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Like so many libertarian-esque arguments, this sounds reasonably good on the surface, but I think real life is a bit more complex, and nuance matters. Just to

Like so many libertarian-esque arguments, this sounds reasonably good on the surface, but I think real life is a bit more complex, and nuance matters. Just to use an absurd example, let's imagine an alternate universe where Hitler and the Nazis were in power in the U.S. here in 2019. Would it be acceptable, then, for Github to cancel their contracts? Or would that be playing politics too? Please note: I'm not suggesting ICE is equivalent to Nazis. I'm simply suggesting there is a limit to your assertion that enterprise services should always avoid politics. It's easy to bucket politics as this thing that doesn't really matter. We're privileged as hell in the U.S. in 2019 that that is mostly true. But for the majority of world history, politics has dire consequences for major segments of the population. With respect to ICE, they absolutely are violating some pretty fundamental human rights. I don't think it's beyond the pale for technology companies (often heavily reliant on immigrant labor) to take a stand here.

mpfundstein 7y ago
which human rights do they violate?
- the_gastropod 7y ago
  Child separation, for starters. The UN Human Rights Office agrees that it's a human rights violation: https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/06/1011391 https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/06/1011391
  - _-david-_ 7y ago
    The problem is there are only a few different solutions: 1. Release parents and children into the US regardless of legal status. 2. Keep children in jail with their parents. 3. Separate children by sending them back to their country. 4. Separate children by placing them somewhere in the US (either with family or social services). 5. Send the entire family back to their country they came from. Keeping innocent kids in jail is not right. Separating kids is not right. Having open borders is not practical. Sending back people to their own country is not right. There is no solution. Many people who make the same argument as you would say just let them into the US but it is not practical when you have a welfare system. Many who criticize the current system even Bernie Sanders [0] says you can't have open borders since it would cause too much strain with our welfare system. So what is the solution? [0] https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/08/bernie-sanders-open-borders-1261392 https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/08/bernie-sanders-ope...
  - mpfundstein 7y ago
    If I rob a Taxi and I get caught, it’d be put into prison. My children of course won’t be. So isn’t that child separation as well? And yes, crossing the border Illegally is illegal by definition. What else do they do to violate human rights?
datashow 7y ago
The whole imagination of "the Nazis were in power in the U.S. here in 2019" is invalid. What Nazis did in the history (bombing and assassination) will make them declared as a domestic terrorist group by FBI before they gaining power in the U.S. At that point GitHub will certainly not provide service to them.
- the_gastropod 7y ago
  The Nazis mostly gained power through democratic process. That's beyond the point, anyway. The Nazis were "just" a political party in power. It was "just" politics, just like terrorism.
mc32 7y ago
You don’t have to provide hypotheticals. China has some good examples of companies engaging in and supporting activities against people in Hong Kong and Xinjiang (I guess Tibet is forgotten). The thing is while we disagree with those companies and their government, there isn’t a mechanism to address those issues. Just like there wasn’t a way to address the Gulags. That has to be addressed by the people internally in that jurisdiction. It has to be addressed by the laws available. Fortunately the US is better at following our own system of laws that say China where on paper people might be better off than us, but sadly their constitution is simply a formality. So your question is not answered very simply and does not have a simple solution. For example, we were not about to invade the USSR over the Gulags, we were not about to invade China over its multiple purges, despite the horrendous atrocities. I can think of Vietnam as the only country invading another to stop mass systemic purges when they went into Cambodia.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  This is complete absurd, nihilistic, and disempowering. People all over the world have joined together in protest and support for the treatment of each other, in the context of local conditions separate from their own, and driven change and progress. This is happening now between the US and Hong Kong and in solidarity struggles across a Latin and America. By your line of reasoning, no one in the west should’ve have supported divestment from South Africa during apartheid, even though that was a wildly effective strategy. You don’t wait for power to grow a conscience, you force it into a corner with your own and the solidarity you build with others.
  - mc32 7y ago
    Yes countries have the option to blockade, sanction, tariff, ostracize and so on. National governments can do that. We do some of those things with DPRK, Iran and Russia, among others. Still, some countries are more resilient than others of more stubborn than others and will press on. Iran is a decent example. We sanction and apply other pressures, they go in killing and persevere despite all that.
    - 7y ago
whiddershins 7y ago
It’s not that politics kinda don’t matter, it’s that they are so important, no one can be trusted to have the best, most clear, unbiased view of things. Most everyone nowadays seem to wander around thinking their views are obviously correct, and the people who disagree with them are either ignorant, immoral, or arguing in bad faith. Rationally that doesn’t make sense. No one knows everything, and everyone has blind spots. Most people are doing their best to have decent opinions. So we have this kind of genius political and economic system that assumes everyone is going to be biased and small minded, and mostly just act in their own interests as they perceive them, and yet things mostly come out pretty ok. With that in mind, it follows that corporations should mostly just pursue profits, even though that doesn’t sound right. But certainly they should not take stances on the “issues of the day” ... especially if they are publicly held companies. Your scenario doesn’t make sense because our system is designed so that voting and legislating and regulating and so forth address the hypothetical Hitler problem. The corporation has a different role to play.
- wizzwizz4 7y ago
  I don't think your "with that in mind" follows. Corporations are emergent features of groups of humans, and there are things that they just don't do because none of the humans involved even consider them okay for long enough to think of how to do them. If corporations actually mostly pursued profits, there'd be nothing left but fire. Rather, corporations should (according to an extension of your argument, which I don't necessarily agree with) pursue the goals of the people who make up the corporation. Except that doesn't really happen; corporations are rather a power-multiplier for those in charge of them, subject to the constraints of the corporate structure that forces those people to prioritise profit over their own goals. Thus, it makes sense for people to lobby large companies en-masse; they can't use the corporations as force-multipliers, but they can use their ability to threaten the companies' profit sources (and so direct the companies' motivations) to their shared interest.
  - whiddershins 7y ago
    Corporations act on the behalf of shareholders. They might employ people to do so, and those people in some sense might “make up” the corporation, but it is literally their job to pursue the interests of whomever owns stake in the corporation. I glossed over a lot of steps in my hacker news comment about a specific context. The context is some people trying to get github to take a stance, an opinion, about a department of the us government. It’s hard to be creative enough to imagine a more partisan or divisive topic, where moral consensus is effectively impossible. Within this context is is absolutely safe to describe the role of the for profit (public in this case) corporation - as opposed branches of the government, or non profit organizations, or unions, or groundswell movements or any of the various emergent structures you might want to throw in here - as seeking profit.
input_sh 7y ago
Nazi Germany would compel GitHub into working for them. ...at least, that's what IBM claims happened to its German subsidiary during WW2: https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss
- drewbug01 7y ago
  Luckily there's plenty of evidence out there that makes it crystal clear that IBM very much wanted to be in business with Germany during that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust (I think my favorite part of that book is learning that Hitler literally gave Watson a medal.)
zo1 7y ago
I can't see how any of what the OP said is Libertarian-like in any manner.

mpfundstein 7y ago

which human rights do they violate?

the_gastropod 7y ago
Child separation, for starters. The UN Human Rights Office agrees that it's a human rights violation: https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/06/1011391 https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/06/1011391
- _-david-_ 7y ago
  The problem is there are only a few different solutions: 1. Release parents and children into the US regardless of legal status. 2. Keep children in jail with their parents. 3. Separate children by sending them back to their country. 4. Separate children by placing them somewhere in the US (either with family or social services). 5. Send the entire family back to their country they came from. Keeping innocent kids in jail is not right. Separating kids is not right. Having open borders is not practical. Sending back people to their own country is not right. There is no solution. Many people who make the same argument as you would say just let them into the US but it is not practical when you have a welfare system. Many who criticize the current system even Bernie Sanders [0] says you can't have open borders since it would cause too much strain with our welfare system. So what is the solution? [0] https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/08/bernie-sanders-open-borders-1261392 https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/08/bernie-sanders-ope...
- mpfundstein 7y ago
  If I rob a Taxi and I get caught, it’d be put into prison. My children of course won’t be. So isn’t that child separation as well? And yes, crossing the border Illegally is illegal by definition. What else do they do to violate human rights?

datashow 7y ago

The whole imagination of "the Nazis were in power in the U.S. here in 2019" is invalid. What Nazis did in the history (bombing and assassination) will make them declared as a domestic terrorist group by FBI before they gaining power in the U.S. At that point GitHub will certainly not provide service to them.

the_gastropod 7y ago
The Nazis mostly gained power through democratic process. That's beyond the point, anyway. The Nazis were "just" a political party in power. It was "just" politics, just like terrorism.

mc32 7y ago

You don’t have to provide hypotheticals. China has some good examples of companies engaging in and supporting activities against people in Hong Kong and Xinjiang (I guess Tibet is forgotten). The thing is while we disagree with those companies and their government, there isn’t a mechanism to address those issues. Just like there wasn’t a way to address the Gulags. That has to be addressed by the people internally in that jurisdiction. It has to be addressed by the laws available. Fortunately the US is better at following our own system of laws that say China where on paper people might be better off than us, but sadly their constitution is simply a formality. So your question is not answered very simply and does not have a simple solution. For example, we were not about to invade the USSR over the Gulags, we were not about to invade China over its multiple purges, despite the horrendous atrocities. I can think of Vietnam as the only country invading another to stop mass systemic purges when they went into Cambodia.

claudeganon 7y ago
This is complete absurd, nihilistic, and disempowering. People all over the world have joined together in protest and support for the treatment of each other, in the context of local conditions separate from their own, and driven change and progress. This is happening now between the US and Hong Kong and in solidarity struggles across a Latin and America. By your line of reasoning, no one in the west should’ve have supported divestment from South Africa during apartheid, even though that was a wildly effective strategy. You don’t wait for power to grow a conscience, you force it into a corner with your own and the solidarity you build with others.
- mc32 7y ago
  Yes countries have the option to blockade, sanction, tariff, ostracize and so on. National governments can do that. We do some of those things with DPRK, Iran and Russia, among others. Still, some countries are more resilient than others of more stubborn than others and will press on. Iran is a decent example. We sanction and apply other pressures, they go in killing and persevere despite all that.
  - 7y ago

whiddershins 7y ago

It’s not that politics kinda don’t matter, it’s that they are so important, no one can be trusted to have the best, most clear, unbiased view of things. Most everyone nowadays seem to wander around thinking their views are obviously correct, and the people who disagree with them are either ignorant, immoral, or arguing in bad faith. Rationally that doesn’t make sense. No one knows everything, and everyone has blind spots. Most people are doing their best to have decent opinions. So we have this kind of genius political and economic system that assumes everyone is going to be biased and small minded, and mostly just act in their own interests as they perceive them, and yet things mostly come out pretty ok. With that in mind, it follows that corporations should mostly just pursue profits, even though that doesn’t sound right. But certainly they should not take stances on the “issues of the day” ... especially if they are publicly held companies. Your scenario doesn’t make sense because our system is designed so that voting and legislating and regulating and so forth address the hypothetical Hitler problem. The corporation has a different role to play.

wizzwizz4 7y ago
I don't think your "with that in mind" follows. Corporations are emergent features of groups of humans, and there are things that they just don't do because none of the humans involved even consider them okay for long enough to think of how to do them. If corporations actually mostly pursued profits, there'd be nothing left but fire. Rather, corporations should (according to an extension of your argument, which I don't necessarily agree with) pursue the goals of the people who make up the corporation. Except that doesn't really happen; corporations are rather a power-multiplier for those in charge of them, subject to the constraints of the corporate structure that forces those people to prioritise profit over their own goals. Thus, it makes sense for people to lobby large companies en-masse; they can't use the corporations as force-multipliers, but they can use their ability to threaten the companies' profit sources (and so direct the companies' motivations) to their shared interest.
- whiddershins 7y ago
  Corporations act on the behalf of shareholders. They might employ people to do so, and those people in some sense might “make up” the corporation, but it is literally their job to pursue the interests of whomever owns stake in the corporation. I glossed over a lot of steps in my hacker news comment about a specific context. The context is some people trying to get github to take a stance, an opinion, about a department of the us government. It’s hard to be creative enough to imagine a more partisan or divisive topic, where moral consensus is effectively impossible. Within this context is is absolutely safe to describe the role of the for profit (public in this case) corporation - as opposed branches of the government, or non profit organizations, or unions, or groundswell movements or any of the various emergent structures you might want to throw in here - as seeking profit.

input_sh 7y ago

Nazi Germany would compel GitHub into working for them. ...at least, that's what IBM claims happened to its German subsidiary during WW2: https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss

drewbug01 7y ago
Luckily there's plenty of evidence out there that makes it crystal clear that IBM very much wanted to be in business with Germany during that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust (I think my favorite part of that book is learning that Hitler literally gave Watson a medal.)

zo1 7y ago

I can't see how any of what the OP said is Libertarian-like in any manner.