[aadishv]

I feel like that's the whole point of the OP. I agree with the overall post but mentioning the ICE relationship seems to detract from the main point.

"I hate GitHub because X Y and Z features are bad" is a good reason to move away; "I hate GitHub because one of their thousands of enterprise customers does not align with my political views" is not, in my opinion.

For the record, I do not support ICE

[MildlySerious]

People protesting ICE do not do so out of political concern, but humanitarian concern.

This seems like a minor nitpick as those two are intimately tangled up, but it matters to make the distinction. Standing up for others is not petty or self-serving and that's exactly what this sort of conflation can falsely imply.

[rvcas]

Just because people have a revolutionary fetish and fantasize about being the ones to stop Hitler in 1933 (they would not have) does not make their delusions a reality. These dorks make anti-establishment vibes so lame. Just because you say something doesn’t make it real.

[andrew_]

It's virtue signaling plain and simple. People who crafted their identities around the current thing in ~2017 are religiously attached to having to be part of the in group and can't let it go, and it inevitably bubbles up like this.

This will no doubt rankle those who align with that group, but they are a pathetic remnant of a terrible period of rampant sociopathy.

[oofbey]

Politics in the US is so extremely binarized these days that I think it’s hard to assign motive for political issues beyond “my friends say that our team feels this way.” Which I would argue is much more political than anything fundamental.

[etyp]

I read it as "this was a big news story which we care about. You may know it, but it is not the primary reason. Here is the primary reason."

[jenadine]

That's why the article put that reason aside

[zdragnar]

It could have done an even better job of putting it aside by not even mentioning it at all.

Instead we're all sitting here talking about it instead of the technical reasons.

[latexr]

It does signal/imply that even if GitHub fixed every technical grievance tomorrow, Zig might still not come back.

[jdiff]

You got one. And how many good neighbors were dragged out of their cars, how many parents torn from their children, and how many American citizens wrongly harassed or dragged out of their houses for it? How many preachers praying peacefully in the streets were shot in the head?

This is not, and has never been, about the murderers. The murderers are the excuse, the people who are actually being harassed and brutalized are not them. And as mentioned, many of them are American citizens.

[kamranjon]

You can support sane border policies without also supporting racial profiling, the militarization of our cities and warrantless searches and detention. These two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but arguably much of what ICE has represented recently is what many people would consider to be unconstitutional behavior.

[tombert]

Ok, if you want to go down this road, should I start posting articles of religious leaders caught raping children? Should we be spending 170 billion a year trying to shut down all churches?

[oofbey]

One or the biggest ironies in US politics to me is the complaints about the degradation of the rule of law in this country under Trump. While simultaneously arguing that federal immigration law should be actively ignored and blocked by cities and states. Of course the details are all messy and complicated. But if you feel both of those things are true, you owe it to yourself to take a moment and reflect on the irony of your own views. Empathy for people you disagree with is in dangerously short supply these days and is fundamental to a functioning democracy.