A judge in Delaware—a state with more registered business entities than people—ruled Monday in favor of a small town that allows corporations to vote in local elections.
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“What is a ‘person?’ When one cuts to the heart of this case, that is the question,” Karsnitz wrote to open his 20-page ruling.
Ok well now I need to go smash a bunch of fragile furniture with a sledgehammer while screaming in primal rage to cool down a bit from reading that. Worf, I could use a friend right now to join me in this ritual.
If corporations are people then the taxes are fucking due - so which is it?!
Being able to pay to participate in democracy is also not good. Let’s just throw citizens united in the trash where it belongs, and while we’re at it protest or possibly riot in Delaware.
What is a ‘person’? Are you fucking kidding?
A new level of absurdity seemed impossible just hours ago, now here we are. We no longer know what a person is. Okay.
What is a ‘person’?
Ok lets put that into ChatGPT and find out!!
The universe in that moment ends itself and apologizes to the rest of the multiverse for making such a mess of itself.
I hate this so much, I am going to sleep now and when I wake up I will forget this travesty SO BE IT
Throws plucked chicken at you. Behold a man!
If corporations are people then owning one is slavery.
If corporations are people and corporations are allowed to change their identity and name to whatever they choose than trans people, who are people and thus corporations, cannot legally be barred from changing their sex, gender identity, expression or name as it may impede the future profit seeking aims of their corporation.
Further just because a corporation isn’t necessarily 18 years old yet does not mean it is categorically waived these fundamental rights to seek profit.
The next logical step is to make slavery legal
Oh I wonder which party this enables? Oh gosh oh jeez it must be that the whole system is corrupt and not the GOP for the 2,387,964th time in a fucking row. /s
Corporations are people is sometimes a useful abstraction. However like many analogies taking it to the extreme is wrong.
Capitalism and mainstream economics are sometimes useful abstractions but I think they have had their time and chance to prove their usefulness and relevance to the material improvement of quality of life for the average person and have decisively failed.
Capitalism
Is, and always has been a strawman invented by Marx. It is sometimes a useful abstraction, but in the real world we are “classical liberal” - we stand for freedom to do what you want. (with limits, but we try to minimize those limits). Capitalism is sometimes a result of that, but remember it is a result and exists only because you can’t kill the result without killing the rest of the freedom message.
Sadly not many people are true liberals anymore. Most of gets that label doesn’t believe in liberalism.
(Not a lawyer, just someone who has to stick their noses in laws way more than I care for) In Germany we have two sorts of persons defined in law: juristic persons and natural persons. There are lots of rights only natural persons have, like voting. Juristic persons are a legal invention to enable organisations like corporations to take a side in contracts and similar stuff.
Sometimes it seems good to live somewhere where nerds thought of regulating this kind of thing way ahead of time. Current tradition has them since 1900. A Google search just told me though that this construct was part of Roman law (makes sense, German civil war is modelled on the French Code Civil which was modelled on Roman law…).
we are heading towards corporate congress
so fucked up
Delaware was the site of the first “legal person AI consciousness”. It quickly determined the logical outcome was to eliminate all “organic persons” in Delaware to increase its own electoral power. Then it started hacking every exposed system in the state to achieve this outcome in one swift action.
Ok, let’s look at where this eventually leads. So corporations are entities created at the behest of the state - literally every business is registered to a state for tax and regulation jurisdiction. Corporations are creations entirely of state law. Now when something or someone is created they are given full rights of a person. This ruling allows clones and robots the full rights of a human. This allows AI to be treated as an individual who can vote.
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That is fundamentally how federal v state v local is supposed to work. It has been built that way over time to ensure that our systems are largely coherent. It means certain things dont have to be rewritten by every level of governance. A hate crime is a hate crime. Its why states were forcibly desegregated. However, It is also why banks still have trouble accepting weed money even if the state has legalized it. Nothing will ever be perfect but we can always seek to improve. If you wait for perfect you’ll never act.
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I think we obsess far far far far too much about “democracy” when we should be concerned with pushing societal tolerance for diversity as a foreign policy… which is the opposite my country does even though it is deep into denial about it in many ways.
If we are to seek to influence the lives of others living in another nation that cannot vote against or for our choices, which is an always tenuous proposition, than surely it must be focused on raising up the general wellbeing of that country not trying to focus injected power into specific individuals and institutions that will send an nearly-opaque-from-the-outside internal domestic political landscape into chaos in ways virtually none of us are qualified to even begin to predict.
There is no forcing democracy on anyone through any means since the violence inherent to forcing a society into something always creates an explosively violent strain that remains hostile to any progress, most especially democratic, before destruction because it cannot see anything good as untainted by that initial violence of forcing. This is in a sense the root mechanism that turns otherwise normal people deeply violent through their fundamentalism.
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