Slow Motion.

I love AdBusters. Even more so, I love their spoof ads.

Let’s face it, how many men actually look like this:

And how many more look like this:

Heh.

A few more from AdBusters:

Visit their site for more. I like it. Do you know of any other cool spoof ad sites? I’m always ready and willing to take a dig at those evil, nasty corporations. ;)

Speaking of which, I finished watching The Corporation today. Quite interesting, in a scary ‘omg-the-world-is-going-to-end!’ type way. It was put together really well, so even if you’ve heard of it and know already that you don’t agree with the gist of their message, I recommend it anyway. It’s quite an eye-opener in many regards – especially, I think, on water as a commodity, to be sold to people by corporations.

I liked the story Vandana Shiva told in the movie, though. She said that when the British tried to tax salt in India, Ghandi and a whole bunch of his friends went down to the beach, picked salt up, and said they’d refuse to pay any tax on a commodity as basic as salt. They won out in the end, and so can we. The corporations may suck [and they do, for the most part] but the power is with the people who buy their products. If we stop buying, we help.

The truth of the matter is, though, that a lot of products are a necessity for us to maintain our current standards of living. Some of those products may be produced by dodgy companies, but how do you drop that product when the competition is inferior in design or quality? It becomes a wrestle between ethical standards and personal comfort.

On top of that, there’s the ethical question of whether to research as many products as you can, in order to make educated and informed consumer decisions, or whether to allow yourself to remain blissfully ignorant. It’s not quite ignorance, though, because you know that you could potentially find something unsavoury if you dig a little. So what do you do? Do you choose to remain ignorant and blissfully unaware of the questionable ethics that produced the products you consume, or do you dig into the history of each one? This isn’t a rhetorical question.

How do you guys do it? And do you boycott any particular products for any reason? Tell me your story. :)