Your outrage over other's faux outrage is faux outrage. You are missing the point. It is easy to buy from someone other than Amazon. It is not easy to buy from someone who is necessarily "worse" than Amazon.LMK5 said:Total BS. Let's call it what it is: fluid principles. It's the easiest protest in the world to buy from someplace else rather than Amazon and you know it. If someone really didn't like the practices of Amazon and Jeff Bezos, it should give them a bad taste in their mouth--an avoidable one--every time they paid them.OaktownBear said:This is called the principle of universal complicity. In a modern world it is impossible to live without interacting with or purchasing from entities that have practices you don't like. So if you speak out against anything, the fact that you don't live like Thoreau gets thrown in your face as hypocrisy by those who don't care about what is important to you.LMK5 said:
What say you going4roses? Still doing business with Amazon or are you willing to walk the walk?
The bottom line, played out over and over again, is that people love to protest, but they will only act on their principles up to the point of inconvenience. It's faux outrage.
Personally, I don't see Amazon as a bigger net offender in the world than most. They are just a larger company. In fact, it is really hard to determine their net harm vs. the alternative. Their fulfillment capabilities often allow me to purchase from smaller suppliers with more better practices than the handful of stores I could purchase from pre-Amazon. It also allows me to find a wider variety of products and more creative products than I ever could before because small, innovative businesses can make a living nationally where they could not in a brick and mortar store. It frees up real estate for other purposes. There are a lot of positives to Amazon. There are also things that they should do better. Saying they should do better and shopping there doesn't make my concerns faux.
When people who do nothing express faux outrage at other's faux outrage because the other decides to be better but not perfect, that is just an excuse to make yourself feel better about doing nothing and to shut people up. If for instance, I were concerned about my diet's impact on the environment and I chose to eliminate meat and dairy because they are much less efficiently produced food, but I said, you know what? I really like chocolate chip cookies. That requires butter. I'm significantly reducing my impact, but I'm allowing myself the butter for chocolate chip cookies. That does not make my concern faux.
