Have you considered the possibility that I merely didn't completely understand everything you said? You mentioned ethics repeatedly in your post, so I thought your "critical difference" referred to ethics rather than merely the definition of journalism.
I thought the you said anonymity was the critical point making it unethical (given your reference to "journalistic ethics". Now it sounds like you merely meant that it doesn't fit some definition of journalism. Is that right?
So would a fair characterization of your beliefs would be that Michael's proposal would be ethical (much like the anonymous hypothetical woman I mentioned, or the real anonymous woman I linked to) but not journalism?
Or is it unethical for some reason that you didn't mention?
> Have you considered the possibility that I merely didn't completely understand everything you said?
You post history is anti-woman in any discussion about women. Thus your attempts to reframe a CEOs speculation about anonymously attacking a female journalist's (and her family's) privacy as "journalism" after she criticises her company is unlikely to be a misunderstanding about ethics.
When a journList talks about your company the correct responses are:
i) ignore it
ii) rebut it
iii) use the complaints process or law to correct defamation
The option
iv) secretly investigate the reporter and her family to discredit her
... is clearly, unambiguously, the action of a fucking asshole.
You should find it troubling that your hatred of women forces you into supporting possibly criminal behaviour of fucking assholes instead of just accepting that this one time this woman is right.
I have no idea why you think my post history is "anti-woman" or that I hold "hatred of women". I think many of the arguments pushed by people who self describe as "pro-woman" are nonsense, but that's not the same thing.
...the action of a fucking asshole...
Contrast with what I said: "are we simply engaging in internet mobbing because...the CEO is kind of a jerk?"
Unless the anonymous woman I described (and the anonymous writer at modelviewculture) is also a "fucking asshole", the "secret" part of investigating the reporter is not a problem. So investigating and reporting is "possibly criminal"? Assuming there is something more here than mobbing someone you dislike, I truly do not understand it.
> I have no idea why you think my post history is "anti-woman"
You have never, ever, taken the side of a woman in any HN discussion.
Whatever the situation you will always find some way to criticise the woman, even if it requires you to distort facts and construct wierd hypotheticals.
That discussion is almost the opposite of this one - the author spurred negative emotional reactions, but I defended her due to her careful definitions and reasoning.
As samreidhughs points out, you are incorrect in this claim for a second time. My mistake, I remembered that comment, didn't remember it was you who made it.
I pretty rarely defend a person of any gender, however. Most of my comments tend toward abstraction. I barely view the comments I've made here as defending Uber, and more as simply advocating against mobbing.
Weird hypotheticals are a standard practice in philosophy.
Also, 'yummyfajitas criticizes or disagrees with male people all the time too. It's only natural, if you omit vapid posts of agreement from your repertoire, that you're always going to be seen disagreeing with and criticizing people.
Edit: Oh, I see that you've made these inane responses to yummyfajitas before. We can see an analog in your past comment:
> You don't create as much discussion going the other way - there are no posts from you askng why society accepts most corporate boards having no women or asking why society accepts discrimination against people with Arab sounding names. All your questions are about why it's okay to discriminate against white males in these kinds of programmes.
And yummyfajitas's reply:
> No one on HN is defending discrimination against people with Arab sounding names.
Perhaps the same sort of observation might be found on this axis of discussion?
And this isn't the first time you've made some metacommentary aboutq yummyfajitas's posting history. This time it's "hatred of women", last time it was racism. What are you gonna try next time?
No fajitas, it did not occur to me that you were incapable of interpreting a basic English sentence with a clearly defined subject and modifier, and that you'd resolve your confusion by fishing around for words scattered elsewhere in the post to fill in the blanks.
But the point, again, is that you described what the Uber exec proposed as "hiring journalists to do journalism to journalists." And the point you missed is that what he was describing was manifestly not journalism, for reasons I went on to describe.
There are several other reasons why his line of thought was hugely unethical, but those are separate issues, and given your tendency to put words in the mouths of others, that's not a conversation I'm willing to have with you.
