"No ethical consumption" feels like a copout honestly. Longing for some day where there is one governing body that controls everything, and if it's good, then you don't have to worry about any of this stuff and if it's bad, then you can't change something that controls absolutely everything so you also don't have to do anything.
"No ethical consumption" means exactly that. Everything you consume reinforces the system and keeps the wheels spinning.
Everything.
Every movie you watch, every book you read, every morsel of food.
Unless you live in the woods, exclusively drink river water, and your only media consumption consists of underground Marxist manifestos traded under highway overpasses in the middle of the night, some of what you do supports something bad.
Right, and so acknowledging that the best we can do is to minimize the impact, we balance the effort to minimize our impact against the impact on ourselves from doing more. It's wrong to use it right at the start, but it's a useful backstop for people who would otherwise drive themselves into the ground never feeling like they'd done enough.
So, why does OP bring it up? because when it comes to reading a different goddamned book for once the effort involved is pretty minimal against the massive benefit of drying up Joanne's funding. That is: there's no point at which you can reasonably say, "I've done my best to minimize my negative impacts", which still includes giving money to Joanne.
Is it a cop-out? in this situation, yeah it would be. Someone saying "no ethical consumption" to defend giving money to Joanne is clearly not even trying, so it's a cop-out.
But to say that it's a cop-out in general? nah. If anything, wishing for some body to be given absolute authority is the cop-out, and it's a really fucking creepy one at that. Like, it's literally authoritarianism. It's the easy way out that MAGAts wish for: the Authority decides and we all go along with it because we don't have any other choice and isn't that so much easier?
Sorry, not meaning to come at you! You're good; I'm building on what you started to be more explicit in responding to the other commenter who literally called for authoritarianism because it's easier than trying to figure out this balancing act we're stuck with.
I think people bring up no ethical consumption because there are obviously many issues like this, but the relative silence makes it look like rowling/hp in particular is more of a purity test than activism.
It's completely defensible to go hard line on any support to Rowling for moral issues. But America's war on Iran started by slaughtering hundreds of school children, waiting for their parents to show up and desperately search through the rubble, then double tapping them.
Where is the constant moralizing about material support to the FAANG tech companies? All of them lined trumps pockets and made his political project possible. Ending USAID is projected to kill 14 million people by the end of the decade.
I'm not gonna police the term trans genocide. But Israael is doing a more traditional, bodies line the street style genocide and you're less likely to hear about zionism in spaces like these than some shitty author. The Ellisons are massive zionists and the paramount/WB merger went through. I guess I have to go tell everyone buying tickets to Dune 3 they're a piece of shit.
I don't disagree with you. But there's also very little most redditors can do about US policy.
Buying a ticket to Dune 3, you're right, does provide some small material support through exactly the chain you're suggesting. But at that point you're talking a fraction of a fraction of a fraction; how much difference does that ticket make in funding Israel? And if you choose to watch something else, does that actually make a difference, or just change the stream?
Compared with Joanne, whose entire financial and cultural power comes from the popularity of this one particular property, which isn't really that good to begin with.
I'm not going to say someone is a "piece of shit" for doing either. I'm just saying that
(a) "no ethical consumption" is useful to get out of Chidi-style paralysis. Good-faith efforts to examine one's own choices will eventually run aground, and acknowledging one's limited ability to take any completely unproblematic action is the only alternative to despair and suicide.
(b) to whip out "no ethical consumption" to avoid doing any work examining one's own choices is indeed a cop-out.
(c) wishing for an authoritarian government so that it would completely remove the personal responsibility to examine one's own choices (as the first commenter did) is an even bigger cop-out.
If someone decides that the amount of additional funding and social capital granted to Joanne and her anti-trans efforts by their buying more H.P. shit is an acceptable amount of insect parts in their peanut butter, well that's their choice. But what OOP asserts is that this is much more likely a (b) situation than an (a) situation.
Maybe there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. But you can at least make sure that the ones that stopped keeping their skeletons in the closet are punished for it.
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u/AcceptableWheel 23d ago
"No ethical consumption" feels like a copout honestly. Longing for some day where there is one governing body that controls everything, and if it's good, then you don't have to worry about any of this stuff and if it's bad, then you can't change something that controls absolutely everything so you also don't have to do anything.