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I Twitter, Therefore I Am.
Jun. 24th, 2009 07:12 am"I wouldn't want to use anything that something had died to make!"
Oh, the stupidity of the innocent.
Darling, you live in the Western world. You naturally use something that someone has died in the process of all its components being brought together. Your world is subtly coated in the blood of those less fortunate. It's a 'clean blood' though, because you'll never see it.
The war in the Congo, in which women and girls are routinely raped, and boys are turned into child soldiers? Is a result of a power struggle over the coltan mines, which is an essential element in most electronic equipment, but specifically mobile phones and laptops. In fact, many of the wars in Africa are related to resources and who controls them. Western companies have been doing business with whoever controls the resources, often ignoring and turning a blind eye to what is done, in the name of profits for their Western shareholders.
Do you know what happens to your used electronic equipment when it's done? I don't know where the US or EU waste goes, but Australia's ends up in China - seeping industrial chemicals into the land and bodies of the people who pick over the corpses of our electronics, human vultures trying to eke out a living from the fragments of re-usable metals that still remain in the shattered casings. There's nothing else to do in the cities used as dumping grounds - their land's being poisoned beyond use thanks to our waste. And yes, people die of it.
Just because you don't see the blood spread out over the things you use like a dismembered animal carcass on a butcher's board doesn't mean it's not there.
But it's not something we see on the news or hear about on Twitter.
Oh, the stupidity of the innocent.
Darling, you live in the Western world. You naturally use something that someone has died in the process of all its components being brought together. Your world is subtly coated in the blood of those less fortunate. It's a 'clean blood' though, because you'll never see it.
The war in the Congo, in which women and girls are routinely raped, and boys are turned into child soldiers? Is a result of a power struggle over the coltan mines, which is an essential element in most electronic equipment, but specifically mobile phones and laptops. In fact, many of the wars in Africa are related to resources and who controls them. Western companies have been doing business with whoever controls the resources, often ignoring and turning a blind eye to what is done, in the name of profits for their Western shareholders.
Do you know what happens to your used electronic equipment when it's done? I don't know where the US or EU waste goes, but Australia's ends up in China - seeping industrial chemicals into the land and bodies of the people who pick over the corpses of our electronics, human vultures trying to eke out a living from the fragments of re-usable metals that still remain in the shattered casings. There's nothing else to do in the cities used as dumping grounds - their land's being poisoned beyond use thanks to our waste. And yes, people die of it.
Just because you don't see the blood spread out over the things you use like a dismembered animal carcass on a butcher's board doesn't mean it's not there.
But it's not something we see on the news or hear about on Twitter.
