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Comment by clavicat | Hacker News Reader

>Intel joined other prominent U.S. companies Monday pledging to do more to address systemic racism in the wake of the killing of an African-American man, George Floyd, by a police officer in Minneapolis.

>“Black lives matter. Period,” CEO Bob Swan wrote in a memo to employees Monday, embracing the rallying cry of contemporary civil rights activists. “While racism can look very different around the world, one thing that does not look different is that racism of any kind will not be tolerated here at Intel or in our communities.”

lmfao

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What is wrong with clavicat's comment? He is pointing out the hypocrisy of Intel claiming not to tolerate any form of racist. Genocide is by definition racist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide

It is the same as when Western branches of various multinational corporations redesign their logos in rainbow colors for the Pride month, but their Middle Eastern branches do not ... offending Islam or the CCP comes with enough downsides to make them think twice.

I think the best default way how to view corporations is "perfectly immoral psychopathic beings always heeding the current Zeitgeist for maximum profit and cheap P.R. points among the class that locally matters".

I am happy to change my mind about some of them if they prove otherwise (e.g. by turning down a massive contract for ethical reasons, or standing up to a Twitter mob sicced on by influential people), but this is my default view in absence of other evidence.

I believe this has happened exactly once, and it's already widely known:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#2010–2016:_Giving...

The worse part, at least to me, is that that these shallow gestures presumably work, that somehow empty posturing on progressive-cause-du-jour actually does buy them goodwill in the western world.

It's either that, or this entire thing as a corporate strategy is run by some HR echo chamber with minimal forethought, and any downside is farmed out to external PR crisis management teams.

I'm starting to think it's the latter, given the amount of backpedalling and policy changes as of late (think google employee walkouts, publishers dealing with wrongthink books, netflix employees trying to scuttle the company's IP etc)

What you're seeing is a tiny peak of issues that pop into public consciousness essentially randomly, sometimes because you did a gesture and other times because you didn't do a gesture. Shallow gestures are common because, the vast majority of the time, the only response is some people saying "oh that's nice".

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