If you interact with American businesses, use American technology or pay taxes to any Western government, you're indirectly funding genocide, slavery, wanton environmental destruction and countless other crimes by the US, its allies and corporations.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, none of our hands are clean. We all deal with our complicity in various ways, and draw our lines in the sand where we will, but at the end of the day survival in this world forces us all to be hypocrites.
This is quite a stretch of mental gymnastics from the initial point, drawing a blatantly false equivalency between the consumer and the producer as an at attempt to derail and minimize the latter's direct contribution to the forced unethical consumption. And it's an especially absurd argument since it's impossible to ethically consume or even survive with such owners of the means of production.
And this whole falsely applied narrative is unironically a very frequent laundering tactic of their proponents.
And btw I don't even think most are really willing to accept the accusations of the American companies, as they've been told for centuries that these are the good guys.
You've done the thing where you've basically restated my argument and implicitly agreed with it but for some reason also framed your comment as strident disagreement and accused me of motives I don't have. Like many people here, your emotions seem to have poisoned your intellect. I assume you just skimmed my comment and got triggered?
I'm not drawing an equivalency between consumer and producer, I'm pointing out a relationship which, while unequal, still exists and needs to be acknowledged. I'm not attempting to derail or minimize anything. You claim you "condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin," and that's fine, but in any practical sense it's meaningless moral posturing. Unless you run off into the woods to live off the grid, you're still a part of the problem, it's unavoidable.
Yes, it's entirely possible to disagree with the misinterpretation of an otherwise as-objectively-as-possible true sentence.
It seems like you're holding onto your initial position, applying the factually true statement:
no ethical (as in a way of not contributing to others' exploitation) consumption is currently possible
in an twisted manner. Which is also evident from the very last sentence, where you're suggesting only a form of ascetic lifestyle is able to absolve somebody, however one would realize such thing is both impractical and still impossible to do so under the current economic-political landscape. Not to mention that all this suggests that you, maybe unwittingly but still, tie civilization advancement possibility to the existence of an exploitative societal structure.
Instead of talking about the way it's currently shaped to be ran by those who are profit-driven, violently steal resources and contribute to exhaustion of all peoples around the world, you're simplistically reducing it to a matter of entire groups of people, ignoring their standing in the social strata, having to either choose primitivism or accept they're just as bad as their rulers. Even if you've disclaimed that you're not concealing any motives and the responsibility is unequally distributed, your adherence on shifting away from those in charge of the means of production, which is how you've chosen to initiate this very exchange, enables an interpretation of you implicitly defending them, and I believe that's also what anyone with an ounce of critical thinking ability would make of. I would be less critical if you at least suggested organization against the existing way the global socioeconomical system as an alternative, but the appeal to the adherence to an archaic lifestyle suggests this is not something you'd probably approve of. A positive surprise would be taking this for granted and you just condemning those willing to comply all along I suppose?
And throughout the entire history, it has been shown that these are the exact same accusations that have insidiously been made by whoever is directly behind exploitative administrations. They put the blame on those who are always barred from having any say/questioning the way their labor is being used, divide them, deject their protests and prevent overthrowing.
> You claim you "condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin," and that's fine, but in any practical sense it's meaningless moral posturing. Unless you run off into the woods to live off the grid, you're still a part of the problem, it's unavoidable.
This whole narrative here really boils down to the Oh you like music? name every song meme.
P.S. I'd advise refraining from appealing to imaginary emotional reactions on behalf of the other party. It usually demonstrates inability to defend a particular view and deflects from meaningful dialogue.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, none of our hands are clean. We all deal with our complicity in various ways, and draw our lines in the sand where we will, but at the end of the day survival in this world forces us all to be hypocrites.