I have been telling people about the stupidity and the immorality of buying and wearing diamonds for a few years while receiving mostly perplexed looks and polite smiles from the people I tried to convince. Needless to say, I am quite a failure at this.However, in the movie Blood Diamond, Jennifer Connelly's character summed it up infinitely better than I could have done. She said, "People back home would not buy a diamond if they knew it cost someone their hand."
Wanting and buying diamonds, besides being an example of how we are fooled by brilliantly evil marketing strategy to pay enormous sum of money for artificially-scarce commodity, also provides great incentives for mistreatment of the poor and the children. Child enslavement, mutilation, and murder are done just to bring us some stupid shiny rocks. A good summary of all the various reasons we should stop wanting diamonds can be found in this article and this article.
I also would like to point out that we have the technology to synthesize diamonds atom-by-atom, resulting in better quality gems than any naturally occurring diamonds. (This reminds me that, once upon a time, aluminum was priced more highly than gold, due to the difficulty of extracting pure alumninum from rocks. Now, after appropriate technology was discovered in 1886, aluminum is abundant and cheap enough that we can throw away aluminum foils. I suspect that I will use diamond-based semi-conductors, diamond-powder coated electronic devices, and forever-sharp-diamond-edged knives in a decade or two.)
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P.S. Jennifer Connelly, besides being one of the most beautiful actresses in the world, can actually act, and very well at that. She got an Oscar for her role in A Beautiful Mind. I saw her movies since she was a teenager, and I thought, "Good thing this girl is pretty, she cannot act." I'm very happy to see that I'm completely wrong. Starting in the late 1990's, it became more and more apparent what a good actress she has become. Some of her roles I enjoy include a lesbian college student in Higher Learning, the leading role in Dark City (one of my top ten Sci-fi movies), a political activist in Waking the Dead, and a drug addict in Requiem for a Dream.
6 comments:
3 of that 4 are what I rate as her most sexy movies. Pure coincidental :)
Ha Ha, you got me!
Still, there is that 1 out of 4...
My friend said just like you after watching that movie! Now having read your post I begin to take it seriously. How about other stones?
Other rocks are not controlled to the extent that diamond is controlled by De Beers. That's why they are quite cheaper.
Personally, I don't find gemstones exciting. They are rocks to me. I'd rather have the equivalence in food or money.
Those who relie on diamonds market will loathe that technology....haha
I wonder what would it be like to get a diamond in a low price that I can just throw it away without even have to care about it, like what happened with aluminium.
I didn't know that the movie Blood Diamond is that good! I thought it's an action movie :( Better rent it and check it out. :)
Blood Diamond is an entertaining action movie but it also has a message that rational people should pay attention to :-)
It's just silly and sad to have so much suffering for well-promoted rocks!
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