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The problem is that "objectivity" is impossible and "neutrality" is in fact just siding with the status quo. I'd argue that this new trend of companies taking responsibility for the things they do or enable is a result of people giving much more of a shit than they have in the past, not a result of apathy.

Look on the bright side. You're worried about setting a bad precedent, but the current trend in the top of the legal world is to ignore precedent, or hand-select the precedent you want. If this sort of thing becomes such a problem that action is needed, we can count on SCOTUS.



This is just a painfully thin excuse to justify exercising your power over others while you have it.

If the overton window shifts, and you and your ideas are being deplatformed using the same justifications you’ve championed, you’ll be screaming for a return to objectivity and neutrality.


Objectivity and neutrality don't exist; you can't return to a condition that never existed (people with narrow perspective frequently mistake alignment with their own subjective biases as being “objective” and/or “neutral”, but that is self-delusion.)


Objectivity and neutrality have value even if they can never perfectly realized.

Case in point:

You wouldn’t be arguing against objectivity and neutrality if doing so did not advance your own social and political power; you yourself have abandoned any pretense of aspiring to either.

This makes you a self-serving person to whom it would be dangerous to grant power.


You have it exactly backwards. Anyone who claims to be objective is either bullshitting you or so naive as to be unreliable. Neither case is a person you want to empower.

Anyone who claims to be "neutral" is in fact declaring their own apathy towards a topic, and when that topic is "should a specific group of people have civil rights" then neutrality is ethically disgusting. I'm personally apathetic regarding whether some money-collecting company wants to work for AI people, so I don't really care about Kickstarter's policy here, and I don't foresee myself caring in the future. Pretending that Kickstarter is a power broker of some kind is in my estimation some serious Chicken Little territory.

"Aspiring" to either objectivity or neutrality is not the same thing as actually manifesting either quality, and such aspirations generally involve disclosing conflicts of interest or other biases, which are things every living person has. Wrapping either concept in other weasel words doesn't really move the needle.


It's not backwards to favor someone attempting to manifest objectivity and neutrality over the person telling you, forthrightly, that they'll trod over anyone and argue anything if it advances their aims and shifts power to their in-group.

I find your position to be the one that's "ethically disgusting", completely without principal beyond your self-serving aims, and corrosive to a healthy society.




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