You did did read the employment contract before you signed for your very own personalized but infernal handcuffs, didn't you? Bet you will find that clause, a clause often with no title but commonly referred to as the "moral clause" (or behavior code or morality clause or even "bad boy clause") that is embedded (often claimed by so-call-victims as "hidden") somewhere in the middle of your lengthy employment contract.…
Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, shuts forum
321–330 of 368 posts
Re: Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, shuts forum
#322Its striking to me that there seems to be a segment of the population now that think that a company should behave like a democracy. I'd be very interested to see research about how this kind of viewpoint has changed over time, at what kind of companies it is more or less prevalent at, etc. I find this viewpoint astonishing personally, but that might have to do with my upbringing and cultural background.
The fact that we tolerate these pseudo-feudal corporate silos within our nominally democratic systems is what's bizarre to me. I live in a democracy and yet most of my day-to-day decisions are governed by an unapproachable billionaire C-suite. Why?
Re: Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, shuts forum
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
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There's a reason this topic gets flagged off the front page relentlessly, and it has something to do with the fact that even a comment that begins with the sentiment "I largely agree with you" elicits a full-page response complete with citations to "isitgenocide.com" and the Wikipedia page for the Nakba. This isn't curious conversation; it isn't even conversation. Be introspective for a second: do you feel like you'r…
Some see things like this [0] and chalk it off as cost of war or whatever, and are not outraged or worse justify it, but they can't demand the same of others.
> This isn't curious conversation; it isn't even conversation
Agree. Due to the conflict's very public nature, the narratives have deep-seated irreconcilable differences mixed with a good dose of racism/supremacism/moralism, while the moderate voices are the most feeble, because they're also outnumbered [1].
[0] https://twitter.com/ytirawi/status/1766912143444656544
[1] https://twitter.com/AdlerJoelle/status/1766974185094492610
Re: Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, shuts forum
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Up until Hamas attacked Israel, Palestine relied on Israel to collect taxes. Collecting taxes is the bmost basic government function there is. Hamas had twenty years to become a government. It was uninterested in doing so. Israel is not the genocidal agent here.
This line of logic is so low level, why did a non-governmental party..not build a government..in a walled off open air camp...where an occupier controls what goes in or out & has destroyed things like seaports & airports. VERY low level.
Israel didn't occupy Gaza so how is an "occupier" controlling everything? What about Egypt? If Israel controlled everything then how did lathes for making rockets, trucks, machine guns, RPGs, grenades, assault rifles, mines, get to Gaza?
Your "open air camp" is my "Singapore". It was up to the Gazans to decide what to do on this piece of land they were given control over. Even if they aspire to have the entire of Mandatory Palestine they could have chosen not to do this using violence.
Israel didn't destroy airports or seaports. Gaza never had a deep seeport, the water is shallow, and the fishing ports exist. Israel does have a naval blockage on Gaza so that Hamas couldn't get tanks and artillery and more weaponry in to attack it with, a fairly reasonable position. Similarly Israel will not allow airplanes to fly in either, for the same reasons.
I'm not following on "non-governmental party", didn't Hamas win the elections and rule Gaza as its government?
Re: Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, shuts forum
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Israel is an inherently inequitable and therefore likely terminally conflict-ridden ethnostate. Israel is a reasonable reaction to a long and terrible history of ethnic persecution How can these two thoughts go together? Either its a horrible "ethnostate" or its a reasonable construct due to Jews special history.
The same way any number of understandable or even reasonable reactions can end up being suboptimal or even counterproductive. See the prisoner's dilemma. Any history of ethnic suffering creates a situation where it's natural to suspect outgroup society can't be trusted to reliably treat the ingroup adequately well. So in response, they might create institutions that privilege the ingroup and prioritize its security a…
So you're basically saying it made sense at the time (and perhaps it still does) but it also created a mess with the Palestinians? I can agree with that.
Yet here we are, what are we going to do now? Going back in history to prevent the holocaust and many other atrocities towards Jews before (and even after) is not possible. Preventing Zionism is not possible. For some reason the intellectual elite seems to be convinced the only possible way out of this is the elimination of Israel - how come? I can understand why Palestinians or the Iranians would want that, I don't understand the huge support in the West for this type of thinking though.
Re: Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, shuts forum
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hamas has an objective of killing civilians. You will of course argue that Israel does as well, but that will be an argument, not a plain statement of fact.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/ha...
If Islam does not allow the killing of civilians then what exactly happened at the Nova festival or in all the settlements attacked on Oct 7th?
Re: Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, shuts forum
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's all sorts of stuff in here I disagree with ("Hamas has by all accounts treated its detainees well"? There's video footage!) but it doesn't matter. We're not going to resolve Israel/Palestine on an HN thread. I have a very limited point to make here, which is that it can't possibly be the case that a party to a war can't kill civilians under any circumstances. If you agree with that, there's nothing for us to…
I addressed that in the first line! To restate: why is Hamas' attack on Oct 7 bad? It's because they killed civilians. If we condemn that, then we must condemn all the IDF killings of civilians. If we do not, what basis do we have to condemn Hamas? Israel's killing of civilians is a horrendous war crime. No we are not doing a carve-out because they really want to kill Hamas fighters. Absurd and horrific to suggest th…
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-un-rape-oct7-...
You assertion is also ridiculous because it ignores the order in which things happened. First Hamas attacked civilians. Then Israel responded. During that response civilians were killed.
Israel's killing of civilians is a war crime only under certain conditions. Killing of civilians during war isn't automatically a war crime. If there are war crimes, then we should certainly condemn them.
Re: Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, shuts forum
#328Israel is an inherently inequitable and therefore likely terminally conflict-ridden ethnostate. Israel is a reasonable reaction to a long and terrible history of ethnic persecution. What's going on in Gaza is an unacceptable humanitarian tragedy that is a reaction to an unacceptable attack. There are players on both "sides" of this conflict that are driving it because they actually want the conflict, people who never…
This is more eloquently put than I could write however it feels quite pessimistic (understandably so) I personally have felt a bit more optimistic about the long term future. Coming of age in post 9/11 America and going from the warm embrace of playing my Nintendo 64 everyday to seeing regular people go full on hate for people like me was a depressing era that I thought would never end. It certainly shaped how I view…
Why is your response as a Muslim to the horrific attack of Oct 7th a worry about backlash to you personally? vs. e.g. feeling for the victims of that attack?
This feels very tribal to me. Do you really think this is the right framing?
If Israelis suffer, is that somehow going to fix your problem? Are we trying to make things better to all or make things worse for all but feel like we're doing something? It seems to me the protests are doing the latter. I think, and I might be naive, that if the global Muslim community engaged with the intent of finding ways to make this win-win, we could get somewhere. But it seems the community is engaged in lose-lose (or maybe lose-lose-lose).
Re: Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, shuts forum
#329Israel is an inherently inequitable and therefore likely terminally conflict-ridden ethnostate. Israel is a reasonable reaction to a long and terrible history of ethnic persecution. What's going on in Gaza is an unacceptable humanitarian tragedy that is a reaction to an unacceptable attack. There are players on both "sides" of this conflict that are driving it because they actually want the conflict, people who never…
> What's going on in Gaza is an unacceptable humanitarian tragedy that is a reaction to an unacceptable attack. Why is one a humanitarian tragedy but the other an unnacceptable attack. You're trying to absolve Israel of its role in the killing of 30,000 civilians over 5 months, to the condemnation of the entire world. Israel is not entitled to kill civilians under any circumstances, not even if Hamas makes it hard to…
If you want to argue with someone who said any of that, find someone who actually said it. Pointing out that Israel is an inherently inequitable ethnostate should have made it pretty clear I'm hardly trying to "absolve" Israel of anything, and that's not the only clue in my comment.
If you're having trouble parsing out what I actually said, you're welcome to ask actual questions rather than rhetorically leading ones (much less wildly putting words in my mouth).
You might also find how I responded in another branch helpful:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39662944
as well as meditating the difference between speaking in terms of the understandable and the excusable.
> Finally, to be clear the protest is of a Google exec by a Google employee over a google policy/contract which is part of the IDF's murderous policy.
You might imagine Google has leverage (that perhaps a sufficiently large number of employees could apply themselves to) with Israel to get them to abandon their current policy by threatening to withdraw from their contract. It's pretty likely that they don't, even assuming what Google provides isn't fungible.
One of Hamas' goals is apparently to provoke Israel to continue to kill civilians in hopes that it ruins Israel's relations with various western institutions. If that starts to actually work even with smaller stakes players like Google, it's likely enough they'll do more of what works.
And it actually gets traction fairly easily because there are people in the Israeli government who, as you point out, apparently prefer unrestrained aggression as a strategy for advancing various internal agendas. And some of them have the talent for actually consolidating internal power as international criticism and isolation increases.
This conflict is happening both because real grievances provide the groundwork and because there are actors on both sides of the conflict who genuinely think they have something to gain from acting as they have since October, even in the face of unconscionable slaughter (which can, after all, be converted to grievance fuel). The United States government can barely bring to bear pressure that restrains it. The idea that Google can do much seems even thinner.
(I agree, by the way, that Israel has responded in ways that are wrong morally and probably wrong strategically. It's similar in some ways to US mistakes post 9/11, and our eventual transition to more focused counterterrorism criminal and military ops seems to have worked out much better for us, though Israel has enough plausibly different problems I'm sure there are some apples and oranges.)
Re: Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, shuts forum
#330From the article: > One employee asked about Gemini's bias. Specifically, the person wrote that when asking Gemini, "Do women in Gaza deserve human rights?" the chatbot didn't have a response and directed the user to try Google search. But when the employee asked the same question of women in France, Gemini answered "Absolutely," followed by multiple bullet points backing up the assertion. > CNBC replicated the searc…
What would you expect to achieve asking a question like that? If you try to use an LLM as your moral guide in figuring out whether women deserve human rights, you just may be too dumb to be allowed to connect to the internet (though I'm not sure how it relates to possibility of employment with Google). But I don't think any living human being is actually this dumb and still can figure out how to submit a question to…