Comment on Private water company increases CEO pay by nearly 100%. This is how Steve Reeds, UK water minister, reacts

• Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Steal the cake from the public.

  Slice it up and sell the slices to the fatcats at discounted prices.

  Throw a few crumbs towards members of the public and claim that “now everybody can own it”.

  It’s been the neoliberal strategy for privatizing public assets since the very start.

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• AnyOldName3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It being obviously fucking stupid to anyone with the slightest grasp of reality doesn’t mean that Thatcher didn’t think it was true and wasn’t one of the people unwilling to think. She should have been sectioned for being deluded into thinking Atlas Shrugged was real life, but instead managed to get elected, and decades later, we’re still dealing with the consequences of putting the country in the hands of someone guided predominantly by their favourite storybook.

  There’s really clear evidence that there was an attempt to make normal people buy stocks in water companies in the fact that there was heavy television advertising in the run-up to privatisation encouraging people to buy stocks in water companies while they were still a fixed price. Post-Thatcher privatisation of UK infrastructure and public services, on the other hand, has always been done behind closed doors straight into the hands of hedge funds, venture capital, and individuals capable of buying the whole thing. The end result is always the service going to shit once there’s a profit motive conflicting with the service motive, but if you compare the percentage of these companies that are owned by pension funds and individuals who hold less than a few hundred pounds worth, it’s clear that the water companies have much more of their ultimate ownership in the hands of normal people than, for example Royal Mail. Obviously (to sane people), it’s way less than if the state owned the water companies, but it’s not nothing.

  Accusing a post of whitewashing Thatcher when its opening line explicitly states she was evil is a pretty big leap. Calling someone evil should be the opposite of whitewashing, and isn’t inconsistent with saying they thought they were helping. Plenty of evil people are deluded into thinking they’re doing something moral and that, because of that, the ends will justify their amoral means, or they don’t even notice their means are amoral.

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  • leisesprecher@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You’re whitewashing, because you’re implying that she had good intentions. She did not. She was not misled by propaganda, she knew what she was doing and what the implications would be.

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    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Stating that Hitler thought he was helping Europe by slaughtering millions of Jews and other minorities doesn’t imply any degree of approval for anything he did or acceptance that if he’d been right, the end state he was aiming for was worth the atrocities committed trying to get there. Evil in the real world isn’t like a cartoon where the bad guy just enjoys being bad for its own sake. Pretending otherwise just makes it harder to recognise when people are doing evil things again just by being simultaneously incorrect and in charge.

      It seems like you’re under the impression that thinking you’re doing something good is virtuous, but I fundamentally disagree. I don’t think morality should be solely judged by outcomes, either, but rather whether you take reasonable measures to ensure that even if you’re wrong, you don’t make things worse. Everyone hears the phrase the road to hell is paved with good intentions as children, so should know that having good intentions has little to no bearing on whether they’re a good person unless they’re also making sure they’re not doing evil by recklessness or negligence.

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      • leisesprecher@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Are you by any chance familiar with degrees of murder, involuntary manslaughter and insanity?

        If I think I’m defending myself, despite no reason to do so, I can’t claim self defense. You can’t argue, that your neighbor certainly didn’t threaten you in any way, but he sometimes looked really weird, so it’s self defense to kill him.

        I’m not even sure, what exactly you’re trying to argue here?

        It seems like you’re under the impression that thinking you’re doing something good is virtuous, but I fundamentally disagree

        It seems like you made impressions on yourself, because that’s completely besides anything I wrote.

        Doing something bad and knowing that it’s bad, is bad. That should be very very obvious.

        You’re building yourself an entire terracotta army worth of strawmen here.

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      • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        When you start using Hitler and Jews... You lost it..

        Other commenter expounded to your the error of your choice. It is up to your to figure if you care where he or she is coming from.

        That analysis is solid IMHO tho

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