General American History Thread - Finding new things to be ashamed about

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > General American History Thread - Finding new things to be ashamed about

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Grand Prize Winner: Feb 19, 2007

tooterfish posted:

An entirely appropriate sentiment in general, but perhaps not in the context of a general American history thread?

Perhaps it is more complicated than you would like it to be. The special torpedoes used in the attack at Pearl Harbor were designed and built by Mitsubishi. In Nagasaki.

Picture of what remained of that factory, 1400 feet north of ground zero:
https://www.osti.gov/manhattan-project-history/images/mitsubishi_image.htm

quote:

Pearl Harbor was too shallow for conventional torpedoes; they would've just dived in and stuck to the bottom of the ocean floor. So a few months before the attack, Japanese designers created finned torpedoes that could perform "a feat like that of an acrobat high-diving in shallow water."

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-12/vintage-popsci-pearl-harbor

Honda was founded in 1948. I remember reading the autobiography of the founder of Toyota and he mentioned that he was living in Kokura at the end of the war. It was cloudy that day, so the folks flying Bockscar could not find Kokura. Nagasaki was the secondary target.

# ? Dec 10, 2013 21:26

boner confessor: Apr 25, 2013; by R. Guyovich

Grand Prize Winner posted:

So your argument is that corporations should not be held accountable for their actions?

Depends on what you define as action. Actively comitting crimes is one thing, being in bed with sleazy or unethical interests is something else. This derail kicked off over my and others disagreement as to how culpable GM was in the destruction of American streetcars. I don't think that selling competing product and operating a holding company to push more product is inherently unethical in anything more than the vaguest anti-corporatist stance. Likewise, I don't see how it's possible to claim that WW2 could not have happened if GM didn't manufacture/sell trucks in Nazi Germany but then again people really hate corporations.

Coca-Cola actively buys up groundwater around the world, meaning that their bottling operations directly impact the water supply of residents. This is a direct action for which they can be held accountable. Coca-Cola's contribution to growing obesity is a different question for which it is difficult to establish a direct chain of responsibility. It is silly to me to blame corporations for the latter when that is pretty much what they do, create and sell produt. You can have a problem with that without blaming them for causing everything they touch to wither.

boner confessor fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Dec 10, 2013

# ? Dec 10, 2013 21:28

tooterfish: Jul 13, 2013

tooterfish posted:

Pretending like corporations are entirely passive in this regard is either incredibly naive or wilfully ignorant.

United Fruit for starters. Sometimes the unethical stuff isn't just incidental. Corporations don't just exploit weak states to drive up their profits, many have (and still do) take an active role in perpetuating such states.

Sometimes leftists (as do others of all political stripes, don't want to offend anyone!) get in such a rush to prove how ideologically hardcore they are that they dogpile onto nonsense like the Streetcar Conspiracy.

United Fruit actively hosed with the politics of Latin American countries and called on the US Military to intervene in favor of pro-corporate interests. That is a Bad Thing, without a question. However, are they equally responsible for maliciously spreading harmful parasites and fungi that negatively impact American agriculture to boost their profits?

Just because bad things resulted from corporate action does not necessarily mean there was some cackling fat cat pulling the strings. That's all I'm saying.

# ? Dec 10, 2013 21:37

Grand Prize Winner: Feb 19, 2007

I agree. A lot of harm that corporations cause is the result of simple negligence rather than malice. But that negligence should be punished.

Grand Prize Winner posted:

I agree. A lot of harm that corporations cause is the result of simple negligence rather than malice. But that negligence should be punished.

It's a spectrum. Bhopal? Reparations are long overdue. IBM selling the Nazis computers to make their genocide more efficient? That's a stretch. GM selling buses when basically everyone in America agrees that buses are better than streetcars? Come on.

Grand Prize Winner posted:

How does the fact that the war would have happened anyway excuse GM?

Because it's silly to blame them for selling product to Bad People. This is a useless standard of culpability. I'm having a hard time thinking of any for profit organization which hasn't at some point been in business with either Bad People directly or a corp which has assumed Bad People status. It's a slippery slope which ends with 95% of people and organizations being tantamount to war criminals.

# ? Dec 10, 2013 21:57

Proust Malone: Apr 4, 2008

It's a stretch to blame them for stuff that happened before the war, but iirc they were allowed to keep money made during the war by their german subsidiary including profits from slave labor and were compensated for damage done to their factories which totally blows my mind.

# ? Dec 10, 2013 22:04

Grand Prize Winner: Feb 19, 2007

Crazy Joe Wilson posted:

Going back to the Puritan topic, as an American history teacher who gets to work with early colonial history, the Puritans have always fascinated me, but mostly for what happened to them after 1700. They arrived in what would become New England close to the mid-1600s, and their population stood at about 100,000 by the time of Metacom/King Philip's War, but after the the Salem Witch Trials and their loss of political power following the English Monarchy taking away their colonial charter (The one that let them restrict leadership to only people who belonged to the Puritan Church), they seem to just kind of disappear from historical record. Was New England's Puritan population swamped by other Protestant English moving over following the Witch Trials? Obviously there is still Protestantism in New England to this day, but Boston and Massachusetts are far more well-known for their Catholic population nowadays. I'm really curious about this, and if someone could illuminate the social and cultural changes in New England around 1700-1780 that'd be great.

Basically they became the Congregationalists, but their role as the major dissenters from Anglicanism was supplanted largely by Methodists and Baptists, and to a lesser extent Presbyterians, in the early-mid 19th century. There's a book called When Church Became Theatre that's specifically about the shifts in vernacular church architecture in the late 19th century, but the early chapters have a decent enough overview of New England public religion.

Alec Bald Snatch fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Dec 10, 2013

# ? Dec 10, 2013 22:07

anonumos: Jul 14, 2005; Fuck it.

Grand Prize Winner posted:

I agree. A lot of harm that corporations cause is the result of simple negligence rather than malice. But that negligence should be punished.

How does the fact that the war would have happened anyway excuse GM?

Well, the main thing is to stick them with the bill for externalized costs. They love externalizing costs, like Micky D's paying so little that their employee qualify for public assistance. I've heard it described as a massive subsidy to McDonald's, for which they pay very little in taxes.

It's been like this since before United Fruit; do you think UF paid a penny for their use of the US military forces in SA?

# ? Dec 10, 2013 22:22

Silver2195: Apr 4, 2012

comes along bort posted:

Basically they became the Congregationalists, but their role as the major dissenters from Anglicanism was supplanted largely by Methodists and Baptists, and to a lesser extent Presbyterians, in the early-mid 19th century. There's a book called When Church Became Theatre that's specifically about the shifts in vernacular church architecture in the late 19th century, but the early chapters have a decent enough overview of New England public religion.

To put it a different way, the Puritans became less and less Puritan over time, because Puritanism is unbearable.

# ? Dec 10, 2013 22:40

boner confessor: Apr 25, 2013; by R. Guyovich

Grand Prize Winner posted:

So you're saying that a corporation that provided material aid to the Nazis is in no way morally culpable for its actions?

They're morally culpable of selling trucks to the Nazis and then having horrific labor practices imposed on them by the corporatist Nazi state. This sets us down the slippery slope where basically every corporation and individual has a long lasting moral taint due to participating in our terrible economic system. GE, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Kodak, all Nazi collaborators: basically try to find a for-profit organization which hasn't done business with a horrible person.

And why stop there? Are you an American citizen who has paid taxes? Congrats on being morally culpable for the Iraq War! Everyone is terrible just for being alive. How is this a useful thing to discuss?

boner confessor fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Dec 10, 2013

# ? Dec 10, 2013 23:26

PittTheElder: Feb 13, 2012; Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

I feel like trying to assign moral agency to whole corporations (especially GM sized ones) is kind of dumb, because despite what SCOTUS might say, corporations aren't really people, and we shouldn't treat them like one. A much better idea would be to consider if individuals within those corporations were doing stuff they shouldn't have.

# ? Dec 10, 2013 23:31

Antwan3K: Mar 8, 2013

SnakePlissken posted:

There has to be a specific name for this rhetorical ploy. Can't think of it off the top of me.

It's called "Making a reasonable argument". Doesn't come up that often.

Corporations suck because they make it really easy to be evil, but the choices to be evil are still made by people. The corporation isn't to blame because it's not a person. The people at the corporation making those strategic decisions--not the schulbs in the factories--are to blame for those actions. And the lack of regulations for corporate ill-behavior, we can blame that on people, too, the politicians who are against such regulations and the people who vote for them.

# ? Dec 11, 2013 01:50

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

SnakePlissken posted:

There has to be a specific name for this rhetorical ploy. Can't think of it off the top of me.

I think you're looking for "tu quoque": "You think GM was evil for selling to the Nazis? Well, then you're evil for paying taxes!". Even if the arguer is correct that supporting the US government is evil, that doesn't address the claim of whether what GM did is evil.

I don't really see the point of handwaving away the sins of contractors who sell equipment to aggressive regimes. GM did a bad thing by selling to the Nazis. I do a bad thing by buying clothes produced by slave labor. Rather than turn everything into a useless moral gray zone like Popular Thug Drink is saying, reminding people about the exploitative system they're caught up in is a good way to push for changes to the system to keep that from happening.

# ? Dec 11, 2013 02:04

SnakePlissken: Dec 31, 2009; by zen death robot

I'm sorry for being snarky. PTD's av looks too much like a certain family member and every time I see it I go "Hell NO I'm not doing the drat dishes!"

# ? Dec 11, 2013 02:37

SnakePlissken: Dec 31, 2009; by zen death robot

VitalSigns posted:

I think you're looking for "tu quoque": "You think GM was evil for selling to the Nazis? Well, then you're evil for paying taxes!". Even if the arguer is correct that supporting the US government is evil, that doesn't address the claim of whether what GM did is evil.

I don't really see the point of handwaving away the sins of contractors who sell equipment to aggressive regimes. GM did a bad thing by selling to the Nazis. I do a bad thing by buying clothes produced by slave labor. Rather than turn everything into a useless moral gray zone like Popular Thug Drink is saying, reminding people about the exploitative system they're caught up in is a good way to push for changes to the system to keep that from happening.

And this is well put. I'd say the tu quoque is closest I could find at the most recognized aggregator of rhetorical tricks I know of offhand. Turning everything into a useless moral gray zone, as you put it, in order to not refute an argument but to effectively drown it is one of the biggest ones I come across.

# ? Dec 11, 2013 02:56

CharlestheHammer: Jun 26, 2011; YOU SAY MY POSTS ARE THE RAVINGS OF THE DUMBEST PERSON ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH BUT YOU YOURSELF ARE READING THEM. CURIOUS!

Obdicut posted:

It's called "Making a reasonable argument". Doesn't come up that often.

Its not really, misdirection is probably a better word. It tries to make the argument that if this is bad you are bad, assuming that because you do bad thing, it must be good. Which is silly. While not actually addressing the original complaint. Its actually a really common tactic that doesn't make sense as it requires you to assume that everything you do is good.

# ? Dec 11, 2013 03:07

Krispy Wafer: Jul 26, 2002; I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat; Grimey Drawer

What were American opinions about Germany before WW2? I know in WW1 there was a fair amount of support for Germany before we entered the war on the Allied side. If I recall correctly that wasn't as strong in 1939, but that didn't stop people like Charles Lindbergh from vocalizing their admiration for the 3rd Reich. So Hitler = Evil obviously wasn't as apparent then.

I don't mean to defend Ford, GM, or IBM - but in the context of our public neutrality are those companies wrong for supplying Hitler prior to our entry in the war? After 1941 it gets hazy since it's not like you can just stop doing business in a Facist economy. Yes, they were helping a government do terrible things to its citizens, but that never stopped them from doing business with the US either.

Crazy Joe Wilson posted:

...They arrived in what would become New England close to the mid-1600s, and their population stood at about 100,000 by the time of Metacom/King Philip's War...

One of my earliest descendants in America, John Frink was in the raiding party sent to kill King Phillip. His pistol misfired and an Indian took the fatal shot and got all the glory.

The Frinks did a little better with their guns in the Civil War where John O�Neille Frink was in the regiment that fired upon Stonewall Jackson, with one of the horses falling within 3 feet of him. Oops.

# ? Dec 11, 2013 03:23

AuntJemima: Jul 22, 2007

So I posted this in the Stupid/Small Questions Megathread but they told me to take it here.

I've always been very interested in America and its history and Americana type stuff. I've lived all my life in another country and went to a vocational school so I have not been in an academic setting since secondary school which was years ago. The history courses back then were all about the World Wars.
So what I'm getting at it is can anyone recommend me any American history documentaries, mini-series, books.. anything like that!

Thanks in advance!

# ? Dec 12, 2013 21:13

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

Ken Burns' The Civil War is a must watch documentary series.

# ? Dec 12, 2013 21:58

computer parts: Nov 18, 2010; PLEASE CLAP

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Ken Burns' The Civil War is a must watch documentary series.

Do not buy the Blu-ray if you are going to pick this up, as it crops the picture to make a widescreen image.

# ? Dec 12, 2013 21:59

Proust Malone: Apr 4, 2008

Ken burns is always awesome. Prohibition and baseball are also great.

You might also check out "The American Experience" series from pbs. Hour long treatments of various topics that are generally excellent.

# ? Dec 12, 2013 22:36

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

The HBO documentary series John Adams. Great footage taken from the trial of the soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre.

# ? Dec 12, 2013 22:54

Sharkie: Feb 4, 2013; by Fluffdaddy

cheerfullydrab posted:

Great footage taken from the trial of the soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre.

Come again?

On the other hand, googling that led me to this in the wikipedia article and now I really want to see it, at least this section:

quote:

In Episode 3, Adams travels to Europe during the war seeking alliances with foreign nations...It first shows his embassy with Benjamin Franklin in the court of Louis XVI of France. The old French nobility, who are in the last decade before being consumed by the French Revolution, are portrayed as effete and decadent. They meet cheerfully with Franklin, seeing him as a romantic figure, little noting the democratic infection he brings with him. Adams, on the other hand, is a plain spoken and faithful man (particularly to his wife), who finds himself out of his depth surrounded by an entertainment- and sex-driven degeneracy which nevertheless masks a highly sophisticated and subtle culture among the French elite...Franklin soon has Adams removed from any position of diplomatic authority in Paris

Ahaha, go home you stick-in-the-mud dork. Ben Franklin was a dick, but he knew how to have a good time, being a member of the Hellfire Club and everything.

# ? Dec 12, 2013 23:29

Amused to Death: Aug 10, 2009; google "The Night Witches", and prepare for

Ron Jeremy posted:

Ken burns is always awesome. Prohibition and baseball are also great.

You might also check out "The American Experience" series from pbs. Hour long treatments of various topics that are generally excellent.

Also to add, The Dust Bowl was really great.

I guess just watch every documentary Ken Burns has made.

# ? Dec 12, 2013 23:37

Schenck v. U.S.: Sep 8, 2010

Obdicut posted:

It's called "Making a reasonable argument". Doesn't come up that often.

I can see how it might seem reasonable if you didn't bother thinking about it very hard, but he's making a couple very basic errors that make a hash of what he's saying.

First he says this,

quote:

United Fruit actively hosed with the politics of Latin American countries and called on the US Military to intervene in favor of pro-corporate interests. That is a Bad Thing, without a question. However, are they equally responsible for maliciously spreading harmful parasites and fungi that negatively impact American agriculture to boost their profits?

If you discount the loaded use of "maliciously," the answer is "Yes"! If you actually study the history of United Fruit you will find that they were most definitely aware of the effects of monoculture banana cultivation in spreading Panama Disease, and they didn't care. They saw it happening in real time because they were tracking the damage it did to their banana harvests. They responded by gradually moving their cultivation operations from contaminated locations to new areas, bringing the disease with them. They were fully aware that this was happening, but because it was more profitable in the near term to perform this "slash-and-burn" banana cultivation, they did. not. care. Eventually they spread Panama Disease all over the planet and there was nowhere left, so they switched production from the Gros Michel variety to the less tasty but more resistant Cavendish banana. Yes, UFCo deliberately spread harmful parasites and fungi all over the world, with full knowledge of what they were doing and what the consequences would be.

The second thing he did is false equivalence,

EvanSchenck posted:

...

First of all, I agree that United Fruit is culpable for the spreading of disease. I think that was a particularly poor example to use.

The 'reasonable argument' to me is that corporations, as a group, are kind of automatically lovely, or allow for the shittiest possible decisions. There are 'good' or well-behaved corporations, but they're the incredible minority; most (large) corporations, past and present, act unethically in terms of labor relations, natural resource exploitation, subversion of government, etc. etc. These decisions are made by individuals at the corporations, but they're encouraged and enabled by the structure of corporations and, even more importantly, by the structure and sanction of laws of our society. I think blaming corporations is fixing the blame at an oddly certain level.

quote:

Diffusion of responsibility is not absolute. My grandfather voted for Richard Nixon so he shared to some small degree in responsibility for the bombing of Cambodia, but acting like that diminishes in some way the responsibility of people like Nixon and Kissinger is just loving obtuse.

The Cambodian bombings happened in in 1970, when Nixon was serving his first term. He'd campaigned on a 'secret plan' to end Vietnam. While that might have been facile and I could blame people for falling for it, I don't think much blame attaches at all in that case--but voting for him in re-election, after he'd engaged in those bombings, does act in some fashions as an 'endorsement' of it-- but as you say, it's a diffused bit of responsibility. It in no way diminishes Kissinger or Nixon, and I don't think that you can reasonable make the claim that Popular Thug Drink said it did, either. For me, blame or culpability doesn't diminish by distributing it or diffusing it.

So basically, I find group blame very difficult to assign, and with a corporation, I don't see any reason the blame would attach inside the corporation particularly without leaching outside it. The blame also therefore lies on our society, our system of laws, our judges, our politicians, and, distributed and diminished in magnitude, to the voters who enable that, to the workers who swallow conscience because they need a job.

Finally, the weird thing about corporate blame is that, since corporations can be eternal, stuff from the 50s gets brought up as though its relevant today. To me, the particular bad practices of the 20s and the 50s and the 80s all have people who push them, but moreover they all have a system that enables them, and that system is the problem. The system selects for CEOs who will make these sort of horrific and lovely decisions, and our system of laws allows that behavior--in fact, it encourages corporate ill-behavior. I think focusing on the the culpability of the corporations ignores the structural reasons for the hosed-up stuff, and weirdly buys into corporate personhood, into the fiction of corporation as identity.

# ? Dec 13, 2013 13:25

FAUXTON: Jun 2, 2005; spero che tu stia bene

Obdicut posted:

First of all, I agree that United Fruit is culpable for the spreading of disease. I think that was a particularly poor example to use.

The 'reasonable argument' to me is that corporations, as a group, are kind of automatically lovely, or allow for the shittiest possible decisions. There are 'good' or well-behaved corporations, but they're the incredible minority; most (large) corporations, past and present, act unethically in terms of labor relations, natural resource exploitation, subversion of government, etc. etc. These decisions are made by individuals at the corporations, but they're encouraged and enabled by the structure of corporations and, even more importantly, by the structure and sanction of laws of our society. I think blaming corporations is fixing the blame at an oddly certain level.

The Cambodian bombings happened in in 1970, when Nixon was serving his first term. He'd campaigned on a 'secret plan' to end Vietnam. While that might have been facile and I could blame people for falling for it, I don't think much blame attaches at all in that case--but voting for him in re-election, after he'd engaged in those bombings, does act in some fashions as an 'endorsement' of it-- but as you say, it's a diffused bit of responsibility. It in no way diminishes Kissinger or Nixon, and I don't think that you can reasonable make the claim that Popular Thug Drink said it did, either. For me, blame or culpability doesn't diminish by distributing it or diffusing it.

So basically, I find group blame very difficult to assign, and with a corporation, I don't see any reason the blame would attach inside the corporation particularly without leaching outside it. The blame also therefore lies on our society, our system of laws, our judges, our politicians, and, distributed and diminished in magnitude, to the voters who enable that, to the workers who swallow conscience because they need a job.

Finally, the weird thing about corporate blame is that, since corporations can be eternal, stuff from the 50s gets brought up as though its relevant today. To me, the particular bad practices of the 20s and the 50s and the 80s all have people who push them, but moreover they all have a system that enables them, and that system is the problem. The system selects for CEOs who will make these sort of horrific and lovely decisions, and our system of laws allows that behavior--in fact, it encourages corporate ill-behavior. I think focusing on the the culpability of the corporations ignores the structural reasons for the hosed-up stuff, and weirdly buys into corporate personhood, into the fiction of corporation as identity.

I don't think the idea that (for example) United Carbide as a business entity being culpable for thousands of deaths and ongoing environmental hazards in Bhopal really requires an acceptance of any abstraction of the corporation outside of using it as a label under which many levels of evil were ignored, condoned, and committed. If it's reasonable to argue that there is a culture in international corporate business which enables the kinds of decisions that lead to safety devices being sabotaged and willfully overlooked in regular maintenance, then it would almost certainly follow that using a corporation as a label for a quanta of that culture (BP or Enron or Bear Stearns as another example) is perfectly valid and a much better illustration of how the proliferation of a culture of ignorance, incompetence, and malice can render a corporation at large culpable for actions committed under its logo. From there you can argue the innocence of individuals separately, but much in the same way 'just following orders' is no defense, 'my boss greenlighted it' doesn't fly.

# ? Dec 13, 2013 14:43

Obdicut: May 15, 2012; "What election?"

The Entire Universe posted:

I don't think the idea that (for example) United Carbide as a business entity being culpable for thousands of deaths and ongoing environmental hazards in Bhopal really requires an acceptance of any abstraction of the corporation outside of using it as a label under which many levels of evil were ignored, condoned, and committed. If it's reasonable to argue that there is a culture in international corporate business which enables the kinds of decisions that lead to safety devices being sabotaged and willfully overlooked in regular maintenance, then it would almost certainly follow that using a corporation as a label for a quanta of that culture (BP or Enron or Bear Stearns as another example) is perfectly valid and a much better illustration of how the proliferation of a culture of ignorance, incompetence, and malice can render a corporation at large culpable for actions committed under its logo. From there you can argue the innocence of individuals separately, but much in the same way 'just following orders' is no defense, 'my boss greenlighted it' doesn't fly.

I don't know what you mean by 'quanta of culture'. I'm not arguing the innocence of any individuals, either, as I thought I made clear--I think that even at the lowest level, the janitor at Halliburton who really needs the job to live and eat, is in a very tiny minor way culpable.

What I'm more saying is "Nearly everything in our legal system, or culture, and our society says that exploiting people and resources and distributing harm to the commons is perfectly okay behavior, at worst a 'necessary evil'."

# ? Dec 13, 2013 14:48

FAUXTON: Jun 2, 2005; spero che tu stia bene

Obdicut posted:

I don't know what you mean by 'quanta of culture'. I'm not arguing the innocence of any individuals, either, as I thought I made clear--I think that even at the lowest level, the janitor at Halliburton who really needs the job to live and eat, is in a very tiny minor way culpable.

What I'm more saying is "Nearly everything in our legal system, or culture, and our society says that exploiting people and resources and distributing harm to the commons is perfectly okay behavior, at worst a 'necessary evil'."

By quanta, I mean corporations as semi discrete constituent culture-parts of the American corporatist social culture. You can blame America for enabling the kind of behavior corporations engage in, and blame the corporation for proliferating the beliefs and practices that constitute that behavior. Taken separately, each can be considered their own culture. Taken together they are virtually symbiotic - without the proliferation of the sociopathic mindset within the corporation the public would not be as amenable, willfully ignorant, or quick to condone certain practices as 'the cost of doing business.'

It's a lot like the photon - it's discretely identifiable as an individual corporation's practices and rationale but also part of the broad pattern present in the American culture. Not to mention hard to detect since the public is more than happy to believe a corporation is simultaneously present for purposes of civil rights and absent for purposes of civil responsibilities/criminal liabilities.

# ? Dec 13, 2013 15:48

Schenck v. U.S.: Sep 8, 2010

Obdicut posted:

The 'reasonable argument' to me is that corporations, as a group, are kind of automatically lovely, or allow for the shittiest possible decisions. There are 'good' or well-behaved corporations, but they're the incredible minority; most (large) corporations, past and present, act unethically in terms of labor relations, natural resource exploitation, subversion of government, etc. etc. These decisions are made by individuals at the corporations, but they're encouraged and enabled by the structure of corporations and, even more importantly, by the structure and sanction of laws of our society. I think blaming corporations is fixing the blame at an oddly certain level.

Do you think that structure of society just creates itself spontaneously? Do you think that these entities have no influence over the social and legal environment they move in?

quote:

It in no way diminishes Kissinger or Nixon, and I don't think that you can reasonable make the claim that Popular Thug Drink said it did, either. For me, blame or culpability doesn't diminish by distributing it or diffusing it.

Again, the quoted portion of what he wrote is

quote:

And why stop there? Are you an American citizen who has paid taxes? Congrats on being morally culpable for the Iraq War! Everyone is terrible just for being alive. How is this a useful thing to discuss?

He is obviously representing that if everybody is responsible, than nobody is responsible and we shouldn't even bother to discuss it because it is not "useful." This makes no sense, because some people have more power and influence over what happens in the world than others do. An American citizen who has paid taxes is a little morally culpable for the Iraq War, whereas somebody who served in the Bush administration is a lot culpable.

quote:

So basically, I find group blame very difficult to assign, and with a corporation, I don't see any reason the blame would attach inside the corporation particularly without leaching outside it. The blame also therefore lies on our society, our system of laws, our judges, our politicians, and, distributed and diminished in magnitude, to the voters who enable that, to the workers who swallow conscience because they need a job.

Like I tried to say above, this moaning about "the system" tends to obscure the fact that things can be changed by deliberate policy. There's no reason that a company like HSBC should make billions of dollars behaving illegally, chip off a portion of those illegal gains in fines to regulators, and still make a profit. There's no reason that certain corporations should be allowed to grow to such a size that they are too structurally important to punish. There's no reason that a whole host of immoral and unethical behaviors typical of corporations should be legal. No reason, except that people and institutions with a lot of power use it to manipulate "the system" to their advantage.

# ? Dec 13, 2013 19:41

Obdicut: May 15, 2012; "What election?"

EvanSchenck posted:

Do you think that structure of society just creates itself spontaneously? Do you think that these entities have no influence over the social and legal environment they move in?

I don't think that society creates itself spontaneously, no. I don't think that entities in a society have no influence, either. Hopefully that clears that up.

quote:

He is obviously representing that if everybody is responsible, than nobody is responsible and we shouldn't even bother to discuss it because it is not "useful." This makes no sense, because some people have more power and influence over what happens in the world than others do. An American citizen who has paid taxes is a little morally culpable for the Iraq War, whereas somebody who served in the Bush administration is a lot culpable.

I don't think it's useful to distinguish between a 'good capitalist' and a 'bad capitalist' in terms of how they act; e.g. polluting or choosing not to, selling poo poo to terrible countries or not. I think my major disconnect with you is that I don't think 'culpability' is at all useful. I don't think, to borrow your phrase, that Cheney created himself spontaneously, either. The people who served in the Bush administration got there through a complex series of interactions, and their own personal efforts weren't primary in getting them there, or creating the conditions that allowed them to act as they did once they were there.

quote:

Like I tried to say above, this moaning about "the system" tends to obscure the fact that things can be changed by deliberate policy. There's no reason that a company like HSBC should make billions of dollars behaving illegally, chip off a portion of those illegal gains in fines to regulators, and still make a profit. There's no reason that certain corporations should be allowed to grow to such a size that they are too structurally important to punish. There's no reason that a whole host of immoral and unethical behaviors typical of corporations should be legal. No reason, except that people and institutions with a lot of power use it to manipulate "the system" to their advantage.

I'm sorry, but I can't distinguish between 'this moaning about 'the system'" and the series of complaints that you just laid out about the system. The system is the legality of these behaviors; until that changes, these behaviors will occur. Some corporations might rise above those behaviors on their own, but you can't depend on that in any way shape and form. I don't agree that the sole reason lies with a current set of people in power manipulating the system, I think that the system itself is set up so that those actions are the actual function of the system, that is the system operating as designed. I think that the system needs to change because it selects for and rewards those behaviors, and yes, a very large part of that is that it rewards corporations influencing politics, making this a very difficult structural problem to solve.

I can 'blame' WalMart for lobbying and being horribly unethical, but I don't feel that blame really does anything or goes anywhere. The problem is not that WalMart lobbies, it's that WalMart is allowed to lobby. WalMart lobbies, among other reasons, to preserve its ability to lobby, but it is still that structure that is the problem and not the actual corporation in and of itself.

I think that this may simply be a perspective rather than a substantive disagreement, but I'm not entirely sure. It's finals week and my head is chock-a-block full of the various essays I'm writing, so I may have been less than coherent. Hopefully it's still useful in understanding my point of view.

# ? Dec 13, 2013 20:24

Paper With Lines: Aug 21, 2013; The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!

Amused to Death posted:

Also to add, The Dust Bowl was really great.

I guess just watch every documentary Ken Burns has made.

Doesn't it usually seem sort of weird for the video format? It is actors talking and pictures of the subject material. I could read it faster than it takes to watch it.

# ? Dec 13, 2013 23:03

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Paper With Lines posted:

Doesn't it usually seem sort of weird for the video format? It is actors talking and pictures of the subject material. I could read it faster than it takes to watch it.

It's a solid way to do that sort of thing, and it's been around for at least a half-century now. The Great War was done in that style back in 1964 and it's still a brilliant documentary series for anyone interested in WWI.

# ? Dec 13, 2013 23:15

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Obdicut posted:

I'm not arguing the innocence of any individuals, either, as I thought I made clear--I think that even at the lowest level, the janitor at Halliburton who really needs the job to live and eat, is in a very tiny minor way culpable.

I don't see how the janitor is culpable. The land, resources, and machinery are owned by a wealthy elite, and the janitor has no way to support himself without selling his labor to someone. A janitor at Union Carbide in America has no knowledge or power over the safety conditions in India. If he stopped working on his own, it would make no difference, the company would hire another janitor, and he would starve. I don't think it's fair to blame someone for not pointlessly martyring himself. The CEO on the other hand, does have power over conditions. He could have prevented it, but he let regulations slide to have better quarterly profit numbers and improve the value of his stock options. If the board had let him go, he already has more than enough wealth to live in luxury the rest of his life.

I know you don't deny that the people who made the decisions and who are wealthy enough not to be coerced by the system are mainly responsible. But I don't see how that carries over to the janitor who has no power and no meaningful choice about whether he sells his labor or to whom, and would literally die if he refused to follow the system. Might as well blame the people at Bhopal for not being willing to die storming the gates of the chemical plant at that point.

VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Dec 14, 2013

# ? Dec 14, 2013 19:22

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# ? Jun 10, 2024 12:12

BlueBlazer: Apr 1, 2010

VitalSigns posted:

I know you don't deny that the people who made the decisions and who are wealthy enough not to be coerced by the system are mainly responsible. But I don't see how that carries over to the janitor who has no power and no meaningful choice about whether he sells his labor or to whom, and would literally die if he refused to follow the system. Might as well blame the people at Bhopal for not being willing to die storming the gates of the chemical plant at that point.

Until someone is actually held responsible at any point in this century its going to be the faceless corporation as a whole. You would think that getting payed extravagant amount of money to be an executive, someone who makes and institutes the most important decisions, should be the one where the buck stops. You pay him so much money to take those risks, well you would think those reward/risk ratios should leave him culpable at the end of the day. You see this in Japan, but it is very absent in American Corporation.

Every defense of corporate negligence/malice I've seen revolves around the burden of proof that the executive had any role to play in said negligence....

# ? Dec 14, 2013 19:42

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > General American History Thread - Finding new things to be ashamed about

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