[ElComradio]

Fair enough re: employment, but if we shift "employed by" to "do business with" it's still the same discussion.

A theme going on here is a binary state regarding how we should treat individuals and consider their positions. This idea of "endorsing" Thiel means you are supporting all of his political views and not just his business views. That if one supports Trump one is all-in on all of his positions.

For example, many of Trump's supporters are identifying with his economic message. They may find his immigration stance to be distasteful but the overriding concern is the economy, so they are willing to suck it up. Trump's bloc isn't a monolithic group with shared priorities.

Altman's position on this is exactly correct- expressing his disagreement with Thiel but with the maturity to quash the urge to run away from or "punish" Thiel. We would be better off as a society if we all adopted this mindset.

[tptacek]

If we shift "employment" to "do business with", we have formulated an argument that boycotts are unethical. So, no, I don't think that gets us anywhere.

[ElComradio]

Boycotts are designed to force a _business_ to change behavior.

If we extend this into the realm of the individual and political speech, it is a totally different animal with clear dangers for freedom of expression.

I am not myself sure if I would consider it a moral failing to "boycott" an individual as a pressure tactic in these circumstances (or more like misguided social engineering) but it is definitely laudable to take a more nuanced view as Altman and YC have done.

[tptacek]

Businesses are made of people. But your argument is even less coherent than that. When people boycotted Nestle, they were supporting a campaign whose intended impact could have put thousands of people out of work, many of whom had no opposition at all to the boycotter's ideas. Boycotting a company is an even more grave act than criticizing some dude with more than one McLaren about endorsing a Trump campaign surrogate who could most likely buy McLaren Automotive. But we tolerate and accept boycotts, as we must, because they are a form of political speech.

[ElComradio]

It is totally fine to take action against a business; that the business is comprised of people who have no direct input into the actions of the entity and may face consequences of the actions against it should not be an important consideration of where you choose to spend your money.

A counterexample would be a situation where someone went and figured out that most of Nestle's employees were supporting Trump and then boycotted the business as a way to pressure those employees into altering their positions. That is much closer to being morally objectionable.

Outside of that, Altman _has_ criticized Thiel's views, directly. The disagreement seems to be about what to do afterwards. He is simply not willing to cut him off for this disagreement. If this way of thinking was a social norm, you would eliminate "anti-PC" griping which is important to a good chunk of Trump supporters, and you would likely see positive social change happen more rapidly (e.g. if this was the norm 50 years ago you might have seen more movement on gay marriage, etc. if people could pipe up without fear of being fired (or "boycotted")).