I was selected for a project in a Gulf country and we had a preliminary session where I got an eye opener. Basically, no women or gays, no non Islam religious paraphernalia, no atheists, no Jews and if you have Israeli stamp the company would help you get a new passport, no drinking, cover up tattoos. Never noped the fuck outta something as fast as declining that project. No money is worth working for these savage nations.

It’s gross how much these corporations act woke in the west and then basically bend to these kinds of countries. Disgusting, and yet everyone in the west eats up the marketing propaganda.

Men were sent to the country in their stead, and had to pretend they were the ones responsible for building the thing.

The women were told it was for their safety, but the rumor was that a week before we were set to travel, the customer had apparently said, "by the way, we don't do business with women."

As it should be. Corporations should not have many opinions and should operate within the law. If corporate leaders or employees don’t like it then they can spend their free time lobbying or campaigning for politicians that want to change things. Only after the law is changed should the company make a change. Until then, business as usual.

That would almost be ok if corporations weren't allowed to lobby the government, have their employees, owners or board members go work in politics or have other types of influence on politicians.

But they have tremendous influence on the laws that they themselves ostensibly have to follow.

Not to mention that:

- even when they break laws they tend to get just a slap on the wrist

- the corporate execs responsible for the lawbreaking rarely go to jail

- even if they're unlucky enough to go to jail the jails tend to be cushy country clubs

- execs have golden parachutes that let them cash out even if they screw the company, and can easily get jobs elsewhere (not that the people at the top who bear ultimate responsibility for the company even have to work another day in their life)

- corporations manipulate voters' opinions through (perfectly legal) advertising, PR, media ownership/influence, sponsorship, greenwashing, astroturfing, etc

I'm curious where this view comes from. The last time I checked, corporations are composed of people, and people are fraught with opinion.

Corporations should operate within the confines of non-discrimination law. If these business opportunities aren’t open to their Jewish or female employees, they are partaking in discrimination.

Until we start crucifying corporate lobbyists in the public square, mass criticism is the only weapon we have.

Just because one university is very “woke”, and another university forms a partnership with Qatar does not mean that universities in general are hypocritical, or even that any specific university is hypocritical.

If you are going to make such a broad argument as “American universities are hypocritically supporting the Qarar government” as you seem to be, you need to give more examples than just one university forming a partnership with Qatar.

- Northwestern University

- Cornell University

- Carnegie Mellon University

- Georgetown University

- Texas A&M University

- Virginia Commonwealth University

That’s just the ones I know of in Qatar, there’s also a bunch more in other gulf region countries (like the UAE).

> Kipnis was the subject of yet another Northwestern Title IX investigation earlier this year — this time for writing “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus,” a book about being investigated for saying there are too many Title IX investigations.

https://www.thefire.org/breaking-laura-kipnis-second-title-i...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/laura-kipniss-endle...

For many institutions, the idea of being green is to dump their crap in other countries. So much that in many cases, it is better for the environment to put plastics in the regular trash to end up in a proper landfill rather than in the oceans by unscrupulous "recyclers" in countries where regulations are conveniently not enforced.

China used to be one of these dumpster countries, but now, they start caring a bit about the environment, which is a good thing, but there are still plenty of poor countries accepting our trash only to dump it in the oceans or in nature.