I’ll start off with an anti-anti-globalisation rant, which is my bugbear-of-the-moment. Scum and hooligans being passed off as bunny-hugging third-world loving political awarees. They have no discernable political thought and no affiliated social movement, they’re simply a bunch of kids with too much time on their hands who don’t bathe often enough.
McDonalds and Starbucks make easy targets, but damnit there’s nothing wrong with a Big Mac and a stinking big strawberry flavoured latte with caramel and chocolate sprinkles. If they’re putting the corner coffee shop and local burger joint out of business, tough titty, that’s progress. The local coffee shop skimps on fresh beans and the local burger joint can’t make rat glands taste like burger, so if their products were superior they would survive despite smaller marketing budgets.
The damn kids are bored because they have nothing to spice up their lives. At least we still had the Cold War hanging over our heads, and generations before us have always had wars to put things into perspective. Sixty million men dying on the dung heaps of Europe – that’s an issue. Monsanto putting vitamins into potatoes that will mutate and take over the world – that’s crap.
Sure, Nike’s exploiting children in Bangladesh by having them work for less than 1% of the New York minimum wage. But in Bangladesh 1% of the NY minimum wage is a hell of a lot more than the average person’s getting, mostly due to the average person fighting disease and flooding and starvation and unemployment. Nike certainly is exploiting these children, but the anti-globalisation movement’s making it sound as if Nike’s keeping small children from going to school and forcing them to work in slave camps.
Without a job in a Nike sweatshop these kids won’t have a pot to piss in, and ever larger numbers of children in those countries are turning to prostitution. With the full approval of their parents. Instead of farting about in Gothenburg smashing some Holiday Inn windows, why aren’t these filthy teens volunteering for the US Peace Corps, or Doctors without Frontiers, or Unicef? Why aren’t they out there helping improve social structures in Bangladesh, helping create a society where parents would protect their children at any cost, helping share knowledge of what it’s like to live in a safe and stable environment, rather than walk the streets of Sweden or Prague or Seattle?
Hell, I live a privileged life, and I’ve never been to Sweden or Prague or Seattle. I spend my money making my world a little bit better, and I spend my time making myself a little bit better. The anti-globalisation activists travel from protest to protest, a core group of several hundred. What’s it costing them in time and money? What’s it costing society in repairing the damage? I may be naïve, but I’m not naïve enough to think McDonalds are carrying the costs of replacing broken windows. I’m paying for it by getting two chips less than I’m supposed to with every order, and the leaf of lettuce on my burger is exactly 12 hours older than it would have been.
To top it all Greenpeace and assorted loonies with a ferret up their collective asses (like ALF and GAIA) have joined the bandwagon on this travelling circus. How much money and time is spent on saving the panda, a lovely cuddly animal that nature itself (and not man) has seen fit to drive to extinction? The panda used to roam all over Eurasia, yet they evolved to a point where they find it difficult to survive in the only climate suitable for their staple food. Pandas are polar beers in disguise, yet their eating patterns have evolved to exclude everything apart from bamboo.
In addition the loose alliance of environmental groups have spent millions of US dollars on campaigns to save other endangered species, both fauna and flora. How many of these millions have been spent on improving the living conditions of the people in these same areas? How many of these millions have been spent on direct action at all, and weren’t siphoned off for administration and marketing and office space and corporate travel and lobbying politicians?
The whole anti-globalisation movement – as much as it can ever be seen as a single organism comprised of like-minded individuals – consists of misguided and uninformed teenagers bored with their colourless lives, backed by organisations which exist only for the sake of existing, pouring essential funds that could have been the life-blood of humanitarian work into a black pit of activism.
Too many people to help, too many idiots chasing panda-flavour Big Macs.
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