You want to blame someone? Let's blame THEM!

[Bonobo]

Reading posts on DU about how the average consumer is to blame for the BP spill because they use petroleum products inspired me to post this.

It seems an apt analogy to say that blaming the consumers for BP's misdeeds, greed and carelessness is a lot like blaming the above factory workers for unregulated Capitalism.

Have we become so abused and victimized that we now would blame these people:


instead of these people:

[RandomThoughts]

1. You are correct, in my view.

Stealing free will by training in false ways to live, or with deception puts the blame not on people that act with best intents. The fault is on those that use deception to get people to support bad methods, people double their fault when they know they do wrong and then get people to follow them by deception. Since they are responsible for that wrong done by their information systems.

Another reason to be kind, and to not tell people how they have to think and feel, but to support thinking and feeling in their decision making.



(And yes I saw the sleeping reference, although that is a perception on what is to be asleep. There are some that think it is to be awake to be mean and not care, while others think that is to be dead. Again it is two views. I would go as far to say it is to be asleep to think some are asleep so do not deserve caring and dignity.)

[Bryn]

2. Lots of us at DU know ...

We know it's the government that's a big problem.

[NYC_SKP]

3. Are those the Chinese KYE workers used by Microsoft, et al?

I was reading about that...

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/kye-china-worker-conditions,news-6479.html

Horrible.

I can't, however, fully agree with your analogy.

Consumers create demand, so while we should place most of the blame on the folks who made the mess, not the consumers, I think it's still important to promote awareness and change our value system.

Users of petroleum based products are, to some degree, culpable.

:patriot:

[Bonobo]

4. No doubt, but to claim a sort of moral equivalency is ridiculous.

It is like saying that the media wouldn't put such bullshit on the news if we didn't consume it.

It is only a half-truth.

Part of it is that we consume it, however we have no real choices, so is it the chicken or the egg?

In a country with no viable mass-transit that was built for highway travel...
In a country where everything has been centralized so there are no real communities anymore. No local source of food, shoes or underwear...
In a country where you are fucked if you don't have a car...
In a country with no real independent media anymore...

Can we really blame the consumer equally?

[NYC_SKP]

5. No, not equally, not even close.

to me they are separate important campaigns.

Even with the safest and most environmentally responsible extraction of petroleum, I'd still want incentives to educate and use less.

You're right, blaming the consumer for this gulf shit is a distraction, not even close to legitimate.

:thumbsup:

[Bonobo]

6. Separate campaigns, both crucial. Yes, I concur completely.

But when alternative energy sources are already available, but are not picked up and offered to the consumers, it becomes clear that it is a racket.

Wind power? Solar power? Bio-fuel? Are these being fully utilized or is it more likely that renewable energies are not being worked on because they do not contribute to the lining of the fat cats' collective wallets?

Cannabis? Is it being tested and used to help ease the many pains it has been strongly suggested that it helps with? No. Why? Because -say it with me- it does not help line the fat cats' collective wallets.

How many other examples of things are there that would be useful for humanity but which do not get mass-produced and utilized because we have created an economic system which creates disincentives for such things?

[laughingliberal]

12. +1000 nt

[Hannah Bell]

13. no, consumers don't "create" demand.

[NYC_SKP]

15. Corporations exploit consumers to create demand, true.

But without the consumers buying into the bullshit, there would be no demand, so they/we are NOT off the hook.

Education, education, awareness, work.

We don't disagree, I'm pretty sure.

:patriot:

[staceysdn]

7. every last one

have lied. why is this catastrophe possible in this day and age??? this will ruin the whole ecosystem and eventually, impact everyone.

[Mind_your_head]

8. Raising their right hand means NOTHING anymore.....

There is NO SHAME.

SHAME is BAD. It ruins your self-esteem. :eyes: :shrug:

SHAME doesn't do ANYTHING to make you want to be "better".....NOOOOOOO

on edit to add: and these pathetic, white, gutless, souless *ssholes are supposedly our *leaders*?!? No wonder we feel F*CKED.

[aquart]

10. Because we keep not sending them to jail. We NEED to jail them.

I say pick 'em up under the Patriot Act. They have terrified millions of Americans.

[Ozymanithrax]

9. It is not the average consumer, it is our civilization, our way of life.

It is the 98% of the population of earth that is not living in some remote jungle as hunter gatherers.

The gusher is a symptom of the civilization that we, our parents, and our grandparents created.

The answer is to re-engineer our entire civilization to use some other source of cheap, easily obtainable form of energy...just as soon as we discover it. I think "Unobtanium" has enormous potential as a future fuel, as soon as we kill those damned 9 foot tall blue Indians.

Our civilization is not going to quit using oil soon, because there is no alternative as long as we want to eat. What we need to do is to agitate for international oversight on oil drilling, because when someone screws up more than one city, state, and nation are affected.

We should also be realistic about the world we live in and recognize that re-engineering an entire civilization is going to be much harder than stopping that gushing oil well, and will take a lot longer.

[KT2000]

11. I do not accept blame

the oil industry and the car industry and powerful politicians decided for all of us that we would be dependent upon oil for our transporation needs. No one consulted me.

I have been for the development of electric cars and other methods but corporations that are more powerful than me decided that electric car development should be stopped and existing electric cars should be demolished.

[Scuba]

14. Yeah, I'm sick of 'blame the victim' ...

...Besides politicking for better government and regulations, what do the blamers think those of us who burn gas should be doing?

Moving near where we work? Unfortunately, the current employment culture in America means you'll likely be in a new job every few years. Are we supposed to move every time?

Bicycle to work? Same problem. Many of us commute thousands of miles to work, not because we want to, but because we have to. At one point in my career I had to fly 1,200 miles back and forth each week for two years, consuming vast quantities of jet fuel that wouldn't have been used had my seat on the plane been empty, like the one next to me sometimes was.

Change careers? Pretty hard to do without burning down everything you've worked for and starting over.

Change lifestyle? Do we live better than the average European? Some of us, a little, in terms of home and PERHAPS fuel-consumption history. But the graphs showing how Amerians use more than their fair share of fuels don't show splits between military, corporate and private gasoline consumption. (Can anyone provide this breakdown? Thanks.) I suspect the average consumer may look pretty innocent with that data at hand.

Retire? Hah. I'm not in the top 20% of Americans who own 93% of American wealth. Like most of us, I have just been scraping by, saving for retirement, and then seeing it vanish when the casino my 401K's played in turned out to be fixed.

Meanwhile, note this taken from http://www.observer.com/2009/o2/yacht-update regarding Paul Allen's fishing boat. "The yacht, which houses a crew of 60, two helicopters, seven boats, a submarine, and a remote controlled vehicle that crawls the ocean floor, costs the billionaire $20 million a year (or $384,000 a week) to keep up. Maybe he can cut his fuel consumption. Maybe he could scrape by with just one of his two helicoptors.

Time to lock these guys in a cell.