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GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

latimes.com

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Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#571

Post by leftyted »

rtpg wrote: post #504
Sophistifunk wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - that moral position should be right You do realise that what this actually means is "this person agrees with me"

How is this a problem? Like.... seriously. This is the whole point of everything. If you believe strongly in a thing, then you should fight for it. And other people in society will judge you for it (rightly so!) So yeah, you decide that you care enough about "sanctity of marriage" so you decide to not sell cakes. So everyone who disagrees with you boycotts your business. Others believe that sexual orientation is such…

You envision society as a battleground for various moral perspectives. I think there's some truth to that. But are there any ground rules? If so, what are they? Are you giving me license to firebomb ICE facilities because I "believe strongly" that ICE is evil? Or is the law a red line that no one can cross? If so, what about "bad laws"? What about civil disobedience?

Another perspective on this is that, for a society to function, people need to be able to agree to disagree about most things. This means that we are all morally compromised and we all must be morally compromised in order to live together. A society in which everyone follows their own moral impulses is a society that will not function.

I find myself wavering between these two perspectives (the first being yours). I don't mind people protesting. But how about blocking roads? How about vandalizing your ideological opponent's office? How about smashing windows? How about preventing your ideological opponents from speaking? It seems to me that your perspective minimizes the danger here. There's no guarantee that things will just work out. We might reach a level of polarization after which we simply won't be able to cooperate.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#572

Post by shadowgovt »

malvosenior wrote: post #480
shadowgovt wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if anyone should have some stake in the definition, it should probably be Holocaust survivors. Which is one of the reasons (to pop context back to the up-thread post) I find the claim the comparison cheapens the memory of the Holocaust somewhat worthy of skepticism.

That's not how language works. People can't just redefine things to suit their political needs (even if something terrible has happened to them in the past). It's 100% expected that people who break the law will be imprisoned if caught. A prison is not a "concentration camp", a detention center for illegal aliens is not a "concentration camp". People end up in those places because they broke the law, not because peop…

What law have the people in the camps in the southern border broken? Think carefully on this, and ask yourself when they had their day in court.

We have due process, and that applies to everyone beholden to our laws, whether or not they are citizens.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#573

Post by Ygg2 »

istjohn wrote: post #518
userbinator wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This politicisation of tech that's happened at a surprisingly rapid rate since a few years ago is scary, because it threatens to split the industry and maybe even eventually society into a number of opposing factions.

Everything is political.

If everything is political, politics is just background noise.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#574

Post by aeturnum »

manfredo wrote: post #486
dcposch wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used > Where do we start? Where do we stop? Often when moral question pops up on HN, the top comment is some variation of > But where do we we draw the line? > I wonder whether we should even try. Counterpoint: cynicism is too easy. Actually giving a shit is harder, it's uncomfortable, it involves compromise. Yes, there's ambiguity. Ye…

I think you're misrepresenting the argument of people who don't think developers should interfere with the usages of their product. The most compelling arguments I found is that just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society. What us privileged few who work in technology see as using our position of influ…

> just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society.

I agree this is problematic. However, programmers are uniquely well situated to create a system for asking "the rest of society" questions about what kinds of systems they would like a programmer to support.

> make the deliberate decision that refraining from exercising that power is the morally optimal choice.

Quitting would be (as close as one gets to) refraining from exercising power. What you're describing is cooperating with the status quo, which is definitely an exercise of power.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#575

Post by slykat »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #434
slykat wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok so would you ok with a restaurant not serving republicans because the party currently supports ICE's actions?

A bit of Slippery Slope combined with Strawman fallacy here.

I just wanted to see if dunstad would support such a ban. And they did, as you can see by their agreement. This shows how real that slippery slope is for many people...

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#576

Post by paggle »

The reason that this kind of protest is happening now is that companies like GitHub have to continuously serve the product, they can’t just sell into a channel and forget about what happens like a boxed software vendor or a furniture company.

I wonder if this can create a new business model for an arms-length distributor, a company that maintains GitHub deployments for customers and pays royalties to GitHub. This distributor could sell to all kinds of unsavories while giving GitHub plausible deniability.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#577

Post by opnitro »

Frondo wrote: post #432
opnitro wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, we carve out special exceptions for race, gender, sexual orientation, etc... Beyond those special carve outs, laborers should have the freedom to follow their ethics.

We carve out those special exceptions for reasons of striving to create a fairer world for everyone: people in this country have historically been (and contemporarily are) discriminated against for race, gender, sexual orientation. The discrimination, both from people personally and encoded into laws and large-scale businesses processes, makes society unfair for those groups, e.g. redlining put people of color at a s…

I think you misunderstand me. I don't think those carve outs are a bad thing.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#578

Post by BeetleB »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #530
userbinator wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This politicisation of tech that's happened at a surprisingly rapid rate since a few years ago is scary, because it threatens to split the industry and maybe even eventually society into a number of opposing factions.

I've said it before, and say it again StackOverflow has taken a huge nosedive sicne the "Time to take a stand"[1] post, where Joel stated openly that if you don't support open borders, you aren't welcome on StackOverflow. [1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take...

Can you point me to the part where he said that?

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#580

Post by aeturnum »

slykat wrote: post #381

I find it ironic that the same people protesting the contract would also protest a bakery that refuses to sell a product for say a same sex couple (or if you were in the 60s, restaurants that refused to serve blacks). You either have a viewpoint that: 1) a business shouldn't make a moral judgement on its customers and be accessible to all 2) A business can make moral judgements on its customers and choose not to do b…

I do not think the dichotomy you outlined accurately describes how things work

I mean, this is why we have developed the idea of a "protected class."

Because you're correct that, at the end of the day, judgement is judgement and sentiment is sentiment and everyone is the hero of their own story.

But to place the limits of proper action at sentiment is solipsism.

So there is a set of protected classes which we, as a society, have decided are inappropriate reasons to discriminate against people. The quick reasons it is wrong to discriminate: sex, race, age, religion[1]. There are many reasons we allow people to discriminate: lack of money, being violent to employees, being unacceptably rude, setting off explosives, etc. These are all discriminatory practices that often involve moral judgement.

We are always in the process of trying to decide if we should have a new protected class and how that class should be defined. I also suspect we will, at some point, talk about removing protected classes.

Businesses should (and in fact always do) make moral judgements about their clients. The people at Github who chose to work with ICE decided it was morally right for them to do so. You can tell because they did it. They might say they were sad about it and had "moral qualms" but at some point it does seem like it comes down to yes or no.

So do you think we should have a government agency class? Or perhaps a law enforcement class? I personally do not.

[1] Some exceptions here, of course, a mosque does not have to hire a catholic priest who applies to be an imam.

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