If you support tolerance you don’t support Trump
There will be resistance however.
IBM employees are taking a public stand following a personal pitch to Donald Trump from CEO Ginni Rometty and the company’s initial refusal to rule out participating in the creation of a national Muslim registry. In November, Rometty wrote Trump directly, congratulating him on his electoral victory and detailing various services the company could sell his administration. The letter was published on an internal IBM blog along with a personal note from Rometty to her enormous global staff. “As IBMers, we believe that innovation improves the human condition. … We support, tolerance, diversity, the development of expertise, and the open exchange of ideas,” she wrote in the context of lending material support to a man who won the election by rejecting all of those values. Employee comments were a mix of support and horror. Now, some of those who were horrified are going public, denouncing Rometty’s letter and asserting “our right to refuse participation in any U.S. government contracts that violate constitutionally protected civil liberties.” The IBMPetition.org effort has been spearheaded in part by IBM cybersecurity engineer Daniel Hanley, who told The Intercept he started organizing with his coworkers after reading Rometty’s letter. “I was shocked, of course,” Hanley said, “because IBM has purported to espouse diversity and inclusion, and yet here’s Ginni Rometty in an unqualified way reaching out to an admin whose electoral success was based on racist programs.”
I’m somewhat shocked that IBM refused to rule out participating in the creation of a national Muslim registry.
Resist.
More intolerance against the intolerant!
These IBM employees are as bad as the KKK and almost as bad as Black Lives Matter.
(Just trying to anticipate the response from Trump and Co.)
Ophelia, have you even tried to understand the poor conservative’s position on this? How can you not consider the side of all those flyover country people who want this registry? You’re just living in your liberal bubble again!
Gad, this is going to be a long four years….
I absolutely abhor that corporate notion that just because one earns a living working for them then one has to believe the corporate line, lock, stock, the fucking lot (to steal a line from the wonderfully silly Mockney film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), and subsequently will go along with any bullshit the company wishes to pull just because it’s ‘policy’.
Whatever happened to the notion that people are indiviuals with minds of their own?
And “IBMers”! Sounds too Disney for these British ears. EMM EYE CEE KAY EE WHY, EMM OH YEW ESS EE. Excuse me, I have to go and vomit.
IBM probably still has all that code lying around from the 1933 German census.
Yeah, IBM has got a reputation to live down with respect to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
It would be a technological and organisational disaster, which is exactly the sort of project IBM (and their counterparts) absolutely love. It’s one of the reasons I stopped working for big corporations, even as a contractor.
And as others here have said, IBM in particular is not without form in this area…
Diversity and multiculturalism are now pretty much the ideological cornerstones of crony internationalist capitalism. Those concepts are the ‘noise’ the creaking substructures of this failing model make. IBM will resist the pressure to create such lists because it could potentially undermine the bottom line. All the rest is piffle.
^6 Google “phoenix pay system”
I’ll raise you every IT project the UK has ever attempted.
I only worked on some of those projects. Honest.
^8 It occurs to me that IBM should totally take on the Muslim registry project, and assign the Phoenix team to it. With that track record, three quarters of American Muslims will never make it on the list, but a random assortment of several million Baptists and Presbyterians from flyover states will. [evil grin]
(Cackles at Steve/#10…)
I likewise nominate the Phoenix team. Can you submit a tender on behalf of someone else?
Sorta more seriously: good on IBM. To those more cynically suggesting they also know it’s a likely disaster in the making, oh, I’m sure the general crackedness of the concept and those proposing it makes it a little easier to say to hell with it. But these things have an odd way of going together: venal, craven, disgusting use of wedge issues and glaring impracticability…
And I’m still happy to say: their actually standing on the principle is welcome. Resist indeed. And, by all means: _encourage_ that resistance. Resistance that is scattered, divided, biting at each other, questioning one another’s motives, that’s easy to overcome. A united opposition, an opposition that knows what it stands for, and encourages doing the right thing, is another matter.