"You're doing business with someone whose views I dislike" is not harassment, nor do I believe that the person who opened the issue is arguing in good faith. The world is full of people with whom I disagree (often strongly) on matters of core values, and I work with them civilly because that is what a mature person does. Unless the VC firm starts pushing Zed to insert anti-Muslim propaganda into their product, or harassing the community, there is no reasonable grounds to complain about the CoC.
I don't agree that it is immature or overly sensitive. The issue basically says:
> Hey, you look to be doing business with someone who publicly advocates for harming others. Could you explain why and to what extend they are involved?
"doing business with someone whose views I dislike" is slightly downplaying the specific view here.
I think that the formulation you gave is precisely "doing business with someone whose views I dislike". It assumes much that simply should not be assumed, to wit:
* That this man actually advocates for harming others, versus advocating for things that the github contributor considers tantamount to harming others
* That his personal opinions constitute a reason to not do business with a company he is involved with
* That Zed is morally at fault if they do not agree that this man's personal opinions constitute a reason to not do business with said company
I find this kind of guilt by association to be detestable. If Zed wishes to do business with someone whom I personally would not do business with for moral reasons, that does not confer some kind of moral stain on them. Forgiveness is a virtue, not a vice. Not only that, but this github contributor is going for the nuclear option by invoking a public shaming ritual upon Zed. It's extremely toxic behavior, in my opinion.
Yet they post this on Github, which apparently isn't a problem for themselves or the code of conduct despite Microsoft having ties with the Israeli military.
I don't think any of the evidence shown there demonstrates "advocacy for harming others". The narrative on the surely-unbiased-and-objective "genocide.vc" site used as a source there simply isn't supported by the Twitter screencaps it offers.
This also isn't at all politely asking "Could you explain why and to what extend they are involved?" It is explicitly stating that the evidenced level of involvement (i.e.: being a business partner of a company funding the project) is already (in the OP's opinion) beyond the pale. Furthermore, a rhetorical question is used to imply that this somehow deprives the Code of Conduct of meaning. Which is absurd, because the project Code of Conduct doesn't even apply to Sequoia Capital, never mind to Shaun Maguire.
The issue also cites the New York times. Here is an archive: https://archive.is/6VoyD You can read the quote for your self here https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1941135110922969168 there is no question about the fact that this is racist speech, that builds up on a racist stereotype. Many of Zed’s contributors are no doubt Muslims, whom Shaun Maguire is being racist against here.
Zed’s leadership does have to answer for why they invited people like that to become a part of Zed’s team.
Boycotting a text editor because the company that makes it accepted funding from another company that has a partner who holds controversial views on a conflict in Gaza where children are killed is going a bit far I think.
In a perfect world, children don't get killed, but with that many levels of indirection, I don't think there is anything in this world that is not linked to some kind of genocide or other terrible things.
I don't have a startup, but not accepting $32M doesn't seem particularly easy to me.
I am sure plenty of people here know these things, this is Y Combinator after all, but to me, the general idea in life is that getting money is hard, and stories that make it look easy are scams or extreme outliers.
We clearly disagree here, but be that as it may, Zed’s contributors are obviously outraged at this, and I argue that this outrage is justifiable. The amount of money you accept from reprehensible people is usually pretty strongly correlated with the amount of people who’ll look down on you for doing so.
I would say all of them. By taking part of a discussion about the editor, they are contributing. But if you are talking about code contributions in particular. Zed has thousands of code contributors, and this discussion has hundreds of interactions, overwhelmingly supportive. There is no way for me to cross check that (but honestly I would be very surprised if there is no code contributor among the 170 upvotes this discussion got).
But this is all an aside, I was talking about contributors in a more general sense.
Microsoft has ties to the Israeli military. Every commentator in that post should be ashamed of using and supporting Github, a product of Microsoft, as they are indirectly supporting the Israeli cause. This is far worse than simply accepting funding from a company who hires an employee with disagreeable views.
> Mr. Maguire’s post was immediately condemned across social media as Islamophobic. More than 1,000 technologists signed an open letter calling for him to be disciplined. Investors, founders and technologists have sent messages to the firm’s partners about Mr. Maguire’s behavior. His critics have continued pressuring Sequoia to deal with what they see as hate speech and other invective, while his supporters have said Mr. Maguire has the right to free speech.
Shaun Maguire is a partner, not just a simple hire, and Sequoia Industries had a chance to distance them selves from him and his views, but opted not to.
This is very different from your average developer using GitHub, most of them have no choice in the matter and were using GitHub long before Microsoft’s involvement in the Gaza Genocide became apparent. Zed’s team should have been fully aware of what kind of people they are partnering with. Like I said, it should have been very easy for them not to do so.
In my moral calculus, it is literally not possible for a person to say something that is so bad that it becomes morally worse than actual physical violence. I know from experience that I am not at all alone in this, and I suspect that GP thinks similarly.
Emphasizing the nature of Mr. Maguire's opinion is not really doing anything to change the argument. Emphasizing what other people think about that opinion, even less so.
> Zed’s team should have been fully aware of what kind of people they are partnering with.
In my moral calculus, accepting money from someone who did something wrong, when that money was honestly obtained and has nothing to do with the act, does not make you culpable for anything. And as GP suggests, Microsoft's money appears to have a stronger tie to violence than Maguire's.
Just to be clear we are talking about genocidal and racist hate speech here (you can see for your self). It it is not some one off things he has said (which to be clear would be bad enough) but something Shaun Maguire has defined his whole online persona around. Speech such as these are an integral part of every genocide, as they seek to dehumanize the victims and justify (or deny) the atrocities against them.
As an aside—despite the popularity of the trolley problem—people don‘t have a rational moral calculus. And moral behavior does not follow a sequential order from best to worse. Whatever your moral calculus be, that has no effect on whether or not the Zed team’s actions were a moral blunder or not... they were.
It's only a moral blunder if you either decide everyone is guilty of indirect association with "bad" people, or if you selectively chose who is guilty or not based on some third factor (generally ingroup/outgroup). The former doesn't result in making Github threads, and the latter is a kind of behaviour that ironically leads to the sins underpinning this whole issue.
The site you linked to just seems to brazenly misrepresent each of Shaun's tweets - e.g. the tweet that "demonized Palestinians" never mentions Palestinians, but does explicitly refer to Hamas twice. Not sure how Shaun could have been any clearer that he was criticizing a specific terrorist group and not an entire racial/ethnic group.
the post on genocide.vs is almost two years old. Shaun Maguire’s speech has only gotten worse since. NYT took up that story when his speech started targeting a particular American Politician with his racist Islamophobia. Go to Shaun Maguire’s twitter profile, scroll down e.g. to his May’s tweets before he became so obsessed with being racist against Mamdani, along the way you will find plenty of tweets e.g. the Pallywood conspiracy theory, and plenty of other genocide denial/justification, intermixed with his regular Islamophobia. Just see for your self.
It very much is a fringe and very hateful viewpoint. There is a difference between disagreeing with how a technical and a legal term is used to describe atrocities, and flat out denying and justifying said atrocities. Most people who don‘t describe the Gaza Genocide as a genocide are doing the former. Shaun Maguire is doing the latter. When he publicly shares the Pallywood conspiracy theory he is engaging in and spreading a hateful genocidal rhetoric. This is hatespeech and is illegal in many countries (though enforcement is very lax).
> There is a difference between disagreeing with how a technical and a legal term is used to describe atrocities, and flat out denying and justifying said atrocities. Most people who don‘t describe the Gaza Genocide as a genocide are doing the former. Shaun Maguire is doing the latter.
Nothing you have quoted evidences this.
> When he publicly shares the Pallywood conspiracy theory he is engaging in and spreading a hateful genocidal rhetoric.
Claiming that your political outgroup is engaging in political propaganda is not the same thing as calling for their deaths. Suggesting otherwise is simply not good faith argumentation.
Nothing you have done here constitutes a logical argument. It is only repeating the word "genocide" as many times as you can manage and hoping that people will sympathize.
> This is hatespeech and is illegal in many countries
This is not remotely a valid argument (consider for example that many countries also outlaw things that you would consider morally obligatory to allow), and is also irrelevant as Mr. Maguire doesn't live in one of those countries.
> Claiming that your political outgroup is engaging in political propaganda is not the same thing as calling for their deaths.
I don‘t think you grasp the seriousness of hate speech. Even if you don’t explicitly call for their deaths, by partaking in hate speech (including by sharing conspiracy theories about the group) you are playing an integral part of the violence against the group. And during an ongoing genocide, this speech is genocidal, and is an integral part of the genocide. There is a reason hate speech is outlawed in almost every country (including the USA; although USA is pretty lax what it considers hate speech).
The Pallywood conspiracy theory is exactly the kind of genocidal hate speech I am talking about. This conspiracy theory has been thoroughly debunked, but it persists among racists like Shaun Maguire, and serves as an integral part to justify or deny the violence done against Palestinians in an ongoing genocide.
If you disagree, I invite you to do a though experiment. Swap out Palestinians with Jews, and swap out the Pallywood conspiracy theory with e.g. Cultural Marxism, and see how Shaun Maguire’s speech holds up.
> I don‘t think you grasp the seriousness of hate speech.
No; I think you are wrong about that seriousness.
> by partaking in hate speech (including by sharing conspiracy theories about the group) you are playing an integral part of the violence against the group.
No, I disagree very strongly with this, as a core principle.
> and serves as an integral part to justify or deny the violence done against Palestinians in an ongoing genocide.
And with this as well.
> If you disagree, I invite you to do a though experiment. Swap out Palestinians with Jews, and swap out the Pallywood conspiracy theory with e.g. Cultural Marxism, and see how Shaun Maguire’s speech holds up.
First off, the "cultural Marxism" theory is not about Jews, any more than actual Marxists blaming things on "greedy bankers" is about Jews. (A UK Labour party leader once got in trouble for this, as I recall, and I thought it was unjustified even though I disagreed with his position.)
Second, your comments here are the first I've heard of this conspiracy theory, which I don't see being described by name in Maguire's tweets.
Third, no. This thought experiment doesn't slow me down for a moment and doesn't lead me to your conclusions. If Maguire were saying hateful things about Jewish people (the term "anti-Semitic" for this is illogical and confusing), that would not be as bad as enacting violence against Jewish people, and it would not constitute "playing an integral part of the violence" enacted against them by, e.g., Hamas.
The only way to make statements that "serve as an integral part to justify or deny violence" is to actually make statements that either explicitly justify that violence or explicitly deny it. But even actually denying or justifying violence does not cause further violence, and is not morally on the same level as that violence.
> There is a reason hate speech is outlawed in almost every country (including the USA; although USA is pretty lax what it considers hate speech).
There is not such a reason, because the laws you imagine do not actually exist.
American law does not attempt to define "hate speech", nor does it outlaw such. What it does do is fail to extend constitutional protection to speech that would incite "imminent lawless action" — which in turn allows state-level law to be passed, but generally that law doesn't reference hatred either.
> The Pallywood conspiracy theory is exactly the kind of genocidal hate speech I am talking about. This conspiracy theory has been thoroughly debunked
Even after looking this up, I don't see anything that looks like a single unified claim that could be objectively falsified. I agree that "conspiracy theory" is a fair term to describe the general sorts of claims made, but expecting the label "conspiracy theory" to function as an argument by itself is not logically valid — since actual conspiracies have been proven before.
> First off, the "cultural Marxism" theory is not about Jews, any more than actual Marxists blaming things on "greedy bankers" is about Jews.
I don’t follow. Cultural Marxism is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory which has inspired terrorist attacks, see e.g. Anders Behring Breivik, or the Charlottesville Riots. Greedy bankers is not a conspiracy theory, but a simple observation of accumulation of wealth under capitalism. Terrorists targeting minorities very frequently use Cultural Marxism to justify their atrocities. “Greedy bankers” are used during protests, or political violence against individuals or institutions at worst. There is a fundamental difference here, if you fail to spot the difference, I don‘t know what to tell you, and honestly I fear you might be operating under some serious misinformation about the spread of anti-Semitism among the far-right.
As for Pallywood, it is a conspiracy theory which states that many of the atrocities done by the IDF in Gaza are staged by the Palestinian victims of the Gaza Genocide. There have been numerous allegations about widespread staging operations, but so far there is zero proof of any of these allegations. It is safe to say that the people who believe in this conspiracy theory do so because of racist believes about Palestinians, but not because they have been convinced by evidence. And just like Cultural Marxism, the Pallywood conspiracy theory has been used to justify serious attacks and deaths of many people, but unlike Cultural Marxism, the perpetrator of these attacks are almost exclusively confined to the IDF.
By the way Shaun Maguire has 5 tweets where he uses the term directly (all from 2023) but he uses the term indirectly a lot. And just like Cultural Marxism citing the conspiracy theory—even if you don‘t name it directly—is still hate speech. E.g. when the White Nationalists at the Charlottesville riots were chanting “Jews will not replace us!” they were citing the White Replacement conspiracy theory (as well as Cultural Marxism) and they were doing hate speech, which directly lead to the murder of Heather Heyer.
And to hammer the point home (and to bring the conversation back to the topic at hand), I seriously doubt the Zed team would have accepted VC funding from an investor affiliated with an open supporter of Anders Behring Breivik or the Charlottesville rioters.
> Cultural Marxism is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory
No, it isn't. I've observed people to espouse it without any reference to Judaism whatsoever. (I don't care how Wikipedia tries to portray it, because I know from personal experience that this is not remotely a topic that Wikipedia can be trusted to cover impartially.)
> Greedy bankers is not a conspiracy theory
I didn't say it was. It is, however, commonly a dogwhistle, and even more commonly accused of being a dogwhistle. And people who claim that Jews are overrepresented in XYZ places of power very commonly do get called conspiracy theorists as a result, regardless of any other political positions they may hold.
> Terrorists targeting minorities very frequently use Cultural Marxism to justify their atrocities.
This is literally the first time in 10+ years of discussion of these sorts of "culture war" topics, and my awareness of the term "cultural Marxism", that I have seen this assertion. (But then, I suspect that I would also disagree with you in many ways about who merits the label of "terrorist", and about how that is determined.)
> honestly I fear you might be operating under some serious misinformation about the spread of anti-Semitism among the far-right.
There certainly exist far-rightists who say hateful things about Jews. But they're certainly not the same right-wingers who refuse to describe the actions of Israeli forces as "genocide". There is clearly and obviously not any such "spread"; right-wing sentiment on the conflict is more clearly on Israel's side than ever.
The rest of this is not worth engaging with. You are trying to sell me on an accounting of events that disagrees with my own observations and research, as well as a moral framework that I fundamentally reject.
I should elaborate there. It doesn't actually matter to me what you're trying to establish about the depth of these atrocities (even though I have many more disagreements with you on matters of fact). We have a situation where A accepts money from B, who has a business relationship with C, who demonstrably has said some things about X people that many would consider beyond the pale. Now let's make this hypothetical as bad as possible: let's suppose that every X person in existence has been brutally tortured and murdered under the direct oversight of D, following D's premeditated plans; let's further suppose that C has openly voiced support of D's actions. (Note here that in the actual case, D doesn't even exist.) In such a case, the value of X is completely irrelevant to how I feel about this. C is quite simply not responsible for D's actions, unless it can be established that D would not have acted but for C's encouragement. Meanwhile, A has done absolutely nothing wrong.
> No, it isn't. I've observed people to espouse it without any reference to Judaism whatsoever.
That’s the point of a dog whistle. Are people who use (((this))) idiom also not antisemites because they don’t explicitly mention Jews? Also look up Cultural Bolshevism and who used that term.
In my circles there is a saying: If you are at a party, and somebody brings a Nazi to the party, and nobody kicks the Nazi out of the party, then you are at a Nazi party.
Sequoia Industries were made aware that one of their partners was a racist Islamophobe, they opted not to do anything about it, and allowed him to continue being a racist Islamophobe partner with Sequoia, one can only assume that Sequoia Industries is an Islamophobic investor. I personally see people knowingly accepting money from racist Islamophobes as being a problem, and I would rather nobody did that.
> In my circles there is a saying: If you are at a party, and somebody brings a Nazi to the party, and nobody kicks the Nazi out of the party, then you are at a Nazi party.
Yes, you are from exactly the circles that you appear to be from based on your other words here.
In my circles, that reasoning is bluntly rejected. The reductio ad absurdum is starkly apparent: your principle, applied transitively (as it logically must), identifies so many people as irredeemably evil (including within your circles!) that it cannot possibly be reconciled with the observed good in the real world.
And frankly, the way that the term "Nazi" gets thrown around nowadays seems rather offensive to the people who actually had to deal with the real thing.
> Speech such as these are an integral part of every genocide, as they seek to dehumanize the victims and justify (or deny) the atrocities against them.
That does not make such speech genocidal.
It also does not make such speech worse than physical violence.
It also does not make the speech of someone you associate with relevant to your own morality.
Now that Microsoft's role has become apparent, and which has had a significantly larger impact compared to Sequoia's inaction, why do developers continue to use Github? There are several alternatives which provide equivalent features. Why is this type of inaction not condemned?
Furthermore, if accepting funding in this manner is considered a violation of their CoC, then surely the use of Github is even more of a violation. Why wasn't that brought up earlier instead of not at all?
And finally, ycombinator itself has members of its board who have publicly supported Israel. Why are you still using this site?
Turns out when you try to tar by association, everybody is guilty.
