“The brazen hypocrisy staggers the mind. Disney, which commands a market cap larger than the GDP of many nations, can’t find the courage to even wait for court challenges? Meta, which regularly boasts its power to connect billions, suddenly can’t muster the strength to defend its own policies and users? These aren’t businesses making tough choices – they’re paper empires run by moral cowards—simpering, whimpering, and weak.”
Ah the ol’ “you can’t participate in a society you gave criticisms about”.
“Don’t like capitalism? Stop buying things.”
“Hate fossil fuels? Don’t use transportation or electricity which relies on it.”
“Hate slavery? Manufacture your own clothes.”
“Don’t like the country? Move away.”
Even just social media is a sort of must today. It isn’t, not really, but neither is a car or buying things if you really get down to it.
But for like a teenager, social media is pretty much a must. We can all pretend it isn’t and how brave it is to be against the mainstream and do your own thing but you might feel a twinge of regret 20 years down the line when you have little to no relationships.
It’s easier to use the things, complain about them, organise and change them, then it is to change them via expecting everyone to make the same personal choices. There’s clearly something worthy or interesting about the systems. So let’s just try to take out/regulate whatever makes them shit.
Ah, the ol’ strawman approach - argue with a ridiculous version of what somebody said instead of what they actually said, which in this case was don’t buy from companies you object to. Seems pretty straightforward and not at all stupid like move to a different country or stop using electricity. No need to be a dick.
That’s trivial when youre boycotting a single company that isn’t relevant for some large industry, but try boycotting some large fossil fuels company.
You simply can not trace back the origins of all the products you use which have employed petroleum products at one point or another in the manufacturing process.
Being a moral consumer is legitimately impossible.
If you managed to have enough money to buy yourself a bit of land and built literally everything by hand, then perhaps you might avoid contributing to capitalism, but unless you plan to abandon literally all modern conveniences and hand-forge plumbing for your outhouse, it’s not going to work.
It’s not a strawman when there isn’t a version of the argument that isn’t hard to attack. I just steel-manned the argument and it still doesn’t work.
Seems pretty straightforward.
You proved it’s impossible to be a completely ethical consumer, but did you prove that it’s necessary to be a consumer at all? Or that all volumes of consumption are equally culpable?
Depends on how you define it
In 1906, Alfred Henry Lewis stated, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.”
Personal consumption accounted for 68.8% of US GDP in at the end of 2024, an all time high. Granted, ~45% of that is very hard to cut back on (healthcare, insurance, housing).
But even still, a drop of 10-15% would be devastating. If you could organize it, you could even skip payments on the big ticket services. Everyone skipping a month of bills at the same time would do serious, recession-level damage.
It’s not a direct fix for our problems, but you can play serious economic chicken when most of the economy flows through your wallets.
Yes, you can influence the system while participating in it.
My point exactly.
You can’t completely isolate yourself and boycott everything that should be boycotted, and it’s not gonna be even marginally as effective as if a large group of people boycott a specific thing. Focus the economic power of many and you get results, instead of individually trying to boycott every single thing.