maus42

This piece of information just amplified my depression when I learned about it, because of past not-income-optimized life decisions (okay, probably even more because of limited abilities and capabilities), I know know for sure that with a high probability I won't plausibly have ability to buy my way into that kind of world and yet I'm regularly reminded that it exists and not only that, but how it exactly looks like.

Of course, in the past, the equivalent me still wouldn't have had access to the world of magnificent parties and elite courtesans either. But I believe that the whole of that kind of social strata would have been much more distant, and thus less traumatizing in that particular psychosocial way. Sure, you'd see carriages passing by (or passing over you if unlucky) now and then, and maybe you'd buy a ticket to see the King have his breakfast (and it would be once in a year event to satisfy your curiosity), but that lifestyle wouldn't be marketed to you. There wouldn't be the constant visual reminders that if you'd done something differently, how different your life could be.

Giving it another name ("homophobia", "insecure about their own sexuality") does not make the issue go away for the people who suffer from it.

You don't magically grow more confident about your sexuality (or your whatever) by hearing that you are insecure about it. Or at least, I don't know how.

HN crowd is a quite special case.

Elsewhere in the world, FB is assumed as to be the standard. My romantic life has been very disappointing, so some time ago I tried creating a Tinder account (it is the only dating [yes you read it right, dating, not hookup] app that has entered the popular consciousness in this country and thus has a significant amount of female users). Last time I checked, they still required a FB account.

>Stop moralizing the behavior of companies. They aren't humans.

That is true. Companies, however, consist of humans. Make the people making the decisions to be held responsible for those decisions.

>Yet somehow many of us approve when the victims are wealthy and higher status

Of course we do. What does, exactly, the level of wealth and status we are talking about entail?

Owners and executives of a large multinational firm can wield more than enough power to influence governments. Some of these people of wealth and status are the governments. (The names revealed in the Panama papers toppled the government of Iceland.)

That's at least one order of magnitude different power dynamics than in case of your regular person charged with robbery or DUI. (Also, we might view the case of hacker revealing conversations of people charged with DUIs if the conversations constitute evidence about that particular part of machinery of justice system not to be working as intended.)

One fascinating question is which country should be responsible for nationalizing them. According to the Snowden leaks, the US government is already more than happy to cooperate with FB and Google and alike to spy on non-US citizens; handing the private data to the US government bureaucracy appears to be not much of an improvement from a point of view of an EU citizen

Maybe these megaliths should be split according to the national boundaries, not unlike how the AT&T / Bell System was structured as a combination regional telephone companies.

>A corporation is a moral agent

I otherwise agree, but I don't know if Apple is a moral agent - that discussion will into quite complex philosophical issues. But certainly each individual person making decisions at Apple is a moral agent.

>I find it fundamentally strange that we expect our corporate overlords to do anything other than maximize their profits.

There is difference between what we can realistically expect people to do (often, not much, and even after accounting for that, still disappoint) and what they should do and we should expect them do (do what is right).

To continue with the illustrative examples from fiction. Nobody expects Theoden to do much anything useful after listening to all that poison of pouring out of mouth of the Wormtongue. But is it what he should be doing?

As many others commented elsewhere, moral relativism is not very robust ethical system in a global community.

If you ever have kids, why would you teach them some morals over others? Would you teach that some moral standard (pick any! say, "it's not generally okay to steal others' stuff") would just stop by the virtue that they just happen move to different jurisdiction where the government is not interested in e.g. property rights? Or it is okay that just the natives of Thiefmark have their stuff stolen by others? Can you go and take their stuff with you to Hobbiton, given they live in Thiefmark and King Thiofden is not going to punish you for that? What if the raiders of Rohan move to your neighborhood?

This is a different issue whether it makes sense or is productive in the long term to fight against the Chinese law in some particular way. But sensible ethical systems are universal.

Sure, if you are an US citizen, you can argue that it should be US government's job to represent your ideals in the wider world. But your government is not the only party responsible for representing your moral or political positions in the world.

For example, the US government collectively is not particularly famous for 100% morally upstanding behavior. Granted, the US behaves often better than other great powers, and certainly it represents many ideals of democracy and liberty more than other contending powers. But consider the mess that was Iran-Contra affair or the various regimes ranging from unsavory authoritarianism to sheer terrorism (with "disappearances" and torture) CIA supported in Latin America in the name of anti-communism. (God forbid someone propose an idea of land reform in South America or advancing workers' and natives' rights against UFC, despite that's how numerous European countries avoided communism.) Did these actions (and various other questionable shenanigans the US government has been partial to) represent your ethical positions?

It's everyone's job to do it, and what any government does is only part of that. For example, you mentioned AAPL stock owners. According to any sane ethical system, the moral duty of any individual CEO or a member of board or stock owner as a human person with rights and corresponding duties to act ethically overrides their financial or legal duty to maximize corporate profits.

I thought "watching" anything (or even having a Netflix subscription in the first place) wasn't obligatory part of the activity "Netflix and chill".

On the contrary, the culture and the society very much influences how various mental issues develop and manifest and how they are interpreted.

You can't explain writing emails impersonating someone simply as result of "chemical imbalances in the brain" (except if you reduce every kind of human behavior to that, but then the phrase "chemical imbalance" does not explain anything). Brains and their chemical imbalances are much older than the technology of emails, or even writing.

>The guy is an active stalker. Let's stop making excuses for horrible behavior. He's not "confused". He's malicious. He's threatening. He's trying to destroy her livelihood.

I did not read the root comment as an excuse, but rather an attempt at understanding what kind of twisted psychology would lead into this kind of horrible stalking behavior. Most often, people are not consciously driven by some kind of desire to be evil just for evilness' sake.

If the Hollywood romance concepts like "persistence will lead to romantic happiness" is a partial reason how people can rationalize this kind of behavior, that's an issue that hopefully can be tackled.