#I had to delete huge parts of this that went on the whole anti capitalism speel since we all been brainwashed by a ridiculous capitalist

[tessatechaitea]

Doomsday Clock #5

Nostalgia's branding efforts might be a little off the rails.

Dammit. I had almost forgotten how everybody blamed and mistrusted superheroes!

Of course there's always been a long history of Gotham Police mistrusting and hating Batman (if only because he does their job better than they do and obviously has way better pay and benefits). But DC really fucked up when they decided that level of mistrust should be applied more broadly so that every citizen suddenly turned against even Superman, the universally acknowledged boy scout. I'm not a comic book historian so I don't know when that attitude began but I think it's generally acknowledged that it was a byproduct of Watchmen and similar comic books of the time. "Look at how more realistic this is! Why should a world embrace and trust masked heroes?! And Watchmen was so popular, that aspect of it must be what made so much money!" But, of course, that's the kind of thing people who didn't read Marv Wolfman's New Teen Titans believe. Because if I had to pick a starting point for when the mistrust of heroes seriously got rolling (I'm not saying it wasn't there before! It just wasn't the standard reaction of the public), I'd point to Wolfman's work trying to adapt The X-men feel to DC's superheroes. In the X-men, the "heroes" were actually mutants enrolled in a school where they could feel safe and learn to control their powers. They were hated by the public due to bigotry and a misunderstanding of what they represented to humanity's future. They were constantly attacked by "evil mutants" due to a disagreement on what mutants meant to the world. This worked as a plot point because of the bigotry aspect and the underlying difference between mutants and superheroes. But translating that to DC's world where mutants don't exist completely missed the mark. Wolfman's world became a place where The New Titans formed to help the world but never actually did. They simply created a headquarters in New York where they were constantly attacked by family members. Of course the people of New York would begin hating them for bringing danger and destruction to the city. Because they were actually doing that! And since The New Titans became DC's biggest seller for quite some time, every comic book writer on Earth learned that Wolfman's model was acceptable to readers. Instead of having heroes exist for saving the world, they could just exist to be targeted by super villains. And if that's all super villains seemed interested in then isn't it true that heroes are the root cause of all the problems with super villains? It's one thing to comment on bigotry in America by portraying people's hatred of mutants. It's a totally stupid other thing to have people hate heroes because of the destruction caused by the heroes attempting to simply save themselves from their enemies. In the first one, you side with the mutants because the people hate them for irrational reasons. In the second one, you have to side with the citizens because who wouldn't be upset if their house was destroyed and their dog was killed because The Joker was trying to kill Batman? I've said all of that before. Sometimes, I feel that's all I have left to say about DC. At least when Priest recently had the public hating the Justice League, it was because the Justice League was racist! Not in the regular racist way where Batman is using slurs and Superman is flying around in blackface and a sombrero but in the systemic way where they don't realize they're being racist but they just are. That was at least different (even if I still wasn't happy about it). I don't understand people who prefer heroes who are mistrusted and hated over heroes who are inspiring, loved, and embraced by the public. Wasn't the latter version the whole point of them in the first place?

Dammit! I should really read ahead before I go on a rant! Although, technically, I think this somehow proves my point about how this is all supposed to fix what went wrong with The New 52.

This issue is called "There is no God." I'm guessing at the capitalization because the font actually reads "THERE IS NO GOD". But it doesn't end in an exclamation point (or any other kind of punctuation, being a title and all) so I'm assuming it isn't meant to be yelled and it's just DC's perverse avoidance of lower case letters. Anyway, "There is no God" is the perfect title to ruffle religious feathers. But I bet it's a set-up! I bet Geoff Johns is going to write a story about how God does exist, even if only in a metaphorical way that gives hope to people who need more than a few decades of random, chaotic life! I mean, I would like more than a few decades of life too! But I wouldn't mind if it remained meaningless. Who needs a purpose? That's just adding obligation to this precious gift! Why do people want that?! I think that's why "being inspiring" has become such a huge achievement for so many people. Because it seems to give meaning to your life without you having to actually do anything except exactly the thing you want to do. So, say, I was coming up with a completely hypothetical situation where a guy I know survived an IED attack in Iraq but the four other people in his Humvee were killed, he might want to find meaning in why only he survived. He might feel somehow responsible for carrying on in a meaningful way to make their deaths less random and nonsensical. He might also become religious because it's too painful to believe that those four other guys simply winked out of existence in a meaningless war that didn't do anything for anybody (aside from some people making a lot of money (and aside from opening up the country to more chaos and instability)). And the meaning he might find in his life is becoming the center of attention just like he always wanted but could never attain. He became a comedian who also inspires people because he's so badly burnt and disfigured, how can he tell jokes?! Now his life has meaning even if his jokes and his poetry never get any better because the people who hear and read them are Christian and patriotic supporters who can't be critical of anything he does. So if he says in a poem that his daughter is crying "alligator tears," nobody tells him that they're "crocodile tears" and that if his daughter is crying them, it means she doesn't actually care that he's off in Iraq. And when his only joke is that he was blown up and set on fire, nobody minds because he was blown up and set on fire and—look at that!—he can still stand up and tell jokes! So inspiring! Now if my thought process were better than it is, I would delete all of that so that I don't sound like a jealous and bitter friend. But I explained my thought process earlier so you can judge me but I've got my Oreos ready to go after you misunderstand the hyperbole and facetiousness. Also, I'm not jealous and bitter. I'm supportive but critical! Which is why I didn't post what I just wrote on his wall. Because he can take supportive but I don't think he's up for critical. Especially hyperbolic and super truthful critical. Hypothetically, I mean! Back to how this comic book is doing its part to reset the DC Universe into the Post-Zero-Hour, Pre-New 52, Post and Pre a bunch of other stuff I can hardly guess at because DC Continuity is super fucked, a news report on a hospital television reports on Hawk, Dove, Red Star, and the Rocket Reds. So maybe I was wrong about Post-Zero-Hour! Maybe this reboot is post-Crisis only? And I might be wrong about that too! Isn't the current Superman from the Crisis timeline where they actually beat the Anti-Monitor? It's hard to remember Convergence because it was super boring and terribly written. It rated 5 Flaccid Penises out of 5. Unless you're totally into flaccid penises and then it rated zero of them. Along with the Rocket Reds and Red Star gearing up for an anti-west battle, Pozhar has stepped up to the plate as well. Or whatever you step up to in Russian baseball. Do they have something akin to baseball in Russia? Maybe cement-block-call? If we're going by themes, it's beginning to look like we're headed back to the eighties cold war, so a reboot to pre-Crisis levels of continuity isn't completely off the table! If I didn't know Geoff Johns was writing this, I'd be tempted to guess it was Dan Jurgens. The Cold War of this ear isn't about nuclear superiority but about metahuman superiority. But that's just a superficial difference, really! What's actually happening in Watchmen 2: Doomsday Clocks is identical to what was happening in Watchmen. Which means everybody will get along at the end not when Mister Terrific teleports a fake space creature into the middle of New York but when an actual cosmic threat attacks Earth and all the American and Russian metahumans have to team up to save the day. Then everybody will be inspired and begin fucking. Right on panel! I hope. In Moore's Watchmen, there was a thread with that kid reading the pirate book. I wasn't smart enough to know what that was about. Maybe it had something to do with how, to survive, the lead turned himself into a monster the way Ozymandias did. Or maybe it was just about the kinds of things media used to distract the populace. Who can tell?! Not me! Anyway, this series has Nathaniel Dusk stories as the story within a story. I guess it's the only way DC could get people to read them. So boring! You can tell they were boring if you read them in 1984. Also because an old man really loves them in this comic book. That old man is Johnny Thunder! His name makes him sound exciting but you'd be wrong! More boring! And he's trying to get the Justice Society back into continuity. Most boring of all! Some of you might be bristling at my description of the Justice Society as "most boring of all." But you've forgotten about the hyperbole and facetiousness! There's a twenty-five percent chance that I actually liked the Justice Society and own a bunch of their comic books! The Superman Theory states that the American government is in the business of making metahumans to make sure they retain control on the world stage. Most of the heroes deny that they were made by the government because they were actually made when they were exposed to Nth Metal. Duh. Everybody who believes The Superman Theory must not have read Metal. How did they miss it? It was the biggest and longest blockbuster ever produced! Anyway, Lois thinks Lex Luthor is the one behind this propaganda. But Lex denies it. In fact, he says somebody in the government is creating metahumans and that person was once a member of the Justice League! So, um, like Lex? Hopefully the reveal of the person behind The Superman Theory doesn't wind up being somebody like Commander Steel. With a twist like this, it's got to be somebody you generally associate with the League, like Martian Manhunter or Gleek.

Here Ozymandias lectures Batman thanks to years of terrible comic book writers.

By the end of this issue, Rorschach and Saturn Girl have caught up with Johnny Thunder who finally found Alan Scott's lantern. Batman has been captured by The Joker. And Geoff Johns is well on his way to telling comic book fans how dumb they've been accepting the bullshit narrative they've been fed for years that super villains only exist because super heroes exist. Rating: This issue was called "There is no God" and it had nothing to do with the story inside. But it was used because it was part of the Eugene O'Neill quote that closes the issue: "When men make Gods, there is no God!" Is that how every issue has been titled so far? Using a bit of the quote at the end? I haven't been paying close enough attention to know. Anyway, I have a few issues with that quote. First off, you shouldn't capitalize "Gods." I suppose you can argue that you would capitalize "Johns" but if you choose to do that, I probably don't like you and would discount your argument on that basis alone. I mean, the point is that men are making little gods which kills the proper noun God. Second, why does it end in an exclamation point? Is the second half of that statement such a huge twist that it needed the surprise element of the exclamation point? Maybe Eugene knew it was a fairly week turn to the phrase and thought the exclamation point would bolster the sentiment. I know that trick! The third problem I have with it is that I don't understand it in the context of this story. Is Johns saying that super heroes have replaced God? Are fans now supposed to feel reprimanded for being blasphemous monsters?! Am I supposed to believe that if we rely on heroes, we have lost our faith in God? Is Johns saying inaction through faith is better than relying on super heroes? Or is he saying that we lose our own motivation and free will when we expect heroes to save the day? How is that any different than expecting God to save the day? I guess in that context, I understand the quote! "When we come up with something more entertaining that still doesn't actually help or save humanity, we've forgotten the original concept we came up with that doesn't actually help or save humanity!" Hmm, good quote! I've won myself over! Five out of five stars! Not for this issue but for my twisted logic! For more of this sweet, sweet writing, subscribe to my newsletter: E!TACT the Newsletter.

#Doomsday Clock #DC Comics #Geoff Johns #Gary Frank #Brad Anderson #Batman #Watchmen

[rimaregas]

The NYT’s Curious Praise of CEOs As Moral Leaders | #SocialEthics on Blog#42

I happened upon the strangely titled article, The Moral Voice of Corporate America, in the New York Times’ business section. Intrigued, I clicked the author’s bio before beginning to read.

The piece is written no differently than an opinion piece. While it includes many quotes from CEOs, it is almost completely devoid of any nuanced analysis to go with the contrasting facts chosen for the piece, links to assertions made, data, or examples that buttress the arguments made. In short, the piece is nothing more than a glorified ode to CEOS without so much as a thin veil of journalistic ethics, at the very least, presenting the reader with a requisite minimum of background in a larger context, nuance, counter-argumentation, and some analysis. Nothing.

There isn’t even any background reporting on why some of those CEOs might have chosen to throw their lots behind issues having nothing to do with Charlottesville. For example, while Gelles tells readers that Apple’s Tim Cook came out as gay, he could also have informed them that he’s a Southerner. Surely, his distaste for the Trump administration’s bent stems from strong personal views that were informed by a lifetime of exposure to bias of all kinds? Cook has given interviews to the media in the past and spoken out about social issues that he cares deeply about. Why not include some of that, aside from the fact that he’s gay and proud?  I am sure that the decision by Cook (not mentioned in the article) to award $1 million each to the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, with a promise to match 2:1 every dollar Apple employees donate to those two organizations. This was Cook’s response to Trump’s Charlottesville comments. It has nothing to do with his sexual orientation, and everything to do with the sour look on Cook’s face whenever he’s been in the presence of Trump.

You don’t change things by just yelling,’ Apple CEO Tim Cook. ‘

The same goes for Gelles’ approach to his coverage of Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation’s mission is social justice. A reminder of that to Times readers would have contextually placed Walker’s statements. Of course Walker would make such comments! That is what he does on a regular basis, among many other things.

Gelles quotes Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce:

“’When I went to business school, you didn’t see anything like this,” said Marc Benioff, the founder and chief executive of Salesforce. “Nobody talked about taking a stand or adopting a cause.’

Now, Mr. Benioff is at the vanguard of a group of executives who are more connected — to customers, employees, investors and other business leaders — than ever before, and who are unafraid to use their influence.”

Marc Benioff is two years younger than I am. By the time he went to college, business ethics had long come under the influence of Milton Friedman’s 1962 tome, Capitalism and Freedom. Social activism most definitely would not have been a covered topic at USC’s school of business administration by the mid-1980’s, anymore than it would have been at Wharton at any point in time. Such teachings would have been considered heresy.

https://www.rimaregas.com/2015/09/25/from-milton-friedman-to-ronald-dworkin-economics-for-hedgehogs-socialethics-on-blog42/

Politics, particularly in the last nine years, have increasingly clashed with the common-sense business practice of not offending one’s customers. Does that mean that Benioff’s activism was purely motivated by his bottom line? No! But one cannot discount how much of his bottom line would have been affected had he remained silent.

The same holds for many CEOs who have come out of the woodwork both in favor or against a particular social issue that they are both passionate about and affects their particular business’ bottom line. Perfect cases in point are the owners of Chick-A-Fil and Hobby Lobby. Chick-A-Fil distinguished itself a few years back for its openly hostile policy against the LGBTQ community. Hobby Lobby’s owners sued the Obama administration, along with others, not to cover contraceptives as a part of employer-provided health insurance benefits. While one can try and call these behaviors social justice for the extreme right, they are decidedly anti-social when one takes society as a whole, not to mention the fact that both of these businesses cater to conservative customers first and foremost. Once in the fray, they made the conscious choice to forge ahead. Theirs were calculated decisions, both business and moral, to act as they did. Neither corporation has suffered as a result of their calculated risk, whereas Google or Apple, given the same set of choices, would most definitely have suffered serious blows.

One of the relative few counterpoints used in the piece come by way of Travis Kalanick, former Uber CEO. Kalanick is an outlier, as much as recently convicted Pharma Bro, Martin Shkreli. They are not representative of the “dark side” of business.

Proof Tim Cook smiles… Happier times for Travis Kalanick and Tim Cook.

The son of Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, gets a mention for his now publicized email urging his friends to make donations to organizations that are fighting for social justice, in addition to the revelation that Murdoch made a $1 million contribution to the Anti-Defamation League. While it is entirely possible that young Mr. Murdoch is a social justice-minded sort, Fox News is a family-owned business that, at the moment, is saddled with having to contend with a long-running reputation for racism and, more recently, sexism and sexual harassment by their top talent, costing them tens of millions of dollars in settlement fees. All of these things must be weighed, in addition to the fact that James Murdoch was taken aback by Trump’s racist commentary. Murdoch’s shock and resulting benevolence don’t make him, or any one of the other CEOs who have spoken up, moral leaders.

Tech companies get praise for stepping up and obliterating the presence of neo-Nazi website The Stormer, deleting white supremacist content, and the financial accounts of known supremacists. There is no mention of the fact, especially in the case of The Stormer, that these tech companies’ lax policies with fringe elements have long been a bone of contention, particularly with African Americans involved in movements for social justice. For example, it is well-known that Facebook has been suspending the accounts of prominent Black activists as it had been allowing white supremacists to exercise their free speech. Facebook, in particular, has been the subject of much criticism in that regard. It behooved these tech companies to step up and speak out for those reasons, first and foremost.

To his credit, Gelles does include a reminder of some of the more spectacular faux-pas we saw recently:

“When Pepsi this year released an ad featuring Kendall Jenner offering a police officer a soda in the midst of an apparent Black Lives Matter protest, the condemnation was swift. Two years earlier, Starbucks drew wide ridicule when, as part of an effort by Mr. Schultz to start a national conversation on race relations, baristas were encouraged to write “race together” on coffee cups.”

But what’s missing is the obvious mix of ham-fistedness, mixed with a bit of social consciousness, mixed with a whole lot of obvious naked commercialism at a time of deep social anxiety. Starbuck’s attempt came at the height of police brutality cases and while it may have been well-intentioned, the initiative was most definitely ill-planned. The image Starbucks has always fashioned for itself is one of a socially-conscious enterprise, particularly in its partnerships for the overseas procurement of the main ingredient for its business. The leap from that to the national conversation on race was a huge leap.

Egregiously missing from the conversation in the Times piece is any mention of the fact that so many corporations are represented in the highest levels of the Trump administration and dictating the rollback of a dizzying number of regulations, to the point where corporations and the U.S. government are virtually indistinguishable. Add to deep corporate influence in the deregulation of everything to the real problem of American jobs not returning to the U.S., and the perception problem becomes far more acute than ever. For Apple, who used to manufacture everything in a Mac right here at home, the lingering specter of Cook’s unfulfilled promise to bring back at least some manufacturing to the U.S., against the backdrop of the deal Foxconn, Apple’s Chinese manufacturer, just signed in Wisconsin. These are the kinds of problems that underlie the reasons why so many CEOS now feel real pressure to completely disassociate themselves from a government with which they eagerly allied themselves and now cannot afford to be tied to in any way.

Curiously, a related article appeared in Business Day three days earlier, presenting the views, pro and con, of Walmart customers following that company’s CEO’s statement in opposition to President Trump. The piece, with a byline of “New York Times” oddly mirrors the corporate ethics piece both in the things it highlights and the things it fails to analyze.

Walmart’s C.E.O. Had Plenty to Say About Trump. So Did His Customers

“Peter Caprio, 64, had just started pulling out of his parking spot when he realized the cooler he had put in his trunk was holding the rear gate of his BMW sport utility vehicle open.

Mr. Caprio, a school business administrator, said Mr. Trump had made fair points in his news conference on Tuesday, when he said the violence was not just the fault of the white supremacists. “He was right; it’s on both sides,” he said.

But even if he might have agreed with Mr. McMillon’s position, he suggested it was not appropriate for the chief executive of a big company like Walmart to comment on politics.

“The C.E.O. has to worry about stockholders, nobody else,” Mr. Caprio said. “If it doesn’t affect stockholders, best to let it go.””

The comment is both a rather odd and typical one. Our culture has been inculcated in Milton Friedman’s “CEO responsibility to shareholders” mantra. The odd part is hearing it in a Walmart parking lot… One can easily observe the divisions of views that belie our nation’s polarization. The older respondents tended to give conservative responses. The younger respondents gave opposing views. Again, no mention is made of the inextricable association of corporate and government in the Trump administration.

Had this piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal, I would hardly have batted an eyelash. But this piece appeared in the New York Times, a publication that is supposed to be the flagship of liberal media and, as such, one we can count on for a more balanced view. This sort of journalism isn’t honest reporting. It is nothing more than pandering to a skittish corporatocracy that is caught between the hyper-capitalism of our new oligarchy and the simmering ire of an electorate that was already angry with the neoliberal establishment.

Subscribers of any newspaper ought to be able to count on reporting that is neutral, thorough and conveys a modicum of depth. This wasn’t it. Corporate self-interest is morphing with our politics. This isn’t the same as suddenly getting religion and abandoning Milton Friedman’s libertarian business ethics. The addition of a white supremacist president is just the straw that breaks the camel’s back. This is a distinction that the corporate media must make in this kind of reporting. Anything less gives the appearance of shilling for the corporate world they, themselves, are a part of.

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      The NYT’s Curious Praise of CEOs As Moral Leaders | #SocialEthics on Blog#42 The NYT's Curious Praise of CEOs As Moral Leaders | #SocialEthics on Blog#42

#Corporate ethics #corporatocracy #Donald J. Trump #Milton Friedman #oligarchy #Social ethics #Social justice #White Supremacy