If there is a company that you believe is causing some harm, you can buy shares of that company and donate any proceeds to a charity that cancels out that harm.
For example, if you are worried about climate change, you can buy shares of an oil company and pledge to donate the proceeds to an organization lobbying for a carbon tax.
If the oil company does well, the carbon tax lobby will need more financing, which you'll be in a position to provide as a shareholder of the oil company.
Buying shares doesn't necessarily mean you "support the company". You can be an activist and vote against current management. In many cases, activist investors have a big impact.
Realistically, it won't matter either way, but at least as an unhappy shareholder you have infinitesimally more power to influence the company than a grumbling outsider. Certainly more than the tiny amount of "support" that your stock purchase will cause should they issue more shares.
Christ almighty, you are so totally wrong. Sorry to be blunt.
First of all, buying a stock generates upward impact (that is, contributes to an increase in market cap) and puts volume/liquidity on the tape, two things that generally benefit a company.
Activists push for shareholder returns, so that they can turn a profit on their investment. Do you know who else tends to hold shares? Board members and executives. But those activists don't generally accomplish their goals by voting their shares. No, they publicize their views, putting pressure on the board by making open arguments for why their plans are more profitable for shareholders. In reality, shareholder votes are generally not dominated by retail investors, who lack the clout to sway other shareholders.
Note also that many short-sellers do the same thing: position themselves quietly, publicize their short thesis, wait for the price to move, and then cover slowly. In either case, in my view it's hard to argue that this is market manipulation -- so long as the arguments are simple revelations of fact, or otherwise in the best interest of shareholders. But the fact remains, a retail investor is not in a position to make either such move.
I don't see what share issuance has to do with any of this. You generally buy shares in the secondary market, on an exchange. Companies don't have to issue new shares for you to buy part of the float.
The greater risk is probably that if you succeed, it will cause the oil company's share price to decline dramatically. Which means you're essentially committing to losing the money. If you're willing to do that you might as well just donate the entire amount to advocating for a carbon tax to begin with, instead of only the dividends.
When you buy share in a company you are either handing them capital to expand directly, or making it easier for them to raise capital by lifting the stock price. Weigh that against voting that share to change their business model. The net result will be highly contingent on the details.
> Another group that the Southern Poverty Law Center smears is the Ruth Institute. The group argues that gays shouldn't have the same rights to adopt. But does that make them haters? No, says founder Jennifer Morse: "I have no problem with gay people. That's not the issue."
This quote from your article seems to indicate it's just people who either don't realise they're bigots, or who think their bigotry is acceptable enough to society that they can get away with it complaining about being called out.
I'd never heard of the Ruth Institute before, and thought they may be a very focused adoption group based on the article. But I just read the latest thing on their website and I can state clearly that they do have a problem with gay people.
In a speech in Uganda she says that the death penalty usually isn't necessary for crimes such as being gay, that gay people hijacked the civil rights movement, that you shouldn't use the word 'gay' as that just plays into their hands amongst other things that have a common theme of a very restrictive view on sexual activity.
The problem with this kind of comment on a tech focused forum is that you can never tell if the person saying it is truly oblivious to context, or if they just think they can win a pedantic argument by pretending they are.
Yes, if you campaign to stop death penalty advocates from marrying or adopting children, because you accuse them all of being pedophile rapists that are destroying society and you knew that people were regularly killed for having that belief then your attack on them as being "morally unacceptable" would be textbook hate too.
There is a subtle (maybe) but important difference that you're eliding. A gay person advocates to be allowed to live their life with exactly as many rights as others, not for you to become gay. Saying that it's morally unacceptable to have equal rights is not the same as saying that it's morally unacceptable to kill someone.
The best part of the Republic of Weimar, second only to its demise, was the infighting. Now that we get to see it on Internet forums, I can only be happy to live in this age.
There is a difference between a hate group, i.e. a group engaging in hatred and violence, and some institute whose policy ideas you disagree with.
Free speech means other people get to be stupid and say stupid things, and as long as they don't resort to violence, your only recourse is to explain to everybody why they're wrong.
Are you arguing that it represses people just to say that something is immoral, and try to convince people not to do it of their own volition?
Or to publish empirical evidence just because it implies something ideologically inconvenient?
Here's a thought experiment. Take it as axiomatic that heterosexual adoptive parents will, all else equal, generally raise more successful children. You're not going to want to do this because it's disadvantageous to a protected class, but there is nothing about the universe that requires all facts to be convenient. So assume for sake of argument that this fact is inconvenient but true. Now, sexual orientation may be a protected class, but so are children, so we've got to balance their interests. We've got to make a choice about which one is more important and when.
But you can't even recognize the need to make a choice if nobody is allowed to say the inconvenient fact.
> Take it as axiomatic that heterosexual adoptive parents will, all else equal, generally raise more successful children
Successful at what? Experience says that they won't be more successful at being good to other people.
Your line of reasoning also leads one to say that black people shouldn't reproduce because their children are statistically less likely to become wealthy. That doesn't strike me as being an honest ethical framework.
The ethical choice would be to advocate for making the world less shitty, not for population cleansing or other acts of repression.
> Successful at what? Experience says that they won't be more successful at being good to other people.
No, see, you're just challenging the axiom.
The reason for the thought experiment is that nobody starts off by knowing things like that one way or the other. You don't know that it is true but you also can't assume that it isn't just because it being true would be inconvenient. You have to consider the possibility that not every fact is advantageous to your in-group, and be willing to accept the cases where that actually happens. Because it will.
Just because somebody says something you don't like doesn't inherently mean that they're wrong. We shouldn't punish people for saying things that could be the truth. If you think they're wrong then you make your case. Everybody else gets to hear you both and make up their own mind. Censoring the opposition is cheating.
> Your line of reasoning also leads one to say that black people shouldn't reproduce because their children are statistically less likely to become wealthy. That doesn't strike me as being an honest ethical framework.
No, it doesn't, because existence isn't the same thing as adoption. The average black kid may have a harder life than the average white kid but that doesn't mean given the choice they would choose not to be born.
Adoption isn't a matter of the kid existing or not; the kid exists. The question is who gets the kid. And the answer should be based on what's best for the kid. You can have a debate about how to define "best" but for any given definition, that's an empirical question with a factual answer. Which means we actually need the facts. And if the facts turn out to be convenient, that's great. But if they're not, they're not. The other side gets to make their case.
You have to be willing to lose when you're wrong because it's the only way you can win when you're right. Anything else is just a war whose victor is decided by might rather than truth.
> Here's a thought experiment. Take it as axiomatic that heterosexual adoptive parents will, all else equal, generally raise more successful children.
Words fail me. Have you ever known a gay person well?
The proper criteria for adoption is whether the adopting family can provide a good home for the child. That is all that matters.
To make the moral issue more stark, let's flip the axiom a bit. For sake of argument, let's assume that Christian families, all else being equal, raise less successful children. Now, in this situation, how do we balance the needs of the child vs. the rights of a Christian couple that is looking to adopt? After all, religion is a protected class, but the child's well-being must be safe-guarded.
> Or to voluntarily choose not to associate with them, which is all the SPLC is advocating people do.
Except that they're lying about it by classifying them as a "hate group" over ideological differences.
There is a major category difference between the Klan, out there burning crosses and lynching people, and some nonviolent conservatives out there saying nonviolent conservative stuff.
Pointing out the difference isn't violating freedom of association, it's just pointing out the difference.
Meh. If someone would uncritically take the label "hate group" without looking up the labelling organization's definition they were always going to be bamboozled. I think most informed Americans would be able to guess what the SPLC would call a hate group.
I agree can completely freedom of speech means you can accuse the SPLC of lying. But it also means the SPLC can call whatever they want a hate group, and the solution to that is also more speech. So far in our little marketplace of ideas you've failed to get me to buy what you're saying.
Using an expansive definition of a common term is classic motte and bailey. Hate groups are evil monsters because they lynch people, some institute is a hate group because they say things we don't like, everybody please assume that institute is all evil monsters out there lynching people. It would be easy to have two separate lists with unambiguous names if they wanted to make the distinction clear, but they wanted to not make the distinction clear.
As to the argument that it doesn't confuse anybody, it sure seemed to confuse that guy who went and shot up the Family Research Council because they were on the list.
And the answer to that is more speech. This is the more speech. Nobody is saying that we should shut down the SPLC because they publish a misleading list, only that everybody should be aware of how they're misleading people.
All these groups seem pretty bigoted (despite the author's reluctance to include any information on them whatsoever) and I do not see why the word 'scam' is justified or relevant in this case.
This is actually a clever idea. I've been using NFS for years for their transparent and reasonable pricing and I doubt they would have been raking in profits over this. If anyone from NFS is reading: might I suggest adding the costs saved for not having to play whack-a-mole with these sites on top of the donations?
Another example would be that some neonazi marches are accompanied by protestors promising a certain monetary amount to a refugee relief organization for every kilometer marched.
They show up along the march's path with signs thanking the neonazis for participating in this fund raiser.
That's hilarious. It's like a reverse pledge to double. You do something nasty I will do something good for the person you are nasty to multiplied by 'x'.
On the downside, of course they could reverse the same tactic, make it look like they only march to do something good in the only way they know how to, or, the internet being what it is the likes of 4chan would show up in very large numbers pretending to be neonazis.
This will get complicated in a hurry. But I like the basic idea.
If there is a company that you believe is causing some harm, you can buy shares of that company and donate any proceeds to a charity that cancels out that harm.
For example, if you are worried about climate change, you can buy shares of an oil company and pledge to donate the proceeds to an organization lobbying for a carbon tax.
If the oil company does well, the carbon tax lobby will need more financing, which you'll be in a position to provide as a shareholder of the oil company.
This idea was developed by economist Brigitte Roth Tran: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2017042pap... .
Hauke Hillebrandt also has a great write up: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iZp7TtZdFyW8eT5dA/...