I don't want to belabor this because Garry has (rightfully) apologized, but I would hope that the standard public figures hold themselves to is “does this elevate the level of discourse”, not just “is it legal to say this”. Things that could not-unreasonably be construed as death threats do not meet that standard.
We're generally free from government suppression of speech, but not free from the social consequences of that speech, because we're also all free to choose with whom we associate and in what manner.
In other words: Many things are legal and still reprehensible.
I can't fix the Internet, but our discourse would likely be improved by people speaking online with the same care they are likely to apply in person. Or perhaps having auto-lockout on your twitter account when you're drunk. ;)
Threats are not always legal. You can argue that it wasn't a threat, but you'd be wrong. Wishes from people in authority are often seen as calls to action by others. Even that's not what he intended, it's would still rightfully be seen as threatening by the target.
It's fascinating to me the extent to which executives don't consider themselves "public figures" when it comes to potential downsides, but they do in terms of upsides.
It feels so obvious to me that the CEO of such a high-profile org should at the very least quickly check public-facing social media posts against someone sensible, if not laundering them all through the experts at their org. But somehow they keep making these mistakes over and over again.
Isn't it the reverse though? If a not notable person tweeted this stuff, it would have blown over and no one would have cared. But since he is notable it becomes a story
I think that was the point of the parents "public figures" comment
> Isn't it the reverse though? If a not notable person tweeted this stuff, it would have blown over and no one would have cared. But since he is notable it becomes a story
Cancel mobs for stuff like this for Joe Average may have worked in 2018, but now are effectively over. It's equals parts a post-ZIRP cultural shift of companies no longer pretending to care about DEI, a post-Elon Twitter cultural shift for what's seen as acceptable, and a post-Oct 7 shift where, frankly, companies are now scared shitless to take political stances in general because of how sensitive the topic of the current war in the middle east is.
I'm sure his company's legal staff has reminded his employees to not engage in political action while appearing to represent their company. My company sure does.
No, see, tech CEOs are all brilliant brain geniuses, and any attempt or notion to run their ideas or behavior past experienced professionals is nothing but a sop to outdated traditions which risks not just slowing them down, but by extension slowing all of humanity down and condemning literally uncountable future generations to darkness and death! Is that what you’re advocating for? The premature deaths of uncounted billions? You monster.
“We believe any deceleration of my tweeting will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the tweet that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”
(with no apology and copious reference of Arkell v. Pressdram to Mr. Andreessen)
Many CEOs are regular people who happen to be overtly charismatic to a fault. It just so happens that overtly charismatic people tend to be rewarded greatly by our social structures
These CEOs aren't doing anything different in these situations - they're being themselves and doing what they did to get their position. Other people generally don't call them out on their BS because it's an uphill battle fighting overtly charismatic people, and it's much easier to accept their flaws for the benefit of riding their coattails to the top
This is why they can't differentiate between upsides/downsides - people let them get away with things that other people can't, and to them it is all the same
I've never heard of Garry Tan before just now, but he didn't strike me as "overtly charismatic" in the linked article. He struck me as incredibly unhinged and unlikeable.
"unhinged and unlikeable" are charismatic traits nowadays. Those are exactly the personality aspects people believe are necessary and find attractive in truly innovative leaders, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. They read as hard-nosed sincerity and truth, no bullshit. The unreasonable man to which the world must yield.
Hell, we recently elected a President almost entirely because he was the biggest asshole in the room.
While I might disagree with the political opinions of those right wing parties, I've never seen any of them show complete incompetence and stupidity to the level of suggesting that people inject themselves with bleach to cure a virus.
While he never suggested injecting bleach, may I introduce you someone incompetent, and unable to keep his mouth shut before blurting out racist nonsense.
> Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you're going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.
I guess if you want to argue about the true meaning of "something like that" or "to use medical doctors with" injecting disinfectant.
> Those are exactly the personality aspects people believe are necessary and find attractive in truly innovative leaders, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
Nothing says innovative leader like taking something a bunch of other people were already doing and doing it the same with added sociopathy on top.
> who happen to be overtly charismatic to a fault.
Not so much.
> they're being themselves and doing what they did to get their position.
yes, there is a way of talking in industry that allows people to rise through the ranks. Its very rare that you get to the top by being an odious prick all the time.
However, people on the inside don't tend call out CEOs, because they need something from them. If you are frank with your CEO and they don't like it, you're out on your arse, to be replaced by a yes man. (not always, but its surprisingly common)
It is very easy to become a CEO as a normal person, only to develop into an horrid shit later.
I might be convinced that founders tend to be charismatic (they convinced a bunch of people to build their dream when it was just a dream, after all), but your run-of-the-mill CEO certainly isn't.
> Many CEOs are regular people who happen to be overtly charismatic to a fault.
It's quite common for them to appear overtly charismatic at first glance. Narcissism and psychopathy are extremely common at that level. It's why you should always be weary of CEOs who seem a little bit too happy to have a very high-profile public presence.
It's the new spin on "I want the President to be someone I can have a beer with."
Quoting 2Pac lyrics is just comical. Even more out of touch than Ben Horowitz (of Andreessen Horowitz) starting every chapter of his ultra-corporate startup book with Jay-Z lyrics.
I suppose I can't disagree with the advise you're providing, although I'm a little troubled by the implication that the problem here is simply that he didn't send this vile rant to his social media team to proofread before he posted it.
'Pass muster,' the figure drawn from the military practice of mustering (gathering) troops for inspection of their uniform, equipment, and personal grooming. Unsatisfactory presentation can result in being sent away to fix it, usually repeatedly and at length while being smoked by an NCO, to help you remember not to make the same mistake again. When this occurs, the one so dismissed has failed to pass muster.
It's not to proof-read it, it's to make sure it's not going to damage the company.
Everyone has opinions that would get them cancelled on Twitter. Most of us are sensible enough to keep them to ourselves, or, at least, off Twitter, without even having the responsibility to maintain the image of a business. He has a duty to his employees, his clients, and his investors that goes far beyond the standard duty of "Don't be an asshole on Twitter."
Political hyperbole is also kind of the norm on Twitter (which is one of many reasons I don't spend much time there), so it's entirely possible he thought he was being humorous, and that it was abundantly obvious that he shouldn't be taken literally. Which might even be true. But CEOs are at extra risk of getting taken out of context and willfully misinterpreted, and they should fucking Tweet like it.
I disagree with what he said, but I'm more insulted that the people are allowed such insane levels of power and responsibility and are given such disproportionate compensation have the common sense of a middle-schooler.
I've worked for several big companies where the CEO wanted people to ask tough questions at big meetings from the rank and file and so on. Front line managers had to prompt employees to ask question so it wasn't just awkward silence.
It's telling executives would think people would just ask tough questions on demand. It of course costs the CEO nothing to provide everyone else at the company tough questions / feedback, employees though need to consider their words carefully depending on who at a company is listening as there can be real consequences.
It's one of those things that I'm sure seems like it makes the executive look "open", but rather it just shows their ignorance / are out of touch with the life of a rando worker.
Not a surprise that kind of unawareness leaks out of the workplace as they operate in a space where they are often relatively free to speak their mind.
The other thing is, there's no guarantee that a CEO that genuinely wants the rank and file to ask tough questions still won't instantly fire someone for the wrong tough question. Some CEOs are all about wanting to be challenged and pushed back by their employees until someone accidentally hits a nerve on a bad day, and there's very little recourse for most employees in the US if they get fired because they pissed off the executives.
My Boss (the CTO at a mid-sized company) says he really appreciates my candor and ability to ask challenging questions, but based on his reactions when I do so I'm pretty sure what he actually really likes the IDEA of being an executive who invites diverse and dissenting input, more than having people do it.
To be generous, sometimes how one feels in the moment is different than how one feels when given time to reflect. So it may be that your boss really does appreciate it (just not right then).
"Managers often say they'll reward something – perhaps they even believe it. But then they proceed to reward different things. I think people are fairly good at predicting this discrepancy...." - "People can read their manager's mind", Jossi Kreinin - https://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind....
This happened with me -- VP said he wanted feedback but clearly didn't like real critical feedback. Then that VP tried to set up a denied promo, even though I was performing two levels above my then-current level. Finally the company got bought and levels were frozen and he was laid off (as executives are often laid off in an acquisition), so who knows what would happened.
I was at a big company where this happened. I also knew of a person behind the scenes with admin access making sure softball questions were voted to the top.
Then they dropped voting when the questions got too real.
Then they lit up the staff by saying, “If you don’t like being here, then leave!”
Then they stopped taking questions and went back to fireside chat monologs that offered no real information.
One of the many Dilbertian experiences in my career.
I once accused a VP of creating an environment of “opaque transparency” in a large staff meeting… nobody laughed, though I got lots of private kudos after the meeting.
Much of the corporate world is smoke and mirrors. That’s the nature of the game unfortunately.
Sure there are humans that stickerbomb a tie die hatchback or go on Joe Rogan but then you got your human that lives a private life and drives a gray crossover.
I'm a YC alum and it's an important bullet point on my resume.
I would rather YC leadership kept their political positions to themselves as much as is reasonably possible. It dilutes the value of that bullet point -- I want it to communicate things about my work ethic and competency. I don't want it to imply _anything_ about my political opinions.
I don't have a problem with tech leaders holding political positions, nor do I have a problem with them making personal donations based on those opinions. Quietly.
Why the double standard? Why should or shouldn't it be couth for someone to talk about their political positions? Everyone is a human, and you don't get anything done in politics unless there is mass action, which means we must have conversations, public AND private, about politics.
I'm sorry, if you are like "I'm glad they gave me the money and the label" and can't take it when someone associated makes an embarassing human moment, you are just trying to have your cake and eat it too. Do better.
I don't think the parent wants to eat their cake and have it too; they're torn between having the credentials or abandoning them because it's embarassing. And who can blame them? I've never said the words "Y Combinator" outside the West coast and got a positive reaction.
YC can have political opinions, but they should acknowledge the opportunity cost of putting their politics before their community. Behavior like the one linked in the OP is incredibly petty and probably should make the associated parties feel bad about working with that kind of person. Lord knows I feel ashamed to be an HN user today.
because they want the signal to come from what YC has accomplished and represents, not the personal opinions of someone associated with them who's leveraging his unrelated benefits in a socially very unacceptable way.
Do better? No, Tan and YC need to understand this will impact their image.
Free speech has consequences. And speech that has unhinged threats (even if it has a disclaimer that it's not) has potential consequences with law enforcement.
I don't think it's out of line for someone who's investing their time and effort into an organization to be critical of leadership.
A CEO represents the organization that they're a CEO of. It's natural and not entirely unwarranted for people to think that a CEO's behavior and attitude is also reflected to some degree by the organization itself.
He said he was drunk when he posted the rant calling for slow death of most of the San Francisco city council, so of course he didn't send it to corporate PR to check. This kind of behavior shouldn't be acceptable for the head of a respectable corporation, even if his tweet hadn't led others to follow up with death threats. He should resign or be dismissed and YC should replace him with a responsible adult. This isn't a minor offense, it is grotesque. If he remains, it reflects very badly on YC.
Obviously, YC is not a "respectable organization", since they picked this fruitcake as their leader. This also explains why a portion of the readership of this site is so obviously unhinged.
People suffer consequences for their worst day all the time. Ordinary workers who engage in this kind of conduct usually get fired, often followed by police investigation, and they aren't judged for the days that they didn't bring their companies into disrepute by calling for the death of public officials. A CEO should be held to a higher standard, not a lower standard.
> It's fascinating to me the extent to which executives don't consider themselves "public figures" when it comes to potential downsides, but they do in terms of upsides.
Really? Because they are all about upsides.
"My initiatives led to 1,500,000 new bank accounts opened in the last 3 quarters!"
Vs.
"I didn't have any knowledge that the 1,450,000 new bank accounts were opened fraudulently!"
That’s what most business “leaders” do. When the money is rolling in they are visionaries, when the money is threatened it’s the economy and time for layoffs. So anything good is their doing, anything bad and it’s time to deflect.
“Garry Tan is right!” the letter sent to Peskin, Preston and, perhaps, others read. “I wish a slow and painful death for you and your loved ones.”
Bizarrely, the letter to Preston and Peskin concluded: “This mail was sent to communicate a political opinion. No threats were intended.”
Is that required? If you're prominent and write something like this, you shouldn't be surprised when people who hate the same people will weaponize it with glee and use it to feel justified in their actions, even if they didn't follow you before.
probably written by someone who just wants to stir shit and it looks like they succeeded. they got attention from a newspaper, frightened the supe and brought negative attention to Garry Tan.
These people all have a lot of money and they all try to use it to influence politics, so if Benioff is so much more successful, maybe there's actually something to learn from him, such as, maybe, not wishing death on people.
As I mentioned in my first message: the startup bros weren’t particularly politically active until the last couple years. And they’ve been relatively successful since.
He likes bravado, but the startup bro faction has succeeded in the majority of political fights it’s engaged in so far. This shouldn’t be all to surprising either: a lot of these local elections are decided by a couple hundred votes. Sustained attention can have a large swing in outcomes.
If the letter wished them a rapid death, would it still be a threat? What if it merely wished them a death of unspecified speed, itself being the natural and ordinary consequence of being alive?
Edit: to be clear, this comment was not asking a serious question
I think context matters. I can say "it would be a shame if something happened to you" and that could be pretty clear threat in some contexts and a genuine expression of concern in others. Same for something like "we all die eventually." In the context of a random letter? Yeah just don't, unless you mean to threaten.
It's mentioned in the article that several lawyers were contacted and they all agreed it plainly did not constitute a threat.
> But tying this potential legislation to the message Tan communicated to his 408,000 Twitter followers would appear to be a serious legal challenge: Half a dozen lawyers and judges told Mission Local that, however ill-advised, Tan’s comments do not rise to the legal definition of a death threat.
Which makes sense. Wishing someone a slow death is akin to saying "go to hell." It is a terrible thing to say and can be said with hate and malice and make you feel very worried but it is not the same thing as "I'm going to kill you."
In law, there is a concept of a "True Threat" [1][2]. Political hyperbole is not a true threat; sending a threatening letter whose only purpose is intimidation may be. So Tan's foolish statements are plainly protected speech, and it is sensible for the recipients of the letters to contact police.
They all filed police reports because they felt threatened but have no issue with everyday citizens and tourists in SF enduring far worse than inebriated vitriol.
Not sure why you are downvoted. This is correct. Ordinary citizens have had to put up with so much worse in their day to day lives in SF due to the lack of these supes doing their jobs. I can attest, I have lived in SF over the last 7 years and have seen its decline.
Downvote be cause it is an unsubstantiated claim, speaks to a state of mind (which implies the ability to mind read, short of that ot is casting a stereotype/assumption), finally, the criticism is "what-about-ism"
From a Seattle perspective, the "seattle is dying narrative" has been going on for a decade, despite the city having thr most cranes on its skyline and being a boom city for that time. Which is to say, confirmation bias is a bitch.
The problem is that this argument is a logical fallacy. Threats to civic leaders are wrong. Whether or not they are good leaders does not change the wrongness of the threats.
Probably downvoted for "Two wrongs make a right" fallacy. Basically if A does something bad, an irrational/tribal behavior is to disregard the problem by bringing up an unrelated bad behavior of another party. Two wrongs make two wrongs.
Tan's tweet was reprehensible, but I doubt it rises to the level of criminality. With respect to his inebriiation, as my elementary school teacher used to say, " While it explains, it does not excuse."
But I think a sincere mea culpa should end the incident.
> “This mail was sent to communicate a political opinion. No threats were intended.”
When I was a kid I formed a core memory when I said “no offence, but…” and then said something incredibly offensive and was subsequently and rightfully lit right up by the person. “But I said no offence!” was my response, completely misunderstanding how that phrase even worked.
It’s implied the letter sender is a Garry Tan supporter when it very well may be a prog supporter trying to extend a pointless news cycle. Remember this is the town where Die Techie Scum was graffitied on sidewalks by a city grantee featured in a local art museum. None of the involved parties seemed too concerned about that.
I can't imagine anyone false flagging a generic / anonymous "Garry Tan supporter" ... that doesn't make any sense at any level.
The tweet itself is the most apparent and damning action. The letter even seems to try to tamp down on the threat, if you were falsifying this whole thing / trying to make a supporter look bad you wouldn't do that.
I can't imagine anyone has a lot of interest in making some arbitrary concept of a "supporter" look bad when the tweet exists.
You can’t imagine the advantage to having your base read Local Shady Billionaire Cabal Wants To Kill Your Favorite Politicians headlines a month before an important election that will set Democratic Party endorsements for the next few cycles?
The tweet is not particularly damning. San Francisco politics is characterized as a knife fight in a phone booth. Much worse things are said all the time without an immediate retraction and apology. This one gets news coverage because certain parties have stooges like Joe at Mission Local (Peskin mouthpiece) and Aldo at S.F. Chronicle (Preston mouthpiece) gassing up non-stories into media events.
For example, it was well known that former school board commissioner Allison Collins was a huge bully. Eventually, the Chron placed a piece profiling a former SFUSD employee who literally moved to Mexico to escape the personal targeting she did. And yet this behavior was barely covered and progs got in line to endorse her in the recall campaign. Similarly, Supervisor Walton threatened a black security guard at city hall without everyone clutching pearls about it (he doubled down when probed).
The entire end goal you describe can be done by pointing to the tweet and the owner of the account is known. No need for any letters to accomplish the same goal.
I can't help but think you just didn't read the article and backed yourself in corner and for no reason keep at it.
I can’t help but think you don’t understand how politics in this town works and probably didn’t follow this story as it has unfolded over the last few days. This isn’t the first article about the incident, which is exactly the point.
Nobody is claiming he didn’t tweet some rap lyrics in poor taste, and he’s apologized for it. At the same time, lyrics aren’t really serious threats — they were even deemed inadmissible as evidence in criminal cases by AB59.
Context matters, the source of the lyrics were not cited, and the lyrics themselves are threatening (in their own context). The article mention that song escalated tensions and tupac was murdered a few months later.
I believe this crosses the line of poor taste by quite a lot. Poor taste will leave someone disgruntled, but to have stalkers send letters wishing your death and that of your family, and sent to your home address! That feels to me to be so far beyond poor taste, that calling that strikes me as downplaying. If you had such a letter sent to your home, I don't think you would truly feel that it was all in poor taste.
If you are gasping at this abhorrently poor taste incident, I recommend you stay far, far away from city machine politics. And again, I am not convinced either way about the sender of the postcard.
"gasping" maybe.. receiving genuine death threats causes that reaction. The line "this is not a threat" is meaningless. The sender has sent the message:
- I agree & wish you & your family dead
- I know where you live
As far as I know, city machine politics stays short of DOX'ing and death threats.
> Nobody is claiming he didn’t tweet some rap lyrics
That would be the implication of calling this a "false flag." A false flag is a military operation blamed on another nation; if this was a false flag, then someone else would have tweeted it from Tan's account, so that they could transmit this sentiment without accepting blame for it.
Maybe you meant "opportunistic smear campaign" or something.
The new part of this article is the physical letters that were sent to some of the people mentioned in the tweet. That hadn't happened when the previously-discussed article was written.
> The board’s five Jewish members — Peskin, Ronen, Melgar, Preston and Rafael Mandelman — in October received antisemitic postcards at their homes. Peskin said multiple supervisors have received as many as four more antisemitic letters or postcards since then.
Is this recent incident with Garry connected at all with the antisemetic postcards delivered last year? I haven't been following this and thus don't know what Garry's issue with the supervisors is.
If not: This is scummy writing to connect his admittedly poor-taste comments to something worse.
I did not stop reading. The antisemetic postcards from October are different than the ones the supervisors received with Garry's face and the "this is not a threat" line.
Its not clear to me that the ones with Garry's face are anti-semetic; unless they are, due to the nature of his extreme concern with the supervisory board, and that's what I'm trying to zero-in on. Its also naturally possible that the motivations of Garry and the person who sent the postcard are different, but again: I think its scummy to then prescribe antisemetic intent to Garry by connecting the two without elaborating within-the-article on why Garry is so drunkenly distraught.
I am not justifying or trivializing how Garry behaved. Its not ok to say what he said. But, its possible for both sides of this to be scummy and horrible; and that possibility is what I want to understand better.
I think you are too eager to decide that the article is scummy.
For me, those two paragraphs do not say that Tan was antisemetic in any form. It says that
i) some of the same people received an antisemitic hate letters before
ii) those antisemetic letters used the same wording than the ones sent using Tan’s face
The only implication that I see is that they were likely sent by the same person/group. I see this is very clear in the writing as it is. Zero scummyness in it.
And, this connection, in my opinion, very much justifies including the antisemetic letters in the article. It seems a very relevant information.
I would argue that Garry's motivation and intent is extremely relevant to this topic of conversation; possibly the most relevant thing. The article omitting this is absolutely scummy, because it fills that omission with connections to antisemetism, and then goes on to speak on how "powerful people need to be held accountable" (absolutely true).
Yes, "for you" and clearly, for me, I did not draw the conclusion that Garry's motivations were antisemetic. That's not the point. Journalists publish articles for an extremely broad audience, and there's a high degree of responsibility and ethics required of the author while publishing; a degree that, to be clear, I do not feel this author met.
It's related in the sense that it's part of a recent pattern of harassment against a similar set of local public officials. It's newsworthy as part of a trend.
Analogous is any other news story that points out any other recent trend.
For example, there is a similar NYT article today about increases in train derailments and accidents since last year. The story mentions East Palestine, OH Norfolk Southern derailment. While they're not blaming Norfolk Southern for the broader increase in accidents, it's something that readers have ALSO heard about that was very prominently in the news and helps ground the trend in a noteworthy example.
I would give this consideration to anyone who is receiving borderline threatening, discriminatory language from an upset mob.
A better question to ask yourself is why Jewish people seem to continually end up in this situation: on the receiving end of antisemitic abuse.
Political stuff pisses people off, but people who are pissed at Jew can always just trot out the antisemitic and dehumanizing statements... Such threatening comments have proved credible enough of the time to make the person on the receiving end really second guess about their safety.
No, but we have over 2000 years of cited, verified, and documented hate and horrific actions towards Jews because they are Jews.
This does have to be included as a possible contributing factor to this death threat.
(There's 2 types of bigots: one type will plainly use terrible language up front to let everyone know what they think. The other type will couch their hate in plausible deniable language so you're really not 100% sure.)
What does being Jewish have to do with receiving antisemitic hate mail shortly after October 7, a brutal antisemitic atrocity committed against Jews? Are you asking that in good faith?
There are many things I appreciate about YC News but being certain that this report will not be censored here is something I truly appreciate about this forum. Thanks @Dang et al.
In a lot of ways censorship here is worse than other places due to the weirdly attributed trust given towards HN members who think of themselves as enlightened intellectuals.
For example, try to post something pro Apple, or even try to play devils advocate. Your comment will be flagged within minutes.
There's a lot of censoring here, not sure how you can be so certain. I think that the admins outsource most of the censoring to "senior" users though by giving more weight to their flagging.
If you have a system that relies on voting, and people vote against some things appearing, that's not called censoring! That's just the system working as intended.
So, just so we're on the same page, you are saying that users of "news.ycombinator.com" wanted to purposefully hide a story about the CEO of Y Combinator wishing the death of San Francisco politicians, as well as the actual death threats that have surfaced as a result.
You can call it censorship or not, but it's not a good look either way.
> [...] you are saying that users of "news.ycombinator.com" wanted to purposefully hide a story about [...]
No, you're interpreting things here in a specific way.
It could be that users didn't think it belonged on HN because it was politics, which is often frowned upon. It could be that they thought there was a problem with the article itself.
In any case, even if it was totally the community choosing to not want to see this news (which I doubt), it wasn't a deliberate action by the people running the site, which does make a difference (otherwise that would've been the original accusation).
I would hope that a CEO of a company that runs the forum you post in sending a drunken text wishing death upon people is both newsworthy and something that we could all agree on is bad. But not only was this article flagged by users, so were many others, as noted elsewhere in the thread.
However, I think you are making a distinction without a real difference. The company that hosts this forum set it up with an incentive structure that results in the behavioral outcomes we see on this forum. If these incentives lead to newsworthy posts concerning the CEO of the company that runs these forums getting flagged, perhaps the incentives need to be changed.
Look, I wrote a huge reply, but I ended up deciding we agree more than we disagree, so I scrapped it.
I think the only thing I'm trying to push back on is any kind of "conspiracy" thinking - this might not be anything coordinated, definitely not by HN staff, nor by HN "elite" users or anything like that.
I don't think that structural problems with incentives require any sort of conspiratorial thinking. If you give individual users the ability to flag or downvote posts to tank their discoverability, it is possible for a disconnected group of users to decide to flag a post for less-than-legitimate reasons, even if they're not communicating with each other.
It's a different flavor of Reddit's "downvote for disagreement" status quo. The rules might say one thing, but the behavior of users says another.
Lol, yes, shadowy "admins" (there really is primarily just one, dang), and "senior" users, as if there is some hidden way to become senior. This isn't Reddit, and it doesn't work that way.
The behavior of who gets downvote and flagging rights is clearly spelled out. It's available to anyone who's been on the site long enough (and it's not that long, at all). I see this all the time where people complain about "being censored", where the reality is the community has heard what you have to say, we just think it sucks. That's not censorship, that's pretty politely stating we would prefer HN not become the cesspool of online discourse that pervades nearly all other online forums.
Looks to me like they've applied some kind of heavy weighting penalty so it's already down to page 7.
I wonder how hard it would be to reverse engineer the penalty. You can easily poll to get points/time for stories and then probably use that to figure out the algorithm and any penalties/boosts (an old version seems to be documented).
We didn't touch the post. It set off the flamewar detector, and rightly so. However, because of the principle I described recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172045*, I'm going to turn that off now.
Being drunk is not an excuse for abuse, so why are we allowing Tan to step away from this because he was drunk? Clearly, Tan would benefit from some introspection and perhaps therapy. We need to hold our leaders to a higher standard of mental health.
Presumably GP is not suggesting censorship but rather that we pause and zoom out before condemning someone for saying something dumb on the internet while drunk.
I have my objects to Twitter, but that isn't one of them. Here, someone in a position of power demonstrated poor judgment and self-control in a way that damages his reputation and that of his company, but does not harm anyone beyond that.
I wouldn't mind making him endure those cringy pre-recorded videos HR makes you sit through every X number of years about professionalism in the workplace, filled with staged and stock photography, amateur hour voice-overs, and fourth grade level personal interaction.
quite the leap from a few too many drinks, directly to therapy and mental health issues. if that's your take from someone being drunk and saying something ridiculous then I'd question your judgement.
> why are we allowing Tan to step away from this because he was drunk?
I'm not. Being drunk excuses nothing. If anything, it makes it more poignant because drunk people are more likely to say out loud those thoughts that they would otherwise prefer keep to themselves. "In vino veritas".
A local resident is exercising their First Amendment right against the elected government officials. The government has no leg to stand on here. What was said is 100% legally protected under the First Amendment.
Yes. Ive had several corporate trainings from several big big companies where they explicitly say so.
I had one training even state outright that if you were seen on social media wearing company swag and doing something like flipping the bird or anything even mildly offensive that was grounds for dismissal.
I work for an anarcho-capitalist. If anything, I'd be shamed for not being more vituperative. These snakes don't deserve anything except your maximum contempt.
Yes, and they also are famously in silos. They each advocate for their own districts only, and so it's often a battle between districts for resources, etc. It's actually a pretty dysfunctional system from what I've seen attending local government meetings and trying to get basic simple things done in my community
Over 95 percent of San Francisco's budget is directly controlled by the Mayor's office. The Mayor's office in San Francisco is incredibly powerful.
Supervisors mostly sit through the monthly televised Board Of Supervisors meeting, where concerned citizens and community activists along with the utterly deranged voice their concerns.
Representation is surprisingly even worse in LA county. 5 supervisors for 10 million people. Californian government systems really weren’t designed for the populations they currently represent.
Thank you, I've read three articles so far and none have explained this. Supervisor is such a generic term, it's difficult to research without knowing what it is.
So basically, he said fuck the council and he hopes they die a slow death. Not very nice, but also not usually a contraversial opinion? Lots of people dislike their councils.
This article is emblematic of everything wrong with "journalism" today. Regardless of what Garry wrote on Twitter (which I'm not defending), he didn't send the letters in question, which are the core of the incident. So some lunatic prints out a tweet and mails it to politicians at their home addresses, and the "journalist" spends a couple thousand words focusing on the tweet, and how the guy who wrote the tweet is rich.
Also, featuring the price of his liquor bottles (prominent in the first article about this by the same writer) is indicative of the level of pettiness involved. Maybe there's an actual story here, but this isn't it, and it's not clear that the story is more than "someone said something regrettable on Twitter".
Yeah, he merely quoted a diss track that famously escalated a previous grudge to murder. Who could ascribe anything but jovial intent to that? Why should somebody as famous as Gary Tan expect to have unhinged followers who could be inspired to act?
Seems like he was hoping to get his twitter followers to harass them in a manner similar to the way he did -- otherwise why tweet it?
Probably receiving death threats causes a lot of real anxiety (not just the PC snowflake kind). That's a lot better than an actual assassination, but it's not nothing either.
"Stochastic terrorism" is just an excuse to crack down on free speech by conflating harsh criticism with violence because deranged idiots exist who might take any criticism of anybody as divine inspiration to commit crimes.
The standard for free speech in America is that if you're not calling for imminent and specific violence, then you're in the clear. The stochastic in stochastic terrorism does away with both the imminence and specificity; with a large enough population you'll have enough nuts that some of them may take even the most mellow criticism as a call to action.
Calling something stochastic terrorism is speech... by your own logic, shouldn't you be defending their free-speech rights to use the term stochastic terrorism?
You say "crack down" but it's just an online comment here, which should be protected, right?
Free speech doesn't imply not being questioned or corrected, but I understand that some have that impression in these times. But that is exactly what free speech is, you speak, someone replies, you may have more to say, and so it goes.
"Die slow" or "I hope you die" are not threats. It's unconstructive venting.
> Free speech doesn't imply not being questioned or corrected
Right. That's why the post I responded to shouldn't object to calling this "stochastic terrorism" on the basis of free speech. In the immediate discussion the argument is inherently self-contradictory.
It also muddies the meaning of free-speech from a profound principle to a cheap argument to club people with online when they criticize something in a way you disagree with.
> ...not trying to prevent the use of the term. I don't even understand how it's not obvious.
The post says it's just an excuse to crack down on free speech, suggesting that it has no validity as an actual idea, that the term itself is invalid. Arguing that a term is always wrong is surely an attempt to prevent the use of that term.
What's more important to free speech.., that people can use the term "stochastic terrorism" to describe a tweet where they think it fits, or that people should not have to be subjected to having their tweets called "stochastic terrorism"?
To me, it's pretty clear: if you're trying to police language, you shouldn't be using free speech as the justification for that.
As far as criticism goes, it takes some creative effort to get much harsher than that. It is far beyond constructive criticism; the target is asserted to be far past salvaging so the only good thing that could happen to them is a bad death.
I guess maybe you think it isn't criticism at all because it's not constructive criticism. But it's certainly criticism, no reasonable person could construe it as anything less than critical. And because it falls short of a specific and imminent threat, it's legal political speech.
> The standard for free speech in America is that if you're not calling for imminent and specific violence, then you're in the clear.
Legally, yes. Socially? That's never been the standard. There is no principle in the US that says everybody has to be cool with anything people say short of calling for imminent violence.
Stochastic terrorism is such a dangerous and nebulous concept. It itself can be considered stochastic terrorism. People become afraid of stochastic terrorism and start to terrorize people whom they don't like. Or can't we say that Garry Tan wrote his tweet only because of what the politicians had done? Aren't they also stochastic terrorists if he is?
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept. It's not nebulous at all, it in fact describes a very specific approach, to the point that it might as well be a playbook.
Part 1 is a radicalization chain, where you have several layers of public figures with varying levels of public-facing support for your cause, who guide people down the chain by platforming people with more extreme public-facing views. So maybe a talk show host who mostly just points out obvious problems in our society, who occasionally brings on guest speakers who have slightly more specific framings, who themselves occasionally publicly support YouTube channels that pitch potential solutions.
Part 2 is consensus building. As people trickle down the radicalization chain, it's important to introduce them to new social spaces that present your ideas as obvious truths. This normalizes your radical ideas in the minds of your newly radicalized cohort. Casual "joking but not joking" comments are a basic staple of this, with guillotine memes and blackpill posting and Boogaloo jokes all serving to make the appearance to their community that their extreme views are normal, acceptable, and widely held.
Part 3 (which is somewhat optional) is targeting. Some prominent figure (likely one of those public figures on your radicalization chain) paints a far less vague target than usual: casually calling for people to kill all landlords is one thing, mentioning one specific landlord is a clear escalation from that. Ideally this is done without making any incriminating statements, which at least in the US is easy: as long as your don't make a specific plan, it's typically considered protected speech.
Part 4 is, to borrow some specifically leftist terminology, "propaganda of the deed", "direct action", or just "terrorism". With a sufficiently large pool of radicalized individuals, you'll have people all across the radicalization and "unhingedness" spectra. The "extremely radicalized, completely unhinged" corner is where you find your martyrs, freedom fighters, etc. They hear the targeting speech from part 3, and decide to take it upon themselves to do something about it. They commit some act of violence, and probably end up facing some extreme consequences for it, whether that means death, imprisonment, etc. Then, your entire movement needs to achieve 2 things: outwardly distance themselves from the "lone wolf" to avoid unwanted scrutiny or consequences, while privately lionizing them as someone who "did what needed to be done" in order to encourage the next one.
The elegant thing about all this is that what it lacks in cohesion, it makes up for in robustness. Since it's not a rigidly fixed organization, individual parts can take a fall without crippling the effectiveness of the whole. One lone wolf doesn't incriminate any other members, except maybe the person who announced the target, if they were sloppy about how they worded it. And if someone along your radicalization chain loses their seat in the public eye for whatever reason, you have plenty of redundancy to fill the gap, and they can probably find a comfortable position somewhere further along the chain once things cool off a bit.
Playing whack-a-mole with the people with enough prominence to plausibly select targets is probably the most legally justifiable way of suppressing a standalone complex like this. Most people along the chain, both participants and consumers, are pretty clearly practicing free speech and assembly. They make perfectly legitimate targets for rival radical movements, but the State needs to uphold basic human rights, so it takes a more precise approach. Focusing on the shotcallers, it's easier (not necessarily easy) to get creative with what constitutes a non-protected "true threat", rather than crack down on civil liberties as a whole.
What you describe is just politics with some violence involved. If you replace “terrorism” with “voting at elections”, you basically describe every electoral movement whatsoever. Calling that “stochastic whatever” seems like pseudo-intellectualism for people who get impressed by math words.
The term stochastic terrorism (as it is used in literature, as far as I know, eg in “The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism”) is simpler. It means that someone sends a message into mass media with an intention to motivate someone to commit an act of terror. That’s all. The intention part quickly got buried by the users of the term, at least on the Internet (what’s the difference if the outcome is the same, amiright?), so now it just means any mean tweet that can motivate a random nut job to do something crazy, as is demonstrated by the comment I replied to.
The radicalized pool is important in the context. If I, Joe-Blow Nobody send out a tweet saying "Bob from accounting is a dick, somebody should deal with that", there's no real threat there. By far the most likely person to do anything about that is me, and if I don't, it's basically a guarantee that nobody will.
If instead, I'm a respected member of a political movement with a pool of radicals, and my target is a rival to my political movement, and I target the radicalized members of my political movement with a call for violence by relying on the movement's normalized justifications for violence, then there is a much, much greater chance of someone rising to the call.
This is a fairly standard and boring way of dressing up censorship as something high-minded.
It's nice that you're familiar with a story from England in 1170, but no, you don't just get automatically blamed in the US when crazy people do things in response to dumb things you said on Twitter.
Regardless, even if you did get blamed, missionlocal is not the impartial jury who gets to decide whether or not quoting 2pac is incitement to violence.
Sigh. Please read the article more carefully. missionlocal explicitly says it is not incitement to violence. Here are three paragraphs from it:
---
But tying this potential legislation to the message Tan communicated to his 408,000 Twitter followers would appear to be a serious legal challenge: Half a dozen lawyers and judges told Mission Local that, however ill-advised, Tan’s comments do not rise to the legal definition of a death threat.
Under Penal Code 422, a person making a criminal threat must harbor “specific intent that the statement, made verbally, in writing, or by means of an electronic communication device, is to be taken as a threat…”
“It is offensive, but it is speech protected by the First Amendment,” said Berkeley School of Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It does not meet the standard for incitement.”
---
"This is a fairly standard and boring way of dressing up censorship as something high-minded."
Do you think that speech is not an act? That speech does not have any consequences in the world, and so should be free from all restriction? That's certainly not the law in the US, and you seem to be aware of incitement to violence.
"missionlocal is not the impartial jury who gets to decide whether or not quoting 2pac is incitement to violence."
Please quote where missionlocal decides that is incitement to violence. You are accusing missionlocal of hack journalism where it is simply reporting what happened. You may not think Garry Tan should get heat for doing what he did, but you should not place your ire on the journalists who are reporting what is by any reasonable definition a story within their purview.
> You are accusing missionlocal of hack journalism where it is simply reporting what happened.
I am not saying that they're hack journalists because they literally accused Tan of incitement to violence (that would probably be libel). I'm saying they're hacks because the article (and the prior one) were full of irrelevant details about Tan, while ignoring nearly all of the details about the actual incident. Tan is not the core of the story, unless you've lost all perspective on your job as a journalist.
It's like reporting on a robbery, but making most of your article about Karl Marx because the criminal was reading a copy of Das Kapital. The only way you get to that point is to blame Marx for the actions of the criminal.
Some unhinged person sent a threat of violence to politicians, using Tan's tweet. That is the story. Tan's liquor cabinet, his history of political donations, his wealth...all of that is irrelevant.
> It's nice that you're familiar with a story from England in 1170, but no, you don't just get automatically blamed in the US when crazy people do things in response to dumb things you said on Twitter.
This comment is everything wrong with media literacy. It's absolutely worthwhile to cover highly public calls to violence of government officials by respected individuals with lots of power and the article makes it clear he personally did not send the letters. But denying that public calls to violence spurs actual violence is denial of basic cause and effect.
> It's absolutely worthwhile to cover highly public calls to violence of government officials by respected individuals with lots of power
I mean, sure...who are you arguing with? I didn't say nobody should cover this. I said this article is terrible.
> But denying that public calls to violence spurs actual violence is denial of basic cause and effect.
Yeah, except we have laws around this concept, and even if what you're saying were true in the US (it isn't, thankfully), it doesn't magicaly make hack journalism good.
Said differently, "incitement to violence" doesn't mean that missionlocal is high-minded and mature for spending two articles talking about the price of his liquor.
> Said differently, "incitement to violence" doesn't mean that missionlocal is high-minded and mature for spending two articles talking about the price of his liquor.
Garry Tan chose to flaunt the high-end liquor bottles and "Twitter menace" plaque ahead of his sort-of-apology, not missionlocal.
Only one of the articles (not the one linked) refers to them at all. The other one focuses more on the hate mail some idiot decided to send being a screenshot of Tan's original tweet, and both of them are pretty clear about it being a rap lyric.
Kind of hard to argue with a straight face that the real problem with the YC CEO
acting like a not-very-smart bro influencer even in his sort-of-apology is that some local rag journalist didn't spare the embarrassing detail.
Sure, Tan was probably more interested in highlighting the "twitter menace" plaque than the fairly expensive liquor and unremarkably-priced wine, but celebrities flaunting wealth with a laughing emoji as a "fuck you" to their critics is a well established trope, and I don't think high-minded, mature journalism is about taking the most sympathetic interpretation possible of bro silliness.
More necessary than the sneer quotes you applied to the "journalist", yes. If I say dumb stuff when drunk and then muff the initial apology (when presumably sober) I wouldn't expect people to sugar coat it either.
Garry clearly isn't too stupid or desperate for clicks to do any better, and so I'm afraid I'm going to have to continue to disagree that we should save our ridicule for his critics.
I think the point is when prominent figures say these things, whack-jobs feel emboldened.
It happened with Trump, who more or less seemed to know he was provoking something dark. Other public figures ought to have more care with their language.
If you are a leader in some capacity, you have degrees of responsibility for things that happen because you rile up your followers.
Clearly Garry’s fans are threatening violence here as a direct consequence of Garry’s intentional targeting and signalling here. I don’t follow at all how the journalistic angle is problematic
Came here to voice my frustration about the muddying of the waters and the quality of this article. Took me a few minutes of cynical reading to understand that he did not send the letters, someone else did.
If your very public words can be mailed to someone and mistaken as a fairly death threat to them do you A) Rethink your life or B) Retreat to how this is not technically a death threat and you did not technically send it to them?
If I say that your argument is counter to the principles of a free society, does that count as a death threat because some unhinged militia type might agree with me then shoot you down in the street?
Yeah, it sure wasn't obvious from the very first thing on the page where it says the letter started with "Garry Tan was right", I'm surprised you were able to figure it out after just a few minutes.
Mission Local is one of the best sources of local San Francisco news, especially anything directly relevant to the Mission District.
If rich jerks don't want to be called out by local journalists, they shouldn't post unhinged public death threats, even as a "joke" or "song reference".
I think your own "partisanship" is coloring your reading of a fairly neutral and factual article. Mission Local regularly publishes stories which are (implicitly or explicitly) critical of the supervisors Tan was threatening here.
I have no idea if missionlocal is partisan, but this article is obviously partisan -- it brings in a bunch of irrelevant factors (e.g. the value of Garry's liquor collection) into a story that boils down to "someone said a thing on Twitter that was bad and offensive, while drunk, and someone else took an obviously unhinged action in result".
It's the easiest thing in the world to report this in a neutral, factual way. You don't need to focus on Gary's money, his association to tech, his liquor cabinet, or anything else. That the reporter(s) could not do this speaks volumes about their motivations.
Aside from that, I have no dog in this particular fight. I haven't lived in SF in years, and if you're insinuating that I'm on a particular side of the political spectrum, you're way over your skis. Partisan doesn't have to mean "left" or "right", by the way...you can just be partisan against tech.
> During his online tirade, Tan posted photos of his private liquor stash, and indicated to a fellow Twitter-user that he was inebriated.
Describing the tweets adjacent to the offensive one gives useful context. This is not the reporter dredging up some irrelevant trivia from deep in Tan's past or something.
Readers might not know who Tan is. It is even more essential context to explain that:
> Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator and a heavy campaign donor to efforts to oust progressive politicians [...]
> Tan is a well-heeled donor for San Francisco’s moderate causes and candidates. He sits on the board of Grow SF, a political pressure group favoring moderate causes and candidates and targeting progressives. Tan gave more than $100,000 to the 2022 campaign to recall then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin. He gave at least $20,000 to the 2021 school board recall, too.
If Tan was just some random person with no influence and no relation to SF politics this would probably not be much of a story. That he is one of the major donors to the political rivals of these supervisors is the reason this is a political shitstorm. Tan's tweet damages the reputation of his "Grow SF" group and the candidates they support, and has possible further political implications:
> Peskin today asked the City Attorney’s Office to look into requiring public disclosures from recipients of political donations from “purveyors of hate and violence.”
You don't need to know anything about the political alignment of anybody to know that a person wishing a politician would die is legal political speech in America, and not even an uncommon sort of it. This sort of thing is regularly said by Americans of all political persuasions about politicians in any and every political party. The article is making a mountain out of a molehill.
For my part, I hope Trump dies painfully, as well as every other living American president (with the sole exception of Jimmy Carter who was a terrible president but a good man nevertheless.) If you live in America, I know you frequently hear people saying they wish X Y or Z politician would die. Such harsh sentiments are commonly expressed in American society. It's a free country and lots of people exercise that freedom with inflammatory but legal hot takes like that.
I think everyone agrees that Tan's speech is protected by the First Amendment. As is strong criticism of his speech. No one is proposing Tan should be fined or thrown in jail or have his rights curtailed by the government.
It is not normal and should not be normal for major political donors to make public death threats to local officials in the city where they live, even as a joke. It's toxic and corrosive to society and politics, and makes him seem unhinged. Tan is rightly getting excoriated, and he deserves scorn from his own political allies for significantly damaging their common causes.
Tan keeps complaining about SF politics being frustrating, but in my opinion, as someone who supports a significant portion of his policy platform, local politics would be improved if Tan would just move somewhere else or shut up and keep his money to himself and leave political discussions to the grown ups.
I'm not certain that Twitter is an exempt place when it comes to threatening statements. You don't have to send it to the person in question in many cases.
Society and the victims are lucky that the letters are the core of the incident. Tan incited some lunatic to send IRL mail with a printout of the tweet to their home address, we're fortunate that he didn't incite some lunatic to send IRL bullets to the home address.
A wealthy, powerful, influential celebrity figure saying something 'regrettable' on Twitter often has real-world consequences. If he'd posted a tweet that read something like "Upload a picture of you assassinating so-and-so and a Bitcoin address and I will send you $100k" and someone followed those instructions, that would be conspiracy to commit murder. If he'd posted "I feel that so-and-so's politics are misguided" that's totally reasonable free speech.
There's also a question of scale or exposure. We legally define rights by qualitative analyses. I feel strongly that as technology increases the power of an individual that quantitative analyses are relevant too. If someone's speech will be broadcasted to 400,000 or 40,000,000 followers, that's one thing, if it's said privately to 4 friends that's completely different.
Somewhere in the middle of these things there's a line between right and wrong. I'm quite confident that telling an audience of 400,000 that you want a few named people to "Die slow motherfuckers" is on the wrong side of that line.
>I'm quite confident that telling an audience of 400,000 that you want a few named people to "Die slow motherfuckers" is on the wrong side of that line.
Then why are we trusting the person to make a rational choice? By that logic, X should simply disallow using certain words when your audience is > 400,000. Because anyone can get incited for violence when they read certain words as you claim.
I would kindly suggest that this is at best wrong, at worst deliberately misleading
The job of journalists is to report news worth events, and provide extra context with some level of verification.
When the CEO quotes rap lyrics which implies that someone should kill them selves, that is news worthy.
The CEO, who is in a position of both power and responsibility, should really not be saying stupid shit. Why? because the job of the CEO is to make sure a company's image isn't tarnished. (see Gerald Ratner).
Tan should frankly grow the fuck up and do what CEOs normally do, which is pay local politics to change.
> which implies that someone should kill them selves
How does the sentence "die slow motherfuckers" even remotely imply someone should kill themselves? Do you see the irony of misquoting him in a comment about misleading journalism?
Necessary disclaimer: I do not support the tweet and it has nothing to do with my comment, so breathe and understand my point before hitting that down-vote.
If we are being pedantic, then "kill themselves" would have been the wrong clause. I would probably change that to "publicly wish death upon someone".
If we are also continuing along pedantry, it was a quote, it was an incorrect assertion.
But what we can possibly agree on, is that whilst we are both engaging on this particular point, the more important issue of a CEO acting incorrectly goes unexplored.
Where I think we are both aligned: the CEO is perfectly within their rights to say stupid things, however they really shouldn't. Whilst we shouldn't use legal tools to stop CEOs doing stupid things, we certainly should use social tools to encourage them to respect other people.
>it's not clear that the story is more than "someone said something regrettable on Twitter".
This is a good point. Who is to say if there is a difference between receiving hateful letters to one’s home and not receiving hateful letters to one’s home?
This is bad journalism because it is a report of events that happened, good journalism would have been a levelheaded piece about how Tan is probably a good guy and we should probably agree with his politics
None of your criticisms make sense to me, this is some of the best local journalism I've seen in a while. The headline is a tl;dr of the entire piece and the first several paragraphs are the facts directly related to the incident and providing essential context. Nothing is sensationalized, there's no sob angle, and they even corrected a minor inaccuracy. The way you describe it is like it's a tabloid covering some nothingburger, but this is a clean summary of an important event: people are threatening SF supervisors, and it's a result of a drunken Twitter rant by Gary Tan. This is what is happening, and this is what the article describes in clear and direct language.
What else could you even want from this article? That they just elide the liquor angle? That they don't cover it at all or spend the entire article analyzing the person who sent the threats? A person in power wished death on a political figure, and people acted on that wish. This is absolutely news worthy of an article in a local blog, whose beat overlaps with the political jurisdiction of the threatened politicians.
I was happy to see the story caught that it was Tupac song lyrics, which I see also was picked up in the previous HN discussion. While it's not really laudable behavior, quoting some lyrics that in almost 30 years hindsight are pretty silly is not quite as threatening as people make out. Probably better to stay off social media when drinking all the same.
I don't understand why the fact that his words happen to be song lyrics somehow softens the blow. If I wrote to my government representative "go hang yourself with a barbed wire" I'd expect it to be taken seriously as a threat. It doesn't matter that the Gravediggaz originally wrote the lyric.
30 years ago those lyrics were threatening, written by, and targeting violent people. They weren't innocent, it wasn't some fantasy, these were people making music about their lives.
This post isn't going to get flagged (or at least not as quickly) because it mentions YC itself, and YC is kid-gloves about moderating posts about YC.
But this is a deeply stupid story with a lede that basically says "I'm unfamiliar with even the most most famous 90s hip-hop". Tan, like many, many, many Internet commenters before him, was quoting Tupac's Hit 'Em Up, which, unless you think Tupac was literally calling out hits on Chino XL, was not intended to be a true threat at the time, and certainly couldn't reasonably be taken as one today.
People come up with all sorts of cringey rationalizations for how this is anything more than someone on Twitter faceplanting a dad joke (sorry, but 2Pac is now dad music, I don't make the rules). That's because the rationalizations are more narratively interesting, which is a pretentious way of saying "fun", and fun beats reason every single time.
EFfective local politics? Definitely not. But then, if you oppose what Tan is about in SF, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
This is an off-topic dupe story and by rights it shouldn't be on the front page, but, whatever.
you think given the context between Biggie and Tupac, where both artists were later violently murdered, Hit'em up, which was one of the rap beef songs of all time, did not include any genuine threats of violence?
I'm not saying that Garry Tan was threatening to, as in the original song, shoot up the supes with AKs, or shoot them in the back with the Mac, or cut their young ass up, leave them in pieces, or snatch their ugly ass off the streets, or get their caps peeled, but I think it would be very strange to rationalize that particular Tupac song as one that was not threatening murder
(For the record, I'm not American but frequent HN often; I have never heard of this song and while the name "Tupac" rings a distant bell, I didn't know if it was a person or a place.)
I dunno, most dad jokes don't read as death threats to the majority of the population. Suggesting it's everyone else's fault for not being familiar with "the most famous 90s hip-hop" isn't very convincing.
Listen to Ken White's podcast or read his blog to learn that threats are evaluated in the context they're delivered in. "Die slowly" is a meme. In fact: this has been a running joke since at least nineteen ninety-nine:
I was in grade school in 1999. A large portion of the population is as young or younger than me and has had no exposure to 90’s hip hop. Gary should keep that in mind next time he tweets.
And as for “context,” is there a medium that provides less context than a tweet?
"I didn't really mean it, I was quoting someone from several decades ago that everyone should have known about as long as they were alive then, interested in the person originally quoted and happened to also know about the quote!"
Hiphop fan here, Tupac has maybe dozens of diss or “threat” tracks in his discography. Maybe CEO shouldn’t be quoting Tupac lyrics in the first place since I am pretty sure hit em up has probably influenced a lot of murders, not just Biggie.
>> unless you think Tupac was literally calling out hits on Chino XL, was not intended to be a true threat at the time, and certainly couldn't reasonably be taken as one today.
Huh?
There were whole articles written about the song and the context of the time in which it was written. Tupac lived a notoriously violent life and saw himself as a legit street gangster despite the actual reality of the opposite.
From 2017:
That opening line—that egregious, confrontational, hate-filled opening line—was one of the most unforgettable utterances ever committed to wax by the late Tupac Shakur. It’s been 20 years since the release of 2Pac’s scathingly brutal diss track “Hit ’Em Up,” a song that came to embody the venom behind the Death Row/Bad Boy beef of the mid-’90s and an easy reference for the antagonistic figure many saw 2Pac as in his final months on this earth.
There was a palpable sense of dread hanging over hip-hop in mid-’96.
The final paragraph of the article sums it up:
In the wake of Shakur’s murder, “Hit ’Em Up” would become a chilling epitaph for a feud that seemed to spiral out of control—even more so after the Notorious B.I.G. met a similar fate in March 1997. Taken on its own merit, it’s one of the greatest diss records in hip-hop history; but attached to the moment, it was a lot more than that. Something more volatile. Something more dangerous.
No, to all of this. No, this is an unserious argument about an unserious event. If he'd quoted Fairport Convention singing about murdering dudes with beaten swords, I insist that we would be having an isomorphic argument right now. About, like, drive-by swordings in the middle ages, and the implied threats thereof. No, I shan't have it.
As a resident dad joke expert: Can you explain what exactly is a 'dad joke' about quoting a line about wishing someone to die slowly? Where's the joke or the funny? Where's the cringe pun?
No, just the ones you are likely to hear about on the news. Take a look at the top 10 richest Americans, most spend very little time on politics and you'll often struggle to even find out their opinions of the issues of the day.
> favoring moderate causes and candidates and targeting progressives
for us non-americans, can someone please explain what general political aims the 'moderate' and 'progressive' parties represent? And where are they on the republican democrat spectrum?
"Left" and "right" are common parlance throughout the world. Where, roughly, "left" favours collectivism and social responsibility, and "right" favours individualism and liberalism (classical sense, not American sense).
Those are horoscopes. They may be commonly understood, (although you're wrong about how people use left and right as well) but if you want to call yourself left, you can match those statements to your opinions, and likewise if you call yourself right. So it is still the case that no one knows what you're talking about.
Liberty is a function of an extraordinarily strong social contract. If you don't have strong enforcement of rights, you don't have rights.
The article goes out of its way to avoid naming the cause which is: housing! More affordable homes! Valuing people over historic buildings and neighborhood character! You know, the kind of stuff that actually should be considered progressive
Everyone claims to wants more affordable homes, there's just a disagreement about how to best achieve it, and a certain amount of money spent on obfuscation and practically counterproductive policies (arguably on all sides); property owners are a major political force on all sides of SF politics, and some of them want to keep prices high.
The "progressives" generally want to limit gentrification, prevent renters from being evicted, and add more subsidized housing. The "moderates" generally want to make it easier to build more housing of any type. You could broadly characterize the two groups as "default skeptical" vs. "default supportive" of real estate developers.
But housing is only one point of disagreement (albeit one of the most significant), plenty of people have more nuanced positions than this, and these camps are not entirely uniform across issues. Other points of recent disagreement include Covid lockdowns, what the school board should focus on, how hard prosecutors should go after police misconduct vs. minor crime, responses to the homeless, how much power the board of supervisors should have vs. the mayor's office, ...
For context, I think it's important to highlight that 60% of SF renters are in rent controlled units. The split between building affordable and not affordable housing has a huge impact on the cities "soul". It's quite literally choosing one future vs another, in many folks minds.
Rent controlled does not mean below market rate, and affordability isn’t poured in concrete so “building affordable and not affordable housing” is a nonsensical statement.
It's true that affordability isn't poured into concrete, but it is baked into each and every real estate transaction.
A new luxury high rise needs to have x number of affordable units by law. As you point out, it's true that they don't build the affordable units much or any different than their other units.
But, the way the whole financial side of the thing is structured is completely different than it would be if the laws were different.
A home is just as much a mortgage as it is a physical object.
This is an extremely charitable take. As far as can be observed by the consequences of their policy, the progs don’t actually care about maximizing new affordable housing production. If they did, they would not have referred to SB35 as genocidal policy. It also squares with their coalition which is basically NIMBYs and nostalgic boomers.
I was trying to be as "extremely charitable" to both sides here as I could, because the point is to broadly characterize the two groups for the information of people unfamiliar with SF politics, not to push my own personal message. (For reference, Wiener, who wrote SB35, used to be my supervisor and I am generally a fan.)
It's not fair to say that the progressive group primarily consists of "NIMBYs and nostalgic boomers", nor is the group cohesive enough to label anyone's individual comments as representative of a "they"; if you are going to characterize either of these groups negatively you should try to quote specific comments and attribute them to specific people, rather than making vague insinuations.
The position on SB35 was taken by CCHO, which is not a wacky fringe organization but instead of the most influential progressive policymaking bodies around housing policy.
I think you offered charity to the point of being misleading. There is only one side who wants to make housing more affordable. The charitable view of progressive policy making is that they reject any demand for San Francisco to be a commercial center and want to preserve the lifestyle, built environment, and composition of residents to what it was in the 80s.
> As currently written, the practical outcome of SB 35 will be to further expedite and accelerate market-rate approvals in the small handful of California communities where the real estate market is already hot – communities that are overwhelmingly urban, low-income, and predominantly people of color. These are the same communities that are currently grappling with displacement and gentrification, and typically have terrible imbalances of market-rate housing development compared to affordable housing. Simply accelerating approvals in those communities is just a recipe to spur even more aggressive gentrification.
I personally think folks like the CCHO are taking a misguided policy approach to solving/ameliorating the problems they worry about, and sometimes behave disingenuously (and should be called out, with specific details, when they do so). But that doesn't make their concerns illegitimate.
> This housing crisis will never be solved without a solution that includes a significantly increased supply of all types of housing, at all income levels, in every community throughout California, both subsidized and non-subsidized. The devastating eviction crisis and rapid displacement of low- and middle-income people from cities results, in large part, from failing to build enough housing for the past half century. SB 35 empowers the state to take action and ensure that every single community is approving its fair share of housing – especially those communities currently punting their housing needs to neighboring jurisdictions.
If you want to characterize Welch specifically as a "nostalgic boomer" I'm not going to argue. (He might even be pre-boomer?)
Calling these proposals "ethnic cleansing" is ridiculous hyperbole. Not as stupid as a death-threat song lyric tweet, but definitely unhelpful. Welch was rightly called out for that one.
Moderates believe supply and demand applies to housing, and that building more housing, regardless of whether it is explicitly "low income", is the most important thing to improve housing affordability. In practice, this means favoring upzoning (allowing duplexes/triplexes/apartment buildings in more places), and minimizing burdens on developers. Eg, advocating against "inclusionary zoning requirements" that require X% of a given building to be rented out at below market rate and against long development approval processes.
Progressives believe that allowing developers to build housing will only create "luxury" housing that is unaffordable to all but the rich, increasing gentrification and displacement. Therefore it's necessary to mandate things like "inclusionary zoning" and tight review of every single development project.
Empirically, the progressive stance results in a lot less housing of any sort getting built, whether "affordable" or otherwise, and consequently higher housing prices for all but the lucky lottery winners who grab the limited number of BMR ("Below Market Rent") units. Some would say that that's actually the goal of progressives (ie, they're using "progressive" window dressing to preserve property values/neighborhood aesthetics of the very rich).
Again, progressives oppose development regardless of affordability. They, for example, opposed amending the city charter to exempt affordable housing projects from discretionary review. They are suing UCSF over hospital expansion and opposed it constructing new housing for its staff. They organized against state bill SB35 and various density bonuses that allow for the construction of new affordable housing. They opposed the height and density proposed for a 100% affordable housing project through HANC and dragged proposals for redevelopment at Potrero Yard and CCSF through decades of process. Progressive political consultants worked for Livermore NIMBYs to spin a lawsuit against a proposed downtown affordable housing project. I could go on.
20 years ago, progs would admit outright that they thought new development was undesirable. Since, it has become more inappropriate to say that out loud so they dress it in concerns about only supporting housing under economically infeasible conditions.
Usually moderates can be either party, the ones willing to work together from both sides, so in the center. Progressives are generally considered to be the left-leaning democrats.
I could be mistaken though, I've been trying to avoid politics recently....
In San Francisco the Republican Party is marginal (and broadly despised by the electorate), so you can think of the "progressives" vs. "moderates" as sort of the local version of two parties, mostly within the Democratic party.
Ridiculous and deranged take. No one on the right will endorse mass-shooters. You have plenty of people on the left willing to make excuses for their looters because "muh socioeconomic factors".
There are no "moderate" nor "progressive" parties. There's just Democrats and Republicans, which in a global context are respectively center/center-right and right. In a US context, both terms are more likely to refer to Democrats, and definitely not to Republicans. There are some other parties but they are of next-to-no consequence in US politics.
It's pretty hard to say what the terms "progressive" and "moderate" mean in a US context, but I would say that both terms exclude the American far right and populist movements, and are vague as to what they include otherwise. The Overton window has shifted hard to the right in the United States, so it's probably somewhat right of what you may expect from, say, a European perspective. A moderate will probably be sympathetic to limiting immigration, for example, a progressive is likely more in support of immigration. Both groups probably support minority rights (e.g. LGBTQ, Muslim, etc), but moderates less so.
In terms of economics, both terms and parties generally describe liberal capitalist economic policy, which is dogmatically entrenched across the US political spectrum, to the point where most Americans cannot conceptualize economic systems other than liberal capitalism. The main difference in political economic values across the US political spectrum fixate mainly on who pays how much taxes, and subsidies for liberal capitalist businesses. Progressives may be more pro-union, whereas most moderates are generally not.
Moderate and progressive groups can overlap, particularly in a politician who wants to appeal to both, usually by contrasting themselves with the right.
Disclosing my biases: I am an American leftist (or social democrat, if you prefer) living abroad, and I generally have quite a lot of disdain for moderates, particularly in the United States. I'm definitely holding my punches for this comment, though, for what it's worth.
You must be purely talking economics if you think the Democrats are globally center-right.
If you have a few minutes of thought to the ~200 countries that 8 billion people are living under, like China, India, Russia, Japan, Iran, Nigeria, Indonesia, Poland, Phillipines, Turkey, and their policies on immigration, LGBT, drug use, freedom of speech/press, you would quickly be disabused of any idea the US democrats are center-right.
What I think is that steeped in a Western European leftist bubble, 95% of the world is right wing to you, and you’re confused on where America stands in that spectrum, forgetting about who’s currently been elected in the rest of Europe like Sweden, UK, Poland, Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, etc.
Aye, center-right in terms of economics, more center (or even center-left) in terms of social policy. Pushing it to the right, consider Democrats on war and the military industrial complex. And, ultimately, I would say that the unifying policy of the Democrats is to preserve the status quo in all matters: social and economic. And the status quo in the US leans right as far as the global stage is concerned. And don't forget about Europe when establishing your list of countries to define a global overton window.
> consider Democrats on war and the military industrial complex
This requires a much longer thesis. In short, war throughout history is quite a centrist position (since it's been waged extensively by both left and rightists). Right now you have the Democrats advocating for defense of a nation against invasion, and a leftist government (Venezuela) advocating for the invasion and annexation of Guyana. When leftist governments aren't advocating for industrial military (USSR), global armed revolution and killing, it's usually said through the privilege and zero-skin-in-the-game safety of being under the US' defensive shield, or it's Pol Pot.
> Democrats is to preserve the status quo in all matters: social
Quite humorous to most global onlookers, I'm sure, as most would not be fond of some Democrats' constant push for "social justice."
> don't forget about Europe when establishing your list of countries to define a global overton window
Europe is 9.3% of the world. Half of which wouldn't agree with you since there are still many right wing governments in Europe and 41% of France voted for Le Pen.
So again, I'd recommend you'd be more accurate in relating the US to whichever country you're in, instead of making statements on the positions of people around the globe in which you seem naive on their governments and history.
Rather than address these points line-by-line, there is a bigger issue at play: a difference in understanding (or opinion?) over what the Overton window is. This is particularly evident in that you cite Europe as 9.3% of the world as relevant to defining it.
The Overton window mainly classifies the kind of ideas that are "politically acceptable" on the stage for which it's defined, using terms ranging from "unthinkable" to "radical" to "popular" to "policy". On the world stage, I would argue that the most left-leaning of European countries define the left end of the window (given that they have enacted left policies), and the most right-leaning countries (e.g. Singapore) define the right end of the window. It's not a matter of proportion.
That said, I agree that the global window is rapidly shifting right, as in your example of France.
Okay, point-by-point:
> Military
I agree that the military does not neatly fit into a spectrum which applies well on the global window of left/right. Reaching instead for political philosophy rather than political practice, I think it's better to introduce the 2-dimensional political compass to understand this rather than relying on the 1-dimensional left/right spectrum: war is more favored by authoritarian politics (which is to say politics that value authority, rather than necessarily repressive regimes, which are totalitarian). I would also say that authoritarianism tends to be more popular on the right, though the Soviet Union offers a clear counter-example. This issue is messy indeed. But, generally speaking, I think that American leftists (as a distinct group from liberals or Democrats) are not in favor of war, whereas everyone right of and including Democrats are generally pro-military and weakly or strongly in favor of American imperialism.
> Social justice
"Social justice" is ill-defined here, and I don't really think Democrats push for it. A positive "social justice", as I understand it, might, for instance, consider reparations, which I don't think any contemporary Democrats have pushed for. Democrats adopt a more equality-oriented (not equity-oriented, which I would argue is more aligned with what "social justice" calls for) approach to social issues, outside of certain matters like ostensible support for affirmative action.
But, I don't think this is the thread to define and argue over whatever "social justice" means. You can send me an email if you want to clear that up.
> On the world stage, I would argue that the most left-leaning of European countries define the left end of the window (given that they have enacted left policies), and the most right-leaning countries (e.g. Singapore) define the right end of the window
Is Singapore really among "the most right-leaning countries"?
In 2022, Singapore decriminalised male-male sex. In over 60 countries worldwide it is still a crime, and in over 10 of those it has the death penalty (at least in theory).
While it has been criticised on religious freedom (for banning certain controversial groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Hare Krishnas and the Unification Church) – it still is greatly ahead in this area of countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia. The government is officially neutral between the major religions, and there is no capital punishment for essentially religious offences such as apostasy, blasphemy, or heresy.
Economically, Singapore deviates in a number of ways from right-wing economic orthodoxy – state-owned enterprises play a major role in its economy, close to 80% of its population lives in government-owned public housing, the government runs a universal public health system.
I'm not sure the overton window applies too much to economic policy in the US at this point; it's essentially hardline liberal capitalism in the Democrats, and liberal captalism with a kleptocracic chaser in the Republican party. Like I said, the entire US political system is united in its unquestioning faith in liberal capitalist economics, the window is very narrow. Democrats will make overtures towards unions, but will never step up to support them when it comes to policy.
As for social policy, it is heading to the right, gaining momentum in the years leading to Trump and making steady gains since. I would characterize the social overton window in the US as the Democrats nailing the left end of the window the wall and Republicans systemically dragging the right end further and further right.
Are you seriously suggesting that abortion wasn't talked about heavily 20 years ago? You don't remember Clinton pushing against people opposed to abortion saying he wanted them to be safe, legal and rare?
Could you name a few countries that are more socially to the left than the US? Let's say with regards to abortion rights, LGBTQ debates, college admissions, immigration, racism.
For context, I'm not white, not American, not christian so I guess I have a different pov, but to me Europe was much much more socially to the right than the US. Maybe it's different when you are white in Europe though :)
Counterproductive, and makes Garry Tan look like a real asshole. Now people will have sympathy for the Supervisors whereas a thoughtful criticism could have put real problems with their leadership on display.
The act of providing "thoughtful criticism" doesn't make it OK to tell people you wish them dead.
>Ranting on Twitter should not be a crime IMO
I don't really see anyone saying that it should be. People are welcome to rant on Twitter, just as people are welcome to take issue with said rant, and then form an opinion of that person based on the words they chose to post.
Thoughtless perhaps, but I don't think this is enough to indicate arseholery. People often get very emotional about things and rant about people while still doing good things and behaving in an exemplary fashion most of the time.
I think it is indicative that not only is he an asshole, he's a asshole with violent tendencies.
I mean, I and everyone I know have become very emotional and ranted about things every so often, but never has expressing a desire to see people die a slow death entered into it. That he did says something important to know about him.
Clearly this was reprehensible behavior by Tan, but this article is a mess. It's conflating unrelated white supremacist threats and Tan's comments, and doesn't really go into why Tan doesn't like Preston, leaving the reader to conclude "maybe it's something to do with racism? Or maybe because he's a socialist and it's discrimination?"
(Hint: Dean Preston is notorious for blocking new housing, while being nominally progressive)
This doesn't excuse Tan's comments in any way, but it seemed like the author just threw the kitchen sink into the article
The threat cited Tan's threatening tweet - certainly not "unrelated".
> Stochastic terrorism refers to political or media figures publicly demonizing a person or group in such a way that it inspires supporters of the figures to commit a violent act against the target of the speech. Unlike incitement to terrorism, this is accomplished by using indirect, vague, or coded language that allows the instigator to plausibly disclaim responsibility for the resulting violence. Global trends point to increasing violent rhetoric and political violence, including more evidence of stochastic terrorism.
652 comments
[ 38.6 ms ] story [ 1405 ms ] threadIn other words: Many things are legal and still reprehensible.
I can't fix the Internet, but our discourse would likely be improved by people speaking online with the same care they are likely to apply in person. Or perhaps having auto-lockout on your twitter account when you're drunk. ;)
Damaging relationships with people disconnected from reality is a bonus, not a detractor.
In the US, inciting violence requires actually inciting violence. What was said doesn't meet that threshold.
It feels so obvious to me that the CEO of such a high-profile org should at the very least quickly check public-facing social media posts against someone sensible, if not laundering them all through the experts at their org. But somehow they keep making these mistakes over and over again.
I think that was the point of the parents "public figures" comment
This is not borne out by historical events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You%27ve_Been_Publicly_Sham...
Note that I say "idiotic comments", not outright " F U and die" comments as is the case here.
(with no apology and copious reference of Arkell v. Pressdram to Mr. Andreessen)
If that is ever typed seriously I don't want to be in those comments.
These CEOs aren't doing anything different in these situations - they're being themselves and doing what they did to get their position. Other people generally don't call them out on their BS because it's an uphill battle fighting overtly charismatic people, and it's much easier to accept their flaws for the benefit of riding their coattails to the top
This is why they can't differentiate between upsides/downsides - people let them get away with things that other people can't, and to them it is all the same
Hell, we recently elected a President almost entirely because he was the biggest asshole in the room.
Speak for yourself. This seems to be mostly an American problem.
Boris Johnson.
> Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you're going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.
I guess if you want to argue about the true meaning of "something like that" or "to use medical doctors with" injecting disinfectant.
Nowadays? It goes back millennia.
Nothing says innovative leader like taking something a bunch of other people were already doing and doing it the same with added sociopathy on top.
Agreed
> who happen to be overtly charismatic to a fault.
Not so much.
> they're being themselves and doing what they did to get their position.
yes, there is a way of talking in industry that allows people to rise through the ranks. Its very rare that you get to the top by being an odious prick all the time.
However, people on the inside don't tend call out CEOs, because they need something from them. If you are frank with your CEO and they don't like it, you're out on your arse, to be replaced by a yes man. (not always, but its surprisingly common)
It is very easy to become a CEO as a normal person, only to develop into an horrid shit later.
Could probably fix that quote by adding "believe they are."
>who happen to believe they are overtly charismatic to a fault.
It's quite common for them to appear overtly charismatic at first glance. Narcissism and psychopathy are extremely common at that level. It's why you should always be weary of CEOs who seem a little bit too happy to have a very high-profile public presence.
Quoting 2Pac lyrics is just comical. Even more out of touch than Ben Horowitz (of Andreessen Horowitz) starting every chapter of his ultra-corporate startup book with Jay-Z lyrics.
Give me DOOM lyrics or GTFO.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/technology/one-family-man...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RFZJKA736UBAH/ref...
I'll reserve judgement until we see how a16z's "digital asset class" thing pans out. Some might even say blockchains are eating the world.
Everyone has opinions that would get them cancelled on Twitter. Most of us are sensible enough to keep them to ourselves, or, at least, off Twitter, without even having the responsibility to maintain the image of a business. He has a duty to his employees, his clients, and his investors that goes far beyond the standard duty of "Don't be an asshole on Twitter."
Political hyperbole is also kind of the norm on Twitter (which is one of many reasons I don't spend much time there), so it's entirely possible he thought he was being humorous, and that it was abundantly obvious that he shouldn't be taken literally. Which might even be true. But CEOs are at extra risk of getting taken out of context and willfully misinterpreted, and they should fucking Tweet like it.
I disagree with what he said, but I'm more insulted that the people are allowed such insane levels of power and responsibility and are given such disproportionate compensation have the common sense of a middle-schooler.
It's telling executives would think people would just ask tough questions on demand. It of course costs the CEO nothing to provide everyone else at the company tough questions / feedback, employees though need to consider their words carefully depending on who at a company is listening as there can be real consequences.
It's one of those things that I'm sure seems like it makes the executive look "open", but rather it just shows their ignorance / are out of touch with the life of a rando worker.
Not a surprise that kind of unawareness leaks out of the workplace as they operate in a space where they are often relatively free to speak their mind.
Then they dropped voting when the questions got too real.
Then they lit up the staff by saying, “If you don’t like being here, then leave!”
Then they stopped taking questions and went back to fireside chat monologs that offered no real information.
One of the many Dilbertian experiences in my career.
I once accused a VP of creating an environment of “opaque transparency” in a large staff meeting… nobody laughed, though I got lots of private kudos after the meeting.
Much of the corporate world is smoke and mirrors. That’s the nature of the game unfortunately.
Sure there are humans that stickerbomb a tie die hatchback or go on Joe Rogan but then you got your human that lives a private life and drives a gray crossover.
Like, say, death threats?
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of humans go their entire lives without joking about death threats.
I would rather YC leadership kept their political positions to themselves as much as is reasonably possible. It dilutes the value of that bullet point -- I want it to communicate things about my work ethic and competency. I don't want it to imply _anything_ about my political opinions.
I don't have a problem with tech leaders holding political positions, nor do I have a problem with them making personal donations based on those opinions. Quietly.
I'm sorry, if you are like "I'm glad they gave me the money and the label" and can't take it when someone associated makes an embarassing human moment, you are just trying to have your cake and eat it too. Do better.
YC can have political opinions, but they should acknowledge the opportunity cost of putting their politics before their community. Behavior like the one linked in the OP is incredibly petty and probably should make the associated parties feel bad about working with that kind of person. Lord knows I feel ashamed to be an HN user today.
Free speech has consequences. And speech that has unhinged threats (even if it has a disclaimer that it's not) has potential consequences with law enforcement.
I don't think it's out of line for someone who's investing their time and effort into an organization to be critical of leadership.
I'd argue you have reached the limits of free speach the moment there are consequences for just the speech.
Doesn't it just communicate that you got in to YC?
As for companies, judge their actions, not their words.
Really? Because they are all about upsides.
"My initiatives led to 1,500,000 new bank accounts opened in the last 3 quarters!"
Vs.
"I didn't have any knowledge that the 1,450,000 new bank accounts were opened fraudulently!"
First day on the internet?
But once Neuralink arrives, we're lost.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmp_--Oow5o
Edit: to be clear, this comment was not asking a serious question
> But tying this potential legislation to the message Tan communicated to his 408,000 Twitter followers would appear to be a serious legal challenge: Half a dozen lawyers and judges told Mission Local that, however ill-advised, Tan’s comments do not rise to the legal definition of a death threat.
Which makes sense. Wishing someone a slow death is akin to saying "go to hell." It is a terrible thing to say and can be said with hate and malice and make you feel very worried but it is not the same thing as "I'm going to kill you."
[1] https://uwm.edu/free-speech-rights-responsibilities/faqs/wha...
[2] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/true-threats/
From a Seattle perspective, the "seattle is dying narrative" has been going on for a decade, despite the city having thr most cranes on its skyline and being a boom city for that time. Which is to say, confirmation bias is a bitch.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
But I think a sincere mea culpa should end the incident.
When I was a kid I formed a core memory when I said “no offence, but…” and then said something incredibly offensive and was subsequently and rightfully lit right up by the person. “But I said no offence!” was my response, completely misunderstanding how that phrase even worked.
I feel like this is the adult version of that.
The letter's sender is unknown...
There is no mystery about the owner of the account where the tweet originated.
The tweet itself is the most apparent and damning action. The letter even seems to try to tamp down on the threat, if you were falsifying this whole thing / trying to make a supporter look bad you wouldn't do that.
I can't imagine anyone has a lot of interest in making some arbitrary concept of a "supporter" look bad when the tweet exists.
The tweet is not particularly damning. San Francisco politics is characterized as a knife fight in a phone booth. Much worse things are said all the time without an immediate retraction and apology. This one gets news coverage because certain parties have stooges like Joe at Mission Local (Peskin mouthpiece) and Aldo at S.F. Chronicle (Preston mouthpiece) gassing up non-stories into media events.
For example, it was well known that former school board commissioner Allison Collins was a huge bully. Eventually, the Chron placed a piece profiling a former SFUSD employee who literally moved to Mexico to escape the personal targeting she did. And yet this behavior was barely covered and progs got in line to endorse her in the recall campaign. Similarly, Supervisor Walton threatened a black security guard at city hall without everyone clutching pearls about it (he doubled down when probed).
What was the false flag?
The entire end goal you describe can be done by pointing to the tweet and the owner of the account is known. No need for any letters to accomplish the same goal.
I can't help but think you just didn't read the article and backed yourself in corner and for no reason keep at it.
I believe this crosses the line of poor taste by quite a lot. Poor taste will leave someone disgruntled, but to have stalkers send letters wishing your death and that of your family, and sent to your home address! That feels to me to be so far beyond poor taste, that calling that strikes me as downplaying. If you had such a letter sent to your home, I don't think you would truly feel that it was all in poor taste.
- I agree & wish you & your family dead
- I know where you live
As far as I know, city machine politics stays short of DOX'ing and death threats.
That would be the implication of calling this a "false flag." A false flag is a military operation blamed on another nation; if this was a false flag, then someone else would have tweeted it from Tan's account, so that they could transmit this sentiment without accepting blame for it.
Maybe you meant "opportunistic smear campaign" or something.
(Edited to add: However, an article discussed yesterday in a now-flagged discussion did have the letters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39199703 )
Is this recent incident with Garry connected at all with the antisemetic postcards delivered last year? I haven't been following this and thus don't know what Garry's issue with the supervisors is.
If not: This is scummy writing to connect his admittedly poor-taste comments to something worse.
Its not clear to me that the ones with Garry's face are anti-semetic; unless they are, due to the nature of his extreme concern with the supervisory board, and that's what I'm trying to zero-in on. Its also naturally possible that the motivations of Garry and the person who sent the postcard are different, but again: I think its scummy to then prescribe antisemetic intent to Garry by connecting the two without elaborating within-the-article on why Garry is so drunkenly distraught.
I am not justifying or trivializing how Garry behaved. Its not ok to say what he said. But, its possible for both sides of this to be scummy and horrible; and that possibility is what I want to understand better.
For me, those two paragraphs do not say that Tan was antisemetic in any form. It says that
i) some of the same people received an antisemitic hate letters before
ii) those antisemetic letters used the same wording than the ones sent using Tan’s face
The only implication that I see is that they were likely sent by the same person/group. I see this is very clear in the writing as it is. Zero scummyness in it.
And, this connection, in my opinion, very much justifies including the antisemetic letters in the article. It seems a very relevant information.
Yes, "for you" and clearly, for me, I did not draw the conclusion that Garry's motivations were antisemetic. That's not the point. Journalists publish articles for an extremely broad audience, and there's a high degree of responsibility and ethics required of the author while publishing; a degree that, to be clear, I do not feel this author met.
Analogous is any other news story that points out any other recent trend.
For example, there is a similar NYT article today about increases in train derailments and accidents since last year. The story mentions East Palestine, OH Norfolk Southern derailment. While they're not blaming Norfolk Southern for the broader increase in accidents, it's something that readers have ALSO heard about that was very prominently in the news and helps ground the trend in a noteworthy example.
Being Jewish isn’t some sort of shield that gives you special rights over anyone else.
It was brought up because they are receiving explicitly antisemitic content from the same people who loved and weaponized Tan's tweet.
A better question to ask yourself is why Jewish people seem to continually end up in this situation: on the receiving end of antisemitic abuse.
Political stuff pisses people off, but people who are pissed at Jew can always just trot out the antisemitic and dehumanizing statements... Such threatening comments have proved credible enough of the time to make the person on the receiving end really second guess about their safety.
This does have to be included as a possible contributing factor to this death threat.
(There's 2 types of bigots: one type will plainly use terrible language up front to let everyone know what they think. The other type will couch their hate in plausible deniable language so you're really not 100% sure.)
Are you asking your question in good faith?
This story's lede is several San Francisco Board Of Supervisors members receiving post cards quoting Garry Tan's words.
Different story.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39199703
For example, try to post something pro Apple, or even try to play devils advocate. Your comment will be flagged within minutes.
Nah even easier, it’s mostly outsourced to groupthink. Doesn’t involve anything nefarious, just inaction and delegation.
You can call it censorship or not, but it's not a good look either way.
No, you're interpreting things here in a specific way.
It could be that users didn't think it belonged on HN because it was politics, which is often frowned upon. It could be that they thought there was a problem with the article itself.
In any case, even if it was totally the community choosing to not want to see this news (which I doubt), it wasn't a deliberate action by the people running the site, which does make a difference (otherwise that would've been the original accusation).
However, I think you are making a distinction without a real difference. The company that hosts this forum set it up with an incentive structure that results in the behavioral outcomes we see on this forum. If these incentives lead to newsworthy posts concerning the CEO of the company that runs these forums getting flagged, perhaps the incentives need to be changed.
I think the only thing I'm trying to push back on is any kind of "conspiracy" thinking - this might not be anything coordinated, definitely not by HN staff, nor by HN "elite" users or anything like that.
It's a different flavor of Reddit's "downvote for disagreement" status quo. The rules might say one thing, but the behavior of users says another.
The behavior of who gets downvote and flagging rights is clearly spelled out. It's available to anyone who's been on the site long enough (and it's not that long, at all). I see this all the time where people complain about "being censored", where the reality is the community has heard what you have to say, we just think it sucks. That's not censorship, that's pretty politely stating we would prefer HN not become the cesspool of online discourse that pervades nearly all other online forums.
Why? HN censors shit all the time, and its all invisible unless you go looking for it.
I wonder how hard it would be to reverse engineer the penalty. You can easily poll to get points/time for stories and then probably use that to figure out the algorithm and any penalties/boosts (an old version seems to be documented).
* and past explanations over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Reminds me of the YouTube videos with "no copyright infringement intended" disclaimers.
I am not a lawyer
I'm sorry you were offended
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-minecraft
But ignore the fact that most people on this board work for companies that build this technology.
So because some un-self-aware rich a hole says something offensive we should censor, restrict the free speech of the general populous?
It's not the enablement of communication that's the problem here. It's a simple case of fault. He is as fault for his actions, not social media.
I'm not. Being drunk excuses nothing. If anything, it makes it more poignant because drunk people are more likely to say out loud those thoughts that they would otherwise prefer keep to themselves. "In vino veritas".
I had one training even state outright that if you were seen on social media wearing company swag and doing something like flipping the bird or anything even mildly offensive that was grounds for dismissal.
Which of us is right? Maybe both (corporate culture can be pretty heterogeneous). Hard to say, regardless
in case anyone else wonders what’s a “supervisor”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Board_of_Super...
Supervisors mostly sit through the monthly televised Board Of Supervisors meeting, where concerned citizens and community activists along with the utterly deranged voice their concerns.
I thought I saw a Venn diagram for XKCD ...
So basically, he said fuck the council and he hopes they die a slow death. Not very nice, but also not usually a contraversial opinion? Lots of people dislike their councils.
Also, featuring the price of his liquor bottles (prominent in the first article about this by the same writer) is indicative of the level of pettiness involved. Maybe there's an actual story here, but this isn't it, and it's not clear that the story is more than "someone said something regrettable on Twitter".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
Stochastic terrorism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
Probably receiving death threats causes a lot of real anxiety (not just the PC snowflake kind). That's a lot better than an actual assassination, but it's not nothing either.
People often say things just to express themselves rather than for any planned and considered reason.
I greatly doubt the plan was to cause harassment. The gains are extremely low and this could cost him his job.
Sure, but you don't have to express yourself on twitter... you do that when you want to communicate something to all your followers.
> ...The gains are extremely low and this could cost him his job.
That's true of the tweet by itself. If sober reason was going to hold him back there would be no tweet at all.
Or you do it automatically and habitually. The brain to mouth filter and a brain to keyboard filter are similar, many people don't have either.
He expressed a strong desire for these people to die a slow death. How is that not intending to cause harm?
The standard for free speech in America is that if you're not calling for imminent and specific violence, then you're in the clear. The stochastic in stochastic terrorism does away with both the imminence and specificity; with a large enough population you'll have enough nuts that some of them may take even the most mellow criticism as a call to action.
You say "crack down" but it's just an online comment here, which should be protected, right?
"Die slow" or "I hope you die" are not threats. It's unconstructive venting.
Right. That's why the post I responded to shouldn't object to calling this "stochastic terrorism" on the basis of free speech. In the immediate discussion the argument is inherently self-contradictory.
It also muddies the meaning of free-speech from a profound principle to a cheap argument to club people with online when they criticize something in a way you disagree with.
> "Stochastic terrorism" is just an excuse to crack down on free speech
Implying the term is used to prevent free speech, and not trying to prevent the use of the term. I don't even understand how it's not obvious.
The post says it's just an excuse to crack down on free speech, suggesting that it has no validity as an actual idea, that the term itself is invalid. Arguing that a term is always wrong is surely an attempt to prevent the use of that term.
What's more important to free speech.., that people can use the term "stochastic terrorism" to describe a tweet where they think it fits, or that people should not have to be subjected to having their tweets called "stochastic terrorism"?
To me, it's pretty clear: if you're trying to police language, you shouldn't be using free speech as the justification for that.
"Die slow motherfuckers" is harsh criticism?
I guess maybe you think it isn't criticism at all because it's not constructive criticism. But it's certainly criticism, no reasonable person could construe it as anything less than critical. And because it falls short of a specific and imminent threat, it's legal political speech.
Legally, yes. Socially? That's never been the standard. There is no principle in the US that says everybody has to be cool with anything people say short of calling for imminent violence.
Part 1 is a radicalization chain, where you have several layers of public figures with varying levels of public-facing support for your cause, who guide people down the chain by platforming people with more extreme public-facing views. So maybe a talk show host who mostly just points out obvious problems in our society, who occasionally brings on guest speakers who have slightly more specific framings, who themselves occasionally publicly support YouTube channels that pitch potential solutions.
Part 2 is consensus building. As people trickle down the radicalization chain, it's important to introduce them to new social spaces that present your ideas as obvious truths. This normalizes your radical ideas in the minds of your newly radicalized cohort. Casual "joking but not joking" comments are a basic staple of this, with guillotine memes and blackpill posting and Boogaloo jokes all serving to make the appearance to their community that their extreme views are normal, acceptable, and widely held.
Part 3 (which is somewhat optional) is targeting. Some prominent figure (likely one of those public figures on your radicalization chain) paints a far less vague target than usual: casually calling for people to kill all landlords is one thing, mentioning one specific landlord is a clear escalation from that. Ideally this is done without making any incriminating statements, which at least in the US is easy: as long as your don't make a specific plan, it's typically considered protected speech.
Part 4 is, to borrow some specifically leftist terminology, "propaganda of the deed", "direct action", or just "terrorism". With a sufficiently large pool of radicalized individuals, you'll have people all across the radicalization and "unhingedness" spectra. The "extremely radicalized, completely unhinged" corner is where you find your martyrs, freedom fighters, etc. They hear the targeting speech from part 3, and decide to take it upon themselves to do something about it. They commit some act of violence, and probably end up facing some extreme consequences for it, whether that means death, imprisonment, etc. Then, your entire movement needs to achieve 2 things: outwardly distance themselves from the "lone wolf" to avoid unwanted scrutiny or consequences, while privately lionizing them as someone who "did what needed to be done" in order to encourage the next one.
The elegant thing about all this is that what it lacks in cohesion, it makes up for in robustness. Since it's not a rigidly fixed organization, individual parts can take a fall without crippling the effectiveness of the whole. One lone wolf doesn't incriminate any other members, except maybe the person who announced the target, if they were sloppy about how they worded it. And if someone along your radicalization chain loses their seat in the public eye for whatever reason, you have plenty of redundancy to fill the gap, and they can probably find a comfortable position somewhere further along the chain once things cool off a bit.
Playing whack-a-mole with the people with enough prominence to plausibly select targets is probably the most legally justifiable way of suppressing a standalone complex like this. Most people along the chain, both participants and consumers, are pretty clearly practicing free speech and assembly. They make perfectly legitimate targets for rival radical movements, but the State needs to uphold basic human rights, so it takes a more precise approach. Focusing on the shotcallers, it's easier (not necessarily easy) to get creative with what constitutes a non-protected "true threat", rather than crack down on civil liberties as a whole.
The term stochastic terrorism (as it is used in literature, as far as I know, eg in “The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism”) is simpler. It means that someone sends a message into mass media with an intention to motivate someone to commit an act of terror. That’s all. The intention part quickly got buried by the users of the term, at least on the Internet (what’s the difference if the outcome is the same, amiright?), so now it just means any mean tweet that can motivate a random nut job to do something crazy, as is demonstrated by the comment I replied to.
If instead, I'm a respected member of a political movement with a pool of radicals, and my target is a rival to my political movement, and I target the radicalized members of my political movement with a call for violence by relying on the movement's normalized justifications for violence, then there is a much, much greater chance of someone rising to the call.
When people with power stay things, other people take it as permission to do things that are said or implied in that speech. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
It's nice that you're familiar with a story from England in 1170, but no, you don't just get automatically blamed in the US when crazy people do things in response to dumb things you said on Twitter.
Regardless, even if you did get blamed, missionlocal is not the impartial jury who gets to decide whether or not quoting 2pac is incitement to violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_Cathedral
---
But tying this potential legislation to the message Tan communicated to his 408,000 Twitter followers would appear to be a serious legal challenge: Half a dozen lawyers and judges told Mission Local that, however ill-advised, Tan’s comments do not rise to the legal definition of a death threat.
Under Penal Code 422, a person making a criminal threat must harbor “specific intent that the statement, made verbally, in writing, or by means of an electronic communication device, is to be taken as a threat…”
“It is offensive, but it is speech protected by the First Amendment,” said Berkeley School of Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It does not meet the standard for incitement.”
---
"This is a fairly standard and boring way of dressing up censorship as something high-minded."
Do you think that speech is not an act? That speech does not have any consequences in the world, and so should be free from all restriction? That's certainly not the law in the US, and you seem to be aware of incitement to violence.
"missionlocal is not the impartial jury who gets to decide whether or not quoting 2pac is incitement to violence."
Please quote where missionlocal decides that is incitement to violence. You are accusing missionlocal of hack journalism where it is simply reporting what happened. You may not think Garry Tan should get heat for doing what he did, but you should not place your ire on the journalists who are reporting what is by any reasonable definition a story within their purview.
I am not saying that they're hack journalists because they literally accused Tan of incitement to violence (that would probably be libel). I'm saying they're hacks because the article (and the prior one) were full of irrelevant details about Tan, while ignoring nearly all of the details about the actual incident. Tan is not the core of the story, unless you've lost all perspective on your job as a journalist.
It's like reporting on a robbery, but making most of your article about Karl Marx because the criminal was reading a copy of Das Kapital. The only way you get to that point is to blame Marx for the actions of the criminal.
Some unhinged person sent a threat of violence to politicians, using Tan's tweet. That is the story. Tan's liquor cabinet, his history of political donations, his wealth...all of that is irrelevant.
YES
(Other than incitement of violence and libel)
It's called stochastic terrorism you dense moron
I mean, sure...who are you arguing with? I didn't say nobody should cover this. I said this article is terrible.
> But denying that public calls to violence spurs actual violence is denial of basic cause and effect.
Yeah, except we have laws around this concept, and even if what you're saying were true in the US (it isn't, thankfully), it doesn't magicaly make hack journalism good.
Said differently, "incitement to violence" doesn't mean that missionlocal is high-minded and mature for spending two articles talking about the price of his liquor.
Garry Tan chose to flaunt the high-end liquor bottles and "Twitter menace" plaque ahead of his sort-of-apology, not missionlocal.
Only one of the articles (not the one linked) refers to them at all. The other one focuses more on the hate mail some idiot decided to send being a screenshot of Tan's original tweet, and both of them are pretty clear about it being a rap lyric.
Kind of hard to argue with a straight face that the real problem with the YC CEO acting like a not-very-smart bro influencer even in his sort-of-apology is that some local rag journalist didn't spare the embarrassing detail.
Sure, Tan was probably more interested in highlighting the "twitter menace" plaque than the fairly expensive liquor and unremarkably-priced wine, but celebrities flaunting wealth with a laughing emoji as a "fuck you" to their critics is a well established trope, and I don't think high-minded, mature journalism is about taking the most sympathetic interpretation possible of bro silliness.
Is this really necessary? Let he who has made no mistakes (particularly when drunk) cast the first stone.
Garry clearly isn't too stupid or desperate for clicks to do any better, and so I'm afraid I'm going to have to continue to disagree that we should save our ridicule for his critics.
It happened with Trump, who more or less seemed to know he was provoking something dark. Other public figures ought to have more care with their language.
Clearly Garry’s fans are threatening violence here as a direct consequence of Garry’s intentional targeting and signalling here. I don’t follow at all how the journalistic angle is problematic
People of a certain political bent are eager to throw journalists under every available bus, even if that means denying history and common sense.
He still incited it.
It didn't take me that. I knew it within moments of reading the article and it seems the vast majority of readers didn't have this problem.
Mission Local is one of the best sources of local San Francisco news, especially anything directly relevant to the Mission District.
If rich jerks don't want to be called out by local journalists, they shouldn't post unhinged public death threats, even as a "joke" or "song reference".
OK. Maybe their coverage of potholes is fantastic, but this article is a terrible, obviously partisan hack job. Both things can be true.
It's the easiest thing in the world to report this in a neutral, factual way. You don't need to focus on Gary's money, his association to tech, his liquor cabinet, or anything else. That the reporter(s) could not do this speaks volumes about their motivations.
Aside from that, I have no dog in this particular fight. I haven't lived in SF in years, and if you're insinuating that I'm on a particular side of the political spectrum, you're way over your skis. Partisan doesn't have to mean "left" or "right", by the way...you can just be partisan against tech.
> During his online tirade, Tan posted photos of his private liquor stash, and indicated to a fellow Twitter-user that he was inebriated.
Describing the tweets adjacent to the offensive one gives useful context. This is not the reporter dredging up some irrelevant trivia from deep in Tan's past or something.
Readers might not know who Tan is. It is even more essential context to explain that:
> Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator and a heavy campaign donor to efforts to oust progressive politicians [...]
> Tan is a well-heeled donor for San Francisco’s moderate causes and candidates. He sits on the board of Grow SF, a political pressure group favoring moderate causes and candidates and targeting progressives. Tan gave more than $100,000 to the 2022 campaign to recall then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin. He gave at least $20,000 to the 2021 school board recall, too.
If Tan was just some random person with no influence and no relation to SF politics this would probably not be much of a story. That he is one of the major donors to the political rivals of these supervisors is the reason this is a political shitstorm. Tan's tweet damages the reputation of his "Grow SF" group and the candidates they support, and has possible further political implications:
> Peskin today asked the City Attorney’s Office to look into requiring public disclosures from recipients of political donations from “purveyors of hate and violence.”
For my part, I hope Trump dies painfully, as well as every other living American president (with the sole exception of Jimmy Carter who was a terrible president but a good man nevertheless.) If you live in America, I know you frequently hear people saying they wish X Y or Z politician would die. Such harsh sentiments are commonly expressed in American society. It's a free country and lots of people exercise that freedom with inflammatory but legal hot takes like that.
It is not normal and should not be normal for major political donors to make public death threats to local officials in the city where they live, even as a joke. It's toxic and corrosive to society and politics, and makes him seem unhinged. Tan is rightly getting excoriated, and he deserves scorn from his own political allies for significantly damaging their common causes.
Tan keeps complaining about SF politics being frustrating, but in my opinion, as someone who supports a significant portion of his policy platform, local politics would be improved if Tan would just move somewhere else or shut up and keep his money to himself and leave political discussions to the grown ups.
This article is anything but neutral (not that I don’t think Tan screwed up here).
A wealthy, powerful, influential celebrity figure saying something 'regrettable' on Twitter often has real-world consequences. If he'd posted a tweet that read something like "Upload a picture of you assassinating so-and-so and a Bitcoin address and I will send you $100k" and someone followed those instructions, that would be conspiracy to commit murder. If he'd posted "I feel that so-and-so's politics are misguided" that's totally reasonable free speech.
There's also a question of scale or exposure. We legally define rights by qualitative analyses. I feel strongly that as technology increases the power of an individual that quantitative analyses are relevant too. If someone's speech will be broadcasted to 400,000 or 40,000,000 followers, that's one thing, if it's said privately to 4 friends that's completely different.
Somewhere in the middle of these things there's a line between right and wrong. I'm quite confident that telling an audience of 400,000 that you want a few named people to "Die slow motherfuckers" is on the wrong side of that line.
Then why are we trusting the person to make a rational choice? By that logic, X should simply disallow using certain words when your audience is > 400,000. Because anyone can get incited for violence when they read certain words as you claim.
The job of journalists is to report news worth events, and provide extra context with some level of verification.
When the CEO quotes rap lyrics which implies that someone should kill them selves, that is news worthy.
The CEO, who is in a position of both power and responsibility, should really not be saying stupid shit. Why? because the job of the CEO is to make sure a company's image isn't tarnished. (see Gerald Ratner).
Tan should frankly grow the fuck up and do what CEOs normally do, which is pay local politics to change.
How does the sentence "die slow motherfuckers" even remotely imply someone should kill themselves? Do you see the irony of misquoting him in a comment about misleading journalism?
Necessary disclaimer: I do not support the tweet and it has nothing to do with my comment, so breathe and understand my point before hitting that down-vote.
If we are also continuing along pedantry, it was a quote, it was an incorrect assertion.
But what we can possibly agree on, is that whilst we are both engaging on this particular point, the more important issue of a CEO acting incorrectly goes unexplored.
Where I think we are both aligned: the CEO is perfectly within their rights to say stupid things, however they really shouldn't. Whilst we shouldn't use legal tools to stop CEOs doing stupid things, we certainly should use social tools to encourage them to respect other people.
> If we are also continuing along pedantry
We're not being pedantic, we're being correct and honest.
This is a good point. Who is to say if there is a difference between receiving hateful letters to one’s home and not receiving hateful letters to one’s home?
This is bad journalism because it is a report of events that happened, good journalism would have been a levelheaded piece about how Tan is probably a good guy and we should probably agree with his politics
What else could you even want from this article? That they just elide the liquor angle? That they don't cover it at all or spend the entire article analyzing the person who sent the threats? A person in power wished death on a political figure, and people acted on that wish. This is absolutely news worthy of an article in a local blog, whose beat overlaps with the political jurisdiction of the threatened politicians.
I think the fact that it's lyrics can make a big difference to the assumed intent. It's a young guy quoting an angry poem vs an actual threat.
"Die slow" is pretty ambiguous though.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14WE3A0PwVs
But this is a deeply stupid story with a lede that basically says "I'm unfamiliar with even the most most famous 90s hip-hop". Tan, like many, many, many Internet commenters before him, was quoting Tupac's Hit 'Em Up, which, unless you think Tupac was literally calling out hits on Chino XL, was not intended to be a true threat at the time, and certainly couldn't reasonably be taken as one today.
People come up with all sorts of cringey rationalizations for how this is anything more than someone on Twitter faceplanting a dad joke (sorry, but 2Pac is now dad music, I don't make the rules). That's because the rationalizations are more narratively interesting, which is a pretentious way of saying "fun", and fun beats reason every single time.
EFfective local politics? Definitely not. But then, if you oppose what Tan is about in SF, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
This is an off-topic dupe story and by rights it shouldn't be on the front page, but, whatever.
you think given the context between Biggie and Tupac, where both artists were later violently murdered, Hit'em up, which was one of the rap beef songs of all time, did not include any genuine threats of violence?
I'm not saying that Garry Tan was threatening to, as in the original song, shoot up the supes with AKs, or shoot them in the back with the Mac, or cut their young ass up, leave them in pieces, or snatch their ugly ass off the streets, or get their caps peeled, but I think it would be very strange to rationalize that particular Tupac song as one that was not threatening murder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XASNM1XEQPs
Like I said, this "online rant, threat of harm" stuff (to paraphrase the story) is pretty supremely cringey.
The person receiving that is probably concerned they've been doxxed on 4chan by now.
That sort of stuff ruins lives, people do go into hiding.
An online rant really is one thing, but when it starts to be connected to crazies sending letters to your home address - that gets scary fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKuoXw2h3Xc
And as for “context,” is there a medium that provides less context than a tweet?
I'm just not a huge rap listener, though I can tell you all about Tupac's family's amazing history.
Huh?
There were whole articles written about the song and the context of the time in which it was written. Tupac lived a notoriously violent life and saw himself as a legit street gangster despite the actual reality of the opposite.
From 2017:
That opening line—that egregious, confrontational, hate-filled opening line—was one of the most unforgettable utterances ever committed to wax by the late Tupac Shakur. It’s been 20 years since the release of 2Pac’s scathingly brutal diss track “Hit ’Em Up,” a song that came to embody the venom behind the Death Row/Bad Boy beef of the mid-’90s and an easy reference for the antagonistic figure many saw 2Pac as in his final months on this earth.
There was a palpable sense of dread hanging over hip-hop in mid-’96.
The final paragraph of the article sums it up:
In the wake of Shakur’s murder, “Hit ’Em Up” would become a chilling epitaph for a feud that seemed to spiral out of control—even more so after the Notorious B.I.G. met a similar fate in March 1997. Taken on its own merit, it’s one of the greatest diss records in hip-hop history; but attached to the moment, it was a lot more than that. Something more volatile. Something more dangerous.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/tupacs-hit-em-up-the-most-sava...
I enjoyed learning about Tan's political history in relation to the supervisors.
The quote from the Berkeley School of Law dean added a good legal perspective.
I think the word "obsessed" would definitely be inapplicable.
for us non-americans, can someone please explain what general political aims the 'moderate' and 'progressive' parties represent? And where are they on the republican democrat spectrum?
Moderate: between Republican and Democrat.
Progressive: left of Democrat
Liberty is a function of an extraordinarily strong social contract. If you don't have strong enforcement of rights, you don't have rights.
The "progressives" generally want to limit gentrification, prevent renters from being evicted, and add more subsidized housing. The "moderates" generally want to make it easier to build more housing of any type. You could broadly characterize the two groups as "default skeptical" vs. "default supportive" of real estate developers.
But housing is only one point of disagreement (albeit one of the most significant), plenty of people have more nuanced positions than this, and these camps are not entirely uniform across issues. Other points of recent disagreement include Covid lockdowns, what the school board should focus on, how hard prosecutors should go after police misconduct vs. minor crime, responses to the homeless, how much power the board of supervisors should have vs. the mayor's office, ...
It's true that affordability isn't poured into concrete, but it is baked into each and every real estate transaction.
A new luxury high rise needs to have x number of affordable units by law. As you point out, it's true that they don't build the affordable units much or any different than their other units.
But, the way the whole financial side of the thing is structured is completely different than it would be if the laws were different.
A home is just as much a mortgage as it is a physical object.
It's not fair to say that the progressive group primarily consists of "NIMBYs and nostalgic boomers", nor is the group cohesive enough to label anyone's individual comments as representative of a "they"; if you are going to characterize either of these groups negatively you should try to quote specific comments and attribute them to specific people, rather than making vague insinuations.
I think you offered charity to the point of being misleading. There is only one side who wants to make housing more affordable. The charitable view of progressive policy making is that they reject any demand for San Francisco to be a commercial center and want to preserve the lifestyle, built environment, and composition of residents to what it was in the 80s.
Folks interested can read what CCHO said about SB35 here: https://www.sfccho.org/in-the-news/2018/10/13/opinion-alarmi...
The crux of their concern/prediction is:
> As currently written, the practical outcome of SB 35 will be to further expedite and accelerate market-rate approvals in the small handful of California communities where the real estate market is already hot – communities that are overwhelmingly urban, low-income, and predominantly people of color. These are the same communities that are currently grappling with displacement and gentrification, and typically have terrible imbalances of market-rate housing development compared to affordable housing. Simply accelerating approvals in those communities is just a recipe to spur even more aggressive gentrification.
I personally think folks like the CCHO are taking a misguided policy approach to solving/ameliorating the problems they worry about, and sometimes behave disingenuously (and should be called out, with specific details, when they do so). But that doesn't make their concerns illegitimate.
Here's an example of an earlier direct reply by Wiener to CCHO about the bill: http://www.beyondchron.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Senato...
> This housing crisis will never be solved without a solution that includes a significantly increased supply of all types of housing, at all income levels, in every community throughout California, both subsidized and non-subsidized. The devastating eviction crisis and rapid displacement of low- and middle-income people from cities results, in large part, from failing to build enough housing for the past half century. SB 35 empowers the state to take action and ensure that every single community is approving its fair share of housing – especially those communities currently punting their housing needs to neighboring jurisdictions.
Here is Calvin Welch, friends with Marti and Cohen and housing guru to Sup. Preston, saying Home S.F., a gentler streamlining measure vs. SB35, was ethnic cleansing: https://missionlocal.org/2016/01/sf-delays-controversial-hou....
I’ll keep looking for the other statement I had in mind.
Calling these proposals "ethnic cleansing" is ridiculous hyperbole. Not as stupid as a death-threat song lyric tweet, but definitely unhelpful. Welch was rightly called out for that one.
Progressives believe that allowing developers to build housing will only create "luxury" housing that is unaffordable to all but the rich, increasing gentrification and displacement. Therefore it's necessary to mandate things like "inclusionary zoning" and tight review of every single development project.
Empirically, the progressive stance results in a lot less housing of any sort getting built, whether "affordable" or otherwise, and consequently higher housing prices for all but the lucky lottery winners who grab the limited number of BMR ("Below Market Rent") units. Some would say that that's actually the goal of progressives (ie, they're using "progressive" window dressing to preserve property values/neighborhood aesthetics of the very rich).
20 years ago, progs would admit outright that they thought new development was undesirable. Since, it has become more inappropriate to say that out loud so they dress it in concerns about only supporting housing under economically infeasible conditions.
Progressive is Left. Their pet terrorist loot the school, the Target, or the Walmart.
Despite what the article says, we have no moderates.
Conservative is right. Their pet terrorists take guns and shoot up the school, the Target, or the Walmart. (And occasionally, a church here or there).
That's US politics in a nutshell.
It's pretty hard to say what the terms "progressive" and "moderate" mean in a US context, but I would say that both terms exclude the American far right and populist movements, and are vague as to what they include otherwise. The Overton window has shifted hard to the right in the United States, so it's probably somewhat right of what you may expect from, say, a European perspective. A moderate will probably be sympathetic to limiting immigration, for example, a progressive is likely more in support of immigration. Both groups probably support minority rights (e.g. LGBTQ, Muslim, etc), but moderates less so.
In terms of economics, both terms and parties generally describe liberal capitalist economic policy, which is dogmatically entrenched across the US political spectrum, to the point where most Americans cannot conceptualize economic systems other than liberal capitalism. The main difference in political economic values across the US political spectrum fixate mainly on who pays how much taxes, and subsidies for liberal capitalist businesses. Progressives may be more pro-union, whereas most moderates are generally not.
Moderate and progressive groups can overlap, particularly in a politician who wants to appeal to both, usually by contrasting themselves with the right.
Disclosing my biases: I am an American leftist (or social democrat, if you prefer) living abroad, and I generally have quite a lot of disdain for moderates, particularly in the United States. I'm definitely holding my punches for this comment, though, for what it's worth.
If you have a few minutes of thought to the ~200 countries that 8 billion people are living under, like China, India, Russia, Japan, Iran, Nigeria, Indonesia, Poland, Phillipines, Turkey, and their policies on immigration, LGBT, drug use, freedom of speech/press, you would quickly be disabused of any idea the US democrats are center-right.
What I think is that steeped in a Western European leftist bubble, 95% of the world is right wing to you, and you’re confused on where America stands in that spectrum, forgetting about who’s currently been elected in the rest of Europe like Sweden, UK, Poland, Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, etc.
This requires a much longer thesis. In short, war throughout history is quite a centrist position (since it's been waged extensively by both left and rightists). Right now you have the Democrats advocating for defense of a nation against invasion, and a leftist government (Venezuela) advocating for the invasion and annexation of Guyana. When leftist governments aren't advocating for industrial military (USSR), global armed revolution and killing, it's usually said through the privilege and zero-skin-in-the-game safety of being under the US' defensive shield, or it's Pol Pot.
> Democrats is to preserve the status quo in all matters: social
Quite humorous to most global onlookers, I'm sure, as most would not be fond of some Democrats' constant push for "social justice."
> don't forget about Europe when establishing your list of countries to define a global overton window
Europe is 9.3% of the world. Half of which wouldn't agree with you since there are still many right wing governments in Europe and 41% of France voted for Le Pen.
So again, I'd recommend you'd be more accurate in relating the US to whichever country you're in, instead of making statements on the positions of people around the globe in which you seem naive on their governments and history.
The Overton window mainly classifies the kind of ideas that are "politically acceptable" on the stage for which it's defined, using terms ranging from "unthinkable" to "radical" to "popular" to "policy". On the world stage, I would argue that the most left-leaning of European countries define the left end of the window (given that they have enacted left policies), and the most right-leaning countries (e.g. Singapore) define the right end of the window. It's not a matter of proportion.
That said, I agree that the global window is rapidly shifting right, as in your example of France.
Okay, point-by-point:
> Military
I agree that the military does not neatly fit into a spectrum which applies well on the global window of left/right. Reaching instead for political philosophy rather than political practice, I think it's better to introduce the 2-dimensional political compass to understand this rather than relying on the 1-dimensional left/right spectrum: war is more favored by authoritarian politics (which is to say politics that value authority, rather than necessarily repressive regimes, which are totalitarian). I would also say that authoritarianism tends to be more popular on the right, though the Soviet Union offers a clear counter-example. This issue is messy indeed. But, generally speaking, I think that American leftists (as a distinct group from liberals or Democrats) are not in favor of war, whereas everyone right of and including Democrats are generally pro-military and weakly or strongly in favor of American imperialism.
> Social justice
"Social justice" is ill-defined here, and I don't really think Democrats push for it. A positive "social justice", as I understand it, might, for instance, consider reparations, which I don't think any contemporary Democrats have pushed for. Democrats adopt a more equality-oriented (not equity-oriented, which I would argue is more aligned with what "social justice" calls for) approach to social issues, outside of certain matters like ostensible support for affirmative action.
But, I don't think this is the thread to define and argue over whatever "social justice" means. You can send me an email if you want to clear that up.
Is Singapore really among "the most right-leaning countries"?
In 2022, Singapore decriminalised male-male sex. In over 60 countries worldwide it is still a crime, and in over 10 of those it has the death penalty (at least in theory).
While it has been criticised on religious freedom (for banning certain controversial groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Hare Krishnas and the Unification Church) – it still is greatly ahead in this area of countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia. The government is officially neutral between the major religions, and there is no capital punishment for essentially religious offences such as apostasy, blasphemy, or heresy.
Economically, Singapore deviates in a number of ways from right-wing economic orthodoxy – state-owned enterprises play a major role in its economy, close to 80% of its population lives in government-owned public housing, the government runs a universal public health system.
Economically or socially and over what sort of time scale?
As for social policy, it is heading to the right, gaining momentum in the years leading to Trump and making steady gains since. I would characterize the social overton window in the US as the Democrats nailing the left end of the window the wall and Republicans systemically dragging the right end further and further right.
For context, I'm not white, not American, not christian so I guess I have a different pov, but to me Europe was much much more socially to the right than the US. Maybe it's different when you are white in Europe though :)
Ranting on Twitter should not be a crime IMO
The act of providing "thoughtful criticism" doesn't make it OK to tell people you wish them dead.
>Ranting on Twitter should not be a crime IMO
I don't really see anyone saying that it should be. People are welcome to rant on Twitter, just as people are welcome to take issue with said rant, and then form an opinion of that person based on the words they chose to post.
I mean, I and everyone I know have become very emotional and ranted about things every so often, but never has expressing a desire to see people die a slow death entered into it. That he did says something important to know about him.
(Hint: Dean Preston is notorious for blocking new housing, while being nominally progressive)
This doesn't excuse Tan's comments in any way, but it seemed like the author just threw the kitchen sink into the article
> Stochastic terrorism refers to political or media figures publicly demonizing a person or group in such a way that it inspires supporters of the figures to commit a violent act against the target of the speech. Unlike incitement to terrorism, this is accomplished by using indirect, vague, or coded language that allows the instigator to plausibly disclaim responsibility for the resulting violence. Global trends point to increasing violent rhetoric and political violence, including more evidence of stochastic terrorism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism