MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics
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Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics
#2Living ethically is very expensive, as you often have to turn down generous but unethical offers.
I am not surprised about MIT's behaviour by the way. As long as top-level education stays private and has to hunt for funding, things like this will always happen.
Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics
#3Living ethically is very expensive, as you often have to turn down generous but unethical offers. I am not surprised about MIT's behaviour by the way. As long as top-level education stays private and has to hunt for funding, things like this will always happen.
Does MIT really need to "hunt for funding"? My impression is that their endowment is enormous.
Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics
#4A lot of righteous, eloquent fury here. I had nearly forgotten about the foxconn suicides, and now that I think about it I don't remember anything really happening except nets being put up.
Louis CK (RIP our opinion of him, but still) put it pretty well once, something along the lines of "slavery built everything we love. We just throw human death and suffering at a thing until it's done. There's no end to what you can do when you don't give a fuck about a certain group of people. You can have candles and horses and be a little kinder to eachother, or you can leverage the endless suffering of someone really far away so you can leave a mean comment on someone's youtube video while you take a shit."
Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics
#5Living ethically is very expensive, as you often have to turn down generous but unethical offers. I am not surprised about MIT's behaviour by the way. As long as top-level education stays private and has to hunt for funding, things like this will always happen.
Does MIT really need to "hunt for funding"? My impression is that their endowment is enormous.
A huge amount of the money in big endowments comes from various unsavory characters. The names of buildings at famous universities are a Who’s Who of famous fortunes built on slavery, war profiteering, drug running, child labor, wage theft and other worker abuse, large-scale environmental destruction, bribes and kickbacks, fraud, outright theft, etc.
The Saudis are a particularly unsavory monarchy (torture, arbitrary imprisonment, lack of basic political rights, foreign assassinations, sponsorship of terrorism, direct military attacks on foreign civilians, etc.), but not fundamentally different from many historical donors.
Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics
#6They should have stuck to attacking MBS, and brought up the fact that the 9/11 hijackers had direct support from Saudi diplomatic personnel.
Attacking Apple for providing well above market pay for jobs that rescue chinese laborers from brutal and dangerous rural farm jobs just makes the writer sound entitled.
Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics
#7Mbs is not trying to make himself look like a positive transformative figure, he actually is one. The war in Yemen is equally the fault of Saudi Arabia and Iran but I don't hear anyone calling for sanctions on Iran. I am astounded that such ignorance could come from one of the worlds pillars of higher education. Consolidation of power such as that recently performed by mbs is routine and it was done in a very humane way indeed compared to other instances. When you consider that not properly consolidating power could lead to the compromising of the state and perhaps set the groundwork for the destruction of the state, his actions seem quite reasonable
Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics
#8Living ethically is very expensive, as you often have to turn down generous but unethical offers. I am not surprised about MIT's behaviour by the way. As long as top-level education stays private and has to hunt for funding, things like this will always happen.
Though whether an unethical offer is generous or a rip-off depends on how much you value you place on the personal integrity you have to trade for it.
Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics
#9A lot of righteous, eloquent fury here. I had nearly forgotten about the foxconn suicides, and now that I think about it I don't remember anything really happening except nets being put up. Louis CK (RIP our opinion of him, but still) put it pretty well once, something along the lines of "slavery built everything we love. We just throw human death and suffering at a thing until it's done. There's no end to what you c…
Apparently (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides), the suicide rate at Foxconn during that period was lower than the overall Chinese or US suicide rate.
Re: MIT's student newspaper criticizes MIT's convenience-based ethics
#10Mbs is not trying to make himself look like a positive transformative figure, he actually is one. The war in Yemen is equally the fault of Saudi Arabia and Iran but I don't hear anyone calling for sanctions on Iran. I am astounded that such ignorance could come from one of the worlds pillars of higher education. Consolidation of power such as that recently performed by mbs is routine and it was done in a very humane…
> I don't hear anyone calling for sanctions on Iran
You're not listening very hard then.