Political Memes

I’m not quite sure what point you’re trying to make in the first paragraph though. Intuitively, I blame corporations but don’t fault them. They are behaving in line with their incentives. It is up to government to create incentives that ensure good behaviour. So to me, the real blame does lie with goverments’ inability to create and enforce a carbon tax (which is generally the agreed upon best way to transition to a carbon neutral economy.)

I'm not sure what the distinction is, there, between blame, and fault, so, constitute a distinction between those two. I would also blame the government partially, yeah, we're in agreement, but I can also like. If we are seeing the reasons why the corporations are acting out of their own short term self-interest, then I can do the same for government, and basically just find fault with nobody, right? That's the only difference I can really come to, there, is that the corporations have a clear chain of causality as to why they might act that way, and the government's is maybe a little bit more obfuscated, or something, but I can still understand the incentive structure there, so I can't really find fault, if fault is like, who is the cause of all this. I guess I'd fault grug, for making fire, or like, god, or the british, or something along the domino chain there. Probably the british.

I think bottom’s up political activism is essential. But also kind of doomed. If those under 35 voted at rates comparable to those over 65 (and yes, that includes in primaries), we’d be approaching the end of Bernie’s second term and democrats would be arguing about who was best suited to carry on his legacy.

Also this, I think it's kind of essential to understand this, and your last paragraph about people whining about a celebrity. A lot of it is kind of this social media cynicism that has consumed everything. You know, can't vote for bernie, have to vote for hillary, because splitting the vote would be bad, so there will only ever be establishment candidates and nothing ever changes at the federal level except on an extremely incremental scale as people vote in local and state level elections, which all tend to have the same problem of fptp systems and the same problem of partisanship. And so it's very easy for people to just look at that, and then either go for damage mitigation, or, depending on how much cynicism they have for lobbied to shit free market liberal dems, or just give up entirely and only focus on local issues and basically damage mitigation on that scale, you know. Can't organize some sort of alternative local system for dealing with any of this shit, without registering as some sort of corporation or nonprofit or co-op, and then you're subject to the same forces that end up fucking everyone else over, even if you can gain traction, so people would rather just volunteer at something that already exists and kind of say they've paid their dues. Anything worthwhile is anti-establishment, and if you're anti-establishment, you will probably get killed or arrested. Or you're just a skateboarder, I guess, which is still pretty sick. Or, MOST things that are worthwhile are anti-establishment, I guess we still have costco.

Not sure what the iphone venezuala comment is? I bring up the cobalt mines simply to say that it is easy for us to forgive our own sins but castigate those wealthier than us. (Also an example of us just being conditioned to shrug and say “that’s inevitable.” No it fucking isn’t! If we as consumers actually cared about real things, like those children, instead of whatever comedian we’re policing on twitter or whatever, we would have ethical mines just as we have ethical clothes, ethical foods etc. But, people’s morality tends to go right up until those morals would become slightly inconvenient.) To the rural citizens in impoverished nations who are already suffering climate change, our desire for plane fueled vacations seems just as unnecessary as Swift’s use of a jet to get to her concerts. In the meantime, paying double the carbon cost to developing the technologies or supporting the agriculture necessary to get us to net zero, well, while there’s room for manipulation and badness, it’s not the worst thing.

People usually bring up the whole cobalt mine thing as a "gotcha" moment for like, any level of leftist action. uhhh you're using an iphone so you can't be a moral beacon! you can't have any opinions on what's right or wrong! sort of thing. It's also a mistake of scale, the relative scales at which, say, 71 companies 99% of pollution yadda yadda, it's way different, the level of fault there, compared to like, the person who has a 3 year old iphone SE which was maybe constructed with a lithium cobalt battery from some imperial african child slave mine. Or people obviously bring it up as a way to disparage the adoption of electric cars, usually from the position of "electric cars suck" rather than "we should have better public transit and bike everywhere". I dunno I'd probably set something up that like, increases tariffs on shit like that, or maybe just fund the shit out of the FTC so nestle goes out of business, or whatever, but as an individual consumer there's really not much you can do. It's much easier, or "more realistic", I suppose, for most people to get off their 9 to 5 of shithole labor, and then just like, buy whichever water is the cheapest, buy whatever choccy milk is the cheapest, rather than looking into the rather hard to parse information of which company's using the most child slaves, or what have you. Because they're basically all doing it, and, say, in the case of a car, it's not much like you can live without one. It doesn't even have to be impossible, really, it just has to be extremely difficult, which, in most cases, it is. It's not realistic, in my opinion, to expect everyone to suddenly pivot to like, supporting more ethical companies and voting with their dollar when most people are put upon enough already, and the american economy is fundamentally built so it's like 3 steps away from slave labor, and if any of us did anything different then the economy would crash, the companies would get bailed out, and we'd all be forced to bite the bullet, like what's happened every single time. Not that any of that would necessarily happen but that's kind of the chain of logic of the american mind.

Anyways, I gotta go feed my dog, and also join a CIA honeypot whatsapp group for leftist activism, cya.