Re: <nettime> two 'meta' notes (was Re: rage against the machine)

[Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>]

ted,

i'm ready to call this a disagreement and to leave it at that: you say 
that it is my remark that "misdirects [the discussion] away from what 
matters most"; and i, to the contrary, think that it is morlock's 
"figure of speech" that misdirects the attention from what a civilised 
and moral response might be, and that's what i tried to say: mind your 
language.
i guess that using "burning at the stake" as a figure of speech is 
easier done if you don't imagine someone actually getting hanged, or 
shot, or killed in the gas, or the like; if, like me, you think that 
these are not such unlikely options to happen literally, not 
figuratively, the air smells different; and that may be due, as you and 
i infer, to being "over-sensitive".
i have no idea why you impute that, because of this sensitivity, i might 
be allergic to power; we can discuss the Nuremberg or Srebrenica or NSU 
trials over a drink some day, but generally, i believe that long prison 
sentences (or the prospect thereof) can already do a lot, and, for me, 
we must not respond "proportionally" to crimes.
i completely agree with you that people working in any industry should 
be held accountable for their decisions and deeds (even if the damage 
done is sometimes immeasurable); even the serious threat of being taken 
to court over the marketing tricks that morlock described in his msg, 
would perhaps (as you also suggest) help to alleviate things.
finally, even more than i fear people who make flippant remarks about 
burning others at the stake, i am afraid of those who think that 
"broad-base popular support" is a confirmation for anything. but then 
that's just me.
i guess the message of this missive is: don't let your language be 
carried away by your anger, even if that anger is due.
be safe,
-a



Am 23.03.19 um 18:00 schrieb tbyfield:
> (2)
>
> On 23 Mar 2019, at 6:54, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
>
> > friends, call me over-sensitive, but i think that nobody should be 
> > burned at the stake for anything in any country; i say this also 
> > because this flippant kind of rhetoric poisons the reasonable debate 
> > that is so urgently needed on the matters at issue here. (to the 
> > contrary, i am glad that some civilised countries find forms of 
> > punishment other than that for actual wrongdoing.) - unfortunately, in 
> > a world where people get imprisoned and killed for all sorts of 
> > things, there is little room for such dark humour... when all the 
> > stakes have been taken down everywhere, we'll be able to laugh about 
> > this joke again, perhaps.
> Andreas, you're over-sensitive. Much as Brian's flight into abstraction 
> misdirected discussion away from concrete facts and struggles, your 
> focus on the brutality of Morlock's remark — which I'm pretty sure was a 
> figure of speech, not a specific advocacy for burning at the stake over 
> drawing and quartering or crucifixion — misdirects it away from what 
> matters most: penetrating the corporate veils that limit liability. If 
> multinational corporate sovereignty is to be a key part of the new 
> global regime, we need concrete strategies for isolating and punishing 
> corporate criminality. Boeing's reputation has suffered: another 
> airline, Garuda, canceled a $6B order for ~50 737s, and more are likely 
> to follow. But minimizing shareholder value isn't enough. We need 
> regulatory systems with teeth as sharp as those used in war-crimes 
> tribunals. Polite anti-corporate rhetoric won't change anything, but 
> identifying specific culprits within corporations and making them pay 
> dearly for their crimes will change everything. Best of all, it can be 
> applied to other imponderables like massive-scale fraud, environmental 
> degradation, arms manufacture, abuses of privacy, and all the rest. For 
> that reason, it *will* have broad-base popular support, sooner or later. 
> The first question is what will finally trigger it, and the second 
> question is whether we've laid solid groundwork for effective 
> progressive responses.
> And that begs an important question that leftoids aren't prepared to 
> answer because, in a nutshell, they're allergic to power: what *would* 
> be appropriate punishments for people who, under color of corporate 
> activity, engage in indiscriminate abuses of public trust.
> Cheers,
> Ted
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