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A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#521

Post by narrator »

throwaway581029 wrote: post #464
throwaway894345 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last company was trending in a similar direction. They would allow one ideological group to post completely unsubstantiated political claims, but opposing views were not allowed to be presented at all, even if they were thoroughly researched (this wasn't "official" policy, of course). Note that while I'm not a lawyer, I suspect that these permitted ideological viewpoints were sufficiently sexist and racist as to o…

Increasingly aggressive activism of this sort started ramping up at my employer a couple of years ago. Several outspoken activists started complaining and demanding all-company meetings, which were granted by HR and company leadership. In these mandatory meetings, which were attended by hundreds of employees, all sorts of contradictory accusations were lodged by the activists. For example, in the first meeting, one o…

Everyone who is interested in the current wave of hyper-politicization should learn about struggle sessions. These originated in Maoist China and were a bullying tactic used by red guards to humiliate anyone who had any opposition to the radical ideology being imposed at that time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#524

Post by scollet »

tomp wrote: post #508
sneak wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a bummer that Coinbase’s ploy to intentionally conflate not supporting the Black Lives Matter movement (that is, a clear implicit endorsement of the status quo) with generalized left/right-political-activism-at-work seems to have worked, at least for a lot of people who aren’t paying attention. This isn’t about office politics, or political activism at work. This is about Coinbase making an explicit vote for the…

What if I don’t like the status quo, and I also don’t like the solution offered by Black Lives Matter?

You've found a spectrum!

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#525

Post by maplant »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #505
rdiddly wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't discriminate against certain protected classes, but yes, it boggles my mind a little bit that someone could think "a corporation" is anything other than one of the most authoritarian, top-down governance structures ever devised.

If it's voluntarily formed, it's not authoritarian. When a political faction deems that those who refuse to pay half their income for a highly benevolent social program, will face punitive legal consequences, that is authoritarian. I only bring this up because I suspect you are in support of these kinds of programs.

It is voluntarily formed at the top, but in practice labor is a required aspect of life in a capitalist society.

If there are only 10 companies and only one will hire you, with no capital you have zero choice but to work for that company.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#526

Post by webkike »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #353
TedShiller wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I think there are only two options for a company: 1) don't allow any activism in the company 2) allow ALL types of activism in the company Right now, it seems most companies only allow liberal activism but not conservative activism. This is a recipe for problems because it's arbitrary and not democratic.

It’s way worse than that. Even centrists and liberals are silenced by the vocal mob for merely questioning the validity of certain policies or initiatives that claim to have some righteous sounding goal, even when there is evidence that the proposed policy is more likely to be harmful than helpful. For example, it should not be controversial to debate the merits of Black Lives Matter, but since the alternate reality…

I always find it curious that some people find BLM as something by which the merits of are debatable. What’s there to debate?

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#527

Post by webkike »

muzika wrote: post #426
sneak wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a bummer that Coinbase’s ploy to intentionally conflate not supporting the Black Lives Matter movement (that is, a clear implicit endorsement of the status quo) with generalized left/right-political-activism-at-work seems to have worked, at least for a lot of people who aren’t paying attention. This isn’t about office politics, or political activism at work. This is about Coinbase making an explicit vote for the…

The reality is thar vast majority of those who do not support the BLM movement are not at all racist. I believe that this movement has made our society more racist and divided than it was before.

Okay, so are black people supposed to just be fine with police killing them? I genuinely don’t understand at how you could arrive at that conclusion

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#528

Post by [deleted] »

lykr0n wrote: post #214

I wanted to find an example for my response to this article, and I can't. I was looking for the sites like GitHub, Go Docs, Cloudflare, Hashicorp, and others what splashed a "#BlackLivesMatter" header on across all their sites. I remember a lot of places slapping banners or changing their headers black in support of the movement, and now I can't find any examples of that happening. They all seem to have been removed…

[deleted]

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#529

Post by john_moscow »

krzyk wrote: post #123

Is "apolitical" stance a bad thing? Isn't it the default, safe? I lived in country where you had to be "political" to be in management, it didn't end up well (East Europe, Soviet Union), I always (naively?) thought that West countries were wiser. So I prefer companies to not mess with politics.

Fellow Eastern European immigrant here. It's hopeless, dude. It's USSR 2.0 being built in our lifetimes. People here didn't see where this road ends, so they've got no idea what awaits them.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#530

Post by sthnblllII »

notSupplied wrote: post #487

When a group of employees demand that their employers engage in political activism, what they are asking for is the ability to commandeer the resources of the company, whether it be its reputation, money, or labor to advance their political objective. They want to amplify their impact beyond what they can accomplish with their personal resources. I wonder how these same people feel about the political contributions o…

While I agree, I think you have it ultimately backwards. The push for politicizing the workplace is being driven from the top. Jeff Bezos is just one of many wealthy Americans who own large stakes in both media and tech companies. Their media companies promote diversity because they think it will produce positive global social effects, but their tech companies resist it presumably because they think it creates negative local economic effects (why else wouldn't Google be %15 Black and 25% Hispanic?) Assuming the positive global effects, its a "tragedy of the commons" situation where ironically the strongest pressure on individual companies comes from employees who consume the media being produced by the owners of those companies instead of those owners directly.
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