Corporate entities are not freed from moral or legal responsibility, just because they are corporate entities
In some sense you're correct. The constitutional system was set up to balance the rights of people against what Madison called "the rights of property." Of course, property has no rights: my pen has no rights. Maybe I have a right to it, but the pen has no rights. So this was just a code phrase for the rights of people with property. As Madison put it, the goal of government must be "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."
The model for the corporation at the time of the framing of the Constitution was a municipality; corporations had no rights of individual persons. This changed when the courts, around the turn of the 19th century, essentially granted corporations the rights of persons, in fact, immortal persons. This extended First Amendment rights, freedom from search and seizure to corporations, rendering them unaccountable. A far cry from their orignial function where states could extend or rescind their charter at will.
Anyways, corporations do have legal responsibility, but as we know they also can afford to pay for many more and much higher quality lawyers than any ordinary individual.
But even their legal responsibility is somewhat diluted in some sense. If you or I are directly responsible for knowingly or willfully killing even just one or two people, this usually leads to imprisonment or even capital punishment in the extreme case. You didn't see any Union Carbide executives imprisoned let alone executed for the over 10,000 deaths resultant from the fiasco in Bhopal, India. The immediate causes of which was a cost-cutting by UCC execs to enhance profits by reducing personnel, lowering minimal training, use of low quality construction material and so forth.
As for moral responsibility, I'd venture to say that the concept of morality has no real meaning when used to refer to actions of a corporation. Governments can be immoral. Their task is to protect the well-being of their citizens, to enforce laws and so forth. Corporations are amoral in the pure sense of the word. They are defined entirely around the pursuit of profit. Anything that gets in the way--taxes, govt regulations, people--which a corporation can accrue more benefits than costs by eliminating, will be neutralized one way or another.
Government, warts and all, is the only social structure accountable for its actions. I don't understand how people can be so enthusiastic for what they term "limited govt," which is not to say that we want to cut back on billion-dollar transfers from taxpayers to aerospace/defense firms, but rather that we wish to curtain the part of the government that was buffering citizens from the full exercise of corporate power.
I'm not sure I understand. The poem refers to lynching, a sport in which Massachusetts was far outmatched by the states of the deep South, not slavery per se.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
Putting your claim of equivalence between the KKK and the NAACP's rhetoric aside, try weighing the groups by their deeds.
In 1919 the NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States: 1889-1918.
Between 1919 and 1922, a further 239 blacks were lynched by white mobs and many more were killed by individual acts of violence and unrecorded lynchings. In none of these cases was a white person punished for these crimes.
Re:Racists suits using percentages are tricky
on
Racism At Microsoft?
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· Score: 1
Regarding "asains (sic) do better than whites", I think you might need to qualify this statement a bit more. In SoCal, there are a bunch of thugged-out, lower class Hmong and Vietnamese kids running around, dealing and gangbanging. The Korean gangs are serious about trying to be taken seriously beyond their pool skillz, and kill on occasion.. but have parents who push them hard enough that most do reasonably well in getting into college, and some do exceptionally well.
Plus, take the 1st/2nd generation thing a bit more seriously with regard to the more "industrious" asian groups (e.g., Chinese, Korean). The more Americanized they become, the less they will push their kids, in generations to come. For a group a bit further in this cycle, look at the Japanese-Americans in California. Some are past 5th generation, and while as a whole they seem to do reasonably well, the ambition and group pressure to excell isn't present to the same degree. If you look at enrollment at MIT for example, the predominant asian group was Japanese-American from the 50's through the 70's, but now there are virtually none in the admitted classes, with tons of ABC/FOB's and Korean kids taking their place.
It's true that many Chinese and Korean immigrants bring virtually no wealth with them, but they find very sophisticated support structures already in place in their respective immigrant communities. The extreme emphasis on kin also helps, with aunts and uncles or other relatives willing to help out.
As a final note, since it seems like you're a supporter of true rugged American individualism (TM), try moving into Compton and raising your kids there. Even if you were to instill a good work ethic, the school system is abysmal enough that straight-A's won't get your kid very far, lacking AP classing and extracurriculars.
I can't agree more.. look at what happened after they translated the Bible into the vulgar tongue. Common people could then read the bible, not just the priestly elite, and what happened? Everybody just started up their own bullshit religion, with personal gods and all that other Protestant shit. We could all still be happy Roman Catholic sheep if they had kept the Holy Book out of the masses' hands.
Thompson: I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft--a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically. My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.
>On the other hand Slashdot is a news site. It is their obligation according to journalism ethics to report in an unbiased fashion. Or at the very least make an attempt. Hardly. Slashdot is a *forum* where various news stories are posted, and people are free to participate in threads discussing the articles. This isn't CNN here, it's a site for nerd discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporate entities are not freed from moral or legal responsibility, just because they are corporate entities
In some sense you're correct. The constitutional system was set up to balance the rights of people against what Madison called "the rights of property." Of course, property has no rights: my pen has no rights. Maybe I have a right to it, but the pen has no rights. So this was just a code phrase for the rights of people with property. As Madison put it, the goal of government must be "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."
The model for the corporation at the time of the framing of the Constitution was a municipality; corporations had no rights of individual persons. This changed when the courts, around the turn of the 19th century, essentially granted corporations the rights of persons, in fact, immortal persons. This extended First Amendment rights, freedom from search and seizure to corporations, rendering them unaccountable. A far cry from their orignial function where states could extend or rescind their charter at will.
Anyways, corporations do have legal responsibility, but as we know they also can afford to pay for many more and much higher quality lawyers than any ordinary individual.
But even their legal responsibility is somewhat diluted in some sense. If you or I are directly responsible for knowingly or willfully killing even just one or two people, this usually leads to imprisonment or even capital punishment in the extreme case. You didn't see any Union Carbide executives imprisoned let alone executed for the over 10,000 deaths resultant from the fiasco in Bhopal, India. The immediate causes of which was a cost-cutting by UCC execs to enhance profits by reducing personnel, lowering minimal training, use of low quality construction material and so forth.
As for moral responsibility, I'd venture to say that the concept of morality has no real meaning when used to refer to actions of a corporation. Governments can be immoral. Their task is to protect the well-being of their citizens, to enforce laws and so forth. Corporations are amoral in the pure sense of the word. They are defined entirely around the pursuit of profit. Anything that gets in the way--taxes, govt regulations, people--which a corporation can accrue more benefits than costs by eliminating, will be neutralized one way or another.
Government, warts and all, is the only social structure accountable for its actions. I don't understand how people can be so enthusiastic for what they term "limited govt," which is not to say that we want to cut back on billion-dollar transfers from taxpayers to aerospace/defense firms, but rather that we wish to curtain the part of the government that was buffering citizens from the full exercise of corporate power.
I'm not sure I understand. The poem refers to lynching, a sport in which Massachusetts was far outmatched by the states of the deep South, not slavery per se.
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
Abel Meeropol, Strange Fruit, (1939)
In 1919 the NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States: 1889-1918.
Between 1919 and 1922, a further 239 blacks were lynched by white mobs and many more were killed by individual acts of violence and unrecorded lynchings. In none of these cases was a white person punished for these crimes.
Plus, take the 1st/2nd generation thing a bit more seriously with regard to the more "industrious" asian groups (e.g., Chinese, Korean). The more Americanized they become, the less they will push their kids, in generations to come. For a group a bit further in this cycle, look at the Japanese-Americans in California. Some are past 5th generation, and while as a whole they seem to do reasonably well, the ambition and group pressure to excell isn't present to the same degree. If you look at enrollment at MIT for example, the predominant asian group was Japanese-American from the 50's through the 70's, but now there are virtually none in the admitted classes, with tons of ABC/FOB's and Korean kids taking their place.
It's true that many Chinese and Korean immigrants bring virtually no wealth with them, but they find very sophisticated support structures already in place in their respective immigrant communities. The extreme emphasis on kin also helps, with aunts and uncles or other relatives willing to help out. As a final note, since it seems like you're a supporter of true rugged American individualism (TM), try moving into Compton and raising your kids there. Even if you were to instill a good work ethic, the school system is abysmal enough that straight-A's won't get your kid very far, lacking AP classing and extracurriculars.
Cheers
I can't agree more.. look at what happened after they translated the Bible into the vulgar tongue. Common people could then read the bible, not just the priestly elite, and what happened? Everybody just started up their own bullshit religion, with personal gods and all that other Protestant shit. We could all still be happy Roman Catholic sheep if they had kept the Holy Book out of the masses' hands.
absolutely wrong. it uses a variable compression rate that averages out to 2.8 bits/s (150MB = 1/5 a CD)
oops.. didn't mean to post this. pls moderate down
Thompson: I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft--a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically. My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.
>On the other hand Slashdot is a news site. It is their obligation according to journalism ethics to report in an unbiased fashion. Or at the very least make an attempt. Hardly. Slashdot is a *forum* where various news stories are posted, and people are free to participate in threads discussing the articles. This isn't CNN here, it's a site for nerd discussion.