[StaceyLi123]

I’m a YC alumna, and didn’t find this acceptable at all. Comments like these only hurt the cause. YC and its leadership should be a pillar of civic discourse in a respectful, impactful manner.

YC - calling on you to take action and hold Garry Tan accountable.

[tptacek]

Accountable for making a bad Tupac joke? It's a song lyric. It's obviously not a threat.

[foldr]

Not sure what you're finding difficult about this. I don't think anyone thinks that Garry Tan was literally planning to murder people. If your defense is "but I wasn't literally planning to murder people", then something has gone significantly wrong with your communication. It looks bad for any organisation to be run by a loudmouth with poor judgment. Seems fair for others associated with the organisation to complain about how this reflects on them.

[tptacek]

He attempted a hip-hop dad joke and faceplanted. That's the entire story.

[foldr]

That's not really inconsistent with what I said or what the OP said. It's disgraceful and embarrassing behavior which would be more than enough to get many people in public-facing jobs fired. But if YC want to continue to be represented by this mook, that's their choice.

Also, while I don't think that a serious threat was intended in this case, there is absolutely no logic to the idea that something cannot possibly be construed as a threat if it's a quotation from song lyrics.

[tptacek]

It's disgracefully bad joke execution, but that's par for the course for dad humor. What's cringier to me is the attempt to extract more meaning from it than that. Nobody in the world construed this as an actual threat; even the people who didn't realize it was a quote from an extraordinarily famous hip-hop track (but clearly do now).

But, I mean, calling this "disgraceful" is narratively a lot more fun than just acknowledging that social media affords us all the opportunity to faceplant publicly with age-revealing pop culture humor. I'm sorry to be captain fun vampire, but the narratively-most-interesting interpretation of a story is very rarely the truest.

[foldr]

For the CEO of a company to even joke about killing elected representatives is far outside the bounds of acceptable behavior. With all due respect to Tupac, the particular words that Tan selected do not exactly push the limits of hermeneutic complexity. Tan chose to make his absurd death threats via a laughably off-key appropriation of hip-hop. That's a double fail. Neither idiocy cancels out the other.

In your second paragraph you seem to suggest that I only hold my point of view because it makes for a good story. That seems a bit patronizing. Perhaps in return I could offer my own diagnosis: that you spend a lot more time on Twitter than I do. Maybe this stuff starts to look 'normal' once you've been in that particular bubble long enough. All the more reason to stay away, in my opinion. If I ever start drunk-tweeting death threats at members of my local government, then I hope that my friends will not run to my defence but make it clear to me that I have a problem.