Paint executives, tobacco executives, shortening/margarine executives all retired to their yachts scot-free, not held to account for millions of deaths caused directly by their choices.
US law enables prosecuting individual corporate officers. The only time I have heard of it used, in living memory, was to prosecute JPMorgan metal futures people for manipulating prices in ways bad for business. Killing people (slowly enough) is just good business.
Certain companies have asked and been allowed to flout the ban on trans fats in foods, until at least 2021. "We still have poison in the pipeline we would like to sell first." Trans fats have been known to be deadly since 1957.
It’s clear that there is no binary here - you can’t be a politics agnostic business and banning ‘political’ discussions at work ends up being Orwellian.
On the other hand it’s also true that activists can destroy a business or at least severely damage its productivity for no appreciable gain.
It seems like some kind of pro-active ethical standards might work better than bans on political speech.
E.g. “as a company we support freedom of speech, including the freedom to express political opinions safely at work. We will not discriminate against our employees or our customers based on their political statements or affiliations unless their activities are criminal or seek to undermine the goals of the company management.”
>” “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution,””
If he were to read history, it’s usually the people who are overly fanatical and dogmatic who are killed by their ex-revolutionary brothers and sisters. They prove too idealistic and get in the way of implementing the actual revolution.
He should reread his history books.
PS let me know if he gets banned/suspended for “violence”.
It's a violation of less importance than Trump's, since Costolo neither has a military nor informally controls any vigilante groups, but it's a violation, all the same.
I agree the author did an excellent job of describing the situation and its pertinent angles and facets.
I agree that there is a probabilistic argument to be made that Trump’s words are more likely to lead to violence than Costolo’s.
However that seems to me to be all the distinction is. Costolo is a public figure. A multi millionaire, almost certainly richer than Trump, and there are violent activists who support his kind of rhetoric too.
It seems pretty clear that Twitter not censoring his tweets the way they have with Trump is based on a political distinction.
You could even see his statement as declaring Twitter itself to be an activist organization that sees revolution as inevitable and is working towards that aim.
That would undermine the idea that it’s somehow at a different level of seriousness to Trump’s tweets.
Costolo is talking about murdering business people whose ethics he disagrees with.
He could be instead be talking about voting out Trump and reinvigorating democratic institutions, but he isn’t.
It's not a call for violence, not even indirectly -- he's not suggesting that they should be shot, only that they will face violence and that they had it coming.
The literal words: "I'll happily provide video commentary."
The shooting happens when the revolution happens, which is unavoidable outcome of their behavior: "are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution".
It's one thing to have a strong opinion on morality -- it's another to support violence against other moralities.