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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Slave labor under the Romans at Rio Tinto from 206 BCE onwards for two hundred years, or the 1888 Zalamea massacre, or the still linguring toxic legacy of the Panguna mine in PNG?

It's such a persistent ongoing problem with mining that I'm personally more inclined to blame the collective detached nature of consumers that demand products and yet turn a blind eye to the sourcing of that which they demand.

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Blaming customers for companies malfeasance must have been one of the greatest deflection tactics ever invented and it saddens me deeply when it gets parroted verbatim by the general populace.

I generally agree, but I’ve seen it taken to an extreme when I found someone claiming that a park strewn with trash wasn’t the fault of those who left their trash behind, but instead the companies that use such ecologically unfriendly packaging.

While fault may not be the appropriate term it is true that those companies have an opportunity to reduce trash in a park by changing their packaging.

I think it is a fair criticism. Individual consumers surely have some culpability, whether they are buying a stolen iPhone or a stolen kidney.

I think the mistake people make is treating responsibility as if it is a limited resource and can only be applied to the consumer or the producer.

The guns in 1888 didn't pull those triggers by themselves.

Shifting blame to regular people only serves to further insulate corporations from the harms and costs they have externalized, and we should be vigilant to make sure we are not enabling them.

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