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Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by minimuffins on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @12:08PM (#21704067)
"In a fact sheet circulating within GitHub, employees opposing the ICE contract wrote that the GitHub sales team actively pursued the contract renewal with ICE. The Times reviewed screenshots of an internal Slack channel after the contract was renewed on Sept. 4 that appear to show sales employees celebrating a $56,000 upgrade of the contract with ICE. The message, which congratulated four employees for the sale and was accompanied by emojis of a siren, bald eagle and American flag, read “stay out of their way. $56k upgrade at DHS ICE.” Five people responded with an American flag emoji."

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-10-31...

Doesn't sound very apolitical.

Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by cmcd on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @12:18PM (#21704226)
Sounds like typical banter after securing a sale. In the same way people might use the wine bottle emoji when closing a deal with a brewery.
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Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by remarkEon on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @05:02PM (#21707688)
There is not a universal right to come to the United States. At some point your argument degrades into “everyone gets to come here and if you enforce or what enforced the existing law you’re [insert -ist here]”. It’s an effective rhetorical payload, I’ll give you that, but it is completely divorced from any kind of system of state sovereignty and integrity.

In a way I agree with you, because “enforcing the law” really is “normalized violence” - philosophically speaking, since it’s the State that has the guns (or most of them).

Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by claudeganon on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @05:38PM (#21707987)
Nor is there some universal standard or determination about who is allowed in. That’s entirely determined by who has power and how they choose to interpret the law or even adhere to it and what degree of violence they use in doing do. In the case of the current administration, that’s stripping children from their parents, keeping people in dangerous, overcrowded, disease-ridden conditions, allowing people to profit off this incarceration, and just generally deploying racist and genocidal rhetoric in doing so.

People aren’t objecting to some abstract notion of enforcing laws, they’re objecting to how power is operating to do demonstrably vile and unnecessary to things migrants with the framework of “enforcement” as an excuse. Rule of law doesn’t exist outside of how it is materially made manifest.

Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by remarkEon on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @06:31PM (#21708325)
>People aren’t objecting to ... enforcing laws

You’re right about that, since they generally didn’t object to the same or similar levels of enforcement from the previous administration. It’s not completely clear why they didn’t, but it probably had to do with olive branch policies like DACA and a mostly compliant media apparatus.

But what’s been the general theme here is that people actually don’t want these laws enforced at all. They have a fundamentally different view about state sovereignty and want that view made real in policy. As I said before, you have a useful rhetorical payload you get to deploy (“everyone who disagrees with me is a racist”) against those who think we should perhaps not just open the borders. Those who don’t want that have to make longer, more complex arguments about things that make states and societies function - which is only “abstract” until it isn’t.

Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by claudeganon on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @06:55PM (#21708462)
I don’t think that everyone who disagrees with me is racist. I’m actually quite open to (but not entirely in agreement with) a left, labor-focused critique that mass immigration under the current circumstances of American Capitalism (widespread wage theft, union busting, lack of enforcement of labor laws) would be used by Capital owners to further undermine the existing working class. I personally believe that increased immigration should be done in tandem with mass protections for workers, including things like easier unionization, the abolishment of sector-wide bargaining bans, increased enforcement of wage and labor laws etc.

What I don’t believe is that the current administration’s practices are anything other than a cynical, racist diversion of tensions and alienation created by Capitalism away from the wealthy and into the scapegoating of immigrants. Broader issues of statehood and sovereignty are not even in question because they’re not meaningful considerations to the people doing these things. They have no allegiance to anything other than what invests them with further wealth, power, and opportunity for cruelty.

The Obama administration absolutely set this all in motion through their feckless, naive, and equally cynical use of immigration enforcement as some bargaining chip for a broader deal. And liberals who fail to acknowledge this should be hung out to dry with him for their hypocrisy.

Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by dang on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @09:42PM (#21709528)
Would you please stop using HN primarily for political and ideological battle? It's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it.

This whole thread is a wretched tire fire filled with people torching the site guidelines on both sides of the war, and reading it makes me wonder why we even bother. Still, crossing the 'primarily' line is an important distinction and your account stands out as doing that. That means you're continually undermining this site for its intended purpose, which is intellectual curiosity, not political battle. The two can't coexist, and the second completely overwhelms the first.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

This isn't an ideological call, and if anyone knows of other accounts that are using HN primarily for political battle, please let us know at [email protected] so we can ask them not to.

Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by remarkEon on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @08:17PM (#21709080)
>...created by Capitalism away from the wealthy and into the scapegoating of immigrants.

Which is of course why Big Capital is against this ramped up enforcement. To attempt to steel-man your argument for a sec you seem to believe that, because you think this administration is racist, what they're doing is nothing more than a scapegoating of immigrants based on tensions created by global capital movement - they're just taking advantage of existing problems in the economy to push their preferred policy in another different-but-related domain. The larger picture is that Big Capital and the Social Justice inclined left are actually on the same page but don't know it: they both want more immigration, and a depleted or hamstrung level of state sovereignty (the latter leads to the former) and are in a sort of blind-truce right now.

It's not at all clear how mass immigration suddenly stops undermining the existing working class if we just have "more protections" for workers. You clearly understand that the laws of supply and demand are real and brutal. We can do everything you want - increased protections, unionization etc etc - and that will just increase the lumens on the lamp drawing everyone in. A large positive supply shock for cheap, low skilled labor is bad no matter how "worker friendly" your government is - unless of course you want it to go full USSR, where everyone is poor and miserable but they have a job they can count on.

Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by LiNeXT on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @12:10PM (#21704093)
This is how enterprise sales are done.
Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by SolaceQuantum on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @12:23PM (#21704323)
If Blizzard can be panned for its enterprise-style move to strip winnings from pro-HK messaging tournament winner in order to better ameliorate itself to a large potential consumer base, why isn’t GitHub allowed to be panned for its enterprise moves in pursuing sales with an organization that is embroiled in political scandal?
Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by LiNeXT on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @12:35PM (#21704507)
There is a vast difference between selling software to your own government for their use and directly, actively, and punitively screwing with an individual a foreign government doesn't like.
Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by SolaceQuantum on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @12:38PM (#21704550)
It was done in order to continue friendly relations with a potential client base. Wasn’t Amazons Ring panned for giving data to the police? Don’t we have a thread on the front page right now about Google giving personal data to the DoJ?
Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @12:56PM (#21704798)
> It was done in order to continue friendly relations with a potential client base

The analogous action for GitHub to Blizzard’s would be booting a user ICE doesn't like to maintain friendly ties with the latter. That hasn't happened.

Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by SolaceQuantum on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @12:59PM (#21704840)
Didn’t GitLab do this?
Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by input_sh on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @01:23PM (#21705196)
As far as I know, not quite.

GitLab modified their customer acceptance so that it gives them an option to refuse a client, saying that they will reach such a decision on a case-by-case basis: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

...while Chef's CEO openly said that they will not renew their contract with ICE and CBP, as well as to donate the equivalent revenue of their current contracts to charities that help people impacted: https://blog.chef.io/an-important-update-from-chef/

> After deep introspection and dialog within Chef, we will not renew our current contracts with ICE and CBP when they expire over the next year. Chef will fulfill our full obligations under the current contracts.

Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by claudeganon on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @02:19PM (#21705895)
I’m fairly certain the actions themselves of the entity being protested are what’s driving the discontent here. People are upset about Hong Kong protestors being tortured and disappeared by police just like they are about migrants being treated the same way by ICE.

It’s not it being your own government vs. a foreign government that’s at issue. It’s what they’re doing to people.

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Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by lykr0n on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @12:21PM (#21704283)
that's a good way to get people to care about the points you're making.
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Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by LiNeXT on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @12:37PM (#21704525)
Selling a piece of enterprise software != alignment. It's a sale, nothing more.
Re:Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract by whateveracct on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @02:20PM (#21705898)
> stay out of their way

that's some authoritarian nonsense