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Comment by slykat | Hacker News Reader

What bothers me the most is how myopic people are about this. Does anyone not see how dangerous it will be if we have the world's largest companies choosing to do business based on their internal moral grounds? Do we really want tech companies to have moral councils that vet customers?

If you want to fix ICE, then by all means, attack the problem at its source! Take that well paid Github salary of yours and fund the ACLU and other lobbyists fighting the good fight. Write your congressman. Call your congressman. VOTE! Campaign for the correct congressman. Code for your congressman. Push for policy that makes ICE employees (and all government employees) more accountable for human rights abuses. All of these actions will be more effective than campaigning for ICE, who will just migrate to a different cloud code review tool if the contract is cancelled (gitlab, bitbucket, or whomever else).

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I see you as the myopic here; by pretending you only have to the long term stuff (votes, campaing) and that the short term stuff doesn't matter or shouldn't be done (like the employees complaining in this case) like these kind of protests live in a vacuum; when artists in the 50s refused to play in segregated crowds you think they didn't ALSO advocate for the long term stuff like voting for congressmen in favor of less racism? Absolutely nothing lives in a vacuum, and creating noise against ICE like they are doing in this case can help even more than doing the politics part themselves, because the exposure they get influences other people reading such news.

I actually don't think this is a short term action. I think of this as a non-action. If Github pulls the ICE contract they will just use a competitor (Gitlab has already gone on record saying they will not restrict customers based on moral viewpoints). And regardless of which cloud code collaboration tool ICE uses, they will still be locking kids in detention camps and trampling human rights. No behavior change will happen at all at ICE if they have to change their git cloud provider.

This is a non action move in my opinion. I see it as slacktivism, if Github pulls the contract, people will pat themselves on the back, and count it as a win. You could argue the exposure might have some effect, but given that ICE human rights abuses have been very well documented by the leading publications, I'm unsure if additional exposure will bring change. I do strongly believe that funding lobbyists is the a great short term thing we can do. From an exposure viewpoint, I think the best thing we can do is raise exposure and support in the blue areas of the country. However, these protests are not doing that.

If I have learn anything about politics is that very well documented facts don't always have more importance in the public eyes than the noise made about a subject, the full political campaign of Trump had practically 0% of any truth whatsoever, just rambling insults and other easily-repeated slogans void of any truth but emotional appeals to a big chunk of the voting population; and he won with millions of votes. So no, I think stuff like this does a bit more than "some effect".

I agree that noise can impact change, but the problem here is we've already got this noise within the Blue states. In order to get a policy change you need to have majority of Congress which means the noise needs to be felt on the Red states. So yea, if this was happening in a corporation based in Texas, Florida, or Georgia, I'd believe this was an action. Right now this exposure is going into publications that target people who already share the same viewpoint as the protestors.

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