Littering is seen as more common than it really is in the public perception thanks to all kinds of cynical messaging from industry groups, like, for example, Big Tobacco and the infamous “Crying Indian Ad”.
This messaging has the effect of shifting the blame of environmental devastation away from industry and onto individuals, much like how the fossil fuel industry popularized the term ‘carbon footprint’ and shifted the onus of fossil fuel emissions away from the fossil fuel industry and onto individuals.
As for the disgusting types of comments depicted in the next panel of the comic, a great deal of that is generated by bots to divide us. It also doesn’t help things in this particular case that only 1 of the 2 main parties/sides in the world’s most “important” country (important and dominant culturally, economically, etc.) is willing to consider any changes to approaches to widespread availability of guns. Creating division is as easy as having bots go around blaming anything (even victims!) except the relative ease of access to guns in the US.
This comic sadly plays into exactly the kind of thinking that leads to defeatism and broad mistrust. The common person is not, in fact, bad.
In fact, it is instead a relatively small number of psychopaths that perpetuate many of the kinds of problems depicted in this comic. The CEOs of any given Big Oil or Big Tobacco company are almost inevitably psychopaths. And we almost cannot help but continue to give power to these kinds of people. They are, after all, often the only ones who think so highly of themselves and their abilities to even offer to take on a leadership role. Sometimes they crave little more than the power itself. And they are the ones with the most power to steer the directions of messaging towards individual blame and individual misdeeds, rather than towards faith in the common person and blame on the corporations they lead.
In other words, the comic’s author is falling right into the trap of being led to see the world misanthropically. When you think “the problem is people,” instead of “the problem is a few people,” there is very little to do except become depressed and inactive.
To solve many of the world’s biggest problems, we literally just need more of the people who first doubt that they themselves could be a good leader to instead raise their hands, instead of letting only the psychopaths and narcissists raise their hands and rise to power.
Naw, fuck that. Even if we weren’t in climate crisis, littering is for tools. Fuck people who litter. It’s like walking into someones home and spitting on the floor.
Wow, I love that first version of the graphic. Though, Cancer it’s self is a microcosm of it. People worry about extremely rare cancers like childhood leukemia (because it’s so terrible), when statistically, it’s a geriatric disorder. Drowning would be a simpler alternative. People wouldn’t touch a beer around water if they understood the risk rationally.
Can you elaborate on that last bit? Asking because I suspect that statement itself is an irrational understanding of risk and actually blowing a relative risk out of proportion. Ie, drinking and swimming might have a higher chance of drowning than swimming sober, it probably even has an alarming looking number like “if you drink and swim, you are 1000% more likely to drown than if you swim sober”, but the absolute risk might still be negligible, like a 0.01% to drown sober and a 0.1% chance to drown drunk (numbers pulled from ass for illustrative purpose, even a 0.01% chance to drown sounds high).
I love your skepticism and that you went straight to relative vs absolute statistics.
Just pulling a random website from a search seems to support my memory that drowning is a much more common cause of death than people tend to realize and that alcohol is commonly involved. Then you need to think about the fact that the vast majority of people are no where near a situation where drowning is a risk most of the time, and you can start appreciating the risk of drowning when near or on water and drinking alcohol.
Because charismatic bad people are very adept at convincing ignorant people that those “others” are, in fact, bad and we all need protection from them. In fact, I think nearly everyone is willing to sign up to harm people in some way - it’s just defining who is bad that those political parties f’ with.
A minority of really bad people have an out-sized harm on society, and we haven’t really figured out a way of preventing that.
Littering is seen as more common than it really is in the public perception thanks to all kinds of cynical messaging from industry groups, like, for example, Big Tobacco and the infamous “Crying Indian Ad”.
This messaging has the effect of shifting the blame of environmental devastation away from industry and onto individuals, much like how the fossil fuel industry popularized the term ‘carbon footprint’ and shifted the onus of fossil fuel emissions away from the fossil fuel industry and onto individuals.
As for the disgusting types of comments depicted in the next panel of the comic, a great deal of that is generated by bots to divide us. It also doesn’t help things in this particular case that only 1 of the 2 main parties/sides in the world’s most “important” country (important and dominant culturally, economically, etc.) is willing to consider any changes to approaches to widespread availability of guns. Creating division is as easy as having bots go around blaming anything (even victims!) except the relative ease of access to guns in the US.
This comic sadly plays into exactly the kind of thinking that leads to defeatism and broad mistrust. The common person is not, in fact, bad.
In fact, it is instead a relatively small number of psychopaths that perpetuate many of the kinds of problems depicted in this comic. The CEOs of any given Big Oil or Big Tobacco company are almost inevitably psychopaths. And we almost cannot help but continue to give power to these kinds of people. They are, after all, often the only ones who think so highly of themselves and their abilities to even offer to take on a leadership role. Sometimes they crave little more than the power itself. And they are the ones with the most power to steer the directions of messaging towards individual blame and individual misdeeds, rather than towards faith in the common person and blame on the corporations they lead.
In other words, the comic’s author is falling right into the trap of being led to see the world misanthropically. When you think “the problem is people,” instead of “the problem is a few people,” there is very little to do except become depressed and inactive.
To solve many of the world’s biggest problems, we literally just need more of the people who first doubt that they themselves could be a good leader to instead raise their hands, instead of letting only the psychopaths and narcissists raise their hands and rise to power.
Naw, fuck that. Even if we weren’t in climate crisis, littering is for tools. Fuck people who litter. It’s like walking into someones home and spitting on the floor.
Of course, I’m just saying this problem that does indeed exist is blown out of proportion by the messaging we’re bombarded with.
A bit of a case of this, basically:
Wow, I love that first version of the graphic. Though, Cancer it’s self is a microcosm of it. People worry about extremely rare cancers like childhood leukemia (because it’s so terrible), when statistically, it’s a geriatric disorder. Drowning would be a simpler alternative. People wouldn’t touch a beer around water if they understood the risk rationally.
Can you elaborate on that last bit? Asking because I suspect that statement itself is an irrational understanding of risk and actually blowing a relative risk out of proportion. Ie, drinking and swimming might have a higher chance of drowning than swimming sober, it probably even has an alarming looking number like “if you drink and swim, you are 1000% more likely to drown than if you swim sober”, but the absolute risk might still be negligible, like a 0.01% to drown sober and a 0.1% chance to drown drunk (numbers pulled from ass for illustrative purpose, even a 0.01% chance to drown sounds high).
I love your skepticism and that you went straight to relative vs absolute statistics.
Just pulling a random website from a search seems to support my memory that drowning is a much more common cause of death than people tend to realize and that alcohol is commonly involved. Then you need to think about the fact that the vast majority of people are no where near a situation where drowning is a risk most of the time, and you can start appreciating the risk of drowning when near or on water and drinking alcohol.
This graph is really cool. Do you have the source ?
I agree! The origin seems to be Susanna Ertrich
Her site: Link
Then riddle me this: why are there many successful political parties based on harming others as their core principle?
Because charismatic bad people are very adept at convincing ignorant people that those “others” are, in fact, bad and we all need protection from them. In fact, I think nearly everyone is willing to sign up to harm people in some way - it’s just defining who is bad that those political parties f’ with.
A minority of really bad people have an out-sized harm on society, and we haven’t really figured out a way of preventing that.
Because the average person is stupid and has fears that can be changed and directed at the “other”