I'm no fan of ICE – a very large percentage of my friends in the US are immigrants, and I generally want my country to be a welcoming one. ICE has certainly committed unethical and probably illegal acts (probably true of most federal agencies).
But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy. It'd attract extreme negative attention from the rest of the government, and great fear from all paying customers that an internet mob could separate them from their code at any time.
We should absolutely be lobbying hard for changes to immigration law, the restrictions placed on ICE, and justice for their wrongdoings.
But I can't see how this helps improve immigration, and it certainly seems likely to cause a lot of negative consequences for GitHub. The employees are putting their employer in a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" situation.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I love the vision of a world where executives don't take actions their workers will protest. I think that in order to get there, the protests need to be reasonable, and I think this one isn't.
EDIT DISCLAIMER: I own a small amount of MSFT stock, which was not on my mind as I wrote this. I use GitHub's free service and have no other relationship I can think of with MSFT or GitHub.
Using Microsoft as your canonical code repository is already a meaningful risk to your business. It's nice that more companies are recognizing this.
They're building nice new features with their ecosystem, too, in traditional Microsoft embrace-extend style.
Edit: Can’t give up on the political process, that’s where the change happens. Continue to apply pressure, your opponents eventually give up or die out.
Um, think you've got this backwards. Private entities shouldn't have to take on anyone they don't want as customers (for whatever reason - do you have to justify who you do or don't want in your livingroom?), but publicly-funded institutions shouldn't be able to deny service on political grounds.
A company I work for is free to take the contract, and I'm free to tell them I don't want to work for them any more because of it.
When the government is acting this badly the social contract gets weaker and begins to fall apart.
This is just a reaction to those larger forces. Until those larger problems are addressed and the government starts acting more civilized there is no reason to expect or hope that business as usual will continue.
(disclaimer: I hold a small amount of MSFT stock, though this was not on my mind when I wrote my original post - thanks for the reminder).
They can deny service to anyone, so long as it does not run afoul of discrimination laws. ICE is not a protected class.
In many ways it does the opposite, for reforms to work you need to build coalitions from all political segments of society, vilifying political opponents (the ones that believe in some kind of immigration control and do not support fully open borders) does not build that coalition that is need to fight the unethical and illegal acts. Instead it puts people on the defensive and further divides the nation ensuring no reform can happen at all
Today it seems if you believe in anything other than fully open unrestricted borders then you are considered to be a racist authoritarian from mid 1940's Germany
It's still politically dangerous, and would earn a company a lot of enemies and mistrust (as well as some allies, though they may be the type to just ask for more, as others on this post have mentioned).
conscientious objection is a different case where you can fulfill your legal obligations in a way that's compatible with your religious or moral obligations -- if we created legislation requiring businesses to serve government agencies, there might be an implied right moral objection where use of force is concerned
That would, of course, be a terrible and illegal abuse of power and essentially be the government policing political speech by private individuals. What an indictment of our government (and I don't mean a single person, but of the system itself) that this seems to be an uncontroversial statement. Because I agree, it's true, and it's the mark of terrible corruption.
It's also unfortunate (I am assuming) that the employees have much less of a stake collectively than other shareholders.
There's a good chance they would make more informed decisions if they were to fail or be successful based on those decisions.
For what it's worth, I think the employees would still make these demands, it would just be nice to be able to show that it was also the right business decision.
I think if the bar is "don't kill minorities" people are mostly going to be OK with you cutting the contract.
They have a problem with their employer, and are being heard in the court of public opinion. Why is that "a bummer"?
I don't have a particular opinion on whether or not what they are doing is an effective way to accomplish their aims. But workers speaking out for any reason, ranging from unethical wage suppression to insufficient toilet breaks to disagreement with company policy, should always be cause for rejoicing.
Employers in the US hold a wildly disparate amount of power (with health insurance being tied to employment, and no social safety net) – so employees that speak out tend to help tilt that balance a very tiny bit back to the side of the employee.
Actually that one is illegal in many jurisdictions, e.g. when it's a store refusing service to gays and lesbians.
It really isn't. Private institutions are under no obligation to collaborate with public agencies unless explicitly required by the Defense Production Act[0]. Please remember that the government is meant to serve us, not the other way around.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
That might be overly naive and I agree that there’s great potential for corruption here as well.
It's wholly different to not accept a contract in the first place, but to unilaterally end it for any reason, political or otherwise, is grounds to consider that service provider unreliable.
And before anyone invokes Godwin's Law, ICE has been recently discovered to have literally poisoned detainees by using toxic cleaning chemicals in close proximity to detainees without giving them any protection or sufficient ventilation[2].
But even if you think it is unreasonable or overblown to call ICE nazis or fascists, I still question the premise that companies should not be held morally responsible for the people they knowingly and willingly do business with. If GitHub was selling software to known terrorists, you'd better believe that the American government (and hopefully most people) wouldn't see it as being fair game.
I agree that the lasting way to stop the abuses by ICE is through legislative and administrative changes, but I disagree with the argument that "refusing to sell software to ICE won't stop them from committing abuses, so I'll just sell them software anyway" is ethically justified. Now, GitHub is obviously free to do whatever they like but the public should also be free to point this out whenever they try to take the moral high ground.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [2]: https://thecrimereport.org/2020/06/11/ice-spraying-disinfect...
Why is this lunacy? If government entities suddenly are under the impression that they'll have a difficult time finding business partners if they're consistently caught doing human rights violations.. seems like a win-win. If anything it would attract negative attention for the next company willing to do business with them.
> We should absolutely be lobbying hard for changes to immigration law, the restrictions placed on ICE, and justice for their wrongdoings.
We're doing that too. There's no reason only one form of action should be followed.
> But I can't see how this helps improve immigration
It helps by making ICE expend their resources on finding new businesses to provide hosting services they need, or if they can't find any, rolling their own.
I see that some commenters are suggesting that github should use its position to influence ICE and maybe that's contributing to some confusion. This was never about improving ICE -- the goal is to cripple and dismantle them.
In a working society, maybe. In a properly functioning government it's the job of the executive branch to find some kind of compromise and operate the government for the benefit of and according to the priorities of a reasonable approximation of all the citizens.
But that's not possible with ICE. Right now there's a large fraction of society that supports inhumane mass deportation, human rights disaster camps across the border, family separation policies (though that got rolled back, thankfully), no-knock armed police raids for visa violations etc....
And there's another large fraction of society, including the Github workers, who find that hateful and immoral. And those folks have no ability to affect policy absent waiting to vote again. Their desires and needs simply aren't being heard.
In previous administrations, that kind of hyper-partisan policymaking by the executive branch simply wouldn't have happened. Either because it's bad politics or because of some sense of order on the part of the policymakers. But it's not true now.
The root cause, basically, is that one political party in the US decided to make an "enemy" out of a population (hispanic immigrants) in order to gin up votes from people that don't like them. And the resulting skew in civic priorities has made a big mess. This is how you get civil unrest, which we're seeing right now in all sorts of contexts.
But the mess isn't the fault of the protestors or the github folks, really. You can't run a country according to the parochial needs of your half of the electorate and tell everyone else to fuck off. They start flipping tables.
Not everything has to be political & tribal.
IMO, if it wasn't for anti-competition lobbyists and government contracts, it would be much much easier to get private companies to take a stand every once in a while.
Imagine for a moment that things change completely, and the ICE starts refusing to follow the orders of the Government - but now the Government is leaning towards the far-left, and wants the ICE to open borders to all. The ICE would no doubt have a lot of supporters, but disobeying the Government in such case would ALSO be wrong because in a democracy, the Government represents the people - by not following the orders of the Government, you're basically advancing anarchy. In both cases, the correct attitude is to fight for a Government change. It's not democratic for a Government organization to take its own stance on a topic despite the Government's policies.
ICE (or any other company/org for that matter) actually has a choice in how it behaves.
Do you see the difference?
Most of the comments here seem to indicate that what was said, and proposed to be done, is political, and politics are bad. This seems to rest on the assumption that one, institutions like ICE are politically neutral, and/or two, simply doing business with a political organization is necessarily "apolitical." It also relies on the assumption that anything that can be identified as political is off limits to businesses, and that many businesses are capable of avoiding being "political" altogether.
Businesses can be largely nonpartisan, but they almost certainly cannot avoid "politics." It is very difficult to be consistently "neutral" on issues like racial justice and equal opportunities for LGBTQ folks. Is hiring a trans woman "political?" Is simply doing business with a political campaign entirely apolitical? When we look to issues of the past, is/was supporting the Civil Rights Movement political? It certainly seems like a totally different type of politics than the kind where you take a partisan stance on economic policy.
IBM rightfully faced backlash for doing business with government institutions in the 20th century that were clearly not neutral on the issue of racial justice. The IBM example isn't to compare that situation to the current, but to demonstrate that you cannot justify an apolitical position in all contexts, and that "apolitical" positions may not be quite as neutral as it appears on the surface (hopefully that avoids a Godwin's Law violation.) Similarly, while to a lesser degree, ICE as it exists today can clearly be identified as an agency carrying out a specific political agenda that has a negative effect on racial justice. If doing business with an institution furthers that organizations' goals, and those goals are not neutral on the issue of racial justice, it certainly can be argued that your continued business with that institution furthers that organizations' goals. To argue otherwise puts one into a position where it seems they'd have to defend IBM in the aforementioned example for logical consistency.
In free societies, governments should only be able to forcibly compel people not to do things (murder, threaten, steal, etc.) - see the concept of "negative rights."
Do you think a company in 1930s Germany should have ethically refused to provide software that was used in concentration camps? [In fact, there was a bit of "IT" then, used for such, but it was provided by IBM. But to make the analogy closer, let's imagine a hypothetically Germany company].
("Companies" don't do anything by themselves, so I guess the question is if the decision-makers in such a company should refuse to sell software to the German government for such purposes, and if the employees should try to pressure the decision-makers to).
If we agree that in that case the ethical choice is to refuse to supply the software, and that it would in fact be unethical to sell software for such a purpose...
Then we already agree that there is some case where a company should refuse to provide services for 'political' reasons, even to a government agency of the country it's located in.
So it's no longer a question of if a company should ever be "expected"to do this -- but if they should in this case, if this particular scenario is such an example. People can disagree on that, can think that obviously this is unlike the Nazi example, that this example does not rise to that level. I'm not trying to insist that this is definitely a "Nazi-like" example.
But once we agree there is at least one such case, it's not a categorical dispute about whether business decisions should be "politisized" ever -- it's a debate about the particular ethics of the specific situation we (or github) finds themselves in, if this example is one that requires us to ethically refuse cooperation or not. Very particularly. I think that is a fine debate to have. I think the debate about whether a company should ever do this sort of thing is not so much, because really we should all be able agree there are some lines that should not be crossed there, there are some cases where, yes, a company should be expected to refuse service to it's own government, once we examine the historical examples that are obviously beyond the lines.
If a government was committing acts of genocide, do you believe private enterprise should be compelled to be complicit in these acts?
Denying service to ICE the organization isn't even remotely comparable to denying service to actual human beings.
But let's take your example, since you aren't the only one who interpreted it that way. That would be covered by the scope of the government contract being awarded during the normal bidding and contract process. The contract would stipulate the terms by which one party could pull out of the deal. What would be illegal would be for political influence to discourage the awarding of that contract.
As someone with entities that are registered to do business with the federal government, I’d provide services to ICE, because ICE isn’t the problem: how they’re regulated is the problem. Not providing services to ICE doesn’t solve that.
Whenever people make appeals like this, I wonder where it is exactly they think the political power to do so comes from. Historically, organized labor, like what’s happening at Github, is the what drives pressure for these kinds of changes and funds politicians and campaigns that implement them.
If you want a more immediate example, look at what is happening across the country right now with how cities are rapidly implementing changes to police in response to protests. If you actually want these changes, this seems exactly the kind of stuff to be doing.
I would focua on what changes you can make with police forces before the second covid wave hits and pushes your issue to remember when status.
I think this line of thinking (whether applied to corporations or people) is a reason. It can be applied very, very broadly and essentially result in doing nothing if a corporation/country/whatever doesn't not hold up to your ethical standard and while formally complaining about some violation. The company doesn't care and you can feel better. There's some truth in "actions speak louder than words".
There's a point where some kind of real action is required to have an impact. And it will more often than not result in a situation that's financially worse. One can't usually follow ethical standards and get the maximum profit at the same time. It's obvious and one should calculate with it. The freedom to choose also implies responsibility to choose.
I am not totally idealistic, some things would result in economic suicide and some would not really help the cause. But one can weigh them and I am not convinced that Github runs a huge risk by denying ICE service. Although I have to admit that I am not sure what ICE is doing wrong. I am not an American. But I really don't like this style of reasoning where the negative financial consequence is just accepted as a reason without really questioning whether it's justified. Amazon already banned the police from using Rekognition, so it can't be total lunacy.
If, like a significant portion of the HN audience, you are straight, white, middle class and male it's probably easier for you to dismiss the right to fair treatment than it might be for individuals in those categories.
I'm having trouble understanding the linchpin of your argument. Government agencies don't have any inherent right to your business and you are free to deny them service for reasons political or otherwise.
The great thing about this, is that someone else will realize there is now an under-served market, and create a business to fulfill that need.
The same case can be made for hiring practices.
>> forcibly compel you to allocate your time and resources to ends they define.
...as has been SOP in even the most permissive of societies throughout history. I'm all for classical liberal ideals influencing the world, but these extreme libertarian rules and values have never existed outside the minds of their most zealous believers and you don't have to get too far into the details to see their contradictions.
Just like I can decide not to let people not wearing shoes or shirts into my business, why shouldn't I be able to deny entry to a neo-Nazi? What if I'm losing black customers because I have racists regularly visiting my store?
That is a childishly simplistic understanding of how free markets work. There is no way a retail business would be established to service the needs of 2% of the population who are wheelchair users for example, when they could easily make their stores considerably more efficient by making the aisles a little narrower.
If we agree that there are any circumstances where a company is ethically required to refuse selling it's software to a national government, then we can look at the particulars of any specific instance and decide if we think that's such a case, but we don't need to argue about whether it's appropraite to "to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity," becuase we've all agreed that there are at least some circumstances where it is.
What is in fact inappropriate is to argue that a company should never be expected to deny service to a government, no matter what they do.
With that being said, in the private sector, there really is no "right to fair treatment" with exceptions for anything required by law for affirmative action. By forcing fairness (where a business must provide service to someone it doesn't want to), you are simultaneously removing the freedom of association [0].
[0] While not explicitly stated in the US constitution is argued to be a fundamental human right.
I've posited the same argument around violence. Most people, in my experience, wouldn't fault a Jew for violently resisting the Nazis. In fact, many resistance groups are held in very high regard. So immediately the questions necessarily moves from "is violence sometimes allowed?" to "when is violence allowed?". Which, if nothing else, is very much a more interesting discussion to have.
So in the end this is posturing (aka signaling).
Can Boeing see a conflict of interest via a vis a military conflict and say, no to the DoD because they like some baddie the USG might tangle with? Now in reality this wouldn’t happen because of USG buying power... but put that aside.
Besides, GitHub probably does offer services to the Chinese government bodies and it will be no surprise to anyone if it turns out they are committing acts of genocide against the Uyghurs. They are probably hosting code related to research and commercialisation of the facial recognition programs that various governments will be implementing.
To draw the line at Ice but not withdraw services from the Chinese mainland showcases the level of myopic politicisation that is being lobbied for here. They are a platform, they should act like one.
Is it within their moral rights for backhoe operators demand manual ditch digging too because that will benefit their friends who lost jobs to powered equipment?
That doesn't change the fact that I'm personally disappointed that they're executing that privilege on this particular issue.
Also it's misleading to refer to it as a "political reason". There are two different things people mean by the term "political". One is through the lens of party tribalism. Like, if a restaurant owner put up a big sign out front that said "I only serve registered Democrats, the rest of you can GTFO." That's about the shittiest and most indefensible form of "bringing politics into it" that I could possibly think of. Probably wouldn't be illegal but obviously I wouldn't think too highly of the restaurant owner and I would hope he quickly went out of business because everyone (left and right alike) would think he's a douchebag.
That's one meaning of "political". The other meaning is simply, "reacting to current events", independently of tribalism or political parties. If someone is actually acting based on moral convictions rather than party loyalty or tribalism, that's very different. I realize that an anti-ICE POV and pro-immigrant POV is strongly correlated with Democrats and the opposite is strongly correlated with Republicans, but if we start casting every single moral conviction or political belief in terms of party loyalties then we have freaking lost as a nation. Party-based tribalism is always bad, full stop, but people acting on moral convictions are as good as the coherency of their moral convictions.
Like, if the US government started rounding up folks by ethnicity and putting them in camps based on obviously racist motivations, like they did to Japanese-Americans in WW2, and it was based on bills passed by Democratic politicians, and the Republicans, bless their hearts, decided to fight tooth and nail against it because Democrats, I would honestly hope that all businesses, regardless of their owner's or employee's political leanings, would ignore the party politics aspect of it and only make decisions based on moral convictions. The parties fight each other all the time but we can't fall into the trap of thinking that political parties are anything other than an unfortunate reality of our system of government. Many of their conflicts are fights they pick with each other to rally their base, whereas if they were actually interested in responsible governance they would try to find common ground and try to negotiate something that actually helps the country.
Some people just have a tribal mentality though. They can't formulate thoughts on any issue through any lens except that of party politics. They think of themselves as "this type of person, not that type of person", and their first cut at bucketizing the population is lumping them in with one party or another. That's not democracy, that's about the stupidest freaking tribalism imaginable. Keep in mind that it wasn't until 1994 (or 1996?) that "bipartisan" and "compromise" became dirty words in political coverage, specifically to the Republican Party thanks to Newt Gingrich, but to a lesser degree to the Democrats as well as they circled the wagons in response. It's only been the last 26 years that parties themselves have become more important to some Americans than America itself, or Americans as a whole.
Besides, what possible negative consequence could GitHub suffer from this? Besides losing the ICE contract? Does anyone seriously think that other government agencies or companies would be so butthurt about GitHub's position on ICE, that they wouldn't want to do business with them? That only makes sense through the lens of the two political parties defining the totality of what it means to be an American, and if that's where people are at, America deserves to crash and burn because it's lost whatever soul it may have once had that elevated it. George Washington's farewell address was on this very topic. He thought the poison pill of the Constitution was that it set up a system whereby people would naturally form voting blocs, and before too long voting blocs would coalesce into two diametrically opposed political parties, and then the system (and America) is screwed. Which is exactly what happened. But it doesn't have to be that way. But the election process itself would have to be reformed into a less antiquated, non-FPTP-based system.
Maybe they use a lot of a free service you provide that costs you money. Maybe they require too much customer support. Maybe they return most of the products they buy from you. I've looked at a few datasets where profitability by customer varied pretty widely, including many that were clearly in the red. Most companies just don't break out their costs by customer enough to see it.
Immigration enforcement is literally the use of force to maintain a larger economic inequality than the downward pressure you referred to.
Not in some subtle way. Enforcing politically decided inequality is literally the purpose of ICE.
It makes people uncomfortable to talk of it in those terms, but when you get down to it, a lot of people want to see enforced inequality, and vote for it.
They couch in terms like "downward pressure" to abstract things away from the people's lived experience, to make it palatable to make one group of people worse off so that another group of people can be better off.
The economics abstraction has the added bonus that we avoid mentionining the lived reality: the perpetual fear, lack of humanity and so forth that come with, say, splitting up families, and preventing them from having any reasonable avenue for leaving an ordinary life. (I've known too many immigrants who cannot find a way to solve the bureaucracy problem, and cannot even determine their legal status, or in some cases if they did try to find out they risk being split from their own immediate family, so perpetual fear and avoidance of authority is their only realistic option for living.)
What exactly is that message? Maybe:
"If you make your money by separating families, putting kids in cages, and deporting asylum-seekers to places where they're in danger, then we don't want your money."
Do you see anything wrong with that message?
It looks like you're trying to imply that discriminating based on political orientation is as bad as as discriminating based on race, gender, origin or religion, but that's wrong. At least when it comes to the law, political orientation isn't a protected class. Race, gender, origin or religion are.
Religion is a choice. Does that mean that you're fine with discrimination based on one's religion?
The question is: does the automation help us build things that were impossible before, or does it exist for the sole purpose of cutting jobs and funneling more money to the executives?
Github refuses to work with ICE today and hypothetically tomorrow will only host code for Democrats? I'm certainly no fan of ICE, but I'm also not sure I like ceding even more control to corporations. Perhaps I'm naive in thinking we can still fix the US through voting.
In this case, there's no way the executives can sanely take the requested action. It'd be terribly damaging to their business. (I may be wrong about this, but it's what I would think if I were an executive).
So now if I'm an executive, I have to roll my eyes at the protesting employees. They lose credibility. I'll know that next time I do something they ask for, they'll just ask me for something I can't do.
That's what bums be out.
To other government agencies, they may see github as a liability and end up leaving github altogether - I think that's the 'lunacy' part from a business perspective.
Corporations know there's always a chance that they'll get an internet pitchfork mob going after them for some (justified or unjustified) reason, and the last thing they want is for their cloud providers to pile on and further add to the fire.
Taking it further, what if a majority of businesses gradually decide to be racist and refuse all services just because they can? Not serving minorities wouldn't really impact their bottom line all that much. The minorities would literally die off.
It's easy to talk about "rights" as if they exist in a vacuum i.e. my rights are mine and they do not affect anyone else, ergo my rights should be absolute. They are not, and should not.
Reality is usually a tenuous balance of rights (usually tilted towards the majority) that people participating in civil society share.
Slow down there, you're going to need more evidence than that to claim that an underserved segment of the population isn't an attractive commercial target.
I agree that wheelchair users might be comparatively expensive customers, but if that 2% stat is correct they would be profitable to someone. A business with 2% of the market as a captive audience is going to be profitable.
If more companies were forced to pause and consider whether taking on certain customers would cause their workers to revolt, we’d all be better off.
Except that every other business can now refuse to serve that business services, because that business serves people nobody else likes.
Given even time and systematic discrimination, that business owner and everyone they serve will be driven to destitution and cease to be a meaningful market segment. They, along with the people they serve can't afford to buy anything anyways.
Should society should just let them die because of the magic of capitalism and (???) rights?
I don't believe that political organisations are considered a protected class so yes, GitHub could decide to only host code for Democrats.
Your point seems to be "This is a slippery slope. Where do we draw the line?"
I think it is entirely reasonable that there _should_ be a line.
To take your example to the disturbing extreme, consider this: "Github refuses to work with ICE today and hypothetically tomorrow will refuse to build crematoria in extermination camps?"
There must be a line _somewhere_. Finding the best place to draw that line is a major challenge that requires significant and likely fraught discussion but it is something that must be done.
Does everyone refuse to work for Komatsu, John Deere, Liebherr, etc? Is that even possible?
ICE is pretty bad at following US law and pretty good at being cruel to everyone in their path
- ICE routinely detains and deports citizens and legal residents (guess their skin color) [1]
- ICE routinely abuses those placed in their care and doesn't punish known abusers [2] [3] [4] [7]
- ICE is happy to hurt its law enforcement practices to round up more immigrants [5]
- under Obama ICE was actively ignoring court orders [6] this is much worse under Trump
- ICE asylum officers (i.e. lawyers and experts) have reported extensive cruel and illegal practices [8]
[1] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-ice-20180...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2018/10/11/adelanto-ice-detention-c...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/us/sexual-assault-ice-det...
[4] https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/im...
[5] https://www.texasobserver.org/ice-hsi-letter-kirstjen-nielse...
[6] https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/ice-and-border-p...
[7] https://www.aclusandiego.org/cbp-child-abuse-foia/
[8] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-11-15/asylum-off...
Honestly, I think the claim that the free market would solve this is so outlandish that the burden of proof is on those who believe it.
Maybe, just maybe, in a dense population centre like London their needs would be met by a few specialist 'accessable' stores. But what about some rural town of a few thousand people?
The court of public opinion doesn't have a good track record, for one. It's decisions are often based on fashion more than any kind of ethical principles.
A classic exploration of this phenomenon is contained in the novel The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.
One particular facet in the discussion that stuck with me more than the rest was a comment by a co-worker who was visiting from the Berlin office.
They talked briefly about small monuments on the street by their home marking the spots where people were arrested and taken to concentration camps as their time and place of death. They pointed out that in many cases those dates are in the mid 1930s. Up to 10 years before the discovery and liberation of the death camps.
Calling ICE nazis (while still hopefully hyperbole) is not necessarily an unfounded comparison.
I'm not you, and I can't imagine what your situation is, but I'll bet whatever precious little civil rights laws that are enforced wherever you are has probably has helped you more than you know.
Some people thought pandemic response teams are a waste of money, until a pandemic happened, then they realized perhaps there wasn't a pandemic previously because that team was doing their job.
If I'll ever find my self in a situation like this - I'll pack my things and run. I'm not going to be happy in a place like this even if government will force those people to tolerate me.
> if a majority of businesses gradually decide to be racist and refuse all services just because they can
That means anyone entrepreneurial enough will have access to an underserved niche market.
I'm sorry but that's an incredibly spineless take. If people stopped having this kind of attitude, then there would be no "someone else".
Trump repeatedly asked his followers to rough up protestors 4 years ago.
Applying the brakes (voting) works better if you also stop applying the gas (providing services).
I think there will always be places that exist that help everyone. First in mind are churches, who often will help people even if the people they help have differing views.
Not providing version control isn’t going to stop kids from being locked in cages away from anyone they know. Maybe do things that actively fix that.
You presume that "dealing with illegal immigration has popular support" is the same as "the public broadly supports arbitrary cruelty to illegal immigrants".
The US population (~80%) appears to think "dealing with illegal immigration" should mean "provide a path to citizenship" [1]
1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx
> I don't think it's fair or makes sense to single them out.
ICE has earned all of the scrutiny they get. ICE does not seem to care about the welfare of the people in its care [2]. It does not seem to care about US immigration law [3]. Or the rights of legal immigrants [4]. ICE employees say ICE prioritizes rounding up law abiding families over criminal investigations [5].
[2] https://theintercept.com/2018/04/11/immigration-detention-se...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-11-15/asylum-off...
[4] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/ice-is-out-of-co...
[5] https://www.texasobserver.org/ice-hsi-letter-kirstjen-nielse...
> Be kind, be bold, never yield
> I’d provide services to ICE
You placed your question in the 1920’s. The SS was founded as a bodyguard unit for NSDAP leaders in 1925 and remained purely an organ of the party until 1933 when Hitler became chancellor and the Reichstag passed the Enabling Acts. Up to that point, most of the political violence was carried out by the SA, which was likewise an organ of the NSDAP rather than the government. After the Enabling Acts, the Nazi government deliberately blurred the lines between the German government and the NSDAP, but that is well outside the timeframe you suggested.
To answer your question, I would probably not do business with any part of NSDAP starting in the 1920’s on account of their history of street violence and their platform of abolishing democracy. I would similarly refrain from doing business with the German government as soon as the Reichstag abolished democracy and outlawed every political party other than NSDAP. This would extend to the SS although the SS itself was not especially involved in any of these events.
As you can see, this isn’t a particularly relevant analogy.
However that is a dicussion that is, at most, tangential to this one.
Segregation wasn't a case of the government pushing these ideas on to unwilling populace.
The company.
You can support the employees without needing to twist reality. There is no question that ending service on non service related grounds makes a company unpredictability unreliable.
Also, I would bet that a review of this from a business point of view might make a moral stance moot. If that's the case, it seems like an easier way to avoid a minefield.
"I think ICE needs reforms, but I don't believe a pressure should be put on them to impose changes"
Makes me wonder if you truly support people protesting or even agree that ICE is doing anything wrong.
An underserved niche market of people who have significantly less money because they can't find work - and your company won't hire them because your other customers who actually have money will boycott you - isn't worth much.
Federal agencies only exist due to political expediencies. If the public no longer wish for the policies to be enforced, why keep the agency?
Such is democracy.
Does the regular outcome of popular votes in favour of shafting minorities, restricting human rights etc. rather than general fairness and dignity for all persons regardless of background count?
What does the second point have to do with the first point?
Anger and outrage are valuable, and it's important that we channel them in the right directions.
The most common cases involve people who did something bad, but where the punishment meted out was totally disproportional to the crime itself.
Justine Sacco is the classic case, who made a bad joke and had her life turned upside down.
Then you have the cases where people are so full of emotion that they get basic facts wrong.
James Damore is a good example of this, who many media outlets falsely claimed had written in his infamous memo that women were inferior to men in terms of software engineering ability.
Just go on twitter or facebook and take a look at how issues are being discussed. Even here on hacker news it's sometimes difficult to have sense making discussions because people are in such a rush to judgement.
1. All persons that are not a danger to others and can prove financial viability (i.e they have a job sponsorship, or other means of self support with out needing social welfare) should be allowed to immigrate on a temporary basis
2. The Immigration process should be limited to only establishment of ID to clear a person from known dangers (i.e medical, criminal or other things that pose a danger to the US population) and financial viability
3. Social Welfare programs should be limited to Citizens Only. Persons can apply for Citizenship after they have lived here for 3 yrs under the temporary immigration program.
As far as Separating a person from their family. We do that to citizens every day. If you break the law you will be separated from your family. That argument does not hold any weight with me, nor does it make a person a racist.
Do you believe people with children should be immune from criminal prosecution?
As to "keeping children in cages" I have been opposed to those programs for as long as they have existed, which is going on at least 3 different presidents now. Where were you when Obama as doing this? Or are you going to pretend that these ICE conditions just magically appeared under Trump like most democrats try to?
At some point you will run down all these dead-end alleyways and you will realize that the perfect spheroid does not exist. For your moral sake I'd hope it's sooner than later.
My personal choice here would be a tax for practices that are provably automatable but not yet automated. The result is the same, we are funding a UBI but now businesses are also incentivized for innovation to escape from the tax. I'm probably missing hundreds of reasonable concerns with my simplistic view point though.
I can imagine a more disturbing (possible) hypothetical: the activists are successful, and Github terminates it's ICE contract. Nobody else will host their code. ICE still has source code that needs to be hosted, so they hire more developers to maintain their own internal source-code repository. Those developers are subsequently blackballed from future employment opportunities due to their past association with ICE.
Hasn’t that ship already sailed? The cake shop ruling by the Supreme Court seems to point to yes.
Either way: not a protected class, and it should stay that way.
Regardless, if enough people think it is wrong that the company goes out of business, so be it. I don't think that is likely, but ok. Automation is going to continue to happen no matter what.
I'm sure many people who believe in $DEITY, and the duties which follow from this, do not see "belief" as a choice they are making.
That said, this isn't mere politics. Actual humans can and are dying including children, the individuals at github/microsoft must excercise their conscious and act accordingly. Same applies to war. This isn't akin to refusing service to democracts or republicans but more like refusing service to organized criminals who also happen to be a government agency. All companies have a right and an obligation to refuse cooperation with a government agency that willfully causes death,torture and imprisonment without due process of innocent civilians. That is not a political stance.
And related to breaking the law and separation from your family, the kinds of crimes you need to commit for that to happen are usually much worse than immigration without a permit. Also, I wasn't thinking of the general idea of deporting someone who has children, but specifically to the cases of families who immigrated illegally, had a child in the US, and are now being deported while leaving a small child without care and with little hope of ever reconnecting with their parents. And the solution is not necessarily to let the parents stay, but to allow them to take their child with them.
Otherwise, your immigration policy sounds pretty nice. I am assuming you would also carve out exceptions for asylum seekers, but apart from that, it sounds positively utopian compared to anything like current practices, from what I've read.
However, the deportation process must be humane. You can detain people who are to be deported in conditions that respect their human rights. You can allow parents of small children with US citizenship to take their children with them (assuming both parents are deported), or to make other arrangements.
The two alternatives are not (1) open borders or (2) concentration camps for illegal immigrants.
And the idea here is to apply pressure any way possible. Maybe losing github doesn’t practically change much, but if I was working somewhere and companies started cancelling contracts due to the unethical actions of my workplace... i would start looking for another job.
For example in many countries you need to "register" political advertising[1]. One could say that it is perfectly reasonable not to help political opponents, but then it would be reasonable to declare your business as politically oriented.
Similarly to how even private universities in the US must uphold free-speech rights is they declare free-speech friendly.
This is not a complete solution, but it does not need to be all or nothing.
[1] in the Uk there was some conversation about Ryanair's showing pro-stay slogan on a plane behind a press conference during the Brexit campaing
It is to some extent a symbolic gesture, but symbolic gestures have power in our world, especially when they are done by the powerful.
And of course ICE is part of the problem. Sure, the way they are regulated is also part of the problem, and that also needs to be changed, but the boots on the ground and their direct managers are not blameless. And they are likely to hold full responsibility for some of the horrendous acts being committed, not everything is commanded from on high. Not to mention the criminal negligence displayed in cases like losing track of people's children - that was not an order from somewhere, that is some bureaucrat who should be held personally accountable for failing to do their job right with catastrophic consequences.
It might very well be, and it's worth debating how much giving business support to an organization whose policies you (possibly vehemently) disagree with is a kind of implicit support of those policies. But, it's also worth asking: if protest by workers to put pressure on their employees to stop giving business support to organizations whose policies they vehemently disagree with is "disappointing," what kind of protest isn't?
It seems to me that when we're talking about corporations, who you do and don't sign contracts with -- who you buy from, who you sell to, and what charities you support -- is far and away the strongest signal you can send. If you're sending a signal of support to Black Lives Matter protests, it's nice if you send out a few tweets and update your home page, but it's better if you donate money, services, and/or employee time. And the group you donate those things to is going to send a signal: donating to Colin Kaepernick's "Know Your Rights Camp" is in some sense a more specific, stronger message than donating to the ACLU.
So it certainly seems reasonable that asking the corporations you work for (and perhaps work with) to put their money where their PR is in terms of who they do business with also sends a message. No, it's probably not in and of itself going to put much pressure on ICE, but it is a statement of values.
I am not sure how much legal barter is, but in many sense the currency is intrinsically linked to the public space of the state.
So disabled people don't get an automatic job, say. But an employer can't just decide not interview someone because "it's inconvenient to interview you due to your disability".
Another: It's not acceptable to say "sorry we can't interview you if you can't climb stairs, because there is a staircase between our interview room and the downstairs offices", because there is a reasonable accomodation possible, namely interviewing in a different room.
A shop is required to make reasonable accomodations, such as provide an entry ramp if that makes sense, and a wheelchair compatible toilet if that makes sense (i.e. it has other toilets).
That prevents shops from saying "we don't care about the 2% so we can't be bothered with a ramp even though the cost is negligable to us".
On the other hand, reasonable is relative. An organisation with no funds would not be required to do the same things as an organisation with plenty of funds. A club open to the public is expected to do more than a private gathering of people where nobody in the group has particular needs. And accomodation doesn't always have to be pre-emptive. For a public facility, anticipating needs of a broad spectrum people is expectecd, but for a small, private workplace it may suffice to react to the particular needs of individual people as needed.
(Note, disability is complicated because there are so many kinds, many of them invisible but cause much difficulty for the persons affected, and people without experience do not recognise the signs. I've used wheelchair here because everyone recognises that, but even with those, a lot of people seem to not understand that if a person can stand up and walk a bit, it doesn't mean they don't need a wheelchair.)
Well, how about "don't discriminate"?
I am not saying it is the perfect solution, but if you want to refuse a service you can always terminate your commercial venture. I do not necessarily see this a clear cut case of positive/negative right.
Similarly to how the state can compel you to get a driving license to drive. You can just give up on driving.
The intended outcome is not that people that want to discriminate stop existing (well, long term also...) but that non-discriminatory interactions can be allowed to flourish.
How to you handle underclass, i.e. people who become disabled or injured, move into a recession, can't meet the initial requirements, or some reason to not comply. With your requirement #1, #3 seems cruel. In most countries a work permit gets you basic access to the same welfare and worker protections (usually statutory retirement, unemployment insurance, health care) for this exact reason.
> If you break the law you will be separated from your family
Really depends what law you have broken, doesn't it? Under US immigration law crossing the border at the wrong place is punishable by $250 fine (8 U.S.C. Section 1325, I.N.A. Section 275). Many traffic violations have stricter penalties.
In early 2017 the Trump administration stopped accepting asylum applications at ports of entry and required asylum seekers to apply in the country (contrary to law). In April 2018 ICE started separating families of asylum seekers who had committed the grievous act of a) crossing the border b) requesting asylum from the first US official they encountered (a condition explicitly allowed in US asylum law)
> keeping children in cages ... 3 different presidents now
I think that's a false equivalency. The fucked up stuff ICE got away with under Obama is not the same as the fucked up shit Trump has given the green light to. The Trump admin is actively violating US immigration law to for no other apparent reason than a simple desire to be cruel to asylum seekers. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/688/the-out-crowd
Whether it's the kind of discrimination the store is obliged to deal with is going to come down to principles of reasonable accomodation.
So, say you had an extremely boutique store up some rickety stairs, where the way it's used is you go up the stairs and meet the chef who will take your order for a wedding cake and you can collect the cake next week.
I would expect, in that case, if the chef is willing to meet you at your home or another place with a menu of options and discuss your order, and then have it delivered next week, that would meet the bar of reasonable accomodation for someone who couldn't use the rickety stairs.
On the other hand, a large grocery store, where browsing the goods is part of the experience and is also significant to product discovery, and maybe pricing and access to better fresh ingredients and different bargains, and where the only obstacle is that the store does not replace one door type with another that a wheelchair user can enter, and the store can reasonably afford the cost, that is clearly inadequate of the store; they have no good excuse and could reasonably accomodate by changing that door.
On another hand, the same large grocery store may find it difficult to accomodate people who cannot tolerate bright illumination (that other people need, to see clearly), and large numbers of people moving around them. In that case, it is not at all obvious that the store can do much to accomodate. I would expect that if the store also provides online ordering with delivery, that it has performed reasonable accomodation for that situation.
In any case, I confess I'm always a little suspicious of this method of argument. Bob says, "I will ban neo-Nazis from my forum," and people chime in with, "Well, what about banning Catholics? Vegetarians? People who admit to liking Nickelback?". Is the principle really that if we find one single case where Bob would admit "I don't think banning that group makes any sense," then Bob needs to just give up and let neo-Nazis on his forum? Personally, I don't think that's a very good principle. An argument about where we (and Bob) should draw the line is reasonable, but I'm not convinced an argument about whether lines are intrinsically evil is.
This is an important point that those in disagreement with these kind of arguments often under-emphasize or ignore entirely. When a government makes it illegal to behave in a racist way, the racists don't go away, and they might even be amplified within those communities in a similar way to the Streisand effect.
If everyone in a community is racist, you can't simply make it illegal to be racist to fix the problem. They have to make that decision on their own - anything else is fundamentally authoritarianism, which doesn't have a great history of long-term success.
The only vilification happening here is your misrepresentation of the critics of ICE, many of whom do not advocate for "open borders".
ICE is not equivalent to "border security", which should be obvious when you consider that this agency was only created in 2002.
ICE doesn't even work at the border. That's the Border Patrol (and customs, and the Coast Guard).
ICE exclusively works within the US. Since illegal immigrants have little protection, it acts much like any unchecked police force, at least according to its critics.
There were 1,200 complaints of sexual assault in ICE custody[0], for example. Less than 2% of these were investigated[1], proving the point about them acting "largely unchecked" that I somehow felt the need to qualify with "according to its critics", above, before looking this up.
From 2012 to early 2018, ICE wrongfully arrested and detained 1,488 U.S. citizens, including many who spent months or years in immigration detention.[2]
Since it isn't particularly hard to find illegal immigrants in the US, ICE also has a lot of liberty to decide who to go after. That's a recipe for arbitrary enforcement, and there have been complaints about individuals, families, neighbourhoods, or cities being targeted or a variety of reasons, none of which fit most people's idea of justice, from shakedown collecting money from individuals in exchange for sparing them harassment to cities being targeted after incurring the wrath of the current government.
[0]: https://theintercept.com/2018/04/11/immigration-detention-se...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_E...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_E...
I bet most businesses would make their stores accessible (within reason) since you need room in isles for carts, etc.
It's important to channel them in all directions that could have impact. You never know for sure which 'direction' matters to the group you are trying to impart change on.
That's the capitalist enrich-the-owners purpose. In my mind, the real purpose of automation is to relieve humans the need to do work so they can live lives of leisure and personal enrichment. Unfortunately, I don't expect us to get there within my lifetime, if ever at all.
White parents were more likely to be able to afford to move which resulted in them leaving. Minorities tended to be poorer and could not leave and stayed in the areas with the worse schools. Kids who go to worse schools are less likely to get out of poverty so they stayed in the same poor areas and had kids in the same area repeating the cycle.
Since schools are typically given money based on property tax it meant that the schools in poor areas tended to receive less funding. There are also issues with teachers getting lower pay if they were in a poorer school. I think these issues are fixed in some states but there are still issues related to this in various states.
As an aside, the relative absence of that kind of movement in libertarian thought experiments has always bemused me; I think there's a somewhat utopian "everything gets better when you take the state out of the equation" notion at play. Everything doesn't automatically get worse, but it doesn't automatically get better, either. If the society still has discrimination, prejudice, and unequal justice, it's still going to face pressures to reform; most of us would rather see where we live be made "better" in our understanding of the term than be forced to move somewhere else to find that "better," even assuming we have the resources to make such a move.
I mean, it's also lunacy that the US government would run concentration camps, right?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/aoc-holocaust-why-mi...
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentratio...
The issue I take with your argument is, politics in the United States aren't "normal". Maybe they never were "normal". But I think the notion is, this is more than a "political" disagreement over whether the tax rate should be 23% or 25%. We're in the midst of a fundamental moral disagreement about whose lives matter.
A government agency cannot be a victim of discrimination, at least not in any way that matters. It is not a person, and does not have rights.
A government agency refusing to follow its orders is in no way parallel or analogous to a private company refusing to serve a particular customer. In the first case it's an illegal act, where the result will be the firing/jailing of the offenders (with the removal of their access that enables them to disobey), while in the second case it's just a normal, legal, expected outcome of business sometimes.
> the correct attitude is to fight for a Government change
Private entities refusing to do business with certain parts of the government is an aspect of fighting for government change. GitHub refusing to do business with ICE is a collective way for GH's employees and executives to lobby the government for change.
And more over, everyone can register a religion these days, look at Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption... So if someone wakes up one morning and starts a religion out of a joke I should be forced not to discriminate against him?
But replace John Oliver with Jewish religion and now this argument sounds different.
But that is the problem with context... I don't like blanket laws making me do things.
There are tens of thousands of them now, every one of them installed by the artist who originally came up with the idea.
They are installed in front of their last place of residence. So it's really decentralised, and the realisation that the Holocaust happened in your street (or even to people living in the house you now life in) is powerful.
A food establishment forced to serve you might serve you food that's gone bad, a mechanic might not fully tighten the nuts on your brake pads, or any other variety of horrible things that people could do to harm you while leaving room for plausible deniability.
At least if they can legally deny service to you, you know that the ones serving you aren't a risk to your wellbeing. And to that end, I think it's a bit unfair to suggest that less money means there would be no businesses to serve that group of people. If every restaurant is discriminating, the singular restuarant that serves the less wealthy group would have plenty of business, simply due to the lack of competition.
The "pro-regulation" argument is valid with regard to a less commoditized market though, which is interesting. For example, I wouldn't want the only company that makes a life-saving drug to be able to legally discrimate who they sell it to.
It's a challenging problem and I certainly see both sides. My gut goes to regulations affecting large businesses but not smaller ones. It feels like there are probably some difficult edge-cases within there though.
I don't think many people would argue that we need a forum where people can advocate for pedophilia and child porn. We've clearly decided that sort of thing is bad. But saying we're going to ban child porn is not the same thing as saying we're going to ban vegetarians.
Certainly reasonable people can disagree on what types ideas deserve platforms. I imagine some (misguided but well-intentioned) people might think that providing neo-Nazis a platform to advocate for their position is a good and fair thing to do, even if they disagree with the neo-Nazi message. But it doesn't mean that people who don't think that's ok are somehow anti-free-speech fascist dictators who want to have control over every kind of speech.
I also get exhausted when people trot out the slippery-slope argument at every opportunity in order to shut down discussion. Not everything has to be a slippery slope! People are actually capable of making decisions in a nuanced, fine-grained way!
This seems like an unfruitful digression.
OP already agreed that the actions of ICE are immoral and that this action is within the moral rights of the workers.
The main question is about efficacy. That isn't elucidated by introducing a thought experiment where you believe the moral rights of developers are not as clear cut.
So the question is can employees who have diverging moralities have direct input on what a company considers moral and immoral outside the common take of the population at large?
When I was 11 or 12, I realized I didn't believe in god (I didn't know the term "atheist" at the time). My parents were Catholic, and I was forced to attend CCD weekly during the school year (the Catholic version of "Sunday School") in addition to weekly Mass. I tried so hard to believe in a god because I didn't want to disappoint or anger my parents, and I wanted to fit in with my peer group. I was trying to make a choice to believe, but that's just not a choice you can make. You either believe, or you don't.
In hindsight I'm glad I failed to choose to believe, but at the time I agonized over my non-belief daily, thinking there was something wrong with me.
I think this is a fair read on sexuality especially given the "spectrum" understanding of sexual preferences. If you're born 50% interested in men and 50% interested in women, you can very well choose to live your life (and identify) as a straight person or a gay person (or a bisexual person!).
That doesn't mean that others aren't born with a 0/100 ratio (one way or the other), though.
The employees of Github are not an “internet mob”. Your use of that phrase implies a lot about the way you are trying to frame this situation.
I think it's very easy to refute this statement by looking at any country where freedom of speech isn't guaranteed by law. The most populous country in the world is a glaring example.
Catholicism is an organization that as one of its main tenets is homophobic. How is that better (or is it worse) than being an Confederate flag-waver or a neo-Nazi or a Black racial separatist or ? I'm sure the answer is obvious to you, but only because of your personal idiosyncratic preferences. Evil is not an objective spectrum. It's a subjective high dimensional manifold.
What if the government, which issues identity documents that allow you to "run", decides they just don't like you and declines to produce them?
Which is pretty much what US law says, because it's reasonable on avwrgt.
I think I would rather work for a company where they do the right thing, even if it does cause negative consequences.
I understand that you're not convinced that banning ICE from their platform is the right thing, or will even do anything useful around immigration. I don't agree with that point of view, and I expect GH's employees don't either. Ultimately it's up to the company's management to decide who they'd rather to piss off: the US government, or a portion of their own employees.
They're incarcerating newborns and forcing unrelated 5 year old detainees with no relation to them to take care of them. They smell, they're covered in lice, bodily fluids, they're denied personal hygiene, food, water. They are forced to drink water from toilets.
Kids that are too active are sedated and some of them, left unsupervised causing them to smash their heads against the floor causing them permanent brain damage.
Children covered in lice, bodily fluids, without showering for weeks to months. Newborns being taken care of by 5 year old detainees with no relation. They are denied food and water. They are forced to drink water from toilets. They're scared to ask for food and water [1].
Then, let me introduce you: The Mexican Repatriation Act of 1929. If your argument is that citizens need to be protected, I remind you that in 1929, the US government took US-born children of Mexican heritage (technically, US nationals), put them in buses, and sent them to Mexico. In total, up to 4,000,000 Mexicans and their US born descendants were victims of this.
It is possible that some the families being detained and separated are descendants of US citizens. But nobody cares, you know why? because it's not about citizenship and immigration. It has never been about that. It's about making bullshit excuses for racism and ethnic cleansing. Before the Mexican annexation it was done to the Native Americans, and for them there were other excuses as well.
The US has set a strong precedent about not giving a flying fuck about borders, immigration and sovereignty. What did American immigrants in Tejas, Mexico do? or Alta California, Mexico? or the Kingdom of Hawaii? or countless other territories? They were given land grants and instead of being grateful, they revolted, declared independence and then joined the Union because they were not allowed to have slaves, or because they saw themselves as entitled to those lands. Lands that they had no connection to whatsoever.
Before the US existed, their predecessors, the British empire, had other races to discriminate. Basically every other nation including other nations in the British Isles. That mentality led them to invade 99% of the planet and kill millions of people through wars, famine, etc.
In contrast, the ancestors of the families being detained are the populations that have inhabited North America for 10,000 years. Not a couple of centuries. 10,000 fucking years.
I think there is justified wariness about building too much on top of any service given away for free.
It’s called a dog whistle. Damore knew exactly what he was saying, who it would appeal to, and how to attempt to cover himself when the whole thing blew up in his face.
Blaming ICE for immigration policy that have been inept for decades is going to solve what?
I understand the concern and the intent. I don't - yet? - see the impact.
In most casts that results in discriminatory civil suits. Imagine a restaurant, who has even greater leverage to test the for whatever reason mentality, asking a black family to leave without stating a reason. In most places in the US restaurants have the legal right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.
Are you saying that private entities should be forced to provide services to federal agencies?
Race is a protected class, occupation is not.
Federal agencies are not protected classes of citizens. In fact it is quite literally illegal to force a company to do business with the government if it doesn't want to.
This is easy to fix: just exclude Microsoft from participation in any federal tenders. Either you do business with all of the federal government, or you don't. It's pretty straightforward. Right now, the situation is pretty absurd: Microsoft will sell dual use tech to China (which, let me remind you, runs concentration camps for Muslims), and to countries which literally throw gay people off the roofs, but US federal law enforcement is somehow not quite good enough to deal with. This is extreme hypocrisy, but it's pretty typical overall. I would encourage Microsoft to be consistent, and sever its business ties with countries where the human rights are not respected at least to the extent they are in the United States.
Yes, doing the right thing often is dangerous and earns you hatred from other people doing bad things who love the freedom of hiding amongst a herd of other equally guilty people.
The reason we have so much respect for people who take stand and do what they believe is right is because doing so is so hard. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
I and others say "humanitarian reasons".
I think that's the big disconnect here. You don't think ICE does immense harm (you're even willing to downplay it as "political" to not support them).
Regardless of where folks fall politically, I think they should be loathe to support an organization that treats folks so inhumanely.
And I think you're missing the point.
"We should absolutely be lobbying for hard changes".
Jeez, what do you think it is that they're doing? They're lobbying using the power that they have.
I'm in one of those weird moods where I want to see if I can argue something that sounds weird at first. If that's not your thing just ignore this post.
Putting pressure on ICE isn't going to change anything. Institutions cannot be trusted to reform themselves. In fact, it's going to be worse than doing nothing. The people involved will feel like they have "done their part" and will do fewer useful things in the future than they would have otherwise, mostly because they wasted their time on this thing.
Pressure has to be put on congress to reform ICE. Anything that distracts from that, or makes people feel a sense of accomplishment without furthering that goal is worse than useless.
I think that social constructs could be discriminated against based on race, religion, sex, etc if it was discriminated against because its members were part of a protected class.
[0] https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/8686/what-is-a-creed...
Microsoft itself is denying service to police departments right now regarding face detection tech.
"Microsoft won’t sell facial recognition to police until Congress passes new privacy law" https://www.theverge.com/21288053/microsoft-facial-recogniti...
I think its appropriate to refuse to work with nazi germany, apartheid south africa, khmer rouge, etc. But I don’t think ICE is anywhere near those regimes.
If GitHub staff equate them, then I question the logic of any organization that makes those comparisons. Mainly because it they aren’t operating rationally then perhaps next is DEA, NRA, non-GPL contributors, etc.
I don’t see any good where companies try to work or not work with specific organizations based on very niche boycott campaigns.
If a practice is provably automatable, then it's already automated. That's what proof looks like.
Making something illegal may feel good, but if 100% of the population (by the terms of your scenario) are against it, legislation is hardly going to move the needle.
It isn't that outlandish that the market will sort it all out. I doubt anyone is going to be unhappy if business get a bit of a prod to remind them that wheelchairs exist, but the idea a free market would ignore 2% of their potential customers is just not true. Greedy capitalists have incentives to be thorough; 2% of the market changing hands is enough to get the attention of any CEO.
Most businesses would notice 2% of their customers disappearing, let alone 2% of the broader market.
Assuming that refusal-of-service is a sort of relief valve is wildly optimistic.
Overt but relatively passive forms of racism effectively give pervasive comfort and encouragement to those who would engage in more active acts. Indirectly, this is also why "dog whistle" speech is so dangerous.
Per your example, in an environment where simply refusing service to you was common and widespread, you might find that someone who does agree to serve you is doing so just for the opportunity to spit in your food (at best).
For some reason, people fail to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration.
That is true, but it most likely leaves wheelchair users paying a premium on goods and services for the privilege of even being able to enter the establishment, and probably having a smaller selection of lower quality to choose from to boot.
That is what generally happens with captive markets, you know.
Go back and read the comment threads here when the story broke. The population of sexist software engineers extends far beyond Google and isn’t a secret to anyone.
It wouldn't be the only obstacle. Let's take wheelchair-accessible parking spots for example. We have to convince the store that sacrificing regular-sized parking spots (and the ones closest to the store, at that) in order to make room for a smaller number of larger parking spots that are reserved for 2% of their customers (and not exactly the most profitable 2%, either) is a reasonable accommodation.
Bear in mind that some of those spots we're asking them to convert might already be reserved for the store manager, some senior employees, and the employee-of-the-month as perks, rather than for customers. You will have a lot of convincing to do, and should expect significant pushback from the local chamber of commerce.
I think there's a moral component and a practical component. The latter becomes very difficult when taking a stand against a government entity in your home jurisdiction, since the offending government may put you out of business or something.
For example, in Nazi Germany (which I agree is a useful example to reference), a company that refused service to the Nazis would have had its executives murdered and been taken over by the state within a day. (My guess based on my recent read of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but I may be off).
On the other hand, refusing service to North Korea (sanctions aside) is a clearly ethically correct thing and offers little practical risk for companies based in the West.
I think that's a better situation than the U.S. model which essentially foments society-dividing political warfare by cancelling people from different political viewpoints. It just serves to divide your country even further.
If you disagree, answer me this: Are you okay with the fact that a racist employer can fire you for not being racist enough? Are you okay with the fact that a Christian employer can fire you for supporting LGBT rights.. (they cannot fire you for being gay, but they can fire you for supporing gays)? Are you okay with the fact that an employer can fire you for supporing BLM? If political opinion is not protected, you'd better hope your employer has the same political opinions that you do... or else you'd better stay very quiet (chilling effect).
Discrimination against an arm of the government itself (ICE) seems to me to be an advanced stage symptom of a systemic societal sickness. I have no idea how it will resolve, but I wish you all the best. Hang in there.
How's that Jedi contract looking now?
You know, in free societies, there is society. That is very different from "wild reign of every impulse going through the head of an individual", which of course would be impossible anyway as an individual is itself permanently full of conflicting impulses.
Not to do things and do things is only a matter of wording. Forbidding to kill people is equivalent with compelling to do something: people are compelled to repress their possible will to kill other people. Accepting to follow an interdiction is doing something. Only something that doesn't exist won't act in any way or an other.
You've proven your point. Paying customers would be afraid of doing things ICE is (in)famous for, lest they are “separated from their code”. i.e. Denying ICE means people will act nicer in general!
Should they? Well, one hardly can force someone to work for one's self nowadays.
Companies aren't democracies. Why should "the population at large"'s opinion matter in anyway? Most people don't even know Github exists, let alone what it's for.
Depends on how spread out the population is - black folk, maybe (but I don't have a simulation on me to work it out for sure and in what situations that theory might collapse), the subset of trans folk who're still working out how to blend in and not be seen as such in a rural area, not so much.
There's entire countries where some products are just not available commercially due to the lower income meaning nobody wants to put in the effort to work out how to provide them cost-effectively.
I'm even betting that it is a small vocal minority that is against it.
So, how should GitHub proceed in your opinion?
In the EU under human rights, discriminating based on political orientation is just as bad as discriminating based on race, gender, origin or religion. Religion and political beliefs are equivalent under the rule of law.
The UN also recognize discriminating based on political orientation under their human right declaration: "Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status"
Denying service to ICE the organization isn't even remotely comparable to denying service to actual human beings.
Is ICE staffed entirely by robots? How is it not denying service to actual human beings?
AFAIK there is no strict control on US state borders, citizens are allowed to move freely. In many cases running away is as easy as purchasing Greyhound bus ticket. It's great that you deeply care about prosecution of LGBT people in places like Middle East, but it's not really relevant to a discussion of anti discrimination laws in US.
> isn't worth much
You don't have to be big to be successful. This scenario means that you have very low barrier to enter this market and will have to spend close to nothing on advertising. But what's more important - this scenario is unrealistic. If you live in a country where it's possible to pass anti-discrimination laws - you don't need those laws, since majority of your country already finds discrimination unacceptable.
The majority of a country finding discrimination unacceptable isn't necessary to pass anti-discrimination laws - just that most people don't care whether someone gets discriminated against or not. If you don't care (or need the job to survive yourself), you'll do whatever your boss tells you to do, and you're hardly going to boycott a store for discriminating against someone else, which means a subset of the population has disproportionate impact.
(~80%) appears to think "dealing with illegal immigration" should mean "provide a path to citizenship" [1]
Meanwhile, that exact same poll had 75% of respondents favoring "Hiring significantly more border patrol agents."
Or perhaps the checks are very common and don’t usually result in public letters and whatnot.
ICE hasn’t even been accelerating in their harm to people. If anything they’ve plateaued or declined. I’m not sure how to best measure fascism in ICE, but long term internment, death, and mistreatment is probably a start. The death rate has dropped, despite many more detentions [0]. I tried to figure out some metric around number detained, but I think that may also be influenced by number of crossings and not straightforward to risk of becoming Nazi Germany.
How do you think we can better measure this risk within ICE?
[0] https://www.cato.org/blog/8-people-died-immigration-detentio...
Almost all the vocal critics of ICE I am aware of are Social Democrats that want Open border, Free Everything for Everyone, and curtailment of capitalist systems. They use ICE as an easy target to push their other agenda which is replacing capitalism with Socialism and open borders
>ICE exclusively works within the US.
Actually they work in 53 nations, and has a active role at many ports of entry but that really is not relevant
>>Since illegal immigrants have little protection, it acts much like any unchecked police force
Given the context around this discussion I would be hard pressed to pain ICE any worse than every day police
Law Enforcement in this nation need MASSIVE reforms, ICE include, as do every level of Law Enforcement.
Police Abuse is rampant and not simply a domain of illegal immigration enforcement.
>>There were 1,200 complaints of sexual assault in ICE custody[0], for example. Less than 2% of these were investigated[1]
lol, your "2 sources" are all the same source... They all reference the same intercept story which is very biased and highlights the problem with Wikipedia today
Further The Intercept does not claim that only 2% of the reports were investigated it says that the OIG only shared investigations on 2% of the cases with intercept as s result of the FOIA request, that does not mean there were not investigations on the other 98% only that the investigations were not released under FOIA. That can be for a number of reasons.
>From 2012 to early 2018, ICE wrongfully arrested and detained 1,488 U.S. citizens, including many who spent months or years in immigration detention.
I would like to know the actual total that spend months or years in detention "many" is a subjective term used to incite an emotional reaction. Not a data driven analysis to understand the scope of the problem
That said 1 is too many as as I have said before we need police reform
Unfortunately we are at a political impasse for any-kind of real accountability reform because the Social Democrats block any reforms that do not involve complete amnesty and open borders including full access to tax payer funded social welfare for all immigrants. That is a non-starter for most people. I will support open borders in the absence of social welfare, or I will support social welfare in the absence of open borders but I will never support both at the same time as that is not economically feasible.
After Trump took office, I began reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, to be on guard – I was afraid. The ICE camps are evil, scary, cruel, and probably illegal, but not indicative of the sort of fascism we saw under the Nazis. After all, they functioned similarly under the previous US president, who did not seem to have fascist tendencies. As others have mentioned, the detainment of the Uighurs rings much, much closer to Nazi Germany. In some ways scarier.
We have the freedom to leave work and sit in front of courthouses in protest until those responsible for ICE atrocities are prosecuted. We have other similar such freedoms.
Demanding your employer to take a foolhardy action which will register as a minor inconvenience in the target's IT department is... just silly. It's grasping at the closest power center you can find instead of making the effort to find a relevant one.
Denying the use of racially biased facial recognition software is a much clearer example where the risks are lower and the impact much, much greater.
It's much less clear that a source code repository is the fulcrum that enables 40 children to be jammed into a room without hygiene. Maybe if you worked for a critical supplier for ICE you could have an impact (which I would much encourage).
Note that MSFT isn't denying the use of Microsoft Office or Outlook to the FBI et al. That's essentially what GitHub's employees are asking for. They're denying the use of a tool which can be directly used to do harm, until they're sure it'll be used appropriately.
If a tech company were supplying software that was a key enabler for ICE's cruelty (such that ICE's cruelty would be significantly hampered without the tool), by all means they should stop the sale.
In this case, GitHub took actions similar to what you describe, donating $500k to "nonprofits helping communities adversely affected by the Trump administration’s immigration policies": https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-10-31...
Personally I think $500k is a bit small, and if I were Nat Friedman in this situation, maybe I would have announced a few extra paid leave days for employees engaging in protest, strikes, visiting elected officials to lobby for change, etc.
Nat Friedman's quote on this particular request from employees is "Picking and choosing customers is not the approach that we take to these types of questions when it comes to influencing government policy."
Even if there is no direct impact (such as another supplier stepping in) an individual choosing to avoid directly, supporting an organization they cannot morally abide has personal moral value. Probably not in a utilitarian sense, but that isn't the only basis for moral action in humans - see the trolly-problem for the canonical example.
IBM literally sold them information retrieval technology they used to keep track of concentration camp inmates. So clearly the important decision-makers did not agree.
I guess it is like any other question of what an organization should do. Those with the power to make decisions will decide based on some combination of their own ethical standards or (more likely) what think they is "good for the business", where PR as well as employee morale are components of that. The employees without the power to decide directly can organize to try to convince those with the power to make decisions of the correct ethical choice, or of what's good for the business, or to try to change the calculus of what's good for the business by effecting PR and employee morale etc.
I mean, this is kind of just a description of how human organizations or collective decision-making works....
I personally think that what ICE is doing is absolutely immoral and unethical, putting people, including asylum seekers, into (yes I think it's appropriate language) concentration camps, without a trial or hearing or access to a lawyer, in unsafe conditions (covid makes this even more extreme), separating children from parents, etc. If we looked for an external arbiter of this, I think it also clearly violates international law and agreements on the rights of migrants and refugees, so that could be another argument, don't sell software to organizations that will use it to violate international law.
I personally wouldn't at this point call for github (or anyone) to avoid business with the federal governmetn entirely -- just to avoid your products being used for the programs that are violating international human rights. That is, avoid doing business with ICE, for sure. Maybe with DHS in general, or particular programs/units in DHS.
I can't make you agree. People disagree, this is part of human life. But if I were in github, I'd be working to convince other co-workers of this, and to convince decision-makers leaders of it, as those in the article are presumably doing (I still can't read the article because paywall, so I'm only guessing as I think most commenting are!) This is how humans in organizations work.
However pretending that a vocal minority trying to push an agenda isn't bypassing democratic decision making is ludicrous.
Of course decision making in companies is not democratic, but if as a partisan employee you're trying to impose your opinion instead of trying to implement some kind of democratic process to consult other employees anonymously then you are no different than any authoritarian movement.
As you note, neither github nor hardly any company has any kind of "democratic decision-making" at all. It's just not how companies work in America. So I don't understand hwo you can be "bypassing" something that doesn't exist.
When the executive and other decision makers at a company make decisions with no democratic decision making whatsoever, do you think that is "no different than any authoritarian movement"? Personally, I think saying it's "no different" is a bit much, it's a differnet in a bunch of ways -- but I think it's not great, I think we should work to put democratic decision-making in all companies. Do you agree?
In the meantime though, we don't have that. So what are people who want to have impact on the decision-making supposed to do? Even when there is democratic decision-making, it's considered normal to try to convince your fellow-decision makers of things. I don't understand where you are drawing the line between allowable ways to effect decision-making and "like an authoritarian movement". I mean, nobody's threatening anyone with violence, are they? What means of persuasion or pressure are according to you allowed, and what means are not?
It doesn't help that I don't think either of us has actually read the article, because it's behind a paywall? So I actually have no idea what methods or persuasion or pressure they are using. Do you know more than me? If so, feel free to tell me (ideally with a link to another article so I can get it from the source), and explain why you think those methods have crossed the line into "authoritarian"?
Since I don't know specificcally what they are doing, I can't really defend it specifically. Like, if they were beating people up who didn't agree with them, I'd definitely agree that's something authoritarian movements do! (I still don't think I'd agree it's "no different", there are always differences, that's a kind of lazy thing to say, "no different"). But I don't see any reason to think or assume they are doing that? Do you have more information than me? I'm confused why you are assuming they are using unethical methods, or even what you think those methods they are using are. Are you saying just that going to the press makes it "no different than any authoritarian movement", but if you just talked about it quietly inside the company that would be okay? That would seem an odd distinction to me.
If they want their opinion to be taken seriously, they should setup democratic vote among employees to collect votes anonymously about the issue at hand.
Proceeding otherwise is simply trying to convince colleagues but also removes the possibility for other employees to have their voices heard anonymously.
I fundamentally disagree with this. Your argument is akin to stating that there should never be any casualties in a war. There is no way to effectively win a war without sometimes sending some troops into situations where you know they will die.
Compared to soldiers who knowingly lay down their lives in losing battles to help win the war, choosing a moral course of action that merely ends a company seems like a pretty cheap sacrifice.
For instance in France regarding B2B sales:
"Constitue également une discrimination toute distinction opérée entre les personnes morales sur le fondement de l'origine, du sexe, de la situation de famille, de la grossesse, de l'apparence physique, de la particulière vulnérabilité résultant de la situation économique, apparente ou connue de son auteur, du patronyme, du lieu de résidence, de l'état de santé, de la perte d'autonomie, du handicap, des caractéristiques génétiques, des mœurs, de l'orientation sexuelle, de l'identité de genre, de l'âge, des opinions politiques, des activités syndicales, de la capacité à s'exprimer dans une langue autre que le français, de l'appartenance ou de la non-appartenance, vraie ou supposée, à une ethnie, une Nation, une prétendue race ou une religion déterminée des membres ou de certains membres de ces personnes morales."
This clearly states that you cannot refuse to sell a product or to a company on political grounds, just like you can't refuse to sell to a Jewish association because they are Jewish, or to a Italian company because you don't trust Italians.
2. If we had not been devaluing black lives and letting off murdering cops for hundreds of years, we would not be seeing protests in the streets. This was entirely preventable: just dismantle systemic racism, like yesterday.
3. If the majority of github’s employees shared your skewed view of the blm protests, they might apply pressure on their employer, yes.
At least for Americans you are wrong on all three counts, and that may be where the confusion is coming.
The workers (and as I already stated, the OP) all agree that there are actions done by ICE that are not only unethical but morally reprehensible. One of the (only) two major parties officially agrees as do a large portion of their constituents.
So your question about views "outside the common take" is interesting but not relevant to this discussion.
Saying folks have the freedom to leave their job is ridiculous and only reinforces my point.
This is a highly debatable opinion.
> A corporation refusing to work with a legal entity really shows just how much power corporations now have.
Not really, everyone has always had a choice. It's just sometimes a choice that they cannot refuse. And, as far as choosing to only host "democrat" code, where would we like that line? At Chinese code? How about NK? What about environmental activists that US oil interests don't like? The scope of this argument is larger and pertains to how we would like to structure our means of production and about what actors we care to dis-incentivize and why. Since ICE systematically abuses its power over vulnerable people, I'd say "stop it by any means necessary, save further harm." If the corporation is a spear, then throw it; if the law is a sword, swing it. If people are being egregiously harmed in it, it is the duty of the people to end it.
Fortunately, in fact, plenty of organized people have been taken seriously, and have effected change, through other means.
I think this is an important distinction that needs to be resolved in some legal means. many people have differing opinions on this, so having some systematic process is useful so we don’t end up wasting energy on a very loud minority.
This is a complex issue and it’s something that companies should be good at. In this case, having some systematic way of making this decision public is helpful to me in planning who to purchase services from. Some generic statement that the decision was “based on company values” (that can change at any time) makes it hard to predict future decisions.
This ambiguity over how products are run is a big part of how I struggle to predict what Google products will continue or be, arbitrarily to me, discontinued.
Does this sound like a truthful and faithful assessment to you?
By possibly bypassing the majority's opinion. Also called authoritarianism. Putting pressure in a non-democratic way is silencing people's opinion and similar to censorship.
[I bet I'll get more downvotes than answers].