[razemio]

Ah, that's a thing I hear in Germany aswell. "they..." Who is they? It is a very dangerous narrative, somehow implying that a small minority controls everything and its only purpose is to undermine "our" freedom. Even worse, everything that is annoying / dangerous / anti freedom is the result of this one group "they". What a big pile of BS. Yes lobbies exists, but it is not a single entity. Yes, political parties exists but they do not have absolute power. All these annoying things are the result of several parties and lobbies arguing and finding compromise. There is no they. It is the outcome of thousands of people thinking.

The straw anecdote is flawed. It is a one time transition. Why do you not take the plastic straws (which I guess are still sealed) out of the dumpster? We did the same thing. We are using those during private parties since years. When guests come to me asking why we are still using these, the awnser is to save the environment ;).

[regpertom]

Tbh I think ‘they’ can still be used to describe what you say. I don’t mean it as a far out thing, just an abstraction. AFAI figure, there’s lot of different people doing lots of different things for lots of different reasons. Rather than the dangerous narrative, is it ok to word it as more like: there are ways to control/direct society, a lot of them have been figured out, various people use them, to various effect. Is that kind of they ok?

For example, there exists people that use addictive strategies such as by casinos to hook people into their app. Leaving at that level of abstraction I feel as though that group can be a ‘they’. It just feels like an easy way to reference a group as long as I’m sincerely not trying to pull a fast one on anyone… which I hope I’m not :s

I would have liked to have taken home the broken escalator too, or the lifetimes of toner from the xerox-Kyocera change, but I worry about becoming a horder always thinking ‘well it’d be a waste to throw it away.’ Poverty trauma I heard it’s called.

I hope the straw thing wasn’t flawed, not as in ‘so why bother’, coz yeah it was a one off thing, more like the priority was to print off a bunch of advertising to get on the straw change goodwill bandwagon. It was just one of those funny such is life moments, walking past all the plastic core-flute signs about doing what’s right for the environment knowing there’s a million straws in the bin out the back you know?

[lmm]

> Yes lobbies exists, but it is not a single entity. Yes, political parties exists but they do not have absolute power. All these annoying things are the result of several parties and lobbies arguing and finding compromise. There is no they. It is the outcome of thousands of people thinking.

Thousands is still a very small number of people to control a country. Yes there are multiple parties and multiple lobbyists. But they're largely from the same handful of cities, the same social class, and representing that class' interests. Politics really has become a lot more centralised, placing a lot more power in the hands of a few people, not necessarily for nefarious reasons (or at least, not any more nefarious than the normal human desire for power), but nevertheless something that urgently needs to be fought against.