ted,
i'm ready to call this a disagreement and to leave it at that: you say
that it is my remark that "misdirects [the discussion] away from what
matters most"; and i, to the contrary, think that it is morlock's
"figure of speech" that misdirects the attention from what a civilised
and moral response might be, and that's what i tried to say: mind your
language.
i guess that using "burning at the stake" as a figure of speech is
easier done if you don't imagine someone actually getting hanged, or
shot, or killed in the gas, or the like; if, like me, you think that
these are not such unlikely options to happen literally, not
figuratively, the air smells different; and that may be due, as you and
i infer, to being "over-sensitive".
i have no idea why you impute that, because of this sensitivity, i might
be allergic to power; we can discuss the Nuremberg or Srebrenica or NSU
trials over a drink some day, but generally, i believe that long prison
sentences (or the prospect thereof) can already do a lot, and, for me,
we must not respond "proportionally" to crimes.
i completely agree with you that people working in any industry should
be held accountable for their decisions and deeds (even if the damage
done is sometimes immeasurable); even the serious threat of being taken
to court over the marketing tricks that morlock described in his msg,
would perhaps (as you also suggest) help to alleviate things.
finally, even more than i fear people who make flippant remarks about
burning others at the stake, i am afraid of those who think that
"broad-base popular support" is a confirmation for anything. but then
that's just me.
i guess the message of this missive is: don't let your language be
carried away by your anger, even if that anger is due.
be safe,
-a
Am 23.03.19 um 18:00 schrieb tbyfield:
(2)
On 23 Mar 2019, at 6:54, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
friends, call me over-sensitive, but i think that nobody should be
burned at the stake for anything in any country; i say this also
because this flippant kind of rhetoric poisons the reasonable debate
that is so urgently needed on the matters at issue here. (to the
contrary, i am glad that some civilised countries find forms of
punishment other than that for actual wrongdoing.) - unfortunately, in
a world where people get imprisoned and killed for all sorts of
things, there is little room for such dark humour... when all the
stakes have been taken down everywhere, we'll be able to laugh about
this joke again, perhaps.
Andreas, you're over-sensitive. Much as Brian's flight into abstraction
misdirected discussion away from concrete facts and struggles, your
focus on the brutality of Morlock's remark — which I'm pretty sure was a
figure of speech, not a specific advocacy for burning at the stake over
drawing and quartering or crucifixion — misdirects it away from what
matters most: penetrating the corporate veils that limit liability. If
multinational corporate sovereignty is to be a key part of the new
global regime, we need concrete strategies for isolating and punishing
corporate criminality. Boeing's reputation has suffered: another
airline, Garuda, canceled a $6B order for ~50 737s, and more are likely
to follow. But minimizing shareholder value isn't enough. We need
regulatory systems with teeth as sharp as those used in war-crimes
tribunals. Polite anti-corporate rhetoric won't change anything, but
identifying specific culprits within corporations and making them pay
dearly for their crimes will change everything. Best of all, it can be
applied to other imponderables like massive-scale fraud, environmental
degradation, arms manufacture, abuses of privacy, and all the rest. For
that reason, it *will* have broad-base popular support, sooner or later.
The first question is what will finally trigger it, and the second
question is whether we've laid solid groundwork for effective
progressive responses.
And that begs an important question that leftoids aren't prepared to
answer because, in a nutshell, they're allergic to power: what *would*
be appropriate punishments for people who, under color of corporate
activity, engage in indiscriminate abuses of public trust.
Cheers,
Ted
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