@FlipppyyJr @Deleted User OMG, I’m new here so I don’t know anyone, but I hope you guys aren’t serious. Theft doesn’t matter? How else are they supposed to get money? This is a criminal mindset.

If a person owns a piece of property, don’t they have the right to dictate terms for who enters or makes use of that property? As a rightful owner, can’t I say, *”You must take off your shoes if you want to enter my house”*? Isn’t it equally within my rights to tell one person they must take off their shoes and another that they may leave then on? This is an essential characteristic of ownership, is it not? You need not enter if you don’t accept my terms - I’m not forcing you to come in.

I think it’s been adequately demonstrated that people with the power to effect policy care more about their personal interests than anything else. The only options are to make them care about the environment - which is not within our power - or deprive them the ability to dictate policy.

Since they are easily able to hide their motives (and even their actions) by outright secrecy or by framing their actions in a misleading way, there is no way to assure that the wrong people do not gain the ability to dictate policy, leaving us with only one viable option - have *no one* dictating policy in the broad scope. Then individual groups may seek out environmental misdeeds, prove them, and act by boycott or direct action to stop them without being roadblocked by enforcement of policies that favor the transgressor.

I don’t understand the last statement.

Gotcha. Well, this is what happens when we try to abdicate personal responsibility. We don’t want to deal with the problems of our world ourselves, so we make it somebody else’s job; and the power implicit in that job doesn’t draw people who want to help humanity, it draws people who want to wield that power for personal benefit.

If it benefits them more to harm humanity, then that’s what they’ll do. That will *always* be the case, and thus by making voting our only act of influence, we’ve made ourselves impotent in effecting the change *we* want to see, and unwitting power supplies for the agendas of unscrupulous misanthropes.

@beyond_gravity Are you asking if people have the right to use violence against others for drinking bottled water? Wow. And we call these ideas “solutions”?