Hacker News Reader

Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

I skimmed the report.[1] Very few corporation names can be found, unless I missed them. I found some attributions in highlight stories, e.g. Tate & Lyle Sugars in a Thailand case of sugar plantation taking land by force; but those are few and isolated.

IMO a list of names of people murdered means almost nothing to any reader beyond the symbolic value. Now, if you also attach the names of responsible/beneficiary corporations in each case, especially the multinationals, it would be a lot more powerful.

[1] https://www.globalwitness.org/documents/20190/Last_line_of_d... (warning: it has `content-disposition: attachment` so it will be downloaded rather than opened by your browser)

View on HN

Are you saying that an environmental activist being murdered is only newsworthy if you can find a way to pin the blame on a Western corporation? That seems a fairly callous attitude to take.

Who said Western? Are corporations or specifically multinationals uniquely Western? What a weird thing to get defensive about.

Yes, of course multinationals are Western - they're creatures of the Western system of bilateral investor-rights treaties and the largely Anglo-American corporate legal system. Chinese and Russian companies may operate outside their own territory, but they don't have the distributed ownership and management to qualify as multinational.

Coming up with your own narrow definition of a widely accepted term and attacking someone else for using its widely accepted definition is a one-way ticket to a toxic interaction, which ends here.

Huh, you're right - guess that comes from growing up during the '80s, when "multinational corporation" was practically synonymous with "transnational corporation". My bad and thanks for the correction.

Okay, appreciate the apology.

> if you instead attach the names of responsible/beneficiary corporations

Then you'll get annihilated by slander cases before any other inquiries even start. :(

It’s not slander if it’s true.

And if it’s not true then don’t say it.

You also have to be able to afford to prove that it's true in court.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com