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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

The GP made an observation about "greedy corporations".

You sarcastically wrote

> Posted from your iphone while driving to the gas station to fill up? Where did you fly to for your last vacation?

as if using any of those technologies means that you have no standing to criticize "greedy corporations".

I've pointed out the (potential) disconnect between the technologies and the corporations, and you've now wandered off into "fossil fuels do stuff, physics matters" which of course is true but as before, has nothing to do with someone criticizing what they see as/claim are "greedy corporations".

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Nice try, but I'm not stupid enough to fall for your deflection. GP did not complain about "greedy corporations." He complained about "greedy corporations destroying our planet." They aren't destroying our planet. You, GP, and I are destroying our planet. But unlike you and GP, I am an adult and I don't try to blame other people for my actions.

Once again, you're making an implicit claim about all the nice things in contemporary civilization (or least the list you gave), in this case that their mere existence is "destroying our planet". But you haven't made that case, and it is far from obvious that it is true. It could be true ... but I'm also to the imagined version of a political & economic system that had still produced portable hand-held network connected computing devices and long distance personal transportation vehicles without "destroying our planet".

What I cannot imagine, however, is an alternative that still featured "greedy corporations" without the "destroying our planet" part.

CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O

Why can't you understand that this is the only thing that matters??

Well, corporations are destroying our planet, whatever our individual consumption patterns are. I could be living in the woods and that would not change. I'm not denying we have a share of personal responsibility in profiting from this ecocidal system: i'm saying individuals have no choice and no power over this, and social change is produced on a bigger level.

We do have power over this. You said it yourself:

> I could be living in the woods...

And so could the rest of us. If we did, there would be no CO2 emissions and, therefore, no global warming. But we don't choose to do this because we would rather live with modern convenience.

There's fallacies with your argument:

- it's technically illegal for me to do that here in France, even if i'm the legal owner of the woods

- it could be a choice to live low-tech alternative lifestyles, if there was not active attacks by the State and corporations to destroy any kind of alternative means of survival, such as the very violent processes over the past few centuries to destroy subsistance farming and non-monetary exchanges (laws & regulations, expropriations, imprisonment and murder of political opposition such as during the Paris Commune)

- it doesn't matter what we personally and individually do: this is a problem at scale that can only be addressed at scale, and pretending otherwise is a bad faith argument on either side ("recycle your plastic bottles to save the planet")

- there's a wide range of possibilities for durable/repairable goods and sustainable lifestyles in between primitivism and our current ecocidal nightmare: to frame political choices as a binary is very limited or dishonest from an intellectual perspective

The main issue here is the implication of human free will.

We're driven by our herd instinct and subconscious manipulation. The way Edward Bernays and others like him have guided us to consumption.

To break free from this woud require either the summoning of collective free will or the brainwashing to keep the eternally growing consumption to cease.

The decision to keep manipulating the masses is something the decision makers behind corporations and governments either enable or actively participate in, but for individual it is extremely unlikely to break this machine.

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