[borgia]

>Why not have campaigns to not support products made by countries with oppressive governments.

Nobody cares. It's over there, it's not something we need to worry about.

It's not like the working conditions of those making our clothes, those making our smartphones, those pulling the materials for our electronics from the earth, etc. aren't unknown. They're very well known. We know damn well that there's children sewing together our shoes. We know that the people making our smart technology products are so miserable that their offices have anti-suicide nets in place around the building and throughout the stairwells.

We know this stuff and we don't care. We want our products and we want them as cheap as possible. The shareholders in these companies want the company to perform as best as they can to maximize returns, that means acting nefariously in many cases and we all know that.

People do not are and they will not care. If you gave people the choice, to be made anonymously and that nobody would ever know their choice, between paying multiple times what they pay for their technology or abolishing child labour and horrible working conditions they would choose the cheaper option. Or maybe not, maybe they would choose abolishing these things in an effort to delude themselves and make themselves feel better, but when it comes time to purchase a product they will still go for the cheaper one manufactured in horrible conditions.

People simply do not care so long as it is not them feeling the affects. That's the same damned reason nothing is being done about the NSA revelations, or the corporate corruption of the US government, or the torture allegations about the CIA and the list goes on.

[classicsnoot]

people do not care and they will not care you may be right, but you are painting with an immensely broad brush. you care. i care. i bet many care. does that mean anything? time will tell. ...nothing is being done about NSA, Gubniment corruption, torture allegations, etc Jeez. What did you expect, a revolution? This country of mine [ours?] was built to do things slowly. The original idea was to make it hard for the central government to do things quickly, thereby weakening its power. It may have worked for a while, but it also severely handicapped anyone in the government to stand up to banking and commercial interests [there are some in the government, past and present, who legitimately care about people and earnestly try to do the right thing]. things take time. understand, i have said, verbatim, everything you stated more than once in many different situations. i agree, but i guess seeing it in writing from another person rustled some optimistic feathers i had not known i had. a personal story, so take it with a grain of salt: someone i know, very personally, works for no such agency. at the time of the Snowden Revelations, they were obviously mum. to date, they have said nothing about it, but i have watched the bags under the eyes deepen, the gray hairs multiply, the demeanor sag. Does this mean anything to anyone, does it mean there is hope? who knows such things. i encourage you to consider two things: 1) wedding bands serve the very important function of reminding a person what they already know; the effort is the point. the building is the amalgam of the bricks put into it. 2) no one changes their mind during an argument; it is only after silent and solitary consideration that a person's mind changes.