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using discord is morally lazy
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Like some other posts say, no idea if OP wrote this, but if the author is looking here, I want to offer constructive criticism.
There are a truly uncountable number of unjust things going on right now. There are possible solutions to many if not all those problems that exist. But no one has enough time I'm their life to fight every single injustice going on.
Do you still eat eat chocolate? A lot of chocolate is still produced with what is practically or entirely slave labor. Do you eat almonds? Those are using enormous amounts of water in California, which is already facing a mega-drought. China still has horrible labor practices in manufacturing. Most Americans still have to drive cars and that's destroying the environment. I could go on for hours.
The point is, no one can possibly fight for every cause. Even the most dedicated, well meaning person will have to (indirectly) participate in some injustice. It's honestly better for people to pick their battles. Find something you might have the power to change and focus your energy on that injustice.
But don't lash out at people who are already overburdened by late-stage capitalism and don't have the knowledge or energy to fight the same fight you are.
Have you seen The Good Place? There is a part of this where they're investigating the "points" system that is used to determine who does and doesn't get into the eponymous Good Place. It's a dead simple system: you do a good thing and you get some points, you do a bad thing and you lose some points, the more gooder or more badder the more points get added onto or subtracted from your total, and anyone over a certain threshold gets into the Good Place. It makes perfect sense, and it's exactly the kind of system I think most people would design if they were the ones given the task. I know it was my first idea when I considered the problem, and it seems like that system worked well enough when it was first rolled out. On investigation, the characters find out that
spoiler
no one has gotten into the good place for centuries because the nature of trying to survive in a system as complex and interdependent as the one humans live in means that everyone has to either choose to simply go without what they need to live or participate in some form of evil. There's even a character who understood the nature of the good place, and led every second of his life abiding by the principles that he know would allow him to gain entry. He dropped off the grid, became self-sufficient, and is self-sacrificing to the point of being personally miserable. He does everything he can to maximize the good he puts into the world, and he accumulated about half the points he would have needed under that system to get into the good place.This is something that comes up in leftist circles from time to time as well, and a place where I break from doctrine. There's a common phrase that popped up as a reaction to what you said above, "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism". Everything involves exploitation of the environment, or of labor, or generating waste and other externalities that you're just not gonna deal with. You're gonna have to do something unethical in order to create more value than you invest in something. But, on the other hand, we need to live here. We don't have the luxury of designing a system from scratch with ethics at the forefront, our kids are hungry today. So you do your best, you keep your consumption to a comfortable minimum, you use the paper straws when you can, you try to shape policy toward decency with what little power you have and you don't hold yourself responsible for what's out of your hands. There are no ethical consumables, but their can be ethical people.