51–60 of 89 posts
"...Google execs all work for their shareholders, in a psychotic "market system" in which the myth of "fiduciary duty" is said to require companies to hurt us right up to the point where the harms they inflict on the world cost them more than the additional profits those harms deliver" Nailed it.
Not really. The idea that "fiduciary duty" requires companies to maximize shareholder value is a pernicious Internet myth.
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Would you be assuaged if it was titled "Ad-tech is police state tech"?
I think that would definitely make it a more precise polemic, but the incorrect use of the word seems more of a symptom of the author's sloppiness than anything else.
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Fiduciary duty isn't a myth! It just doesn't mean what people claim it means.
Will you enlighten us?
It gained popularity in corporate governance since then but it’s not a legal requirement it’s a shareholder preference. But that preference is violated all the time.
People often cite a 1919 era case from Henry ford because it has a pithy statement but the court in that case explicitly upheld many of the decisions Ford made that violated the principle.
That is, there is no law or precedent that requires corporate officers to only consider shareholders.
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I'm open to another definition that attempts to faithfully capture the general dynamics of fascism, and avoids the trap of pigeonholing the term into a few specific movements that are now safely in the past.
Basing the definition on actual examples of fascist movements is not pigeonholing, it's being accurate.
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> Fascism, at least as the Nazi's defined and implemented it, is the belief that a socialist economy will work when the people have a similar genetic likeness. Wrong. You can read Umberto Eco's essay "Ur-Fascism" to have a more informed view.
It's available from its original publisher the New York Review of Books: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/>
If paywalled, also at The Anarchist Library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...>.
Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Facism explores the concept in more detail, at book length. Those looking for a specific definition might prefer to skip forward to Chapter 8, "What Is Fascism?"
https://files.libcom.org/files/Robert%20O.%20Paxton-The%20An...>
Why was this flagged? And, there's no vouch option Yes, Thiel openly says surveillance tech is the anti-Christ. Then, he goes on to build the tech. The frustrating thing is seeing it happen in real-time and knowing you can't inform or educate enough people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918548>