Le vendredi 14 octobre 2005 à 12:42 -0400, Chad Smith a écrit : > On 10/14/05, Daniel Carrera <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Chad Smith wrote: > > > > > You just brought up Nazis. You lose. > > > > Come on Chad. There are cases where Nazis are a perfectly good > > comparison. In this instance, Nicolas was making a valid historical note. >
> No, it wasn't. The companies he was talking about made war machines, gas > chambers, and torchure devises. The companies I was writing about made pretty much everything from war machines to basic day-to-day stuff. Do you really think a regime like this can only subsist on war machines and torture devices ? The gaz they used in torture chambers was an of-the-shelf vermin-killer which happened to work as well when the "vermin" was human. The company producing it didn't even had to change it and didn't blink when it started receiving larger-than-usual orders. The people running death camps were civil servants that explained later at Nuremberg they had been doing the same administrative work they would have done in a summer camp, and why should they have lost their job because their government was mad? The moral of all this being out-of-the-ordinary acts do not have to come from out-of-the-ordinary channels, and it's the responsibility of everyone (corporations, individual people) to check their work isn't being used in unethical ways. It's ok if you don't know and you've not purposefully taken steps to ignore it. But as soon as you do know it's no longer business-as-usual. And sure it's inconvenient but ethics are not supposed to be convenient. You'll remark the military have the same rule even in the USA - you're only supposed to blindly follow orders up to a point after which you get in trouble with your commanding officer if you do. Since Google made changes to permit chinese censorship they can not even pretend they didn't know what they were doing. And they do not share responsibility for every single act this entity does, but they do share responsibility for the part they knowingly contributed to. -- Nicolas Mailhot
