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How do you justify the use of illicit drugs considering the supply chain?
- Thread starter legend166
- Start date
Another OP that disappears like a fart in the wind after claiming to be interested in a discussion.
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It's not a competition, but there have been multiple, often decades long, conflicts in the Congo since the 1960s, most of which were funded in one way or another by the gold and conflict mineral industries.
"Awful" doesn't even begin to cover it. The most recent of these conflicts began around 2004 (I think) and includes such highlights as large-scale genocide, children being kidnapped/systematically abused and converted to combatants, women kidnapped to become sex slaves for soldiers, and the use of rape as a weapon of war. All of that going on for nearly 15 years with, I think, one (maybe two) short breaks in fighting. It's not happening on our doorstep though, so we naturally give less of a shit.
(That's not me getting on my high horse, I think it's just how our brains work; the fight on the other side of town isn't as pressing as one in our backyard.)
I think that's a pretty flimsy rationalisation. If that gets you through the day, more power to you, but smartphones are nothing more than a manufactured convenience.
I would argue that the real difference is this: Smartphones have external economic forces actively creating the perception that they are a necessity, whereas as drugs tend to rely on internal forces within the user to do that.
I wish I could make that a bit pithier, but I'm just not that smart.
Sent while stoned from my iPhone
OP
OP
No one responded for like a day so I didn't really check.
I think the whataboutism to smart phones is a cop out.
A lot of the responses are a bit more.....heartless than I expected. If it came out the CEO of Apple was using profit from the iPhone to participate in pedophile sex slavery I'd hope the response would be a little bit stronger than "Eh that's an issue for the state."
My point with the thread was to not discuss legalisation because it's not a reality. What is reality is that they are illegal and so that's the context of the decisions. And we know the decision to consume illicit drugs go on to fund violence, sex slavery, terrorism, torture, abduction as a matter of course. Yet the response is a shrug of the shoulders.
I don't think most consumers of any (legal or illegal) product know or care about the distribution chain, and in fact just because a product is legal does not mean it is produced ethically. That being said, I'd say buying shit that can wreck your life from some shady guy in some shady alleyway should be the first red flag on the eyes of the consumer of those products, no need to consider anything else.
You're kidding yourself if you don't think the CEOs of the companies you buy from aren't complicit in sex slavery and trafficking. The wealthy are far from angels and are largely above the law.
Another false equivalency and ridiculous claim. Corporations can be awful, but overwhelmingly they cannot touch cartels in-terms of rape, sex trafficking, and murder.
How do we decide when something is whataboutism and when something is straight up hypocrisy?
It seems to me that employing whataboutism here when there are very clear parallels with the ethics of the supply chains is something of a cop out.
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I don't get it, surely the pendulum is swinging more towards legalisation, that's if I accept your strange limitation on the argument about who is responsible for handing the drug trade to the criminals.