It feels so obvious to me that the CEO of such a high-profile org should at the very least quickly check public-facing social media posts against someone sensible, if not laundering them all through the experts at their org. But somehow they keep making these mistakes over and over again.
Edit: to be clear, this comment was not asking a serious question
When I was a kid I formed a core memory when I said “no offence, but…” and then said something incredibly offensive and was subsequently and rightfully lit right up by the person. “But I said no offence!” was my response, completely misunderstanding how that phrase even worked.
I feel like this is the adult version of that.
Is this recent incident with Garry connected at all with the antisemetic postcards delivered last year? I haven't been following this and thus don't know what Garry's issue with the supervisors is.
If not: This is scummy writing to connect his admittedly poor-taste comments to something worse.
Reminds me of the YouTube videos with "no copyright infringement intended" disclaimers.
[1] https://uwm.edu/free-speech-rights-responsibilities/faqs/wha...
in case anyone else wonders what’s a “supervisor”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Board_of_Super...
Being Jewish isn’t some sort of shield that gives you special rights over anyone else.
I think that was the point of the parents "public figures" comment
Also, featuring the price of his liquor bottles (prominent in the first article about this by the same writer) is indicative of the level of pettiness involved. Maybe there's an actual story here, but this isn't it, and it's not clear that the story is more than "someone said something regrettable on Twitter".
But this is a deeply stupid story with a lede that basically says "I'm unfamiliar with even the most most famous 90s hip-hop". Tan, like many, many, many Internet commenters before him, was quoting Tupac's Hit 'Em Up, which, unless you think Tupac was literally calling out hits on Chino XL, was not intended to be a true threat at the time, and certainly couldn't reasonably be taken as one today.
People come up with all sorts of cringey rationalizations for how this is anything more than someone on Twitter faceplanting a dad joke (sorry, but 2Pac is now dad music, I don't make the rules). That's because the rationalizations are more narratively interesting, which is a pretentious way of saying "fun", and fun beats reason every single time.
EFfective local politics? Definitely not. But then, if you oppose what Tan is about in SF, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
This is an off-topic dupe story and by rights it shouldn't be on the front page, but, whatever.
But I think a sincere mea culpa should end the incident.
These CEOs aren't doing anything different in these situations - they're being themselves and doing what they did to get their position. Other people generally don't call them out on their BS because it's an uphill battle fighting overtly charismatic people, and it's much easier to accept their flaws for the benefit of riding their coattails to the top
This is why they can't differentiate between upsides/downsides - people let them get away with things that other people can't, and to them it is all the same
for us non-americans, can someone please explain what general political aims the 'moderate' and 'progressive' parties represent? And where are they on the republican democrat spectrum?
This is not borne out by historical events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You%27ve_Been_Publicly_Sham...
Quoting 2Pac lyrics is just comical. Even more out of touch than Ben Horowitz (of Andreessen Horowitz) starting every chapter of his ultra-corporate startup book with Jay-Z lyrics.
(Hint: Dean Preston is notorious for blocking new housing, while being nominally progressive)
This doesn't excuse Tan's comments in any way, but it seemed like the author just threw the kitchen sink into the article
But once Neuralink arrives, we're lost.
From a Seattle perspective, the "seattle is dying narrative" has been going on for a decade, despite the city having thr most cranes on its skyline and being a boom city for that time. Which is to say, confirmation bias is a bitch.
you think given the context between Biggie and Tupac, where both artists were later violently murdered, Hit'em up, which was one of the rap beef songs of all time, did not include any genuine threats of violence?
I'm not saying that Garry Tan was threatening to, as in the original song, shoot up the supes with AKs, or shoot them in the back with the Mac, or cut their young ass up, leave them in pieces, or snatch their ugly ass off the streets, or get their caps peeled, but I think it would be very strange to rationalize that particular Tupac song as one that was not threatening murder
It's about time Y Combinator has executives who aren't so busy with politics. It gives the whole incubator, startup scene, etc, a bad name.
The good ol' days are over. I still have in my mind Y Combinator of Paul Graham (a man wise with his words), but given that we've already had even Sam Altman in control of it.
I'm guessing YC nowadays is not that different from private equity/VCs like A16z, which enjoy having their fingers on everything. Typically, it is stuff they don't know much about and look plain stupid.
I hope PG can bring the good ol' days back someday, when it was about entrepreneurship, having people laser-focused on building disruptive companies.
But ignore the fact that most people on this board work for companies that build this technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
Stochastic terrorism
(Edited to add: However, an article discussed yesterday in a now-flagged discussion did have the letters: >>39199703 )
It was brought up because they are receiving explicitly antisemitic content from the same people who loved and weaponized Tan's tweet.
https://missionlocal.org/2024/01/garry-tan-death-wish-sf-sup...
He hasn’t liked it when the threats were the other way:
> In the past, Tan has not been receptive to jokes about him: When commenting on San Francisco community organizer Julian La Rosa, who had said that “millionaires and landlords should be guillotined,” Tan seemed to take the jest deadly seriously.
> “This is not a joke,” he posted. “This guy wants to guillotine people.”
> “This kind of stuff should have zero place in San Francisco politics,” he later said.
When people with power stay things, other people take it as permission to do things that are said or implied in that speech. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
Its not clear to me that the ones with Garry's face are anti-semetic; unless they are, due to the nature of his extreme concern with the supervisory board, and that's what I'm trying to zero-in on. Its also naturally possible that the motivations of Garry and the person who sent the postcard are different, but again: I think its scummy to then prescribe antisemetic intent to Garry by connecting the two without elaborating within-the-article on why Garry is so drunkenly distraught.
I am not justifying or trivializing how Garry behaved. Its not ok to say what he said. But, its possible for both sides of this to be scummy and horrible; and that possibility is what I want to understand better.
(with no apology and copious reference of Arkell v. Pressdram to Mr. Andreessen)
> But tying this potential legislation to the message Tan communicated to his 408,000 Twitter followers would appear to be a serious legal challenge: Half a dozen lawyers and judges told Mission Local that, however ill-advised, Tan’s comments do not rise to the legal definition of a death threat.
Which makes sense. Wishing someone a slow death is akin to saying "go to hell." It is a terrible thing to say and can be said with hate and malice and make you feel very worried but it is not the same thing as "I'm going to kill you."
edit: ah yeah he is lol:
It happened with Trump, who more or less seemed to know he was provoking something dark. Other public figures ought to have more care with their language.
Clearly Garry’s fans are threatening violence here as a direct consequence of Garry’s intentional targeting and signalling here. I don’t follow at all how the journalistic angle is problematic
But man, doing this is at best cringe, and at worst extremely unprofessional
Note that I say "idiotic comments", not outright " F U and die" comments as is the case here.
"If you are with [progressive supes] then FU too" makes me wonder how employees, YC applicants, and others are treated if they are so aligned or appear to be. A laptop sticker or T-shirt with one of these names on it would be noticed, not to mention social media posts or "following" status.
YC portrays itself as a meritocracy and striving to find the right or the best founders. If the top officer is filled with such resentment, I don't see how that doesn't cloud the YC environment and the types of founders who are invited to participate.
> Stochastic terrorism refers to political or media figures publicly demonizing a person or group in such a way that it inspires supporters of the figures to commit a violent act against the target of the speech. Unlike incitement to terrorism, this is accomplished by using indirect, vague, or coded language that allows the instigator to plausibly disclaim responsibility for the resulting violence. Global trends point to increasing violent rhetoric and political violence, including more evidence of stochastic terrorism.
If you dislike their politics, so be it - donate to campaigns or personally run against them. Write a letter explaining how you'd like them to vote.. But the amount of absolute crass behavior people allow "because it's the internet" is mind boggling.
People of a certain political bent are eager to throw journalists under every available bus, even if that means denying history and common sense.
I think the fact that it's lyrics can make a big difference to the assumed intent. It's a young guy quoting an angry poem vs an actual threat.
It's telling executives would think people would just ask tough questions on demand. It of course costs the CEO nothing to provide everyone else at the company tough questions / feedback, employees though need to consider their words carefully depending on who at a company is listening as there can be real consequences.
It's one of those things that I'm sure seems like it makes the executive look "open", but rather it just shows their ignorance / are out of touch with the life of a rando worker.
Not a surprise that kind of unawareness leaks out of the workplace as they operate in a space where they are often relatively free to speak their mind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/technology/one-family-man...
The standard for free speech in America is that if you're not calling for imminent and specific violence, then you're in the clear. The stochastic in stochastic terrorism does away with both the imminence and specificity; with a large enough population you'll have enough nuts that some of them may take even the most mellow criticism as a call to action.
"Die slow" is pretty ambiguous though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XASNM1XEQPs
Like I said, this "online rant, threat of harm" stuff (to paraphrase the story) is pretty supremely cringey.
Progressive is Left. Their pet terrorist loot the school, the Target, or the Walmart.
Despite what the article says, we have no moderates.
Conservative is right. Their pet terrorists take guns and shoot up the school, the Target, or the Walmart. (And occasionally, a church here or there).
That's US politics in a nutshell.
It's nice that you're familiar with a story from England in 1170, but no, you don't just get automatically blamed in the US when crazy people do things in response to dumb things you said on Twitter.
Regardless, even if you did get blamed, missionlocal is not the impartial jury who gets to decide whether or not quoting 2pac is incitement to violence.
This is an example of caring more about what people say than what people actually do.
For a generation who is so proud of itself, Millennials, your results suck. Where are your accomplishments?
Mission Local is one of the best sources of local San Francisco news, especially anything directly relevant to the Mission District.
If rich jerks don't want to be called out by local journalists, they shouldn't post unhinged public death threats, even as a "joke" or "song reference".
> COWEN: Isn’t it the voters you need to replace? Those people got elected, reelected.
> GRAHAM: Well, the reason San Francisco fundamentally is so broken is that the supervisors have so much power, and supervisor elections, you can win by a couple hundred votes. All you need to do is have this hard core of crazy left-wing supporters who will absolutely support you, no matter what, and turn out to vote.
> Everybody else is like, “Oh, local election doesn’t matter. I’m not going to bother.” [laughs] It’s a uniquely weird situation that wasn’t really visible. It was always there, but it wasn’t visible until Ed Lee died. Now, we’ve reverted to what that situation produces, which is a disaster.
It's impossible for commentary from a person who controls a vast amount of capital to not be political.
I agree. We need to bring civility and basic respect, for the institution, back into our public discourse.
Ranting on Twitter should not be a crime IMO
Sure there are humans that stickerbomb a tie die hatchback or go on Joe Rogan but then you got your human that lives a private life and drives a gray crossover.
I would rather YC leadership kept their political positions to themselves as much as is reasonably possible. It dilutes the value of that bullet point -- I want it to communicate things about my work ethic and competency. I don't want it to imply _anything_ about my political opinions.
I don't have a problem with tech leaders holding political positions, nor do I have a problem with them making personal donations based on those opinions. Quietly.
It's pretty hard to say what the terms "progressive" and "moderate" mean in a US context, but I would say that both terms exclude the American far right and populist movements, and are vague as to what they include otherwise. The Overton window has shifted hard to the right in the United States, so it's probably somewhat right of what you may expect from, say, a European perspective. A moderate will probably be sympathetic to limiting immigration, for example, a progressive is likely more in support of immigration. Both groups probably support minority rights (e.g. LGBTQ, Muslim, etc), but moderates less so.
In terms of economics, both terms and parties generally describe liberal capitalist economic policy, which is dogmatically entrenched across the US political spectrum, to the point where most Americans cannot conceptualize economic systems other than liberal capitalism. The main difference in political economic values across the US political spectrum fixate mainly on who pays how much taxes, and subsidies for liberal capitalist businesses. Progressives may be more pro-union, whereas most moderates are generally not.
Moderate and progressive groups can overlap, particularly in a politician who wants to appeal to both, usually by contrasting themselves with the right.
Disclosing my biases: I am an American leftist (or social democrat, if you prefer) living abroad, and I generally have quite a lot of disdain for moderates, particularly in the United States. I'm definitely holding my punches for this comment, though, for what it's worth.
Mission Local is a non profit org in SF that has done really great work.
Many of their articles focus on corruption in the city government, for example https://missionlocal.org/2022/08/nuru-sentenced/
You can see their funders here: https://missionlocal.org/our-donors/
If that is ever typed seriously I don't want to be in those comments.
OK. Maybe their coverage of potholes is fantastic, but this article is a terrible, obviously partisan hack job. Both things can be true.
Here it means members of the county board of supervisors. If you live in a place where that's not a thing, it's very similar to a city council or county commissioners in many other US places.
The person receiving that is probably concerned they've been doxxed on 4chan by now.
That sort of stuff ruins lives, people do go into hiding.
An online rant really is one thing, but when it starts to be connected to crazies sending letters to your home address - that gets scary fast.
The "progressives" generally want to limit gentrification, prevent renters from being evicted, and add more subsidized housing. The "moderates" generally want to make it easier to build more housing of any type. You could broadly characterize the two groups as "default skeptical" vs. "default supportive" of real estate developers.
But housing is only one point of disagreement (albeit one of the most significant), plenty of people have more nuanced positions than this, and these camps are not entirely uniform across issues. Other points of recent disagreement include Covid lockdowns, what the school board should focus on, how hard prosecutors should go after police misconduct vs. minor crime, responses to the homeless, how much power the board of supervisors should have vs. the mayor's office, ...
I mean, sure...who are you arguing with? I didn't say nobody should cover this. I said this article is terrible.
> But denying that public calls to violence spurs actual violence is denial of basic cause and effect.
Yeah, except we have laws around this concept, and even if what you're saying were true in the US (it isn't, thankfully), it doesn't magicaly make hack journalism good.
Said differently, "incitement to violence" doesn't mean that missionlocal is high-minded and mature for spending two articles talking about the price of his liquor.
So because some un-self-aware rich a hole says something offensive we should censor, restrict the free speech of the general populous?
It's not the enablement of communication that's the problem here. It's a simple case of fault. He is as fault for his actions, not social media.
For me, those two paragraphs do not say that Tan was antisemetic in any form. It says that
i) some of the same people received an antisemitic hate letters before
ii) those antisemetic letters used the same wording than the ones sent using Tan’s face
The only implication that I see is that they were likely sent by the same person/group. I see this is very clear in the writing as it is. Zero scummyness in it.
And, this connection, in my opinion, very much justifies including the antisemetic letters in the article. It seems a very relevant information.
This story's lede is several San Francisco Board Of Supervisors members receiving post cards quoting Garry Tan's words.
Different story.
I had one training even state outright that if you were seen on social media wearing company swag and doing something like flipping the bird or anything even mildly offensive that was grounds for dismissal.
Neither of these do much, honestly. The government already steals enough of my money, I'm not handing them more. And as a silicon valley nerd I'm not going to attract votes by personally running.
But yeah, wishing death is immature.
Wish we could disentangle flies from sausages and move YC office back to Mountain View, where it belongs.
Which of us is right? Maybe both (corporate culture can be pretty heterogeneous). Hard to say, regardless
Everyone has opinions that would get them cancelled on Twitter. Most of us are sensible enough to keep them to ourselves, or, at least, off Twitter, without even having the responsibility to maintain the image of a business. He has a duty to his employees, his clients, and his investors that goes far beyond the standard duty of "Don't be an asshole on Twitter."
Political hyperbole is also kind of the norm on Twitter (which is one of many reasons I don't spend much time there), so it's entirely possible he thought he was being humorous, and that it was abundantly obvious that he shouldn't be taken literally. Which might even be true. But CEOs are at extra risk of getting taken out of context and willfully misinterpreted, and they should fucking Tweet like it.
I disagree with what he said, but I'm more insulted that the people are allowed such insane levels of power and responsibility and are given such disproportionate compensation have the common sense of a middle-schooler.
EDIT: I see people making a fair point about "too much criticism" as it sort of contradicts what I said about "speak my mind". I guess my worry is not about free speech or other people just criticizing but more of the woke crowd that just wants to cancel you because they disagree. I should have clarified that in initial comment.
This does have to be included as a possible contributing factor to this death threat.
(There's 2 types of bigots: one type will plainly use terrible language up front to let everyone know what they think. The other type will couch their hate in plausible deniable language so you're really not 100% sure.)
Give me DOOM lyrics or GTFO.
Or, you know, just be drunk off of Twitter?
Elon barely gets away with it, and everyone else isn't that rich.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ugD3_yt756w (goes without saying, but NSFW)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Board_of_Super...
A better question to ask yourself is why Jewish people seem to continually end up in this situation: on the receiving end of antisemitic abuse.
Political stuff pisses people off, but people who are pissed at Jew can always just trot out the antisemitic and dehumanizing statements... Such threatening comments have proved credible enough of the time to make the person on the receiving end really second guess about their safety.
If you have a few minutes of thought to the ~200 countries that 8 billion people are living under, like China, India, Russia, Japan, Iran, Nigeria, Indonesia, Poland, Phillipines, Turkey, and their policies on immigration, LGBT, drug use, freedom of speech/press, you would quickly be disabused of any idea the US democrats are center-right.
What I think is that steeped in a Western European leftist bubble, 95% of the world is right wing to you, and you’re confused on where America stands in that spectrum, forgetting about who’s currently been elected in the rest of Europe like Sweden, UK, Poland, Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, etc.
Prescriptively, you are right, but descriptively, for a particular subset of Silicon Valley CEOs, it seems pretty on-character.
---
But tying this potential legislation to the message Tan communicated to his 408,000 Twitter followers would appear to be a serious legal challenge: Half a dozen lawyers and judges told Mission Local that, however ill-advised, Tan’s comments do not rise to the legal definition of a death threat.
Under Penal Code 422, a person making a criminal threat must harbor “specific intent that the statement, made verbally, in writing, or by means of an electronic communication device, is to be taken as a threat…”
“It is offensive, but it is speech protected by the First Amendment,” said Berkeley School of Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It does not meet the standard for incitement.”
---
"This is a fairly standard and boring way of dressing up censorship as something high-minded."
Do you think that speech is not an act? That speech does not have any consequences in the world, and so should be free from all restriction? That's certainly not the law in the US, and you seem to be aware of incitement to violence.
"missionlocal is not the impartial jury who gets to decide whether or not quoting 2pac is incitement to violence."
Please quote where missionlocal decides that is incitement to violence. You are accusing missionlocal of hack journalism where it is simply reporting what happened. You may not think Garry Tan should get heat for doing what he did, but you should not place your ire on the journalists who are reporting what is by any reasonable definition a story within their purview.
> However, I do worry that there is too much criticism these days when someone speaks their mind.
You don’t need to feel conflicted. Just think of that “too much criticism” as people who disagree with the initial take as speaking their mind in response.
I don't currently have anything worthy of a death threat but if I ever do in the future, I'd prefer the public not know where I sleep.
Also, f all forms of KYC. Half of those companies end up getting hacked or leaking data at some point in the future.
Supervisors mostly sit through the monthly televised Board Of Supervisors meeting, where concerned citizens and community activists along with the utterly deranged voice their concerns.
It didn't take me that. I knew it within moments of reading the article and it seems the vast majority of readers didn't have this problem.
Agreed
> who happen to be overtly charismatic to a fault.
Not so much.
> they're being themselves and doing what they did to get their position.
yes, there is a way of talking in industry that allows people to rise through the ranks. Its very rare that you get to the top by being an odious prick all the time.
However, people on the inside don't tend call out CEOs, because they need something from them. If you are frank with your CEO and they don't like it, you're out on your arse, to be replaced by a yes man. (not always, but its surprisingly common)
It is very easy to become a CEO as a normal person, only to develop into an horrid shit later.
Progressives believe that allowing developers to build housing will only create "luxury" housing that is unaffordable to all but the rich, increasing gentrification and displacement. Therefore it's necessary to mandate things like "inclusionary zoning" and tight review of every single development project.
Empirically, the progressive stance results in a lot less housing of any sort getting built, whether "affordable" or otherwise, and consequently higher housing prices for all but the lucky lottery winners who grab the limited number of BMR ("Below Market Rent") units. Some would say that that's actually the goal of progressives (ie, they're using "progressive" window dressing to preserve property values/neighborhood aesthetics of the very rich).
A wealthy, powerful, influential celebrity figure saying something 'regrettable' on Twitter often has real-world consequences. If he'd posted a tweet that read something like "Upload a picture of you assassinating so-and-so and a Bitcoin address and I will send you $100k" and someone followed those instructions, that would be conspiracy to commit murder. If he'd posted "I feel that so-and-so's politics are misguided" that's totally reasonable free speech.
There's also a question of scale or exposure. We legally define rights by qualitative analyses. I feel strongly that as technology increases the power of an individual that quantitative analyses are relevant too. If someone's speech will be broadcasted to 400,000 or 40,000,000 followers, that's one thing, if it's said privately to 4 friends that's completely different.
Somewhere in the middle of these things there's a line between right and wrong. I'm quite confident that telling an audience of 400,000 that you want a few named people to "Die slow motherfuckers" is on the wrong side of that line.
A. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences.
B. Just because you CAN say anything you want doesn't mean you SHOULD. Part of living in society is acting... civilized.
Suggesting you should treat others with respect is now equated with hating freedom of speech? I guess our country really is in trouble...
This is not a freedom of speech issue, it's a "CEOs shouldn't be idiots" issue.
Like, say, death threats?
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of humans go their entire lives without joking about death threats.
Economically or socially and over what sort of time scale?
My theory is the real reason for the return to office mandates is to keep employees stuck in a situation where they are compelled to chase big comp and compromise whatever morals they once had just to put food on the table.
But freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences of that speech.
Like people judging what you say.
I'm a free speech absolutionist, but I still think neo Nazis are assholes. I think they should be allowed to say it (absent violence), but anyone who chooses to say it is going to drastically change the way I think of them.
I don't even think it's "because it's the internet." "In Real Life" political discourse has been getting significantly more and more crass and more and more belligerent in the last 10-15 years. Go over to YouTube and bring up some Reagan-Mondale or Clinton-Bush debates and compare their tone and temperament to what we see today. People still felt strongly about the issues back then, but we weren't so constantly hurling threats and potty-mouth insults all over the place like today.
How can you be in support of Freedom of Speech,
and at the same time be out here saying there is "too much criticism"?
It doesn't make any sense.
Are you asking your question in good faith?
Why? HN censors shit all the time, and its all invisible unless you go looking for it.
I'm just not a huge rap listener, though I can tell you all about Tupac's family's amazing history.
Probably receiving death threats causes a lot of real anxiety (not just the PC snowflake kind). That's a lot better than an actual assassination, but it's not nothing either.
I've probably done it two or three times. I've wished people dead quietly, maybe about 10 times. Never actually killed anyone. One person I wished dead, did die (of leukemia), probably, unfortunately, slow and painfully.
Here's someone I would right now, wish a slow and painful death, publically. Vladimir Putin.
come after me with an accusation of a death threat.
Liberty is a function of an extraordinarily strong social contract. If you don't have strong enforcement of rights, you don't have rights.
Why do people always say this? Yes, it’s true - and it’s also just flexing your power and ability to crush any speech you deem should have “consequences”.
Free speech advocates are trying to push for a consistent, fairly applied position (which is very noble but imo untenable - I’m not a free speech advocate) and often met with a response that’s essentially “you have no power and I do, so if I dislike what you’re saying I’m going to crush you”.
It's debatable.
Imminent exhortations of others to break the law should be illegal.
Past that, it's a slippery slope to pre-arresting people for thought crime.
As abhorrent as some of the language is, it seems... dicey... if the US had simply banned gangster rap, NWA, fuck-the-police style music. And it's a tenuous line from threat to actual violence.
Which is why "credible" is usually the standard for charging. I.e. did you make a threat and take actions to realize the threat?
Then why are we trusting the person to make a rational choice? By that logic, X should simply disallow using certain words when your audience is > 400,000. Because anyone can get incited for violence when they read certain words as you claim.
As for social policy, it is heading to the right, gaining momentum in the years leading to Trump and making steady gains since. I would characterize the social overton window in the US as the Democrats nailing the left end of the window the wall and Republicans systemically dragging the right end further and further right.
Huh?
There were whole articles written about the song and the context of the time in which it was written. Tupac lived a notoriously violent life and saw himself as a legit street gangster despite the actual reality of the opposite.
From 2017:
That opening line—that egregious, confrontational, hate-filled opening line—was one of the most unforgettable utterances ever committed to wax by the late Tupac Shakur. It’s been 20 years since the release of 2Pac’s scathingly brutal diss track “Hit ’Em Up,” a song that came to embody the venom behind the Death Row/Bad Boy beef of the mid-’90s and an easy reference for the antagonistic figure many saw 2Pac as in his final months on this earth.
There was a palpable sense of dread hanging over hip-hop in mid-’96.
The final paragraph of the article sums it up:
In the wake of Shakur’s murder, “Hit ’Em Up” would become a chilling epitaph for a feud that seemed to spiral out of control—even more so after the Notorious B.I.G. met a similar fate in March 1997. Taken on its own merit, it’s one of the greatest diss records in hip-hop history; but attached to the moment, it was a lot more than that. Something more volatile. Something more dangerous.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/tupacs-hit-em-up-the-most-sava...
Reminded me of a fascinating video I recall; Bush and Reagan debate illegal immigration in 1980's primary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmgPp_nlok
They sound more liberal than half of today's Democrats.
Just ask Paul Pelosi. IANAL, I don't know what the legal definition of a credible threat is, but I completely empathize with these politicians who might be wary of what someone with the resources of Tan may do directly or incite.
Yes, "for you" and clearly, for me, I did not draw the conclusion that Garry's motivations were antisemetic. That's not the point. Journalists publish articles for an extremely broad audience, and there's a high degree of responsibility and ethics required of the author while publishing; a degree that, to be clear, I do not feel this author met.
We’ve all said things we aren’t proud of in the heat of the moment, especially under the influence of mind altering substances. And perhaps he was making an (albeit poor taste) joke? We’ve become far too sensitive these days.
I'm sorry, if you are like "I'm glad they gave me the money and the label" and can't take it when someone associated makes an embarassing human moment, you are just trying to have your cake and eat it too. Do better.
Individuals judging you and making personal decisions on how to relate to you?
Or society making decisions to withdraw necessary services?
This is where firmly distinguishing between (individual freedom to associate / decide) and (social responsibility to deliver a necessary service) needs more clarity.
Should I be allowed to picket on public property in front of someone's house I disagree with? Or refuse to provide a service to them because I don't like them? IMHO, probably.
Should the city be allowed to turn off their electricity and water? IMHO, probably not.
Should VISA and Twitter be allowed to ban them? ... oof. That's a toughy.
Really? Because they are all about upsides.
"My initiatives led to 1,500,000 new bank accounts opened in the last 3 quarters!"
Vs.
"I didn't have any knowledge that the 1,450,000 new bank accounts were opened fraudulently!"
You say "crack down" but it's just an online comment here, which should be protected, right?
I enjoyed learning about Tan's political history in relation to the supervisors.
The quote from the Berkeley School of Law dean added a good legal perspective.
Lots of people seem to have poor opinions of Elon specifically because he does this sort of thing.
That seems to be working as intended.
And we're never going to fix the "money buys away consequences" problem. F.ex. I'm not beholden to chefs' opinions of me, if I can throw 100x average salary to get one to work for me.
Doesn't it just communicate that you got in to YC?
I mean, he can legally say it for sure, and I wouldn't argue that the law should prevent him from that. But once said, everyone else has every right to condemn him for it.
he basically needs to step down from the podium now or he's going to hurt the cause of making sf better, which is really unfortunate.
YC can have political opinions, but they should acknowledge the opportunity cost of putting their politics before their community. Behavior like the one linked in the OP is incredibly petty and probably should make the associated parties feel bad about working with that kind of person. Lord knows I feel ashamed to be an HN user today.
He even goes as far to call this "broken" — it's literally democracy.
Granted, this was in a smaller venue, but seeing H.W. actually consider the question on the spot and deliver an on-topic, detailed answer outlining his position was... refreshing.
Presumption that the question is valid and interesting, the asker is to be respected, and supporters of the platform espoused and opponents have good points and should be respected.
Empathetic disagreement is not something you typically see anywhere recently. It's been boiled down to staccato sound bites.
"Die slow motherfuckers" is harsh criticism?
However, just because it's narrowly legal to say something doesn't mean it's a good idea; this kind of thing does tremendous self harm to the speaker's public reputation.
> it's clearly not a threat
No, it's not a threat, it just _references_ a famous death threat, one that Tan regrets that we didn't get when he initially tweeted it.
Making lots of money, and keeping that money, is independent of goodwill. Especially if you're starting rich enough to bypass needing many random people to help you.
I can't agree that Elon showing his ass on Twitter is fundamentally changing social acceptance of doing so.
This requires a much longer thesis. In short, war throughout history is quite a centrist position (since it's been waged extensively by both left and rightists). Right now you have the Democrats advocating for defense of a nation against invasion, and a leftist government (Venezuela) advocating for the invasion and annexation of Guyana. When leftist governments aren't advocating for industrial military (USSR), global armed revolution and killing, it's usually said through the privilege and zero-skin-in-the-game safety of being under the US' defensive shield, or it's Pol Pot.
> Democrats is to preserve the status quo in all matters: social
Quite humorous to most global onlookers, I'm sure, as most would not be fond of some Democrats' constant push for "social justice."
> don't forget about Europe when establishing your list of countries to define a global overton window
Europe is 9.3% of the world. Half of which wouldn't agree with you since there are still many right wing governments in Europe and 41% of France voted for Le Pen.
So again, I'd recommend you'd be more accurate in relating the US to whichever country you're in, instead of making statements on the positions of people around the globe in which you seem naive on their governments and history.
The job of journalists is to report news worth events, and provide extra context with some level of verification.
When the CEO quotes rap lyrics which implies that someone should kill them selves, that is news worthy.
The CEO, who is in a position of both power and responsibility, should really not be saying stupid shit. Why? because the job of the CEO is to make sure a company's image isn't tarnished. (see Gerald Ratner).
Tan should frankly grow the fuck up and do what CEOs normally do, which is pay local politics to change.
For example, try to post something pro Apple, or even try to play devils advocate. Your comment will be flagged within minutes.
He expressed a strong desire for these people to die a slow death. How is that not intending to cause harm?
And that's because in modern times we've been rapidly diluting the meaning of basically everything by endlessly resorting to inappropriate hyperbole. This makes it difficult to express things and practically impossible to express an extreme feeling without resorting to the sort of hyperbole that makes hyperbole look restrained, which is what this thread is ultimately about.
It'd be nice if we returned to the era of words having meaning, but the era of the internet probably makes that impossible.
Such responsibilities at some point seem an inherent consequence of running an economy where (1) companies are allowed to grow as big as they want & (2) "social" functions (i.e. services to all) are sometimes only provided by private parties (there is no government/public alternative).
* Leaving aside the protected-classes argument
Garry Tan chose to flaunt the high-end liquor bottles and "Twitter menace" plaque ahead of his sort-of-apology, not missionlocal.
Only one of the articles (not the one linked) refers to them at all. The other one focuses more on the hate mail some idiot decided to send being a screenshot of Tan's original tweet, and both of them are pretty clear about it being a rap lyric.
Kind of hard to argue with a straight face that the real problem with the YC CEO acting like a not-very-smart bro influencer even in his sort-of-apology is that some local rag journalist didn't spare the embarrassing detail.
Sure, Tan was probably more interested in highlighting the "twitter menace" plaque than the fairly expensive liquor and unremarkably-priced wine, but celebrities flaunting wealth with a laughing emoji as a "fuck you" to their critics is a well established trope, and I don't think high-minded, mature journalism is about taking the most sympathetic interpretation possible of bro silliness.
People keep parroting this but it shouldn't be public information. Personal safety is more important than the law, as is established in the universal unalienable rights. Where I sleep is emphatically NOT public information. Period.
Until the law is changed to ensure my physical safety I see no reason to re-register.
It's not fair to say that the progressive group primarily consists of "NIMBYs and nostalgic boomers", nor is the group cohesive enough to label anyone's individual comments as representative of a "they"; if you are going to characterize either of these groups negatively you should try to quote specific comments and attribute them to specific people, rather than making vague insinuations.
Nah even easier, it’s mostly outsourced to groupthink. Doesn’t involve anything nefarious, just inaction and delegation.
The act of providing "thoughtful criticism" doesn't make it OK to tell people you wish them dead.
>Ranting on Twitter should not be a crime IMO
I don't really see anyone saying that it should be. People are welcome to rant on Twitter, just as people are welcome to take issue with said rant, and then form an opinion of that person based on the words they chose to post.
I'm not. Being drunk excuses nothing. If anything, it makes it more poignant because drunk people are more likely to say out loud those thoughts that they would otherwise prefer keep to themselves. "In vino veritas".
The Overton window mainly classifies the kind of ideas that are "politically acceptable" on the stage for which it's defined, using terms ranging from "unthinkable" to "radical" to "popular" to "policy". On the world stage, I would argue that the most left-leaning of European countries define the left end of the window (given that they have enacted left policies), and the most right-leaning countries (e.g. Singapore) define the right end of the window. It's not a matter of proportion.
That said, I agree that the global window is rapidly shifting right, as in your example of France.
Okay, point-by-point:
> Military
I agree that the military does not neatly fit into a spectrum which applies well on the global window of left/right. Reaching instead for political philosophy rather than political practice, I think it's better to introduce the 2-dimensional political compass to understand this rather than relying on the 1-dimensional left/right spectrum: war is more favored by authoritarian politics (which is to say politics that value authority, rather than necessarily repressive regimes, which are totalitarian). I would also say that authoritarianism tends to be more popular on the right, though the Soviet Union offers a clear counter-example. This issue is messy indeed. But, generally speaking, I think that American leftists (as a distinct group from liberals or Democrats) are not in favor of war, whereas everyone right of and including Democrats are generally pro-military and weakly or strongly in favor of American imperialism.
> Social justice
"Social justice" is ill-defined here, and I don't really think Democrats push for it. A positive "social justice", as I understand it, might, for instance, consider reparations, which I don't think any contemporary Democrats have pushed for. Democrats adopt a more equality-oriented (not equity-oriented, which I would argue is more aligned with what "social justice" calls for) approach to social issues, outside of certain matters like ostensible support for affirmative action.
But, I don't think this is the thread to define and argue over whatever "social justice" means. You can send me an email if you want to clear that up.
I'm a socialist that thinks that companies should be transitioned into public ownership once they grow big enough.
It fixes the issue you describe in addition to the myriad of other issues associated with ever-increasing privatizion of what should be the commons.
As classic liberals, they actually were.
I think you offered charity to the point of being misleading. There is only one side who wants to make housing more affordable. The charitable view of progressive policy making is that they reject any demand for San Francisco to be a commercial center and want to preserve the lifestyle, built environment, and composition of residents to what it was in the 80s.
I mean, I and everyone I know have become very emotional and ranted about things every so often, but never has expressing a desire to see people die a slow death entered into it. That he did says something important to know about him.
20 years ago, progs would admit outright that they thought new development was undesirable. Since, it has become more inappropriate to say that out loud so they dress it in concerns about only supporting housing under economically infeasible conditions.
You can support the right of people to express their opinions, but disagree and regret what those opinions are.
Folks interested can read what CCHO said about SB35 here: https://www.sfccho.org/in-the-news/2018/10/13/opinion-alarmi...
The crux of their concern/prediction is:
> As currently written, the practical outcome of SB 35 will be to further expedite and accelerate market-rate approvals in the small handful of California communities where the real estate market is already hot – communities that are overwhelmingly urban, low-income, and predominantly people of color. These are the same communities that are currently grappling with displacement and gentrification, and typically have terrible imbalances of market-rate housing development compared to affordable housing. Simply accelerating approvals in those communities is just a recipe to spur even more aggressive gentrification.
I personally think folks like the CCHO are taking a misguided policy approach to solving/ameliorating the problems they worry about, and sometimes behave disingenuously (and should be called out, with specific details, when they do so). But that doesn't make their concerns illegitimate.
Here's an example of an earlier direct reply by Wiener to CCHO about the bill: http://www.beyondchron.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Senato...
> This housing crisis will never be solved without a solution that includes a significantly increased supply of all types of housing, at all income levels, in every community throughout California, both subsidized and non-subsidized. The devastating eviction crisis and rapid displacement of low- and middle-income people from cities results, in large part, from failing to build enough housing for the past half century. SB 35 empowers the state to take action and ensure that every single community is approving its fair share of housing – especially those communities currently punting their housing needs to neighboring jurisdictions.
I don't see this in practice. These "free speech advocates" really just want their speech to be mainstream and for everyone else to go away. See Elon and his banning of pro-Palestinian or leftist voices.
What's wrong with the "woke crowd?" Is that not merely a nebulous group of people who have political opinions with which you disagree? What's wrong with them wanting to "cancel" you? Is that not an exercise of free speech and free association? Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from consequences. "Cancellation" just a social consequence, is it not?
Behind each of these question marks is nuance: I like Ken White's treatment of the topic: https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-sham...
e.g. "I support the right of people to eat what they want, but really wish they ate less junk food."
With respect to criticism, I tend to agree in general. I wish people spent less time giving importance or fixating on random dumb or offensive things people say.
Part 1 is a radicalization chain, where you have several layers of public figures with varying levels of public-facing support for your cause, who guide people down the chain by platforming people with more extreme public-facing views. So maybe a talk show host who mostly just points out obvious problems in our society, who occasionally brings on guest speakers who have slightly more specific framings, who themselves occasionally publicly support YouTube channels that pitch potential solutions.
Part 2 is consensus building. As people trickle down the radicalization chain, it's important to introduce them to new social spaces that present your ideas as obvious truths. This normalizes your radical ideas in the minds of your newly radicalized cohort. Casual "joking but not joking" comments are a basic staple of this, with guillotine memes and blackpill posting and Boogaloo jokes all serving to make the appearance to their community that their extreme views are normal, acceptable, and widely held.
Part 3 (which is somewhat optional) is targeting. Some prominent figure (likely one of those public figures on your radicalization chain) paints a far less vague target than usual: casually calling for people to kill all landlords is one thing, mentioning one specific landlord is a clear escalation from that. Ideally this is done without making any incriminating statements, which at least in the US is easy: as long as your don't make a specific plan, it's typically considered protected speech.
Part 4 is, to borrow some specifically leftist terminology, "propaganda of the deed", "direct action", or just "terrorism". With a sufficiently large pool of radicalized individuals, you'll have people all across the radicalization and "unhingedness" spectra. The "extremely radicalized, completely unhinged" corner is where you find your martyrs, freedom fighters, etc. They hear the targeting speech from part 3, and decide to take it upon themselves to do something about it. They commit some act of violence, and probably end up facing some extreme consequences for it, whether that means death, imprisonment, etc. Then, your entire movement needs to achieve 2 things: outwardly distance themselves from the "lone wolf" to avoid unwanted scrutiny or consequences, while privately lionizing them as someone who "did what needed to be done" in order to encourage the next one.
The elegant thing about all this is that what it lacks in cohesion, it makes up for in robustness. Since it's not a rigidly fixed organization, individual parts can take a fall without crippling the effectiveness of the whole. One lone wolf doesn't incriminate any other members, except maybe the person who announced the target, if they were sloppy about how they worded it. And if someone along your radicalization chain loses their seat in the public eye for whatever reason, you have plenty of redundancy to fill the gap, and they can probably find a comfortable position somewhere further along the chain once things cool off a bit.
Playing whack-a-mole with the people with enough prominence to plausibly select targets is probably the most legally justifiable way of suppressing a standalone complex like this. Most people along the chain, both participants and consumers, are pretty clearly practicing free speech and assembly. They make perfectly legitimate targets for rival radical movements, but the State needs to uphold basic human rights, so it takes a more precise approach. Focusing on the shotcallers, it's easier (not necessarily easy) to get creative with what constitutes a non-protected "true threat", rather than crack down on civil liberties as a whole.
Here is Calvin Welch, friends with Marti and Cohen and housing guru to Sup. Preston, saying Home S.F., a gentler streamlining measure vs. SB35, was ethnic cleansing: https://missionlocal.org/2016/01/sf-delays-controversial-hou....
I’ll keep looking for the other statement I had in mind.
It's the easiest thing in the world to report this in a neutral, factual way. You don't need to focus on Gary's money, his association to tech, his liquor cabinet, or anything else. That the reporter(s) could not do this speaks volumes about their motivations.
Aside from that, I have no dog in this particular fight. I haven't lived in SF in years, and if you're insinuating that I'm on a particular side of the political spectrum, you're way over your skis. Partisan doesn't have to mean "left" or "right", by the way...you can just be partisan against tech.
Is this really necessary? Let he who has made no mistakes (particularly when drunk) cast the first stone.
I think the video does a good job of highlighting how many classic liberals actually had the same tenants and objectives, such as respect, compassion, and human development.
Calling these proposals "ethnic cleansing" is ridiculous hyperbole. Not as stupid as a death-threat song lyric tweet, but definitely unhelpful. Welch was rightly called out for that one.
Altering consciousness is a human trait which I support in the end. Doing unreasonable things while in altered states is a consequence, and likewise fine as long as things as nobody really gets hurt.
Saying strange things or stirring up controversy by having unpopular opinions or hurting someone's feelings a little... not a big problem. Apologize and move on.
What happened here is pretty far across the line, though.
It was pretty close to a death threat and served to encourage others to get even closer. I'm not quite sure if it should be illegal, but it should get a public figure fired.
Analogous is any other news story that points out any other recent trend.
For example, there is a similar NYT article today about increases in train derailments and accidents since last year. The story mentions East Palestine, OH Norfolk Southern derailment. While they're not blaming Norfolk Southern for the broader increase in accidents, it's something that readers have ALSO heard about that was very prominently in the news and helps ground the trend in a noteworthy example.
The term stochastic terrorism (as it is used in literature, as far as I know, eg in “The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism”) is simpler. It means that someone sends a message into mass media with an intention to motivate someone to commit an act of terror. That’s all. The intention part quickly got buried by the users of the term, at least on the Internet (what’s the difference if the outcome is the same, amiright?), so now it just means any mean tweet that can motivate a random nut job to do something crazy, as is demonstrated by the comment I replied to.
>It reduces sales of vehicles
Has it really? His cars achieve supposed ~30% profit margins: some of the best in the industry. They have dropped prices beating inflation while competitors cannot. They also got the best software stack of any EV with additional value add such as Sentry mode. Im in the market for a new car and I am baffled as to why every car hasn't copied all the good things from Tesla yet. Its just software!
>and public sentiment and visibility drives extra regulatory scrutiny on SpaceX
so what? Its not like they can drop SpaceX for some other competitor waiting in the wings? If SpaceX says no to the government, the government is the one to lose out.
>You have reporters asking the POTUS what he is doing to investigate Musk
More performance art just like the SEC's investigations. Who wants to be the one to be blamed for destroying the golden goose? Definitely not the SEC and Biden is just performing like he always does to please his base so Musk gets away with stuff that would land others in prison.
>and an angry stockholder just got a 50 billion ruling against Musk
Yeah that was a nice victory but it remains to be seen if he appeals it and/or it has dire consequences for Delaware. So far Delaware has been a small bright dot in an otherwise hopeless situation as this is not the first time they managed to stick it to Musk.
> During his online tirade, Tan posted photos of his private liquor stash, and indicated to a fellow Twitter-user that he was inebriated.
Describing the tweets adjacent to the offensive one gives useful context. This is not the reporter dredging up some irrelevant trivia from deep in Tan's past or something.
Readers might not know who Tan is. It is even more essential context to explain that:
> Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator and a heavy campaign donor to efforts to oust progressive politicians [...]
> Tan is a well-heeled donor for San Francisco’s moderate causes and candidates. He sits on the board of Grow SF, a political pressure group favoring moderate causes and candidates and targeting progressives. Tan gave more than $100,000 to the 2022 campaign to recall then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin. He gave at least $20,000 to the 2021 school board recall, too.
If Tan was just some random person with no influence and no relation to SF politics this would probably not be much of a story. That he is one of the major donors to the political rivals of these supervisors is the reason this is a political shitstorm. Tan's tweet damages the reputation of his "Grow SF" group and the candidates they support, and has possible further political implications:
> Peskin today asked the City Attorney’s Office to look into requiring public disclosures from recipients of political donations from “purveyors of hate and violence.”
If instead, I'm a respected member of a political movement with a pool of radicals, and my target is a rival to my political movement, and I target the radicalized members of my political movement with a call for violence by relying on the movement's normalized justifications for violence, then there is a much, much greater chance of someone rising to the call.
This is a good point. Who is to say if there is a difference between receiving hateful letters to one’s home and not receiving hateful letters to one’s home?
This is bad journalism because it is a report of events that happened, good journalism would have been a levelheaded piece about how Tan is probably a good guy and we should probably agree with his politics
While I am not going to say that there is a phenomenon akin to sycophant Olympics performed for the benefit of an audience of a single dunce king going on here,
I know several people who love tesla cars, but wont buy them due to Musk association, so I am going off that. 30% margins on more cars is better than 30% margins on less. Owning a tesla is a scarlet letter for many democratic owners I know.
Similarly, the DOD is not going to stop buying from SpaceX, but is slowing down development that he wants.
Similarly, Musk wants twitter to be successful, and hostility to and from the political left has made that all but impossible.
Early musk benefitted greatly from his social reputation and hype. My perspective is that his public persona since ~2019 has been more of a drag than boost.
Im not sure where you stand. Are you arguing that his public persona is currently a net benefit to his corporate objectives? That they are so small they cant be quantified? That the consequences fall short of what would happen in a morally just world?
US presidential elections come to mind; the likely nominees of both major parties are viewed unfavorably by a majority in polls, but one of them is almost certainly going to win.
Garry clearly isn't too stupid or desperate for clicks to do any better, and so I'm afraid I'm going to have to continue to disagree that we should save our ridicule for his critics.
And I really agree that the crux is "big enough" -- at some point, a phase change happens and regulation for social good needs to change too ('too big to be free'?).
We could pro/con public vs private-but-regulated management, but that's a dead horse and they're both valid options.
If he hadn't publicly knee-jerked on price and due diligence, he likely could have closed at a much lower price.
Which would have led to him maintaining more ownership of Tesla.
The government doing something against my personal safety and consent in the name of the law doesn't make it not a leak.
Could probably fix that quote by adding "believe they are."
>who happen to believe they are overtly charismatic to a fault.
I guess it is the formal definition.
In Australia we have a slightly different version. We don't prevent the crazies from voting. Instead we insist everyone must vote, including the crazies. Turns out when you do that the non-crazy voters outnumber the rest by a considerable margin.
A weird thing happens when you make voting compulsory. Another bunch, which I now regard as crazy, insists they should be free to not vote. They get fined. (I have a vision of what would happen in the USA if someone proposed compulsory voting. It's far left and far right politicians who would be thrown out if the centre voted, inciting their following to riot in the streets, shouting "Freedom!")
It's kinda funny, because they are allowed to not vote. The actual requirement isn't to vote because it's impossible to police. The requirement is to turn up at the polling place and have your name recorded. You can write whatever you damned well please on the voting slip. After most elections the country gets to have a laugh at the insults and pornographic images that have been inscribed on those slips.
It's also funny because these crazies are insisting they have a right to not participate in the democracy. And they don't. Those that do participate then pass rules to fine them, and the non-participants get pissed off about that and demonstrate their now white hot anger by not voting again.
And I bet you thought I was being harsh for calling them crazy. It's like watching someone put their hand in a fire, and not remove it because it hurts.
And that is an excellent example of why compulsory voting works. The voices of the crazies literally get drowned out by the people who would otherwise be too lazy to vote. Or perhaps they just figure they are in the centre, know stuff all about the candidates, and most other people are reasonable like them so they won't change the outcome. But it turns out if most normal, reasonable, uninformed people remove themselves from machinery of democracy, what you get left with is crazies voting for crazies.
People often say things just to express themselves rather than for any planned and considered reason.
I greatly doubt the plan was to cause harassment. The gains are extremely low and this could cost him his job.
I think the word "obsessed" would definitely be inapplicable.
I guess maybe you think it isn't criticism at all because it's not constructive criticism. But it's certainly criticism, no reasonable person could construe it as anything less than critical. And because it falls short of a specific and imminent threat, it's legal political speech.
It's true that affordability isn't poured into concrete, but it is baked into each and every real estate transaction.
A new luxury high rise needs to have x number of affordable units by law. As you point out, it's true that they don't build the affordable units much or any different than their other units.
But, the way the whole financial side of the thing is structured is completely different than it would be if the laws were different.
A home is just as much a mortgage as it is a physical object.
For my part, I hope Trump dies painfully, as well as every other living American president (with the sole exception of Jimmy Carter who was a terrible president but a good man nevertheless.) If you live in America, I know you frequently hear people saying they wish X Y or Z politician would die. Such harsh sentiments are commonly expressed in American society. It's a free country and lots of people exercise that freedom with inflammatory but legal hot takes like that.
I wonder how hard it would be to reverse engineer the penalty. You can easily poll to get points/time for stories and then probably use that to figure out the algorithm and any penalties/boosts (an old version seems to be documented).
It is not normal and should not be normal for major political donors to make public death threats to local officials in the city where they live, even as a joke. It's toxic and corrosive to society and politics, and makes him seem unhinged. Tan is rightly getting excoriated, and he deserves scorn from his own political allies for significantly damaging their common causes.
Tan keeps complaining about SF politics being frustrating, but in my opinion, as someone who supports a significant portion of his policy platform, local politics would be improved if Tan would just move somewhere else or shut up and keep his money to himself and leave political discussions to the grown ups.
Sure, but you don't have to express yourself on twitter... you do that when you want to communicate something to all your followers.
> ...The gains are extremely low and this could cost him his job.
That's true of the tweet by itself. If sober reason was going to hold him back there would be no tweet at all.
Legally, yes. Socially? That's never been the standard. There is no principle in the US that says everybody has to be cool with anything people say short of calling for imminent violence.
Or you do it automatically and habitually. The brain to mouth filter and a brain to keyboard filter are similar, many people don't have either.
I am going to quote your post out of order to answer easier(hopefully you don't mind).
The reason I broke it down is to make the point that I feel those real world consequences are minuscule enough to the point where it does not matter. Maybe I should have clarified more in my prior post.
> I know several people who love tesla cars, but wont buy them due to Musk association, so I am going off that.
Its funny as I know multiple college professors with the same mindset. They ended up buying 80-100k BMWs or Mercedes Benz instead of Tesla. The market above 50k represents a small portion of the market. I call this the managerial class price tier. The further you go down the more people become price sensitive and that is what Musk is counting on.
He was never going to own 100% of the car market in the US, there are just too many players with more entering soon(The Chinese). So if some(maybe even the majority of) liberals refuse to buy Teslas, I am not sure if it would matter long term. The demographic makeup of his buyers may shift but the absolute numbers wont (once the numbers settle after the Chinese enter the market). His cars are just so much more competitive vs everyone else and selfish interests will sway enough buyers especially when the majority of buyers are price sensitive above all else. Its like that old push in the 70-80s to "Buy American" as the Japanese flooded the market with much better products at way better prices. In the end GM saw their market share crumble from ~50% to what it is today (~17%)
Ditto for everything else. The DOD working less with him is only a net negative to themselves. Its been 1+years since the announcement of the twitter takeover. If anything would have changed at DOD we would have seen it by now. Instead efforts at SpaceX have only accelerated since he exposed his views on Twitter.
Just as a small example: In 2023 1 year post twitter: World record for launches of any rocket in a single year (96) beating the second best record (Soviet Union at 60 launches) and anything the US govt has done, Falcon heavy improvements surpassed the world record for heavy lift vehicles(Saturn V). A record number of those launches have also been private for the government. I dont see any evidence the DOD is slowing down with them. They are speeding up.
Source of the above claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8GZ0H0xSFo
>Similarly, Musk wants twitter to be successful, and hostility to and from the political left has made that all but impossible.
There are theories that he wanted to move twitter in this direction as it killed the only major way for people to push back against the powers that be. Just think of how many revolutions started on Twitter and sustained itself due to the real time nature of the platform. Now we are seeing Pro-Palestinian people being banned. I really don't know what his plan is for Twitter and it is still baffling that he continues to execute brilliantly in his other companies yet this remains a dumpster fire.
>Early musk benefitted greatly from his social reputation and hype. My perspective is that his public persona since ~2019 has been more of a drag than boost.
I was part of the Tesla "skeptic" community from 2016-2020. I saw first hand how so many industry experts were shouting from the rooftops at how terrible Musk was as a person. The Left only discovered this side of Musk when it was inconvenient for them. Before that they were happy to ignore the actual people working in industry and enjoy this "real life tony stark". The skeptic community was continually wrong about him. Every giant pitfall that they said was coming did indeed come but he always found a way around it. He has proven (to me) that in this country, the kind of success he has gotten makes his public persona not important in the grand scheme of things. Until something drastically changes, (maybe an extreme anti-corporate government that is just impossible until at least 2028) he is going to keep flying further and further forwards regardless of what people think of him. Hell this year is the year I finally started believing that landing someone on Mars will happen and he will be the one that makes it possible. If that happens no one is going to remember the leftists that criticized him in the history books.
And that scene already has a bad name. And let's not forget that he's also an EA acolyte. Every time I think that the image of SV couldn't get much worse, it does.
And as for “context,” is there a medium that provides less context than a tweet?
* and past explanations over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Do they just want people to acknowledge it was bad, and then everyone goes on with their life? Do the police make them wear a scarlet letter or send them out into the wilderness. Does it mean they are no longer invited to dinner parties?
Free speech has consequences. And speech that has unhinged threats (even if it has a disclaimer that it's not) has potential consequences with law enforcement.
I don't think it's out of line for someone who's investing their time and effort into an organization to be critical of leadership.
I don't disagree with 90% of what you said, I just dont understand what you think the criteria for "mattering" is. What would mattering look like or not? If the question is if Elon's flamboyant behavior has impacted his bank account, I think the answer is clearly yes, to the tune of 10s of billions of dollars.
If the question is if the consequences of his behavior are terminal for his companies, then I think chances are miniscule that any of it will matter. If meaningful consequences would be Elon plagued by regrets and misery, I think the answer is obviously not.
GRAHAM> … It’s all because Ed Lee died
Similar to Garry Tan in that.
My criteria would be is he hindered in a material way from his goals. Clearly loss of income from liberals does not matter given the resources he and his companies have already.
If he were in Europe, i'd imagine there would have been attempts to break up his companies way before it got to this point. That would force him to choose what he really wants to do.
Maybe attempts to restrict him or people like him from getting to this point where he has so much sway. There is this idea on the left that "billionaires are a failure in policy".
The actions the Swedish union are taking against Tesla are very late but are a positive step towards clawing back some of that power but the actual pain that Musk has to endure has to come from the US.....and it will not be coming any time soon.
It's quite common for them to appear overtly charismatic at first glance. Narcissism and psychopathy are extremely common at that level. It's why you should always be weary of CEOs who seem a little bit too happy to have a very high-profile public presence.
Hell, we recently elected a President almost entirely because he was the biggest asshole in the room.
For example in the US they have their elections on a Tuesday (in Australia it is a Saturday), this strikes me as suboptimal if you want the most people to vote then you should hold the election at a time that is convenient for the largest number of people, which is not in the middle of a regular working day.
Australia also has pre-polling (i.e. you can turn up to a polling station and vote before the nominated "election day") and Postal voting (both of which are to my understanding extremely controversial in the US).
I believe in the US you also need to register to vote and you have to take steps to maintain your registration. again that is an added barrier that creates more friction.
Australia also has Preferential voting, I do not believe US elections use this method.
Did you notice the article tries to mix up Tan’s letter with “antisemitic” letters also received? Those are irrelevant, but very politically savvy to try and equate the two.
Gary stepped on his own dick with this move. If you want to beat them, you need to play the game better than they do.
This article is anything but neutral (not that I don’t think Tan screwed up here).
It's really, really fucking stupid to do this, and even worse as a leader of an influential and impactful organization.
Also - is Hacker News independent from Garry Tan's influence? If so, what assurances of that are there? If not, what can be done to ensure he never touches HN?
I am not saying that they're hack journalists because they literally accused Tan of incitement to violence (that would probably be libel). I'm saying they're hacks because the article (and the prior one) were full of irrelevant details about Tan, while ignoring nearly all of the details about the actual incident. Tan is not the core of the story, unless you've lost all perspective on your job as a journalist.
It's like reporting on a robbery, but making most of your article about Karl Marx because the criminal was reading a copy of Das Kapital. The only way you get to that point is to blame Marx for the actions of the criminal.
Some unhinged person sent a threat of violence to politicians, using Tan's tweet. That is the story. Tan's liquor cabinet, his history of political donations, his wealth...all of that is irrelevant.
Speak for yourself. This seems to be mostly an American problem.
Is Singapore really among "the most right-leaning countries"?
In 2022, Singapore decriminalised male-male sex. In over 60 countries worldwide it is still a crime, and in over 10 of those it has the death penalty (at least in theory).
While it has been criticised on religious freedom (for banning certain controversial groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Hare Krishnas and the Unification Church) – it still is greatly ahead in this area of countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia. The government is officially neutral between the major religions, and there is no capital punishment for essentially religious offences such as apostasy, blasphemy, or heresy.
Economically, Singapore deviates in a number of ways from right-wing economic orthodoxy – state-owned enterprises play a major role in its economy, close to 80% of its population lives in government-owned public housing, the government runs a universal public health system.
Forcing the uninformed and uninterested to vote has never yielded better results by any measure.
I thought I saw a Venn diagram for XKCD ...
Of all the diss tracks, he picks the one with allegations of sleeping with someone’s wife, making fun of someone’s health conditions, demeaning women, and of course repeated threats of death that eventually manifested in real-life murders.
Take OpenAI's Head of Research (quite the public role given they're a research company) openly calling for genocide in Gaza, asking to "finish them", "More! No mercy!" including civilians, over a series of 80 deranged tweets. [1] Zero repercussions, still happily heading research at a company whose supposed objective is developing AGI for the benefit of mankind.
Also very quickly scrubbed off of HN [2].
[1] >>39124666
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20231226171217/https://news.ycom...
San Francisco DA should look into charges and hold Mr. Tan accountable for his behavior.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RFZJKA736UBAH/ref...
I'll reserve judgement until we see how a16z's "digital asset class" thing pans out. Some might even say blockchains are eating the world.
That stiff upper lip has, perhaps, become a bit more relaxed.
The nice thing now is ordinary people to get to see this.
Compulsory voting drives engagement. Representative democracy saves the public from themselves.
The vast majority of people vote for who they trust.
For context, I'm not white, not American, not christian so I guess I have a different pov, but to me Europe was much much more socially to the right than the US. Maybe it's different when you are white in Europe though :)
Can you share a quote, where he literally does that? I only read, that he is talking about Hamas. And explicitely not about civilians.
"When asked if she felt personally threatened by Tan’s behavior, Chan responded “Seeing what my colleague[s] received in the mail? Yes, absolutely. I have a 10-year-old. I do not tell people where my child attends school.”"
As for companies, judge their actions, not their words.
I'd argue you have reached the limits of free speach the moment there are consequences for just the speech.
> Verbal harassment
> Peskin has been known to make inappropriate late night phone calls to public officials and private citizens.[9] For example, he called the Port of San Francisco director Monique Moyer several times about cutting their funding over disagreements concerning waterfront building height limits. Mayor Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle that people around city hall had been complaining about Peskin's behavior for years.[49] However, former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos has said Peskin's alleged behavior falls "well within the boundaries of the system" and that it's "not unusual in politics at any level of government."[49]
> In 2018, at the scene of the St. Patrick's Day fire in North Beach, Peskin was reportedly intoxicated while he verbally berated then-Deputy Fire Chief of Operations Mark Gonzalez. Peskin has denied being intoxicated at the time but has apologized for his behavior.[50]
> In June 2021, Peskin announced in a statement that he would be entering into alcohol treatment.[51] Peskin apologized for behavior that he attributed to his alcohol problem, but also announced that he planned to remain in office while in treatment.[52]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Peskin#Verbal_harassment
>“I apologize to the Board of Supervisors for my comments late last night in a post,” Tan wrote. “There is no place, no excuse and no reason for this type of speech and charged language in discourse. I am sorry for my words and regret my poor decision. I love San Francisco. I know the community will hold me accountable and keep focused on our true mission: making San Francisco a vibrant, prosperous and safe place.”
Having seen him talk on video he seems like a decent guy who is not very good at dealing with conficts. See eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yMc99fpfY&t=630s
How does the sentence "die slow motherfuckers" even remotely imply someone should kill themselves? Do you see the irony of misquoting him in a comment about misleading journalism?
Necessary disclaimer: I do not support the tweet and it has nothing to do with my comment, so breathe and understand my point before hitting that down-vote.
"Die slow" or "I hope you die" are not threats. It's unconstructive venting.
Surely they should just... put some people into power who'll do what they want? Like I'm not even saying "Why haven't they solved the problem", I'm saying "Why haven't the rich tech guys not just spent money to put people they like in power?" And I'm not just saying Garry personally, I'm saying it seems an almost universal view that rich silicon valley people want different people in charge, so... go... do it?
Or do they actually have a load of political power and just don't want to fess up to the fact it's their own dumb politics causing the problems in the first place?
I’d love to support Garry politically to get SF back to its roots and to put math back in schools.
Unfortunately Garry has blocked me on X for no good reason that I can think of?
Then they dropped voting when the questions got too real.
Then they lit up the staff by saying, “If you don’t like being here, then leave!”
Then they stopped taking questions and went back to fireside chat monologs that offered no real information.
One of the many Dilbertian experiences in my career.
I once accused a VP of creating an environment of “opaque transparency” in a large staff meeting… nobody laughed, though I got lots of private kudos after the meeting.
Much of the corporate world is smoke and mirrors. That’s the nature of the game unfortunately.
You can call it censorship or not, but it's not a good look either way.
Right. That's why the post I responded to shouldn't object to calling this "stochastic terrorism" on the basis of free speech. In the immediate discussion the argument is inherently self-contradictory.
It also muddies the meaning of free-speech from a profound principle to a cheap argument to club people with online when they criticize something in a way you disagree with.
No, you're interpreting things here in a specific way.
It could be that users didn't think it belonged on HN because it was politics, which is often frowned upon. It could be that they thought there was a problem with the article itself.
In any case, even if it was totally the community choosing to not want to see this news (which I doubt), it wasn't a deliberate action by the people running the site, which does make a difference (otherwise that would've been the original accusation).
YES
(Other than incitement of violence and libel)
If we are also continuing along pedantry, it was a quote, it was an incorrect assertion.
But what we can possibly agree on, is that whilst we are both engaging on this particular point, the more important issue of a CEO acting incorrectly goes unexplored.
Where I think we are both aligned: the CEO is perfectly within their rights to say stupid things, however they really shouldn't. Whilst we shouldn't use legal tools to stop CEOs doing stupid things, we certainly should use social tools to encourage them to respect other people.
> 30 years ago a guy that worked as an international translator said to me, if people only knew how their political and business leaders act when they don't think anyone important is watching.
> The nice thing now is ordinary people to get to see this.
Ordinary people like you and me are inherently no more virtuous and have said things that we would be ashamed of if seen publicly. The difference is that we, unlike the Tans and Musks of the world, don't have a reality-distortion-field of wealth - and even worse: adulation - that makes us feel we can express our worst and ugliest impulses.
Our mistake is in raising business leaders to demigod status in the first place. We shouldn't then be surprised when that goes to their heads.
If I punch someone in a boxing ring, I don't go to jail.
However, I think you are making a distinction without a real difference. The company that hosts this forum set it up with an incentive structure that results in the behavioral outcomes we see on this forum. If these incentives lead to newsworthy posts concerning the CEO of the company that runs these forums getting flagged, perhaps the incentives need to be changed.
> "Stochastic terrorism" is just an excuse to crack down on free speech
Implying the term is used to prevent free speech, and not trying to prevent the use of the term. I don't even understand how it's not obvious.
> If we are also continuing along pedantry
We're not being pedantic, we're being correct and honest.
I think the only thing I'm trying to push back on is any kind of "conspiracy" thinking - this might not be anything coordinated, definitely not by HN staff, nor by HN "elite" users or anything like that.
"No! Not like that!"
The post says it's just an excuse to crack down on free speech, suggesting that it has no validity as an actual idea, that the term itself is invalid. Arguing that a term is always wrong is surely an attempt to prevent the use of that term.
What's more important to free speech.., that people can use the term "stochastic terrorism" to describe a tweet where they think it fits, or that people should not have to be subjected to having their tweets called "stochastic terrorism"?
To me, it's pretty clear: if you're trying to police language, you shouldn't be using free speech as the justification for that.
It's a different flavor of Reddit's "downvote for disagreement" status quo. The rules might say one thing, but the behavior of users says another.
Not asking whether they would have gotten _some_ backlash (of course they would), but whether they would have gotten the same backlash, from the same media and people giving it to Gerry now, and whether it would be as effective to get them getting some board discipline and/or have them relieved from their positions.
It's ok to say "but those are bad people and would have deserved it, while the ones Tan targetted are good". It comes off as a little strong, but at least it's an understandable and cohesive political stance.
It's also fine to say "No, saying such things is a no-no, no matter which is the target, period.".
But it's a little hypocritical when people who claim the latter in this case, to ignore or even applaud similar comments when they're in line with their politics.
With all due respect, I find it hard to believe anyone with any knowledge of Australian elections would write your comment.
Most of the public is aware of this, and will probably continue to accept it as long as the general standard of living doesn't fall to much.
Boris Johnson.
Which is backwards. Poor people's reputation is the most valuable thing they have.
Nowadays? It goes back millennia.
Citation needed. I live in a country with compulsory voting, and I don't see any indication that it drives engagement. Lots of people only go voting because they have to. They simply vote for the man or woman they think looks best, or they have seen on TV and said something funny, or stuff like that.
> The vast majority of people vote for who they trust.
But in many many cases without really looking into who is trustworthy.
You can as well add 30% random votes, although those would be spread equally between candidates, not based on color of their hair, or random fake quote on the ineternet
> Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you're going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.
I guess if you want to argue about the true meaning of "something like that" or "to use medical doctors with" injecting disinfectant.
The behavior of who gets downvote and flagging rights is clearly spelled out. It's available to anyone who's been on the site long enough (and it's not that long, at all). I see this all the time where people complain about "being censored", where the reality is the community has heard what you have to say, we just think it sucks. That's not censorship, that's pretty politely stating we would prefer HN not become the cesspool of online discourse that pervades nearly all other online forums.
They were still way over the line and he apologized. But I did not see any of the claims of "openly calling for genocide in Gaza". Did you? You may link some quotes then. Possible I missed them, but I rather think, this was the usual hyperbole.
"innocent civilians" was the only questionable phrase, but still not at all a clear demand to kill civilians, rather a doubt whether armed civilians, who want to kill jews, should count as civilians.
Nothing says innovative leader like taking something a bunch of other people were already doing and doing it the same with added sociopathy on top.
It's called stochastic terrorism you dense moron
What else could you even want from this article? That they just elide the liquor angle? That they don't cover it at all or spend the entire article analyzing the person who sent the threats? A person in power wished death on a political figure, and people acted on that wish. This is absolutely news worthy of an article in a local blog, whose beat overlaps with the political jurisdiction of the threatened politicians.
> But in many many cases without really looking into who is trustworthy.
> They simply vote for the man or woman they think looks best, or they have seen on TV and said something funny, or stuff like that.
These two things are largely linked. If one believes that one can view the true nature of reality and divine the future then one is in for perpetual disappointment with politicians. Trustworthiness can only be known a posteri. A priori we only have heuristics. The reason for the existence of representative democracy is so that politicians do the work of politics.
One may not always agree with the electorate but my experience tells me that compulsory voting does drive engagement. It changes how political parties spend money and who they use that money to try and influence. Engagement in countries with compulsory voting is different to how it would be in the same country without compulsory voting.
The average member of the electorate possesses no expertise in any single field and is ignorant of everything. The average member of the electorate holds no single opinion. This is a good thing.
Whether people's beliefs are right or wrong is one thing but what you don't want is a bunch of radicals (of any persuasion) who have made the leap of faith which prevents them from reversing course. When large proportions of a society is radicalised to hold extremist and exclusive political opinions, that's when voters cannot be convinced. This rarely ends up good for society and occasionally ends violently.
Can you share a quote here, that you think was a open call for genocide in Gaza? Then we can debate concretely that and not something meta.
So basically, he said fuck the council and he hopes they die a slow death. Not very nice, but also not usually a contraversial opinion? Lots of people dislike their councils.