Completely irrelevant news

[sabotabby]

I've been told that today is Buy Nothing Day. I'm not normally a consumer whore or anything, but I think I will celebrate it by being one. You know, just to be contrary. Also, I've already bought a coffee -- at the Second Cup, no less! It annoys me that a lot of people think that Adbusters' notions of switching one sort of consumer capitalism to a "better" consumer capitalism is actual activism.

The magazine has very pretty pictures, though.

In other news, career criminal and whiny baby Lord Black is asking for his Canadian citizenship back. I guess maybe he shouldn't have said those nasty things about us when he renounced it in the first place. Excuse me for a sec...

AHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Oh man, I hope they give his citizenship to the poorest Haïtian refugee they can possibly find -- preferably a poor Haïtian communist refugee. Who has converted to Islam. And is gay. And drives a cab. That'd be the best thing ever.

Comments

[ironed_orchid]

the average consumer, given the current economic structure, is going to go with cheap and dirty over expensive and clean

Absolutely, which makes ethical consumerism a privilege for those who can afford to spend more money. Which is fucked up, because being ethical should not be the privilege of the rich.

I do try to buy organic and fair trade products whenever I can, but often the discrepancy in price between them and 'conventional' products is simply not economically viable on a small budget. as for household recycling etc, people will do it if councils make it easy to separate recyclables, but a household doesn't produce anything near the waste that a company does.

I remember springheel_jack writing a good entry some time ago about the rift between hard core environmentalists and socialism, which was very interesting and I think drew attention to many of the ideological differences. However, to be really concerned about the welfare of human beings should include a concern for the environment because a healthy environment makes for healthier humans.

[sabotabby]

I think I made a post about that regarding air conditioning, and how the alternatives proposed by various environmental groups were all geared towards people who owned their own homes. The more money I make, the more ethical my spending habits get. It's a pretty direct correlation.

I'd like to read springheel_jack's post, if either of you could find it. If one assumes that capitalism and environmentalism are fundamentally incompatible (and that's my assumption), you'd think that socialists and environmentalists would find a bit more common ground. I tend to fault the environmentalists more on that, but I'm probably biased.

[ironed_orchid]

Here you go, this is the part I was thinking about, but the rest of the post is also very awesome:

Incidentally this is why I am not a Green. I am a Red. You can't be a Green and a Red at the same time. That doesn't mean you can't care deeply about the environment and be Red. Indeed you must: the workers have nothing to gain by shedding their chains in a ruined and filthy world. But you can't be Red and be a Malthusian, and I think that the global Green movement is exactly that. Marx's most bitter polemics were not against the Ricardians, they were against the Malthusians; the Marxist desire for justice is simply a mistake if scarcity is irremediable.

[sabotabby]

Oh yeah -- I remember reading that and not really knowing what to say other than, "Wow."

[ironed_orchid]

Me too, but it stuck with me, and I've been reminded a few times since then.