Comment by sd9
21 hours ago
The title is a non-sequitur.
“Terrorist sympathizer” and “successful businessperson” (or “rich person”) are completely orthogonal. Building a successful business does not necessarily change your terrorist sympathisation status. You can be a rich terrorist sympathiser.
Your comment fails to mention that the accusations of sympathy for terrorism are lies.
I am not equipped to give an opinion on that either way. I’m just saying that building a successful business is independent of the accuracy of your ideology.
I think this is partly true. Raising the necessary funds, hiring enough of the right people and become sufficiently visible to get "mindshare" are all important factors in building a successful business. It is a lot harder to do these things if your ideology is out of step with what is considered mainstream.
Fair comment. They are two different things.
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It was kind of the focus of the article though - how his pro Palestinian politics interacted with being a SV founder.
It also fitted with some @paulg twitter stuff. He wrote a fair bit about both Gaza and Replit.
> It also fitted with some @paulg twitter stuff.
TIL. Big fair-play to him, and I'm very sincere about it, he must of have left a lot of potential money on the table from possible investors as a result of his view on the genocide in Gaza. Again, fair play to him, we need a lot more people like him in our (pretty sad) industry from this point of view.
Just look at Tal Broda for one example.
As far as I can tell, nowhere does the article argue that being "terrorist symphathizer" and being a successful business person are mutually exculsive, so you seem to be arguing against a point no one made.
What is obvious is that people should be outraged if a successful businessperson is actually a "terrorist sympathizer", because most people, whatever their ideology, would simply consider it to be an outrageous and ridiculous state of affairs if a successful businessperson was allowed to function unimpeded in western society and its business world if they themselves considered the businessperson to be an unapologetic "terrorist sympathizer".
The title is clearly an enagement ploy by the editor because it forces the reader to decide whether they themselves believe the founder is actually a terrorist sympathizer or not. If they don't think so, then it's outrageous that he's been libelled in a such a manner. If they think he is a terrorist sympathizer then it would be outrageous to them that he is allowed to operate unimpeded in western society and its economic realm.
That's why this comment sounds disingenously pedantic and your follow-up comment's detached tone doesn't feel sincere frankly. The article does list specific reasons why he was called a "terrorist sympathizer" and forces the reader to decide whether they themselves would consider the founder a "terrorist sympathizer" given the context in order to come to a conclusion about him in general.