You can be “mission-focused” while still acknowledging human rights.
Acknowledging that black lives matter goes beyond politics.
A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
751–760 of 774 posts
Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
#752Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That any race matters more than any other race. If someone put "X Lives Matter" on a t-shirt, where X is any other race, they would be attacked, or at least fired from their job.
Similarly, you can go to work wearing a blue Biden hat, and nothing would happen. However, if you went to work wearing a red Trump hat, it might be your last day at work.
In a democratic society, this doesn't make sense.
Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
#753Earlier quoted context omitted.
You, I, and Coinbase are all doing nothing to promote Joe Danna's campaign for sheriff of Harris County, Texas. Does that mean that we're effectively endorsing the status quo and the incumbent Ed Gonzalez? Or does it just mean that the Harris County sheriff's office has nothing to do with us?
You've made a strawman. I didn't say that all politics must exist in the workplace. Work is inherently political. There's no escaping that your workplace is making decisions about wages, benefits, access to their products, how they spend their donation dollars, if they support candidates, who they employ, etc. etc. etc. All of these are political decisions that (I believe) are inescapable and also that workers should…
I wouldn't deny, and Coinbase didn't deny, that employees should be able to discuss decisions about wages, benefits, products, employment, etc. If you'd like to use the word "political" to refer to anything that affects society in any way, by all means go ahead, but you have to recognize that other people who say they're "apolitical" aren't using your definition. They just mean that they're not engaging in arguments like "we've gotta elect suchandsuch candidate!" or "we've gotta embrace suchandsuch slogan!"
Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
#754Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good. People experiencing the social consequences of expressing bigoted views, and being a little more afraid as a result, is how the world moves forward. A term sometimes used for it is the "democratization of discomfort". The First Amendment cuts both ways.
You’re not wrong... but remember that the voting booth is another anonymous forum.
> You’re not wrong... but remember that the voting booth is another anonymous forum.
Sure, and the implication that letting discriminatory behavior remain normalized can be a strategy that lets you court voters at the margin isn't new.
In a sense, it is a strategy that grants political power but denies a mandate to do much of anything meaningful with it to combat discrimination. It also cedes the initiative to the opposition who can easily retreat or just run (and then continue to portray your compromised proposals as just as extreme as ever).
Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
#755Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course context matters, but you're still conflating or redefining words here. Each of your examples is an example of implicit agreement, not explicit, because of the context provided. That's what context does ... it allows you to make an inference about how people are feeling or thinking about a certain topic when they don't explicitly say so. Your inference may be right, but it may also be wrong. If in your paren…
"Choosing to be nonpolitical" is an explicit statement of non-support for things like BLM.
Well, back in the day in Eastern Europe choosing to be "nonpolitical" was an explicit endorsement of Fascism, according to the Communists.
Two can play this game.
And it is a game.
Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
#756Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re not going to take a stand now, when will you? When I'm not at work. When and where I stand is my business, but "when" is definitely not when I am at work and nobody is bullying anyone.
So what about Twitter flagging Trump’s tweets? Do you think that happened without a politicised workplace discussion? With the amount of power that tech wields over society these discussions _have_ to happen.
That doesn't require a politicized workplace. Only a mission-focused one. One of Twitter's mission could very conceivably be to attach warnings to misinformation, irrespective of what political agenda it is intended to advance.
Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
#757I feel like this is the start of a rising tide. I think Brian's stance is great, companies have missions, they should focus on those missions. Everything has become so political that your work, which occupies a large portion of your life, should not be divisive.
Unfortunately I think politics is unavoidable in some (many?) businesses. A financial services company that deals with new currency instruments that aim to supplement or supplant fiat currency is going to be neck-deep in politics pretty often. Coinbase will have to make political decisions, and it's natural that people within the company will have differing opinions -- informed by their personal politics -- as to the…
Coinbase says they want to be political insofar as it relates to and advances their mission. But political activism that is outside this scope is a distraction and what they are barring from company premises. I assume they also oppose political initiatives being taken without the approval of management.
Their position is pretty straightforward and sensible, even if it is not entirely straightforward to implement in an even handed way.
Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
#758Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's a numerical bias. Rather the extreme left are just hyper-aggressive in ways other parts of the spectrum aren't, especially libertarians are not aggressive and they were traditionally a big bloc inside tech firms. As for the belief that the left are intellectually superior, that's not specific to tech firms. You get empty slogans about being "reality-based" from the left in all walks of life. It's w…
> especially libertarians are not aggressive Depends on the subgroup. > As for the belief that the left are intellectually superior, that's not specific to tech firms. IMHO, I feel this is an organic collusion of messaging. Like the boomers felt a little envious to Leftist ideas and it shows in how boomers are teaching future generations. I don't think this is intentional but there does seem to be an implicit shift i…
Thanks. Having had many years of being downvoted on HN I can assure you it doesn't matter how specific you are, if you aren't leftist here then leftists will downvote you as much as they can. Sometimes an especially aggressive leftist will go through your comment history and downvote every single comment as well in retaliation, which is how you can get a series of technical posts about technical topics that were upvoted at the time suddenly going to -1 after an unrelated later post on a topic the left cares about.
This is why I call the left aggressive. I've never seen those sorts of tactics from libertarians and I have years of experience of them, or even conservatives. I have seen people who claim to be libertarian suddenly turn out to be totalitarian and start behaving in ways that are totally opposite to their prior stated positions once they got hold of some power, though. So I think there are some people out there who self-identify as libertarian because they came to associate it somehow with critical thinking or other positive qualities, yet never truly adopted the world view. But this is rare. Most people who claim to be libertarian act in ways that are relatively consistent with that claim.
I agree that leftists push hard the idea that leftism is the same thing as critical thinking. This confusion can be especially seen in universities, which regularly claim to be teaching students critical thinking yet in which leftists have steadily pushed out anyone not aligned with them over the decades. People truly trained in critical thinking would ask what justifies the claim that universities teach critical thinking, but of course none of them ever seem to do this. It's just taken as given.
We can see the results: academia is filled with groupthink, in which people's worth is based on vague groupthink-oriented concepts like "reputation".
Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
#759Earlier quoted context omitted.
Count me as well. It is horrifying how otherwise well intentioned people are busy pushing the society we were escaping to into the society we were running away from.
What are the political opinions you have in mind? (that could cause USSR-2 to happen?) And what were/are the different opinions of (some) employees at Coninbase that triggered this whole thing in the first place? > pushing the society we were escaping to into the society we were running away from This is too abstract for me. Would it be weird if I asked for concrete examples? (of how society is getting pushed in a ba…
Some current trends that remind me of the horrors we lived before 1990 in Eastern Europe:
1. Blind worship of "equality"
2. Control and censure of language, communication and media
3. Demonization of money, successful people and corporations
4. Politicization of workplace and professional activities
5. Politicization of schools and academia
6. Polarization between "right" thinking and "evil/unacceptable/deplorable" people
7. Politically connected minorities overwriting democracy
8. Ceding more and more power and responsibility to governments from individuals and NGOs
9. Governmental intrusion in more and more aspects of our lives
10. More and more rules and regulations in our everyday lives in the name of stopping evil/wrong elements
11. Fall of meritocracy
12. Wishful thinking ignoring evidence of reality
13. Using guilt for historical misdeeds done by forefathers to silence contemporary groups
I could go on, but I think this is a sufficient sample.