3 ms·

I think a lot of the problem with this kind of thing is that the things where the evil is obvious and wrong, i.e. finance (in which I work by the way!) are easy

I think a lot of the problem with this kind of thing is that the things where the evil is obvious and wrong, i.e. finance (in which I work by the way!) are easy to pick on, especially when the industry has so wrecked the world economy, but those things which are less obvious are left alone. How about the person working for an apparel firm which keeps people in the 21st century version of slavery? Or the people working for governments who either directly or by proxy commit terrible crimes around the world? I'm not trying to excuse anything, rather I just think it's more complicated than it seems.

ddw 15y ago
I see it a matter of degrees. Every last person is complicit in some way in awful things, but the garbage man that works for the government that kills people in Iraq isn't quite as culpable as the hedge fund trader that directly harms the world economy.
- singular 15y ago
  Absolutely, but things get complicated when you compare the little guys in any situation. It's not so easy to compare. I am a low-level functionary on the death star :)
billpatrianakos 15y ago
Everything is more complicated than it seems but we live in a world where bumper sticker politics reigns. If you can't say it in 140 characters or 6 seconds then it goes over everyone's head. These days it's now about what makes sense but how you can market a bad idea to look like a good one. It's hard to argue anything these days because once you show that you understand the shades of gray people think you're wishy-washy or a hypocrite. It's so hard to have real meaningful discussions these days and I've found the best you can do is pick one point, base your argument on that alone, and let the complexity be damned.
throw_away 15y ago
Or what about the person who pays taxes to such a country or buys those cheap clothes? We all have some level of culpability, whether we choose to admit it or not. I think that the realization of this makes people very uncomfortable and one way people deal with this is the desire to find all of the bad things and then perform a stack ordering of badness. A couple of examples: For the sub-prime mess, people will argue for hours whether it's the fault of the borrowers for taking on more than they could handle, or of the banks for pushing the loans or of the government for encouraging the sub-prime market. Fact is, it's probably a mix of all of these things and we should address all of them. Secondly, a common argument against veganism is that no matter how much you try to avoid animal products, it's impossible to do so in today's society as animal products are in a lot of innocuous seeming things like film or tires. But this fact doesn't invalidate the vegan's goal of trying to reduce (what they see as) evil as much as possible. In short, the attempt to find every bad thing or trying to pick out the most bad thing is an impediment to ever making anything better.

ddw 15y ago

I see it a matter of degrees. Every last person is complicit in some way in awful things, but the garbage man that works for the government that kills people in Iraq isn't quite as culpable as the hedge fund trader that directly harms the world economy.

singular 15y ago
Absolutely, but things get complicated when you compare the little guys in any situation. It's not so easy to compare. I am a low-level functionary on the death star :)

billpatrianakos 15y ago

Everything is more complicated than it seems but we live in a world where bumper sticker politics reigns. If you can't say it in 140 characters or 6 seconds then it goes over everyone's head. These days it's now about what makes sense but how you can market a bad idea to look like a good one. It's hard to argue anything these days because once you show that you understand the shades of gray people think you're wishy-washy or a hypocrite. It's so hard to have real meaningful discussions these days and I've found the best you can do is pick one point, base your argument on that alone, and let the complexity be damned.

throw_away 15y ago

Or what about the person who pays taxes to such a country or buys those cheap clothes? We all have some level of culpability, whether we choose to admit it or not. I think that the realization of this makes people very uncomfortable and one way people deal with this is the desire to find all of the bad things and then perform a stack ordering of badness. A couple of examples: For the sub-prime mess, people will argue for hours whether it's the fault of the borrowers for taking on more than they could handle, or of the banks for pushing the loans or of the government for encouraging the sub-prime market. Fact is, it's probably a mix of all of these things and we should address all of them. Secondly, a common argument against veganism is that no matter how much you try to avoid animal products, it's impossible to do so in today's society as animal products are in a lot of innocuous seeming things like film or tires. But this fact doesn't invalidate the vegan's goal of trying to reduce (what they see as) evil as much as possible. In short, the attempt to find every bad thing or trying to pick out the most bad thing is an impediment to ever making anything better.