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873 points helsinkiandrew | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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jajuuka ◴[] No.45374111[source]
Wow, they actually are pulling back. That is really surprising. Wonder if they see the winds changing on this issue and want to get on the right side of history. Big props to everyone at Microsoft who spoke out about this and risked or lost their jobs because of it. They kept that fire lit on their ass.
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slantedview ◴[] No.45374160[source]
Last week a UN human rights commission found that Israel is carrying out a genocide. I think you're right that the winds have changed and now companies will shift their positions.
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mrits[dead post] ◴[] No.45374208[source]
[flagged]
computerex ◴[] No.45374257[source]
The word genocide has a legal definition, it’s not up for discussion or debate. What is happening in Gaza is a genocide according to genocide scholars.
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zeroonetwothree ◴[] No.45374558[source]
Legal definitions are often up for discussion and debate. That’s a large part of what lawyers do, in fact.

Anyway I have no comment on the specific claim being made here, I just really dislike it when discussion is stifled by saying “I’m right and no one can ever disagree”.

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computerex ◴[] No.45374847[source]
That's like debating the definition of homicide or rape. There is no nuance here.
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1. glenstein ◴[] No.45375406[source]
Exactly. I think people socialized into certain conversational norms in politicized online spaces, ridiculously overestimate plausibility of the rhetorical gambit of going "gee, who's to say?" when attempted out in the wild.

I think one strength of the liberal academic tradition is that whether it's philosophy, whether it's law, you get introduced to the "whose to say" archetype early on and get inoculated against it. It's not just that the concepts are well enough established that they're resilient against such skepticism, but even in cases of uncertainty, routine amounts of conceptual uncertainty are not a deal-breaker to investigating and understanding urgent moral issues.

A real argument in the negative would be along the lines of "here's how food truck inspection policies are tied to well-established norms that better explain the outcome of famine than intent to destroy". A not real argument is spontaneous, mid-debate discovery of the transience of linguistic meaning, discovered just in time to skirt the question of genocide.

The trouble with this form of skepticism is it can only ever be hypothesized, never actually consistently embodied by real people. Long before navigating to hacker News, you would look at your computer and be paralyzed by fundamental puzzles like "what is electricity", "what is information", "is there really an external world" and so on. It wouldn't have been discovered mid conversation about genocide.