"I don't think McCarthy's victims would agree with you."
Why not?
It's not just that McCarthy made accusations which caused any problems. It that those accusations were seen as plausible and were believed by society at large and those in power.
*Why* was this the case in the 1950s, and why was it okay for substantiation and due process not to be sought by Congress, is the question you should be asking. It wasn't just a case of one guy saying some stuff and magically everyone just believing him. There were deep, wide social undercurrents arising out of the Cold War and WW2 and the revelations of Stalin's genocidal omelette-making in the 1930s that hadn't been fully acknowledged by the Left intelligensia at the time, admittedly because they were busy fighting Hitler but.... prop up one dictator to fight another and pretend Dictator #1 who kills more people is all sunshine and roses, you will get blowback, and it came in the 50s. McCarthy was just one lightning rod among many.
Start giving people the right to locking up other people who say things they don't like... and that seems like a quicker route to a dystopia than to have people be allowed to say anything they want.
"OK, then how about someone does soemthing real that would have an immediate impact on CO2 emissions without making anyone rich through creating a new commodity trading system?
Ration gasoline in the US. Eliminate using cars for pleasure trips..."
As I understand it, the appeal of emissions *trading* schemes is that it's a hybrid, market-based solution. 'Blue-green' eco-capitalism that merely recognises that climate change is an externality, and charges for it via tax, then lets private enterprise sort it out. As opposed to a 'red-green' approach that would do exactly as you suggest: ration, eliminate, cut, directly via the government.
The theory is that the market approach would generate the same outcomes (reshape cities for more localisation, increase public transport, etc) by generating appropriate taxes and subsidies to reward innovation. That's the theory. But then, the unaided free market has had warning of global warming for thirty years too - people were talking about it in the 1970s, watch Soylent Green if you've forgotten - and has done less than nothing to fix it, so who knows?
It's quite possible that the direct governmental, non-market approaches might be more efficient - but given the pro-market political climate in the UK/USA for the last thirty years, where people scream 'SOCIALISM!' at anything done by the government (and the tone of your post suggests that you think similarly), then trading schemes seem like the best we're likely to get.
"If you want to stand on the shoulders of giants, you need to trust the giants."
Said Ptolemy to Copernicus.
Sometimes old data *needs* to be re-analyzed, and if you're talking about changes occuring over multiple human generations, it seems like preserving those old recordings would be Priority One.
"I mean the raw data is going to be in many different forms, and from many different instruments, gathered by many different people, and full of different kinds of errors."
And that's a reason for it not to be recorded for meta-analysis... why?
"What a great word. What a lovely set of implications it has. Are the climate change "denialists" related to Holocaust deniers by any chance?"
Pretty much, yes. The icecaps are melting and the Northwest Passage is opening; denying this takes the sort of folksy gut leadership needed to think marching on Moscow is a good strategic call.
Except, if the warming data is correct, the holocaust caused by global warming is 1) much bigger, and 2) still preventable, and so the denialists are actively responsible for causing it, rather than just being after-the-fact supporters of genocide.
Allowing for discount factors (*) for the difference between actual gigadeath genocide and mere planned gigadeath genocide what does that come to in milliHitlers? I'm not sure, but it seems like pound for pound, a Lomberg should rate more than an Irving, but less than an Oppenheimer.
(* Based on the current market spot price for moral insurance and hedged call options for a soul)
"Anybody remember color monitors before Windows? It seemed like everybody used a different standard. You had to pick your hardware based on what your software supported. And not all software supported all hardware."
What, you mean the PS/2's VGA? Yeah, Windows didn't have a lot to do with that.
TrueType fonts, on the other hand... that I can thank Microsoft for. Sort of. See, on the one hand, yeah, before Windows printing was a nightmare. After Windows.... it's still a nightmare if you're trying to port between Windows and other systems because Microsoft didn't *give* us those TTF fonts, it just licenced them, and they're all still under copyright. Programmers haven't really had a sense of "owning" their system since Windows 3.1. But Adobe and Apple were no better, though PDF helped a lot. But it took Linux and things like Bitstream Vera to even start trying to sort that whole portable font mess out, and it's still ugly.
"Obviously, if everyone was more interested in politics than software like the FS guys are, we wouldn't get anywhere. "
I'm not sure that that's obvious at all. I do think that the Hurd shows that the FSF can't always code for toffee, but without the GPL I doubt Linux would have got off the ground; see what happened with the *BSDs.
Think of the "politics" of Free Software - the ideals and the licences - as the kernel and the software as what's built on top. You have to realise that both software AND social constructs are technologies, and one fits on top of the other.
Saying "the political guys don't do anything" is like saying "those filesystem guys don't code any user interfaces therefore they contribute nothing to my system". They contribute the legal channel by which you are able to connect the pieces together.
Some of us still remember when freedom to tinker wasn't always a given, see.
"The phrase "technology over politics" is also a naive position to take: it tries to frame technology and politics as non-overlapping things. In the real world no collaboration is free of politics, that includes technological collaboration."
More to the point perhaps, politics IS social technology.
By which I mean, politics (and economics, which is not at all a different thing but merely politics by a different name and with a different skin) is a set of agreements on how we organise our society, which is the same sort of thing as software or network protocols, and can be analysed in very similar terms. Does a particular social arrangement promote the end-to-end principle or does it centralise power in priviledged hosts? What "shape" or structure does a particular social arrangement produce? How "maintainable" is the society produced by following a particular political viewpoint's rules?
These are difficult and complicated and heavily disputed questions, but they are *technological* questions none the less because laws and polities are human artifacts: both produced by us and shaping our lives. "Politics" isn't some weird creature from outer space that descends onto our world; it just is what we do to organise ourselves.
Technology is inescapably political, and politics is inescapably technological. It's only in recent years that the word "political" has been thrown around as an all-purpose swearword meaning something like "irrelevant" when really what it means is "holding to a political viewpoint that the speaker thinks is objectively wrong/dangerous."
The point being that although we may have different opinions about politics, politics itself is not ultimately open to opinion but can be analysed as fact: it is technological in nature, and regardless of opinion, it reveals its true nature through structuring operations on society over time. The catch is just that it often happens to take a *long* time (on the order of several human generations) for the full effects of a political programme to display its results. But the same can be said of technology.
"Would Obama have been elected if the press hadn't focused on his race?"
In a do-over one-on-one contest against John McCain (with Miss Alaska in the background)? In a heartbeat, and probably faster. He was the only one who could talk in complete sentences.
Would he have made such a meteoric rise *to* Presidential candidate without race angle? Not sure.
Late 30s, learned cursive in primary school, have NEVER willingly used it and am glad its dead. It's ugly and horrible and near-illegible and one of the most pointless inventions ever. It sacrifices all regularity and readability for a marginal speed improvement and there are no professional situations I know of where it's acceptable to use; you'd be better off learning how to write clearly on a whiteboard, at least those are in use.
Now, Palm Graffiti 1 (sadly mourned)... now that stood a serious chance of permanently rewriting my *printing* skills until I couldn't remember how to write a 't'.
"And, the very next model year, every one of those manufacturers were putting burp tanks on their radiators. "
As a counterexample, a New Zealand inventor designed a car battery with a separate compartment for the ignition circuit so you could never flat your battery by leaving your headlights on, and...... yeah, he went out of business and I'm still waiting for that one to get adopted by anyone. Guess he did a good job keeping it secret, huh?
One thing I've always wondered: where did the long-held literal "tinfoil hat" meme really originate from, and when?
I know everyone nowadays just uses it as a ha ha joke, but you know what's strange? I've never seen any research or reporting into precisely *which* patients first started seriously claiming this very literal set of symptoms: 'government mind control radiation in my brain which I'm trying to block with metal headgear' thing.
Because, y'know, given that 1) we do actually have this capability, and military scientists have been playing with things like microwaves and covert communications since WW2, and 2) it's a very specific and technologically-aware fear - I mean it's not 'God or the devil is talking to me', it's 'government agents are beaming rays', which seems like it requires a fair bit of education and sophistication - it seems like it would be useful to understand the roots of the phenomenon. At least find out what decade people started worrying about this, what social classes, etc.
For extra credit, it would be useful to ask: did the original 'patient zero' literal tinfoil-hatters have any connection, for instance, to the military? Were they Vietnam vets? Korea vets? WW2 vets? Any possibility that they might have been involved in experimental radio research? Any crossovers with the known times, places and areas of MKULTRA research?
But no, we just get 'ha ha silly tinfoil hat wearers, of course we know there are no such things'. Doesn't that seem a little odd and unscientific to you?
"I want to see what will happen when you're someplace without internet access."
Without... Internet access? That would be like... being 'off-line'? But then how would people post lolcats? They'd have to get Facebook updates via Gmail... oh wait...
I'm sorry, I can't grasp that concept at all!
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug
on
F-22 Raptor Cancelled
·
· Score: 1
"``No American soldier has been killed by an enemy aircraft since 1951.''
Only because the U.S. doctrine has been to have total air superiourity "
That's nice and all if you happen to be one of the tiny fraction of the world's population who are a US soldier, but a more interesting question would be how many foreign civilians have died in attacks since 1951 BECAUSE the US has total air superiority?
Has the US dominating the air been a net win in humanitarian terms?
You're getting me curious! What are those networks like?"
Their TCP three-way handshake goes like this: SYN SYN NACK.
Welcome, BARACK.OBAMA@WHITEHOUSE.GOV, to area52.31337.nopeeping.nuh-uh.icu.goaway.clubhouse.nwo.mil. Your security clasification: ACCESS DENIED Would you like to play a game?
"If the jobs are so bad, one may want to analyze the reasons workers in those countries actually take those jobs as opposed to other jobs in their region"
Because a commercial agri-conglomerate has bought up all their village land and/or water, leaving them unable to support themselves without migrating to the city, perhaps?
"Many people think the way you seem to, which is that "opting out" is impossible. This is an uninformed opinion, it would seem, since options abound."
Some options do, yes. A lot less than one would want, but sure, we should use what we've got or lose it.
But what bugs me is when on the one hand, free market advocates will say "if you want ethics, shop ethical and pay more! Don't lay your moral trip on me, man! Freedom and market efficiency uber alles! PROGRESS!"
And then people who seem in much the same free-market-ethics camp will, when someone like Richard Stallman starts making harumphing noises about how unethical Practice X is and why ethics determines that we should buy a less-functional but ethical product over one that's fuller-functional but unethical, come back with "Hey man, I'm a PRAGMATIST. I use what WORKS. Don't try to use a less-functional product! That's stupid and inferior! Your silly 'ethics' and 'morals' and 'politics' are getting in the way of my PROGRESS! Open source, not free software! Quit being so rigid and dogmatic!"
You can't have both. If you want a society where ethics drive purchases and it's all the consumer's choice, then the consumer MUST at some point choose the less-functional but more ethical product, and doing that MUST be seen as the correct economic choice. Or we're all doomed.
"Bottom line.. if you like electronic devices, you have to go some way to avoid Foxconn. Apple is known for its secrecy, but we documented evidence that Apple was involved in this intimidation in anyway, you have to assume that Foxconn, and only Foxconn is responsible."
But Apple must be a contributory party if they keep their Foxconn involvement secret.
It seems to me that if we really want to eliminate economic exploitation, we have to outlaw commercial secrecy. Outsource if you must, but insist that ALL outsourcing partners and deals and trade treaties are public knowledge down to the last initimate detail.
Yes, that gives your competitors knowledge. Sorry. Price of doing business in an open society with informed consumers. Until the consumers are fully informed, you don't have an efficient (ie, actually free) market.
"The conditions under which the goods we buy are prepared, be it Nike shoes or a Big Mac or an iPhone, is ultimately the responsibility of the individuals who are purchasing those goods."
Any idea how we can seriously rebel against this, when all the main vendors do it? Not buy any shoes at all? Go naked and barefoot in protest?
NB: I'm actually serious. I WANT this crap to stop. It's gettng so I can't buy anything without guilt. What can I, as a consumer, *do* to make it stop? Make a list of the worst corporate offenders, okay. But if it turns out that *all* the major brands outsource to the shady Asian grid and have some quantity of raw human misery embedded in their products... what's the ethical response?
Talking and protesting got us the 1999 Seattle protests. Then the War on Terror intervened and we protested that. People are still getting killed and tortured and maimed, for religion, security, oil, diamonds, bananas, rice, chocolate, coffee and garments. What's the next step? Exhaustively confirm the ethical pedigree of everything we buy? Good, but it turns out that buying ethical is expensive, and puts you into the 'luxury purchase' bracket. Okay, I can cope with being a rich pampered luxury-buying middle-class bastard if it will help someone else. But will it?
How do we effect serious change? Boycott everything at once? Start considering literal economic terrorism, direct action to shut down the worst offenders? Go that route and how do we stop ourselves from being perpetually angry, violent people?
Slashdot Mirror
Why are the poor mailing food, anyway?
"I don't think McCarthy's victims would agree with you."
Why not?
It's not just that McCarthy made accusations which caused any problems. It that those accusations were seen as plausible and were believed by society at large and those in power.
*Why* was this the case in the 1950s, and why was it okay for substantiation and due process not to be sought by Congress, is the question you should be asking. It wasn't just a case of one guy saying some stuff and magically everyone just believing him. There were deep, wide social undercurrents arising out of the Cold War and WW2 and the revelations of Stalin's genocidal omelette-making in the 1930s that hadn't been fully acknowledged by the Left intelligensia at the time, admittedly because they were busy fighting Hitler but.... prop up one dictator to fight another and pretend Dictator #1 who kills more people is all sunshine and roses, you will get blowback, and it came in the 50s. McCarthy was just one lightning rod among many.
Start giving people the right to locking up other people who say things they don't like... and that seems like a quicker route to a dystopia than to have people be allowed to say anything they want.
"OK, then how about someone does soemthing real that would have an immediate impact on CO2 emissions without making anyone rich through creating a new commodity trading system?
Ration gasoline in the US. Eliminate using cars for pleasure trips..."
As I understand it, the appeal of emissions *trading* schemes is that it's a hybrid, market-based solution. 'Blue-green' eco-capitalism that merely recognises that climate change is an externality, and charges for it via tax, then lets private enterprise sort it out. As opposed to a 'red-green' approach that would do exactly as you suggest: ration, eliminate, cut, directly via the government.
The theory is that the market approach would generate the same outcomes (reshape cities for more localisation, increase public transport, etc) by generating appropriate taxes and subsidies to reward innovation. That's the theory. But then, the unaided free market has had warning of global warming for thirty years too - people were talking about it in the 1970s, watch Soylent Green if you've forgotten - and has done less than nothing to fix it, so who knows?
It's quite possible that the direct governmental, non-market approaches might be more efficient - but given the pro-market political climate in the UK/USA for the last thirty years, where people scream 'SOCIALISM!' at anything done by the government (and the tone of your post suggests that you think similarly), then trading schemes seem like the best we're likely to get.
Welcome to the world you demanded.
"If you want to stand on the shoulders of giants, you need to trust the giants."
Said Ptolemy to Copernicus.
Sometimes old data *needs* to be re-analyzed, and if you're talking about changes occuring over multiple human generations, it seems like preserving those old recordings would be Priority One.
"I mean the raw data is going to be in many different forms, and from many different instruments, gathered by many different people, and full of different kinds of errors."
And that's a reason for it not to be recorded for meta-analysis... why?
"What a great word. What a lovely set of implications it has. Are the climate change "denialists" related to Holocaust deniers by any chance?"
Pretty much, yes. The icecaps are melting and the Northwest Passage is opening; denying this takes the sort of folksy gut leadership needed to think marching on Moscow is a good strategic call.
Except, if the warming data is correct, the holocaust caused by global warming is 1) much bigger, and 2) still preventable, and so the denialists are actively responsible for causing it, rather than just being after-the-fact supporters of genocide.
Allowing for discount factors (*) for the difference between actual gigadeath genocide and mere planned gigadeath genocide what does that come to in milliHitlers? I'm not sure, but it seems like pound for pound, a Lomberg should rate more than an Irving, but less than an Oppenheimer.
(* Based on the current market spot price for moral insurance and hedged call options for a soul)
"There are many other arguments, such as those made by China and India when they decline to throw their economies under the proverbial bus"
What is this thing you call an "economy" and why is it more important than human survival?
"Anybody remember color monitors before Windows? It seemed like everybody used a different standard. You had to pick your hardware based on what your software supported. And not all software supported all hardware."
What, you mean the PS/2's VGA? Yeah, Windows didn't have a lot to do with that.
TrueType fonts, on the other hand... that I can thank Microsoft for. Sort of. See, on the one hand, yeah, before Windows printing was a nightmare. After Windows.... it's still a nightmare if you're trying to port between Windows and other systems because Microsoft didn't *give* us those TTF fonts, it just licenced them, and they're all still under copyright. Programmers haven't really had a sense of "owning" their system since Windows 3.1. But Adobe and Apple were no better, though PDF helped a lot. But it took Linux and things like Bitstream Vera to even start trying to sort that whole portable font mess out, and it's still ugly.
"Obviously, if everyone was more interested in politics than software like the FS guys are, we wouldn't get anywhere. "
I'm not sure that that's obvious at all. I do think that the Hurd shows that the FSF can't always code for toffee, but without the GPL I doubt Linux would have got off the ground; see what happened with the *BSDs.
Think of the "politics" of Free Software - the ideals and the licences - as the kernel and the software as what's built on top. You have to realise that both software AND social constructs are technologies, and one fits on top of the other.
Saying "the political guys don't do anything" is like saying "those filesystem guys don't code any user interfaces therefore they contribute nothing to my system". They contribute the legal channel by which you are able to connect the pieces together.
Some of us still remember when freedom to tinker wasn't always a given, see.
"The phrase "technology over politics" is also a naive position to take: it tries to frame technology and politics as non-overlapping things. In the real world no collaboration is free of politics, that includes technological collaboration."
More to the point perhaps, politics IS social technology.
By which I mean, politics (and economics, which is not at all a different thing but merely politics by a different name and with a different skin) is a set of agreements on how we organise our society, which is the same sort of thing as software or network protocols, and can be analysed in very similar terms. Does a particular social arrangement promote the end-to-end principle or does it centralise power in priviledged hosts? What "shape" or structure does a particular social arrangement produce? How "maintainable" is the society produced by following a particular political viewpoint's rules?
These are difficult and complicated and heavily disputed questions, but they are *technological* questions none the less because laws and polities are human artifacts: both produced by us and shaping our lives. "Politics" isn't some weird creature from outer space that descends onto our world; it just is what we do to organise ourselves.
Technology is inescapably political, and politics is inescapably technological. It's only in recent years that the word "political" has been thrown around as an all-purpose swearword meaning something like "irrelevant" when really what it means is "holding to a political viewpoint that the speaker thinks is objectively wrong/dangerous."
The point being that although we may have different opinions about politics, politics itself is not ultimately open to opinion but can be analysed as fact: it is technological in nature, and regardless of opinion, it reveals its true nature through structuring operations on society over time. The catch is just that it often happens to take a *long* time (on the order of several human generations) for the full effects of a political programme to display its results. But the same can be said of technology.
"Would Obama have been elected if the press hadn't focused on his race?"
In a do-over one-on-one contest against John McCain (with Miss Alaska in the background)? In a heartbeat, and probably faster. He was the only one who could talk in complete sentences.
Would he have made such a meteoric rise *to* Presidential candidate without race angle? Not sure.
Late 30s, learned cursive in primary school, have NEVER willingly used it and am glad its dead. It's ugly and horrible and near-illegible and one of the most pointless inventions ever. It sacrifices all regularity and readability for a marginal speed improvement and there are no professional situations I know of where it's acceptable to use; you'd be better off learning how to write clearly on a whiteboard, at least those are in use.
Now, Palm Graffiti 1 (sadly mourned)... now that stood a serious chance of permanently rewriting my *printing* skills until I couldn't remember how to write a 't'.
"And, the very next model year, every one of those manufacturers were putting burp tanks on their radiators. "
As a counterexample, a New Zealand inventor designed a car battery with a separate compartment for the ignition circuit so you could never flat your battery by leaving your headlights on, and... ... yeah, he went out of business and I'm still waiting for that one to get adopted by anyone. Guess he did a good job keeping it secret, huh?
That'll show those stupid jellyfish monkeys who's really top species!
Right, the Frey Effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect
One thing I've always wondered: where did the long-held literal "tinfoil hat" meme really originate from, and when?
I know everyone nowadays just uses it as a ha ha joke, but you know what's strange? I've never seen any research or reporting into precisely *which* patients first started seriously claiming this very literal set of symptoms: 'government mind control radiation in my brain which I'm trying to block with metal headgear' thing.
Because, y'know, given that 1) we do actually have this capability, and military scientists have been playing with things like microwaves and covert communications since WW2, and 2) it's a very specific and technologically-aware fear - I mean it's not 'God or the devil is talking to me', it's 'government agents are beaming rays', which seems like it requires a fair bit of education and sophistication - it seems like it would be useful to understand the roots of the phenomenon. At least find out what decade people started worrying about this, what social classes, etc.
For extra credit, it would be useful to ask: did the original 'patient zero' literal tinfoil-hatters have any connection, for instance, to the military? Were they Vietnam vets? Korea vets? WW2 vets? Any possibility that they might have been involved in experimental radio research? Any crossovers with the known times, places and areas of MKULTRA research?
But no, we just get 'ha ha silly tinfoil hat wearers, of course we know there are no such things'. Doesn't that seem a little odd and unscientific to you?
What I'm boggling at is how come Adobe Reader files can include Flash content.
How are they planning on printing that?
No Google Updater or Apple Updates?
"I want to see what will happen when you're someplace without internet access."
Without... Internet access? That would be like... being 'off-line'? But then how would people post lolcats? They'd have to get Facebook updates via Gmail... oh wait...
I'm sorry, I can't grasp that concept at all!
"``No American soldier has been killed by an enemy aircraft since 1951.''
Only because the U.S. doctrine has been to have total air superiourity "
That's nice and all if you happen to be one of the tiny fraction of the world's population who are a US soldier, but a more interesting question would be how many foreign civilians have died in attacks since 1951 BECAUSE the US has total air superiority?
Has the US dominating the air been a net win in humanitarian terms?
"And some even more restrictive than that.
You're getting me curious! What are those networks like?"
Their TCP three-way handshake goes like this: SYN SYN NACK.
Welcome, BARACK.OBAMA@WHITEHOUSE.GOV, to area52.31337.nopeeping.nuh-uh.icu.goaway.clubhouse.nwo.mil.
Your security clasification: ACCESS DENIED
Would you like to play a game?
$ls ..
NO
$cat .
NOPE
$pwd
AS IF
$cd
YEAH RIGHT
It simplifies things immensely.
"If the jobs are so bad, one may want to analyze the reasons workers in those countries actually take those jobs as opposed to other jobs in their region"
Because a commercial agri-conglomerate has bought up all their village land and/or water, leaving them unable to support themselves without migrating to the city, perhaps?
"You can have cruelty-free or you can have leather. Pick one, you don't get them both."
I dunno... some way of killing the cows blissfully? Death by snoo-snoo?
"Many people think the way you seem to, which is that "opting out" is impossible. This is an uninformed opinion, it would seem, since options abound."
Some options do, yes. A lot less than one would want, but sure, we should use what we've got or lose it.
But what bugs me is when on the one hand, free market advocates will say "if you want ethics, shop ethical and pay more! Don't lay your moral trip on me, man! Freedom and market efficiency uber alles! PROGRESS!"
And then people who seem in much the same free-market-ethics camp will, when someone like Richard Stallman starts making harumphing noises about how unethical Practice X is and why ethics determines that we should buy a less-functional but ethical product over one that's fuller-functional but unethical, come back with "Hey man, I'm a PRAGMATIST. I use what WORKS. Don't try to use a less-functional product! That's stupid and inferior! Your silly 'ethics' and 'morals' and 'politics' are getting in the way of my PROGRESS! Open source, not free software! Quit being so rigid and dogmatic!"
You can't have both. If you want a society where ethics drive purchases and it's all the consumer's choice, then the consumer MUST at some point choose the less-functional but more ethical product, and doing that MUST be seen as the correct economic choice. Or we're all doomed.
"Bottom line.. if you like electronic devices, you have to go some way to avoid Foxconn. Apple is known for its secrecy, but we documented evidence that Apple was involved in this intimidation in anyway, you have to assume that Foxconn, and only Foxconn is responsible."
But Apple must be a contributory party if they keep their Foxconn involvement secret.
It seems to me that if we really want to eliminate economic exploitation, we have to outlaw commercial secrecy. Outsource if you must, but insist that ALL outsourcing partners and deals and trade treaties are public knowledge down to the last initimate detail.
Yes, that gives your competitors knowledge. Sorry. Price of doing business in an open society with informed consumers. Until the consumers are fully informed, you don't have an efficient (ie, actually free) market.
Can we make this a political platform?
"The conditions under which the goods we buy are prepared, be it Nike shoes or a Big Mac or an iPhone, is ultimately the responsibility of the individuals who are purchasing those goods."
Any idea how we can seriously rebel against this, when all the main vendors do it? Not buy any shoes at all? Go naked and barefoot in protest?
NB: I'm actually serious. I WANT this crap to stop. It's gettng so I can't buy anything without guilt. What can I, as a consumer, *do* to make it stop? Make a list of the worst corporate offenders, okay. But if it turns out that *all* the major brands outsource to the shady Asian grid and have some quantity of raw human misery embedded in their products... what's the ethical response?
Talking and protesting got us the 1999 Seattle protests. Then the War on Terror intervened and we protested that. People are still getting killed and tortured and maimed, for religion, security, oil, diamonds, bananas, rice, chocolate, coffee and garments. What's the next step? Exhaustively confirm the ethical pedigree of everything we buy? Good, but it turns out that buying ethical is expensive, and puts you into the 'luxury purchase' bracket. Okay, I can cope with being a rich pampered luxury-buying middle-class bastard if it will help someone else. But will it?
How do we effect serious change? Boycott everything at once? Start considering literal economic terrorism, direct action to shut down the worst offenders? Go that route and how do we stop ourselves from being perpetually angry, violent people?
I'm open to suggestions.