> There is no reason for someone to not live it up if the collective is not going to also sacrifice.

If everyone thought as you do saying "Until everyone agrees to sacrifice, I won't either" then no one would ever sacrifice. Leading by example on the other hand is a proven way to help inspire change and can help avoid adding to harms caused by people who choose to live selfishly as long as they can point to anyone else also being selfish.

Housing is a subject full of complications and increased population density causes problems for the environment as well. Personally, I don't care of you live in a McMansion or a shanty town. I don't care of you buy the plastic razor with 47 blades or whatever they are up to now or switch to double bladed razors, but don't blame your selfishness on "the collective". You have no power over what they do, and they have no power over what you do. You alone are responsible for deciding for yourself what you're willing to give up in order to help the environment.

The collective has entire power over what you do. Global climate change was never solved by individual decisions, because when you live a different lifestyle than your workmates, you basically give up both the jobrace and the friends.

As for myself, I absolutely blame society for having a house. I live in France where class warfare is still a thing, and living in a block with people of the other ethnicity is unthinkable (they raped my goddaughter, but that’s only one example of storied - they kill gays at the train station too, so I take my car). Give me love and I’ll turn over my lavish house and happily live in a small flat, if I’m not hated for being there.

>I live in France where class warfare is still a thing, and living in a block with people of the other ethnicity is unthinkable (they raped my goddaughter, but that’s only one example of storied - they kill gays at the train station too, so I take my car).

Jesus, do you live in _Banlieue 13_ or something?

"They" ("the other ethnicity", as you put it) did nothing to your goddaughter. A criminal, on the other hand, did — and I hope they are paying a high price for it.

I live in France as well, and I share a block with many ethnicities. Without exception they've been warm, welcoming people.

Quite frankly, your comment exposes your racism. C'est une honte.

> Jesus, do you live in _Banlieue 13_ or something?

I live in the center of Lyon. The problem has grown bigger than you imagine.

> Quite frankly, your comment exposes your racism.

The one who did my goddaughter at the age of 7, I invited him home because I wasn’t racist. I couldn’t imagine they systematically raped the white girls when given the opportunity. I also couldn’t imagine police knew it and left him free despite 7 previous condemnations. He was a nice guy, met at salsa lessons, invited several people for my birthday.

Police left him free. Police left him free because the judges free them. They wouldn’t free a white guy. It’s outrageous. Police left him free!!!

> They wouldn’t free a white guy.

You have read too much conspiracy websites I'm afraid.

Faulting people for stereotyping and generalizing is not going to do any good. It is human nature, and the nature of all animals, to do this. You get bit by a hyena, you avoid hyenas. You cut yourself with a knife, you become careful with all knives. You may very well be correct, but lecturing someone usually only hardens their resolve. This lesson is something people have to learn for themselves.

People should be called on their bullshit. And saying that an entire race is to be held responsible for a rape is bullshit.

If it were a "white" person that had raped his god-daughter would he be clamoring to live in a different community. Without knowing this person, I can confidently say no based on the stereotypical racism in his outlook.

Racial categories are a societal invention. They are completely made up and arbitrary which is why we should be especially intolerant of racists. Not only is it a cruel viewpoint, it's a stupid one.

A knife is a knife is a knife. But the definition of what race someone belongs to is entirely up for debate depending on where in the world they are.

I don't think he mentioned race, I think the word he used was "ethnicity" which is inclusive of culture, and doesn't necessarily include race at all. Culture is a shorthand way of saying "behavioral trends within a self identifying community." You might say its a "dog whistle" for race, and you may be right, but we argue the point and take people at their word, in good faith, here.

If I were a white person that lived in a white community that had problems with women getting raped, I'd leave. There are communities like this, and plenty of people trying to find a way out of them. If I were a brown person that lived in a brown community with these problems, I'd leave, which is why I am sympathetic to immigrants leaving their countries and going to ones where women don't get raped all the time.

Also, after reading more of this thread, I don't think he's saying "this ethnicity rapes people" necessarily, I think it's more like "when someone from this ethnicity does rape someone, they don't get punished because the judges are afraid of being wrongly called racists, so if I move away from them, at least the rapists where I move will go to jail. It's not safer because they rape less necessarily, its safer because the rapists are in prison."

But that's all beside the point. You can't fault people for generalizing, we are pattern finding creatures by nature. It's a shortcut to bettering our lives. The pattern might only be correlation and not cause, but that doesn't change the improvement we get when we make decisions based off the recognized pattern, hence the evolutionary advantage to pattern recognition. The apparent pattern might not even exist, but behaving as if it does might not cause us any detriment at all, so there's no selective pressure against it. Berating people for this doesn't solve the problem, it in fact worsens it, and if you're indeed right, then over time people will meet nice people that fall into a negative stereotype in their mind and adjust their world view accordingly, no lecture required.

> I don't think he mentioned race, I think the word he used was "ethnicity" which is inclusive of culture, and doesn't necessarily include race at all. Culture is a shorthand way of saying "behavioral trends within a self identifying community." You might say its a "dog whistle" for race, and you may be right, but we argue the point and take people at their word, in good faith, here.

Ethnicity in french is the equivalent of race in english, when we speak about human beings.

If a white person raped my goddaughter, he would be in jail, period.

The guy wasn’t in jail. Think why.

> People should be called on their bullshit.

I’m calling you on your bullshit, but only because you present it that way: You are denying that there is a widespread rivalry between two ethnicities in France, and there are real victims. Real victims on one side (including rape, murder) and mostly paper victims on the other, and you are helping this situation to happen, mostly by putting pressure on the police to not jail the culprits. It’s like foxes in a hen enclosure, where you would blame the hens for speaking up.

> You are denying that there is a widespread rivalry between two ethnicities in France

The real issue is islamophobia and racism especially amongst the oldest who are sadly the majority of the population and the last to vote.

There is no widespread rivalry of any kind in France. You have to live an extremely sheltered life and watch to much TV to believe that.

> The collective has entire power over what you do.

No, they don't control you, but they can influence you, just as you can influence them and their choices.

Climate change isn't solved by individual decisions because the worst of it isn't the result of an individuals choice. Corporations are primarily responsible and as individuals we are largely powerless to change their practices. That doesn't mean we can't make personal choices that reduce the harms we cause, it's just not going to solve the problem.

I have yet to visit France, but I doubt everyone there would share your view that living with people of another ethnicity is unthinkable or would by necessity result in rape. That doesn't mean you shouldn't make sensible decisions to protect your safety. If your train stations are unsafe, don't feel bad about driving a car, but you should probably be pushing for improvements to the security of your public transportation. Make choices that are good for the environment where you can. Our circumstances may limit our choices, but if we're doing our best that's all anyone can ask.

This is circular. If the individual is constantly checking the dysfunctional apparatus of the public, then the public won't change because the individual won't. Gandhi pretty much tackled this in whole. Individuals have to independently strive towards this, of their own volition, to dismantle the heteronomous shitshow that the West has constructed with their virulent socioeconomic modal.

Nobody in their right mind agrees with the state of civilization, probably at all; this is the consequence of heteronomy. So even if you're affine to laissez-faire idealities, their realities with the concentration of wealth and the fundamental aspect necessitates someone ultimately is sacrificed to turn the wheel, typically the "third world". Or any of a huge battery (probably infinite) of other similar moral concerns.

We're all culpable for the continuity of this, myself included. We need exceptional individuals to live exceptional lives more than ever, though. We need to take it upon ourselves to begin dismantling these systems and their fundamental concepts.

Yes, there is. Personal fulfilment. Living up to your own standards.

Why do you want to consume because everyone else is doing so? Is the only reason you're willing to consider doing otherwise to save the world? Is life worse without the disposable products? Why are the decisions you make in your life contingent on some insurmountable, unachievable goal such as "everyone else must do it first"?

Life is worse without disposable products. In some cases, the disposable products are cheaper. In other cases, they are more convenient. In most cases, you can't buy products without a ton of disposable plastic, foam, and cardboard packaging. It's hard/extremely expensive to not buy a detached single family home in the US. Public transportation in America sucks and you can't get anywhere without a car.

I want to live a world with as close to zero carbon footprint as possible, however, short of sacrificing all my possessions and living like a hermit, I can't do that without collective change. I've taken many steps to minimize it but it feels like the next step I take will have almost no impact while also making the quality of my life significantly worse.

Well I disagree. Life is better without disposable products. Life is better with less things in general.

I use almost no disposable products. I think the disposable products I do use once, would be floss picks and fuel for the car. I even avoid buying trash bags and just reuse grocery bags. My carbon footprint is on the order of a village dweller from a third world country, and I don't even do it because of my carbon footprint, I do it because life is better when it is simpler. I'm not a hermit, I have an active social life and an active life in general. And my life is good, better than it was when I had a bunch of things and lived in an apartment.

I don't care about carbon emissions, the collective, any of that, and I am doing vastly more for those causes than 99% of the people that lecture me about them, and my only motivator is living by my standards, being honest with myself. That's all it takes, if you care about these things live like it, if you can't be bothered to live by what you say then quite frankly shut the fuck up about it.

You consume grocery bags, you dispose of trash, you buy floss picks, and you put fuel into a car, and those things alone put you way above a village dweller from a third world country, who buys no floss picks, owns no car, puts no fuel into a car, and does not buy groceries at a market that hands out bags.

I use on the order of a half gallon of gas a month. I'd say a village dweller has a larger carbon footprint in firewood alone.

I re-use grocery bags for trash and use no trash bags. I reuse any disposable plastic I can, at least once. That cut's my plastic output roughly in half compared to other people around me.

I've taken to using a water pick now, so a bag of those picks takes me maybe a year to use. That's miniscule.

I don't know if you've ever been to a third world country, but plastic bags even at small street shops are all the rage. I probably dispose of less plastic than they do. And to top that off, most developing nations don't have the infrastructure to handle it, and you see the bags clogging up waterways and blowing around, it's a big problem. So the direct pollution, even if I used more plastic, doesn't compare because most of the plastic I use goes to a landfill, not the local creek that's used as a sewer.

Like all environmental discussions, they always degrade into whatever moral failure someone cares about.

Throwing out 500 lbs of unnecessary plastic packaging has nothing to do with single family houses.

I think environmental damage scales directly with consumption of energy, whether it be to move mass or manufacture plastic. The sheer amount of consumption due to living far away from each other, with all the human mass, water, fuel, trash, machines, food, and everything else that has to move because of the distance people are from each other dwarfs everything else.

There is no “sustainable” world and a lifestyle that allows 8 billion people to have their own cars, fly to island vacations, and live in suburbia, with current energy transformation technology. Doing all the other things is a rounding error.

At the end of the day, the physics is simple. Moving mass a certain distance takes a certain amount of energy. Our current method of harnessing that energy results in a lot of byproducts, and we have yet to find alternatives with sufficiently better properties. Either we find that breakthrough technology, or reduce the mass and/or distance it is being moved.