Attribute responsibility. People need to take responsibility for their own decisions, and change them.

You’re just playing word salad here.

It’s still about attributing blame because you refuse to account for how people operate and how effective lobbying/propaganda groups are on regular people who aren’t as aware on any given topic as you are.

I’m not. I mention it in response to people’s attempts to claim it’s never their fault. It’s always someone else’s fault. That there’s nothing they can do, it’s always everyone else.

This is a made up strawman. No one is saying that here, and people aren’t typically saying that without a large amount of nuance and less absoluteness on this topic.

And society would be better off for that change anyways.

You say this like you’re making a point when instead you make it clear you udderly missed my point. The point was that its “technically” peoples choice, but it clearly isn’t with how heavy the lobbying is.

The hope was that this would moove your opinion and help you culture an appreciation for the extremely strong effects of propaganda and lobbying such that something people think is choice, is far less choice than they think.

Perhaps I’m milking this point now, but I really thought it persuede you to think more about how people who aren’t in your specific bubble think and are affected.

People who are in areas with public transit and refuse to use it because it’s a minor inconvenience are specifically who I’m talking about that with. And yes, people’s votes helped cause that change.

People’s votes after what though? People didn’t just randomly form these opinions.

People in Europe have completely different opinions in general, and you know what the major factor is? A lack of the massive inertial propaganda that the US has had. Did you check out my link? I encourage you to watch it.

It’s just not as simple as you make it out to be.

I’m sure there are. I know there are. Every year I strive to improve. To consume less. To eat less meat. To bike and rid myself of the car I drove for far too long. Improvement takes time. It’s not a one second thing, it takes decades of effort. But it makes a difference, one little step, one person at a time, makes a difference. However, I can be sure I’m actually trying.

It sure does, now how can you say all that, but miss my point entirely that there could be someone putting the exact same amount of effort into being a better person yet not have their issues align with yours on this at all?

Do you not see why policy is the major way to change their habits?

No rain drop thinks it caused the flood. Every, single, bit matters.

You aren’t arguing against me. You just aren’t reading my points at all.

A response needs to come from all sides

That is literally impossible for the very same reasons that you said “I’m sure there are. I know there are.” above. If you can’t, how the hell are you expecting other people to for the issues you find most important?

You can’t solve it by only focusing on companies.

Quite frankly, you absolutely could. If the propaganda influencing consumer choices was stopped, you’d have a good enough solution.

Manufacturers would be making smaller vehicles due to regulations, people couldn’t choose monstrosities, roads would get slimmer in new development, public transportation would be built better.

Its completely possible from a top down approach, but utterly impossible when trying to focus from a bottom up approach.

A lot of people’s apathy is driven by the false perception that they cannot make a difference with their own power.

Partially because there are so many folks like you who without realizing they are doing so, expect everyone to understand and care about every topic, even while you yourself obviously could not live up to such an unrealistic standard.

But also partially because of propaganda.

Why do you think BP loves telling people to take personal responsibility over climate issues? They know its a dead end.

That their vote doesn’t matter.

This part I absolutely agree with and constantly argue with people on lemmy about. So many people believe the only way out is some whimsical fantastical revolution that will never come, or a third party that would actually secure a victory for the enemies.

Consumers are not babies. Most are not children. They can take full responsibility for their own choices and failure to research when it’s available.

This is an attitude that seeks to attribute blame rather than practically solve the problem.

This is evidenced by you continuing to say:

There is a reasonable extent that can be forgiven from lack of information.

Which only deals with this from thinking about this as a “who do I blame” rather than a “How can society solve this problem”.

We’ve seen that consumers for instance, don’t choose excess packaging, companies do.

In that same way, with things like the CAFE standards, Chicken tax and other ways that trucks are incentivised not to mention propagandized, its easy to see how this consumer “switch in preference” was manufactured, in the same way that the consumer switch to eating 4 times the amount of cheese within a few decades was a manufactured choice by teams of lobbyists.

We could all simply choose to consumer less animal product, be healthier and leave the environment in a much better position, but yet schools are still forced to feed kids milk with every meal due to lobbying.

Basically always, the root cause lies somewhere with some lobbyist group pushing their interests over that of the consumer.

You can handwave that away and choose to focus on personal choice, but to do that is to ignore the fact that for every issue you care about a whole lot, many people have issues they care about more, even if you’re just talking about fellow climate appreciating folks. What I’m saying is people can’t put all of their energy into every issue all at once. No human can. They’d burn out and be unable to move. That’s why these things matter and can only really be solved at the policy level.

See people driving to work when they’re easily within public transit areas.

You ever stop to think of the long history of car companies actively and successfully lobbying to ruin public transits image and efficiency in the US?

This didn’t just put up over night. People didnt just magically have these conclusions. Great video on this topic by a pretty awesome edutainment channel.

See people buying slave labor made trinkets off temu, shein, amazon, AliExpress, and many more, or buying constant new shitly made polyester clothes because “fashion”.

I guarantee you there are areas of life you are blind to as well, where someone equally as idealistic to you and equally looking for someone to blame rather than solving the problem, is screaming at the top of their lungs angry you don’t do something about it thinking the same as you “the information is all there!!!”

All the information is easily accessible and clear to everyone. They are making a conscious decision to pollute more for their own convenience. This is not saying companies are not also responsible for massive amounts of waste. Do not take it like that. But people need to also understand lifestyles cannot stay the same and still fight climate change. People need to give up their trinkets, fast fashion, cars, etc, if they want to actually fight climate change and pollution

Yada yada yada, but they won’t, and until you get the reasons why they won’t, and how humans have finite focus, and do burnout, or become apathetic, often due to literal people whose jobs it is to get them to, you won’t be trying to solve the problem, but instead you’ll be trying to pin the blame to the least powerful people in the scenario.

I feel you misunderstand my point.

I’m saying consumers are way less responsible for their purchasing decisions than many people think.

Car centricity is a societal problem. The big trucks are a car company propoganda problem.

If you can’t see the difference where we have gay marriage, for a while had notably less discrimination, a massive improvement in workers rights, improvements to social security nets etc, I don’t know what to tell you.

More than that, this childish opinion misses that you haven’t tried this.

You’ve constantly swapped between democrats and republicans, and purity tested so hard that democrats have basically stopped seeing you as a real force for change within their party.

You have only tore down your chances while actual progressives keep trying, only to be disappointed that you’re there as a roadblock to your shared goals.

To top this all off, you clearly do not understand that you not only need 3 of 4 branches of government and definitely need a super majority senate (Which you haven’t had usably in 25 years) but you also need enough progressives within the party to sway their goals away from just the wishes of their corporate donors.

You want to pretend that we have tried this, but we haven’t tried jack shit, because of folks like you.

More than that, you haven’t tried any other method either, so your comment ends up boiling down to “lets try nothing because I don’t like, nor do I want to try the ‘boring, unfun, hard things that actually make a difference’”

Its completely relevant to anyone who isn’t a child.

You can’t magically have this whimsical revolution you dream of.

Its 100% a “you first” type of deal where you absolutely are not willing to be first, and don’t realize you have a whole lot of the population you’d need to convince first, and until you do, you need to face the hard realities of the system you live in, and mitigate the damage.

The most important thing is to first have a governing body that governs the police, without being police.

Without this, nothing here matters because they haze, and brutalize those who do not conform to their awful internal group standards.

You can literally see what happens to good cops. They get forced out.

The problem with your post, is that you can’t help someone who does not want to be helped.

Ideally that type of person would be kicked out of the force, but instead they comprise of the majority of these forces.

Just to be clear, many if not most agencies have mandatory psych evals, visits etc after different types of incidents, but as you can see, they just don’t solve the problem.

How do you change that though? By beating down the people who have the least damage per person? Or by beating down the companies that push these products, and more importantly the ownership class that owns them and casually use private jets to chauffeur their poodles around?

Uh, source? Do I know you?

You don’t. That’s why its up to you to make your point when making statements like this.

I’ve seen no such actions so without any particular claims, this is just fantasy posting.

The leverage is numbers.

I literally address the fact that you don’t have said leverage and wont get it any time soon in the very thing that you quote.

No one is being convinced by your angsty, snarky, online leftist purity raging.

And the organization at this point is just basic survival instinct?

If you think basic survival instincts are in any way conducive to long term goals… I don’t even have a clever retort. That’s just an insane thing to think.

We’re on a burning planet and being told that yes we need change, but we also need to wageslave while doing it.

You aren’t told, thats the reality.

People stop doing their jobs, without tremendous planning ahead, and they die.

That’s reality.

You are nowhere near having the capacity for a general strike, and you’re losing capacity as the tech feudal lords clamp down on the means of communication, and as people on decentralized platforms are notoriously completely impossible to deal with and hyper idealistic.

Nice try glowie.

See, it’s childish bullshit like this which means we can’t make progress.

My point is clearly that nothing remotely like these fantastical ideas of an underground revolution are actually happening. We’ve seen these grumblings online for fucking decades.

You’d think you’d have literally anything, like non personally, to show for it. Instead its nothing but talk.

Some random not hyper online dude shooting a healthcare ceo in the back because his back hurt and he was hard done by them is the closest you’ve come to that, and it wasn’t you.

I just know what has already happened in the past and can try to extrapolate.

You are remembering selectively, and remembering out of context, because the US is not WW2 germany. They’re WW2 germany with nukes and a military multiples of times more formidable than the next multiple combined.

There is no coalition of countries currently equipped to take them on.

More than that, those countries are all having similar problems with right wing groups flaring up.

More than that still, in recent history, when there have been revolts, they haven’t switched to socialism, or even just more socialism than before in notable ways. They’ve mostly just switched to more capitalism, supported by the US.

And again, I don’t know what basis you have to speak of my character.

Because once again, the online fringe you represent simply has no track record to speak of. They simply have not done anything for decades, and if they had any teeth, there would be something, anything to show for it.

Jesus christ, is that the most radical, outside-of-the system take you could think of for global policy change?

No, it isn’t the previous thing you absolutely do not have the guts or organization for is. This is the accomplishable thing that would not accomplish the final goals and instead would be handing right wing fascists the long term victory on a silver platter.

Have you ever considered taxes to pay for collective goods and services, making peoples lives easier, them smarter, building trust in the idea that government can work and giving the government more teeth?

People will eat shit salads before they give up their F150s. We can’t just let people pay to avoid responsibility.

The F150 people were sold on the ridiculous trucks by the automotive industry. Theyre also much smaller as a part of the problem.

The people who make decisions we all feel forced to live with are the ones whose businesses choose the path of least resistance

No we don’t, and no it isn’t. That’s how the suppression of radical change works.

You aren’t doing jack shit of this radical change you spout on about. You don’t actually want to help, so you come up with excuses to do nothing while feeling better than those who do because your ideas all start with someone else moving first.

I am not saying that anything short of utopia is not worth pursuing, just that I don’t see why we shouldn’t start from that and then work down to a realistic compromise

Because you don’t have the leverage or organization to start there. Instead you must start by slowly working to put out the fire and getting your fellow countryman to see the benefits of socialist policy.

rather than starting from the bad options that are given to us.

You exist in this system, not outside of it. You start here for that is reality, not fantasy. Id love to start from the position of being the rich using my wealth to sway policy. It’s not reality though.

There are other choices, if you can look further than your nose.

List one that doesn’t start with some fantastical revolution you aren’t organizing and aren’t willing to risk your life in as a first mover

If the answer is about forming a new party in a country that has winner takes all or first past the post, I fear you’ve not thought it through.

No we don’t.

What we really need is people to stop fantasizing about spherical revolutions in frictionless societies and do the boring, unfun, hard things that actually make a difference.

It requires people not doing nothing until magically the perfect thing comes along and realizing they’ll have to wade through and actively support shit, until they’ve successfully reformed or composted said shit into something that is finally able to grow the first leafs of anything resembling a society they want.

I’m just so tired of people rejecting the facts of the political systems they live under in order to pretend to chase some other system they won’t see within their life time.

We have to pick the least bad option and then try to make them better because that’s just the way shit works. Acknowledging that doesn’t mean you are complicit or any other such nonsense in the same way acknowledging climate change doesn’t mean you don’t want a climate that isn’t rapidly deteriorating.

“But if x, y, and z people just…” yeah well they won’t, and we know they won’t, so we have the constraints we have.

Not super directed at you, I’ve just been seeing entirely too many naive, in my opinion, fake socialists that seem to only value socialism as far as they can use it as a weapon to brandish against liberals and other socialists who simply see reality and acknowledge that doing anything requires getting your hands dirty.

World is too busy deciding whether to kill minorities or tax the rich an extra few percent to make any progress on this.

Ugh.

That is fucking absurd.

How the fuck even.

Why is no one with this information making a top comment about it?

All the top comments seem totally unreasonable at first glance.

Seperation of church and state is so obviously different than the state infringing on your personhood.

Its a wildly incongruent comparison.

I’m not sure I follow your attempt to paint this as a slippery slope given that one thing is a person’s personal name, a part of their person, and the other is the state brandishing elements of religion.

Seems reasonable

Meanwhile in Ontario, right beside them, public funds still go to Catholic schools

I must then ask, as someone not familiar with Irish politics.

Are they wrong? Does she actually want to leave the EU and or NATO?

Partially because we allow every decent company that pops up here to be bought out by Americans.

We can’t trust any negotiations we make with him long term anyways.

Quite frankly, in the absolute best case scenario, we have to hunker down, diversify trade, bolster our support systems, and hope to high heavens that our neighbours start back taking their lithium.