Awesome, I just watched this video last week and really enjoyed it.

I don't always agree with everything Žižek puts out there but he is always thought-provoking.

Great post.

Agreed with the previous commenter in that while I don't always enjoy (or pretend to understand) some of what Zizek writes/says, I very much liked this.

Excellent! Powerful analysis of the "ethical" dimensions of cultural capital.

Ethical consumption was always a style choice of guilty liberals, and never had a chance of effecting the behaviour of people who are more price sensitive. The problems for these countries is the lack of diversity in their economic base, there is no reason why consumers shouldn't buy the lowest priced coffee.

An interesting, thought provoking talk!

But what about the idea of teaching a man to fish instead of just giving him fish? A lot of charity work aims at more than just treating symptoms of poverty!

A very interesting video on a subject I've been really interested in for a long time.
The problem I often find with those kind of critics though is that they generally don't go and describe what they define as capitalism and not capitalism. Some could argue that some forms of ethical consuming (ie : subscribing to farmer's produce baskets for instance) are in a very greyish area of definition. Likewise, in definitions of consumption and consumerism. Would he qualify so any exchange of goods ? only monetary ? or in particular circonstances ? I guess maybe they don't bother defining because there is a corpus of definition that scholarly people know, but in my studies it never appeared really clear to me where the boundaries stand.
And i think it's important to then explore what could be done out of those boundaries, and out of the other outdated models.

We've already eliminated poverty many times over, at least in the United States. The problem is that poverty is constantly being redefined so as to perpetuate the need to alleviate it. The poor today are infinitely better off than the poor of only 100 years ago and here we are objecting to the situation rather than celebrating it.

So is this the same argument as put forth by animal rights activists who say we shouldn't increase regulation of livestock treatment because that will just make it harder to abolish animal exploitation (because people will be more horrified by it if it is more horrible)? The counterargument there is of course that change is only possible gradually. If people don't think sows deserve freedom from gestation crates or whatever they aren't going to suddenly decide sows' right to live trumps our right to pork.

The problem of course is that the individuals helped by lesser improvements are thrown under the bus for the sake of bigger improvements. We cat rescuers could spend all our time campaigning for government-run TNR and the abolishment of petstores and puppy mills and not rescue any actual cats and probably do more good in the long term. But one problem with that is that my skillset is much more suited for looking after cats than for political campaigning. So instead of making the situation less bad in a completely insignificant way (oh wow, 7 cats were saved and only 30,000 killed) should I just do nothing since I am not very good at doing things that would really help? The lecture guy acknowledged this with the $20 surgery at the end, but should we be throwing the kid under the bus or not? Maybe he meant to imply that we should; I can't see how to infer that he thinks we shouldn't.

Another thing is that I don't think doing the easy things that help in a very small way necessarily means that you don't consider the overall problem. I guess some people might figure "oh, we have charities that help with this one issue, so there is no real problem, and I've done this one thing so I've paid my dues and it no longer has anything to do with me," but, really? Are most people that ignorant? It reminds me of the idea that people think that by doing little things like turning off your lights you are going to save the earth, when that is barely even a drop in the bucket compared to what we need, which we can only get by fundamental change. Government/big business certainly pushes this idea, so I think it might be common for people who aren't environmentalists to think that they are making a difference by doing all these little things. But most people who are involved in bigger things also do the little things (and if you don't, you get labeled a hypocrite, like Al Gore flying in airplanes). So my point was that little changes and big changes aren't mutually exclusive, but on the other hand, we do often police people over the little things rather than going after the big things. In any case, I don't think abolishing the little things (charity) is the answer so much as educating the populace about the big things. I guess that charity can place too much emphasis on the good you are doing by donating, as if it was actually solving a problem when it is really only ameliorating it in a tiny way, because people are more likely to donate if they can feel like their donation makes a big difference. But I would still buy the fair trade coffee over the exploitative coffee, I just wouldn't get any ideas that I was solving poverty by doing so.

Is there a transcript for this? The sound sometimes disappears for a couple of seconds...

I'm not particularly impressed by the animator's choice to represent the Africans receiving TOMS as animals. Why has nobody else noticed this?