Techies Are the New Puritans

Well, you were thinking, anyway, for a brief, shining moment. I misdoubt you will again, and for longer next time -- once you start to get a taste for the habit, it's all but impossible to kick, not least because you don't want to.

Now I have to come clean: I gave you a trick question, asking you to define a function which in fact is trivial. Do you know Lisp? Never mind, it's simple enough, not least because we can cheat by assuming the definition of 'legitimacy' -- here, I'll give it to you in Lisp, thus:

    (defun mob-legitimate-p (&rest args)
      nil)

Let's assume I feel, for whatever reason, that you done me wrong. Let us further assume I find it meet to express my resulting dismay by first blacking your eye and splitting your lip, and then aiming a loaded shotgun at your brisket and demanding that you put right my grievance, in the precise fashion I see fit, lest I splatter your thorax across the opposite wall.

Now, leave aside the question of whether you've given me cause for grievance, which you'll note was nowhere mentioned in your homework assignment. While I'm aiming that shotgun at your chest, how legitimate do you think you'll regard my grievance? How does it affect your consideration that I find it meet to back my demand for redress with violence and the threat of more violence? Regardless of how I might make or you might evaluate my case in the abstract, what effect do you consider my actions to have on the legitimacy of my claim?

And, finally: Can you define in rigorous terms why it should be in any way more moral, or less deleterious to the good order and conduct of any society, for many people to engage in actions analogous to those I've just laid out? It's not right or just or meet or permissible for me to act in that fashion, but the common theory seems to be that, if I go out and round up five hundred more who're pissed off just like me and we all come back with shotguns, or Molotovs, or what-have-you, the very same actions are somehow ennobled thereby. I've heard a goodly number of arguments for why that is, but none has managed to convince me; perhaps you'll be the first! In any case, I hope you'll attempt so to do, and look forward to studying the result.

".. with as much money as the city spends on programs to help them.." - that's pretty much the answer right there.

As an employer, I have a moral obligation to do my best to ensure that my employees can get to and from work safely and without fear of harassment, assault, etc. As it relates to the topic at hand, this is the only reasonable consideration for management. Period.

If doing what I can to protect the physical and mental well-being of my employees requires that I make a judgement call to avoid certain areas of a city, I would make that judgement call every single time because it's simply the right thing to do.

Search the SF Chronicle archives.

In a nutshell, the city doesn't have enough money to install public toilets which are deemed appropriate for use by the homeless etc. Not sure what the exact requirements were, but that's the nub of it.

Of course, the city is giving payroll tax breaks to Twitter and other tech companies because they threatened to leave the city (to Australia at one point!) if they didn't get it.

There's a link there somewhere...

Anyway, end result is that Twitter employees are going to have to cycle in shit, walk in shit, and stand on BART escalator shit. Karma is beautiful.

I am sensing some combativeness which is leading me to suspect you have wildly misinterpreted my intent. It is not my intention to make any assertion on morality in this comment, or the previous comment.

Part of my point was that the legitimacy of the grievance is a distraction. Due to its subjective nature, it cannot be computed (most reasonable people will often find each other in agreement, but this is still a distraction (and itself depends on the subjective. What is "reasonable"?))

Furthermore, actions taken by either party are again a distraction. We can talk about appropriate ways to resolve disputes, (I would argue, and I think you would agree, that threatening me with a shotgun is an appropriate response to an exceptionally narrow range of situations) but that is not what this discussion is about. The article is not about how to resolve the tension between the homeless and the 'techies'.

What the article is about is classifying the nature of the grievance techies have with the homeless. The article asserts the grievance stems from a form of Puritanism; Puritan-esque ideas about the intrinsic value of labor and the forms that contribution to society must take. The author implies that this grievance would be "not legitimate", and in fact I agree with the author. Still, the 'legitimacy' of that grievance is a distraction in the context of this conversation.

I am not arguing that the authors judgement call on the legitimacy of this grievance is incorrect. Rather, I am arguing that the author has dismissed the possibility that the grievance techies have with the homeless is much simpler (which does not* mean 'correct', 'legitimate', or 'moral'.)*

I cannot fulfill your request (in the final paragraph of your above comment), because I do not believe that a grievance is legitimized by the size of the mob. Furthermore, I believe the 'moral legitimacy' of the a grievance is not relevant to ascertaining what grievances a mob has. In fact, we cannot even begin to discuss that until we have agreed upon exactly what that grievance is. Agreeing what the grievance is must be a prerequisite for discussing the merits of the grievance.

tl;dr: The mob is techies. Noreen Malone believes that the mob has been riled up by some form of neopuritanism. I consider that possible, but I do not consider it the simplest explanation, nor the most likely explanation.