https://sfba.social/@drahardja/117344931893000589
the other day a tanky said a sentence constructed like that to me too, while literally arguing for me to join his authoritarian group
Don’t make Perfect the enemy of Progress.
I do things that make no difference globally because I don’t want to take part in the bad things.
I did not vote for the government that is ruling my country. My single vote did not make any difference, but it makes me feel better that I did not vote for this government.
I travel by train instead of a plane and I ride a bike instead of driving a car because I don’t want to be part of the club of high CO2 emission citizen.
Doing that does not matter globally, but I feel better about myself that way. I don’t tell other people what to do or to follow my example, but I think some people around me do notice and maybe it does get them thinking?
But I have no illusions, most people are busy enough and do what is most convenient every time. I am the only adult in my circle that does not own a car. But I feel powerless beyond my personal life to change anything.
I know it is not good enough, but I don’t know how to change other people.
I did try and sometimes I still do try, but to no effect besides annoying people. 🤷
Hiding behind vague hypotheticals because you voted for a union busting genocider with a staff full of Epstein patrons
I have been told this my whole life, how our silly little actions didn’t mean anything because they were too small or fringe or whatever.
The difference is I can look back across the decades and see a lot of people who I have helped, and who have helped me in turn, things have been directly made better as a result (well, at least some of the time). Meanwhile, their “more realistic” approach centred on voting has seen periods of glacial progress and rapid retreat, leaving them further back than ever before in my lifetime.
I have been told this my whole life, how our silly little actions didn’t mean anything because they were too small or fringe or whatever.
Same. Ive never believed it.
Be a helper.
Look man, you’re only saving 50% of the children from starvation, so obviously your idea is bad and we should continue letting 100% of the children die until someone comes up with the perfect solution.
I suggest we start calling this The Musk Argument.
As in, I won’t spend an inconsequential fraction of my money to solve world hunger – after I literally challenged you for a proposal to do so – because I don’t think you will be 100% successful.
Instead, I think I will take public actions to kill untold numbers of poor people around the world while I continue my quest to be the first smart boy with one million million dollars.
History has taught us that reform doesn’t work. It makes the current mode of production, something clearly unfair, slightly more palatable. This is not a solution. Revolution is the only method of improving society as a whole in meaningful ways.
I encourage anyone curious about these topics that are unsatisfied with the concept of reform to study Marxism.
This is only valid as long as your partial/incomplete solution doesn’t encourage people who would otherwise keep working on solving the whole problem to decide that since there’s a solution they can just knock off for brunch and leave you to it.
Partial solutions to a polluted creek that’s choked with litter? Yes please, then we can see what comes next
Placebo solutions that make people who’ve made no difference feel like they’ve done their part to fight fascism and can go back to brunch? Gtfo with that shit.
Hint: if the “problem” is a societal one, nothing you see or hear suggested by anyone who has advertisers is going to actually solve anything, and is likely to work against anyone trying an actual solution.
And here we are. The exact sentiment described by OP.
You are the one describing the solution as “placebo”. I think the effort I implement is a positive step. I believe strongly that you are one of two types of people: Anti-solution and an agitator trying to divide and dishearten; or… maybe… you’re invested in the positive outcome and you will continue the greater work while I try to ensure you still can.
If you were only doing it because it was 100% bad, then you’re just as much of an idiot as those ‘why wouldn’t you rape without sky-daddy watching you’ christians. You can still work to solve it when it’s only 90% as bad as it was, since it will still be 100% bad.
Hint: Telling people to either be fully dedicated to solving the big issues or give up and ‘go to brunch’ is reductive and not encouraging the way you want it to be.
No.
The “solution” they’re clearly trying to defend without naming it to make it obvious is “voting for liberal politicians”. That absolutely 100% is a placebo, and every time the liberal shitbag wins, all their Blue No Matter Who voters (or whatever the equivalent is in other countries) go back to brunch and pretend all the problems have been solved
Hint: “go back to brunch” is a derisive way to mock liberals, and wasn’t intended to be encouraging at all to anyone.
all their Blue No Matter Who voters (or whatever the equivalent is in other countries) go back to brunch and pretend all the problems have been solved
From the other poster: Using a paper straw does reduce plastic usage. So will using reusable grocery bags. A person can quite easily do both. Deriding the paper straw as a useless step just seems unhelpful to me. When the plastic bags and straws are reduced, we can attack other angles too. As an anecdote, I rarely even get offered a choice of straw nowadays - it’s either not present or paper. that’s a minor win, but a win nonetheless. Some people worked hard to make that happen and this talk of placebo is derisive of that work.
This is you presuming to know the motivations of all other people and deciding for them when they stop working on new things. Just because I want people to be involved in their political processes doesn’t mean I stop at the voting booth, or can’t also be doing service in my community. I don’t love the catchphrase ‘Blue no matter Who’ - but I recognize that not voting blue is always going to be detrimental to the cause until enough people are involved in local level organizations to change the candidates from the ground up. Until we get there, I recommend we vote blue.
Discouraging civic engagement only benefits the wealthy. Wanna fight fascism and oligarchs? Encourage people to participate instead of telling them it doesn’t matter or there can only be revolution instead of incremental progress.
Hint: “go back to brunch” is a derisive way to mock liberals, and wasn’t intended to be encouraging at all to anyone.
That’s my whole point. Don’t discourage.
More encouragement of participation is better. Tell me that’s wrong.
Plastic pollution in the ocean is not from consumer waste, it’s from industrial fishing. Plastic straws LITERALLY DO NOT ADDRESS THE ISSUE. It’s a fantastic example of this.
Discouraging civic engagement only benefits the wealthy.
Look at the people telling you to engage in these ways.
This is the epitome of the issue I’m talking about – you people seem to presume the engagement ends at the simple step. For some, it will, but those people weren’t likely to engage larger in the first place and reducing the consumer waste doesn’t hurt.
For others, it will make them aware of the larger call to action, to get them to join advocacy groups that punish industrial and systemic issues.
I can’t stop fascism or climate change or pollution on my own. I need MORE people engaged and telling people we need all or nothing solutions can only lower the number of people willing to take action. Individual, even trivial steps matter.
Look at the people telling you to give up.
No one is saying to give up. The fact that you hear “stop wasting your energy trying to solve things in ways that are controlled by the people profiting from the problem” and interpret that as “give up” tells us all exactly how engaged you are with anything that actually might make a difference.
Your lack of reading comprehension tells me exactly how much you think.
My point being: ‘give up’ is what some people, who would otherwise be our allies, are hearing. Stop telling *them* to give up.
You won’t make more anti-capitalists by squashing the people who see the problems and want to solve them just not in your way. That only accelerates us towards the fascism you claim to be against.
“I use a paper straw, so I dont have to reduce my plastic usage”
I think this is an example of what this commentor was pointing out.
Perfect is the enemy of good (or good enough).
I see way too much of this on the internet, here on Lemmy included. Thanks for posting this. I have this thought a lot but haven’t see this good of a way to put it before.
Its state sponsored propaganda using companies as proxies to bypass those pesky human rights laws and is vastly on the Republican side but you do have aipac dems and similar issues in other first world countries.
The rise of right wing extremist politicians and the world also going to shit is no coincidence.
They’ll also tell you things such as “don’t trust the government” while also being the party in control. It should be obvious to anyone who isn’t a cultist.
It should be obvious to anyone who isn’t a cultist.
I love the ‘no true scot’ part here.
Nice argument
Yeah I’ve had this kind of discussions with right wing folk. We were discussing socialist policies, which I was in favor of and they were against. They were pointing out there were people abusing current socialist policies and getting a free handout, so all of those policies should be cut to prevent the freeloaders from freeloading. I argued that any kind of policy, no matter what the policy is, is going to be abused by a small fraction of the population. It’s not possible to create something without loopholes and people exploiting them. We should try to prevent it in the design, but in the end we should accept that’s going to happen and instead focus on if the policy is also actually helping the people it was designed for.
Nothing is perfect, problems won’t be fully solved and / or new problems will be created. That isn’t failure, it’s life.
Also systems designed to prevent exploits require resources. For example checking that people getting unemployment benefits are actually unemployed is actually work. It is often cheaper to be imperfect, just because those checks are so expensive.
Often there’s a break even point at greater than zero auditing where the audits start costing more than the amount of fraud, but it’s surprisingly common that zero or very nearly zero auditing is actually the most efficient setup, because regular people just don’t commit fraud all that often. When dealing with corporations, on the other hand…
…add a few more special investigators for high tax evasion crimes to the IRS (or whatever your gov org is called) and you’ll reap more for the state than you’ll ever could with welfare fraud.
The head of the German tax union (DSTG) with 75000 members who advise German IRS employees, intervene for tax equality, fight tax evasion into tax havens and offshore companies says the yearly sum of high tax evasion fraud amounts to 200 billion, while welfare fraud amounts to 275 million. He advised the new government under the ex-Blackrock chancellor Merz at the start of their legislation to make this his priority.
What did the government do of course (in corporation with the so called workers party SPD) recently in a whimsy attempt to bring down state debt? Create a barrage of reforms all targeting the poor, especially those receiving welfare, but also working families, the health system and workers rights. Then he openly states at podium discussions the German workers are to lazy compared to Chinese workers. He actively pushed the far right AfD to record election results and his own parties to record negative results.
The corrupt finance minister Katharina Reiche (greedy POS ex fossil fuel manager) of the same party is actively working to eradicate the last chances of the country to get a foothold in green tech like wind power generation, heatpumps and green hydrogen for steel production (like she did 2012 in another gov for the solar industry) and pro fossil fuel industries.
This all lead to record level negative popularity for the conservative party, record level rates German Angst regarding economic downfall of citizens in recent public polls and record level popularity of the right wing AfD (whose level of economic profession and that of those electing them shows in a proposal to tax all income classes the same with a flat tax of 25%).
The only ray of hope is the left party who recently won the Berlin elections whose first priority there is to transfer flats in the hands of greedy flat corporations, working only for the share holder value, to state property.
The easiest way to avoid freeloaders and abusers is to make services available to anyone who wants them. Then the only abuse is trying to count one person as multiple people to get an unfair amount of benefits which isn’t even possible for things like universal healthcare.
current capitalist approaches are being exploited RIGHT NOW to consolidate wealth and power (see: kushner buying the lakers, ellison buying warner bros and thats just los angeles alone). i’d much rather have a handful of everyman freeloaders than concentrated greed.
There’s like two kinds of proposals, and whichever kind you make you get criticized. You make a big proposal, people say “Well yeah but how does that work on the ground?” You make an on-the-ground proposal, and people say “Well how does that scale to the whole thing?” Alright fine, then let’s just die!
Even though I agree on parts of it, don’t forget that Trump has upended the whole system and decades of progression in six months. So next time democrats tell you that “change takes time and needs patience” you should also show them the middle finger. Especially so if they say this in relation to changing back things Trump has done.
There’s a good chance that anyone making this argument doesn’t see it as a problem in the first place.
That’s correct. Dismissal of the effort and disgust for the goal seem to go hand-in-hand.
Digital privacy? They’ve got you anyway AND I don’t care about privacy Environmentalism? Nothing is 100% green anyway AND I don’t care about the environment
Lots of examples like that.
They want to beat down both your goal and effort, because admitting even one of those being reasonable threatens their worldview.
Also there is crossover. Even if you managed 100% green, maybe some engineer who worked on it accidentally hit some Palestinian with their car, so now the entire project is just a secret genocide.
Yes, but this message gives them the chance to expand their view. The chance.
A monkey is gonna monk. No matter what you tellem.
It’s such a lazy answer and we see it everywhere. Check any discussion on veganism and you’ll spot it.
That’s exactly what I thought when I read this. We have multiple antivegan accounts on my instance that spout this crap and troll others. If they get banned, they come crying back instead of realizing how unwelcome they are. What a waste of time to spend it this way instead of actually helping people. You can’t talk about veganism on here without the same type of asshole coming out of the woodworks.
moral envy:
feeling of envy and resentment directed at another person, not because the person is wealthy, or gifted or lucky but because his or her behaviour is seen as upholding a higher moral standard than the envier’s own
it’s one thing to do something ineffective, but be optimistic. it’s another to waste others time and morally grandstand if they won’t do ineffective things with you
Problem is in this case it’s effective
Would be even worse if we all ate animals:
I’m sorry you ran into assholes.
Edit: yeah you can tag this one as an antivegan debate pervert and move on.
I’m not antivegan
this is a counterfactual and cannot be proven
In this paper, we link a validated food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) to estimates from a review of 570 life-cycle assessments3 (LCAs)
lca studies are disparately methodized, and cannot be combined. this is junk science
I.e. eating less meat does not affect animal welfare, zoonosis and land use change?
Are you an imbecile or a troll?
calling me names won’t change the facts
Yeah. We can call you names, and it won’t change the fact that eating less meat does affect animal welfare, zoonosis and land use change.
Or do you have some actual argument to make?
meat production continues to rise, and there is no reason to believe it could rise any faster. systemic change needs to happen.
The growth of total meat production is not indicative of the change in harm done by developed countries. It can only be combated by increasing poverty, decreasing population or imposing laws onto developing countries. Most people would be unwilling to impose that.
Quoting rising meat consumption as an example of how vegans are wrong is… Non factual. Naming those that do consume animal (products) in smaller amounts just as bad as those habitual carcass consumption clowns isn’t conducive to the goal of reducing meat consumption either.
vegans aren’t wrong to be vegan. but it would be wrong to say being vegan causes systemic change. which I thought was the point I made to begin with, and to an extent, the point of this post
Things have gotten worse over my lifetime in small, almost imperceptible ways, which have all accumulated into the humungous shit sandwich we find ourselves consuming daily. The only way things will get better is in the same small, incremental way. Should we fight for more, faster, better? Absolutely! Should we let that get in the way of small wins? Hell no. It’s not sexy, it feels like trudging through mud every day and requires a level of faith to believe that the small contributions each of us make will matter in the long term. But it is the only way given the realities of the world we live in. Everything else is apathy or accelerationism.
