Dick Costolo: Some Business Leaders Should Face a Firing Squad
forbes.com
forbes.com
It's one thing to have a strong opinion on morality -- it's another to support violence against other moralities.
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.
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.”
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 ends with a comparison between Costolo’s call for violence and Trump’s.
Can anyone make a case for why Costolo’s tweet is not a violation of twitter’s TOS’s and Trump’s is?
I agree the author did an excellent job of describing the situation and its pertinent angles and facets.
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.
I made a case. I didn't say I subscribe to it. I don't.
That's what I tried (and apparently failed) to convey by concluding "it's a violation, all the same"
Right, he's only proclaiming that he'd be happy if they were shot...
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".
Right-wing persecution complex is so funny.
Anything else is consequence of someone else’s intent to kill them, or negligence.