211–220 of 289 posts
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If you did that, you couldn't take US money either. Especially now that we've seen Trump and his friends, does anybody really consider them better than any other powerhungry folks?
Can you show me the list of President Trump's human rights abuses ?
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Same answer: simple avarice. There is a lot of Saudi money and they are willing to invest it. And their money is just as good for hiring programmers and renting servers as anyone else's.
yep kind of confused to. The silicon valley is a for-profit sector, when they write "diversity, inclusiveness, fairness" and so forth on their banners they are very much qualifying this within a business context. People need to be a little more honest and accept that those slogans are marketing messages, nobody in the valley is seriously going to turn an investment away for moral reasons
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> And their money is just as good for hiring programmers and renting servers as anyone else's. maybe you didn't mean it this way, but i was struck by the nonchalance of this statement, as if being able to spend money justifies taking the investment. and i presume that's exactly why the article was written, to question that kind of stance. now i love tech, and will defend our ability to progress and advance and make n…
> but none of us gets a free pass from morality, not even in business. What? It's certainly not the business role to make any moral decisions - while we don't yet have true simple responsibility principle in our society, we're thankfully have some separation of responsibility. If you think that a certain country is immoral and we shouldn't do business with it, lobby for sanctions - this way all businesses will have t…
You forget that businesses don't make decisions at all. A business is not a person, it has no capability to make decisions. The employees that work for the company make the decisions, and they certainly have an obligation to behave ethically.
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Selling weapons to Saudis has been going on for decades, Trump, Obama, Clinton, Bush... all have been selling them weapons for billions of dollars. It's pretty big hypocrisy of US, on one hand you consider Iran the most evil nation state in the world (or at least ME region) and have been sanctioning them for decades (with slight easing of that approach recently), on the other hand nobody bats an eye for selling weapo…
> I never could understand this big glaring hypocrisy from my European point of view. Surely you're joking. All the major European nations have been masters of exactly what you're describing for centuries. It has been historically routine European behavior. There are plenty of modern examples of it. See: the French, UK and German relationship with Iraq pre Gulf War and their assistance with Iraq vs Iran. Germany mass…
Only US is capable of invading almost any country it wants relatively easily due to its huge navy and aircraft and military bases all over the world. With its huge economy only US can really put meaningful sanctions on foreign countries (US navy basically singlehandedly controls international maritime trade). Notice that almost all sanctions are led by US as EU just nods in agreement and does whatever US tells them to do.
So similar hypocrisy from European countries is less dangerous but US with its power akin to British Empire before can literally rewrite borders around the world and overthrow governments at whim. So when US says Saudi Arabia is an ally and Iran is enemy, that dictates the policy of the whole western world basically.
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yep kind of confused to. The silicon valley is a for-profit sector, when they write "diversity, inclusiveness, fairness" and so forth on their banners they are very much qualifying this within a business context. People need to be a little more honest and accept that those slogans are marketing messages, nobody in the valley is seriously going to turn an investment away for moral reasons
I took that as people need to be a little more honest and accept that those slogans are lies and bullshit. This kind of attitude is exactly the problem. Sure, they are for profit, but since when is that the only thing that matters? I would never knowingly take blood money from a dictator, even if it meant I lived an impoverished life. If the company I worked for took such money, I would begin looking for alternate em…
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classic whatabout-ism that doesn't hold up to scrutiny, and more importantly doesn't matter. "America is also bad!" would not be a defense to selling chemical weapons to Hussein. It's not a defense to helping build the Great Firewall. Your actions' consequences are your fault.
It's not whatabout-ism. The question was why is Saudi money accepted. Human-rights violations is totally irrelevant. If it were a leading concern then companies couldn't accept American money either. SpaceX basically couldn't exist. Humans rights is about political power nothing else. Saudis are already dancing to the USA's tune so the US doesn't roll out the human rights and democracy trope. Instead they trade.
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I kind of agree with you, but I think you muddy your argument by getting into the weeds somewhat. For me this whole thing is pretty simple - where do you draw your line? I mean, off the top of my head here's a rough list, in my extremely rough estimation, of human rights offenders from bad to good: badness country 100% DPRK 90% Saudi Arabia 80% Dubai 70% Russia 60% China 50% USA 40% India 30% Japan 20% Australia 10%…
And how do we make countries high up on that list go down? Economic isolationism surely isn't the answer - seeing as North Korea is #1 on that list. Notice that the countries lowest on your list of badness have the closest ties to Western countries (with the exception of Antarctica). Saudi Arabia becoming more closely tied economically to Western countries is an opportunity to lessen its "badness" on your scale. Rece…
Take my home country Norway, since we are on the list ;-) It is one of the richest countries in the world as well as most equal which tends to lower corruption. Poverty and inequality raise it.
But of course history and culture matters too. Norwegians have had a reputation for honesty for hundreds of years. In some ways it is self perpetuating. There was a story about a Norwegian sailor who had cheated a prostitute in a foreign city. This angered the other Norwegian sailors who made him go back to her next time the landed to apologize and pay her compensation. To them this guy was risking the reputation of all Norwegian sailors. Something they benefitted well from.
When you got a reputation you become invested in it.
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>The money from regimes that have been criticized for their human rights records TBF the US well and truly falls into that category too.
classic whatabout-ism that doesn't hold up to scrutiny, and more importantly doesn't matter. "America is also bad!" would not be a defense to selling chemical weapons to Hussein. It's not a defense to helping build the Great Firewall. Your actions' consequences are your fault.
Ah, but America has also done this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riegle_Report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War#Iraq_2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq%E2%80%93United_States_rel...
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If you did that, you couldn't take US money either. Especially now that we've seen Trump and his friends, does anybody really consider them better than any other powerhungry folks?
Can you show me the list of President Trump's human rights abuses ?
He has already publicly complained that he can’t use the FBI for whatever he wants to, like going after his political opponents.
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You can't think of any other reasons apart from racism why people would think differently of Saudi Arabia vs Norway?
You mean aside from tarring all Muslims or all Saudis as the same as ISIS (a millennial cult) and Norway isn't as pure as you might think - Scandinavia kept on with eugenics long after the rest of the world recoiled in horror