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from the somebody-should-invent-a-cleaner-world dept.
Ever more the light seems to be shining in dark spots, and the cockroaches scatter. The Huffington Post reveals today that DuPont has knowingly been poisoning a small farm and community for decades, desperately trying to dump and hide the environmental, social, and medical fallout of their chemical C8. Despite their efforts, the scandal behind C8 cannot be so easily pushed down inside a landfill and forgotten like a painfully produced Atari video game. From the TFA:
That May, a group of DuPont executives gathered at the company's Wilmington headquarters to discuss the C8 issue. According to the minutes, attendees discussed recently adopted plans to cut C8 emissions at Washington Works, such as adding scrubbers to vents that spewed the chemical into the air. But they decided to scrap these initiatives. The additional expense was not "justified," the executives concluded, since it wouldn't substantially reduce the company's liability. "Liability was further defined as the incremental liability from this point on if we do nothing as we are already liable for the past 32 years of operation," the minutes read. "From a broader corporate viewpoint the costs are small."
One might think we would have learned our lessons from poisoning the world with lead, but clearly these executives never got the memo. Quite strange, given they're from the same company. I'm almost speechless at the scope of the harm and damage, knowingly and premeditatively, performed against all of humanity worldwide. The Chinese government announced today the arrests, and more than likely inevitable executions, of a score of executives and officials responsible for the Tianjin port explosions.
At what point does the harm that executives, in companies such as DuPont, meet thresholds high enough to discuss special prosecutions and the death penalty? When even China, who lacks a strong history of supporting human rights and consumer protections, recognizes that some executives and officials need to be "criminally detained" and ultimately dealt with, when can we in the so-called civilized Western societies perform the same? We've yet to even slow DuPont down.
[More after the Break]
DSM-IV Definition. Antisocial personality disorder is characterized by a lack of regard for the moral or legal standards in the local culture. There is a marked inability to get along with others or abide by societal rules. Individuals with this disorder are sometimes called psychopaths or sociopaths.
From the quote in the article (emphasis mine), can any reasonable person conclude that these executives do not need to be handed life sentences in prison at a minimum? It's not hyperbole to say that I could walk into a church, make racists statements, kill a half a dozen people, and receive a much harsher sentence than a group of executives that knowingly caused birth defects, miscarriages, cancers, among a myriad of other serious health conditions, up to and including grisly and pointless deaths. More maddeningly, to be commensurate, I would need to have children and begin a multi-generational attack on my fellow citizens to come close to what DuPont executives have done against a single community, much less the world.
It may be time to seriously, and a civilized manner, begin discussing how to bring these executives up on criminal charges, and even executing them. Especially helpful to remember in these discussions, that it is now TWICE that DuPont has knowingly poisoned the world and harmed MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS of our fellow human beings . Forget about our reputation in the world now; We're the country that has deliberately been destroying the world for profit, and all of the documents and science exist to prove it.
So.... do we need a third time from the same company before we can start talking about preventative measures and justice?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Translation Error on Friday August 28 2015, @04:26PM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 28 2015, @06:05PM
I see this sentiment occasionally on SN, and the answer hinges on what users want SN to be. Readers who want SN to be "news" or a place of "journalistic integrity" are sort of missing the central lesson Slashdot refugees discovered during the great Slashdot-beta exodus, namely that the central value proposition of the site, the community, was not the news but the discussion about the news generated by the tech-savvy, nerdy participants. It's the difference between Walter Cronkite's CBS Evening News and Fred Friendly's Ethics in America.
Anyone who wants the former will be sorely disappointed, because that standard of journalism has vanished from the world (at least, the English-speaking world). Even articles from the venerable BBC are rife with clickbait titles, typos, and grammatical errors. As a site that sources articles from other news sites, it's not really possible for Soylent to do better than they without significant re-processing by the volunteer submitters and editors. Even that, I can say from experience, is not worth the effort because no matter how careful you are, many readers are so conditioned by, and accustomed to, the "gotcha" journalism that passes for "news" these days that they savage any attempt, no matter how careful; and the grief you get as a non-subject matter expert across the many subject areas SN comprises if you should make a mistake in terminology is discouraging, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, for people who want to chase that goal, SN is not the right outlet for them. RSS is.
People who accept the Fred Friendly premise accept and grant SN greater latitude in subject matter. They can have rich, spirited, and informed discussions about tech, science, pop culture, and all things that matter. As such, this article and others like it seem fair game to me. That is particularly true in this case, because of the unbridled influence that corporations have on our world and each and every one of us. We all know it. If we don't talk about it on this forum and elsewhere, then we won't figure out what to do about it. We must figure out what to do about it, because it's the one, the only, the central power dynamic of our age.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Friday August 28 2015, @07:17PM
I see this sentiment occasionally on SN, and the answer hinges on what users want SN to be.
I feel like we have already decided and documented what we want SN to be here [soylentnews.org]. The very first item in the Submission Guidelines is "Be neutral and factual in both Subject and Summary."
To that end I feel that name-calling and biased articles actually discourage fruitful conversation because people don't talk about the subject at hand and just align themselves to whatever side their identity politics require.
I really think the opinion should be saved for the comments.
And yes, that goes double for the SJW Hugos story the other day as well.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 28 2015, @08:28PM
Do they? Or do we see fruitful discussion arise from difference of opinion? What I see are people to the left of me, and to the right of me, none of whom are timid wusses, who chime in with reasoned, confident discussion. There are users who feel to me like thorns in my side and in the side of the site, who make damn good points. I mod them such. I trust that in a site like this, right/left echo chambers that prevail elsewhere can be short-circuited and productive discussion can occur. Learned, informed men & women can maturely contend in the Agora.
Now that we're in the post-Post-Modernist age, it's safe to call BS on that. There's no such thing. Better to wear your heart on your sleeve, and be prepared to defend it. Everything else is a ruse.
No, the answer is for you and those who feel this way to step up and contribute in the form of submissions and turns as editors. If you don't like the tenor and tone of what's on offer now, then add your take. If you think you can do a better job submitting and OK-ing (as editor) articles that are "neutral in tone," then do; but, *spoiler alert*, no matter how hard you try to do that, you'll still have the peanut gallery ragging on you for bias.
Please do submit articles, and take a turn as an editor. Please also refrain from too sharply disparaging those who have stepped up in your stead. If you don't, those who make the machinery of the site work stop, and then the site and the community die with it. Be constructive.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday August 28 2015, @09:40PM
No, the answer is for you and those who feel this way to step up and contribute in the form of submissions...
I submit quite frequently, thank you.
I'm responsible for about 95% of the polls as well. So, I'm intimately familiar with getting shat on for making the effort!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @01:43AM
Sir,
Do you really think an entirely objective summary of a festering turd could ever eloquently convey the standard impression heaved upon the senses, or unfortunate sole of a typical person? It is true, but not exactly obvious or exciting that a turd fixed to a soiled and static surface is in motion in accordance with planetary and galactic trajectories; but a freely moving heap is something to behold indeed. Though the difference between the freely moving and apparently stationary heap is infinitesimal, the cognitive effect is notable, yet very subjective. An apparently stationary turd is generally taken for granted, though duly avoided; while one in apparent motion is almost always formidably recognized as a spectacle, even when moving away from the observer. My point, however shitty it appears, is that humanity is not entirely rational and requires a little artistic finesse here and there to put things in perspective. News without opinion / a world without turds; there would be no fun in that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Saturday August 29 2015, @04:57AM
I think griping about the tone of a submission detracts far more from the possible discussion than anything.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday August 29 2015, @06:05AM
Because being respectful and deferential to people who would kill you to save a nickel is ever so effective.
Pitchforks man. And shovels.
(Score: 0, Troll) by frojack on Friday August 28 2015, @06:58PM
Could submissions that start with lines like "Ever more the light seems to be shining in dark spots, and the cockroaches scatter," please be automatically rejected? Or at least edited into something that looks a bit more like, you know, news?
I agree, the thing reads like a political screed or SJW manifesto rather than an informative article.
The first sentence does server the purpose of warning the reader that there will be exactly one side of the issue explored. However, it also serves as a quality indicator that should have triggered editorial review.
Even some of the links (to Kettering) took 5 long ranting paragraphs to get to the point. Even the linked C8 Wiki article leads off with a huge quality warning.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @01:13AM
Fuck off (have that peer reviewed, if you please) with your lofty standards. This site isn't supposed to be pure journalism. Look and you'll observe opinions in many articles that work just fine, but would be awkward without them - take this for example. [soylentnews.org]. Do the the subjective descriptions of "earthy" and "delicious" qualify as biased bullshit journalism? Hardly. But your ilk would refine such writings to the barest and most boring objective form, all for the glory of something you probably don't really understand anyway. Maybe take some creatine and caffeine if you really find it that exhausting reading over the occasional opinion in short summaries. Dupont sucks and begs for much vitriol. Maybe someday you can find a nice AI bot to worship and play indifference with. For now, a few humans remain, along with the occasional sentiment or two.