Nothing should fall on the morals of the lower class consumer. While personally buying secondhand, keeping stuff you own until they break and fixing them, as well as reducing overall consumption is personally what I do, I shouldn’t need to do that. The company should change there slave laws.
I always have mixed feelings on this meme.
One of the things that bothers me most in the world is when people are santctimonious about language or comedians while wearing sweatshop clothes etc.
It feels like people exclusively choose the moral battles that involve zero effort or sacrifice on their part. This “oh well, what can I do about Apple?” Fucking look into fairphones, buy refurbished, be okay with a shitty old phone for years etc. At the very least, feel some fucking guilt, write letters demanding they do better (which carry a lot more weight coming from their customers!)
Think about how much you’ve seen about causes that everyone upvoting has almost zero part in versus the everyday horrors that fuel our amazingly decadent first world lives.
Sorry, unhinged rant over.
The first panel is pretty accurate tho.
The best way to show a company you do not want to support them or their practices is to stop giving them money. Voting with your wallet is the thing that’ll be the the most notably change in an earnings call. I feel many people forgot that.
It’s not always convenient, but you can’t just take all the benefits of a capitalist system without having any of the responsibilities.
It’s almost funny how sometimes, this works, but for the completely wrong reasons. Bud light tanked HARD - because of a trans ad. Coca-Cola had an (somewhat unsuccessful) boycott - because of alleged connections to Israel. On the other hand, nestle has been killing people in Africa for at least 2 decades by buying up the entire water supply and nobody seems to really care.
I’d really like to see people take some responsibility and think about which company they are giving their money.
not to be a debby downer on you, but short-term fluctuations in any given companies stock-price is rarely indicative of anything. there is a whole side of trading built exclusively around “event trading”. see something negative in the news? open up a short-line on that ticker to crash the price, see how far emotional gamblers take it down…then cover for a solid profit.
considering the type of people generally on lemmy, i imagine your already quite disillusioned with the state of our society but if for some reason your a glutton for punishment and want to become even more disgusted…there’s a book I highly recommend you read.
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, written over a century ago as sort of tongue-in-cheek guidebook to how this casino we call the stock/futures market (that we have seemingly tied our entire economy too…) really operates, everyone who trades professionally is familiar with all the fundamental ideas laid down in that book, any that arent don’t survive a recession/crash cycle.
You’d be making a great point if Google, Samsung et al weren’t also behaving atrociously.
It’s possible that they have the iPhone for some reason other than they bought it new. Maybe it was a gift from a parent who uses iPhones, or maybe it was a hand-me-down, for example. Point being, the guy in the second panel doesn’t have enough information to say what he’s saying.
beyond that, even if it was bought new, its not like that person can, upon learning something about apple that they dont like, go back and retroactively un-buy their phone.
If anything, throwing a perfectly good iPhone in the trash and buying another smartphone would be even more hypocritical
If someone is complaining about the reasonableness of the price of an Apple product, while using one (and presumably leaving on the features that advertise in messages that an iPhone was used), I think it’s fair to assume they are paying or going to pay those prices, especially because of all the stuff Apple does to maintain a closed ecosystem of products.
There’s also the implied expectation that an ethical company would be voluntarily using the money they get to make sure they are giving back to employees and the broader society, but that’s unrealistic because companies never work like that.
Voting with your wallet is the thing that’ll be the the most notably change in an earnings call.
Voting to break up monopolies via anti-trust law enforcement will have more effect. “Voting with your wallet” is useless when oligarchs buy out their competitors on this hypothetical voting ballot.
It’s not always convenient, but you can’t just take all the benefits of a capitalist system without having any of the responsibilities.
There is literally no product you can buy in a capitalist system that did not feature suffering somewhere along the manufacturing pipeline.
The absolute best situation you can hope for is that every single person in the chain from acquisition of raw materials to manufacturing a finished product is that the only suffering they experience is “I am forced to do this labor so I don’t starve”
I should point out that this is an extrme rarity in supply chains and manufacturing goods. Typically it’s much worse.
The reason things are like this is that it’s very easy for humans to compartmentalize things and ignore the suffering of others if it makes their own situation just a little more bearable.
As much as I wish Nestle would shrivel and die, there are far too many people out there that will buy the baby formula or the chocolate bar without even considering the misery that went into making it. And even if they know about it, it’s easier to just buy it and feel a small pang of guilt than go without.
That line of thinking only benefits the large corporations in the end. There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, so whatever, let’s keep consuming from the corporations around and let’s not try to reduce their power? It’s like criticizing veganism because plants are also living beings, and we can’t eat anything without causing some form of suffering.
True, but my point is that this is a systemic problem. You cannot buy different things to solve it.
You would do much better by reducing your consumption rather than buying different brands
Aren’t boycotts illegal in some parts of the US or is that only for Israeli products?
…you said on an iphone^¤
heh, gotcha
^¤ or similar device
Although I don’t agree with his politics at all, I remember learning about this concept from Ron Paul, of all people. He was being interviewed, and the interviewer said, “You vote ‘no’ on every spending bill, but then inside the spending bill, you have made all sorts of earmarks,” implying that this made Paul a hypocrite.
But Ron Paul said, “It’s my job to make earmarks for my constituents.”
That’s when I realized that there are two things in play, “The world as it is now,” and “The world as in my ideals.” Ron Paul’s ideal world had virtually no government spending (again, I disagree with his concept), but the world that he lived in required him to spend the government’s money on his constituents.
It’s for this same reason that I feel like fighting against gerrymandering in America, locally, if the gerrymandering would benefit you, is a losing proposition right now.
As much as we don’t like it, it’s currently legal to gerrymander for a wide variety of reasons, so the good politicians will be trying to make gerrymandering, as a whole, illegal, while making sure to gerrymander as much as is legally allowed at the same time. It’s not hypocritical. It’s just that we live in that world. If people complain, you just say, “Look, here’s the bill/amendment that I support that makes gerrymandering completely illegal. Those are the laws I want in place. What I’m doing right now is doing what my constituents think is best for them. If you don’t like it, then make sure my bill/amendment passes.”
Make explicit anti-gerrymandering gerrymanders.
Republicans act like children, so treat them like it: have clear consequences, an easy to understand path back to fair play, and follow it up consistently.
I sometimes get confronted with “gotcha” statements like “You want to eat healthy? But you drink alcohol!”
Gotcha guy is annoying, but not wrong. Folks hate having their hypocrisy pointed out. So much in fact they make a comic about it.
If top-left were also running their own sweatshop factory, then it would be hypocrisy.
People like your “Gotcha guy” are never sincere; you won’t see someone behave like that who actually does go to extremes to avoid all third-degree connections with anything unethical. It’s always someone just disingenuously being a dick trying to “pwn the libs”.
It looks to me like he’s engaging in fallacies. Even if the people in question are hypocrites, being one doesnt make a statement the person made wrong, so using an accusation of hypocrisy as a comeback comes off as an attempt to shut down a line of thinking about a large scale issue by redirecting the conversation to one person’s moral failings, without actually addressing the statements his comebacks are a response to at all.
No, he is wrong. The points still stand since he didn’t counter them, he just brought up some unrelated bullshit.
Gotcha guy is annoying, but not wrong. Folks hate having their hypocrisy pointed out.
Person A: “Smoking is associated with chronic health disorders. You shouldn’t smoke.”
Person B: “But you smoke yourself. So much for your argument!”Is this related to the rhetorically classic Tua Mater defence?
Ben Stiller said this? Lol
good comedians do generally have to have some empathy and atleast a tangible connection to the working class, to remain relevant and keep their material relatable
exhibit A, for what happens if you don’t…Dave Chappelle, who went and ran off to some bougie town in ohio to build a palace around himself. his jokes started punching down instead of up, cause that’s how isolated rich people think fundamentally. like a 2hr standup where he told only told like 5 jokes leading up to a barely connected and not all that funny trans joke…compare that his earlier Clayton Bigsby/I’m Rick James Bitch! stuff…
there are some that can make this stuff work, like that Tosh.0 guy. no clue what he’s doing now but his whole shtick was acting as an obnoxious rich person talking down to an audience of what is also most likely rich californian assholes…which also plays great for the working class/rest of america crowd.
as for the quote, who the fuck knows…i have always liked Ben Stillers stuff though
It’s on the Internet so it’s definitely real
– Abraham Lincoln
