Shame on Y Combinator

Given the era it was written in "race, color, national origin, and religion" were seen as a way of defining and carpet bombing the entire "ancestry" topic. If they just listed "ancestry" there would be wiggle room with what is the definition in order to discriminate on ancestry. For the purposes of the legal system the definition of ancestry in that context is all of race, color, national origin, religion.

Interesting political affiliation isn't seen as ancestry although in practice it most certainly is. We like to LARP that elections are fair because people decide, when the reality is most of the population is born into party affiliation and boundaries are gerrymandered such that almost none of the public gets to actually decide anything ever. What I'm getting at is we LARP that the people have a voice and a crucial part of the LARPing is we must pretend political affiliation is NOT dominated almost entirely by ancestry. If for example "all black people vote for party X" that would imply black people are not part of a representative democracy where leaders are selected by voting etc, which is totally badthink thoughtcrime to even consider as a physics style thought experiment or mathematical inductive reasoning. So obviously politics can't be a protected class in a "democracy" like the USA.

If you do not believe that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, then, while I implore you to reconsider, I am content to agree to disagree.

But you might take that disagreement up first with Paul Graham and Sam Altman. They do not agree with you. They aggressively don't agree with you. They compare Donald Trump with a fascist dictator. I think they're right about Trump, and therefore that they're very wrong about continuing to endorse Thiel.

I would be doing Sam Altman no favors to pretend otherwise.

The right wingers love to do that too, not only the lefties. Call somebody "racist" or "socialist" and you have marked them as so bad that no further dialog is needed (or even possible).

Correct. That was what I was getting at with one vote, one person and buying more raffle tickets than another for a drawing. Money = votes, otherwise there wouldn't be so much money in play.

It's not a true democracy when the rich (whether that be the Koch brothers or George Soros) indirectly get way more voting power than the lower and middle classes get.

If people weren't swayed by obvious attack ads, then I wouldn't care how much money people wanted to throw away on elections. And indeed, they wouldn't throw any away, because it would be a total waste then.

> I think you are mixing things, Democracy does not give anyone the right to be liked even when they say awful stuff ... support[ing shameful things/people] at such scale is shameful too.

I have some sympathy for both perspectives (Marco's and Altman's), and I have a great dislike of Trump, but ultimately this leads to some very difficult questions related to the intersection of public and private life, and how the same intersection could and should affect (or not) employment, eligibility–recognition (e.g. for scholarships, invitations to speak, awards, public office, etc.) and other junctions of persons and institutions.

Without intending (at any level, in this context) to dive into some of the issues I'll mention shortly, I want to consider the implications from a personal angle. The Catholic Faith is important to me, and I consider it an obligation – as occasions arise – to be something of an apologist for any/all of the Catholic Church's teachings, no matter how unpopular: on contraception, abortion, the nature of marriage, sexual morality, and so on. I have, do, and will speak and write publicly about those things. I have been and will likely continue – on occasion – to be chastised for doing so. I get no enjoyment from vitriol, but as I said, I think I have a moral obligation to speak up.

So, in a society that largely rejects such teachings, what should the consequences be for my publicly defending and promoting those beliefs? Is it desirable that (if not now, eventually) I should not be able to be gainfully employed among, say, the mainstream tech crowd? If I were launching a startup, should my venture be disqualified from funding by VCs or other investors that learn of my views and public defense–promotion of the same? Should I be disallowed to speak at popular tech conferences if I applied to do so? Should the answers to those questions be different if the way I go about my unpopular activities is devoid of personal attacks and discourtesy (i.e. shown to individuals with whom I have disagreements in public or private).

The reason I've made this so personal is because I've actually worried, a bit, about these matters in recent years. I've wondered too, if I have children, and if they follow in my footsteps in these matters (I hope they would), what would be the consequences for them?

But the personal angle is really just for perspective. More broadly, how should our society treat those with unpopular views (even very unpopular ones)? I suppose one might judge that exclusion–rejection at the level of affecting quality of life and participation in "the mainstream" might be a deterrent to such views or might even "cleanse" them from individuals and communities. But where does it stop, and what does it mean if tolerance convulses into its opposite? I worry we're only headed toward a deeper fracturing of our society and ideological ghettoization. I don't think that will make our society stronger; no, quite the opposite.