💾 Archived View for splint.rs › ethical_consumption.gmi captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:51:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-06-14)
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There is no ethical consumption under capitalism
This sugar-coated cowardice assaults me nearly weekly.
Let's look at the underlying assumptions that allow us to digest this nonsense:
1. Almost everything you buy causes problems for someone, which means *actually* all of them, even if it's not actually all purchases.
2. Since everything does some harm, any two purchases are just do 'harm', because thinking about the difference between buying a plastic and a wooden chopping board doesn't interest me.
3. I don't care.
I wouldn't complain about someone just skipping to 3. I can't argue with a blank stare, and when people tell me about how the oils used in Peanut Butter damage the rainforest, I probably look like a mannequin. But I'm not about to start lecturing people that the asphalt on the roads sometimes contains trace amount of animal parts, so we may as well eat battery-chicken eggs, and someone once killed a cow, so now we're all polluted by vegan-original-sin forever.
I want everyone who says this to know that anyone with a braincell left alive can hear is 'we can't do everything perfectly, so we can't do anything at all, so I'm not a bad guy, I'd like to help, but it's the system, and I can't, but I'm not a bad guy'.
Also, there's no such thing as capitalism