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Comment by 0xbear | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering when the other shoe was going to drop. Now both of the "star" SV CEOs who had the gall to constructively engage with the administration are under fire for "harassment". I wonder how Thiel has managed to avoid these Alinsky playbook tactics so far.

In any company of tens of thousands of people, you can always find a few people who are mistreated (even at such bastions of social justice as Google and Microsoft, see the recent news about Google's internal mailing list). The strategy in this case seems to be to take these few cases, and blow them completely out of proportion in social media to ensure political compliance from the CEO, or in this case just to punish for previous non-compliance. Not even the second coming of Steve Jobs is immune.

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This is (a) changing the subject, (b) lacking information, (c) partisan flamebait and (d) ideological boilerplate ("Alinsky playbook"). That easily clears the bar to be called political trolling whether you meant it that way or not. On HN we judge that by effect, not intent, because effects are what we're trying to optimize for. (If anyone wants a further explanation see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...).

Bottom line, please stop and please don't post like this to HN.

> I wonder how Thiel has managed to avoid these Alinsky playbook tactics so far.

Partly by being gay, partly by "that shoe dropped a while ago." He co-authored a book titled The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford in 1995.

Per wiki:

> In 2016, Thiel apologized for two statements he made in the book: 1) "The purpose of the rape crisis movement seems as much about vilifying men as about raising 'awareness'" and 2) "But since a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than belated regret, a woman might 'realize' that she had been 'raped' the next day or even many days later." He stated: "More than two decades ago, I co-wrote a book with several insensitive, crudely argued statements. As I’ve said before, I wish I’d never written those things. I’m sorry for it. Rape in all forms is a crime. I regret writing passages that have been taken to suggest otherwise."

> In any company of tens of thousands of people, you can always find a few people who are mistreated

It's how the company handles these situations that matters. If the guy who harassed Susan Fowler was fired instead of promoted, Kalanick would probably still have his job.

The fact that this comment hasn't been downvoted into oblivion yet (in fact, it may be the top comment on this thread right now) is galling.

I'll go ahead and emphatically state that I did down-vote this, because chalking up someone being mistreated in the workforce to a coordinated liberal agenda will get you banned from the comment section on most real news websites, but apparently it makes you a fuckin' hero around here.

OPs comment is so disconnected from the article its actually funny. That person did not read it.

> apparently it makes you a fuckin' hero around here

It takes time for the community's actual response to emerge in cases like this, not to mention for moderators to see them.

> I wonder how Thiel has managed to avoid these Alinsky playbook tactics so far.

Because your conspiracy theories aren't real.

No kidding. Knowing how Musk is idolized around here, was anticipating some defense, but the ability to harness Trump to ignore real problems in these companies, that's..wow. And it's the top-most comment right now. How does that work?

> How does that work?

Because most of HN have bought Musk's PR persona hook, line, and sinker.

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