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.

Of course mega corps are a bigger problem than owners in my town specifically. I’m just trying to understand what the end goal even is if we were somehow able to convince the whole country to do ethical consumerism (which for many reasons I think will never happen). Of course coloring all of this is we may have different optimal outcomes in mind since I’m a socialist. I appreciate the good faith debate.

So does my local mom and pop business owner. In fact they probably donate a larger fraction of their net worth than bezos. And they fund changes that have a larger impact on my local area than bezos.

How exactly do you come to the conclusion that buying from Amazon is “more harmful”? In my view, I have limited time and energy to sort these things out. Why spend time splitting hairs like this when there are more effective things I could be doing?

Honestly wouldn’t count on it. Most small business owners at least in my area are huge Trump supporters or zionists. And even if they weren’t, if everyone went there they’d just become the new Amazon. That’s how capitalism works.

Fair enough. I guess I just don’t have much faith that any profit seeking companies are not evil or won’t become evil once they find success, so I don’t really get any catharsis from moving from one to another over moral grounds. Which is why I try to focus on avoiding companies altogether when possible, instead going with community made alternatives (e.g. lemmy > reddit) which to me represent something more revolutionary. Any less fundamental changes than that generally feel pointless to me.

that’s going to have an effect and it’ll say something.

Sure, if you somehow were able to accomplish this feat and get millions of people to stop going to Amazon, it would cut into Amazon’s profits. But what is the statement? And what is the desired outcome? Amazon won’t die, they have AWS which is most of their profits. Even if they did something equally shitty would likely replace them.

And where should consumers go instead? I don’t think walmart is more “ethical” overall than amazon, or costco or ebay or fedex or ups or whatever. So what’s the point? Why should I spend all this time and energy splitting hairs when I could be organizing, participating in established boycotts with specific actionable demands, striking, voting with my vote in the few direct democratic systems that exist, donating to organizations trying to make systemic change, and volunteering in my local community mutual aid groups?

And do you have any real world examples that worked (still not sure how we’re defining “worked” here) that weren’t well organized boycotts with specific demands?

If you want to do so and can afford it, go for it. But without an organized movement backing it, don’t expect it to change their behavior.

Whole foods? Eat a dick bro. Stop supporting national companies that are supoorting this admin.

This is precisely what I hate about “ethical consumerism.” Not only does it not work, it also pushes people to perseverate and waste energy over individual choices that, again, do not matter and divides us for no good reason. We are all just trying to get through this. Shopping at Whole foods or Amazon does not mean you endorse everything they do. It might just mean you have a dietary restriction that local grocers cannot accommodate or you need things delivered to you because you are disabled. Amazon makes the vast majority of its profits from AWS anyway. Whole Foods could die tomorrow and it essentially would not change anything.

In fact Whole Foods once was your local grocer. That’s how capitalism works. There is no such thing as ethical consumption.

You want change? Organize. Boycott. Strike. Participate in mutual aid groups. If given the opportunity for direct democratic action, vote - with your vote, not your wallet.

you really think they’re gonna say “yes people aren’t eating at your place because it’s to expensive, you should lower your prices”

That is essentially what they said.

Another article…

That article also doesn’t say anything about the efficacy of voting with your wallet. Just that people are doing it.

It does give examples of boycotts that worked, meaning organized and with a clear message. Very different from randos silently “voting with their wallets” over “thing they don’t like about a product”

I literally just quoted the people in the article you cited

Voting with your wallet out of a need to survive is still voting with your wallet.

Are you hearing yourself right now? How tf is it a vote if you don’t get to choose?

Wikipedia’s definition is: “an analogy that refers to the theoretical impact of consumer choice on producers’ actions by means of the flow of consumer payments to producers for their goods and services.”

Yes and tire dust already makes up 78% of the microplastics in the ocean.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/tire-dust-makes-up-the-majority-of-ocean-microplastics-study-finds

In the absence of clear demands and organization (which would make it a boycott, which is something that works), “voting with your wallet” just looks like random noise to them. You really think because you stop buying a product or go to the grocery store across the street instead anything will change?