06.30.20
Gemini version available ♊︎Crocodiles Can Only Ever Fake Empathy
Or shed a tear…
Summary: Greenwashing, pinkwashing, openwashing and abduction of various authentic civil rights movements (centered around gender, race, and sometimes economic issues) is very easy and cheap relative to the depths of corporate pockets; the problem is, those things help distract the ‘masses’ from objectively immoral and universally unacceptable acts
THE saying about the massive reptiles, remnants of an ancient era of dinosaurs, is mostly sarcastic in nature. Crocodiles don’t shed tears, they just eat their prey heartlessly. No sympathy. This is what they do. There’s also that old parable about “reptilian brains” — something that became a lot less comical because some nuts and cranks take this more literally and imply that some humans are reptiles in disguise (not metaphorically).
A lot of the corporations we deal with pretend to value women, to value ethnic minorities and so on. IBM issued not one but several puff pieces and press releases to that effect yesterday. We put those in Daily Links, filed under “IBM”. In reality, as is widely known, those corporations care about nothing but profit. In the case of IBM, we're talking about almost exclusively white men. Their recent choices of CEOs (female, then Indian) are motivated by the need to shed off a stigma — not an elusive/outdated one but a persistent and ongoing one (it’s still justified).
“Some people out there can distinguish/tell apart facts from marketing and recognise the value of what’s objectively true.”Techrights is being slandered for all sorts of things. Moments ago in Twitter I saw full-time Microsoft staff trying to incite Free software people against the site. That’s hardly the first time; they do that a lot in Reddit as well. Techrights annoys them because it tells them what’s true about their paymaster; in their eyes, it puts at risk their salary and job security.
Longtime readers of Techrights know that we don’t treat unfairly or favour one corporation over another for arbitrary reasons. Techrights is highly respected among staff of the European Patent Office (EPO). A few of them even donated to us over the years, not because they were asked but because they wanted to. These fine minds, the hard-working examiners, understand that the real enemy isn’t truth but liars such as António Campinos and Benoît Battistelli, who force them to grant software patents in Europe in defiance of the law. Some people out there can distinguish/tell apart facts from marketing and recognise the value of what’s objectively true. Even when it’s not always convenient. Embracing politically-correct and corporate-friendly views is risk-free and easy; it at least feels like everyone out there already agrees with you (many of the rest are censored or are self-censoring) and the media spikes stories/opinions. Blogs like IP Kat nowadays delete comments. For inaccuracy? No. The blog ‘owners’ (the new ones) don’t always agree with commenters, so they believe they ‘help’ us by eliminating particular viewpoints. They also sweep under the rug anything which speaks of EPO misconduct. That’s a dangerous thing to do and it makes IP Kat complicit. This morning/last night when they wrote about Munich they started with: “IP Tech Summit 2020 is taking place in Munich from 3 to 4 December 2020 within Microsoft’s premises!”
So criminals who bribed officials in Munich (to derail GNU/Linux) are still trying to set the tone there. Microsoft still does this all around the world, but who cares when there’s patent money to be made, right? Even patents that are patently bogus, more so after 35 U.S.C. § 101/Alice.
Corporations lack complex feelings. They’re like reptiles. Instinct for prey. Public institutions that are devoured by such ‘corporate reptiles’ become the same. There’s nothing public about them anymore. Nowadays the Linux Foundation “loves Linux” like Microsoft does. █
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