I’m not sure they’re entirely clear on what the word “condone” means:
con·done
kənˈdōn/
verb
accept and allow (behavior that is considered morally wrong or offensive) to continue.
“the college cannot condone any behavior that involves illicit drugs”
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My understanding is no one has seen what Nimble America has posted. The only public example is a billboard with a distorted photo of Hillary and a caption saying “Too big to jail”. Palmer seemed to be hiding under the Reddit username NimbleRichMan. This is something that Palmer has denied, but the reporters who broke the story have emails from him saying that he did write posts under that username.
Either way, we don’t know what Reddit usernames that NimbleAmerica have been using and so we don’t know what memes they have been posting either. We do know that beyond Palmer Luckey’s involvement are two mods from Reddit’s the Donald board, one of them being alt-right’s Milo Yiannopolous. Also one of the questions they ask if you want to become a mod is to answer the “difference between white nationalism and white supremacy?”
So we don’t really know that they are a Nazi propaganda machine, but Palmer Luckey has aligned himself with people who are horribly racist from the alt-right. That the alt-right has been producing enough racist, sexist, anti-semitic memes, that it seems unlikely that Nimble America have been producing memes that aren’t horrible. That said, it’s grey enough line that some are giving Palmer the benefit of the doubt.
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Publicly-owned, no clear distinction between company policy and founder’s actions, a warning to potential customers and clients. It matters a lot! That’s why these weasely facebook statements from individual friends in high places are so shabby: it’s the company trying to get through it without taking a side on whether racism is bad or not.
A flip scenario would be, say, calling for anyone who isn’t an atheist to be death-camped in memes of “Lenin the Lenis” or some shit like that, and it being paid for by a guy at Facebook with $700m in the can. I mean … is it even out there? In any case, yes, I would be fine with the company explicitly taking a stand against that.
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I am not talking severity, but principle. Though I will put an asterisk up by saying I have no idea what Mr Palmer has put out there. At what point are views awful enough they should never work ever anywhere?
For an example, how about Orson Scott Card and some of the horrible shit he has said? Should we condemn Tor for publishing his books?
Though IMO, this is akin to people criticizing say Muslims for not condemning Terrorism often or loud enough. A similar statement of ,“Their views don’t represent ours.” is often seen as not only a lack of condemnation - but a subtle condoning which seems to be happening here to a degree.
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One of the problems is that beyond being the founder of Oculus, he is one of mayor faces of the company. It’s going to be an issue if he continues to do a lot of PR for the company.
Also developers & early adopters had already had issues with what they felt like Palmer Luckey lying to them or at least being dishonest regarding the price and release of the Oculus Rift. The DailyBeast who broke the story have pointed out that Luckey has either lied to them or is lying in his statement. Going forward, with this lack of trust, it’s going to be hard to trust what Palmer Luckey has to say about anything.
On the flip side while Palmer gave $10,000 to alt-right trollies, Oculus are owned by Facebook and one of their co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, has given $20 million to Hillary Clinton. However, some people it’s not supporting Trump that they have a problem with, which Palmer has denied, it’s supporting racist alt-right trollies, which he has confirmed. Also spending on money on a company specifically trying to lower the online discussion around the candidates. A form of advertising so low and dirty that the name for it is “shitposting”.
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Quite right. And everyone around the world is free to react to his actions by refusing to spend money on any company that pays the salary of that racist trolley.
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The dosage makes the poison. As has been reiterated by practically everyone else in this thread. Is the concept really that difficult to grok?
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This is a silly hypothetical, since we have plenty of examples, including this one, of rich people sponsoring far right views, but none espousing violent communist expropriation of the wealthy. Of course there are obvious reasons for why the rich would fund the far right over the far left. Furthermore, companies have routinely fired leftists for their politics.
More importantly, this goes beyond somebody’s personal views, as this guy has $700 million and was funding an organization to shape online political discourse. What the OR executives have failed to condemn is something far more dangerous than an employee who expresses extreme views on Facebook.
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Evidently I am not up on how horrible this guy is. After a bit at thedealybeast article, a Wired article, and skimming the site he supported, it looks like the typical political trash (and newest post was 7/11? Is that right?) Not sure on why I should be getting the pitchfork out of closet. Maybe some one can link me to the horrible memes that so clearly crossed the line that I should not buy a VR headset I can’t afford anyway.
Oh no, one rich guy is funding the far right in Silicon Valley! The Horror. The Horror. (See Chart Below)
Oh no, someone funding “an organization to shape online political discourse”. What, like moveon.org or one of the 10001 other organizations with varying degrees of sleeze?
Source for chart:
The company policy of not caring is a good company policy, I think.
And the reaction of customers and developers to say, “We’re not working with them because they’re backing that monster” is also fine.
I think the issue is that the practical strategy of “support the art, if not the artist” is flawed in that if you support the art, the artist IS supported, and more empowered to do their horrible things.
You can think the Oculus is cool without thinking this douchecanoe is decent, but you can’t buy Oculus without also giving money to this douchecanoe.
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I’m not limiting my criticism here to just Silicon Valley. That tech workers overwhelmingly donate to Democrats isn’t proof of how left wing the Valley is, so much as how Democratic policy positions have shifted to focus so heavily on the tech industry at the expense of more traditional left wing politics. More specifically, I’m not very concerned about the politics of tech workers (who are still middle class) so much as their incredibly wealthy bosses.
And nearly all of those are problems too, since most of them are the creatures of a few wealthy donors, giving the rich outsize influence on political discourse. There’s nothing inherently wrong with creating a group to influence politics, it’s just that most of us are unable to financially compete, except if we pool our resources, which is not an easy task.
The issue with Luckey isn’t that he’s funding just another group, but one founded by people who already made racist memes. Which is why he was interested in funding it in the first place. The group seems to have fizzled and it’s unclear how much they actually did. The media exposure this got probably means the initiative in its current form is dead. However, the alarm here is that more and more rich people are not content with just trying to influence democratic publics and governments, but are funding groups that are hostile to democracy itself. And this is very hard to combat.
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Will it also be the year of every fucking mass storage device ever STILL presenting as read-only even when it plugs directly into your brain?
(I’ve had a very long argument with my Ubuntu laptop, a USB HDD and my girlfriend’s Kindle tonight. I hate computers right now)
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It helps if the article is about spreading neo-nazi propaganda.
That said, the only meme I’ve seen of theirs is the “Too big to jail” one, which seems like a perfectly valid criticism. The message board is private, so I wasn’t able to see the rest of their oeuvre.
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I suppose you can do what you want. My points are:
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They aren’t backing the guy - he just works there. It seems their sin isn’t condemning him enough. Assholes need jobs too.
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As with any time people get up in arms and start to threaten to boycott or avoid a company or product I ask: what are you doing to vet the other 99 companies you dealt with that week?
Which again relates to my 2nd point. Unless you are buying directly from a person you have vetted, you are most likely giving money to a racist, sexist, wife beater, drunk, pedophile, Nickleback listener, etc.
So if everyone does it, and all of them suck why are we dog piling on one guy (which I didn’t care about), and it is now spilling over because the company he works for won’t call him an asshole too?
Again, I haven’t seen much of what this group put out. I imagine it’s horrible. I imagine Lucky is horrible. But $10k isn’t exactly funding some massive multimedia campaign. I had never heard of the group until this story. Shit, that will barely pay for one hooker and blow party.
I just find the whole thing rather irrational and more of a knee jerk response.
I can’t wait for the Control-Alt-Delete Right movement.
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In all fairness, not buying a VR system I wasn’t going to buy anyway isn’t much of an overreaction.
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If that is the measure, then I too am condemning the companies actions through non purchase.
One really doesn’t.
There is a substantial list of creators whose work I stopped looking at once I found out that they were scum (Roman Polanski, Mel Gibson, etc).
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Card is not an founder of Tor, nor was he recently made a near-billionaire by Tor purchasing his company.
There’s a wee bit of difference between your drunk uncle raving about Killery and somebody with a billion dollars that’s in bed with the most-viewed website on the planet.
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I really hope it doesn’t. Aside from Palmer’s bullshit (a huge aside, no doubt) Oculus is one of the better tech companies when it comes to diversity and treating developers fairly. They’re orders of magnitude ahead of their main competitor in that respect.
The dozen or so people there that I know personally are all as appalled by this as everyone else, and I was glad to see a lot of developers showing support for them at the same time as condemning Palmer’s actions.
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