The American family separation thing the person above you mentioned, for instance, falls into the line of unacceptable for me, but for some people it's an acceptable response to illegal immigration. This is, indeed, very, very hard.

You do know that the very child separation policy you decry was implemented specifically to prevent child trafficking and keeping children away from people that can’t be verified to be related?

Kidnapping doesn't cease to be kidnapping just because it was done by a government official.

Article 16 (3):

> The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

When a government sanctioned agency engages in something that is probably illegal (and definitely immoral) and you still think they are worthy of your business, you are complicit in their actions.

Many would argue, correctly or not, that the policies of not having children housed with whatever adult they cross the border with is in service of avoiding child trafficking.

Didn't the Ninth Circuit federal court order ICE to follow this practice? See the Flores Consent Decree.

> The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

and:

"children and their parents must be housed together when incarcerated"

That clause (perhaps the entire UN declaration of human rights) seems incredibly ambiguous. Reading the whole declaration seems like it, perhaps, means protection of the specific enumerated rights of part 16 sections 1/2 which seems basically like the right for anyone to marry or not anyone they want and for that person to terminate the marriage when they choose.

There is also the issue of why they are incarcerated in the first place. They have committed no crime, migration and seeking refuge is protected under international law.

The UN universal declaration of human rights is written to be easily accessible and understood by the general public. And given that it was written 75 years ago I think they did a good job. I actually recommend everyone to read it entirely in your native language, as it has probably been translated into it and will only take a few minutes. A beautiful document indeed.

The important thing here though is not how rigorously defined these rights are, but the spirit of the law is clearly saying that the family is a fundamental unit of society. Separating the family unit is a failure to uphold that principal.

I must admit it sounds like the stuff of paranoid fantasy.

Update: this from Channel 4 seems reasonably calm and balance. I had to hunt through a lot of clickbaity headlines to find it: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-were-mass-...

For a country with a documented history of disrespect for bodily autonomy it seems entirely in line with expected behaviour to me.

>Over the six-year period that had followed the passage of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, physicians sterilized perhaps 25% of Native American women of childbearing age, and there is evidence suggesting that the numbers were actually even higher.

https://time.com/5737080/native-american-sterilization-histo...

What is the threat model here? If the adult they are crossing with is trying to sell the child in the US, then having the adult and child detained together still prevents this.

Also, at $250 for a paternity test, wouldn't a cost-benefit analysis make it rational to do that rather than risk the (more expensive) harm of separating a child from their parent?

Until the detention is over and then you release them together?

One threat model is child abuse. Detaining them together enables abuse. Another threat model is deceiving the government about the child trafficking. Separating the child and the adult allows investigators to question them separately without the adult coaching the child when investigators are not present.

> Also, at $250 for a paternity test, wouldn't a cost-benefit analysis make it rational to do that rather than risk the (more expensive) harm of separating a child from their parent?

This is a good point but not all children are biological offspring of their legal parents. When you suspect trafficking and the adult claims the child is adopted what do you do?

So, being political at a company level means defining a morals for companies that transcends de jure laws. Which is, basically, another set of uber-laws but without any real oversight nor finesse.

In the end refusing selling a computer to ICE should be like refusing to sell a soda to a black person: a clear case of discrimination. And companies should be threatened with dissolution if so; moral focused groups can then just create foundations or churches instead.

When you say "political decision", what do you mean? I suppose it is possible to regard every decision one makes (eating at McDonalds, buying a MacBook, driving a car, riding a bike, doing sports, watching news, going to college, etc.) as political. It's almost certainly not how people prefer to think.

Not everything a business does is political, but when a business chooses to remain apolitical on an issue which effect the lives of other people—especially those who work for the business or who’s lives are affected by the customers or the product of that business—they are making a political decision. And more often then not a rather poor one.

I prefer to test principles by inverting the politics and seeing if I still agree: what about the gay wedding cake guy? Was he justified in refusing a commodity average cake to a gay couple?

And you aren't good enough (and never will be).

This kind of ignorant, childlike approach to politics is why the Democrats are going to lose so hard in 2022... and God forbid the Republicans stumble onto their version of Barack Obama... 2024 will be a nightmare.

When I eat at Chick-fil-A, I'm not making a statement that I want gay people to be eradicated, I just like goddamned pressure fried chicken sandwiches. When I buy something from a company that produces their goods in China, I'm not saying I want Uyghurs to be slaughtered en masse.

In fact, in every single one of these instances, I'm not actively giving a shit - or making a statement - about either of those things... I'm doing it because I haven't eaten since 6 a.m., or because I need a USB-C cable, not because I hate gay people and Chinese Muslims.

This is why the did business with == “fully support” equivalence is so dumb.

It’s an extremely common philosophy that if your actions aren’t politically motivated then you’re being apolitical but I don’t think that works in the real world because those actions have real political effects/consequences regardless of whether you considered them or not.

Is there a practical difference between someone choosing to join your cause and your coercing someone to join your cause?

Is there a practical difference between someone choosing to remain uninvolved and someone choosing to join the opponents of your cause?

Yes, in that one involves coercion, which in itself has a moral weight.

> Is there a practical difference between someone choosing to remain uninvolved and someone choosing to join the opponents of your cause?

Yes, in that those are different actions and as such will produce different outcomes.

I assume that those two hypotheticals were intended as counterexamples to the principle that being involved in activity that produces or contributes to harm is wrong even if you don't specifically intend the harm.

It's not as if e.g. buying a kidney on the black market is morally equivalent to kidnapping a person and surgically removing it from them (presuming that that is how the vendor acquired it). But it's more absurd to pretend that you can engage in that transaction, proclaim "I didn't intend and don't condone any harm ensuing from the acquisition of this organ" and thus absolve yourself of any guilt.

That's not how discussions work around here. And, frankly, you sound a bit condescending.

Yes, I know--offering obvious expository answers to obviously rhetorical questions is how discussions work around here. ;)

> I assume that those two hypotheticals were intended as counterexamples to the principle that being involved in activity that produces or contributes to harm is wrong even if you don't specifically intend the harm.

That's not the principle in question. The claim, AIUI, is that to not participate in a certain political cause--to remain neutral--is equivalent to joining with the opponents of the cause. IOW, "inaction is action," "you're with us or you're against us," etc.

> And, frankly, you sound a bit condescending.

Wow, two thought-provoking questions and a friendly statement, and I've already condescended. How dare I, right?

Keep HN'ing, mate!

That's not the point. It's okay to pose rhetorical questions, and it's okay to address a specific user with genuine questions. It is not okay, however, to ask a specific user rhetorical, leading questions, because that makes it seem like you want to "win" this discussion.

Pretty sure that reading my mind and accusing me of bad faith is a violation of The Guidelines. Maybe you should take a leave of absence from the HN Volunteer Police Department.

Classic HN... "Can't you just let me rake in all this cash without the guilt trip over all the bad things I'm doing?"

Why can't a corporation have a moral imperative that says "I will not participate in acts of cruelty"?

Corporations have a lot of power in our society and it seems having a moral guideline here would be beneficial to society as whole. Yes I know this can but both toward liberal and conservative ideals but overall I think it's a better position to have.

Because it won't be consistent about it.

Lockdowns are the heart of cruelty. Mass, evil incarceration of entire populations without any evidence they work, such that millions of people have had to go without vital life saving cancer screenings, they've been losing their jobs, there have been suicides, etc. Incredibly cruel policies. So surely every corporation is going to be totally anti-lockdown, right?

Oh, what's that? There are tradeoffs, you disagree, etc.

Well, yeah. And that's why institutions of any kind shouldn't adopt such vague, naive, poorly thought out slogans. Even defining "acts of cruelty" is hard. Look at this thread. Some leftist immediately dragged it into the standard tirade against US immigration control. Why is the cruelty there being inflicted by those who enforce the laws rather than the parents who take their children on an adventure of illegal immigration, knowing full well what the consequences may be? You can slice it both ways, depending on perspective.

That's why smart firms stay out of these debates, unless they were specifically founded to take a position on one of them. But it seems Valley tech firms are increasingly not so smart. That's OK, it'll be good to have a free competitive edge over them.

Thus, if it's legal then the company is doing nothing wrong. If they're harming someone then laws should change - which is what the democratic/legislative arm is for - and law suits should be filed.

I'm not against a company having a moral stance but to implicate all those that don't as bad moral actors when they system is set up the way it is seems a tad invidious.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Legislators work to try and capture what is right for now and the future, and in common law jurisdictions a claimant may (sometimes) sue and not have to wait for legislation. As I wrote, I'm not against anyone taking a positive moral stance but since there's no way to know or even agree on what is moral, to say that it's immoral to take no stance other than to work within the law (which is a already a very extensive moral code) would seem invidious.

This is a political problem that can only be solved politically (by voting) not by some tech companies doing small scale boycott

Yet, big companies have had boycotts internally and that lead to the company changing its course. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/google-will-not-renew-a-cont... And, yeah, sometimes the efforts only work for a short period but they still had an effect.

Voting is nice but - most often - you don't get a real choice with voting. You choose one corrupt politician for another because more money == more speech. The uninformed masses who are more concerned with their own daily lives (divorce, family deaths, their children, etc.) are what are making large decisions for the rest of the informed. The cycle perpetuates.

Project Maven continues, now run by Palantir. Google's refusal to continue the project did nothing but slow down the project by a few months.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-14/palantir-...

In fact, considering the goals of Project Maven (roughly making sure you're blowing up what and who you intend and avoiding collateral damage), if you consider Google a leader in AI, you could make the perverse argument that you're actually killing people by reducing the effectiveness and delaying the timeline of the program. I'm not saying I've researched this enough to say that this is a correct or even plausible argument, merely that it is possible.

You're only complicit if you pay taxes.

Refuse to pay or reduce your income below the taxable threshold and you will no longer be complicit.

Politics is a lot more than just voting, especially when you have a two-party system that is vulnerable to ratcheting and deception.

Not really, no. You don't have to make money. You're able to live a life free of income and taxes, live like a vagabond.

You choose to earn enough income that you have to pay taxes on it. If you decide to get a job that pays you enough that you have to pay taxes, you're complicit.

No such conclusion if everyone stops selling software to ICE until they stop their grossly inhumane actions.

Again, you choose to make a taxable income; you choose to pay taxes.

Remember that any time you support the marijuana market (legal or illegal) as a purchaser and indirectly add demand to the curve that feeds the cartels in Mexico.

I hope you support drug legalization, otherwise this attitude is massively hypocritical.

And please explain why buying legal marijuana supports the cartels? Are people buying Mexican brick weed from dispensaries now?

Until people refuse to smoke illegal marijuana en mass, the markets are effectively the same.

> hope you support drug legalization, otherwise this attitude is massively hypocritical.

This is completely orthogonal to legalization. As long as the cartels still get it into the country at a competitive price to local growers (legal or illegal), the cartels are being supported.

Which will only happen when it's legalized, which is exactly my point.

BTW, I'm not misleading you in the other thread. I know no one wants to believe that their own government could do that, but unfortunately they did. It's an "open secret", something like NSA spying was circa 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud

Bandar helped negotiate the 1985 Al Yamamah deal, a series of massive arms sales by the United Kingdom to Saudi Arabia worth GB£40 billion, including the sale of more than 100 warplanes. After the deal was signed, British arms manufacturer British Aerospace (now BAE Systems) allegedly funnelled secret payments of at least GB£1 billion into two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington, in yearly instalments of up to GB£120 million over at least 10 years. He allegedly took money for personal use out of the accounts, as the purpose of one of the accounts was to pay the operating expenses of his private Airbus A340. According to investigators, there was "no distinction between the accounts of the embassy, or official government accounts [...], and the accounts of the royal family." The payments were discovered during a Serious Fraud Office investigation, which was stopped in December 2006 by attorney general Lord Goldsmith.[68][69] In 2009, he hired Louis Freeh as his legal representative for the Al-Yamamah arms scandal.[70]

A court affidavit filed on 3 February 2015 claims that Zacarias Moussaoui was a courier between Osama bin Laden and Turki bin Faisal Al Saud in the late 1990s, and that Turki introduced Moussaoui to Bandar.[72] Zacarias Moussaoui stated on oath and wrote to Judge George B. Daniels that Saudi royal family members, including Prince Bandar, donated to Al-Qaeda and helped finance the 11 September attacks. The Saudi government continues to deny any involvement in the 9/11 plot, and claims there is no evidence to support Moussaoui's allegations in spite of numerous previous intense investigations, noting that Moussaoui's own lawyers presented evidence of his mental incompetence during his trial. Leaked information from the redacted portion of the 9/11 Commission Report states that two of the 9/11 hijackers received $US130,000 in payment from Bandar's bank account.

Obeying the law is like that.

As the culture war has become a bigger part of politics, like the grandfather comment suggest, more of these issues fall into that second bucket in which it is tough to accept neutrality.

If he could do that with a female roommate why shouldn't he be allowed do that with his male roommate? It isn't reasonable to object to gay marriage on a technicality like that while also being fine with the laws regarding straight marriage.

Didn't I already give the reason? Because it could be used as a loophole in the tax law, that men and women in temporary relationships didn't exploit, even if divorce is instant and the high earner can keep all the wealth that had been taxed at a lower rate. (Because women generally don't let themselves get used like that.) On the other hand, in a community property state, with no pre-nup, that loophole is closed.

It's also generally reasonable, as a structural concept, to object to the idea that laws should treat men and women equally, or men/women and men/men pairings, as some kind of universal principle. California's legislature adopts this stance: it outlaws same-sex boards (at least all-male ones) in publicly traded companies.

Similarly, it's reasonable to examine the question of same-sex relationship laws with more nuance than saying everything should be the same as marriage because equality. Maybe the divorce and taxation laws should be different, because the straight ones ought to be written with children and rapidly declining female fertility in mind. Maybe the "next of kin" definition or inheritance laws should be adjusted, when it comes to extended family. Maybe gay marriage should have a fine-grained series of check boxes to opt in to each of the privileges and duties and consequences, because that's just good customer service for gay citizens, but straight marriage should be all or nothing, for good reasons.

I personally think that this is outdated, and that we should incentivize such things in more direct ways if we should at all, but this is a reasonable point of disagreement prima facie.

Straight couples can get married without any plans to have a child. Why is is different for gay couples?

Gay couples can also have a child either through adoption or biologically with a surrogate or sperm donor.

And at the same time, it is true that a gay couple can have children through adoption, or biologically.

It is for both of these reasons that I disagree with the argument.

That being said, at the time when the argument was relevant, the overwhelming majority of married heterosexual couples did have children, and gay adoption as well as IVF were not really a thing.

But nowadays, of course, anyone making this argument would be making it from bias. In the framing of the thread, which was the 1940s, it is more reasonable.

There is also the scientific question of whether sexual orientation is innate or a preference. For a long time, the science was wrong. Key research was done on that in the 1990s and early 2000s, and that filtered into the public conscience over time. Even as late as 2013, only 40% of Americans recognized that sexual orientation was innate. But once that premise became accepted, support for legalizing same-sex marriage quickly followed.

In the context of the US, your arguments are compelling, but they show exactly why the issue isn’t “morally indisputable.” It’s worth reading carefully through Obergefell. It spends a great deal of time establishing several things. First, that sexual orientation is innate and immutable: “Only in more recent years have psychiatrists and others recognized that sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable. See Brief for American Psychological Association et al. as Amici Curiae 7–17.” Second, that the understand of marriage had in fact changed to deemphasize children. Third, that new studies had shown that large numbers of same-sex couples were in fact raising children together. All of these established why same-sex unions should be protected as part of the fundamental constitutional right to marriage. Other approaches were possible and had been advanced. Some on the left wanted a broader rethinking of traditional marriage as a social institution. Obergefell could have treated marriage as just some government tax benefit, which was the libertarian view. Instead, it doubled down on the fundamental importance of traditional marriage, and the government’s legitimate interest in recognizing and promoting that institution, while expanding it to same-sex couples. It was very much the product of political debate and compromise amongst a variety of positions.

And in the end, this debate was ultimately a good thing because the political process fostered understanding and consensus. Same-sex marriage has become accepted quite rapidly. (Abortion rights, by contrast, remain highly contentious and no consensus has ever developed.)

This is rather an argument for a change in taxation laws instead of gay marriage.

Also, what is the scope of what people can “reasonably disagree” about? You mention same-sex marriage, but that’s illegal in most countries, including Switzerland. Are people in Switzerland, and India, and every single Muslim country in the world, for the most part not “reasonable?” And even in countries where it is legal, laws on related issues like surrogacy or religious exemptions vary. I’m talking about very socially liberal countries like France and Germany, where surrogacy is banned.

(1) Yes, bigotry against LGBT people makes Switzerland, India, and Indonesia less reasonable.

(2) The United States is generally underrated when it comes to moral clarity. We get a lot of stuff distinctively right and should pat ourselves on the back more often than we do.

(3) There clearly is a threshold past which we can refer directly to moral clarity, and can't hide behind the ambiguity of politics. It's been 73 years, and a lot of people on this thread don't have to Google "IG Farben", or, for that matter, to consult Wikipedia to know what I mean when I allude to IBM's complicity in the early 20th century. Some issues just are clear.

I agree there are some issues that are beyond politics. But there is an impulse to expand that category beyond what fairly fits in it. The debate and compromise attendant in politics is how societies achieve consensus, and prematurely stifling it creates problems.

But I disagree with you that reasonable countries can debate discriminating against gay people. The countries that do that are, in that way, lesser than the countries that don't. Seems pretty simple to me.

Also I want to point out that I specifically called the argument unreasonable and not the people. I meant "unreasonable" as a synonym to illogical. There is no real logical consistency to any arguments that there should be added legal benefits for straight couples that don't apply for gay couples. All the arguments fundamentally come down to some sort of bias against gay people which can be ideological or spiritual but are never based on reason or logic.

The rational/logical argument for opposing gay marriage has two strands:

1. Marriage != civil unions. You can have equal legal rights without the religious concept of marriage being involved, and many countries already had that, so the effort to go further in many places didn't involve doing anything beyond upsetting religious people. It didn't make the lives of gay people better in any specific legal ways. You seem to be conflating the two.

2. The historical taboo against homosexuality is because such couples don't produce children, and thus must be supported in old age or times of famine etc by the wider community who may not feel any particular loyalty to them. In a world where the family is the primary unit of support, such couples can end up with nobody to support them, and moreover, don't contribute to creating the next generation.

The concerns in (2) may seem parochial given the existence of the welfare state and contemporary concerns about over-population. But although it's a sad and scary prospect, it won't be a huge surprise if homophobia comes back in future generations because the demographic deficit is enormous and nobody's talking about it. The welfare state and pension schemes depends critically on a growing and strong economy to support it, which boils down at some level to having enough people. Yet birth rates are far too low to sustain those systems over the long run. If pension funds start drying up because there aren't enough workers, then gay couples might end up being hit by a doubly whammy of (a) not having children who can support them if the state fails to do so and (b) popular resentment against them for contributing to the problem of a declining population.

Of course, neither problem would be their fault. They didn't choose their orientation. However, people certainly knew that centuries ago and the taboo existed and was propagated because society needed families and a growing population to be stable. If pension funds are in as much trouble as demographers claim, we may see a return to that world, and it won't be entirely irrational.