Saturday, May 24, 2014

there are a lot of positives to treating corporations like people. rather than fight against the idea, the focus should be on using it to the general public's advantage.

you may have seen something about the civil war, but it's nonsense. the idea is british in origin and older than that. stated simply, a corporation cannot appear as a defendant in a lawsuit unless it is legally treated as though it is a person. abolishing legal personhood would also make it impossible to sue corporations. you'd have to sue individual people that work at a corporation instead - and good luck demonstrating liability. that's the whole point in the first place - to make it easier to establish liability...

here's another example of the way the idea could be used to the general public's advantage: if corporations are people, should they not be taxed as though they are people? if you follow the logic through, it's really blatantly unconstitutional (in canada, at least) to give corporations specialized tax cuts. at the earnings levels they have, they should be putting 90%+ of their profits into public spending. so, why doesn't somebody force them to...?


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BrotherWoody1
Do you think the Holocaust survivors or even the Weisenthal Institute could look into both Ford + IBM for their active support of the Third Reich & their active participation in the Holocaust itself. It's entirely natural to Ford & IBM to move from one Nazified state to another Nazified state. I hope that the Court also makes them accountable for their actions before 1945 as well as after.

deathtokoalas
it's known that ibm & ford were both actively involved in the third reich. however, the biggest criminal enterprise in the holocaust was the standard oil, through it's agreements with ig farben. ig farben was the company that made the gas. it was interlocked with the rockefeller concerns, at the time.

you have to understand that the united states did not enter world war two until 1941, and was not particularly hostile to german plans to attack the soviet union. if you look at the situation carefully, it becomes clear that the american concern was damage control to reverse hitler's botched invasion (which they seemed to support until it failed) and save western europe from stalinism.

ig farben was dismantled after the war. it's major successor company was bayer. smaller successors include hoechst, agfa-ansco and basf.
to an extent, he's right - it's about class. but, what nader is missing is that his idea of "left" is pretty right-wing. what he's describing is a process of moderate right-wingers in the two parties coming together and (representing a dominant popular consensus) working against the existing political consensus, which is to the extreme right. and, these are absolutely exciting developments if you're a reformist liberal (that is, a centrist on any non-american political spectrum) that wants to focus on incrementally fixing little aspects of the system, rather than tearing it all down.

it follows that what he's describing is a resurgence of the center. and, i'll take it. but, that's not the same thing as left & right coming together.


if you actually take the time to hang out at some street protests in north america, you might be shocked to find out that the people that call themselves leftists are mostly actually center-right liberals that react violently to most left-wing ideas. the spectrum has just shifted so violently that mills is considered far left nowadays.

there really isn't a left to speak of to begin with.
google > raytheon.

i mean, if it's one or the other i'd rather the former.

i think this video is confusing correlation with causality in several places, and in the end trying to pull a valid point out of a giant mess of meaningless correlations. religious societies are generally less free, because you get killed when you disobey the book in the most trivial way. i don't doubt the correlation, but is the lower level of crime a result of a higher level of morality, a more stringent level of enforcement or even a lack of proper statistics brought on by a conspiracy of silence stemming from the fact that virtually everybody could be taken behind the mosque and shot in the forehead?

& etc.

to answer the question, which is what baited me into watching it: not all religious people are stupid, but most stupid people are religious.

uploading first movement (demo) to soundcloud

this is the guitar run through of the first movement of the proverbs symphony, as it was initially written (and demoed in early 2007). note that this version is less than seven minutes and is written to be performed live, whereas the completed movement is over seventeen minutes and would be impossible to reproduce without an orchestra of guitarists.

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/proverbs-symphony-movement-1-winter-2007