Interesting podcast on this subject: https://srslywrong.com/podcast/ep-346-does-parenting-make-you-more-conservative/

The conclusion they come to is that becoming more conservative with age generally only applies to low information apolitical people who are sort of vaguely left leaning when they’re young. As they age they become more entrenched in the system, acquire more wealth, etc, and those vaguely conservative ideas they had in the back of their minds become more pronounced. There’s also the overton window shifts that may mean someone who thought of themselves as vaguely liberal in the past may now consider themselves socially conservative in the current climate.

Not a vegan but if you think what happens to cows is a medical “treatment” then you are a dumbass

If the recipient asked for it and the donor is giving it out of free will

…and it’s medically indicated

Piracy is not stealing/theft. That is a corporate lie.

Downvoted cause I agree. Adblock is based and so is piracy.

Ads are an unwanted local infection that brings malware and brainwash people. Blocking ads is the sane behavior

? I agree but that doesn’t make it not piracy. Are you implying piracy is not sane behavior?

https://gg.deals/ is pretty nice for PC games at least

Infrastructure is a valid point. Cold is not.

https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU

Where does it say that specifically?

See the row labeled “degoogling”

According to e/os themselves, it is degoogled…

Sorry but they are liars. The only truly degoogled android OSs are GrapheneOS and the experimental mobile linux ones.

I really wish these alternative OSs were more truthful in how they portray themselves. They might not be terrible options for certain people and they might have good intentions but the dishonesty really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. There are so many who are misled.

Calls home to Google constantly ootb https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm

By using /e/ os you are supporting google because /e/ os is not degoogled

/e/ os is not degoogled

Why doesn’t the hypocrisy argument hold water?

The wrong boys can explain it better than I can if you’re willing to listen to a podcast about it. I find them very amusing so it’s long but an easy listen.

https://srslywrong.com/podcast/325-the-idea-of-hypocrisy/

The meme I was referencing is this: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat

Fair enough. I don’t think being a hypocrite is such a bad thing :)

https://srslywrong.com/podcast/325-the-idea-of-hypocrisy/

what would you think about a vegan running around yelling, “meat is murder” and then sitting down to eat a bacon double cheeseburger?

The hypocrisy argument really doesn’t hold much water. Real “yet you participate in society. Curious!” energy. It is ok to advocate for systemic change while participating in an unethical society. I think it’s more honest to acknowledge the limits of what your individual buying power can do. I’ll read the article though. Cory Doctorow is great.

This is a good point, it certainly seems to impact branding/how companies choose to present themselves.

Sadly the alternative is accelerating everything bad. So it’s up to those of us awake to the issue to do whatever we can.

I guess I just don’t think the only alternative is “ethical consumerism” and I don’t think that will it ever create any significant change given how difficult it is to do well (if such a thing is even possible) and how few people realistically will ever engage with it to begin with. There are lots of methods of resistance, many of which have been shown to create real systemic change in the past and in my opinion are far more worth your time money and effort, including:

• Participating in boycotts that are well-organized with specific actionable demands
• Labor movements/union power
• Donating to political orgs fighting for systemic change
• Voting for direct democratic initiatives that push policy forward
• Moving from for profit solutions to community built ones, buy nothing groups, mutual aid, etc.

Maybe we will just have to agree to disagree

But this just lends to my point that it’s ridiculous to expect average consumers who are just trying to survive to juggle all of these things that they can’t easily see and which business owners have a direct incentive to hide. There’s a reason that ethical consumerism hasn’t worked.

If we all shopped at 20 million different stores instead of the same one, we would not recreate the same oligarch power.

Even if it didn’t, which I’m still skeptical of, the products on the shelves would likely still become consolidated into mega corps. The shipping companies would consolidate. Every piece of the supply chain that the consumer doesn’t have direct control over would consolidate. Would that really be that much better than the current situation?

You can’t just count on markets to manage themselves. That’s how we got into this mess.

I’m just not convinced things were as peachy as you describe. Basically since the beginnings of capitalism there have been people with power and influence similar to modern billionaires. It is just the natural trajectory of capitalism for those people to accrue more and more wealth and increase the gap between those at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy.

Small town businesses abuse their employees and rip off their customers as much or more in my experience than big businesses. And many of them are directly politically opposed to me and are actively doing damage in my local community. Their suppliers are big businesses who I don’t have control over. I just don’t see them as ethically better.

So what would life be like if every American stopped patronizing Amazon and started funding their local community? All of that would start to become undone, and we would begin to regain that lost prosperity and wrest control over our politics away from billionaire oligarchs.

And I don’t think this is true either - if people spent their money locally on small businesses and their criteria for where they spent their money primarily revolved around that, all that would do is prop up more local oligarchs and turn those small businesses into the big businesses you say are worse.