This is why I’ve become an accelerationist, pissing off massive swaths of Lemmy tankies and libs. We likely need these consequences so people make more active, informed decisions in the future. I’m old enough now that I see people making the same mistakes over and over and over again.
Unfortunately, we’re talking generations here before we see positive results. We didn’t really condemn terrible leaders of the past until they were swept deep into the margins of history.
Best reply I got here tbh.
Strikes do a lot more damage to companies. I think a lot of people mix the two ideas up.
The last most successful boycotts were mostly ones you never heard of, and at least one you rather not hear of. We managed to get tuna companies to pretend to harm fewer dolphins in 1988. Before that is was things like the 1965 Delano Grape Strike and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The most recent boycott that actually got a company to change its marketing and outreach was the Bud Lite/Dylan Mulvaney boycott by the anti-trans right.
If you think you can get enough people as worked up about an issue as the chuds were about a single commercial featuring someone they were scared of, then by all means let’s fire up all the engines and get boycotting. Otherwise, I would encourage people who work at these tech companies to start talking about unions and making change from the inside. But none of that does as much damage to a company as getting politicians installed who are already taking bribes from other companies. Yes this is a dark perspective, you’re welcome to disagree but in my nearly five decades on Earth this is just what I’ve seen over and over.
Boycotts are performative stunts that feel good but don’t have impact on companies and even gets more attention ON those companies.
No really, this is a phenomenon that’s known. When people were protesting Blizzard, I swear to fucking god, people I knew for years who hadn’t played WoW since they were kids suddenly decided to reactivate their accounts because all the talk about blizzard “made them nostalgic” and despite being sympathetic to the people hurt by the company, they simply didn’t have the mental value-system to draw lines between those two things. Their own desires to escape and recapture youth was far, far stronger than the social messaging they honestly just felt was finger-wagging and parental scolding, so they rejected the idea of protesting without conscious thought.
And there are far, FAR more people like this than there are people with steadfast principles and discipline to stick to them. The depressing majority of people are not really thinking, they’re just going with the flow, agreeing with popular sentiment when it’s convenient, doing whatever they want when nobody is looking because capitalism has bled our axioms out.
If we put that much energy into volunteering with groups raising funds for primaries, getting to know our neighbors and forming communities, actually talking to people in our communities, we would abolish this fascist empire in a single election cycle. (Assuming we have elections again.)
edit: I firmly stand by my claim that you can change the world a lot better by being a good, active, social person who organizes your community. If we all kinda, embraced this as a passion and cared about people who aren’t in our discord servers, we wouldn’t need to try to boycott companies who won’t give two shits about you giving them more press.
Welcome to how the world has always worked and always will. There’s gin to help wash the black pill down.
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We’re not given much choice.
You simply don’t exist as an American without a car and a phone and internet and an address with your name on it. Anything below that is considered fringe, poverty or societal reject. Good luck getting a job without a smartphone and your own car, don’t expect public transportation to be of any help, it doesn’t generally exist outside the larger cities and what there is of it, often sucks and takes hours out of your day. Our “public” internet is mostly coffee shops who make you buy something to sit there using their slow-ass wifi. If you fall on hard times, you have to apply for aid, which comes with stacks of provisions, like having an address and a phone, and this kind of aid is only available temporarily and if you accidentally make too much money they will cut you off.
If you’re savvy you can learn to use things like libraries and carpools and food banks and other resources for the needy. But it’s really, really hard to get out of poverty once you fall down. Most institutions and companies that provide services of any kind charge you more and more the less money you have. You need to have over a certain amount in your bank or you pay fees. You need to pay your bills on time or they charge you twice as much, you need to keep a credit history maintained even if you’re broke, because most employers include credit checks in their hiring process.
Most of the “middle class” you see here are suburban families working multiple jobs 6 days a week or more and are on average hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in debt. Two people working often requires two cars, now your monthly transportation costs outpace your living expenses. Have kids or want to have kids? Good fucking luck figuring out childcare or daycare and paying for that too, not counting the vast sums of money the delivery and hospital stay alone cost, even if you have insurance. It’s okay, smartphones and tablets will raise your kids. Keep the machine moving.
I cannot comprehend owning a $5000 car.
That’s insane that some people have up to 5k to spend.
The so-called “wealth” you see in the American middle-class is mostly just debt. We have the shiniest toys and the biggest houses here, but it’s a giant gilded-cage. Most of us die in debt.
Reddit gets half a billion browsers a month. They announced last year that they would be partnering with Google to train and host a new generation of AI, and we also know now that people like Elon Musk have no qualms about enforcing their agendas on the site.
The number one way to filter the plausibility of conspiracy theories is to ask one simple question: How does this impact the rich?
For the vast majority of normal kook conspiracies, they fall apart almost immediately when you apply that filter. They have way too much to lose to risk gambles on covering up moon landings and flying saucers or perpetrating huge hoaxes that need a vast contingent of people involved to maintain. Meanwhile, social engineering… that’s easy as shit, you can do it alone if you have the resources. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. It starts simple with “Hmn I want to make people realize that investing in my company is a smart move” but quickly degrades to “We can’t let people think this genocide is bad, it will wreck our bottom line.”
They’re banning or shadowbanning people almost arbitrarily, they don’t want more human users than bots, they can control the narratives and conversations and public sentiment with a turn of a dial if they get enough bots who seem like convincing human users to all chime in about something.
You can really see the disonnence on a major post criticizing Elon Musk or on the topic of vandalizing Teslas. The posts are all highly voted, but the top comments are all crying and whining that Musk “doesn’t deserve the hate” or how “vandals should be put in jail, we obey the law in this country!” and a lot of other very obvious oligarch fellation machines.
It works very well too. People always look to each other for cues, and if the people they look to aren’t even alive, we have a generation being led by undead abominations, being influenced to discard their critical thought, their morals and ethics, their values.
Because it’s being used as pro-AI hype BS. No idea what it’s referencing here and now on lemmy where most people here are far less accepting of AI hype, but I’ve seen it used on the highly delusional Singularity subreddit. Usually followed by hundreds of comments from people making actual real-life plans for what they’re going to do when the “artificial super intelligence” makes them wealthy.
8-chan was a “less moderated” version of 4-chan where the founders of Q-anon got started, it was a notorious forum for trading child abuse material.
Really good point and in cases like this we should all be a lot more concerned with people who seem obsessive about a given subject. It’s not a coincidence that so many crackpot Q-anon “save the children from the demon vampires” nutcases were actually themselves pedos who were caught, or that Q-anon STARTED on a pedophile message board.
Also, the almost universal knee-jerk response that we have as a society broadly to child predation makes a helluva mask for trampling on the rights of others and making a scapegoat that will be condemned in the public court long before any charges are brought up. The absolute ease and temptation of creative editing and a thirst for views can make the producers of this content work harder to portray events out-of-context.
I’m sure there are plenty of actual predators who are worried about being hit with a sting, but I have seen more than a handful clips of these rogue pedo-hunters going after like, 21-year-old boys and their 17-year-old girlfriends, and people who looked genuinely confused and seemed railroaded into meeting someone.
I know this message will never stick with the wildly reactionary and emotional viewership who needs to hear it, but we make vigilantism illegal for a damn good reason, and just because Dateline managed to stay above the waterline for the most part, that doesn’t mean some operation of randos you know nothing about on youtube have both the best intentions and the legal acumen to actually make a difference. They may well be making the problem worse by setting up situations where stings against child predators could become outlawed.
100%.
There is an old trope about arsonists, they either become criminals or they become firefighters.
At least with firefighters, we don’t have to worry about if the firefighter is going to get the fire in a room alone later.
Wow, just TYPICAL that one of you people would just IGNORE the fact that the object is actually an accumulation of particles that were formed in a number of astronomical events over billions of years, I guess you don’t even CARE about the rich history that went into this object before your precious “geology” worked on it, and only care if it’s “well rounded.”
I would much rather see a concerted effort to like not do wars, instead of this overtly obvious attempt to stir the pot.
deleted by creator
fails to convince me I “messed up” on anything in any possible way, stance unchanged.