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Moral self-licensing. I think a lot of the Green movement has the trappings of a religion, with shame and guilt used as motivators, and expensive rituals like
by barrkel 6y ago
Moral self-licensing.
I think a lot of the Green movement has the trappings of a religion, with shame and guilt used as motivators, and expensive rituals like trash sorting used to evidence your membership of the group.
I want to pay someone else to sort my trash. In fact, I want the cost of sorting my trash embedded in the costs of the goods I buy, so I - and in particular, my neighbours - have no motivation to burn their trash, or worse, dump it somewhere illegally.
As it is, I pay for supplemental private trash collection due to the public UK council collection now being insufficient to deal with the quantity. "Recycling" - mostly cardboard delivery boxes - overflows into the private landfill bin because the public bins are only collected every fortnight. Which doesn't help with the smell from nappies and cat litter.
- ip26 6y agoI don't think that's because the Greenies want it that way, rather industry & large interests managed to deflect regulatory changes like this: I want the cost of sorting my trash embedded in the costs of the goods I buy By arguing that individuals can & should do it themselves, knowing full well only a small minority ever would.
- smhost 6y agoI wouldn't lump in the whole of the green movement, but corporate greenwashing and anti-materialist organizations like XR are definitely a big challenge for climate activists.
- pydry 6y ago>Moral self-licensing. I think a lot of the Green movement has the trappings of a religion, with shame and guilt used as motivators, and expensive rituals like trash sorting used to evidence your membership of the group. Guilting individuals for not recycling was a corporate PR response to getting heat for the byproducts of their businesses littering the streets. This started back when plastic packaging was first introduced (~60s, I think). Just like guilting individuals for jaywalking was a corporate response to getting heat for too many automobile deaths in the early days of the car. This happened around the 30s I think. The fact that the most obviously cynical and powerful groups in the world can spread deliberately self serving propaganda and then successfully blame their own disingenuousness on the largely selfless groups who mostly just want to create a better world for everybody is a portent of a very, very dark future.
- liability 6y agoAt least shaming people for littering mostly worked. Maybe it was misdirected due to corporate interests, but there is definitely a lot less trash on the ground now...
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoDepends on where you are. I sometimes wish for more draconion enforcement, like in Singapore for instance. Or something more funny, squads of litter spotters, following the litterers back home, kicking down the door, and dumping the litter there.
- MiroF 6y agoWhere are you claiming has more littering than beforehand? or is this is just yet another HN complaint about the sidewalks of SF....
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoNope. In parts it depends on the weather, if for instance there were loads of people/families in a park, or on the beach/riverfront, or some larger sports/show/music event. But even without that, it seems to me there is more littering in general, compared to a timeframe of say 2004 to 2012. Speaking from Hamburg, Germany here.
- WealthVsSurvive 6y agoThank you for stating what should be obvious: most of the psuedo-green beliefs are the result of direct misinformation from the producers of human-harming pollution. It should make people more rabid to tear them apart, not less.
- thu2111 6y agoIt can be flipped around a third time. Eco-campaigners that create hate campaigns against corporations doing useful work, without even the faintest idea of a proposal for what they want those corps to do differently, will inevitably produce nonsensical virtue signalling PR responses. What else are they going to do? As the article discusses, plastic recycling is hard.