don't get me wrong, I care about this as much as you do. I'm just saying that the valley itself is not the right place for this, it's a political matter. we shouldn't waste our time going on a deep introspection tour into 'tech values', they have a duty towards their shareholders as much as BP or Exxon.

Or as little. The concept of fiduciary duty is just a hack to keep corporations working in the service of capital, rather than, you know, the common good or whatever. It's neither a legal standard nor an economic imperative, just a convenient myth. I guess it can be encoded into the charter of a company, in which case it is their imperative, but I digress.

But I totally agree that it's absurd that this debate is being scoped to the tech industry.

Basically Silicon Valley companies are very vocal about protecting human rights (which is good), and turn around and accept funding from nations that don't value them.

And it's not like these SV Companies didn't have any other source of funding.

The let part is very curious for its implication. What would the proposal be exactly, other than using violence and bureaucracy (every investment goes through an inherently corrupt government investment approval board) to curb free association and dictate capital flows through a command & control filter?

Want to invest in Coca Cola? No you may not, they've killed millions of people with obesity, diabetes and cancer over decades. So says some government tyrant dictating what you're allowed to invest into.

Want to start a marijuana company and take an investment from another marijuana company? No you may not, it's a schedule one drug that is evil, according to some government drug enforcement tyrant. They're not about to let you do such a thing.

You'd have to isolate yourself from half the planet economically to follow it to its proper conclusion. That includes: China, most of Africa, most of the Middle East, half of South America, several Eastern European nations, Russia, along with plausibly India and the US. And really where would we draw the line (other than arbitrarily by previously mentioned government tyrants)? Let's review the historical slave trade practices of various European nations for example, surely that counts against them in this absurdist premise. No investments are to ever be allowed from the Netherlands accordingly.

We live in the real world, where things are not black and white, but that line you talk about? It's called law and we will be spending at least the next couple of centuries working out the kinks.

Because talk is cheap, but comfortable lies work.

The case can easily be made that part of the American rise to power was basically war profiteering.

Even Russia enjoys whataboutism wrt to American morality...

Heck did you take money from a Bank? Would you surprise you to know that virtually every bank actively launders money for drug lords, terrorists and every other sort of undesirables?

Money by definition isn’t clean, Saudi Arabia, UAE and the likes have one of the largest investment funds in the world you can’t withdraw a dollar from a bank without touching that money.

Do you think I'm an idiot? I know that basically half the things I own are at the expense of others, like my nice monitors and other electronics. However, this is a huge step away from taking money from dictatorships and slave traders. Let's be sure we are both talking about the same thing here. I hope to one day apply the skills I have gained at the expense of others to better the lives of the less fortunate to a much greater extent than I have harmed them. It is my ethical duty to do so.

I'm not some confused idealist and I don't appreciate your condescending attitude. I do not personally have a bank account. It is unavoidable that my company has a bank account, and the fact that the money is dirty is a separate issue and needs to be addressed. On the other hand, it isn't unavoidable to turn down investments from bad characters. In the event that my company would knowingly accept such money, I would leave. So I don't understand your point.

You're not the first person to try this angle, and honestly others have made a better argument than you. Stop playing devil's advocate, and let's talk about the reality we actually live in.

Are you wearing your glasses? What VC are you talking about?

  I would never knowingly take blood money from a dictator, even if it meant I lived an impoverished life.

If my wife hates me for not taking blood money, I have failed to find a compatible life partner.

If my children hate me for it, I have failed to educate them about morality.

Whatever kind of ill will falls my way as a result of sticking to my guns and valuing the herd over the individual, I will take it with a smile. Because I can sleep at night knowing that I didn't decide that my own petty little problems are more important than the problems faced by people living under dictatorship.

Love can be an incredibly powerful thing. Love can be an incredibly selfish thing. Love can bring peace to all who accept it. Love can be the spark that leads to war. It is neither purely a good or evil thing. It cannot be used as an excuse for supporting the systematic degradation of human rights. That is love being selfish. Because it's not about the wives and children of the world, it is about your wife and your children.

> If I had a friend and loved him because of the benefits which this brought me and because of getting my own way, then it would not be my friend that I loved but myself. I should love my friend on account of his own goodness and virtues and account of all that he is in himself. Only if I love my friend in this way do I love him properly.

-- Meister Eckhart

> If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the "loved" person. [..] Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object - and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of the man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he just has to wait for the right object - and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.

-- Erich Fromm, "The Art of Loving" (1956)

I will read the Mark Twain story you referenced in the other post tonight, and will share my thoughts with you on it later.

It seems we both see the forest for the trees with this issue, and I appreciate the quotes you've left me. They've given me something to chew on.

It's a nice play on emotions to bring up "wife and children", but that's not reality here.

"But what if you were hanging from a cliff and only a job offer from Pol Pot could save you.. "

Because that's not missing the point at all.

My principle on this matter is more important than any emotion I may have.

Some people feel like it's ok to be selfish as long as they don't directly see the results of their selfishness. Yet imagine if every time you went to pick up your check, you were forced to watch a woman get stoned to death because someone raped her, and the ones doing the stoning were the ones handing you the check.

Any person that is okay with this scenario is a scourge on this planet.

Any person who isn't okay with this scenario, but is ok with taking blood money from foreign countries where they do not have to see the violence actually taking place, well honestly I just pity them for living their life in such a state of confusion.

People love to argue for the abuser. Any argument you can make for "having" to, say, become an SS officer to feed your family, is outweighed by the much more justifiable need to kill that SS officer to protect many more lives.

The people who are on the receiving end of stuff like this usually don't get to post on HN, and to signal obedience towards their murderers, while giving no real thought to those they murder, well... as Ilse Aichinger said, to forget the dead is to murder them again.

If I'd live under circumstances where I indeed had no other choice, maybe. Luckily, I live in Western society, so the answer to your question is "can't happen here".

... right now. But it could not that long ago, and when the wind changes, maybe it could again. Why does the West take oil/blood money? Because we are - no pun intended - a society built on sand.