Assuming no mitigating circumstances for not speaking out, it literally is acceptance and tacit perpetuation of the status quo which is most certainly political.

I'm not saying there were no mitigating circumstances nor condoning the person's behavior but they are clearly correct on that specific point.

"It's not the violence of the few that scares me, it's the silence of the many." Martin Luther King, Jr.

The mitigating circumstances are the un-nessicary stress and responsibilities of dealing with anyone who doesn't 100% agree with what you're saying. Unfortunately these are pervasive on pretty much any platform you are on, so there's no good way around it.

It's pretty necessary to deal with racism. It's life and death, in fact. The fewer who speak out, the more stress for everyone who abrogates their responsibility.

You completly ignored everything that I said

That's a baseless accusation. I specifically refuted what you said with an argument that even used the words of your own response. To be even more clear, there are no known mitigating circumstances here and your excuses are not mitigating circumstances. See previous comment for argument.

I want to be free to choose whether a political issue deserves my action or inaction in a work setting.

So please respect (not you but people who make such statements) individuals who rightfully choose not to get involved.

There isn’t just the “right” way of thinking. Which is what exactly is happening right now. “Either you think and act as we do or you are an ass*ole.”

Pluralism of thought shouldn’t even be in question in the 21st century.

They are involed, specifically in presrving the status quo. There is unfortunately no abstaining in the same way you can't abstain when you know a child is being abused.

Thinking, saying and acting how one does does not exempt them from being the consequences of doing so, specifically, being judged for it.

HN is not a uniform group of people speaking with one voice. It's a group of different people with different opinions on different subjects who speak up at different times.

It's tempting to personify things that are too complex to grasp in detail, but this roads lead nowhere.

There is a difference. They tell you to quit your job usually, not harass your coworkers into becoming your loud speaker for the cause.

If the Recoil project were contributing to racism in the US, I think we all agree that would be a problem.

Connecting facial recognition software and racism seems to be earning you downvotes here.

While racism is the hot button topic right now, widespread governmental and corporate (or indeed, private) use of facial recognition software is problematic for many reasons. Erosion of privacy, sexual and non-sexual harassment and stalking, racial profiling, gender profiling, profiling for membership of any other kind of group, cute Facebook apps tied to shadowy political organizations, even crazy dystopian inventions like the Chinese social credit scheme. This tech needs to be very strongly regulated, and soon.

Anyone working in this field, and creating this type of software for companies with a historically weak moral compass, _should_ think deeply about their involvement.

Facial recognition may not work reliably if there is training data bias, which can be disadvantageous if you want it to work.

And as you note it can also be used for reducing privacy at scale in a way that humans can't normally do on their own, for example personally identifying thousands of people in a crowd at a sporting event or political rally.

Recoil isn't facial recognition software, it's a React state management library. That's why the employee's conduct was so toxic here; the project he demanded a statement from just has nothing to do with racism in the first place.

How does this even apply when it’s employees on the same company and team having disagreements?