Science doesn’t, either. For example, this famous study:
But of course, the Party of Personal Responsibility* and its Libertarian enablers would prefer we not pay too much attention to a system that immiserates and makes desperate millions of Americans while benefiting a (now multi-generational) minority. Much easier to pin the blame entirely on individuals than to address the externalities of their holy “free” market.
[*disclaimer: large corporate “persons” and multi-millionaire humans exempted]
That’s a feature, not a bug. That’s a great example of one of the many ways that the student loan system is specifically designed to force people without family wealth to be good, pacified cogs in the machine.
I chose my masters degree based on the industry that is big in my home state, too. For me that was semiconductors, but I know exactly where you’re coming from.
Let’s be clear, me getting my house in order is fixing my literal house, my lifestyle and my society in which i live, in no particular order, because it turns out that other people’s actions have consequences for me, and by extension are part of my proverbial house.
I meant figuratively, as in people who fly in airplanes when electric trains are available are in a worse position to critisize everyone else’s actions when it comes to hydrocarbon consumption.
What, you haven’t personally developed a solar-powered teleporter for trans-oceanic travel? You slacker. Clearly you’re in no position to chide huge multinational corporations for being 70% of the world’s CO2 output.
Yes, I know, I suck for not entirely transforming the global economy to be more ecological sound. Hence, I should stay home in my sackcloth and beat myself regularly for not being perfect…
I have not said that anyone, much less you, needs to transform the entire global economy, just that we have to work on ourselves as well as on the system since we are quite literally the consumers of that system.
You know what, you are right, I take it back. The analogy wasn’t dumb, just badly used by you. I actually really like it as a analogy! You still haven’t responded to what I did with it.
Why do you think that in the case of the war on drugs everything is being tried to stop a behavior, everything but simply asking all users to stop using. I guess they never thought of that as a option! Maybe you need to get the word out about this new revolutionary answer to the war on drugs!
Or do you already do that? In forums discussing drug policy, do you go around asking all participants if they themselves have already stopped taking drugs? And that if they haven’t at least done that they shouldn’t be allowed to participate in the discussion anymore?
I used the war on drugs as a metaphor, even though it is certainly not the perfect metaphor, to illustrate that we (the US public) are partly to blame for the illicit drug trade. It was to parallel the destructive nature of both drug abuse and rampant oil consumption and the relationship between consumers and suppliers.
As far as telling drug addicts to “just stop” was never my point and is obviously a pointless idea given the mountain of data rejecting it. A better message might be, don’t start but now we are discussing drugs and not oil.
I am advocating for people who literally despise the oil indistry to take a look at themselves and do their part. That is not the same as saying the oil industry is a bunch of richeous people with no blame but it is certainly being taken that way no matter how often I explain it. For the record, I am not advocating for anything I am not doing myself as that would be hypocritical.
As far as preaching to people who are already addicted to drugs, I would not do that because it would be pointless and counter productive since they have a neurological dependency on the chemicals their body produces as a resilt of taking those drugs. Advocating for less oil consumption is certainly not even remotely the same and that is not the comparison I made.
My point is not everyone has access to better, more environmentally sound choices, because they can be more expensive, time consuming, and in the case of people with disabilities, impossible. In the words of an old cat and girl comic your ideals are a luxury. You can do all those things, I can too. That’s fucking bully for us. Not everyone can afford to live an in environmentally sound way. To assume that what YOU can do is what we all can do is just… ignoring reality of the lives of your fellow human beings to a massive degree.
And the CORE problem IS corporations, who are responsible for a huge amount of environmental degradation, not individuals. And governments, often beholden to corporate largess for re-election, tend to shape laws in such a way to give loopholes. And then, of course, they can’t dictate to other countries.
We can do our little bit here and there, but a huge, global systemic change is literally the only thing that will change the current situation. If Greta can grok that, you most certainly can too.
My statements are for the public in general, the fact that they can not be acomplished by every single human on the planet does not invalidate them. I am unclear on why you thought I was talking about everyone or nobody.
…Because that’s literally what you said to @heng, upthread, with the implication that unless they were “walking the walk” that they had no right to “talk the talk.”
I was indeed, and reading his posts and comments in this forum gives me some insight into his life. That said, this thread evolved from my first comment to him into a much more general analysis of the point at hand. Specially once a few people made general statements against my point not remotely related to his specific condition. Don’t you think we have be labored this point enough? I believe that people should practice what they preach. How is that such a contentious issue? I get that every idea can not be applied to every last specific variation of the underlying conditions but that does not discount the validity of the idea. Every idea can be nickpicked adnauseum but it gets tiresome and counterproductive. Do you disscount Vegan philosophy because technically they are eating the bacteria on the strawberry?
