I’m not sure how else to put it. As an example, someone who cares about issues of LGBTQIA+, but when it comes to issues of capitalism pushing exploitative practices in video games, they are siding against the player and doing the “it’s on you how you spend” shtick.
I suppose another way to frame this would be “how do you deal with selective empathy?” Because that seems to be how it in some cases, that the person cares about the thing that personally impacts them, but otherwise, they’ll side with the exploiter in a heartbeat.
It disgusts me when I see it in action, so much so I almost wrote this as a rant post in the comradelyrants section instead. But I feel it’s a topic that deserves more discussion attention than that.
In general, the mindset that goes something like:
“So this company dropped some spikes on the sidewalk.”
“Well I think if somebody stepped on them, that’s on them. It’s really obvious that they are there and I went out and walked just fine and had a good time, I just walked on the grass to get around the spikes.”
The implication: individuals should be expected to change their lives to accommodate the careless, dangerous, or otherwise predatory behavior of others and if they don’t, it’s their fault.
Like what kind of poor excuse for humanity is this stuff.
I see Libertarians advocating for microtransactions as it is “how the consumer spends that benefits the corporation” bullshit.
Instead of Libertarians seeing capitalism advancing towards the usual notion of maximising profits, they just see as consumers helping the corporations and thus it should be perfectly legal to do so. Games become worse due to their “efficiency” (efficiency meaning to extract as much profit as possible) by laying off employees, replacing them with contract work, utilising microtransactions, especially if the game is Free to Play. Did this all happen when the consumer spend their game or was it due to the capitalist because he wanted to maximise profits?
The libertarians argue “They should just stop spending if they don’t like the company!” but this doesn’t explain why capitalists make a tendency towards maximising profits. Then they argue about " ““social”” enterprises " and whatnot. In other words, what they explain (i.e. the products consumers buy), doesn’t explain the general tendency of capitalism, nor political economy in general.
This means that these libertarians have nothing to explain. Their arguments don’t explain anything. They don’t explain capitalism. Selective Apathy is nothing more than ignorance. They don’t care about other people, they only care if they are not affected, or if this practice helps them in some way or another. This line of thinking of “I don’t care what you do” can be extrapolated to many horrible ideas that libertarians or liberals can cling on to. We can also argue this is an aspect of alienation, but I made my point. This is just another aspect of individualism.