Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

icij.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 459 posts

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#231

Post by Buttes »

aslkdjaslkdj wrote: post #227
erentz wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair a lot were clamoring behind Bernie Sanders. But Hillary bent the DNC to do some fairly corrupt shit and so you got Trump. The democrats are still trapped by this neolib-technocrat-west-wing fantasy-land where the best person at debating wins regardless of the fact they don’t actually stand for anything.

What corrupt shit? What specific action did the DNC do that caused Bernie to lose?

Hillary won like every southern state, the Bernie folks are living in fantasy land if they think the DNC could control that outcome.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#232

Post by gaius »

sgt101 wrote: post #194
dqpb wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rights only exist in the context of a system that enforces or supports them.

I don't agree. Some rights are fundamental - the people who had their lives stolen by trans Atlantic slaving had their lives stolen. Their rights were violated. The fact that the social and political system of the time conspired to facilitate that doesn't make it less true.

They had their lives stolen before that - they were already slaves by the time the Western slave traders bought them from their local, African slave owners.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#233

Post by dsacco »

sgt101 wrote: post #194
dqpb wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rights only exist in the context of a system that enforces or supports them.

I don't agree. Some rights are fundamental - the people who had their lives stolen by trans Atlantic slaving had their lives stolen. Their rights were violated. The fact that the social and political system of the time conspired to facilitate that doesn't make it less true.

I think the parent commenter was trying to say that rights only exist as a productive concept when other people agree with them.

You can argue that certain rights are fundamental, but it doesn’t mean anything if most people disagree with you. Whether or not rights are “fundamental” (i.e. exist outside of an enforcement structure) not a useful distinction, because it’s meaningless - whether or not you get to exercise that right has nothing to do with your claim being correct, it has to do with other people agreeing and sanctioning your behavior.

Like most normative claims, personal rights do not really exist coherently if you don’t first define them in the context of a relationship. This is demonstrably the case because the idea of a right would be redundant or meaningless if it were not for an adversary threatening that right in the first place.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#234

Post by java_script »

avar wrote: post #199

A publication using "the 1%" in the context of "the global elite" means what exactly? A salary slightly north of $30k/yr lands you in the global elite club of the 1%.

Are you an AI? If so, try this on for size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_speech

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#235

Post by andrepd »

danharaj wrote: post #96
joelrunyon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the corporation is still the symptom. What we should be doing is insulating the government from outside influence.

A government insulated from outside influence no longer governs.

I don't understand. What do you mean by this?

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#236

Post by maus42 »

haaen wrote: post #103

Comment from economist Tyler Cowen when the same group of journalists released the Panama papers: Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers? Let’s say a group of criminal defense lawyers kept a database of their confidential conversations with their clients. That would include clients charged with murder, robbery, DUI, drug abuse, and so on. In turn, a hacker would break into that database and post the informat…

>Yet somehow many of us approve when the victims are wealthy and higher status

Of course we do. What does, exactly, the level of wealth and status we are talking about entail?

Owners and executives of a large multinational firm can wield more than enough power to influence governments. Some of these people of wealth and status are the governments. (The names revealed in the Panama papers toppled the government of Iceland.)

That's at least one order of magnitude different power dynamics than in case of your regular person charged with robbery or DUI. (Also, we might view the case of hacker revealing conversations of people charged with DUIs if the conversations constitute evidence about that particular part of machinery of justice system not to be working as intended.)

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#237

Post by nickbauman »

nickpp wrote: post #154
nickbauman wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The terms "capitalism" and for that matter "communism" are labels that have lost almost all meaning. The USSR was a dictatorship as is Russia today. "Capitalism" was a term coined by Karl Marx as a critique of 19th century industrial England. Calling yourself a "capitalist" is like calling yourself a "alienist". It's an archaic term and imprecise at best.

Don’t do that. We know exactly what capitalism is and what communism is. Some of us lived under both. And the fact that communism is the favorite system of dictatorship is no coincidence: communism itself is an autocracy.

The USSR loved to use communist slogans but the implementation was pure autocracy.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#238

Post by kharms »

haaen wrote: post #103

Comment from economist Tyler Cowen when the same group of journalists released the Panama papers: Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers? Let’s say a group of criminal defense lawyers kept a database of their confidential conversations with their clients. That would include clients charged with murder, robbery, DUI, drug abuse, and so on. In turn, a hacker would break into that database and post the informat…

This argument falls apart when you extend it a little bit further.

Suppose that same public defender got his client off, and in their last conversation his client tells him "thanks! I'm going to go rob a bank." Now that public defender would be both legally and ethically obligated to report said crime.

Why? Because the default state is this - if you know of a crime, you are obligated to report it. The public defender example is the exception we carved out because we as a society believe it's required for a fair trial. Not so for money laundering.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#239

Post by anigbrowl »

icelancer wrote: post #208
wfo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we decide corporations have no obligation to be moral or decent, they naturally will behave as we expect. If we expect and demand (and punish the absence of) more, we can get more. Corporations are made up of people, and people are fully capable of not committing rampant constant fraud. Spending thousands of dollars to avoid their moral tax obligations instead of paying is in my view fraud and corruption; the fact…

What you are asking for is vigiliantism and extralegal actions against corporate persons and the people that make up these corporations. There's a lot of reasons why those things are considered pretty bad. I also find it interesting that you say: "Corporations are made up of people, and people are fully capable of not committing rampant constant fraud." What are our local, state, and federal governments made up of, t…

GP made no such call to extralegal action. Don't make false allegations like that please.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#240

Post by grondilu »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #223
grondilu wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't we all have the right to a basic level of livelihood? You have the right to it, but you're not entitled to it. To me, having the right to do something means you can't be prosecuted for doing it. It doesn't mean that society must help you.

Ok, let's set aside for a moment your personal politics, since compassion is clearly not a concept you're likely to grasp right now. As a practical matter, what do you think happens to any society that suffers a class divide severe enough that (a) the majority of the citizenry ends up in the underclass and (b) being in the underclass sucks badly enough to really piss people off? Societies need to take care of their c…

> Societies need to take care of their citizens and ensure they receive, if nothing else, fair treatment under law and approximately equal opportunity.

I'm not sure what you mean by "approximately equal opportunity", since the circumstances of life are so different it seems delusional to me to hope for equal opportunities for everyone.

But I do agree on the concept of fair treatment under law, and I believe it's a fundamental basis for the notion of justice.

I just don't believe poverty necessarily results from any unfair treatment, and that as such its prevention or mitigation is not society's duty.

Post reply on HN