But he's rich! What's even the point of being fantastically wealthy if you can't make the rest of the world bow to your every whim?!
Funny Events of the "Woke" world
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
EA tries to be inclusive by changing Chinese New Year to be Lunar festival in the Sims 4.
It went down as well as you can probably predict with the Chinese users
steamcommunity.com
It went down as well as you can probably predict with the Chinese users
The Sims™ 4 General Discussions :: Steam Community
The Sims™ 4 - The Sims is on Discord!About the GameUnleash your imagination and create a unique world of Sims that’s an expression of you. Download for free, and customize every detail from Sims to homes and much more. Choose how Sims look, act, and dress, then decide how they’ll live out each...
...It's not like EA is unique in calling it Lunar New Year instead of Chinese New Year. But sure, let's call them "woke" for it.
That's.. not really true.
There are some dictators who were definitely set up or received resources from the West, like Hissene Habre. There are other dictators who served in colonial-era armies and used their military position to sieze power from weak civilian administrations, like Jean-Bedel Bokassa or Idi Amin, but that's not really the same thing as being set up by the West. Bokassa and Amin's regiemes largely failed to draw Western support, and became increasingly hostile to Western interests over time. Other African dictators, like Robert Mugabe and José Eduardo dos Santos, were anti-colonial freedom fighters. Some of the latter explicitly aligned themselves with a socialist platform and received support from the Soviet Union.
The grain of truth here is that, like all colonized regions, many African states had little experience or expectations of democratic government, and in many cases lacked both functioning institutions and political expertise. Many people found themselves part of postcolonial nations which did not reflect their own ethnic or political identity, and to which they felt no great loyalty. The result was often weak, corrupt governments which had little in the way of public support and were extremely vulnerable to being deposed by their own militaries. Foreign powers (including the PRC) sought to exploit this situation and often backed various groups and governments deemed favourable to them. For example, the Chinese sent political advisors and gave financial support to the government of the Central African Republic in the 60s, and the fear of Chinese influence played a key role in the subsequent military coup (which lead to a brutal dictatorship).
While most of the political problems in Africa have their roots in Western colonialism, and in many cases have continued to be exploited by Western governments up to the present day, Western governments do not control everything that happens in Africa. They don't need to, they are the beneficiaries of a global hegemony wherein all governments rely on their approval for economic prosperity and political legitimacy. In that sense, China's newfound ambitions could present an opportunity, but it is not a benevolent gesture. It is not about freeing Africans from the cruel oppression of the West. What China is doing is just the same old neo-colonialism, and if African states aren't careful they're just going to find Western hegemony replaced with Chinese hegemony.
Yeah, I've had to deal with Koreans at work cranky about the Chinese trying to monopolise LNY
Also, this is the time when woke and anti-woke normally intersect against the anti-woke Chinese crowd
Because corporations produce all the things consumers buy, it's not the fault of the consumer for consuming, it's the corporation's fault for meeting demand.
Cool, I guess I can eat grass-fed steak 7 days a week, drive a pickup truck, fly multiple times a day, buy from amazon daily with prime shipping. This communist says my carbon footprint doesn't matter unless I am rich.
It wouldn't be corporations fault for meeting demands... if all they were doing was meeting demands. But if you really think all corporations do is only produce what the public wants or asks for, maybe grow up.
Carbon footprint IS a scam. The U.S. military alone has a larger carbon footprint than many countries combined, and that's just the U.S. military.
I'm guessing it's not from the effect when chimney sweeps had finished their job and walked across the carpet.
It doesn't.
Your decision whether or not to eat steak will not change the number of cows being reared. If you fly multiple times a day, you'll be booking flights on aircraft that would be flying anyway. As for driving a pickup truck or buying from Amazon prime delivery, those are so insignificant that even giving them thought is an insult to the severity of the issue. Nothing you do to change your economic impact on the world will ever really matter because you have almost no influence within the economic system you live in. You can choose to spend your extremely limited money on things that you think are less bad for the environment, but that money won't magically disappear once it leaves your hands. Jeff Bezos will get his grubby reptilian claws on it sooner or later.
The rhetoric of the "climate footprint" is an intentional derailment because it deludes people into thinking that the solution to climate change lies in individual changes in behaviour rather than in collective political action or, god forbid, regulation, and that's simply not true. It preys on the need people have to see themselves as moral. Morality is not going to save anyone. Noone is going to get to climate heaven as a reward for flipping their underpants and only using one sheet of toilet paper. We're all going straight to hell together.
I agree to some extent that the argument for regulation and policy at the top is strong, and all too often the rhetoric about individual choice is an attempt to weaken such things. But on the other hand, the need to exercise some personal morality and power over one's own actions has persuasive value (to not be seen as a hypocrite or an example to others), and furthermore even a modest number of people doing a modest amount is better than nothing - never mind that enough people doing something gives producers of goods and services motivation to cater to it and also improve their ways. Thus it might not be as good as some collective action from the top, but nor should it be neglected.
We honestly need both to solve climate change, people have to be willing to radically change their life before, and after the collective political, and economic change that occurs. A lot of Americans don't vote for example, and many don't care about politics. Also, polling indicates people have a different view of a policy depending on the wording, so the republicans will word it one way, and the democrats another, and we will most likely get gridlock in implementing the Green New Deal. By the time we move the Overton window, it will be too late.
My solution is it is simple, instead of the Green New deal which is a giveaway to solar panel companies in China, we should be doing more remote work. A lot of transportation should have an electric motor, and we should heavily invest in all forms of nuclear power.
Edit: Also to answer your question about an individual carbon footprint, yes it doesn't matter if only one person isn't flying, but if a majority or a large amount of the population loved non-vegan, non-lab grown meat, pickup trucks, large homes, cheap energy, less government intervention, fewer taxes, good luck selling the Green New Deal.
We're at the point now where "better than nothing" isn't good enough.
Painting the roof of your house white is better than nothing, and yet most people I think would find taking any kind of moral satisfaction in painting the roof of your house white to be laughable and out of touch, and that's really the problem. At this point, any individual action you could take is just laughable and out of touch. There are things you can do which are relatively big, avoiding unnecessary flying is actually a good idea, switching to a plant based diet is actually a good idea (and will also typically improve your health and life expectancy). The problem is that even these things don't really matter and yet they trick people into thinking they've made a difference when they haven't.
Sure, maybe they signal to companies that their customers are concerned about their climate impact, but they also signal that you can be deceived very, very easily into believing that small, insignificant changes are a way of helping. I'm sure it's creating work for some PR consultant somewhere, but in terms of actually delivering meaningful change.. I don't think so. You'd be better off showing up at a protest (even if you drove there in your SUV). I get that people won't see it that way, and I get the argument about perceived hypocrisy, but at this point engaging with that argument is irresponsible. It is not our job as individuals to fix the problems of the broken economic system we live in. Very, very few of us have anything approaching the power to do that.
You've actually got this backwards. "Investing in nuclear power" means buying parts and technical expertise from China. China has pledged to make nuclear power the core of its energy policy, although the Fukushima accident kind of put a damper on that and lead to a lot of reviews of safety policy. Regardless, China has a willingness and proven experience in exporting and building nuclear reactors in other countries. The infrastructure to build nuclear power stations cheaply and quickly no longer exists in most developed countries because we have not been building them. Compare this to China, which has a completely self-sufficient supply chain.
I feel like there are people out there who have some deeply irrational attachment to nuclear power, and who want to see it as some kind of "realistic" science-led solution in contrast to the idealism of renewables (primarily because they don't like the people who favour renewables). Nuclear power is not a universal solution to anything, it's an extremely situational solution and by the time it becomes less so (likely to due to research being lead by China) it's probably going to be too late. China happens to be in the situation where nuclear power is extremely viable. The US and Europe are not.
Renewable energy is not empty idealism at this point. Europe could meet its energy needs with renewable energy within a couple of decades, long before any investment in nuclear power would pay off. The main technical challenge isn't building the power plants, that's very easy now and we've become very efficient at it, it is the need for a very large energy grid. It could still be done though, if the will existed to do it.
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Actually not entirely true.
Some companies have built in obsolescence in things they make so they will have to be replaced due to specific known issues or lower quality parts.
Some companies just go with certain options because they're cheaper and it makes them more money e.g. disposable cups made of Seaweed cost more than those styrofoam stuff.
In terms of scale if everyone in the world went fully green and I mean full on Solar panels, wind, heat pumps eco friendly diet etc etc the change to CO2 emissions would be 3%. That's it around 70% of emissions are industry and 27% services.
Flying multiple times a day? If it's commercial then well done you've still polluted less than Leonardo Dicaprio's yacht in 1 day.
Sure try to be more sustainable if you can simply because it helps stop using up on renewable resources and delays the next round of oil wars or whatever but just don't feel like shit over not being the best because half the reason this shit is being pushed now is because rich industrialists are hoping that getting enough people maybe even up to getting that 3% reduction will be enough to buy them a few more years raking in tons of money before they have to actually not get hundreds of Millions every years and have to actually re-invest some of that into updating the company to make it more efficient and green.
For anyone (though I doubt it) who doesn't get that comic.
"touch grass" becomes official state policy?
Ah, yes, individual action.
I'll always remember one lecture I had from a professor of environmental science at one of the UKs leading research hubs about this. On about how companies putting solar panels on their roof was hilarious to watch it went something like this "The company is based in Northern Scotland in a very hilly region where even when it is sunny it's pretty weak and it rains so much there they'd get more power putting a bloody water wheel coming off their gutters and they were boasting about their green credentials because they'd put Solar panels on their roof, on the side the sun barely ever hit because it was the front of the building and they wanted it to show off their Solar panels to visitors."
I think if you want to uncouple individual action and collective action organised by the state, you're close to asking for a dictatorship.
They do not exist in isolation. A nation merrily chowing down on all the steaks they can eat that expects the government to reduce beef farming is not how it works. A person who argues there should be less air travel who is busy jetting around the world every week is easily made to seem a fool and a rogue. Being prepared to do something on an individual level is part and parcel of the same attitude that drives encouraging wider change in society and government.