Ah, human rights abuses. Got it. That’s been common knowledge for quite a while now. If you had to have John Oliver point it out to you, you were living with your head in the sand.
I thought it was some new information about it containing lead or something.
Look, damn near EVERYTHING these days is tied to human rights abuses. Food, rubber, electronics, clothing, meat, chemicals. As humans, we just aren’t evolved to handle the sort of horrible complexity that our society presents. Trying to be an ethical consumer takes a crazy amount of research and sacrifice and, to be blunt, doesn’t change a god damn thing. It’s all too interconnected and people don’t have large enough attention spans.
Here’s what I mean by that: Let’s say everyone suddenly decides that yea, cocoa harvesting practices are a big problem and we should all stop buying chocolate. Well, large corporations don’t really care about the day-to-day opinions of consumers. They have contracts that are often up to a year long specifically to hamper things like boycotts. So it doesn’t matter if demand drops, they still get to sell X tons of product at Y price. Now, you can say that when it comes time to renegotiate the contract, they might get less. But when have you ever seen the public rally behind an issue and have it be relevant for more than 3 months? After a year, most people will have forgotten or stopped caring about the boycott and demand will be right back where it was before.
How many times have people tried to boycott companies like Nestle or General Mills? Just last year there was a boycott on Starbucks for their anti-union practices; people that were ADAMANT that they’d never have starbucks again flocked to the stores for their latest holiday special drink.
I guess my point is, we no longer live in a society, we’re held captive by it. I’m going to keep eating chocolate.
I’m at work so I can’t watch it now but I’ll post it here too remind me to watch it later
https://youtu.be/FwHMDjc7qJ8?si=Z_hikobll6djQ8PC
Ah, human rights abuses. Got it. That’s been common knowledge for quite a while now. If you had to have John Oliver point it out to you, you were living with your head in the sand.
I thought it was some new information about it containing lead or something.
Look, damn near EVERYTHING these days is tied to human rights abuses. Food, rubber, electronics, clothing, meat, chemicals. As humans, we just aren’t evolved to handle the sort of horrible complexity that our society presents. Trying to be an ethical consumer takes a crazy amount of research and sacrifice and, to be blunt, doesn’t change a god damn thing. It’s all too interconnected and people don’t have large enough attention spans.
Here’s what I mean by that: Let’s say everyone suddenly decides that yea, cocoa harvesting practices are a big problem and we should all stop buying chocolate. Well, large corporations don’t really care about the day-to-day opinions of consumers. They have contracts that are often up to a year long specifically to hamper things like boycotts. So it doesn’t matter if demand drops, they still get to sell X tons of product at Y price. Now, you can say that when it comes time to renegotiate the contract, they might get less. But when have you ever seen the public rally behind an issue and have it be relevant for more than 3 months? After a year, most people will have forgotten or stopped caring about the boycott and demand will be right back where it was before.
How many times have people tried to boycott companies like Nestle or General Mills? Just last year there was a boycott on Starbucks for their anti-union practices; people that were ADAMANT that they’d never have starbucks again flocked to the stores for their latest holiday special drink.
I guess my point is, we no longer live in a society, we’re held captive by it. I’m going to keep eating chocolate.