If big companies face no consequences, then our society will fall apart. They have ruined millions of lives and are responsible for a large portion of the 450k overdose deaths from 1999 to 2018.
It amounts to literal gambling with people's lives and the individuals responsible face almost no risk. The worst thing that happens is that their company has to pay a big fine. Someone who steals a car will face a multi year federal sentence. Who had the biggest negative impact on society, the dude that stole a car or the people responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths?
>If big companies face no consequences, then our society will fall apart.
It currently is and I don't see any sign of it stopping. The foundation was laid in the 80s, the roof fell in on January 6th, and the Democrats don't have enough of a spine to actually fix the problem because Republicans keep calling them mean names.
The fault in our society is not that one party is bad and the other party it's good, it's that both parties think that about each other and believe a whole bunch of distortions based on the extremes of either party. Rs think Ds are destroying our society just as much as Ds think Rs are doing the same. Both sides are vilifying Is for not taking enough of a stand on The Issues That Will End The World TM.
The only way out is to fix that mutual misunderstanding, and to stop destroying the neutral space where that misunderstanding can be mended.
I'd love it if whenever politics comes up on HN, we started brainstorming ways to do that, instead of amplifying the us vs. them rhetoric that is too prevalent elsewhere.
Both parties are bad because only bad parties can succeed in our bad system. Also because they're basically identical. They are ants contending over a postage stamp, on a continent of political possibility. The only thing we can expect them to do is what they've already been paid by lobbyists to do before. That's why CARES Act is more of the same, except worse, that we already saw in the 2008-9 "bailouts". The next time most Americans suffer some easily foreseeable disaster, we can be sure that billionaires will feast even more and regular people will be helped even less.
There's no logical reason to be fighting seven wars, having 5% of the world's population but 25% of its prisoners and 20% of its covid deaths... and 800 billionaires. Our polity is shit. We're not in a local maxima. Literally any possible change would be for the better. The system we have cannot be changed via the methods it allows, however. Juvenile pleas for understanding only prolong our misery.
I agree with most of what you're saying. There's a huge space of possibilities that are completely invisible to the current system. But I disagree weakly with the second to last sentence, and strongly with the last sentence.
The system we have cannot be changed via the methods it allows, however.
Not all at once, that's for sure. But the right small changes early on can lead to very large changes later. Some of those are possible, like voting methods other than first-past-the-post or instant-runoff. Some of them are in the direct control of people who visit HN, like the nature of social networking algorithms, and the metrics chosen to optimize them.
Juvenile pleas for understanding only prolong our misery.
For what it's worth, when I was a teenager, I was far less interested in understanding or compromise. That was about two decades ago. It's only after living in many, many different places as an adult that I think that "understanding" is not only possible, but necessary. My perspective now is anything but juvenile.
When I'm saying we need to bridge the gap between left and right, I'm not saying we need to preserve the status quo exactly as it is. I'm saying that not doing so will practically guarantee that all sides end up worse than the status quo.
Changes for the better will necessarily be extreme. If that weren't the case, we would have found a way to accomplish them already. Your "conservative" aunt won't like the changes we need any more than your "liberal" uncle will. News media firms are owned by people who like and propagandize in favor of the current system. It isn't important that all Americans like each other. In our current situation, 95% of Americans share certain interests even though they are culturally opposed. They could work together without liking each other.
After annoying powerful interests for decades, Martin Luther King Jr. finally tried to unite poor blacks with poor whites, not because they liked each other but because they shared common interests. He was assassinated within five months. TPTB can abide less racism, but not more class solidarity.
> Changes for the better will necessarily be extreme.
It’s long been my loosely held belief that _extreme_ change to a political system will _necessarily_ harm the average citizen. I think history has shown that to be true fairly consistently.
sometimes the short term harm inflicted on a few is worth the benefits it will bring society in the long term
"Our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?"
But who among us has the moral authority to claim which harm is okay on which few? I remain convinced that the path to sustainable progress does not lie in the direction of extremes. Push too hard too fast, and you both amplify your opposition, and risk pushing in the wrong direction.
But the great thing is we can all disagree on that, and still agree to work together where we can.
We are constantly gaslit by the war media, so there is a difference between perception and reality. It would not be extreme in any real sense to stop fighting all or even some of our stupid murderous wars. It wouldn't be difficult; we could just... stop. Yet every time there is a suggestion to stop antagonizing Russia or China, or stop attempting to depose every Latin American leader who isn't a right-wing hardliner, or relax the economic sanctions imposed on a third of humanity, or just accept that Near Eastern nations are going to build the pipelines they choose to build where they choose to build them, we are subjected to intense campaigns of sky-is-falling fear-the-brown-people bullshit.
It would not be extreme in any real sense to give labor unions more power, or to imprison fewer people, or to end drug prohibition, or to stop brutalizing undocumented immigrants, or to have less racism enforced by our bureaucracies, or to reign in abusive social media firms, or to provide adequate health care to everyone. All of these things have already been done in particular states and municipalities. Large numbers of Americans already support these things. Even so, armies of Chickens Little lie in wait to assail those who reasonably suggest further improvements.
We got in this position by gradual "sustainable" steps. Shit runs downhill. If everything continues to change in the way it has changed already, in ten years we'll be even further downhill. The 1960s' civil rights movement wasn't gradual accommodation. Old white people were angered all over the nation. That's why it led to genuine improvements. As Lenin said, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.
The 1960s' civil rights movement wasn't gradual accommodation.
And this and a multitude of other things drove some to double down on Confederate culture and eventually led to January 6th. The US abounds with examples of blowback at home and worldwide. That needs to be taken into account somehow in any future strategy for improvement. Giving the best and least committed of your opposition some dignity should make it easier to convince them to work with you to restore the much larger gap in dignity for others, and reduce the blowback.
Do you think that it is possible to reason with every person? Do you think that if someone simply sat down with every Jim Crow Southerner and explained nicely that black people deserve rights that would have solved the civil rights issues of the 60s?
> His efforts to improve race relations, in which as an African-American he engaged with members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), convinced Klansmen to leave and denounce the KKK.
Absolutely, many people can be convinced and reasoned with, I don't dispute that. What I'm saying is that there are people who are prejudiced to such an extent that there is no reasoning with them. You have never addressed how we deal with that problem. There are people like this in society at large and there are people like this in positions of power in government and in the private sector. Both problems need to be addressed in some way, because the people in government and the private sector derive power from the people in society who support them and we can't tolerate this in a civil society. I don't know what order to solve them in and perhaps solving one would solve the other, but it's a problem that prevents us from working together in a more fundamental way as a society. Ignoring it is not an option.
I actually talked to him once, his strategy isnt to approach kkk members to convince them to leave, but to let members who are questioning approach him.
He also told me its just as important to disrupt their organizing and recruiting efforts to stop new people from joining
I don't think reasonable people can consider racism a reaction to the civil rights movement that happened in 1960s. Anti-black racism was fostered in what became USA from 17thC, in order to justify slavery. It has been somewhat lessened of late, but if it didn't exist in 1960 there would have been no reason for a civil rights movement. This is like blaming the Native American genocide on recent complaints about it from Native Americans.
So, it's foolish to blame "the events of 1/6" on civil rights organizers. It's also foolish to blame the events on racism. Sure, there were racists involved, but as mentioned above we have had racists in USA for a long time. If they really wanted to have a racist insurrection, they probably would have done it on the occasion of the election of an actual black man, instead of that of an ancient white man whose 93-year record in public office clearly documents that he is also a racist. The occupy-capitol people foolishly identify with a politician whose speech and policies are racist, and that is certainly a large part of his appeal to them. Of course if black people had done similar things they would have been gunned down. Still, the occupy-capitol people never would have turned to Trump if any "real" politician had had a sensible message with respect to national conditions. To name a single example among many, wages have been stagnant since 1971. [0] That's longer than most Americans have been alive. Why doesn't any non-racist politician pretend to care about that?
>When I'm saying we need to bridge the gap between left and right, I'm not saying we need to preserve the status quo exactly as it is.
The Democrats have been trying to bridge the gap for 30 years and the Republicans keep spitting in their face (Newt Gingrich in the 90s, the entire party vs Obama in the 00s). The Democrats seem to have finally figured this out and Republicans are now upset that it isn't working any more. Republicans aren't interested in bridging the gap because if they do, their base will find someone who's "a real fighter, not a RINO".
We have about as much chance of changing politicians by talking about their parties as we do of changing the outcome of a sporting event by yelling harder for our favorite team at the (30-second-delayed) TV.
Maybe we should be more interested in what people can do, than what politicians can't.
I thought our government was supposed to be "of the people" (also known as a democracy). Maybe we should expand access to voting (e.g. easier to register, no-excuse mail-in ballots, adding polling places, making election day a holiday, and/or extending voting days). We could also address gerrymandering and other structural issues (e.g. some system other than first-past-the-post).
Now think about which side wants to do this and which side wants to stop them.
Now think about which side wants to do this and which side wants to stop them.
And then? Instead of lumping people into "sides" like some seem to want us to do because they benefit from conflict, we can ask "Okay, the party can't be reasoned with, but what about the people?" I'm not denying there are politicians and pundits and whatnot who do everything they are accused of. I'm saying we can try to ignore them and focus on human connection with the people who follow them out of tradition but don't fully agree with them. Do you have any ideas for how to start doing that?
I don't normally read people's comment history. I read your past day or so of comments to see why we seem to be talking past one another. IMO the phrasing of some of your comments tends toward escalation rather than discussion. (Disclaimer: I don't represent HN itself in the slightest, nor are my views likely to be fully correlated with the HN mainstream)
>"Okay, the party can't be reasoned with, but what about the people?"
I addressed this earlier, the people can't be reasoned with either, that's what I meant when I said that reasonable GOP politicians get labeled as RINOs and then lose their primary race to the more extreme candidate. In fact, here's a very timely example. Ben Sasse was punished for doing exactly that: https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1357675346062057472
These voters have an outsized effect on government because of the electoral college and the fact that we give more votes to empty land instead of real Americans who happen to live in cities. If we had a fair voting system, these views would be much less mainstream and taken much less seriously. It sounds counter-intuitive but you have to force these people to "be reasonable" by taking away their power if they're not.
>the people who follow them out of tradition but don't fully agree with them.
I think a lot of the voters in this category have left the party, so most of the voters left are the unreasonable ones. Sometimes people can't be reasoned with and the only option left is to limit the damage they can cause.
I agree with the sentiment, but it's also not helpful to lay blame equally. It's pretty obvious that the Republican party and their peripherals (fox news, et al) have caused way more damage than the Democrats.
(Not to say that the problems in our society can be distributed fully between those two groups).
It's pretty obvious that the Republican party and their peripherals (fox news, et al) have caused way more damage than the Democrats.
Obvious to whom, and damage to whom? Even those are things we need to work to restore a common view on. Even if you're right (and w.r.t. Fox News it'd be hard to be wrong), based on those I know who vary from middle left to far right, apportioning partisan blame, and blame in general, is just not going to be a productive way to frame the path forward. Maybe we need to take a breather, ignore who said what and why, and just look at where we really are, where we think we're going, and what we (as people, not as groups or parties or labels) can mutually agree to do to improve where we're going, and to find more common ground where we disagree on the fundamentals.
There are far too many things for just a few of us in a single HN thread to solve, of course, and I suppose proposing that we "elites" "solve" them is one of the things that contributes to the coastal/inland left/right rift. But every time I feel compelled to comment on a political discussion on HN, I'm still going to try (and occasionally fail) to keep searching for a way out, rather than just adding to the volume of what already exists, and encourage everyone who reads this to do the same. We know there is pain, we know there are voices to be heard. Now we need to use that pain to come together instead of to break apart. If we can find ways to do this on HN, maybe we can spread that to all the other communities we are part of.
Yea, tribal politics is so toxic and so incredibly entrenched in our government. There is no room for getting elected for someone who shuns parties in favor of saying that they decide for themselves on each and every issue and not what their tribe has already decided. I don't have the slightest clue about how to fight it or even make it slightly less bad.
It will take the Republicans acting like adults. This is what I meant by both sides being different. The Democrats are interested in governing. The Republicans are not, because they detest the very existence of government.
democrats always seem to fold because the right has moneyed interests on their side, politicians will never act in our interests unless we make the cost of not doing so greater than the cost of helping us
Why? Because people would actually be held accountable for their decisions? Shouldn't that be how it works to begin with? It would be painful in the short term but in the long term i think it would make people better off
I agree that it shouldn't be this way, but I remember 2008 and the fact that zero people were punished. The US government will protect corporate profits at all costs.
There are enough large companies who have committed misdeeds worthy of major consequences that if we actually punished all of them in a meaningful way, the economy would fall apart, because there would not be many companies left.
> it would create opportunity for actually well-run businesses that benefits the customer to take their place
This assumes that you have a functional society after say...Chase or Nestle or Pfizer or Boeing or Disney, etc becomes insolvent. You will lose more than a decade in churn as the monopolies (enough that they can dictate legislative agendas) leave huge gaps that are inevitably filled with instability. The "good actors" that would backfill is a utopian fantasy. Different names, different brands, but the same kinds of people would end up in the same positions of influence. That's how the (mostly) capitalistic system operates.
They dont need to be good, they need to have real competition and realisation that is they break the law they will be slapped hard
Also, we wont have functional society without Dysney and Nestle? What, society will collapse if we run out of chocolates and movies? People won't have diabetes?
> we wont have functional society without Disney and Nestle? What, society will collapse if we run out of chocolates and movies?
The breadth of these companies is almost immeasurable. Nestle owns an immense amount of resource rights (eg the largest siphon of natural water from the Los Angeles basin) and industry (#1 food producing company in the world). Disney is the leading intellectual property holder of the world. The ubiquity, innate cultural knowledge, and economic strength of corporate entities in the world are part of what keep society stable. The brands are stable, so families are able to be stable and confident about the future.
This is why I picked out examples from multiple industries, all of which are known actors, who have been slapped on the hand for heinous acts over recent time.
So let's allow all big companies to do whatever the fuck they want, because otherwise "our economy would fall apart"? This is the darkest comment I read on HN.
This is a common exaggeration used in a variety of ways. A Basic Income will destroy the economy (because the US economy depends utterly on a slave-labor class?) Or electric cars will destroy the economy because whatever. Its thrown around here a lot.
I read it as a lament that our economies are so vulnerable to the actions of a relatively small number of large corporations. Including the idea of certain entities purportedly being 'too big to fail'.
Not sure if that was the intended connotation though.
Name a big company or C-level executive that has faced any meaningful consequences for their misdeeds in the last 15 years. I can think of Bernie Madoff, but he was punished because he swindled rich people. If he swindled poor people he'd be on the cover of Fortune magazine.
