The Daily Blog Open Mic – Saturday 18th November 2017

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Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.

Moderation rules are more lenient for this section, but try and play nicely.

EDITORS NOTE: – By the way, here’s a list of shit that will get your comment dumped. Sexist language, homophobic language, racist language, anti-muslim hate, transphobic language, Chemtrails, 9/11 truthers, climate deniers, anti-fluoride fanatics, anti-vaxxer lunatics and ANYONE that links to fucking infowar.  

1 COMMENT

  1. The neoliberal approach to solving plastic pollution

    Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change could scarcely be more out of sync with the nature of the crisis.

    The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions to green my office space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light colours, stop using the elevator.

    Back at home, done huffing stairs, I could get on with other options: change my lightbulbs, buy local veggies, purchase eco-appliances, put a solar panel on my roof.

    And a study released on Thursday claimed it had figured out the single best way to fight climate change: I could swear off ever having a child.

    These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breathe. But we could hardly be worse-served.

    While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals?CMP=share_btn_fb

    So while the politics need to be fought on the big scale, they also need to be fought in our own homes, workplaces and communities. We can choose to break our involvement in the parts of the consumption economy that we have control over. I’m not talking about food and shelter here, I’m talking about what is going on in our heads when we partake of eating the future. This requires resistance as much as anything, because what I am seeing is a whole bunch of justification to not change and instead blame someone else or at the least apportion responsibility to someone else. The problem with this is that no-one is coming to save us, it’s up to us now to change.

    Lest the argument is made about the stupid greenie wanting to ban Christmas fun, or even the idea that wrapping paper is not a big deal in the scheme of things, I’ll make my own argument clear. We, the people, are actively complicit in the culture that is now destroying the planet. So yeah, a bit of wrapping paper in any household isn’t going to make or break climate change or prevent homicide-fueled manufacture of cell phones, but our refusal to break this madness is going to perpetuate those things, and that’s blood on our hands.

    The other inevitable argument is that this requires collective politics and shouldn’t be framed at the personal level.

    Weka

    https://thestandard.org.nz/pathological-consumption/

    Two words:-

    ‘Shampoo bottles’

    One use throw away

    It is all about advertising.

    Dozens of designs, colours, shapes

    Mass produced and sold by the billion

    For a product tests show is basically identical

    Found on even the remotest island beaches in the world.

    If we want to go some way to get rid of unecessary plastic waste.

    Shampoo should be regulated to only be sold in bulk – Bring your own container.

    Jenny

    https://thestandard.org.nz/pathological-consumption/#comment-1283138

    What, you still buy shampoo?
    I don’t own any or used it since 2012.. Use vinegar, it’ll take around 3 weeks for your hair to adjust then you only need a handful to rinse with once a week. I never use soap or underarm either, I’m lucky and not a stinky dude and make my own washing powder/ dish wash / house cleaner etc.
    Here’s all you need to keep you and your house clean:
    sunlight soap, washing soda, baking soda, vinegar (optional: tea tree or eucalyptus oil).
    Thats it.
    You’ll save loads by making your own products and it’s much safer!

    grumpystilskin

    https://thestandard.org.nz/pathological-consumption/#comment-1283152

    Which is a really good example of what people are willing to do and what they want someone else to solve for them. Some plastics are hard to avoid, but some are definitely doable.

    Weka

    https://thestandard.org.nz/pathological-consumption/#comment-1283160

    This is where you and I disagree, weka.

    In my opinion the individualistic solution is inadequate to the problem.

    It lets the policy makers and the politicians off the hook.

    It lets the profiteers who make this crap off the hook.

    It lets the advertisers who currently have a free hand to manipulate and twist us, into buying this crap off the hook. Witness all the shampoo advertisiments that try to instil insecurity, that we need these products to be attractive or accepted.

    In my opinon the comment by grumpystilskin above verges on the sanctimonious. Look at me, look at what I can do, why can’t you do it too, I am a better person than you, you are a lesser person than me.
    Stilskin may be in a space in his life where he can do these things, but what he may not realise that it is not that simple.

    For many people consumer convenience is a small comfort in a stressful or marginal existence.

    The individualist response to plastic pollution ignores society. Plastic pollution is a societal problem, it requires a collective response. And that requires leadership.

    Don’t let the politicians off the hook over plastic polllution.

    https://thestandard.org.nz/pathological-consumption/#comment-1283215

    We are not worthy

    grumpystilskin, the belief that individual responses to plastic pollution, by those like yourself making your own shampoo and other house hold cleaners, will ever be a solution to plastic pollution is a joke, only serving to give a sense of holier than thou superiority to some, to look down your nose at the rest of us poor ignorant sinners for not being as virtuous as you.

    Jenny

    https://thestandard.org.nz/pathological-consumption/#comment-1283215

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