On my subreddit I put up links to individual videos, websites, or blog posts, etc. Any of these things can be "consumed" (paid attention to) in one sitting (generally speaking). Those are "short links". But "long links" take more than one sitting and to me seem to not belong in the same context as short links.
--
I read Maxine Bédat's Unraveled.
Subtitle: "The Life and Death of a Garment" (from farm, to fabric-making, to cut-and-sew, to retailer and consumer, to disposal and secondhand sale). A long time ago I got into fair trade clothing consuming: buying fair trade and thrift store clothes more. I wanted to see if this still made sense, so I took the opportunity to pick up this book from a "little library".
I am pretty sure it makes sense to buy from thrift stores. I had been concerned that I was taking affordable clothes away from people who had less money than me by buying from thrift stores. I remembered that there were situations where bales of clothes were dumped in developing countries' clothes markets which was bad for their attempts to start their own textile industries. Was this still true? It seems like as of 2021 (date of publication), yes. So I can take one garment at a time out of that stream. Maybe I'm taking good clothes away from consumers in developing countries? Possibly.
The book makes it seem like overproduction of clothes is a bad thing. Certainly it's costly environmentally (clothes become trash, resources are consumed to make extra clothes). But (my thought) then there's an abundance of clothes in developing countries.
In terms of fair trade (manufacturing clothing with a fair wage), I think the situation is that some are caught in Molochian races to the bottom (developing countries, factory owners, maybe the brands to some extent), but some people stand outside the struggle to survive and can make unforced errors (the brands, perhaps; certainly their CEOs who could give up some compensation to pay workers more; consumers) or more positively put, can just decide to make things better. Fair trade is a way for consumers to signal that they want things to be better, and make things marginally better. But maybe unions, regulation, are more effective? (One semi-self-regulation described is something called the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, mentioned in ch. 4 on p. 111 (hardback first ed.) and following) Maybe if a brand saw the PR gain of selling to consumers who have already signalled their desire to pay for clothes that are made with better wages (maybe signalled through fair trade purchases), they would pay workers more / push for better working conditions so as to make the other brands look bad by comparison? *** *** (An) EA perspective: take care of extreme poverty so that no one will work at bad factories and thus they have pressure to get better. On the other hand, pricing in fair wages into clothes could get people to "donate" there who wouldn't think to donate to extreme poverty charities. I feel like the comparison of all these ideas is beyond me, but I would be interested in seeing a collaboration (an adversarial collaboration?) between Bédat and an EA to see what they would come up with. I feel like Bédat is a non-EA who might interface OK with EAs (does research, acknowledges complexities). She has her own think tank ("think and do tank"), New Standard Institute.
The book advances a racial, feminist, and anti-elite narrative, as well as an anti-neoliberalism narrative.
The book has a chapter on psychological manipulation of consumers and the psychological costs of materialism. My thought: from the book it looks like there's a "non-mindfulness" (a differently loaded term than "mindlessness") in people's consumption. Perhaps the enemy to consumers making better choices is a kind of innocence (a non-mindfulness of "I'm just doing what one does" as a small person). Do we dare shatter (or even less-violently reform) that innocence? Sometimes it feels like it just "should not be done" for some reason, like people should be left in the dark. That's interesting.
--
For some reason I felt like re-reading Calvin and Hobbes (comic strip series by Bill Watterson). So I read a collection, Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons. I think the last time I read more than a few strips of Calvin and Hobbes was back... in high school? in elementary school? So I had a different perspective reading it now.
I liked the comic strip when I was a kid. I followed Calvin's lead in both good and bad ways, because of the power of the visuals and writing. Reading it now, there is a way that it "sings", there is life in it.
Here's what I think after reading that one collection:
I see Calvin as being the most real character out of all of them. He seems to be the most passionate.
Calvin is the most likely to someday really love God in this life. The others are too cool (Hobbes), too normal and nice (Susie), or too far along in their path of life (Calvin's parents).
I was surprised by my feelings toward Calvin and Hobbes. When I was a kid, I guess I thought they were kids doing kid things, just like I did. Calvin and Hobbes was an adventure comic, showing the adventures of a boy and his tiger friend. But now I see Calvin as a (tragically) heroic figure in a world of fakeness (and, in the long run, insanity), and Hobbes I now dislike, a clever pragmatist who sits outside of Calvin's passions, plays along, but knows better the whole time. Calvin meets Hobbes in brotherhood, but Hobbes offers brotherhood with an asterisk on it. Hobbes thinks Calvin is cute and immature -- disrespects him -- and Calvin does not suspect it.
Calvin and Hobbes bears some resemblance to Don Quixote. A lone madman lives in his delusions in a real world that is somewhat unforgiving of him. But who is the real fool in quixotic books? Is it the delusional loner? Or is it all the people around him? From a secular perspective (a practically-atheistic one), obviously it's Don Quixote and Calvin. Everyone's going to die at age 80 and so you should do what's popular, pro-social, socially supported, "consensusly real", in the short run -- there is no afterlife in which to fulfill the fantasies fed you by comic books or chivalrous romances, or to imagine that you can stand outside the social order, live in your own world, as Calvin (and maybe Don Quixote?) effectively does when he daydreams.
Perhaps many theists would side with the secular people, but my theism causes me to say that it's the normal, mainstream, functional people who are fools for not seeking true excellence. While Calvin himself isn't exactly seeking excellence of any sort at this point in his life, he is still clean from the fake-spiritedness of (it seems) everyone around him. He is unwise in many ways, but still not a fool in the fatal way that is most successful in this world. Satan could tempt you with the promise of a slushball to the back of a girl's head, or he could tempt you with an easy life, the approval of others, the sense that you're doing what you're supposed to according to society. Calvin's temptations are ones he is fairly likely to grow out of (certainly he will receive plenty of negative feedback on them). But the temptations of the other characters are ones they may succumb to semiconsciously, never truly confronting them. They may slide toward a state where there is a 1% of ungodliness in them that they never want to get rid of, hardening them. Calvin's sinfulness is accessible and blatant, but theirs does not stand out, and they are acceptable in their community.
My theory of the worldview of Calvin and Hobbes is that Calvin is a daydreamer but also in touch with the world of spirits. Hobbes being the main proof, a "friend" who knows better than Calvin.
Is it possible that Calvin's subconscious is more mature than Calvin and can create Hobbes? What is the subconscious self? Is it really you? If you're a materialist (like Freud?) and you have to stuff all phenomena that does not come from the material world surrounding a person into the operations of a person's material brain, there being no other place to locate it, and for some reason you have to say that "the mind is what the brain does" and somehow that the self is identical to the mind, I guess you're forced to say that. But as a philosophical idealist, I don't think that's a very natural way of looking at phenomena like Hobbes. I think the subconscious self is "not you", something other than you, unless you adopt it as your own. If the subconscious self is wiser than you, is on another level, then there is a wiser spirit (wise like God, or wise like Satan) operating in your life. For Calvin this spirit is visible to him in the imaginal world.
Why is Hobbes in Calvin's life? Perhaps Hobbes, like most things, is a negotiation between God and Satan. God wants Calvin, the world's most alone person, to have a friend to comfort him. Calvin, like Job, is a thorn in Satan's side, someone who has not yet confirmed one of Satan's theories about human nature. Satan then exacts a concession from God: this friend will have to disrespect Calvin behind his back, and feed Calvin society's wine of fakeness through his nagging hints that Calvin is a fool, in such a way that Calvin doesn't realize what's going on. (Hobbes is sensible, moderate, wise, and in favor of romance -- exactly the sorts of things that will win a young man praise from his society.) Because of the power of Satan in Job-like situations, God makes the concession, and a spirit is chosen to do the job, a spirit to be called "Hobbes".
No comments:
Post a Comment