Well, I understood exactly what I thought you meant, and it seems you did mean it.
Depressingly, one result of capitalism is that in the future both diseases are likely to be increasingly untreatable - shareholders want pharma companies to develop drugs which treat symptoms but not cure so they form a continuous revenue stream, hence a lack of interest in vaccines and antibiotics which do the job and then aren’t needed. And the same goes for Trump and Clinton - the same forces in society prevent reform of democracy in the interests of a continued revenue stream to the already very rich.
I would say I was countering your argument; the term critical has negative connotations outside of the academic world. Thanks for explaining why you did it – and I agree, the posters here are an excellent judge of an argument’s merits – but I’d hate to think you delete your posts if they don’t get enough likes.
Er, no - I delete them if on reflection I feel they have been badly expressed or are liable to be misunderstood. I’m quite prepared to be contrary; I’m unlikely ever to qualify for “Regular” status so if people think I’m a tool of the Kremlin or whatever it doesn’t bother me, but trying to edit a post that was badly written in the first place usually doesn’t seem worth the effort.
Time to revive the old expression “greenwash”. Nothing to do with using money as a cleaning agent, everything to do with making what you’re doing look green by adding a bit of renewables in there.
Well, it’s not as if his wealth came from petrodollars. I welcome BMGF money towards a lot of good (an associate works with their grants on humanitarian medical projects), my head just breaks when I think about the damages about to be inflicted right out the gate once the new administration gets to tearing down any sort of environmental regulation.
I doubt any of us are important enough for him to care. It’s enough to control the media that are read and watched by the part of the population that is below +1sd on the IQ scale. That’s the great thing about a democracy; you don’t have to persuade the most intelligent people.
No, I grant you that. Now I don’t actually need to use MS products to earn money, I am pretty relaxed about Bill Gates. (Not exactly a chair throwing incident but a change to Word once got our CEO on the verge of throwing a 19 inch CRT monitor out of the window, and what he was saying about Bill at the time was definitely slanderous.)
But I’ll believe that capitalists are getting serious about climate change when they start investing tens of percents of their assets on renewables on the grounds that it’s in the interests of their grandchildren.
Yeah, it doesn’t appear to be the primary goal of the BMGF, it’s spread out over many other tasks and competencies. They also have developed designs for clean, safe nuclear energy, I would imagine plenty of alternate sources of energy as well.
They are not mutually exclusive. An unarmed person can be violent, and an armed person can be nonviolent.
But I think this largely depends upon how one is trying to go about solving problems. The notion of “protest” connotes petitioning somebody else to be in power and “do the right thing”. So I see it as being more compatible with western/colonial liberal democracy, where some trust in representative government is assumed. But I am skeptical of its effectiveness in more despotic scenarios where those in charge can manufacture or be immune to public opinion. Exploiters do not suddenly develop a conscience because some people with signs persuade them that their practices are unfair - they act as if they do because they worry about how they are perceived by others.
I think there is a viable middle ground which is activism which is forceful, while being nonviolent - or at least non-lethal. This involves occupation and oversight of government facilities rather than trusting them, but doing so using force of numbers and restraint of adversaries rather than attacking. If somebody pulls a gun on you, they get tied up and put in the chillout room for a while - that is not violence, but the prevention of violence.
Presumable, @renke doesn’t have that kind of cash lying around, nor a corporation that produces that kind of wealth. That’s the reason governments (and non-profits) are better suited to fighting a large scale problem like climate change. Many of us do what we can on an individual basis, but to imagine that we can do it as individuals, rather than collectively, misses the point entirely.
