My experience of whistleblowing even here in the west is that usually it goes very very badly. The only real thing open to you is to refuse to do anything unethical, quit and walk away. Many people can't afford to do that. Things ought to be different but we live in corrupt societies where the law is different for the rich and powerful than for everyone else.
I encourage anyone interested in the consequences of whistleblowing to watch The Insider. A truly excellent film about a whistleblower at a tobacco company and the terrible things they did to try and stop him. Russell Crowe, Al Pacino, Bruce McGill, Christopher Plummer, many others.
A similar film is Silkwood, which is about the life of Karen Silkwood, who reported concerns about corporate practices related to health and safety in a nuclear facility where she worked. She was severely harassed by her employer and then died in a suspicious car accident.
Anybody who becomes the target of large orgs is going to have a bad time. Just think about the guy who was falsely accused of being the pipe bomber at the Atlanta Olympics after he saved people.
Thats the movie that prominently features "Amazing Grace", right? I still remember having watched it on public television in the late 80s. But all I really remember from the movie was amazing grace being played after the car crash scene.
So many good scenes. Personal favorite, grappling with the role of journalism: "What are you?! Are you a businessman or are you a newsman?" Such a powerful question.
Of course, but I don't think it's specific to "the west" or "corrupt societies". It's human nature. If you're part of a group and you speak against the group, esp. to another group, the group will move to destroy you.
It doesn't matter if you're right; it doesn't matter if the group is doing bad things; it doesn't matter if speaking up will help save lives.
The function of the group is to survive as a group; it will do whatever it takes to achieve that.
Laws that go against human nature fight an uphill battle; it doesn't mean we should not try, but it does mean we should be aware of the difficulty.
So many laws go against human nature; those might be the most important laws.
I don't expect the greedy and powerful to change, but as a society we should do more to protect whistleblowers, the same way we protect threatened witnesses.
Also, more solidarity between workers, although not always possible, would go a long way. So many Google employees can definitely afford to quit in solidarity, or strike. Not saying it's easy, I recognize it isn't.
Other than basic needs is there "human nature" ? Some people will give you the last bite of food, others will lie to you to add to their hoard. I think laws are to make sure we all are on an even playing field (as much as possible) and to deter from the worst aspects of -some- humans who tend to be bad actors. Obviously that's ideally. A lot of times laws enacted by dictators/oppressive religions are there to keep people miserable and afraid and power for the elite (whether communists, capitalists, religiofascists, etc)
When you do the math it's really the vestigial remnants shared with inhuman primates, which have not been completely overcome by the process of civilization so far, that underlie the need for so many laws that would be completely un-necessary if everyone was fully steeped in extreme true humanity and behaved that way all the time.
Too bad we are not evolved enough to have left all of this inhumanity behind along with the extinct hominids, but you have to play the hand you are dealt.
When you think about it though, what most people usually call "human nature" is actually really inhuman nature which has not been fully surpassed.
They wouldn't say it if it wasn't false ;)
Also widely regarded as an excuse to begin with even if not fully recognized as such.
It's always been plain to see the world would be a better place the more inhumanity has been eradicated, but there have always been those who favor more inhumanity not less anyway.
Maybe some people have always been concentrating on their limitations rather than their possibilities, and that's been the limit of their horizon historically since the dawn of man. Others, not so much.
Full "human nature" would be the complete absence of inhumanity in thought & deed.
They are a control mechanism for the masses, nothing to do with right or wrong, which is written in our hearts. But, if you want to disempower the individual, take his money (tax), use that money against him (police, tax inspectors) you need some authorised hymnsheet for the feeble minded to get behind. And that is law.
I don't think we are reading different heart books at all - we are taught that we are but we are pretty much exactly the same when it comes to matters of the heart
It might be the authority of the pharmaceutical industry with regards to what treatments can be provided more psychiatric conditions.
And even then you have to wonder about their criteria - a doubling of diseases with every edition, all those 'chemical imbalances' and not one physical test!
> Laws that go against human nature fight an uphill battle
I'm reluctant to name it "human nature", but let it be.
Most laws are needed to restrict "human nature". Moral codes exist to restrict "human nature". So it is the fate of a law.
> The function of the group is to survive as a group; it will do whatever it takes to achieve that.
It is an oversimplification I believe. Groups have very different goals, and sometimes money is more important then group existence. Groups can accept additional existential risks to increase profits, in such cases it means money has more importance for a group than its existence.
> simplifying: "laws and moral codes exist to restrict 'human nature'"
I strongly disagree with that. Laws (and moral codes) exist to codify the general, agreed-upon human nature. They therefore "restrict," as you say, a subset of people whose internal moral compass is broken.
To pick the most extreme example: most people don't need a law, or even a moral code, to not kill other people. We all (for some large and growing, but not 100%) agreed that killing is wrong, and most of us do not need the threat of a murder trial to talk us out of killing someone who cuts in front of us at the fast food line. To be clear, not 100% of us, but more than 50%, and I hope in many places, much more than 50% of us.
For other, less extreme crimes, the percent of people in consensus might be lower. But even for something like speeding on the highway I think human nature is, on average, a limiting factor more than laws or moral codes, rather than being an uncontrolled source of chaos reined in by law.
People (on average) drive maybe 60-80 mph on the highway (depending on the highway -- looking at you, Montana). If there were no speed limit at all, that wouldn't jump that much: the average speed on the autobahn is apparently 125kph, or 78mph.
Everyone's human nature is, on average, reasonably aligned, and laws tend to reflect that average.
It is the reason I do not like the term "human nature". Is it a human nature to kill other humans? Are moral considerations a part of a human nature?
> To pick the most extreme example: most people don't need a law, or even a moral code, to not kill other people.
How it may be a "nature" if it is artificial? Some cultures routinely eat other people, we do not, how it can be a human nature, if different people coalesce at different "natures"?
There is a famous debate "nature vs. nurture", and I believe it is unwise to call something to be a nature thing, if it is really a nurture thing. It just bring a lot of confusion.
> Everyone's human nature is, on average, reasonably aligned, and laws tend to reflect that average.
Eww... averages... I believe it is impossible to have a meaningful definition of an "average person". There was a story of average pilot[1], and later of a search for average american woman (can't find a link). You cannot have meaningful averages in highly multi-dimensional spaces.
But if we rephrase it referring to a social norms, it could make sense, but then comes a question what is the difference between human nature and social norms?
i very strongly agree. human nature is often used as an excuse for bad behavior. even stuff as seemingly benign as "boys will be boys". pretty much every behavior can be changed with proper training and good role models.
every human has the potential to be a great person. and only education is needed to enable that greatness and allow humanity to benefit from it.
So the issue with laws is they are many types. Criminal, civil, statutory. Defining how the power grid works, what frequency it runs, what devices can be plugged into it so they don't explode is a set of codes/laws. If you violate those there are other sets of civil/criminal codes that can be used to remediate the situation.
And that's just one facet of our lives. In a low complexity society, especially ones with smaller populations there are typically fewer laws. As society grows, and especially as the populations begin to specialize formalized laws are a natural outcome. The farmer, the taylor, and the brickmaker all need common set of rules for expectation in things like trade and debt that get very hard to coordinate as population size grows.
Sure, I'm not arguing that laws aren't needed, just that they're generally more descriptive than prescriptive. I think the same applies even in cases where there is a clear tension between two direct parties, e.g. trade and debt as you describe: laws are a recognition of what most people (for some value of "most") think is fair and reasonable.
In short, laws are not (generally) handed down by some authority, against the will of the majority of the people -- at least not in non-dictatorships.
No indeed it's not specific to the west, but the emphasis was worth it: many western people have such an high opinion of their country that they believe it could only happen in Iran, Russia, North Korea and the likes
You'd do good to expect a threatened group (or individual) to lash out, but that's precisely why we have anti-retaliation laws. Think of them not as telling people they shouldn't try to destroy opponents, but that the society around them will punish them if they do, since it's beneficial for that society.
After all, laws in a rule-of-law country are better thought of as restrictions on the state, not the individual. Without criminal law, what's stopping a police officer for killing you if they think it's appropriate? Laws protecting whistleblowers can then be seen as a promise by society to individuals: "If you come forward, we have the power to protect you."
> If you're part of a group and you speak against the group, esp. to another group, the group will move to destroy you.
Not all "groups" are created equal though. I think a big factor in this is how much people make the group a part of their personal identity. If they feel like they are the group (ie "I am American"), then they feel like an attack on the group is an attack on them (is "Americans are dumb" means I am dumb).
Not all groups latch on to their members sense of identity like that, and in that case an attack on the group is much more acceptable to members of the group.
> I don't think it's specific to "the west" or "corrupt societies". It's human nature.
The west is unique because it has created a very believable façade of cleanliness, majority of the population believes that whistleblowing works and often allegations of corruption are treated like conspiracy theory.
In, let's say, Russia, everyone knows that things are corrupt, at least they are realists.
> fight an uphill battle
For some reason our ideology talks about entrepreneurs as wealth creators and completely forgets about wealth creators that our society doesn't reward or punishes, like whistle-blowers.
I don’t think it’s normal human nature to assault / murder / psychologically torture / ruin the life of / etc someone who points out what your group is doing wrong. It may happen from time to time, enough that it should be a potential expected response. But just like psychopathy and schizophrenia are abnormal, so is murdering or ruining the life of a whistleblower.
1-2% of the population may be a sociopath / psychopath — but its still considered “abnormal psychology”.
If someone had proof that a device I made was hurting people, I wouldn’t try to destroy their life or kill them.
A lot of this whistleblowing doesnt even have jailtime as a consequence to those who failed their duty of care - often it just means they’ll make a few million less dollars but still be plenty comfortable.
We shouldn’t feel its “normal” to murder / torture / assault or ruin the lives of these whistleblowers any more than we think sociopaths are “normal”.
You don't think violence is part of human nature? I don't even know what to respond to that, except that it's not just socio- or psycho- or some other label of -paths. Everyone is capable of violence when threatened. Threatening the group is often perceived as worse than threatening a given individual, and will therefore induce a stronger reaction.
I still dont think its normal to resort to violence just because someone will only make $400,000 this year instead of $4 million as a result of whistleblowing. Or even no change to their income but their company will make less profit as a result of whistleblowing. Or they’ll “be embarassed” as in the case of eBay.
This. Its an uphill battle, and given the risks and rewards ratio definitely the smartest thing is to quietly walk away and report to regulators anonymously if possible.
The amount of cases where C-suites or owners take it very personally and go on vengeance streak are many... you don't want to fight bunch of very well-connected rich sociopaths hell-bent on destroying you or worse, and from position of a 'nice guy'.
There's an odd angle in there that would make an interesting movie where, if the whistleblower was not, in fact, a 'nice guy', and was actually a sociopath who hadn't yet reached the level where they're the ones directing the bad behaviour.
It would be their opportunity to reach said level. Blackmail their way up the corporate ladder.
well stated! i would add that the solution is to find a path of action that does not actually go against human nature but rather embraces it. My favorite historical example is religion, e.g. Moses and the 10 Commandments.
I stand by the 10 Commandments, but people don't even agree what human nature is. I believe it's a reflection of a loving creator and others believe it's an evolutionary fluke while yet others believe it's a piece of a quasi-conscious universe discovering itself. If we can't agree what human nature even is, we're not going to agree what is most in line with it.
we don’t need to agree, it just needs to be metastable, and “thou shalt not kill” is a successful example of solving a tragedy of the commons by coordinating values over a group at scale, and in a way that navigates from one less desirable equilibrium to another more desirable equilibrium through a transition path that is itself stable (otherwise cheaters collapse the transition path)
Oh yeah… a country where most safety features… seat belts (for example or lead poisoning) are results of whistleblowers, yet the path is paved with retaliatory actions , hr taking it like a personal jihad to prove the conversation wrong …. I can personally relate to what it feels to take punches
If the person has pre existing medical condition like diabetes, doing good will literally cost one’s life . Living the experience, for voicing discrimination at employment situation
Have interviewed 176 attorneys over 2 year period with only 5 confirming that the discrimination is illegal , but they had signed agreements to not represent employees.
Found out that one can buyout judges, apparently a judge can punish a legal practice if they don’t want a whistleblower case be presented
Being rich definitely allows one to be ignorant all these ongoing friction in life
TBH that's the only circumstance in which I think it would make sense to whistle blow.
"In 2012, as a consequence of his whistleblower status, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) awarded him $104 million, 26% of the total $400 million in taxes returned. It was the 4th reward paid to date since the IRS Whistleblower Program went into effect in 2006."
I reckon I could do it if I knew I had $104m waiting for me. Think of it as $31m/year to live somewhere equivalent to a moon base or the ISS or something.
I think part of the problem is there aren’t really any “good guys” in most cases.
With regulatory capture and the revolving door between .com and .gov, those who run the corporations and those who are supposed to respond to the whistle are often hanging out in the same back rooms.
The general response seems to be a slap on the wrist and a hardy “Don’t get caught doing that again!”
Forget about whistle-blowing in Europe, it will likely blow up in your face. Best thing is, if you are in a company with unethical behavior, to pack your stuff and leave ASAP and hope that you don't get anything of the fallout.
"Forget about whistle-blowing in Europe, it will likely blow up in your face."
In most European countries, in fact not any that I am aware of, will you get a reward for blowing the whistle. If you do, best case, you don't get any legal problems. Don't expect anyone to hire you in the future. Nobody blew the whistle with the "VW/Audi emissions scandal". They would have gotten a big reward in the US. In the trial the big boss claimed as long that he had nothing to do with it, that it was the sole decision of his engineers, until the court offered him a probation sentence. You blow the whistle? Expect that your boss will claim that it was only your responsibility and he knew nothing about it. Emails on the company server? Expect them to be gone.
"Best thing is, if you are in a company with unethical behavior, to pack your stuff and leave ASAP and hope that you don't get anything of the fallout."
When I was a young engineer in a terrible place, the big boss told me to do something. Disregarding all good practices, risking the health of the employees with this action etc. If I had followed his oral command, it would have been at the same time a reason to be fired on the spot. I could have lived with that, but they could have also claimed millions in damages from the circumstances. There were other issues (IP that I developed). I called in sick for two weeks and then submitted my resignation. Best decision ever. I read about this guy many years later in a major newspaper when he screwed another employee totally off. (Do you read hear H.L.?).
Bottom line: If shit hits the fan, people will lie. They will try to throw you under the bus.
I actually emailed my old boss when I saw the newspaper article, put a link to the article and wrote: "I'm glad to hear that you stayed true to your character." He did not reply.
Yes, he got trouble from the Newspaper article, but they guy he screwed over, he screwed over deeply.
One of the reasons I like the SEC solution so much: It is annonymous, you can provide info through am attorny and the payouts for whistleblowers are high enough that people can, theoretically, stop working and retire.
Not surprising that it will go badly. Most of us have some secrets to hide, so the individuals that make up society have an incentive to exclude such people from their lives.
I couldn’t trust a whistleblower. While grateful for a lot of the work they do, I never want to be their target and would never risk getting close to them.
It's a bit reductionist to consider the things that get whistleblown about as just "everyone has their secrets". Alice is illegally spying on all of society, well, everyone has their secrets. Billy has a porno magazine hidden in his closet, well, everyone has their secrets. Charlie is stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers, well, everyone has their secrets. Daryl is running a child trafficking ring, well, everyone has their secrets. Not all secrets are the same.
> I couldn’t trust a whistleblower. While grateful for a lot of the work they do, I never want to be their target and would never risk getting close to them.
So, you make it a little more likely that whistleblowers will have a hard time, and a little more likely that whistleblowers will be discouraged from ever whistleblowing in the first place. The end result is that you are a little more likely to be affected by the corruption that might have been stopped by whistleblowers.
Everyone has their definition about what a "good person" is. Let me offer my definition. A "good person" is someone who is more likely to benefit than to be harmed by widespread wistleblowing. Good people should want whistleblowers to be protected and commonplace.
I have secrets, but if someone were to leak them nobody would seriously employ the term "whisteblower".
Implying that because someone doesn't want to stay quiet when he sees unethical/unlawful things they can't be trusted on a personal level is a dehumanizing thing to say.
I might be breaking a rule here, but this comment could probably be found verbatim in some company's playbook to discourage whiteblowing.
Imagine someone blows the whistle on you liking K-Pop. By the way, I don't like it at all. But just imagine if you were to like it and someone was to blow the whistle. I seriously haven't listened to K-Pop at all, I know it's just an embarrassing thing people do.
Imagine hanging out with Snowden, you both have done a few rounds of pints. Suddenly you slip up about your music preferences. Next thing you know, tomorrow you see a tweet on Snowden's Twitter account and thousands of comments laughing at you.
> Like what the hell did you do that you really don't want others to find out..?
It doesn't matter. This still applies even if you haven't done anything yet.
Nobody wants to be friends with the kid who narcs on everyone. Show me the man and I'll show you the crime he's committed. Why subject yourself to that?
People often lie not only to others, but also to themselves. Also I don't see a problem with somewhat controversial takes from anonymous accounts; given today's internet opposite would be brave/stupid.
Is it that you morally disagree (I agree that it is a poor reward for doing me a service) or you have a disagreement about why society punishes whistleblowers?
I disagree with equating whistleblowering and snitching. We all have dirty secrets, but let's loosely say that the scale matters.
It is a different story when coworker tells "boss" who is lazying around, and a different story when someone reports a serious misconduct towards other people. I'm not sure how to phrase it clearly, but generally I would not associate myself with former people, but I wouldn't mind the latter. Maybe one day they'd prevent me from doing something really terrible (given I wouldn't know better).
Possibly a fundamentally different outlook? I would trust a whistleblower, but I would have difficulty trusting a person who would cover up serious crimes for an employer. Most employers, by the way, actually do not want it covered up when one of their departments is Doing Crime.
(In particular if you're in, say, finance, or a safety-critical industry, you are not going to want to hire someone who has a known track record of failing to report crimes. I mean, unless you're, like, FTX or someone.)
You see, it makes sence, consider that guy over there - corporate drone, climbing the ladder, would sell his own mother - totally trustworthy, you know what he is gonna do.
But this guy, who values his abstract principles and integrity above any social contract? Can you tell when he has had enough? Do you even know what his values are? What if, one day, he decides that the place is so miserable, so corrupt, so complicit in suffering, that he just burns it all to the ground?
There is truth on this. People love treason but they hate the traitor.
In the US you can get a lot of money for whistle-blowing. You will need it. Don't expect to ever find a decent job afterwards.
This was horrific ! Foxconn acted like a thug with connections to the local politicians and police to bully the whistleblower. I knew there were shady things going on in corporate China, but this was revealing.
This would definitely not be as bad in other countries like India where Foxconn is also trying to setup production.
The story is so juicy. Taiwanese exploitation of the common worker just shows you how in bed the Taiwanese and Chinese Elites are, and also why production will never move to India. Apple loves that productivity
I'm always amazed how cheap and well China can manufacture a wide variety of devices. There is ofc a lot of expertise and economies of scale at work, but the letter is a sad reminder that at least some part comes from exploitation.
"Under Chinese competition law, the complainant has to show proof that their business operations were hurt by the theft of trade secrets. Foxconn said that, as a result of Tang’s disclosures, it had incurred costs of Rmb1.4mn (about £150,000) in August from having to raise its salaries."
I guess the distinction would come from whether salary levels are considered "trade secrets". In the US it definitely wouldn't fly, salary discussions are specifically allowed and retaliation against people discussing their salaries is illegal. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen under some other pretext, but it definitely won't be as blatant.
> As our report describes in detail, the labor conditions of incarcerated workers in many U.S. prisons violate the most fundamental human rights to life and dignity,” said Clinical Prof. Claudia Flores, the director of the Global Human Rights Clinic. “In any other workplace, these conditions would be shocking and plainly unlawful
The US constitution actually allows slavery/involuntary servitude as a punishment for a crime, as per the 13th amendment:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
So it makes little sense to compare prison labour programs to "any other workplace".
> makes little sense to compare prison labour programs to "any other workplace"
Either it's force labour, or it's not. You can't get away with things just by slapping a different label on them.
> The US constitution actually allows slavery
If a Chinese person posted here "actually all the human rights abuses in China are perfectly legal and in accordance with Chinese law" you would not be impressed.
We wouldn't be like "alright, nothing to see here". In fact, we would probably be horrified that the inhumane system was codified officially, and is here to stay, as opposed to being a temporary result of oversight and corruption.
So forgive the international reader like myself for being extremely unimpressed with this state of affairs.
I’m pretty sure that most countries allow forced labour as a punishment for a crime.
In my native Latvia, a member of the EU, it’s the most commonly handed out criminal punishment. x hours of unpaid public work. Typically on a strict schedule. Or you can go to the can if you’re opposed to such “slavery”.
Oh and yes, there are also labour programs in our prisons that are probably comparable to the ones in the US. An easy sell actually, because you can either
1. fill your day by doing some work in horrible conditions for basically no pay, but you get to do something
2. rot in your cell all day long
I’m pretty sure that most people pick option 1. After all, you need a way to buy cigarettes.
Nobody calls this slavery.
We also have mandatory military service that started this year. I’m happy to call this slavery, because it’s imposed on people that haven’t done anything wrong.
But you seriously can’t compare forced labour as a punishment for a crime vs any other workplace. It’s disingenious for very obvious reasons. Why not go a step further? Why not claim that it’s a human rights violation to incarcerate people in the first place? After all, the universal declaration of human rights says that EVERYONE has the right to leave their country, re-enter it, and freely move about in their own country, and this is a “universal human right” that’s so clearly being denied to prisoners.
So forgive the international reader like myself for seeing nothing morally wrong with this state of affairs.
A parent forcing a child to do their chores is forced labor, but no one calls it that or slavery (except the kid :)). Context matters, and compulsion alone is not a rights or ethical violation.
I would assume the people working in the Chinese factory have _some_ time off to go outside said factory? Or have the ability to turn in their notice and leave for a different job?
Agreed on the fact that both seem like a corporate hellhole one way or the other.
I honestly don't see the difference between a factory worker that works seven days a week and lives close to the factory (and doesn't travel, as that's for folks with free time and disposable income) and someone who is in prison. In both cases there is only a very small society that they are actually a part of and very limited personal autonomy. I know a lot of folks like to say the theoretical presence of choice means someone is free, but let us be honest here: When you are poor, you may have a choice of where you are imprisoned but that doesn't mean you can escape.
What you say is true, but unless you have a way to eliminate poverty, the moral imperative doesn't provide a solution.
It doesn't make sense to outlaw poor people. And paradoxically, at least under context of international trade, the only sustainable way to get poor countries out of poverty is for richer countries to trade with them.
The slavery and working conditions in China no longer really surprises me, what I do struggle to understand is that Western companies apparently DO NOT CARE.
I can sort of accept, reluctantly, that the Chinese have a different way to thinking than I do and that I can't necessarily apply my moral code to China. What I cannot accept or understand is that the owners and managers of Western companies, who supposedly share my moral ideals, continues to do business with China, solely to increase profit. It's absolutely disgusting. The mental gymnastics these people have to do to justify or just ignore the problems is beyond what I can even imagine.
Yes, a system called "capitalism" that works perfectly only in theory, and where bending rules creates winning conditions, and corruption is on always upward trend lines.
Companies which sell though Amazon.
Amazon uses a smart strategy of erasing the individual seller identity. Even if you already bought some item from some seller and very happy with it, you rarely would get similar item from the same seller. You usually would just get some which is first in the search, i.e. the one which makes Amazon the most profit.
If company cares about paying workers enough, your item would be more expensive, but you are still "noname" for the buyer on amazon. And now amazon would push your listing away, because it is expensive. Besides, the client will buy the cheapest option in a lot of cases.
There are exceptions though, when you more or less know what you wanna buy and from which exact company. But if you shopping for something like "massage gun" an have nooooo idea which ones are good or bad, sustanable or not - here you probably get something from the first search page with 5 star review and reasonable price. Not something from a company which cares about longevity of the product or about their workers.
And amazon workers are not living the happiest of their lives to begin with, so probably people would not shop their if the care about sustainability. People care about cheap prices and fast delivery though.
Chick-Fil-A has a lot of control about their operation.
Sellers on Amazon have minimum control. It used to be that good price and good reviews would make your item easy to find, but now you also have to pay for it in more and more cases.
There is certainly a niche catering to the handful of customers who do care, have the money to care, have enough information to care and get the opportunity to show they care by selecting the right vendor. But very often I think the consumer is just unable to care because of lacking money, lacking information or outright deception by the vendors and lacking offers from ethical vendors.
And the market unfortunately favors the non-ethical ones. Which doesn't make ethical ones impossible or non-existent, just less likely to succeed and therefore rare.
Arguably the customer doesn't have clarity on this situation here. Customers vote with their dollars and the reason they vote for these companies is because their products are relatively speaking the cheapest for some particular level of quality.
The resolution should be on the western governments to tax or fine the ever-loving crap out of companies and their products that utilize systems like this. Then the products' end prices will reflect the true cost to the consumer because any ethically-produced product of equivalent quality should be cheaper.
Not in this case. Since the non-ethical market participants are non-ethical, they tend to use non-ethical means: like hiding from or like lying to their customers about where and how their products were produced.
Therefore it is not really an informed decision of the customer that makes them successful. It rather is the lack of transparency of the market, due to the non-ethical sellers lying and regulation being too lax.
i buy the cheaper of most products because i can't tell the difference. for all i know it could be the more expensive one that is lying to me. only if i actually know that the more expensive one is genuinely better, not fake and not based on exploited labor, then i'll buy that.
Nobody in power in industry and almost nobody from the consumer side cares about working conditions in any typical outsourcing country. Quite the opposite, "less regulation", "lower cost" and things like that are directly caused by ignoring worker rights and human rights (as well as a few other things).
China is not alone in this, just more present in the HN-relevant IT/tech sector. But clothing in southeast asia, mining in africa and south america, logistics/trucking in eastern europe are relevant examples from other regions and industries.
I don't intend to disperse responsibility here or distract, quite the opposite: One of the main reasons the aforementioned abuses can continue is that "the civilized west" systematically ignores those problems on all levels. There are some EU regulations coming up to improve this situation, but we'll have to wait and see on those...
"It is not a bug it is a feature it seams".
The only way to solve it is to make buying from local producer and from China the same, i.e. extra import taxes. But these import taxes nobody likes, so nothing is done. Just a couple of years ago there was no VAT when buying from China in EU (or it was barely enforceable).
Government is also kinda "happy" in the short run. It is easier to hide the real inflation. Before I could clothe in EU produced stuff, and now I can only clothe in asia produced. But I still get the "same" thing as a consumer, even if my real salary lost some power.
Another huge problem is that most of the time there's really no other choice than to buy "Made in China". Even if you have the money and willing to spend more.
The people would be like: "If our company does not benefit from chinese slaves, someone else will and steal our profits!". Which is kinda sadly true, because Amazon does not care were the stock items come from.
You can produce in countries with strong work laws, but it is just too expensive.
(same with countries where we get energy resources from - they don't have ideal reputation for human rights, but they are cheap).
It is kinda simple: you can buy a tshirt from Italy produced in Italy and having price tag 3 times more. Or you can buy from China... Now think you are a company with thin margins and have to do the same... And your items are after getting sold on Amazon, which algorithms would force you to sell as cheap as possible, otherwise your item would not be seen in the search results.
The companies respond mostly to what the public is willing to do about something. If the only thing people do is complaining on social networks then companies will not address the issue. If people will avoid a certain company based on their behavior then they will change it.
> ...the owners and managers of Western companies, who supposedly share my moral ideals, continues to do business...
SUPPOSEDLY - just like Big Tobacco has always wanted everyone to know the scientific truth about the health effects of smoking tobacco, right?
Capitalism optimizes for profit. If some profits need to be foregone or spent on pretending to share the moral ideals of the consumers - that also gets optimized, to minimize performative idealism and its costs.
Does it even matter? Lots of products on Amazon are produced by non-Western companies which very likely have questionable labor practice. Oh, these days people buy thing on Temu and Shein and things are shipped from outside the US. Consumers always look for the cheapest products, and nothing will change as long as that is true.
> I can sort of accept, reluctantly, that the Chinese have a different way to thinking than I do and that I can't necessarily apply my moral code to China.
Do you really believe that Chinese are different from US in this regard? I.e. that most Chinese people believe that it's perfectly ok to exploit people to the bone, because they have alternatives? No, they, just like us, believe it's a rotten thing to do, and agree to it only because well, they have no alternatives. No different than the extremely exploited workers in hellish factories in XIX century US or England.
> continues to do business with China ... It's absolutely disgusting.
I want to inject some nuance here. Competition in the labor market, which drives business to low- or middle-income countries like China, is really really good for the typical low-middle income person in China. If wealthy countries pulled out entirely, then China's GDP per capita will probably drop from $12,000 back to sub-$5,000 and you will be causing more suffering for the people you're concerned about. By all means, advocate for better pay and conditions and regulations, but don't advocate for pulling out of poor or middle income countries with lax labor protections entirely. It wasn't clear to me which avenue you're arguing for but I feel it's an important point worth stressing.
No fuck that argument people use to whitewash bad/harsch working conditions. "A low income is better than no income". "Better be employed as a slave than unemployed" is basically what they say. Inless its not a close relative or your own kids working there. You would immediately change your opinion if thats the case.
That fucked western hypocritical way of thinking needs to stop. Its really bad.
Better everyone being a poor rice farmer than working in shit factory.
I said that X is bad but Y is worse. It seems you're not even trying to challenge that claim, instead you're saying X is a "fucked western hypocritical way of thinking" and "you would change your opinion from X to Y if you had family in that situation". Then your concluding sentence is "Y is actually better than X" but you didn't even make the case for that in the first place. Unconvincing. I am honestly disgusted at the virtue signalling and moral grandstanding. You would condemn people to the worst depths of poverty because ... well it's not entirely clear to me what moral depravity would cause someone to adopt that position.
Except this has nothing to do with the west. The west is not responsible for working conditions in China in any way, shape or form. It's strictly a Chinese problem.
> what I do struggle to understand is that Western companies apparently DO NOT CARE.
Here's what it is: in law corporations are essentially given a weird kind of personhood. It's that way so corporations can get things done.
Unfortunately, corporations aren't people: they don't care, they don't have ethics, they don't have morals, they don't have values, they don't have family, they don't have a conscience.
It's not an original observation, but due to this, the type of person a company most resembles is one of posessing profound psychopathological traits.
They don't. Companies are structures that attract and reward sociopaths and narcissists, and they're designed to maximise profit. Normal people aren't given the opportunity to weild any kind of power, but people with low empathy and high charisma scores, straight to the top!
"I can sort of accept, reluctantly, that the Chinese have a different way to thinking than I do and that I can't necessarily apply my moral code to China."
so, give them a pass with what they are doing and then criticize others that are giving them the same pass, and also choose to profit from it.
What about people who buy stuff made in China? do they get a pass too? So the only party at fault is the middle-man? slave owners get a pass, consumers that enable the slave owners get a pass and the only party at fault is the evil middle-man corporations?
If its wrong, its wrong for all parties, if its OK, its OK for all parties.
He is right though. The companies are accountable to the shareholders, and the shareholders (usually) don't care.
Companies are not sentient beings, they are made up of people. People that don't care.
Personally, I'm a consumer and I don't care either. I know where my t-shirts are made and I have a vague understanding under what conditions they are made.
This is not a problem that has to be fixed in the west. It's a problem that has to be fixed in China. But China doesn't want to fix it, because fixing it would make them less competitive globally.
Consumers WANT cheap goods. China OFFERS cheap goods. Companies offer the consumers exactly what they want. Simple as.
You really cannot blame only the companies without blaming the consumers too. And if you care, you can stop buying things manufactured in China.
> You really cannot blame only the companies without blaming the consumers too.
Right, the problem is structural, but consumers for the most part aren't and can't realistically be in the know as to the horrible work conditions under which what they consume is produced, most of them aren't particularly happy with their own work conditions in the first place. And even if they do know (when the company has failed to hide it from them) they often don't have a choice. Consumers also don't lobby for worsening the conditions and abolishing the rights of workers. Companies on the other hand are almost always in the know, and choose not only to continue to benefit from this exploitation, but are also willing to go to tremendous lengths to hide, defend or expand this exploitation.
And yet neither of the parties are "evil", the most "enlightened" liberal will realize they both take part in the same economy and use that as a justification, but the consumer can not change this through their consumption (even an immortal, omniscient and perfectly rational economic agent straight out a neoclassical economic textbook would consider this an uphill battle) nor the producer through their production ("another will take my place" and so on).
Now to me if you (not you) recognize this, that the problem is inherently structural, but you're unwilling to criticize and rethink the structure, I have to assume the structure doesn't bother you all that much or worse, that you're a defeatist. Either way the good news is that there is an endless amount of other things to point your finger at (like China).
Companies are to blame because they are the ultimate decision makers. This is how responsibility works. If you kill someone, you'll be blamed for the murder, you won't be able to use "the circumstances lead me to it, I'm poor I needed the money" or "my brain/hands decided to do so" as a defense.
Western companies can't afford to care, as their consumers are buying based on price. Bad working conditions usually mean lower prices, and more success for the company using this.
You can't expect companies to fix this, this needs to come through politics and government. Unfortunately, these days governments who try to address it will be considered enemies of capitalism, considered leftish or communist. As prices will have to rise and consumers won't allow for that.
> this needs to come through politics and government.
There's nothing western politicians can do to fix working conditions in China.
Embargo them? The working conditions in China won't get any better, and you'll simply put a lot of Chinese out of work by doing that.
Higher tariffs? That's just a tax on importing goods for China. While it helps the domestic manufacturing sector, it still does nothing to fix the working conditions in China.
Consumers suddenly start caring? The same as the "higher tariffs" scenario.
There is something western politicians can and should do to help working conditions outside the first world and it is exactly that: nothing.
I'd hope most people are familiar with the fact that the west, and specifically the CIA, later the NED and many different gov-backed orgs have been hard at work making sure the working conditions of those countries are either kept as exploitative as they are, or if possible made worse.
Of course China is a fairly specific case, and while there obviously have been numerous cases of interventionism (like in the Tian'anmen square riots or Taiwan as a whole) stopping the endless anti-Chinese propaganda couldn't hurt (which I'm not accusing this article of being).
It's absolutely obvious to everyone that the US and allies would jump at the first opportunity to meaningfully destabilize China's economy so, no, I certainly don't expect anything positive to be done for Chinese workers by western countries, and especially not by a country like the US that should very much look inwards when it comes to working conditions.
Rules on products sold in the west. Most manufacturing companies already need to trace the origin of their components, so you could specify what products are and aren't allowed to be sold in the west.
And how would that help the working conditions in China?
You’d just shift the manufacturing to a less hostile environment, where the government doesn’t intentionally make it hard to do auditing on modern slavery. Like India.
I just don’t see how it would help the Chinese labour situation at all.
If china wants to deliver to the west they'll need to improve working conditions. Chinese companies will deliver at spec for lowest cost, if you up the spec, they'll adjust and increase cost adjustingly.
"Amazon is squeezing employees for maximum profit!" "Yes, they have to maximize profit by law" right, but there are also laws against union-busting, about workplace safety, etc, etc however _for some reason_ these other laws are second tier to a corporation's legal profit mandate.
That one literally states it's uncertain if it is the case that corporations that are public have to maximize profits in the interest of the shareholders.
this is news to me. although i understand they have different systems im not sure ive ever heard it called slavery... do they? (i guess you could say some of the systems in western countries are a little like slavery but lets not get into that)
Didn't the US have a whistleblower bounty with the IRS? I heard it was one of the most successful programs they ever ran. Whistleblow on your company's tax evasion and you get paid a pretty good chunk of money from the IRS. IRS collects its due and you get paid proportional to the amount of tax revenue evaded (I remember a few cases where the whistleblower got tens of millions of dollars).
It is kind of bizarre, but the incentives are perfectly aligned, if the tax evasion sum is low you get paid less therefor it is not worth whistleblowing. The IRS doesn't want to catch the small fries, to some extent tax evasion is desired for smaller companies.
That does come across weirdly but the IRS is a perennial favorite defund target so they don't have the resources to go after everyone, they should only choose juicier cases in that respect.
There are some good points in this article (the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero) that can be extrapolated to other parts of the financial world. The highest level point is that sometimes, a little slippage is needed for business to get done, and getting business done is the main goal of the economy.
Not having the means to catch every fraudster is very different from wanting them to commit the fraud. I think the only sense in which the IRS wants tax fraud is that some portion of its bureaucracy is dedicated to handling fraud and many of the people so employed would prefer continued employment to magically eliminating all fraud.
You got to the root of what I was saying, making sure mom and pop store at the corner street is paying all due taxes it not worth chasing and might in fact be net-negative to the economy
As a regular reader of Matt Levine this sounds like an opportunity for a securities fraud suit. Surely Amazon has said that its factories follow local labor laws, that whistleblowers are protected etc. That seems like a fairly standard thing for a large corporation to claim.
After reading both the article and his letter, I can't help but feel so, so sad. There's no glory for this guy. In the States, you'd be able to parlay something like this into a speaking/podcast tour, a book deal, and some consultancy gigs.
This guy's life is ruined, his extended family's social credit sullied and, in addition to serving time, he's become the one of the abused workers he tried to protect.
If I was the owner of a company and I had read that letter, I wouldn't be able to live with myself without first trying to do something about it. Maybe that's why I'm not the CEO of Amazon. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised. I know a guy who went mentally ill after his tenure there. Took him ten years to get back into another job. We're talking about the guy who thought a Vogue Cover with Lauren Sanchez was a good idea.
I'm not anti capitalism, anti manufacturing in china, or anti billionaire. I only wish that a human would deliver that letter to Jeff.
I would guess that Bezos has never read this letter. An underling of his would never present this letter to him unless Bezos has specifically asked to be presented such letters, and the fallout from this letter will never be sufficient to warrant his attention.
It's unfortunate that American and European voters don't realize that allowing our companies to do business with places famous for worker's rights abuses and lack of environmental controls affects them, too.
> I would guess that Bezos has never read this letter.
I would guess someone might have informed him of this letter or he might even as well have read it already. What I would not guess about is whether he would give two fucks about it. Because no he would not. Yes, he and his company has proven this.
Business and profit over all else. That is not just really a Chinese problem.
It surprises me how people still love to try to think that “Oh, this is such a horror! If only the Western corporate overlords had the time in their busy schedules to know of these, this would most likely go away”.
Nope, those cheap contracts were signed with this expectation to begin with it.
I would guess that Bezos read this letter, shruged and said something along the lines of "sucks to be him" while ordering a solid gold toilet for his yacht, because the platinum one was "too flashy"
This is unlikely. Solid gold is extremely dense, and would cause weight and balance problems on a yacht, even a large one. I have a family member who used to work at a luxury yacht-building company; they avoided even putting granite countertops and other surfaces on those craft because of the weight, even though the owners could certainly afford it. Instead, they had faux stonework painted by artists.
In addition to removing the bling factor of solid platium there is also a weight saving with the solid gold toilet being 11% lighter than the platinum equivalent.
Nevertheless, weight and balance can be an issue this is why you need to have a yacht extension to increase length (and occasionally girth - you have to use the swedish pumps for that one). In addition you need to buy multiple solid gold toilets for all the bathrooms, plus a couple extra to use as balast to get the correct balance.
Isn't US using prisoners for (effectively) forced labor ?
US and EU are abusing (often illegal) immigrants and turning a blind eye to their terrible working conditions (eg. the slaughter house scandals in the EU that broke out during COVID).
Plenty of shit on our doorstep and people don't seem to be bothered that much stepping over it. Why would we be upset about a larger pile of shit a continent away ? We are so isolated from Chinese culture, I know very very little about China compared to NA and EU.
Also the west is happy to trade with way worse systems (by "our" standards) than China, middle east being the first to come to mind.
Not justifying China, just confused where these moral standard expectations are coming from.
I've never worked for any major tech corporation. I've had opportunities to apply to Amazon and Facebook but never followed through with any of them.
It's partly for moral reasons but also partly out of fear because I'm worried about what that would look like on my record in 10 or 20 years' time if the world returns to sanity.
We've seen what happens to members of distrusted groups during periods of social upheaval.
I just cannot bring myself to bet on never-ending insanity. I cannot imagine such world. I'm already worried about my background in tech causing problems.
Admittedly, I couldn't imagine the world we have today 10 years ago and I can't imagine the world in 10 years time if it continues down that path. I just don't see the point. I don't want to be rich in such a hypothetical hell hole so my mind doesn't see the point going there.
What a shame that companies in question don't even address that a human's right had been violated and do what is right. At least Foxconn could have done the some thing for Tang Mingfang if it wasn't Amazon, if it adressed the issues they had.
In a world run by sociopaths - whistleblowing is a trap to catch the people who could if instead of reporting the issues, they organised together and then could stop you...
I've yet to see any whistleblowing case not end badly.
Some (many?) of those folks did suffer discrimination and even outright persecution from their employers, and horrible financial strain before the eventual payout, but their cases eventually ended up quite well for them.
one case that consoles me is that harry markopolous, the quant who blew the whistle on madoff and his feeder funds-of-funds, despite rigorously not being listened to and almost being railroaded by an SEC coverup, at least got some sort of payout for his pain and suffering that went on for years. I cannot recommend his book enough.
By her own admission she is supporting herself financially from “having bought crypto at the right time.” I’m guessing the vast majority of whistleblowers have that kind of financial cushion to risk it all like this.
Source:
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/10/25/facebook-whistl...
I know this doesn't really solve the underlying problem, but I find that if I use Cloudflare's WARP (https://1.1.1.1/), Cloudflare is able to recognize the traffic is coming from itself and I can get past these captchas
this archive.is website (and its other domains) has been misconfigured in "I am under attack mode" since 2015 or so. which makes cloudflare's nonsense captcha come up every time you visit it (and / or just the javascript bot check script).
nope. archive.is has their cloudflare configuration set to "i am under attack mode"[1], which makes the cloudflare captcha come up every time a tor / vpn / "bad" IP address visits it. its been like this since 2015. if you aren't familiar, cloudflare just serves tor / vpn / "bad" IP captchas for every domain you visit. the captchas themselves are broken half the time. in 2018 cloudflare then added deep packet inspection to see if you're using tor browser and then let you not solve the captcha [2]. but if you're in "i am under attack mode" or some other non default cloudflare configuration, your users will get the captcha
1. or something similar, been a while since i went through cloudflare's configuration options
2. this is also why you will never be able to browse the internet with links / lynx / w3m or use curl / wget ever again without using your bare IP
It's pretty well documented that archive's owner doesn't like the way Cloudflare reports EDNS for 1.1.1.1, and causes problems for people who come via that dns:
and its pretty undocumented that cloudflare has blocked all tor users plus any other major shared IP since 2010 and only in 2018 added the condition i mentioned above, and you still get blocked from all cloudflare sites if you do anything special like change your user agent or the Accept header
ah okay well both are true: if you use tor / vpn (regardless of what DNS server is used) you are blocked from archive.is. if you use bare IP but 1.1.1.1 as your DNS, then i guess you get blocked too
they literally have used cloudflare since 2015 or earlier, for every minute that service existed. if you tried to open it with tor from then until now, you get:
" One more step
Please complete the security check to access "
"Why do I have to complete a CAPTCHA?
Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property."
The captcha has reCAPTCHA written on it and the Tor Browser does like 15 requests to google.com domains. None of the archive.is|li|ph|today domains use Cloudflare name servers and resolving archive.is from all over the world returns not a single Cloudflare IP.
I visited Reddit yesterday for the first time in a long time. I saw an interesting meme and wanted to write a long form piece of content in the comments. After I was done: I received two low-effort replies that revealed to me I have less-than-great communication skills or the readers put zero focus in active reading skills; and one reply with an axe to grind that focused on attacking me and making all sorts of assumptions on who I was as a person, while assuring me I was the person who couldn’t take someone challenging his ideas, and that I was the problem.
Given Reddit's history with fake accounts, I'm not sure that many posts aren't just fever-dreamed LLMs on corporately created bulk accounts.
Reddit has burned a lot of credibility with the power user and creator types. I know plenty who've moved to Mastodon, Blue Sky, Threads, etc. And by doing so, leaves bottom feeders there. And how else do you get engagement? You fake it, naturally.
What are you on about? What relevance does any of this have?
I like the parent comment because it made me laugh, so I was expressing my wish that it would be nice to able to appreciate them for it in some way. I used reddit's gilding feature as a shortcut to convey that wish because most people know of it and it's an easy to understand shortcut.
Because reddit is a cesspit, any feature that was associated with reddit at any point of time is not worth using to convey information? How about text quoting and reply buttons, should we stop using them too? What an absurd way to look at things.
Clearly, I am horrible at communication or Redditors are horrible at reading something at face value.
I shared a recent anecdote about Reddit, because I was reminded of it from your comment. There was no point, I was just sharing what I felt the same way you did when you wrote about wishing HN to have a gild feature.
But if we want to go down the combative discourse route: you're hyperbolizing. Reddit became the mess it was due to a mixture of many things. One of those was its site design/UI; notably public display of post and comment scores that leads to a "dog-pile" effect, rather than natural voting patterns. Being able to gild just intensifies the effects, and leads to posts being interacted with not because the content of their message is informative or interesting, but because it has countless flashing symbols violating your focus, screaming "look at me! look at me!"
I'm not quite sure what your objection is? Are you generally against companies providing services related to warfare? Or are you specifically against providing services for the Israel/Gaza conflict?
If the former - if you are generally protesting commercial services for the military - then there are a lot of companies you need to boycott, before you get around to Amazon. Amazon is a small fish in the sea.
If the latter, then cancelling your Amazon account is pretty small potatos to protest the Israeli attack on Hamas. And I would have to ask: have you also protested the Hamas attack on Israel? While the whole situation is a mess, Hamas definitely started this particular fist-fight.
> While the whole situation is a mess, Hamas definitely started this particular fist-fight.
It's an insanely complicated mess going back a hundred years. Trying to figure out "who started it?" is impossible because at this point we're so far from the domain of applicability of "who started it?" that it isn't a coherent or well defined question any more.
We can also answer (in the same way) about the escalations in the last few decades since 1948. Almost everything Israel did was reactive, they rarely shot first.
I don’t think you can justify ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in 1948, and I hardly think the (Jewish) Israeli government gets to play the “it was 80 years ago, it’s old news” since playing on the historical misfortunes of the Jewish community is their justification for existing.
After Ariel Sharon went full false-flag terrorist in Lebanon, again it’s hard to describe these actions as “reactive”. They were very proactive in their assassination campaigns up to and including their attempts to kill an American ambassador.
The sniper killings of civilians throwing rocks in recent years really precipitated the current (can you call it a third Intifada?)
It’s no easy task saying who started what, nor can we really consider it a cold conflict. It’s constantly simmering, knife attack here, sniper shots there. It’s just going on to keep going.
Even if one wants to leave what happened in 1948 in the past, Israel is still doing plenty of damage to Palestinians today, for example:
1. Indefinitely blockading the Gaza Strip by sea and air thus not allowing it to trade normally with foreign countries.
2. In the West Bank, applying separate legal systems to Jews (who have Israeli citizenship due to their ethnicity) and Arabs (who have no way to become Israeli citizens)
3. Continuing to expand Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank (remember no country recognizes the West Bank as belonging to Israel, not even Israel themselves, so this is one of the most unambiguously illegal things according to international law that you can possibly imagine).
4. Generally restricting the freedom of movement and property rights of non-Jewish civilians in the West Bank (which, again, does not actually belong to Israel). Something like 99% of building permits in Area C go to Jews only.
Does all this justify killing innocent civilians in random parts of Israel proper? No, I don’t think it does. But it’s all still horrible. I wanted to point it out because a standard pro-Israel talking point is that 1948 is so far in the past that wanting to fix it is akin to trying to evict all whites from former Native American land in the US. Be that as it may, Israel is STILL doing plenty of harm TODAY and could at least stop that much.
> Indefinitely blockading the Gaza Strip by sea and air thus not allowing it to trade normally with foreign countries
It should be noted that this didn't just happen, it was in response to threat of violence. Israel wants gaza to stop shooting them with rockets, so they tried to prevent them from importing things that could be used as weapons.
I mean, maybe you could argue the blockade is heavy handed and the military benefit didn't justify the other harm it caused. But its not that different from other forms of ecconomic sanctions used by countries when they want to do something but not actually go to war.
> In the West Bank, applying separate legal systems to Jews (who have Israeli citizenship due to their ethnicity) and Arabs (who have no way to become Israeli citizens)
My understanding is that under the geneva convention it would be a warcrime to apply israeli civilian law to the arabs who live in the west bank. So its not like that is totally in the hands of israel.
(I agree that 3 & 4 are fucked up and pretty impossible to defend)
Compared to what it was like during World War II, everything in 1948 was realistically in an opposite state of World Peace.
Not exactly complete peace, but the closest thing ever, that's why they called it a world war. Just like World War I had been the "war to end all wars" since more people than ever were aware and truly wanted a future benefit from such an exercise, even though it didn't really work perfectly either.
You sometimes have to ask yourself how do you know what it was like in 1948?
Was your late father a World War II combat veteran and able to tell you all about it first-hand over a period of decades?
Or at the opposite end of the spectrum among the vast majority of backgrounds whose World War II veteran ancestors or even regular civilian ancestors are many generations removed by now and there was never as much chance for direct dissemination of first-hand recollections? I would estimate that most people today have not ever met a World War II veteran, much less a World War I veteran like so many grandfathers were when I was growing up.
I accept that type of legacy is informed more so from only one side of the conflict. So it has always made me interested in further understanding those having different perspectives over the decades. And more aware of the natural difficulty of grasping the feelings of those who were on the other side at the time.
One thing about World War II, it was big and it ended with a bang. Real big in both respects. Everybody knows that.
The War to End All Wars wasn't officially upgraded to full World War I status until after World War II got underway. Sequels call for that type of nomenclature.
But what most people worldwide fail to remember now, is that WWII was so big and so deadly that there were only three (3) kinds of people remaining after World War II was over.
1. Those that won World War II.
2. Those that lost World War II.
3. Those that were saved by the ones that won World War II.
That's it.
Everyone else was killed.
Even those at the time having no knowledge that WWII even took place, were still saved by the victors or they would have been cruelly overcome by the more-inherently-violent losing aggressors had they prevailed. More cruelly than anything seen since, although some things are coming closer as memories continue to fade. But on a much smaller scale for now.
In this respect it was the least diverse that humanity had ever been, kind of an unrepeatable bubble of world peace where all everyone can do is pick up the pieces of what's left afterward. So many things were completely destroyed never to be the same again. Everyone has been repressed in some way ever since, with different paths to resolve the devastation but no one could ever realistically expect to "recover" what has been lost forever. But after such a devastating four years of intense combat, huge majorities everywhere were enthusiastic about working together to rebuild rather than fight each other any more. Survivors were so damn lucky and peace was simply worth it so damn much.
Well naturally as time marched on we are all now mostly mixed decendants of those 3 surviving archetypes, nothing that came before really matters as much after WWII than it did before, but difficulty has always arisen among those who could not realize & accept this type of thing. With nuclear proliferation ever since increasing the probability that almost all past human accomplishment would be more fully destroyed if worldwide conflict were to get underway again.
This is how people, some of whose ancestors were not even directly involved in WWII, "lose" World War II in the 21st century.
You lose the memory of it.
Either way the only thing that could ever obliterate the relative world peace that existed from 1946 and beyond, regardless of how that imperfect peace has been forgotten and steadily faded, would be World War III.
And you have to ask yourself who is most likely to actually want to start World War III, should they be stopped, and how would that be accomplished?
Now applying these generic observations to the Palestinians & Israelis today, as well as the Arabs & Jews worldwide, these are peoples that were largely saved by the victors of WWII more so than participating as active combatants. They all should not forget this although I think a lack of appreciation here is basically what's happening when you look at it.
It's not much different than it was in the 1970's during the Arab-Israeli Peace negotiations, and even back before the 1967 conflicts.
The ongoing Cold War was much more ominous and threatening to the entire world, but it was because the governments of US & NATO countries, and the government of the Soviets truly hated each other. This was in contrast to the majority of regular American & Russian citizens who were both fundamentally very similar, having no historical record of animosity, just mostly possessing worthwhile national pride on both sides without prejudice.
OTOH it looks like the majority of Arabs & Jews have hated each other religiously, enough for it to be a source of strife since before anyone living was ever born, and at any one time during recent centuries that was the case and it had been true for centuries before that. It was the modern governments that wanted peace more than the regular citizens, they did the best they could but since then it has been up to the citizens on both sides to pick up the baton and carry it forward into the 21st century. Governments can do no more, it has been up to the citizens themselves to each fully halt all violent aggression & retaliation on their own initiative more & more through time if they desire any kind of peace.
They will have to settle for whatever they can accomplish for themselves, governments have not been able to solve this for centuries even when they try.
And it looks like the governments haven't even been trying for a number of years, those in power might even hate each other more than the opposing citizens do now or there would not have been nearly as many casualties on both sides.
OP is protesting against Amazon providing infrastructure for selecting targets for the IDF to bomb. I'm not aware of Amazon providing services to Hamas, so that the OP is not protesting there isn't that surprising, nor does it imply that OP isn't protesting against Hamas attack.
Speaking about pro-palestinian activism in general, not particularly OP, who I don't know:
If one is an activist, a group commits atrocities and there's no private business related to them, then one sits and do nothing?
The people I see protesting against Israeli invasion of Gaza I failed to see protesting Hamas brutal and inhumane attacks weeks earlier. It seems to me they were silent.
I'm having a really hard time understanding the logic of this kind of activism. It seems to me ideology driven, not humanitarian.
So if it's not possible to boycott an American or Israeli business, there's nothing an activist could do to manifest his support to humanity when innocent people are slaughtered inside their houses by savages?
Adding a disclaimer like "I don't support the 9/11 attacks on WTC but the invasion of Iraq is bad" is akin to subduing to a "have you stopped beating your wife" question.
I don't thinks is a surprise that is exponentially harder to target the military when they have billions of dollars backing them up (yeah I know what some of you gonna say, they should target nobody at all and just suffer in silence, yeah that's not how humans think)
Right, I don't want to get drawn into an internet argument, but it's demonstrably false to say that Hamas targeted ONLY civilians. Military bases were run over too.
This is not true, they targeted what they could, including any military equipment they met. The fact is, they didn't met much military resistance since army didn't consider such attack possible (there are alternative theories here but I'll ignore them) and the limited one they met they often overcame.
Many male and female IDF soldiers died in the 7.10. ambush and some were kidnapped back to Gaza, some of them were killed due to very poor / lacking equipment provided by military (overconfidence in intelligence and border protection/monitoring).
More than 6000 thousand kids have died in the span of 2 months or so.
The most powerful militaries in the world, and more than 12.000 civilians already dead, packed together tightly as in a prison with nowhere to flee bombs raining down on them.
I don't get why anyone can support that. No matter the pretext. History going back over 75 years with so much suffering on both sides, but death tolls magnitudes larger on the palestinian side. A side that was just mostly regular farmers before the first Nakba but slowly became radicalised.
> that was just mostly regular farmers before the first Nakba but slowly became radicalised
Regular farmers who were asked by their Arab "brothers" to step aside while they eradicate the Jews. Surprised Pikachu face when that plan didn't work out and the result was that the farmers couldn't go back.
The same "brothers" now tell them to not leave the Gaza strip (and enforce it by blocking the one non-Israel-controlled exit), and to rather die as meat shield for Hamas. Priorities, priorities...
I've been to Israel and follow the conflict pretty extensively.
The "Meat shield" disinfo is in the grand scheme of things nothing but a gross excuse for the extreme casualties, just like the 40 dead babies thing, or "cave complexes below every hospital" or other campaign PR like "we are doing it because of WMD's in iraq". It's excuses to dominate.
Most has been debunked if you follow independent media. But it seems most here doesn't. US media is highly pro war and for some reason peddles these lies over and over again like Iraq, Afghanistan or so many other wars.
Most people were just regular farmers. That you think a whole region were bloodthirsty barbarians really says more about the racism of american media than anything else.
Most people are regular families just living everywhere on earth throughout all times. That's the beauty of humans, but war campaigns vilifies people so we can dominate them to "protect" us.
> On Thursday, he said that Egypt was already hosting “nine million guests, as I call them, from many countries who came to Egypt for security and safety.”
> But the case of Gazans “is different”, he said, because their displacement would mean “the elimination of the (Palestinian) cause.”
That's "stay there, no matter what", al-Sisi could unilaterally open the Gazan border, after all. In plain English: Meat shield.
> Most people were just regular farmers. That you think a whole region were bloodthirsty barbarians really says more about the racism of american media than anything else.
First, I don't consume american media.
Second, most people in Mandatory Palestine were regular farmers, alright. The armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq were anything but.
> The AFP news agency first reported the Israeli assessment on Monday, citing a briefing for foreign media by senior Israeli military officials. Asked about reports that about 5,000 Hamas militants had been killed since October 7, one of the officials replied, according to AFP: “The numbers are more or less right.”
> Hamas definitely started this particular fist-fight.
A few months before the Hamas attack, the Israeli minister of finances, Bezalel Smotrich (who also is tasked with the responsibility for administrating the occupied West Bank) said: "There is no such thing as the Palestinian people":
Did you know, that the British, during WWII, bombarded German settlements, holding mostly women, children and elderly, on purpose ("Area bombing directive")? In Germany they still call it: "Bombenterror gegen die Zivilbevölkerung", or, "Bombing terror against the civilian population". Here is the Wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_bombing_directive
I do not take any side in this conflict. I think, both sides are monsters. But feeling this way, I can not tolerate one sided commenting, that paints one side as "reasonable" while not accepting what the other side has to endure.
I have family in Israel, people who protested against the judicial overhaul every week for weeks. Some of them are also in the military, saying after the Hamas attacks "now is the time to kill arabs". - The way Israel is reacting to the hamas atrocities [1] will not make Israel a safer place. We haven't eradicated Taliban in 20 years, but sat with them at the table after 20 years and negotiated. - Hamas was built in 1988 after the first intifada. Hezbollah after Israeli invasion in Lebanon 1982. The more military force Israel uses, the more orphans it creates who will run into the arms of another group.
There is only one way to solve this, and that's by giving Palestinians a life that's worth living. Not by denying them basic rights. In the West Bank there are 40 checkpoins, nightly raids, 500-700 children who are detained every year. Military rule for Pals, civilian rule for settlers. So if a palestinian child throws a stone, he can get 10-20 years in prison, a settler? Nothing usually. We have 700,000 settlements built in West Bank in the past years.
All of this injustice will create the next group, even if the last hamas person is killed.
[1] In the current Gaza war, Israel is withholding water, food, medicines, and electricity for 2.1 mil. civilians, 1.1 mil children is against Geneva Conventions. It punishes civilians. And destroying the complete infrastructure of Gaza (hospitals, schools, universities, etc) will make Gaza uninhabitable, and that plus the genocidal language of Netanyahu and his cabinet (Netanyahu comparing palestinians to "Amalek", which the old testament says to destroy--their women, children, the babies; Gallant comparing them to human animals; Herzog saying there are no innocent people in Gaza, blaming the civilians as well)
The sad truth is that all of this was very predictable. It is also very convenient for Netanyahu, whose family[0] and government coalition has some interesting views about the area as a whole[1], including who Jordan belongs to. One could argue a lasting peace is utterly impossible due to ideological reasons/religious extremism on both sides.
It keeps the MIL complex revenues up. Things only make sense after you add how the cash flows. It corrupts everthing in multiple ways at mutiple levels. Mil complex pays no price for bad outcomes. They benefit from them.
> Hamas definitely started this particular fist-fight.
Do you often punch more than 6000 children to death when you have a fist-fight?
I'm being glib, but only in response to your glibness. You're using the classic argument: "It's complicated, and nobody is totally ethical, so I would suggest not taking any action. Ultimately, this benefits my side, but I'm trying to obscure the fact that I'm taking sides so I have the illusion of objectivity."
If you actually cared about human life over choosing sides, you would not be talking about "who started it." You would be talking about how we can end it.
Nope! I think a lot more innocent people are going to die (both Israelis and Palestinians) and I can't see an end in sight. When the violence does flair up, however, America could use it's massive global influence to try and stop it rather than give more weapons to the Israel without the standard preconditions that weapons sales usually entail.
This time, in fact, it's clearer than ever that American citizens have the capacity to make a change. Biden started out as rah rah for Israel and has faced a revolt within his administration from people who have had enough, as well as sustained protests from the outside.
yeah, Im pretty isolationist on the topic. There is no good guy so the best we can do is advocate for an unlikely peace and not get dragged down in the mud. I dont think Israel needs more money and weapons - they already have overwhelming superiority.
Hamas started this last flare up only if history begins on Oct 7. In fact, Hamas's action on that day is an inevitable reaction to decades of systemic oppression, unprovoked aggression and ethnic cleansing.
This entire region is a clusterfuck of, no that side did this first, no the other side did that. No matter what point you are starting at you can go further back in history to say the other side did X.
That said, oct 7 was a clear escalation by hamas and was much more violent than what came before. Unsurprisingly that garnered a response.
It's not complicated at all. The party of this conflict which is the settler-colonizer would like everyone to believe it's complicated but it's quite simple: A people were ethnically cleansed from the lands they lived on for centuries and those people continue to be oppressed and subjugated till this day, not only denied to return back to the lands they were expelled from, but continue until now to be forcibly expelled from the small amounts they remain on.
I mean, that kind of demonstrates my point though - your narrative could be applied to whichever side you prefer.
"A people were ethnically cleansed from the lands" - From context you are probably referring to the Nakba, but you could just as equally be referring to the Jews being kicked out of Arab countries in the 40's and 50's. Or any number of other events for whichever side you prefer.
There's plenty of blood to go around in this conflict.
What are the "other number of events"? Please be specific. Regarding what happened in various Arab countries in the 40s and 50s (which by the way is after the nakba so the tit-for-tat theory doesn't hold up) what does this have to do with Palestinians being ethnically cleansed? Are you justifying one for the other? It's no different than saying because of the European Holocaust or European antisemitism, the Palestinians deserve to be ethnically cleansed.
> What are the "other number of events"? Please be specific.
Why? Its not relavent to my argument and a full history of the conflict wouldn't fit in a hn comment. I'm sure wikipedia has a big timeline of events of this conflict.
I'm claiming your narrative of events could fit either side. Your narrative only mentioned ethnic cleansing once so i only need a single event to make it fit. There are sadly a number of events that probably fit the bill of ethnic cleansing so i picked the most famous one in the region. It doesnt matter how many so long as its at least one.
> (which by the way is after the nakba so the tit-for-tat theory doesn't hold up)
I did not claim that it was. I only claimed that both events fit your narrative of events.
> what does this have to do with Palestinians being ethnically cleansed?
Nothing? I didn't claim that it had anything to do with that.
> Are you justifying one for the other?
No. Obviously two wrongs don't make a right.
----
My claim is that your view of the conflict as "simple" makes no sense as a way to cast judgement on which side is right as the things you mention arguably happened to both sides. So if you think that justifies one side, than logically you should say the same thing about the other.
Unless you want to say both sides are wrong, which i suppose would be logically consistent.
Your argument is that my statement framing the current conflict in Palestine as "A people were ethnically cleansed from the lands they lived on for centuries and those people continue to be oppressed and subjugated till this day, not only denied to return back to the lands they were expelled from, but continue until now to be forcibly expelled from the small amounts they remain on" applies to either side. I charge that you haven't provided any evidence that it applies to the Jews. You bring an example of Jewish expulsion from other parts of the world after 1948 (which does not fit the full description of the statement anyway) but then admit that it has nothing to do with the Palestinian plight or the current conflict.
I believe the example i gave does fit. I understand from your post that you disagree but i can't figure out what specificly about it makes you think it doesn't fit. What is the part that isn't fitting?
Everything from "..continue to be oppressed" until the end.
But again, the main point is how does your example have anything to do with the framing of the current conflict in Palestine and what the Palestinian people are undergoing?
the reality is that past injustices can not be fixed. nothing would undo them, from an ethical or practical perspective. people need to agree on a path to move forward, taking into account the reality of the situation, and if they can, they have to accept the alternative.
Palestinians have some moral high ground with respect to the nekba, as it was a disproportionate escalation. Israel has the highground with respect to de facto power.
If we can all agree that UN resolutions and international law should allowed to be implemented, that would be a path forward better than what's currently happening.
There is a very long list of what would be better than the current status.
None of them can work until the Jews and Palestinians actually want to stop killing each other.
They are currently stuck in a prisoners dilemma.
Who knows, if you are an optimist, maybe the destruction of hamas will be through enough that a successor accepting of current boarders comes to power.
This is the only way I can imagine things moving forward.
This is a false portrayal of the conflict. Israel wants to finish ethnically cleansing the west bank (as they have been doing and continue to do until this day) and want to either keep Gaza as a concentration camp or ethnically cleanse it as well. Palestinians want implementation of international law and UN resolutions which require a return to 67 borders and a right for Palestinian return. There IS a right and wrong side here and portraying the conflict as both sides just wanting to kill each other is obfuscating with the intent of portraying both sides equally at fault and thus the conflict hopelessly unsolvable.
1. "Are you protesting X, why not Y and Z" boring rethoric, I will not even elaborate
2. "Cancelling your amazon account has no impact" well for crying out loud, what are they as an individual supposed to do, lobby the US State Department? Apart from direct action and writing on the Internet about it, not much you can do about a trillion dollar company.
3. "But what about hamas" You don't have to be pro-terrorist to recognise that Israel has attacked civilian targets indiscriminately, repeatedly bombed areas that it had declared safe for refugees, tallies civilian casualties together with military as "enemies killed", etc. It's frankly disgusting to think this can be in any way excused. This is not even to mention how hardliners like Bibi have themselves strengthened Hamas to sabotage the two-state solution.
Whataboutery. And your statement of Hamas "starting" this fight ignores both the historical Israeli agression, oppression, landtheft, and apartheid suffered by Palestinians, or in the particular, the "administrative detention" used by Israel to incarcerate many without trial (or certainly, fair trial), which can be seen as a form of hostage taking for which Hamas' action would be tit-for-tat, directly antecedent to this Likudnik war.
Thousands and thousands of kids have died in the span of a few months. More than 8000 is the latest number!
More than in any other recent war. It's a grotesque display of war actual war crimes now excused by a torrent of fake stories that keeps getting debunked later like the one with "40 dead babies! Absolutely vile and inexcusable!
Don't spread misinformation that it's "just Hamas" that's targeted. It's everyone because they wan't to annex the whole region Risk style, it's bloody classic geopolitics backed by the worlds most powerful military.
Let that sink in, the worlds most powerful militaries have murdered over 8000 kids in the span of 2 months. The west is the moral low ground. We'll do anything for power, resources and money like so many wars before, like so many coups, death squads, and dictators propped up by us.
Hardliner Israeli settlers have been stealing private property for decades before oktober 7. while murdering youth on the borders of Palestine while cheering from luxurious well kept gardens.
I feel bad for all jews getting spearheaded in this very geopolitical conflict. Many if not most do no stand with the military regime currently at war with their neighbours.
> It's a grotesque display of war actual war crimes
Even if we assume that number is accurate.
Dead children dont neccesarily equal a war crime, it depends on context. E.g. if the children are combatants, not a war crime. If it was collateral damage, not a war crime (assuming that it wasnt reckless, there was a porportional military advantage, etc. lots of details here).
To be a war crime requires a bunch of stuff beyond just children dying.
The Yemen civil war is 9 years. So on average 1300 kids a month?
If the Israeli military has killed 8000 kids, that's in two months, so way more than even the dirtiest of other wars, and really the west should be held to higher standards.
I tried to check and multiple NGO's have confirmed that 6000-8000 dead kids is the real number and the death tolls have usually been correct from the palestinian side even if it sounds weird.
Talking about this makes me sick though.
I dont think extrapolating to average rate makes sense in a conflict. By that logic you could say that this conflict has really been going on for 75 years making the average rate really low.
What's wrong with bombing terrorists? At least they do everything to avoid civilians, unlike Hamas and Hezbollah, who specifically target civilians.
What's wrong with providing a service to Israel's military (the only democracy in the Middle east, and tolerant of others)? They literally call civilians in an area before bombing for their safety. What other military in the world does that during a war?
Did you know Amazon provides massive service to the US military and federal agencies?
I respect your choice to cancel your Amazon account for your own reasons, no matter what my opinion may be of the either the company, the effect it may have, or which side of the argument you're supporting by doing it.
It's an act that shows the will to change ones self for the better, of which there should be more (not specific to boycotting).
What "feels" right or wrong to each individual is different, but the world would probably be a better place if everyone listened a little bit more to that feeling (at least in how they act in and of themselves, as opposed to being prescriptive to others about it).
Small correction. Judging by here LinkedIn page (I will not provide link, but it is public), she is not Israeli, she is an american Jew. I think, it is important to point it out since Israeli jews (including Google employees I know) have a very different sentiment about supporting their government.
It's a free market and I'm glad you're able to have that information and act on it.
Personally, I don't care about military actions. Whenever a "bad" country attacks another country, people are always quick to say that the country's military leadership doesn't represent the wills of the people, and you're never able to convince people that the civilian population should take accountability for their nation's actions. Henceforth I feel no responsibility for anything that my government does, because there will be people there to defend my inaction.
Thanks. Ariel is a rare hero. Speaking out against Israel is a clearly a potential danger to your career, and especially something like this. Imagine speaking out against something else that is making Google a couple of hundred million or whatever. "Nest is bad for privacy!". They wouldn't give a shit.
I went to her twitter, used search for "hostages" and found nothing. So I wonder how she will counter the IDF/Israel Gov saying that the only reason Hamas negotiated hostages, was due to the Ground Invasion and the threat of destroying its military arm.
Especially, since the last kidnapped civilians, Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, are still held there since at least 2014 (!). (Do I really need to mention hostages is a war crime in the eyes of the ICC?)
So for me, I will keep buying from Amazon, Google and every cloud operator that might help bringing those civilians back home (same loose causality used by Ariel). Any other initiative to remove extremist from ruling over the Palestine while they are stopping any peace initiative, is welcomed also.
Thank you for this comment, it genuinely made my day better knowing that there are still people inside our techno-system who are fighting the good and moral fight.
It's naive and foolish to upset the money gravy train.
The reality is most countries are corrupted to varying degrees by economic concerns, and it doesn't matter if the country claims to be communist or not.
There is no reward except misery, exile, indefinite imprisonment, and/or assassination for pie-eyed, meat-headed idealists.
