Politics of Consumption
Folk going to expensive hotels and saying 'im spoiling myself'. Why because you are white and rich? The poor black/asian/eastern european etc people who wait on you and clean your room and get next to nothing per hour and little rights or respect or job autonomy etc could maybe do with a bit of spoiling every now and then. A key thing to keep in mind for us all: HOW was this thing im consuming produced? How are the people in it treated?
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
- Lord Acton (1834–1902),in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887.
The Irony of Patriotism
The irony of patriotism and nationalism is that the people who are the worst to you will almost always be from your own country. The people who bully you in school, slag you off in the street for the clothes you are wearing, shouting aggressively at you because you have a different football team, order you around at work, sexually abuse you and beat you up...are normally people from your own country, from the area you live or work in.
So why the love of a country populated by so many people who are nasty to you?
It would, in an odd way, make more sense to love a far off country, that you have never been to, where 99.999% of the people from it have never done anything negative to you! Of course they have not doing anything nice either, but at least they have left you alone... which is more than can be said for the people down your street.
The Poor
" I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non industrious poor. At least they aren't hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they're probably im proving the world more than we acknowledge. Maybe we should think of them as pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one's penchant for self-destruction. " - David Graeber, Debt, the first 5,000 years, p390
Folk going to expensive hotels and saying 'im spoiling myself'. Why because you are white and rich? The poor black/asian/eastern european etc people who wait on you and clean your room and get next to nothing per hour and little rights or respect or job autonomy etc could maybe do with a bit of spoiling every now and then. A key thing to keep in mind for us all: HOW was this thing im consuming produced? How are the people in it treated?
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
- Lord Acton (1834–1902),in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887.
The Irony of Patriotism
The irony of patriotism and nationalism is that the people who are the worst to you will almost always be from your own country. The people who bully you in school, slag you off in the street for the clothes you are wearing, shouting aggressively at you because you have a different football team, order you around at work, sexually abuse you and beat you up...are normally people from your own country, from the area you live or work in.
So why the love of a country populated by so many people who are nasty to you?
It would, in an odd way, make more sense to love a far off country, that you have never been to, where 99.999% of the people from it have never done anything negative to you! Of course they have not doing anything nice either, but at least they have left you alone... which is more than can be said for the people down your street.
The Poor
" I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non industrious poor. At least they aren't hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they're probably im proving the world more than we acknowledge. Maybe we should think of them as pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one's penchant for self-destruction. " - David Graeber, Debt, the first 5,000 years, p390