It seems like most people want YC to cut Thiel off, which would be very similar to that. David Heinemeier Hansson and Ellen Pao have advocated for virtually that exact scenario.
Thiel doesn't even get equity in YC. Thiel's participation in YC is almost literally just a marketing tactic --- it's a co-endorsement. We're telling Altman: rethink the endorsement.
And once that happens, that legitimizes DHH firing Basecamp employees who vote for Trump. I understand that Thiel's involvement with YC is not "employment," but the point is that 1) yes, people are suggesting excluding Trump supporters from employment and 2) high visibility people doing so would have a massive ripple effect on everybody else. It's just another thing that goes from "that's insane and you can't do that" to "these other companies have done it, so it's no big deal."
You can construct a slippery slope out of any argument. I can get you to "DHH fires Basecamp employees" from "refusal to donate to Donald Trump" in just a few more steps. So that argument is not compelling.
It's more productive for us to concentrate on the arguments that are actually being made. You don't have to, of course, but I don't think you'll get very far otherwise.
How would that make you feel if you were a YC-funded founder who happened to support Trump? The semantics of Thiel's relationship with YC doesn't change anything.
This feels like exactly the thing that's been dismissed as an unrealistic slippery slope elsewhere in the thread.
When the narrative was "Thiel's connection to YC is about prestige, so YC should sever that connection to preserve its reputation", I found it basically reasonable.
But if the narrative is "Disavowing Thiel will make Trump-supporting founders uncomfortable with coming to YC, or uncomfortable admitting their support?" Then we've jumped to punishing people professionally for being in a group comprising 40%+ of the country.
Hounding founders who support Trump (who, perhaps, don't even donate or like many of his views) seems to go straight into the awful kind of patronage/exclusion politics that's being condemned here.
I do not support "hounding founders who support Trump". In fact, I don't support hounding most Trump supporters. I am content with hounding key members of the Trump campaign itself.
This seems reasonable - becoming a key member of a political campaign means signing on for that sort of thing - but I'm struggling to reconcile it with the earlier statement. If making Trump supporters uncomfortable about entering a business arrangement is a good thing, surely that's about trying to put economic pressure on Trump supporters in general?
I'm not trying to be uncharitable here - I honestly don't follow. One possibility is that since YC founders often end up quite wealthy, you're talking about discouraging the next Thiel rather than discouraging business with Trump supporters in general?
There's a line there. If Altman wants to express support for another candidate or express disagreement with Thiel's views -- great! The political process at work. What is not okay is him using his position of power to seek retribution against Thiel for his views. YC is not a political organization. It's not about making Trump supporters uncomfortable, it's about making them afraid to exercise their right to free speech.
To be clear, I am not a Trump supporter, but dehumanizing Trump supporters is not a productive approach.
It should. It's extremely bad to exclude people for disagreeing with their political positions. We need to learn how to disagree politely and civilly, and how to keep our disagreements from bleeding over into our total personal evaluation of the opposing person. That's applicable to both sides. Our civilization and democracy depends on mutual toleration and an ability to separate the personal from the partisan.
Cutting people off only further isolates them. If you really want to convert Trump supporters, you have to show them the error of their ways gradually, just like with everything else. Writing them off as irredeemable based on their political preferences is not only inadvisable, but fundamentally destructive of the binding social fabric of the republic.
There's no political argument that you can't turn into a slippery slope like this. You can get to Brendan Eich with just a few more hops from a starting point of "refusing to donate to Trump". So that argument isn't very interesting.
What might interest you more is that I agree with you about Brendan Eich. I think Eich's situation is nothing at all like that of Thiel's. Eich was a full-time employee of Mozilla. From what I know of the situation, Eich hadn't made any of his employees at Mozilla uncomfortable. Eich's support for Proposition 8 was quiet: people dug it out of a database to use against him. And while I disagree with the stance he took against marriage equality, opposition to marriage equality doesn't challenge equal access to the channels of democracy. Eich wasn't campaigning to remove the Muslims from our country, or to imprison those who disagree with him.
OK, you'll be shocked. That's fine; politics is a matter of taste. For that reason, it is ever plagued by this sort of fuzzy, tone-policing, last-year-you-could-say-that-but-not-this-year, latest-fashion argument. Most political pundits owe their careers to that insipid bullshit. Personally I'd like both of the candidates under discussion to go jump in a lake, so we could elect someone opposed to the Eternal War on Everything. That's off-narrative, however, so it will be best to avoid both rural Arab weddings and plant-based pain control for some time to come.
Of course. I also know it started as a left-wing workers movement that moved to the right to gain favour of the wealthy capitalists required to fund its growth which included seizing control over the media.
As a European looking from the outside and more than aware of this history, I see the media goose-stepping to the tune of one campaign which uses it to stoke up moral outrage about their opposition of which this story is a current symptom. The candidate that rhymes with history is not the chaotic/offensive TV personality.
Are you kidding? At no point during that parties history was it ever 'left-wing'. It was partially funded and staffed by the military, and originally organized to push hard against leftist elements in Germany. It primarily appealed to workers as a conservative alternative to leftist politics, quite similar to the conservative party we have today.
>> At no point during that parties history was it ever 'left-wing'
What?! Of course it was - history time: the small feller with moustaches joined an anti-capitalist workers party. It's in the name - it was socialist but nationalist so anti-communist but still decidedly to the left of say the DNC today. Check the manifesto including things like banning rentiers, seizing land, obligating pensions and this little gem "We want all very big corporations to be owned by the government" etc. The moral is that its not where you start, its where you go that matters.
You are completely ignoring the part where he effectively replaced the core of that insignificant political party during the takeover. It's incredibly deceptive to conflate the single most conservative movement in history with leftism because of a hostile takeover of a tiny political party. If you actually read those 25 points, it's a blueprint for a regressive totalitarian dictatorship with a command economy. If you consider that 'leftist', then I couldn't disagree more.
The Nazi party had a left wing well until just before Hitler was appointed chancellor, when it started causing problems for the man and he had it purged. (A lot of the leaders of this wing of the party were killed in the Night Of The Long Knives.)
Source: I read a biography on Hitler, but I don't have time to go track down the exact citations/references. This page might be a good start:
There were factions in the Nazi Party, both conservative and radical.[23] The conservative Nazi Hermann Göring urged Hitler to conciliate with capitalists and reactionaries.[23] Other prominent conservative Nazis included Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich.[24]
The radical Nazi Joseph Goebbels hated capitalism, viewing it as having Jews at its core, and he stressed the need for the party to emphasise both a proletarian and national character. Those views were shared by Otto Strasser, who later left the Nazi Party in the belief that Hitler had betrayed the party's socialist goals by allegedly endorsing capitalism.[23] Large segments of the Nazi Party staunchly supported its official socialist, revolutionary, and anti-capitalist positions and expected both a social and economic revolution upon the party's gaining power in 1933.[25] Many of the million members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) were committed to the party's official socialist program.[25] The leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm, pushed for a "second revolution" (the "first revolution" being the Nazis' seizure of power) that would entrench the party's official socialist program. Further, Röhm desired that the SA absorb the much smaller German Army into its ranks under his leadership.[25]
I wasn't aware that there was a boycott of Oculus over Palmer Luckey, but man, that's heartening to hear. I have to admit that I would not have picked "political integrity" over "access to VR toys" in that particular sparring match. Good for those developers!
Boycotts are a form of speech. The right to criticize is inalienable.
