Jtotheb

I don’t know that there are many white capitalists in South Africa who deserve their money more than any black individual living there

Thank you for the clarification.

In what sense is he correct? It’s not because he’s not black, you’ve just cited the workaround—and it’s not like he’s a guy who takes a principled stand against nepotism. The idea of the state taking partial ownership of a company that is operating in their country also doesn’t give me too much pause, free trade is extractive—and I’m simply not sure that Elon Musk deserves that money more than someone in the South African government, lol

You are correct. I may or may not know a guy who processes return-to-sender mail and sees prisons rejecting photos and other communications that are not sent via their approved companies. This is the US. Don’t forget that prisons are for kickbacks, nothing more.

It’s a quick win if it leads to further progress. It’s a distraction if it’s not part of a larger plan that includes real change. That’s my fear. Banning plastic straws was all we talked about for two straight years. That’s wasted time, and it didn’t really lead to anything else.

Diatribe alert. If you just wanna know, here: 75% to 86% of plastic waste in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch came from fishing industry, article, study.

It’s not bad, and I didn’t claim it to be bad. It’s not relevant in the same way Dr Thunder and Pibb Xtra aren’t leading to a soft drink crisis in the USA—they’re a small part of a much bigger problem.

To carry on with this dumbass analogy, it would be misleading to argue for a ban on off-brand sodas while continuing to mass produce Sprite, Pepsi, and Diet Coke, and it lets big businesses off the hook for their destruction. Same with letting industries shovel untold plastic waste into the oceans behind our backs while making more visible efforts to ban much smaller amounts back on land.

Also, we’re not just worried about plastic because it ends up on beaches. That is, again, missing the bigger picture. It’s also missing why those items in particular end up on beaches, which is because of local littering. A cup on a beach is actually great for the environment compared to a piece of nylon disintegrating in the ocean. It just looks ugly. Our primary focus can’t be on ugly right now.

If you ban plastic straws from European beaches and say job well done, the planet will never notice. We need to start with the big issues, we don’t have time to pat them on the back and keep subsidizing the destruction of our planet. Agricultural fertilizer is next followed by plastic bags, iirc, or maybe bottles.

This is a list of end-consumer items put together by a government body beholden to fishing and other industries. And it’s not even about pollution levels, it’s specifically about beach pollution. Plastic lids on cartons of heavy cream are “also a problem” if we focus only on reducing plastic waste in the kitchen, but implying it’s even relevant compared to industrial plastic waste is disingenuous

Thankfully the people in charge of deciding whether your actions are performative or not have great judgment

Gotcha. Disputing you is classic misdirection, existing traumas are old news, fresh traumas just rattle us (“us”), and of course anything that’s wrong happened somewhere you don’t think about with a shred of care in your heart. I think I can hear the goalposts moving again

People you can relate to better than the ones who’ve been starving? Did you miss that Flint still doesn’t have safe tap water and that the state no longer considers it an emergency so they’ve lost their bottled water funding?

Yeah, this site is basically a news aggregator with a side of tech memes. None of the niche communities we used to interact with exist, and no matter how many times someone says “just make them lol” it’s just too small to support a Memphis Grizzlies or a cat mlem or an alt-biking scene

No American alive today had a say in the electoral college, yet it gave Bush Jr. and Donald Trump presidential powers despite the masses being against them. Americans weren’t in charge of the completely farcical 2000 election, Jeb Bush was. This time around, sure. The people have chosen this. Only after decades of witnessing how little representation they truly have.