientists that need it to conduct a study.
Again, you're avoiding the question; it's a moral question, not a legal one. Yes, it's illegal. But that doesn't mean it's unethical.
I'm asking if it's unethical to sell someone a gun if you're convinced they're going to do something you believe to be unethical with it. I would say yes. I'm not sure if you would say, "no, it doesn't matter if I know they're going to kill children with it", "maybe, if I only think they're going to kill animals with it", or "yes, I don't think I should sell them the gun if I know they're going to do something I don't approve of with it".
To your second point, we're not talking about "maybe they're going to do something bad", we're saying "here's plenty of documentation that they're going to do something bad".
If they are legally allowed to buy it, I would sell it to them but put a waiting period on it ("yep, you own it now. You can pick it up in 5 days"). During the waiting period, if I thought they were going to use it to commit a heinous crime, I would contact the FBI and provide them with all of the buyer's details.
I don't like this contrived example though, and I suspect you've only set it up so that if/when I say "nope, I won't sell the gun to that person" you'll then say "in this case the gun is GitHub and the felon trying to buy it is ICE" which I do not think is an apt analogy at all.
I'm not, I'm just generalizing the stance to whether people have a responsibility of "preventing future crimes" when considering whether to offer services to clientele.
You are though. You seem to be claiming that in general there is no moral imperative to try and prevent any crime. But that misses the point that the harm from some crimes is greater than others, and that there may be a moral imperative from preventing potential quantities of harm, irrespective of whether or not something is criminal.
Sure, but in those two examples the behavior isn't actually immoral, so the work of those companies doesn't increase immoral behavior at all. They can rest easy that gay people will marry with more efficiency and no increase in immoral behavior occurred.
This line of reasoning begs the question. Yes, according to your moral framework, one is actually immoral and the other isn't, but living in a pluralist society requires leaving room for people to have and live by very different moral frameworks. There isn't a universally acknowledged objective standard of morality by which we can judge all actions and beliefs in a society so we need to structure the rule by which we settle moral disputes in a way that doesn't create moral hazard down the line.
If you do have that responsibility, then a huge swath of open source developers in the world are guilty of abetting pedophiles, rapists, and terrorists.
A) Have a means of identifying which of their users are pedophiles, rapists, and terrorists?
B) Have a means of selectively denying people access to the tools?
C) Have a means of determining which of these users would using their tools to rape, produce child porn, and enact terrorism?
Well, in the past open source developers have attempted to put morality clauses into their licenses(ie You may not use this software in the development of nuclear weapons), but it was determined by the open source overlords that if a license puts a restriction on a specific usage, it is no longer Open Source.
So everyone who chooses to license their software as open source is making a choice that intentionally limits their own ability to prevent others from using the licensed software legally. So no, open source software developers don't have the choice to restrict certain groups from using it - but that is because it was a choice they themselves made on how to license the software. Isn't that the ultimate hand washing?
Yeah collectivist and consequentialist views are not without merrit but without a very high threshold things quickly becoming unworkable. There needs to be a balance.
If we change the nationality of the police or immigration force (let's pick.. China), I feel like even people on the "right" will have the opinion that it's wrong to work with them...
No reasonable conception of ethics is anything but consequentialist. Do you intend the word as a criticism? Do you have some alternate, deontological, view?
"Here's our service, use it if you'd like, just don't do anything illegal on/with it" is a line that I'm almost positive the group you're referring to would deem to be "fascist" at this point in time.
There is also a huge generational split between those on the left holding liberal values, and the new progressive left, which has been demonstrated by the recent crackups at media organs like the New York Times (who saw it in their mandate to publish an op-Ed by Hitler in 1941, but the publishing of a sitting senator (Tom Cotton) resulted in a staff revolt and cost the opinion editor his job).[1]
Anyone who was around when the OSI set out a basic definition of minimal requirements for open source licenses will remember that there were some arguments about whether a license could restrict use based on fields of endeavour. The idea that it couldn’t is aligned with universalist civil libertarian principles, and epistemological humility.
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.[2]
The principles of open source are still very strong, and somehow more obvious than free speech or due process. The network effects could make it impossible for any significant change, but I expect we’ll soon see attempts at licenses that are otherwise free, but attempt to restrict use by certain domestic enemies of the maintainers.
[1] Matt Taibbi - https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...
[2] OSI - https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
If your government isn't willing to compromise with you but desires something from you, it's pretty straightforward that you should withhold as much as you can until they decide to compromise.
You're conflating the end result and the means. I wouldn't cheer on any company doing that, just like I don't cheer on companies when they donate to campaigns for racists or people who vote for racists.
The government also doesn't have to compromise. Maybe there's a competitor who is less particular about who they do business with or in fact thinks the cruelty is actually cool and good. gitlab is 100% neutral on who they do business with, for example.
> If Boeing decided that ICE should behave even worse, would we cheer on ICE for compromising?
I said
> I wouldn't cheer on any company doing that,
emphasis on the "n't" in "wouldn't". And to be specific, I would not (<- that not is load bearing) cheer for Boeing advocating for more cruelty, nor would I cheer on the government for acquiescing.
If you want to compel private companies to do work for an unprotected class like a federal law enforcement agency, then yes at that point you should probably go and vote to make sure that happens.
This is a genuine question. I want to immigrate to USA, but currently there is no easy way to immigrate to USA. On the contrary Canada has a fair immigration system that allowed me to stay, work and eventually be citizen.
Why don't people push for a fair immigration system in USA instead of abolishing ICE? What exactly am I missing here?
>but currently there is no easy way to immigrate to USA
The USA has the most immigrants than any other country in the world at almost 47 million residents. That's 4 times higher than the second place country. And the vast majority of them came perfectly legally. For every one person that immigrates to Canada, 6 immigrate to the USA. I don't really know what people are asking for here.
This is one of the supreme examples of what a huge effect media bias can have. Without actually lying, the media coverage of immigration (often purposely blurring the lines between illegal and legal immigration, with the birth of the term "undocumented immigrants"), people have become convinced that the US is xenophobic and against immigration. The U.S legally allows a million people a year to immigrate here.
Per capita doesn't matter at all in this context though. If you were looking to immigrate to a country, you would have a better chance at getting in to the country that accepts 1 million people per year rather than the one that accepts 1,000 per year. The current population of each country is not a factor.
Funny enough many on the right in the US want to change the US immigration rules to be more like Canada or Australia’s rules, ie admission is based on work and skills criteria more so than family ones. The left leaning people oppose this because of how it would de facto change the ethnic makeup of immigrants.
Because there is a rather large disagreement on what "fair immigration" looks like, plus, if I'm being cynical, its an amazing issue to raise money on.
These days, neither party is all that stable. There are many voices trying to redefine both and the reasonable people in the middle are not being listened to. I honestly don't know the final resolution.
Many people benefit from the way the immigration system has settled:
1. High paying legal immigration is tightly controlled because highly skilled people and high-paying employers don't dare to break the law.
2. Low-paying illegal immigration is poorly controlled because poor people and small employers don't care about immigration law.
Pro-ICE-abolition groups, for the most part, want essentially open borders for poor people and are ambivalent about high skilled legal immigrants. ICE, for its part, has become increasingly brutal in its enforcement of immigration law, and has repeatedly been caught employing white nationalists and doing otherwise gross things. Getting rid of an unpopular enforcement agency is considered easier to accomplish politically than to actually re-write immigration law.
ICE only was founded after 9/11, and given that in their short history they've caused so much suffering, it's not unreasonable to demand that the agency be shut down.
ICE was a consolidation of United States Customs Service, the criminal investigative, detention and deportation resources of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Federal Protective Service.
Pushing for legislative and political changes would very much be the right path to go.
As far as ICE goes I think people are understandably shocked by ICE's actions that have been extraordinarily cruel under the current administration, so ICE gets a lot of attention.
Well, there's the people putting people in camps, the people tattooing numbers on those folks' arms, and the people developing the software and hardware to keep track of those people.
Now this isn't quite the IBM nazi connection - but the government snatching up people, then paying private corporations to intern them, in turn apparently using them for forced labour... Is pretty bad.
I'd be surprised if software isn't essential to keeping the machine going - and I'd not hesitated to call taking money for tooling "being a collaborator".
Maybe it's a spectrum thing, and everyone has a line they don't want to cross. There are people and organizations that don't align with my beliefs, but sure, it's cool they use my tools.
However, would you be ok with Hitler hosting code on your service if it contributed in some small way to genocide? That _does_ make me feel ick. Tacit support by large numbers of "not really effected" people is what made the holocaust and slavery and jim crow, etc, possible.
I'm not comparing ICE to Violent White Supremacy... but it's worth staying informed and revisiting our own boundaries as the situation changes.
Skin color, nationality and ethnicity are playing a huge role in how we're treating people right now, and the spectrum of human<>inhumane is getting wider and wider with tacit support :-(
North Korea/China/<insert oppressive regime> uses Linux. Does that make Linus feel ick and want to take some sort of measures to prevent it? I hope not.
Focus on making great tools. Don't worry about who might use them. That's someone else's job. If Craftsman starts trying to vet customers so nobody buying their hammers can use them to build KKK meeting houses, they will now be pressured to deny their tools to whomever the capricious demands of the internet mob dictate.
That idea is hasn't been true for decades. You should see how many corps make political donations - what you see is a consequence of 2 things: "Corporations are people (my friend)" and "Citizens United (2010)/Money is free speech". Now that it exists, the question now is who gets control of the corporate megaphone
Great! This seems like a perfect example of (employment) markets working in a good way. If the employees want the company to act a certain way or take a certain stance, or don't like a contract the company is engaging in, they can first lobby the company to change, and if enough are dissatisfied with the response they can vote with their feet and leave. I realize it's not always so simple, but I see this as a positive sign of workers using our market power.
I would have thought that the workers at GitHub would know as much as anyone that restricting access to one Git service would have a negligible impact on ICE. The real impact would be on GitHub themselves, as they would lose any opportunity to help guide policy or technology at ICE or any other government agency.
It may feel better to watch and yell from the outside, and you may have the moral high ground in doing so. But change happens from the inside. We need more companies like GitHub working with agencies to reform their policies.
Also, change is slow. Protests are step one, but there are probably 235 more steps until change is realized. Slow and steady, my friends.
EDIT: To answer the questions about how a company influences policy. Companies influence policy all. the. time. Look at ALEC[1] look at PACs. Look at the fact that Microsoft is not going to be offering facial recognition tech until privacy protections are passed. Not saying ALEC is good, but it exists.
How is GitHub supposed to change ICE's policies by working with ICE?
"Hey, you see this part of the code where you sort through the parents, to separate them from their children? Maybe don't do that?"
ICE is going to ignore any unprofessional suggestions, that's not what they hired GitHub to do.
In fact the usual argument employers give when you don't do exactly they hired you to do - "that's not what we hired you for" - is pretty strong. And unless GitHub sabotages their own work (which they won't), then their work will simply be in service to ICE's goals. There's no room left over for contributing non-work opinions.
> The real impact would be on GitHub themselves, as they would lose any opportunity to help guide policy or technology at ICE or any other government agency.
There's about a 0% chance that a government agency would change anything about their policies based on what GitHub employees say. Companies that work on government contracts get "report cards" detailing the agency's satisfaction with their performance, and any other government agency can view the reports for that company, so it's in their best interest to try and get favorable reviews by doing what the agency wants.
It think it's pretty naive to expect that GitHub's contract with ICE gives them some kind of inside opportunity to help guide policy within the agency.
On the other hand, employees of ICE, who are actually inside do probably have some (admittedly limited) amount of leverage. It might by that if they are frustrated at losing access to tools that they previously thought worth paying for, they would attempt to exert that leverage for change.
Corps don't just get to magically do whatever they want without repercussion. The purpose of corps is to better humanity, and they should certainly fear "the people" if they are are doing the opposite.
GitHub perhaps, but we are talking Microsoft, and we are talking other corporate powers. One of the things I hear all the time is that corporations influence public policy _too much_. Look at ALEC, look at PACs etc.
Companies _can_ influence policy. Look at Microsoft saying they won't offer facial recognition until laws are passed.
Right, Microsoft is influencing policy at ICE by refusing to provide them facial recognition software, which prevents them from having facial recognition software.
In general, if the idea is that a tool makes you more efficient/effective, denying that tool does the opposite. Making ICE less effective seems laudable, so why not throw roadblocks, even small ones, in the way?
Because ICE as an organization isn't purely bad, nor is it purely good. As it is made up of people, there are good and bad. ICE also fights sex trafficking, which to me is akin to modern day slavery. I want ICE to have every tool at their disposal to fight sex trafficking.
If we stop ICE from using these tools, are you saying that sex trafficking victims are less worthy of help than detained immigrants? How do you draw that line?
No, but there are other organizations that I can donate time, money, and resources to to combat human trafficking. So any negative impact by defunding ICE's human trafficking response can be offset.
> I want ICE to have every tool at their disposal to fight sex trafficking.
I want a different organization to fight sex trafficking. If it's an important enough issue, it can be split from the organization that imprisons children, which is....not too far from what you're lauding ICE from preventing.
There's 3 times more slaves today than during the period of the transatlantic slave trade. Estimated to be 40m people, 10m of which are children, mainly in Africa and Asia.[0]
Employees who want to get paid by the company and at the same time trying to control whom their company should or should not do business with should re-apply for the job that matches their beliefs.
Company cannot and should not have to comply with myriad of conflicting opinions and/or try to satisfy wishes of different opinionated groups of different flavors.
This "let's please twitter mob" mentality is hurting our country.
I don't understand the calls to abolish ICE. Open borders are simply not a realistic policy in the current world. We can barely keep things operating as it is in the US, what would happen when tens of millions of largely unskilled immigrants were to stream across the border? Do people actually think nothing negative will happen?
The specific incarnation of border controls as ICE isn't the only way to control the border.
I'm sure that some people are advocating for completely open borders without concern for consequences. But I think the larger call is saying that ICE as it currently is conceived as a paramilitary-style organization is not the way control the border and manage immigration.
>But I think the larger call is saying that ICE as it currently is conceived as a paramilitary-style organization is not the way control the border and manage immigration.
This seems like what people on the right do with Trump. He'll say some outlandish or indefensible thing on Twitter and pundits will walk it back and lay out some complex argument to support it. It's not convincing in either case. It's the same with abolish the police. The protesters seem to be very clear that's what thy want and people will go to great lengths explaining oh no what they really want is to divert funding to community groups and improve training they don't actually want to abolish the police. Like what? Is anyone stupid enough to believe this stuff?
What protesters? I attended a march in NYC this weekend and the protesters demands included shifting $1 billion of the NYPD budget to community, education, and social welfare programs, and a $500 million investment fund for black businesses. No one was screaming to get rid of all cops everywhere forever.
Are you genuinely seeking to understand, or do you hols these protesters in too much disdain to actually listen to them?
Feel free to try and explain it away but to say no one is calling for this would at this point be willful blindness. I have complete freedom to think that many of the protests demands are dangerous, poorly thought out and outright foolish.
I didn’t say no one is calling for anything. I said they weren’t at the march I attended. I think you’re arguing against a strawman here. Most protesters are not demanding we have zero police.
And yes, you have the freedom to think anything you want.
If there’s one interpretation that makes sense and one interpretation where thousands of millions of people are just stupid or crazy, it’s worth going with the interpretation that makes sense.
There are only so many politically "inelastic" companies and organizations. Customers or employees are bound to have a political opinion that rubs against the company's line(s) of work. The only exceptions are large utilities (e.g. protesting the use of water and electricity in response to climate change) and small retail businesses (which often proudly display their politics and attract like-minded customers).
BLM platform explicitly calls for an "end to all jails, detention centers, youth facilities and prisons as we know them." So maybe GitHub CEO should have not said anything, but he did and its fair for the public (including GitHub employees) to drive accountability to the BLM platform.
And this says nothing of corporate political spending. From the perspective of a dissenting employee, what is the difference between having co-workers who demand an end to ICE contracts (in response to leadership public supporting BLM platform), and collecting salary from a company that donates to politicians who want to abolish ICE?
> Gas stations and steak restaurants (or whatever businesses are considered conservative/republican) refusing to serve democrat/liberal customers?
Having lived through a year long political crisis in Hong Kong, this is actively happening right now. There's even a whole "yellow economic" (meaning, protestors) where they support businesses who also support them. Some of these businesses refuse to serve customers who don't speak Cantonese, or even recently refused to serve customers who wear a government issued face mask.
Businesses who were considered "against" the protestors, got trashed or set on fire.
Whatever their political stance is, I personally refuse to go to any business who's actively refusing to serve customers based on their political stance. You wouldn't feel right refusing customers based on their skin color or religion, so why do it based on politics?
If you take a paycheck from someone, you're implicitly agreeing to carry out their instructions and their vision for their business. If, over time, you have a moral issue with that vision, the best thing for you and that company is to find work elsewhere that is a better fit for your values. It's unreasonable to agree to work for someone and then proceed to undermine their business because it doesn't align with your particular political beliefs.
This would achieve the same ends as protesting, but in a much more ethical manner. Unethical companies would eventually have a harder time finding qualified workers and would suffer accordingly. What wouldn't be happening, is a bunch of people agreeing to serve a business in exchange for money and then reneging on that agreement while still drawing a paycheck.
This is particularly true for higher skilled workers who have other options.
Yes, that's what unemployment means. This has nothing to do with shared values though. I could absolutely work for some company whose values I don't share if they pay me enough.
I’m starting to wonder if “politics” in english has a different meaning than in spanish.
“Everything is politic” is meaningless to me, in the same way that “everything is top priority” is. If everything is top priority, nothing is top priority.
Yeah this is going over the line as ICE isn’t purely used for evil purposes. They do need to protect boarders, what you need is to change some of ICE’s policies. Is sort of like demanding To end all contracts with companies that does not have a have a good diversity policy
I have no idea how these organisations can’t see that their actions turn off vast swathes of those who regard what’s happening in the west as a weaponisation of race in the furtherance of destabilising our (flawed but still the best) civilisations & by doing so, lose the trust of these folk forever.
It saddens me that we collectively rolled over & allowed our software to be politicised, by flagging or cancelling those that see through the narrative & dissented.
Illegal migration is not enforced by race. Nobody has the right to live in another country, particularly if they have entered the country without permission.
This is more an indication of how political extremists use race-baiting to push forward changes they want.
Why do people on the west coast actively try to conflate their employers with their personal politics? To everyone else in the world this is so utterly bizarre. This, in addition to the high cost of living, is why I refuse to work there.
Are open source software licences immoral? Think about it, by making tools open source with MIT or GPL, you are basically allowing anyone (including known immoral actors causing great harm in the world) to freely use them.
By the logic in this thread, it would be more ethical to use a more ambiguous license that allows the creator of the tool to yank the rug out from under any of its users at any time.
My question is not so much about ICE, who I personally feel would be reasonable to refuse to do business with in the current circumstance (caveat: I'm not an expert here and could be wrong). My question is about next "unethical" organization that GitHub has a contract with, and the next and the next after that. Do employees have veto power on revenue-generating contracts, generally? Or is ICE an exceptional case? Should new contracts undergo a vote among employees? What if 51% of employees oppose ending the contract with ICE? Would the other side be satisfied then?
I don't see either approach being morally wrong (granting or denying to employees contract veto power), they're both just different ways of governing an organization. These seem like the underlying questions however, and it seems to me that those calling to end the ICE contract should be prepared to answer them.
Slippery slope is a logical “fallacy”, just like ad hominems or mistaking correlation with causation, to name two examples that, for reasons escaping me, are pointed out incessantly on HN while the former rarely is.
I'm not clear where slippery slope ends and generalizing a question such as "how does GH/MSFT determine who to do business with?" or putting a decision into context begins. I don't see this as being at "the top of a slope" as much as already being on the slope. This was not an isolated request, from TFA: "At Microsoft-owned GitHub, the parent company’s concession only served to reinvigorate internal opposition to a controversial contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement." So this is not a one-off question, the question of ICE is already part of a sequence of demands/concessions.
To use a metaphor, Alice: give me a dollar; Bob: OK here's a dollar; Alice: Thanks but now I need five dollars; Bob: are you just going to ask me for $10 next? Where does this end? Alice: Aha! That's a slippery slope fallacy.
Slippery slope says “if you do A then it will lead to B and eventually Z.” At the moment, we’re not at “A” we’re already at “B,” so I think asking about the rest of the sequence is reasonable.
If management is making concessions to satisfy the workforce's sense of ethics, I think it's reasonable for management to say "OK, after this concession will your sense of ethics be satisfied for the time being? Or is this part of a larger package of demands, and if so what are they?"
To ask a party making concessions to not consider the context at all, the lead up or the implied consequences ("if you did X you'd be a hypocrite to not also do Y") is unreasonable.
I'm glad they aren't vetting who can use their platform based on arbitrary ideological whims, but I'm still salty about them caving to demands to change the default branch name to something other than "master".
We really need to stop this sort of mob thought policing that has taken over the internet and bullies corporations and individuals into conformance. This is not new, but it seems particularly egregious right now. But how do you stop/mitigate internet mobs without "streisanding" even bigger mobs?
> As Friedman spoke, dozens of employees expressed frustration and outrage in a company Slack channel with more than 1,200 people, according to screenshots reviewed by The Times.
We are letting small minorities (dozens out of thousands) amplify their outrage and impose their demands on everyone else. Same thing happens on Twitter, and I really don't like that. It's like that one xkcd[0] except instead of "the people listening" being rational and reasonable, "the people listening" are an angry minority on social media stirring up everyone around them into a blood frenzy.
I'm part Native American, and while I support BLM, Native Americans are facing the exact same tragic societal problems and discrimination as black people. If GitHub supports BLM they should also support Native American Lives Matter.
Usually downvoting here means that a comment is too close to the truth or that it deviates from the officially sanctioned topic, here BLM.
So some regard any deviance as an affront or "whataboutism".
Personal anecdotes are also often downvoted, since neither the salon socialists nor the monetarists want to hear them. It is crucial that one stays in one's own bubble.
There are a few comments in here already decrying “politicization”.
Guess what? Politics are interwoven in every aspect of our lives. You cannot choose to “avoid” them; even suggesting you can be politically neutral is a political stance that comes from a place of privilege, because only the privileged can avoid experiencing negative political consequences inside their bubble.
Collaboration with ICE is collaboration with ICE, whether it’s “just hosting code” or actually contracted by them to develop their systems. It’s the same deal with Amazon or Facebook or whoever. If you work for them you need to admit to yourself that you are an enabler. Most people can’t admit that to themselves, so they maintain an unhealthy cognitive dissonance to keep going.
And it hurts when that dissonance is shattered.
Comparing supporting ICE to a marriage is nonsense, and thinking you can somehow help them be better by keeping them as a customer? A totally naive concept that has been shown not to work in practice since the US 2016 election. (In fact, supporting the monster makes them stronger; if it made them weaker, why would they keep using your product?)
The reckoning we are seeing in tech is long overdue. As developers we are no longer seeing our actions as “politically neutral” and are starting to understand the power we yield collectively to make positive change to our industry.
Nat Friedman is on the wrong side of history here. These empty words are no longer sufficient. Hopefully he figures that out before his tenure at GitHub comes to an end.
So who decides? Do companies now need a chief political officer? Do they do some sort of political review of each new customer? What issues do they use to decide on? Do they deny Apple or Nike because of overseas labour conditions?
IMO it's foolish for a company to wade into these waters at all unless activism is part of their brand. If you signal you're going to take a stand it ends up having to be around everything and people are going to have a lot of conflicting agendas. Or you could just sell software tools to people who pay for them.
Companies can start choosing based on what they feel is right, rather than what is just immediately financially beneficial, since there is no such thing as not "wading into these waters". When presented with the option to sell services to ICE or facial recognition to abusive and murderous police departments who do everything they can to avoid accountability, the executives of that company are explicitly making a choice. Are we okay with our software being used to detain and abuse immigrants? Are we okay with our software being used for targeted harassment and state violence against people whom the state has targeted?
The only people who consider that "not taking a stand" are the people who don't suffer as a result of that choice. Thus, as the parent poster said, this is a support of the status quo (or an escalation of it) by privileged people who will never suffer the consequences of that choice. Saying "the abuse of police power and the imprisonment of asylum seekers has nothing to do with me or my company" is saying "I'm okay with all of this because it doesn't affect me directly".
As we've seen with Facebook, trying to "not take a stand" is actually taking a stand, and saying "we won't fact check obvious lies or take down calls for violence by the military against our own citizens" is saying "we're okay with our platform being used to erode democracy and threaten people's lives". We're seeing now that Zuckerberg, then, is completely okay with the effective dissolution of everything that the US claims to stand for, as long as it means that Facebook won't be broken up as a result of their unethical and illegal business practices.
In this way, Facebook isn't "not taking a stand", they're specifically taking a stand against corporate and social accountability. Because of their position in the market that means that they can directly and indirectly affect what news people see, what groups people are recommended, and what politics people have, and they don't want to give up that power, so they'll implicitly support a government which will let them keep it, no matter what the consequences to anyone else.
There's no such thing as not "wading into these waters"; only following your ethics vs. signing another contract and making a few million bucks from it.
> So who decides? Do companies now need a chief political officer?
Companies make "political" decisions every single day, in literally everything they do. Just as Apple and Nike make the _decision_ to employ the questionable overseas labour practices, providing services to them is also a _decision_. The whole point of the corporate executive branch is to make decisions for the company, it's the difference between McDonalds and a bunch of random stores making hamburgers. You can't hand-wave your way out of accountability with statements like this whenever you start having to face hard decisions like this.
> Companies make "political" decisions every single day, in literally everything they do.
That's incorrect.
The vast majority of companies are small and medium sized enterprises who just try to make it through. Does the launderette in the high street make political decisions? The car dealership? The scrap metal yard?
Those all make political decisions. Let's take the car dealership: What are your hiring practices? Are the cars foreign, or domestic? How do you incentivize your salesforce? How much (if any) insurance do you provide employees? How do you provide credit? Do you sell cars to people with bad credit who you don't believe will be able to make payments? How do you handle missed payments? When do you decide to repossess a car? Do you push low emissions and electric vehicles? There's a ton of politics behind literally all of these (and more) questions.
How many large corporations really have a spotless record? (At least from the point of view of activists). You could also not sell to microsoft because of antitrust, or Google and Facebook for privacy issues, or boeing because of how executives made bad decisions around safety, or McDonalds over pay, or.... pretty much every company does something people wont like. I just think it's a slippery slope and not every company or person needs to be an activist around everything. We all have to pick and choose our battles.
Every decision made at the executive level is inherently a political decision, because someone will benefit.
But not just affirmative actions: not cancelling a contract with an organization that builds concentration camps is making a strong political statement in itself.
They “waded into the waters” the moment they accepted the contract with ICE. What they are seeing now is that their actions have consequences. And while you don’t necessarily intend the consequences of your actions, you must accept them.
Not a direct reply to your comment, but more of an adjacent one.
> Guess what? Politics are interwoven in every aspect of our lives. You cannot choose to “avoid” them;
But I do choose to avoid them in my personal life. A private company can do whatever the hell they want, whether I approve or not, it's their right. I also believe it is my right to not care about politics and continue moving forward with my own life. For me, politics just end up making me upset. I can't think of a single situation that becomes political that ends up making me happy in the long run. As an individual, _most_ politics doesn't affect me and spending my time on it just ends up making my life less enjoyable.
That said, there are some political issues we all care about more so, and we may pay attention to that more. But in a way, I do choose to avoid them (as an individual).
Again, I don't mean this as an attack on your comment, just my adjacent thoughts.
Edit: I do understand how fortunate I am to be in the situation I'm in. I didn't mean (but I see that it came off this way) that everyone should do this, and I didn't mean (again, I understand that I didn't explain myself above) that I'm applying those ideas to this situation (my mind immediately went to the previous flood of COVID stories).
You don't avoid them, you ignore them, and being able to ignore them is a political privilege. A child in an ICE internment camp does not have that privilege.
A child in an ICE internment camp doesn't have to worry about local property tax rates though. As GP said, there are very few pieces of politics that affect them personally, that doesn't mean none. Just as it also means that no bit of politics affects every single person meaningfully.
I hope you're aware that being able to ignore politics is a privilege that you're consciously utilizing.
Some people will get affected by "politics" and, thus, must either be silent and suffer or start to care about politics.
I could be wrong and politics do impact you negatively and...you just don't care. That's a fair stance I guess, as long as you understand that by doing nothing you're essentially accepting that negative impact.
The parent comment touched on this, but wanted to add on - just hoping you're conscious of this truth
You're completely right. I've very fortunate, and that does give me the ability to ignore certain things. I make sure to have an understanding of what is going on, and my active ignorance is more of a way to avoid things I'm already aware of, where my knowledge of the event doesn't help progress anything.
The example that pops in my head first is COVID. I knew what was going on with COVID and how to keep myself and others safe. My issue was that it was circulating everything 24/7, while not offering new information the vast majority of the time. It became very anxiety inducing to see a ton of articles every day that end up just being filler with tangential evidence of nothing new.
But you're completely correct, I'm very fortunate, and I should have clarified more on where and when I choose to ignore certain things.
You are arguing with a group of technocratic ideologues who truly believe in the myths that America is a meritocracy and that the free market can solve all problems. That privilege doesn't exist and that everything that comes out of Elon Musk's and Sam Harris' mouth is not sanctimonious and self-important claptrap as it actually is, but instead beautiful eloquent words graced by intelligence and maturity.
I have attempted on numerous occasions to reason with this community over basic sociological concepts and have repeatedly failed. I have given up on convincing people in SV the truths of the lives of people outside of their bubble. I recommend you do the same and engage in activism. It's more productive. Godspeed.
It’s understandable to give up on a worthwhile cause because you’ve lost the energy for it, but it doesn’t make sense to actively encourage others to give up on it, if the cause was ever important to you at all.
A problem with this line of reasoning is that there is a potentially infinite number of issues, all of which could affect you or someone vulnerable. However, people have issues that are more immediate to them and which they have a more direct responsibility over. For example, If I don't personally champion solutions to police brutality, someone else might, but if I don't do my job and earn a living, there isn't really anyone else who really can or should be expected to pick up the slack.What's more, peple need the mental space to think about the issues that they are going to take a stand on which means that it takes time and energy to address different issues and they need to prioritize. This is one reason why it's reasonable to restrict political discourcse to certain spheres, because doing so is necessary if we are to take into account basic human limitations.
Not entirely true. The essence of the libertarian platform is a political platform that tries its best to ignore you as an individual and let you be free.
If libertarians were running things, you'd be left not entirely but largely alone.
As a minority, who has repeatedly faced discrimination; at various jobs, airports, in restaurants, and at social events, I cannot ignore it.
Also I believe it is a moral obligation to stand up for weak. So even if you are privileged enough to be not affected by politics, you should participate in it for your weaker friends and family.
Exactly this. Choosing to remove politics from your life is an acknowledgement that very little good comes of it.
It comes down to “Control what you can control.”
So much of politics comes down to trying to control other people, whether it be their thoughts, actions, view points, money or rights. It’s an unhealthy topic that tends to leave everyone involved angry.
Choosing to ignore it is an acknowledgement that you don’t want the anger and that the benefit of your anger is rarely, if ever, worth it.
I once met a man who was a who believed deeply in aestheticism. His perception was that the only thing that mattered was the aesthetics of the thing, nothing more. Morality took a second seat, as did everything else. I could not, for the life of me, convince him that life is a bit more multidimensional than that. With each topic, he would aestheticize it, if you will, then speak of how his aesthetization of the topic proved his point. "See: aesthetics!"
It's no different than those who claim everything is "political", which of course all too clearly betrays their steadfast belief in "historical materialism". If you make everything political, refuse to see anything except through a political lens, then yes - everything is political.
I must say, the man of aesthetics was much more interesting to talk to.
even suggesting you can be politically neutral is a political stance that comes from a place of privilege, because only the privileged can avoid experiencing negative political consequences inside their bubble
Yeah... no. I’m politically active, I support a variety of causes. But I can’t support every cause - I’m not privileged enough to be a full-time “activist” of which there seem to be a surprising number these days - and sometimes I just want to write some damn code and focus on that and put food on the table and donate what I can after.
> only the privileged can avoid experiencing negative political consequences inside their bubble.
> Nat Friedman is on the wrong side of history here. These empty words are no longer sufficient. Hopefully he figures that out before his tenure at GitHub comes to an end.
These statements seem at odds. If privileged people are insulated from negative political consequences, then why is he at risk of losing his job for taking the wrong political stance?
There are many ways how his tenure can come to an end. I am expressing a hope that he figures it out while he is still in a position to change things with his power as CEO.
As for people who lose their job for doing the wrong thing, the media is currently awash in those stories.
Even he if loses his job, he’ll still be quite privileged given his wealth and status.
>Guess what? Politics are interwoven in every aspect of our lives.
Yes, but also companies exist literally only to make money. Companies can't exist without workers. Once a company finds itself in a position of conflict of interest between political views of workers and point of existence of the company - where contracts bring money... we're going to see interesting things.
I wonder, who will break first?
The company will decide it's better to bend to political opinions of employees and end the contract == pay a lot of $money$ for breaking the contract early without delivery and set another precedent where employees decide how and with whom company makes money = uncertain company. Who will make future contracts with such company? Would you outsource your project delivery to a company where employees decide whether your project/office/political stand is good or bad?
Or maybe employees will decide they don't want to work for a company and risk unemployment? Who will risk employing a person who rebels against board members of a company and causes financial damages over broken contract?
I would like to see 100s of GitHub employees leaving GitHub and MS to prove their point, rather than working on the contract, being paid 10x salary of their immigrant desk cleaners and shouting how bad it is the contract exists.
So you don't agree with employees disagreeing with their company hosting code or developing tools for the Chinese government to run their concentration camps? Like the parent says, being non-political IS being political. You cannot separate it.
What is so bad about employees at a company having a say in what type of work the company does?
>What is so bad about employees at a company having a say in what type of work the company does?
No, I don't think there is anything wrong with it, that's how we can change direction of the company and produce good. I think that's a very problematic path filled with mine-lands where employees decide how company makes money. GitHub can just outsource this project to Russia, Australia or India, still make money and deliver the project. Silencing voiced of those who speak, but still, being on a path of conflict of interests between board members and workers.
> Yes, but also companies exist literally only to make money.
Companies exist because society, represented by elected governments, considers them a useful concept. Their activity is assumed to be beneficial to society without any explicit requirements to that effect, because they operate in a free market where Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand generally applies.
It is strange how this is always being used to justify any and all morally reprehensible behavior by companies. If you expect people to, on occasion, go above and beyond the minimum required by law, there is no reason to hold companies to a lesser standard.
There are infinite examples where society noticed some less-than-ideal behavior in the pursuit of profits and acted on it, by, for example, legislating environmental, labor, or consumer safety standards.
At the other end of the spectrum, companies do regularly consider ethics in their decisions. This happens so often in fact, most any American CXO would be in jail if the crowd that keeps repeating that any consideration but shareholder value is prohibited by law were right. Google left China at some point for ethical reasons. Apple has invested earlier and more than competitors into environmental improvements. On labor issues, they have often done the right thing where a company like Nike, faced with very similar questions, has not.
Almost tautologically, any publicly known selfless act I could give as an example can be dismissed as still being done solely in the pursuit of money, by being PR exercises. But that just points at how easy it is to get around this fictional requirement to be amoral caricatures of capitalists: do as much good as you want, and call it PR!
Or, in Github’s case, point out how reliant you are on attracting talent. And ditch ICE in the name of recruitment, and, therefore, future profits.
I see another commenter has suffered downvotes for blankly replying "false" to this, so I'll try to be more substantive.
This is confusing symptom and cause. We have evolved a system where companies are defined as having profit as being their "raison d'être" but that's not the same as saying that's why they exist in the first place.
Companies were created to solve problems, those problems required resources and those resources required finance. Economic systems evolved to place individuals with capital in the position of being providers of such finance, who demanded profit as a return, and as such redefined the impetus of companies as existing to provide them with that return.
> Who will make future contracts with such company? Would you outsource your project delivery to a company where employees decide whether your project/office/political stand is good or bad?
I'd gladly prefer to contract with a company that's not known for supporting agencies running concentration camps. This political moment will pass, but twenty years from now after this history chapters have been written on ICE, we still have to live with the choices we made.
> Who will risk employing a person who rebels against board members of a company and causes financial damages over broken contract?
Plenty of companies. Our skill set is very much in demand.
Yes but they understand that in free market, they have to spend money on quality employees to make money. Hence, people still invest in companies where employees are treated better than their competitors.
Unhappy employees is not good for business over long term. That is why you see in news that racist, sexiest, or other bad actors getting fired even when they were top performers.
For a lot of them, no. Also, even if they only want to make money, they will have different opinions about how different company strategies will succeed, and be interested in different time frames.
it isnt typically the only goal, no. Many people own stocks and stakes in companies because they believe in what the company is doing, producing, or working towards.
>As developers we are no longer seeing our actions as “politically neutral” and are starting to understand the power we yield collectively to make positive change to our industry.
The only thing it changes in the industry is who gets a contract.
> You cannot choose to “avoid” them; even suggesting you can be politically neutral is a political stance that comes from a place of privilege, because only the privileged can avoid experiencing negative political consequences inside their bubble.
There are well-known historical analogues for many of the people now attempting to refrain from making political statements. Namely, there were those Germans in the Nazi era who were neither pro-Nazi nor openly anti-Nazi and who underwent so-called "internal emigration". And there were those Soviet dissidents who didn’t want to have any part in that decades-long fight between the West ("You Communist countries don't respect individual liberty and free markets!") and the Socialist Bloc ("You capitalist nations don’t respect workers, lynch black people and engage in colonialist oppression!").
Neither of those groups were "privileged", indeed these particular analogues were living in oppressive regimes that were suspicious of lack of enthusiasm and these people often suffered for that. But now, from our modern vantage point, we can have a lot of sympathy for them. They made a decision that was right for their own lives, and some of what these groups’ artists created may not have been fashionable at the time among all the polemic, but now it is seen to be very moving and have great staying power.
Of course, a big corporation with large government contracts is quite different from individuals choosing to refrain from being involved, or a small circle of people thereof that constructs its own shared private world to retreat into, separated from contemporary debates. But still, I think that we should refrain from condemning cases where one group of people has not joined its peers in adopting political statements or actions, even if we strongly sympathize with those political movements and believe them just.
> It’s the same deal with Amazon or Facebook or whoever. If you work for them you need to admit to yourself that you are an enabler.
Perhaps consider that most people are aware:
- that ICE exists
- that ICE enforces migration law
- that having ICE as a customer helps the US enforce migration laws
Perhaps also consider that supporting the US having migration laws is a mainstream opinion outside a very small cadre of people in a few US cities, so very few people mind that companies serve them.
Honest question and not taking sides on either aisle.
The incarceration and family separation started with the last administration. It’s well documented so don’t ask me to cite sources. Google is your friend.
Let’s say November comes and we have blue in the White House, do those calling for their employer to stop working with ICE/Pentagon/FBI/etc, go quiet and things go back to normal in the news for them?
I think that’s something that needs an answer because a lot of these companies have been working with the government prior to 2016.
If Github/Microsoft start picking and choosing which agencies to host, I would say it's somewhat likely and understandable that they be blacklisted from future government contracts and contract renewals.
It's also somewhat likely that in such a case, as we have seen with the Huawei moves recently, the US government could halt sale/export of tooling to any other government.
I'm curious, if Github does decide to end their ICE contract, if this will follow the 'slippery slope' into then combing other companies ICE works with. Surely there's a bank ICE holds their money in, do they have a Github contract? ICE had a contract with Chef (they don't any more), but if they still did, would Github threaten to cutoff Chef's Github contract if they didn't drop them?
And that's all assuming ICE really is the worse Company/Organization that Github has a contract with. As soon as you open up this can of worms, how do you define the line? And even once you do define the line, there will always be edge cases. And once there's enough examples, companies are going to stop going with Github just to avoid the possibility of having to move forcibly later. After all, what Github provides not only has a large number of competitors, both paid and open source, but is a frontend for an already free source control tool (Git itself). Cancelling the ICE contract is an inconvenience at best, ICE's day to day activities wouldn't be affected in the slightest.
When people say they back Black Lives Matter, what does it mean? Is it real support for actual demands or symbolic and emotional support?
According to wikipedia these are BLM's policy demands:
Policy demands
In 2016, Black Lives Matter and a coalition of 60 organizations affiliated with BLM called for decarceration in the United States, reparations for slavery in the United States, an end to mass surveillance, investment in public education, not incarceration, and community control of the police: empowering residents in communities of color to hire and fire police officers and issue subpoenas, decide disciplinary consequences and exercise control over city funding of police.
Nobody commenting here seems to have any experience with ICE or their procedures or the criminal justice system, or the staggering difference between legal and illegal immigration.
Most of this seems to be driven by headlines on social media rather than any true understanding of the issues.
People always think unions are for benefits, pay, and safety. Tech needs a union that can fight for ethical coding. Workers need a way to band together and say no, we cannot in good faith work on a project.
What does ICE (a big flawed but necessary federal border guarding agency) have to do with BLM (loose movement to ensure equal treatment of US citizens of color by local police departments and preventing horrible abuses)?
I see this as a parallel to deplatforming, but instead of working to silence a particular speaker by shutting off access to popular distribution channels, here we have calls to shut off a company/government's access to basic software development tools.
I think this is a particularly distinctive case, for example, by comparison to the recent news that Amazon is blocking law enforcement access to Rekognition (facial recognition). Facial recognition and AI in general is fraught with massive ethical concerns to the point where leading developers/researchers in the field are actively abandoning it (e.g. YOLO). There's no such concern about development of source control, certainly no more so than would apply to any business productivity software, or virtually any networking, infrastructure, or database projects. Interestingly, this may signal a developing rift between Open Source licensing ethos which strictly forbids limitation on use, running head-on with political agendas which would seek to limit access to software based on the user. Licensing isn't really a concern in Github's case, but will be a consideration that developers have to make when choosing a license in the future, namely... do I release my software as Open Source and give up my right to stop Bad People from using it for their own benefit?
For a company like GitHub (owned by Microsoft lest we forget) to cut off access to a branch of the Federal government would be extremely foolish, but I believe also not only counter-productive, but also ethically questionable and politically dangerous. I don't believe Github (or most any workplace) should be a political battleground for debates over border policy, and I believe that a vocal minority attempting to weaponizing neutral parties like Github leads to bad business outcomes (lost income, hostile workplaces) as well as bad political outcomes (breeding resentment and polarization).
As far as the particular issue of cutting off ICE from its source control software, I think a less political assessment would find that it's in the best interest of immigrants and refugees for ICE to have top-notch software custom built for the populations that they oversee. I'm not particularly familiar with the many tasks that ICE officers perform on a daily basis, but I know that things like trying to process hundreds of thousands of refugees applying for asylum, or trying to place ~50,000 unaccompanied minors in homes throughout the country is a truly massive logistical challenge, and we don't want a single child slipping through the cracks. Cutting off ICE access to software development tools IMO is actively harming these populations.
How does the HN sorting algorithm work when this goes from top page to the bottom of the second page despite having by far the most points and is also a relatively fresh post?
Say you have a SaaS that companies can use, for the sake of argument let’s say it’s Dropbox.
One day a military company uses your product. Should you ban them?
Are all military companies evil? Or are weapons sometimes necessary?
Let’s say you ban them. Where do you draw the line? FBI? Police? Private investigators? Political parties with messages you think are hateful? With messages you just disagree strongly with?
I'm surprised we haven't seen more Balkanization of services. When IBM and others announced they're not selling facial recognition technology to governments, I have to imagine there are companies who are absolutely willing to. Maybe this is happening already and I am not informed.
Also this for social media like Facebook and Twitter.
If working with ICE is so reprehensible, why are none of these employees taking advantage of their in-demand skillset and moving on to companies that better respect their values?
I'm sympathetic with those who point out that corporations typically have more leverage than individual employees, and that changing jobs is not so easy for those who are less privileged. That category, though, of "less privileged" with regards to employment flexibility simply does not apply to the average Github employee, at all, as sircmpwn frequently points out.
Furthermore, regardless of which side of this debate you stand on, it is definitely disheartening to see people so vehemently against this relationship yet do NOT back up their feelings with actions. I cannot help but scoff when I see people on Github with "stop ICE" profile pictures. It's nothing but a profound selfishness: wanting to be on the self-perceived "right side of history" but not so much so that you set your origin to Gitlab or SourceHut instead...
It seems weird to expect them to jump directly to the nuclear option of quitting. Making a demand like this is a first step, and it may turn out not to be necessary to quit if the employer caves.
Fair enough! Though, you do realize that the whole ICE thing has been baking for nearly a year now? The central question I think is: at what point does the employee realize that discussion is more for his/her sake than for the sake of actual change?
Isn't this the same argument as "If you hate America so much why don't you just leave"? Don't employees have more power to change their employer if they are still employees?
I agree that employees have the power to change their employer, I merely am pointing out a potential other option that I rarely see discussed. Github is one thing, and an organization that I think is better than most, I think I was mainly thinking of other equivalents, like Facebook, which has _never_ been anything but reprehensible, and yet employees try to believe in this "change from inside" narrative. At a certain point, it is only self-delusion.
To be honest, I dislike America, and do plan to leave it in the next couple of years. I've always considered it a reasonable option :)
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I think a lot of these tech workers want to justify their stance and feel like they did something to help. Anyone working for Facebook, Google, Amazon and now Github needs to reconcile that they are working for companies that throw morals out the door for money (which is what business usually comes down too) and deal with that in a certain way, or leave.
Github is not making money on its ICE contract though. They took that money to donate it to causes to support immigrants and policy change. I actually think they doubled the amount.
Github from a political standpoint cant drop one govt agency because they stand to lose all their other govt contracts. And any other buyer who now has to now consider they will be dropped if they come down on the wrong side of Github employees' moral compass. Github as a business, especially one now owned by Microsoft cannot do that.
I think Github has tried to do as much as it can to support policy reform without irreparably damaging their business. If that is still not enough employees need to leave at this point. There are many others who would love to work at Github and can reconcile with the situation that Github is in and accept that they are trying to change policy rather than drop the agency and hurt their business.
Private companies should not be expected to play moral authorities in political issues. They are there to make a profit doing anything that is legal, giving into employee demands on political issues is a road they shouldn't take , it will set a bad precedent.
Yeah, but then GitLab will be pressured to back out, and then BitBucket will be too, then ICE will use Gitea, but then the pressure will come back to GitHub to boot Gitea off their platform unless they write ICE out of the license, etc. it's a never ending mess that will harm the software development community.
It would be considered a bad look for vc-supported companies to accept ICE after this. Which is all the better for smaller bootstrapped competitors outside SV, or even outside the US
Is there some way around the paywall I am running into, or are we all discussing this without having read the article, or are most of you LA Times subscribers?
I fully support steps being taken to reign in police and ICE, however it's still painfully ironic that CHAZ currently has been prioritizing enforcing borders, has roaming groups (peaceful and otherwise) ousting dissidents or those deemed as dissidents and verifying "citizenship".
I went to the CHAZ to throw a frisbee with friends yesterday, and literally nothing you just said is true. Be aware that the Seattle Police Department is running an active disinformation campaign about the CHAZ, which is eagerly lapped up by people predisposed to believe the lies.
Friedman made his bed years ago in this regard. I don't blame him though because the same people causing shit for him now will also pull the "silence is violence" or "remaining silent is being complicit" angle should he now tow the line.
And if he disagrees with them, well, look how quickly they ran to the LA Times with their private internal comms slack screenshots.
Corporations are people. If they don't act ethically, we can't expect people to act ethically.
Ending a contract with an agency that runs concentration camps is good. Better, though, is to not accept any contracts with any government that runs concentration camps.
Small steps are good. Big steps are better.
PS: great fear from all paying customers that run concentration camps that an internet mob could separate them from their code at any time -- sounds like a good policy to me. Not as good as "Don't be evil", but reasonably close.
Regardless of whether you are technically correct in referring to ICE as running concentration camps (IMO you are grossly mistaken), statements like these simply act to shut down debate on a topic and suck the air out of the conversation. They should be avoided entirely, and flagged when they occur.
I've made a similar mistaken before, and been called out on it.
Your choice of language by saying "concentration camps" is unproductively hyperbolic and reminiscent of Nazis killing Jews in WW2. People found to have been here illegally are being kept in detention centers until deportation or trial. Nobody is getting gassed or burned in ovens.
In the U.S. context, concentration camp is used almost exclusively to refer to the extermination camps run by Nazis in World War II. I know not everyone on here is American, but that bit of information is useful for understanding why so many people make the association between concentration camps and the extermination of Jews in WWII. And it also explains why it is disingenuous of Americans to state that the US government is running concentration camps; it is technically correct according to the dictionary definition, but it is not correct according to lay usage in the United States.
That's a very roundabout way to say "Americans have a comfortably whitewashed, frankly ignorant version of reality and everybody else should walk on eggshells to help them maintain it".
Concentration camps were not solely the purview of the Nazis, and already had quite the history before they even came on the scene. In fact, while we're on the topic of World War II, the US government held people of Japanese decent in concentration camps during that war - which perhaps partly explains there's such an aggressive effort to make those camps a "Nazi thing".
The rest of the world doesn't have any obligation to help you hide from facing and interrogating your own history.
FWIW, I think you're being needlessly antagonistic. I'm trying to help the misunderstanding between Europeans and Americans on this issue (and leveling criticism against people using the term in a certain way in the American context—ICE is an American government agency, after all). Different cultures use words to mean different things. And I can tell you that, in the American context, concentration camp = Nazis killing Jews and internment camp = Americans putting Japanese Americans in camps. However you think it should be, that's the way things are on the ground here.
As a result, calling whatever ICE is doing "concentration camps" doesn't make sense in the American context, unless maybe you're an academic or specialist speaking to there academics or specialists. And it's actually worse than "doesn't make sense in the American context", since it makes people who are only familiar with the American understanding of the term think that you are a deranged ideologue. And that's bad for discourse and finding a shared understanding, which I think we can all agree is a good thing.
But does the phrase internment camp actually bring to mind abuses such as denying children hygiene supplies such as toothbrushes or basic necessities like blankets in an American reader? The separation of families? The disappearance of children?
If internment camp does not convey that then I think using a technically correct term such as concentration camp to ensure that people pay attention to these abuses is not just technically correct it actually conveys that this is more than "just" an internment camp.
If Americans do generally associate internment camp with that then fair enough call them internment camps in general conversation.
And I'm trying to explain to you that it's not a "misunderstanding" - the US is hardly unique in using euphemisms and indirect language to downplay/distance itself from its actions. The "internment camps" Japanese Americans were held in were concentration camps, and frankly it's absurd to expect anybody else to pander to one's euphemisms for human rights abuses - the right thing to do is to consistently call it out no matter how uncomfortable it makes people, "American context" be damned. After all, we don't (for example) have much concern for the "Turkish context" when talking about the Armenian genocide either.
FWIW, I am not arguing for using the term “internment camp”. But the term “concentration camp” to describe whatever is happening at ICE detention centers doesn’t make sense. People are not being starved or worked to death, they are not being gassed, and they are not being put into ovens. And those things are what “concentration camp” means in America.
Merriam-Webster definition of concentration camp: “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners”
Japanese internment camps from WW2 easily meet that definition.
I think immigration detention centers easily meet that definition too: they hold large numbers of individuals whose only crime is being “the other”.
But they are not supposed to _stay_ there; ICE job in this case is to either avoid them ending up there or letting them out.
The _concentration_ part is missing. Without condoning anything of whatever wrongdoing ICE is doing all the people detained decided personally to embark in a trip that involved that risk.
Concentration camps need to have a concept of raking up a chunk of the population and removing them from society, as in concentrating a part of the population. Prisons are more of a concentration camp than ICE detention centers.
"Being illegally present in the U.S. has always been a civil, not criminal, violation of the INA[Immigration and Naturalization Act]"
"Criminal violations of the INA, on the other hand, include felonies and misdemeanors and are prosecuted in federal district courts. These types of violations include the bringing in and harboring of certain undocumented aliens, aliens (INA §275), ..."
As can already be deduced from the above, illegal entry is a misdemeanor. Only the bringing in, harbouring, and certain specific aggravation conditions raise it to a felony.
It is absolutely a criminal violation. Also there are 2 different acts: the crossing of the border (which even a US citizen can be charged for crossing illegally) and being in the country without permission.
Also misdemeanors are still considered serious crimes. I don't get where this hand-waving "because it's just a misdemeanor" comes from.
He is using the correct definition of concentration camp, you are the one in error. Concentration camps have existed outside Nazi Germany. Just because that was the most horrible instance doesn't mean that other instances stopped being "concentration camps" just like how a particularly horrible murder doesn't make a less violent murder into a non-murder.
The colloquial definition of the term is different from the technical definition, but they don't even meet the technical definition.
According to your definition, a concentration camp is an "internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment.."
People of certain minority groups aren't being rounded up. Illegal immigrants are being rounded up, regardless of race or nationality.
I'm not saying whether that's right or wrong, I'm just saying that calling them concentration camps is hyperbolic and uproductive.
Illegal immigrants are not at all entirely of a single minority group. And even though they are mostly of a single minority group, that fact is incidental to the fact that they are being put in detention facilities, it is not causal.
What the GP appears to be saying is that undocumented (not "illegal" -- people are not illegal) immigrants as a whole are a minority group. This is obviously true if you just look at the world outside.
It depends on how you define "correct," I suppose. If you're using it as a term of art, or you're a right wing think tank, then the correct term is "illegal alien." [0] It does not actually appear in Federal law, however. [1]
The IRS uses the term "undocumented alien," which is kind of a weird, mixed construction, referring to people as "aliens" (which I always find weird, but, okay), but not "illegal." [2]
Other government agencies, and, yes, immigration advocates, use the term "undocumented immigrant," which has the virtue of both being accurate, and not referring to individuals as "illegal," when the thing that's actually illegal is the fact that they are in the country without authorization (the "undocumented" part).
In summary, "illegal alien" as a term of art: fine in my book, just weird. "Undocumented alien": sure, if you're the IRS. But, otherwise, "undocumented immigrant" is the most technically accurate, because it's not the person who is illegal, as the word "illegal" modifying "immigrant" in the phrase would indicate, but their presence in the country that is illegal.
> Other government agencies, and, yes, immigration advocates, use the term "undocumented immigrant," which has the virtue of both being accurate
“undocumented alien” is arguably more accurate; alien is just a (somewhat dated outside of law) term for a foreigner, “immigrant” has further meaning of seeking to make the country their permanent home, which is not always the case for foreigners present without current documentation of legal presence.
"When Canada sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
Due process is the method that a society uses to determine whether people should be punished. The concentration camps under discussion do not hold people who have been adjudicated and condemned; they hold people who have been accused.
He's using the exact same word play. Criminals are most certainly a "minority group" as in they make a minority of the population it's just the colloquial definition of "minority group" means race.
Prisons are similar to concentration camps, with a few differences. Usually you're in prison for a fixed term, with some rules around that, which is distinct from concentration camps. But rampant abuse, so much rape we joke about prison rape, unpaid labour, etc., it certainly looks a lot like a concentration camp.
Yes, it would be wrong if there was not a justified basis for it.
Whether there's a justified basis for interning all people formally labelled as criminals in the USA I'll leave as an exercise, because it's obviously complicated there. So many people are imprisoned in the USA compared with other countries that it seems reasonable to doubt whether it is all justified, or even smart for those who remain outside.
When it comes to interning people who have few choices in life and are doing nothing of significant harm except being somewhere, and in a significant fraction of cases they have been there since birth or near birth, I see no justice-based justification for that.
Immigration detention centres have many of the awful qualities of prison, but the inmates there have not been subject to due process, and do not have a fixed term to serve out. These are qualities that make them more like a concentration camp.
At best, you could say the detention is politically-based to a much greater degree than criminal justice. This is obvious because detention is based on bureaucracy, what mood an official is in when they make a decision, and a person's background which they cannot do anything about, rather than the higher standard of criminal due process based on personal behaviour and trained, scrutinised judges; and because changes of political direction and secondary legislation (i.e. regulations made by beaurocrats, rather than laws) significantly change who is rounded up and released.
So if it's not justified as a prison, and does not have the qualities we associate with justice, and is selecting people based on their background they can do nothing about.... yes, that makes it meet the definition of a concentration camp IMHO.
But we don't call them concentration camps because that's not a good look, due to association with gas chambers and death trains, which to be fair ICE is not known for. We call them detention centres and avoid thinking about what that really means for the people and their families. Which if you think about it, sounds familiar from history...
So you don't like the questions the term "concentration camp" makes you ask about the indefinite detention of foreign nationals for misdemeanor offenses?
Maybe the term isn't the problem and the policy you are trying to defend is
I'm fine with the questions on immigration. It's a political issue that has been unaddressed for decades, and needs to be faced soon.
I'm not fine with hyperbole. It causes unnecessary arguments and deadens people to extreme viewpoints. Reality is bad enough to cause political change as long as attention is brought to it.
How is "ICE is running concentration camps" hyperbole if all parts of the sentence are literally true?
If ICE could be trusted to care for those in its care [1] or respect the legal rights of immigrants [2] then, maybe it would be unfair. How many children need to die in custody before "concentration camp" stops being hyperbolic?
This was clearly addressed in the comment you originally responded to:
> According to your definition, a concentration camp is an "internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment.."
> People of certain minority groups aren't being rounded up. Illegal immigrants are being rounded up, regardless of race or nationality.
Illegal immigrants are a minority group. Whether or not there is a legal argument for the concentration camp is orthogonal to whether or not it is a concentration camp. The Nazis didn't break the law either.
"Concentration camp" as a term pre-dates the Nazis, and has a specific meaning, which does apply here.
>A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group the government has identified as suspect.
I would also note that the term does not apply to places where people in Nazi Germany were gassed or cremated, those have a separate term: death camps.
Which part of the definition do you take issue with in this context?
> Concentration Camps: A place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners
> Ending a contract with an agency that runs concentration camps is good.
If ending contract with an agency that runs concentration camp has any meaningful impact on said agency, the only thing you achieve is making their service a bit worse and life of people in their custody a bit miserable.
That's the opposite of good, you're just hurting people you supposedly care about.
Are you suggesting people give up their cushy, lucrative, fully-remote jobs in the name of a cause they claim to support? And potentially make sacrifices for themselves?!
No no, my friend, life is much more comfy lying through your teeth in the interview, taking that cushy job and attempting to subvert the company from within via social media or internal comms, knowing full well the media has your back and will be armed with outrage porn should you get canned for fomenting what amounts to hostility in the workplace.
> If you are not quitting then you are also profiting form ICE contract.
This is reductive, right up there with "Why don't you move to Canada?" Do you agree with every single action done by all entities you belong to: family, employer, HOA, neighborhood, city council, state/province, and country? If you disagree with the actions of a family member - is your solution to cut them off immediately without talking to them? We spend one third of our working lives with our employers - sometimes we like them well enough to entitle us to "interventions".
Additionally, in their quest to reduce churn/lower salaries, the employers are the ones who seek employee loyalty by convincing us that we are "like family", or show that they are humane (or at least not amoral). They can't have their cake and eat it - if you're an amoral company - own it like Oracle does and take the hit on the type of employees you get.
> If you disagree with the actions of a family member - is your solution to cut them off immediately without talking to them?
I don't think your employer is like "a family member", this analogy is too absurd to counter.
> family, employer, HoA, neighborhood, city council, state/province, and country?
one of these is not like the other.
you get to participate in decision making process via voting in HOA, country ect. Employment is purely transactional like getting coffee from a coffeeshop, you have no say in what kind of beans to pick.
It's not absurd at all for many people as their very identity is quite entangled with their employer and the work they do as they spend the majority of their waking hours doing something work related.
Since employment-as-family was not relatable for you, how about: if you disagree with your HOA/neighborhood watch/city council, is your first instinct to sell your house and move away? Wouldn't canvassing support for your PoV be more reasonable, as an initial action?
I think we are speaking across each other because we have fundamental differences in how we view the employment relationship. I do not expect consensus with employment, but I will not work at any organization that makes it blatantly clear that my voice will not be heard. Oracle makes that abundantly clear - you don't hear many stories about activism from folk at Oracle at that reason.
how is it a bargaining chip if no one ever quits no matter what. I would say 99.99% these people won't quit their jobs even if github decides to start working directly with ISIS.
Just wait till the election is over and Trump is out. All this virtue signaling will stop because their preferred party is in power, and by definition everything that party does is virtuous.
Even if Biden continues the exact same enforcement with ICE, no one will care.
Take this as my personal possibly wrong opinion, but this kind hyperbolic phrasing is only going to hurt your cause.
The same as people defending "punch a nazi" slogans.
They will give your tribe influence, but also steadily decrease your chance at long term victory.
Honestly I cannot understand how many people (I don't care about sides) can believe in progress via violence, promoting violence, or extreme polarization.
I cannot change your minds, but sure I hope it were easier to have a moderate to moderate conversation.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're never interesting and they never end well. Even in the context of the current thread, this subthread stands out as off topic.
If you are faced with an opponent that wants you dead, anything is justified, up to and including violence. Violence indeed isn't always the best way to prevent the rise of fascism, but it should always be on the table as that is easily morally justifiable.
"moderate to moderate" conversation is enlightened centrism. If you are up against an enemy that will use political violence the only recourse you'll have eventually is to do so as well. The sad truth is that political violence is in some cases much more effective than we are led to believe - read up on the rise of Mussolini for examples amongst many.
I for one will not entertain the idea of passivity in the face of evil just in order to maintain some absurd ideal of non-violence. Non-violence is a myth, as violence is inherent to the operation of the current system. All politics is violence, the question is only abstraction, fascists understand this and are not afraid to use it when it is most effective, neither should anyone truly opposed to them.
I will say that as it is right now I don't think that antifascist except in some very limited edge cases, simply because we are not at a level where it would do more good than harm. But there's always the risk that we could get there, and openly saying that you won't use the means necessary does harm.
He asked the king for power and the king always remained the head of state, indeed he was able to remove Mussolini from power when he wished to do so. For other violence worked wonders.
> Non-violence is a myth
Gandhi disagrees, among many others.
> All politics is violence
there is a very important line between violence and non-violence. there is bad and good on both sides of that line.
> I will say that as it is right now I don't think that antifascist except in some very limited edge cases, simply because we are not at a level where it would do more good than harm.
On this we agree :)
> But there's always the risk that we could get there, and openly saying that you won't use the means necessary does harm.
To me the best way to decrease this risk by refusing compromises on violence. I do not think this is a problem that can be solved by (openly) adopting the methods of the enemy.
Look, you look like someone with a strong sense of justice, and I hope you will succeed in improving the world. I believe that my methods are more effective, but trying our best is the only thing we can do.
Still I would like to properly express my own stance: I will never condone initiating violence and I will never stop praising the unbounded power of non-violence and civil conversation. If I will ever have to discard this position one day then a good part of me will die with it.
This is my position, intrinsically I cannot prove it right and I do not demand of others to share, but it is how I decided to play this game. I understand the possibility that I might be wrong; we all need to take responsibility for our choices and this is mine.
I suspect that our dreams of a perfect society have more similarities than differences, I hope we can get there, together.
Then I have at least two question: 1) how much proof should I collect that someone is a nazi before I punch them? 2) how much should I believe other's people claim that someone is a nazi?
Or is it a matter of court? is it a crime to be a nazi or is it simply a punchable offense? Is there an official agency that labels nazis? Or maybe it is a matter of activism, I can punch them while they are declaring nazi ideologies but not in their off-time. What do I do if they change the name of their ideology?
Is there a continuum between nazi and non-nazi? should the punch also have a continuum or is there a cut-off point?
Also how many punches is being a nazi worth? This last one is relevant after a dozen or so if they are still a nazi my hand is going to hurt... or maybe... do I become a nazi if I stop punching nazis?
I in part apologize for the condescending tone. But I consider this very important. I am not against making nazism illegal[1] but you are literally proposing violence as a completely normal form of advocacy.
To me you are literally the most dangerous person in term of risk of an authoritarian regime. Again, you are literally saying that violence against political opponents, and not rule of laws, is the obviously correct and moral choice.
[1] it is so in Germany and it makes sense
PS: I admit I have discarded at least another comparatively more reasonable option. You might mean to say that puching nazis is a form of civil disobedience; as a form of activism to say that nazism should be made illegal. This is slightly less nightmarish, but still I don't understan how _starting_ violence in the streets became the moderate option.
I think it's stupid as hell to have to convince anyone that nazis are worth punching, but whatever, I'll give you one response and leave it.
1) IDK, start with anyone who says they're a nazi. There are tons of people who are openly fascist, white supremacists. No need to worry about grey lines, plenty of punching to go around. If you really want to push the boundaries, go for people who are openly hateful towards minority groups - it's usually not subtle. Punch away, totally ethical.
2) Up to you, it's your punch.
> Is there a continuum between nazi and non-nazi?
Sure but who cares? There may be a continuum but there's also huge parts of the spectrum that are extremely clear cut. Hitler falls in the continuum of nazis, and it's hardly a grey area simply by virtue of being gradient.
> Also how many punches is being a nazi worth?
IDK, depends on the nazi, and how many punches it takes to accomplish what you set out to do.
> do I become a nazi if I stop punching nazis?
Again, your call. It's really weird to me that you have such a hard time with this. You position this like there's tons of moral ambiguity, but I find it extremely concerning that you have a hard time determining who is and is not a nazi. The people who run around with swastikas and want to kill minority groups? They're the nazis buddy, don't worry about whatever weird grey area you've got concocted. When in doubt, feel free not to punch - it's that easy! When they're definitely a nazi, as so many are, and so obviously so, do your thing!
> To me you are literally the most dangerous person in term of risk of an authoritarian regime.
Weird, to me it's the nazis, since like, they advocate for fascism and genocide. Whereas I just feel it's ethical to punch genocidal fascists. Seems like one of us should be a lot scarier than the other
Anyway, I'm sorry you have such a weak ethical compass that somehow "nazis are bad" is a big deep scary question for you.
P.S. If you think the people punching nazis started the violence, I'd recommend reading up!
ICE has done unethical things, but...they are also essential in many of their roles, and every country has a similar agency. Why not use the platform and power you have to push for changes instead of just severing ties? It doesn't really accomplish anything.
Company leadership who don't understand the danger of politics are poisoning their own well. If you open the door to what is fundamentally not part of your core values and culture (in this case a programming/engineering platform), then expect the worse.
The media in Germany is fiercely pro opening. The state television racket is pro opening.
After all, the upper classes need their Romanian builders and package delivery people to maintain their lifestyle and large mansions.
Additionally, they can feel good about themselves and ignore the despair in faces of supermarket cashiers once they reach a certain age and are still on minimum wage (or are even lower paid contractors that can be fired at any time).
They hate America for being great, it's like the British intelligentsia who were pressuring the country to disarm while Hitler was arming. The institutional narrative is often suicidal like this.
They don't actually want the full consequences, but they get a kick out of embarrassing their country.
I keep forgetting to cancel my paid Github account because of the ICE contracts. Thanks for the reminder you're totally okay empowering fascism, Github.
(P.S. Much love for everyone inside Github who has thrown a shit storm or even quit over this shit)
Corporations should remain politically neutral, and only act in profit maximizing ways. That does not make accepting a contract with ICE political, and it is disingenuous to make such a claim. Accepting the contract maximizes profit.
Every country has borders and reasons to limit immigration in various ways (for example, to certain skillsets). There is no blanket allowance to walk into any country outside of a port. This is plainly illegal. When laws are broken, someone needs to enforce the law, apply consequences, and do so as efficiently as possible. ICE is that agency for the US. I feel like those who think ICE somehow shouldn't exist are simply not being level headed and ignoring the reality of the fact that we are a nation that exists first and foremost to serve its current citizens, just like all other nations.
Lastly, by taking political stances, these companies are discriminating against the silent cohorts in their employee base that do not align with those views. It is an especially big problem in tech companies, most of whom are headquartered in the SF Bay Area or Seattle, two progressive/far-left areas that have skewed politics. Other workers who don't have an issue with the company serving ICE don't have a voice. They have no psychological safety. It is irrational for companies to respond to employee pressure or social media outrage - they should take randomized anonymous polls of their employee base if they truly want a good signal on employee sentiment.
I'm no fan of ICE – a very large percentage of my friends in the US are immigrants, and I generally want my country to be a welcoming one. ICE has certainly committed unethical and probably illegal acts (probably true of most federal agencies).
But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy. It'd attract extreme negative attention from the rest of the government, and great fear from all paying customers that an internet mob could separate them from their code at any time.
We should absolutely be lobbying hard for changes to immigration law, the restrictions placed on ICE, and justice for their wrongdoings.
But I can't see how this helps improve immigration, and it certainly seems likely to cause a lot of negative consequences for GitHub. The employees are putting their employer in a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" situation.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I love the vision of a world where executives don't take actions their workers will protest. I think that in order to get there, the protests need to be reasonable, and I think this one isn't.
EDIT DISCLAIMER: I own a small amount of MSFT stock, which was not on my mind as I wrote this. I use GitHub's free service and have no other relationship I can think of with MSFT or GitHub.