His original post , titled I can’t sleep, is some brilliant writing. When we talk about the chilling effect that criticism of Israel creates in industries everywhere (including ours) this is what that looks like.
When you read about the Holocaust and the Nazis, you like to imagine you’d be the good guy. You’d fight the Nazis, you’d free the concentration camps. But apparently I wouldn’t. Apparently I would have just sat there paralyzed, incapable of doing anything about the genocide I see every day. Unable to think of any way to help. All I can do is retweet and protest and write a stupid blog post. I feel so stupid…
I wasn’t ready to see that my friends are Brownshirts [34]. That they actively cheer on the genocide…I wasn’t ready for my friends being [concentration] camp guards, party officials, propagandists.
Fuck, such an accurate picture
I wasn’t ready to see that my friends are Brownshirts [34]. That they actively cheer on the genocide…I wasn’t ready for my friends being [concentration] camp guards, party officials, propagandists.
Yeah that’d do it
I don’t know what to do, but I know these are not my people. Who can work with people whitewashing genocide. Are we supposed to pretend it’s business as usual as we send our friends’ intros, frolic at conferences, discuss monetization strategy.
To Ed Sim, Erica Brescia, Michael Dearing, and especially Matt Ocko, we’re done [47]. I’ll never pitch you again, never ask for help, never send intros or recommend you. I’m done with Boldstart, and DCVC, and Harrison Metal, and Redpoint. (I’m also done with Bessemer [48] and Sequoia [49] and First Round [50].)
Damn, the balls on this guy. Very inspiring
Nothing short of heroic - too many people in a similar situation find themselves saying that it’s awful what’s happening, but there’s nothing they can do about it.
Well, it turns out there is. Inspiring as hell.
Paul is a chad. He also got kicked out of ycombinator for outing the founders skipping vaccine lines and encouraging others to do the same.
Fuck CircleCI
This is why I hate startup culture. When you give off your equity to capitalist fat cats, you make yourself a bootlickers of mainstream discourse, even if that discourse is calling for genocide.
When there is a war, there are war crimes - it’s not surprising, it’s not new and it’s not special. Every single time, regardless of nationality, race, creed, invader or defender. Every single time. You give a lot of people guns, teach them to de-humanise the enemy and then put them through unimaginable stresses, it’s inevitable that some will do bad things. Those who orchestrate such actions and trigger events like this know, accept and want these atrocoties to achieve their own ends.
I respect Paul Biggar for having an opinion and writing a well researched and unimpeachable personal blog about it. Why should any of us who hold feelings have to suppress them?
It’s sad that he’s become yet another victim of this unwinnable war, it’s even sadder that he won’t be the last.
This is today’s reality on the Internet. We used to think it would free us from capitalist control of public discourse. Hahahaha no, anyone saying anything contentious without good anonymity can be fired from their job or face other consequences.
Paul, you are clearly a man who would have refused to take part, even when those you held dear cast aside their humanity. Keep the fight up, your people are out there making the same sacrifices in their life.
I’m not him, just someone sharing his story.
I know.
I am also not Paul
What I don’t understand is him getting sacked. While he did name a few people and cut ties, I don’t see the people named couldn’t stand up with him after being named. It seems as if they really support the war crimes in Gaza.
I don’t mean to undermine anything when I ask this. The article was very good, thank you sharing. I wanted to ask if circleCI made any floss software, or if paul biggar was a contributor to particular open source projects.
I don’t know. I posted it here because CicleCI is a popular tool for Open source projects.
It’s valid and relevant. Thank you for sharing to this community.
Is there a mastodon frontend that doesn’t require JS? I can’t load the toot you linked-to
There’s brutaldon, but it requires you to sign in unfortunately.
I have no idea, but here’s a screenshot:
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Don’t give CircleCI my money, got it
Honestly have no idea why Circle CI would feel the need to do this. Is there really that much external pressure from ???somewhere??? to suppress anti-Israel commentary?
Don’t worry, Bari Weiss will come to his defense any time now.
He attacked their investors by name and said they support a genocide. Either they back him and everyone looses their job or they fire him
AH. Well then… that makes a bit more sense lol
No Investor, even a billionaire, is going to fire everybody.
They just pull their funding, and everyone looses their job. No firing needed.
“Loses.”
It isn’t a shock. Right or wrong, if you call out your boss/board/investors, you should expect to be fired. Corporations are required to protect their shareholders, not make a moral stand. I hope the gentleman here understood that – when you choose to take a moral stand, it isn’t going to be without consequences. It’s one of the reasons we generally admire people who took a stand (and ended up judged “correct” by history).
Corporations are required to protect their shareholders,
Corporations definitely are not required to protect their shareholders, especially when those shareholders are championing genocide.
Anyway, this is yet another reason why for-profit companies should be illegal. The goal of an organization should be to help the world, not make as much money as possible.
“Within the limits of their discretion, directors must make stockholder welfare their sole end,” Strine wrote. “Other interests may be taken into consideration only as a means of promoting stockholder welfare.” – Chief Justice Strine, Delaware’s Supreme Court, 1985’s Revlon v. MacAndrews
First, this is just a US thing. But in the US it also used to be illegal to help slaves run away. Just because some judge says you have to do something doesn’t mean you should do it.
You’re conflating my statement of “this is how you should expect companies to act” with “this is morally right” – which was literally the point of my original post. You’re either deliberately trolling or unable to engage in a respectful conversation. Have a day!
Edit: Oh and CircleCI is a US company, so you once again tried to change the topic to fit your point. Please learn to converse in good faith. Cheers!
Or, they back him and acknowledge that they supported genocide but have since realised how wrong they were?
Or, they back him and acknowledge that they supported genocide but have since realised how wrong they were?
And then they all lose their jobs when the investor(s) pulls out. Did you not read the comment you were replying to?
If it’s a choice between one person losing their job and everyone losing their jobs, you are either rationally pragmatic to just one person or you are ideologically scorched-earth to everyone else.
I mean, if you are someone in a manglement position who has to pull that particular trigger you could also resign in protest, but at least that only torpedos your own career, and not the jobs of dozens of other people who work alongside you.
Actually I agree with Daniel. That’s exactly what they should do. I’m not justifying why the company chose to fire him; they made the evil choice and stand on the wrong side of history. I’m just explaining what happened.
Unless a company is an employee-owned socialist-style worker’s collective, employees generally have no say in that decision. A company can be every bit as evil as their owners want to be. Just look at Google or Facebook or Twitter.
And the problem in America is that for anyone making less than six figures (and many making below seven or even eight figures), their ability to protest any decision made by their employer is heavily constrained by a combination of the employer’s ability to fire them at a moment’s notice and the medical insurance that is tied to their job. Thanks to these two pincer-like forces, employee’s free choices in America are heavily constrained in the interests of capitalism and the Parasite Class.
And even if the “owners” want to be less evil, they themselves are often constrained by their investors, who force them to either toe the line or hurt all of their employees with unemployment and likely destitution and extreme hardship.
Because why bring needless suffering to those (the employees) who cannot do anything to avoid it, when they desperately need their jobs to survive in this capitalistic hellhole? Why punish the innocent employees who are just wanting to successfully put one financial foot in front of the other?
As any sort of CEO, your decisions should be for the financial well-being of your employees, first, which means knuckling under to the political demands of your current investor overlords. After all, if your decisions just put your entire workforce out of work because your investors pulled all of their money, your decision was a horrible one.
Granted, investors with odious ideologies should have been avoided from the start, but hindsight is always 20/20. Sometimes stuff like that isn’t just a known unknown, but even a complete unknown unknown.
And once you have an uncontrollably influential investor, your only choice might be to protect the economic welfare of your employees over an ideological stance that could easily make many of them homeless or even dead.
Between the recent breach and the clear sentiment behind their staff, I really don’t know why anyone chooses CircleCI over GitHub / GitLab Actions.
My friend used to drive me nuts because he kept getting ads about them so he parrot the ads bullshit at me just to grind my gears.
Like CI/CD is a space full of eatabled and power opensource options, why am I paying for a proprietary app.
He should probably leave the US and go to Europe (where his Irish passport entitles him to work). He’s certainly not going to work at a Fortune 500 company any time soon, and any firm that hires him is likely to find itself reciprocally blacklisted.
Ireland is generally supportive of Palestinian freedom, given their history. This extends back well before the recent horrific Hamas terrorist attacks. Israel and Ireland have a rocky relationship, including Israel using fake irish passports for agents. Ireland is not antisemitic, but Israel obviously tries to paint them that way.
What an article. I have no words, but that’s always the case when thinking about Gaza
