Like I don't think it makes sense to do these protests at work. I get there are cases where your employer is doing something immoral. But maybe just switch jobs if you are that upset about it?
eesmith 36 days ago [-]
I don't think you know what "old school" means.
Old school Polaroid employees back in the 1970s started the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers’ Movement to successfully pressure Kodak to stop their secret support for apartheid South Africa.
Labor strikes are also an old school alternative to "just switch jobs."
suraci 36 days ago [-]
> But maybe just switch jobs if you are that upset about it?
That's the gentler way to strike.
As members of the working class, we technically have the freedom to choose which employer we sell our labor to - but we are forced to sell our labor an employer to survive
So, in reality, it's hard
It's like saying, "But maybe just don’t get sick if you can’t afford medical treatment"
croes 36 days ago [-]
But if you want to change something, how does it help to switch the job?
pbiggar 36 days ago [-]
I would argue that if your employer is helping a genocide, it's everyone's responsibility to fight it.
Sure, but do you help fight it by spamming the entire company with a bunch of mail?
mrguyorama 36 days ago [-]
Actually creating spam and noise in an organization is one of the classic ways to sabotage and hurt it, as described in the CIA's simple sabotage field manual.
rogerian9 36 days ago [-]
[flagged]
pbiggar 36 days ago [-]
Surely you fight it by any means necessary? It's a genocide! Microsoft's tools and servers and people were involved in killing way over 60,000 people (and plausibly 300,000). I don't know how anyone could sit idly by in that situation.
birn559 36 days ago [-]
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drweevil 36 days ago [-]
I'm frankly a bit shocked by the equivalence here: genocide not worth spamming. Please tell me this was sarcasm.
FifteenthLetter 36 days ago [-]
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lordfrito 36 days ago [-]
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op00to 36 days ago [-]
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deepfriedchokes 36 days ago [-]
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jedimind 36 days ago [-]
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FifteenthLetter 36 days ago [-]
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op00to 36 days ago [-]
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owebmaster 36 days ago [-]
Why not protest and switch jobs? One is not old school by been submissive, I'm old school and I'm not like that.
stby 36 days ago [-]
Internally. I feel like this word does belong into the headline. Other than that, I will never understand how employees don't move all of their communication far outside of their employers infrastructure in cases like that.
jsnell 36 days ago [-]
It's not about the dozens of activists talking with each other but about them writing to tens of thousands of people within the company. The former you can do on any platform. The latter you can only do on the employer's platform: that's where the people who're apathetic to your cause are, and they're not about to join your Discord.
jedimind 36 days ago [-]
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jsnell 36 days ago [-]
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jedimind 36 days ago [-]
I didn't call you a nazi, but gave an adequate historic example of the "good apathetic worker" who just does his/her "job" without being aware or caring about the consequences of that work. I'm not responsible for your poor reading comprehension skills.
jsnell 36 days ago [-]
You quoted what I wrote and fake-attributed my words to someone manufacturing Zyklon-B. That is not setting up a historical analogy, but a direct insult.
The only correct response from you is an apology, not insults about my reading comprehension.
jedimind 36 days ago [-]
I did not attribute anything to you, it's an analogy. It's still not my problem that you have poor reading comprehension skills such that you can't deal with a rhetorical device which expresses an analogy in the adequate historical context to make clear that "being a good, obedient and apathetic worker" does not free one of the consequences and complicity of work that actively aids and abets the extermination of a people. It's a reminder for those who forgot about the principle of "the banality of evil"[0].
You've been breaking the site guidelines badly by doing two things that are not allowed here: (1) using HN primarily (even exclusively) for political battle; and (2) personal attacks, such as you did here. If you keep doing these things, we're going to have to ban you.
Note: this is not because of your views on the underlying topic. I understand that people have reason to feel very strongly about this topic. However, there are many HN users who share your views without breaking the site guidelines, and we need you to do that too.
Moreover, this has been a pattern with your account in the past since long before the current crisis:
Should I be surprised that a story about a tech company censoring workers communications (emails sent inside and outside) was flagged? Maybe this post was flagged due to the nature of the communications. Maybe Microsoft isn't the only censor.
pbiggar 36 days ago [-]
Microsoft is having a really bad time of it recently. Each of the 3 days of their Build conference was disrupted by protests of their involvement in the genocide.
> disrupted by protests of their involvement in the genocide
If only there was a very simple and obvious way to prevent that.
jedimind 36 days ago [-]
[flagged]
TheNewsIsHere 36 days ago [-]
Microsoft claims that internal and external reviews don’t hold that their services are being used by Israel to further genocide.
I’m sure I.G. Farben could have ginned up a press release to say “Oh that final solution stuff? We have no involvement.”
Microsoft is squarely on the wrong side of history here.
The world is watching you, Satya Nadella.
jjaksic 36 days ago [-]
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dragonwriter 36 days ago [-]
> And more importantly, if you want peace in Gaza, protest against Hamas for terrorism and hostage taking
The Israeli policy of genocide against the Palestinian population is not restricted to Gaza and is older than Hamas. Hamas is, in fact, a direct and deliberate consequence of that policy, its antecedent Islamist networks having been actively fostered in Gaza by Israel during the occupation to create a separate, conflicting, and less internationally-sympathetic (particular to both the West and neighboring Arab regimes) center of Palestinian resistance from the more secular Arab-nationalist groups dominating the PLO, in order to both make local resistance less effective and reduce international diplomatic resistance to Israel’s displacement and eradication of the Palestinian population.
jjaksic 35 days ago [-]
I am most definitely not justifying Netanyahu and how he's handling this. In fact he helped prop up Hamas and made them as powerful as they are for his own political gain. However, Hamas is a truly awful terrorist organization that definitely has made and continues to make the situation A LOT worse than it needs to be. This is not a peaceful residence movement, it's a terrorist organization that DOES NOT WANT peace, in fact their stated mission is a "holy war" and complete destruction of Israel and all Jews. Hamas is not Gandhi or MLK; they're essentially ISIS.
Also, what IDF is doing is not genocide. Please don't misuse the word. Genocide is systematic killing of people of a certain origin, which has happened during the Holocaust and multiple other times in history, but it's not what's happening here. A huge number of innocent Palestinians have been killed, yes, but it's not due to systematic killing based on origin. The population of Gaza has grown from 650k in 1990 to 2.2M in 2023; if there was actual genocide happening (and Israel most definitely has the capacity to kill every single person in Gaza), the numbers would have gone down, not up.
runarberg 35 days ago [-]
> Also, what IDF is doing is not genocide.
A total aside here. I wonder for how much longer this kind of speech will be tolerated? I‘m sure jjaksic believes this and is not actively trying to be hateful (or at least I hope so), but when it comes to other genocides we don’t usually tolerate genocide denial, and correctly mark it as hate speech. I wonder what makes the Gaza genocide different?
One reason could be that the Gaza genocide is ongoing, and history has yet to judge it, but I doubt that. Denying an ongoing genocide is much much worse than denying past one. Another possible reason is that we give people slack because of the lax information environment. If so I hope we stop that. Victims of genocide deserve better, and we should not be considering the reason people say such hateful things.
Netanyahu is most definitely no angel and he's in large part responsible for the current situation including Oct 7 by propping up Hamas for his own political gain. However, what it happening in Gaza is not ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is systematic killing of civilians based on ethnicity. This has happened multiple times in history, but it's not what's happening here. There are way too many innocent casualties, yes, but nobody is systematically killing Palestinians. I don't know what this "relocation" plan is; forced relocation is of course bad, but it's much better than systematic killing (which is what ethnic cleansing is), and it's also arguably much better than civilians being stuck in a war zone.
Truth of the matter is that it's very challenging to fight an army of 40k terrorists who are intentionally mixed with civilians in order to maximize civilian casualties. How would you deal with a terrorist organization like that? I don't think anybody has a good answer.
runarberg 35 days ago [-]
From Wikipedia:
> Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous
The term makes no distinction on how the cleansing is achieved, be it forced relocation or genocide, both meet the definition equally.
Like I don't think it makes sense to do these protests at work. I get there are cases where your employer is doing something immoral. But maybe just switch jobs if you are that upset about it?
Old school Polaroid employees back in the 1970s started the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers’ Movement to successfully pressure Kodak to stop their secret support for apartheid South Africa.
Labor strikes are also an old school alternative to "just switch jobs."
That's the gentler way to strike.
As members of the working class, we technically have the freedom to choose which employer we sell our labor to - but we are forced to sell our labor an employer to survive
So, in reality, it's hard
It's like saying, "But maybe just don’t get sick if you can’t afford medical treatment"
Are you thinking of this?
The only correct response from you is an apology, not insults about my reading comprehension.
[0] https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/hannah-arendts-less...
Note: this is not because of your views on the underlying topic. I understand that people have reason to feel very strongly about this topic. However, there are many HN users who share your views without breaking the site guidelines, and we need you to do that too.
Moreover, this has been a pattern with your account in the past since long before the current crisis:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29660818 (Dec 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646210 (June 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23919180 (July 2020)
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
They got Satya's keynote: https://x.com/NoAz4Apartheid/status/1924512658587263410
In the last one, during a security presentation, the presenter accidentally leaked private information as a result: https://www.theverge.com/news/671373/microsoft-ai-security-c...
If only there was a very simple and obvious way to prevent that.
I’m sure I.G. Farben could have ginned up a press release to say “Oh that final solution stuff? We have no involvement.”
Microsoft is squarely on the wrong side of history here.
The world is watching you, Satya Nadella.
The Israeli policy of genocide against the Palestinian population is not restricted to Gaza and is older than Hamas. Hamas is, in fact, a direct and deliberate consequence of that policy, its antecedent Islamist networks having been actively fostered in Gaza by Israel during the occupation to create a separate, conflicting, and less internationally-sympathetic (particular to both the West and neighboring Arab regimes) center of Palestinian resistance from the more secular Arab-nationalist groups dominating the PLO, in order to both make local resistance less effective and reduce international diplomatic resistance to Israel’s displacement and eradication of the Palestinian population.
Also, what IDF is doing is not genocide. Please don't misuse the word. Genocide is systematic killing of people of a certain origin, which has happened during the Holocaust and multiple other times in history, but it's not what's happening here. A huge number of innocent Palestinians have been killed, yes, but it's not due to systematic killing based on origin. The population of Gaza has grown from 650k in 1990 to 2.2M in 2023; if there was actual genocide happening (and Israel most definitely has the capacity to kill every single person in Gaza), the numbers would have gone down, not up.
A total aside here. I wonder for how much longer this kind of speech will be tolerated? I‘m sure jjaksic believes this and is not actively trying to be hateful (or at least I hope so), but when it comes to other genocides we don’t usually tolerate genocide denial, and correctly mark it as hate speech. I wonder what makes the Gaza genocide different?
One reason could be that the Gaza genocide is ongoing, and history has yet to judge it, but I doubt that. Denying an ongoing genocide is much much worse than denying past one. Another possible reason is that we give people slack because of the lax information environment. If so I hope we stop that. Victims of genocide deserve better, and we should not be considering the reason people say such hateful things.
Truth of the matter is that it's very challenging to fight an army of 40k terrorists who are intentionally mixed with civilians in order to maximize civilian casualties. How would you deal with a terrorist organization like that? I don't think anybody has a good answer.
> Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous
The term makes no distinction on how the cleansing is achieved, be it forced relocation or genocide, both meet the definition equally.