@jesslynnrose offers an allegory for an unnamed technology company with dubious ethics.
The function of a system is its output.
— Jessica Rose (@jesslynnrose) January 7, 2021
If you have dog grooming machine that sometimes smashes puppies and you keep running it, you're in the dog smashing business.
If you work for a mass surveillance company that keeps enabling genocide and undermining democracy...
You might try to guess whether there is any particular technology company she is talking about. People from at least three different companies thought she might be referring to them.
I've had people from three different companies message to ask if I'm attacking them personally and this feels like Schrodinger's take on self knowledge. pic.twitter.com/a2xV1aMJQv
— Jessica Rose (@jesslynnrose) January 8, 2021
A common form of defensive denial takes the form This is not who we are
, which @AlexGraul describes as an oxymoron. @ayourtch reinforces this point by quoting from Donella Meadows: Purposes are deduced from behaviour, not from rhetoric or stated goals
In other words, POSIWID.
But why does this count as an oxymoron? Because it seems to be openly acknowledging the behaviour that contradicts the espoused identity.
In some cases, the contradiction appears to be resolved if we believe that the behaviour of a minority is not characteristic of the majority - as if the minority were not fully part of the "we". Bill Clinton used the phrase in 1995 following the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial, and Barack Obama used the phrase many times. It has also been used on the Republican side. Christopher Scalia calls this a rhetorical sleight-of-hand.
In a corporate setting, executives use this kind of language to blame bad things on the actions of individual rogue employees rather than the corporation as a whole. Yeah, right.
Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems (2008). The quote is on page 14 of my copy.
Christopher J. Scalia, Why Obama says That's not who we are
(USA Today, 8 February 2016)
See also The Fallacy of Rotten Apples (July 2004)
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