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Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

> A comparison of the two is going to provoke, but similarities do exist. It is an uncomfortable truth that both slave owners and corporations...

It has always irked me that people are unable to differentiate between comparing two things and equating two things. Despite being completely different actions, it's commonly accepted to treat them the same. This leads to all sorts of misconceptions and invalidates plenty of reasonable points.

It shouldn't be "provoking" or "uncomfortable" that any two things share some similarities, because everything shares at least some similarities with every other thing. That doesn't mean other properties (e.g. the evils of slavery) of those things automatically become transposable.

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I agree. There are similarities between manager/employee and master/slave relationships, just as there are similarities between these two relationships and that of parent/child, ruler/subject, big-country/small-country, guest/host, older-sibling/younger-subling and even in (m/f)spouse/(f/m)spouse. Social hierarchy in human beings is as inherent as the number of fingers we have on each hand.

On another note, all of those relationships have the similarity of having no equality. If it's uncomfortable, it's only because it is what we can't say. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html For every relationship there are roles and obligations we must fulfil in order to remain in that relationship, and when the obligations are broken by either party, e.g. a master punishing instead of rewarding a slave who did right by their master, the relationship will be imperilled.

>That doesn't mean other properties (e.g. the evils of slavery) of those things automatically become transposable.

And likewise, just because things aren't exactly the same, doesn't mean that don't share many properties.

You are playing word games and have failed to address any of the content. Share owners, slave owners, the phrases differ by two letters. Western culture is a direct descendant of Roman culture, it would be strange if there weren't large similarities, especially at the level of organizational institutions. Why would you expect that the concept of people holding power over other people through directing them on what to do would just vanish?

You would do better to point out the actual differences than to fall back on the claim that because a word is slightly different there may be something different between the two.

phrases differ by two letters

Shit and salt differ by two letters as well. I don't see how that's relevant.

One would want to look at the etymological trees of the words 'slave' and 'share' to see if there are any intersections or common ancestors.

Unfortunately I don't know of any resources that have that capability. Do you?

Dictionary.com says that "share" is from German, and "slave" is from Latin. No common origin.

Well, they don't. "Slave" comes from the Old Church Slavonic word for Slavs, "Sloveninu," which is probably from the word "slovo," meaning speech, while "share" ultimately comes from the Proto Indo-European root "skar-," meaning to cut.

Both are forms of juxtaposition, which carries meaning by itself. Logically, juxtaposition does not need to carry meaning, but to humans it does.

For instance, try comparing the next person you meet with a hyena. It's not likely to be taken as a neutral thought experiment.

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