For viewers in the developed west, “there’s plenty of stuff that we can do as individuals,” said Cowperthwaite: eat less meat, reduce food waste, buy less.
Disappointing the directors don’t fully reject consumption of animals, but not surprising since we can’t even covince people to wear a mask when they’re sick.
Foregoing meat completely is one way to eat less meat.
Anyway, your argument is a perfect example of “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” It will be much easier to convince people to become vegetarian or vegan in the future if they first get used to not eating meat with every meal/every day.
I don’t mean to equate anything here, but do you think that would have been an effective strategy for social change in other movements?
Like: “What if we just did a little slavery? It’ll be much easier to convince slave owners to give up slavery if they got used to having just a few slaves.”
Do you think that would have been an effective strategy instead of calling for complete abolition?
Once again, I’m not trying to draw a comparison here, you could substitute any past social movement, but the logical structure should hold regardless.
The logical structure doesn’t hold. People don’t eat meat for profit, they eat it for preference. You can’t ask slave owners to be slightly less profit-seeking. You can ask people to tolerate small sacrifices like eating less meat.
Whatever the case, individual solutions to structural problems are not and have never worked, it’s a capitalist lie. I intentionally said “ask people to tolerate small sacrifices” instead of “make small sacrifices”. A reduction in meat consumption has to be imposed, whether at the distributor or the supplier.
You are very directly drawing a comparison there, regardless of your claim otherwise.
This is a spurious argument which is clearly meant to provoke, so I’m not going to engage any further. The two are not the same, and if you can’t see that, I’m obviously not going to be the one to convince you since you.
If you can’t understand the difference between structure and content, there’s no point in discussing further.
That’s exactly how most social movements, including slavery, evolved, but OK.
That’s exactly how most social movements, including slavery, evolved, but OK.
Have you … not heard of the civil war?
Which one? Do you mean the one from the country that went from enslaving black people to enslaving prisoners who so conveniently happen to be black?
Really? That’s how things play out in reality for sure, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be calling for anything less than a complete abolition of animal exploitation and cruelty. But let’s try it with some social movement that’s often discussed on Lemmy to be sure. Do you think this is a good take:
“You shouldn’t call for an end to the genocide in Gaza, that’s unrealistic. Just stick to ‘Israel should try and kill fewer Palestinians.’ Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”
The problem of advocating for half measures is that you don’t properly communicate that the behavior in question is unacceptable. It sends a mixed message: “It’s bad and you shouldn’t do it, but it’s still OK to do a little.”
I’m not advocating for half measures myself, but stating that half measures don’t work is simply historically false. You call for radical measures, bomb a bunch of official buildings, get some rights, and then go back to step one. But it never happens overnight, no matter how much we want it to
I agree, and understand change takes time. But to be clear, I’m saying advocating for half measures is relatively ineffective, not that half measures themselves have no effect.
The directors also arrive at the exact wrong advice. You cannot fight International resource extraction by making consumer choices as an individual. To address the problem identified by the film, you have to understand the material basis for why it’s happening and then fight that. And I guarantee it is more powerful than consumer choices.
In fact, consumer choice recommendations are a preferred PR strategy handed down by companies and governments (the latter is usually an expression of the former) that do this kind of extraction. It is a false catharsis that reassigns blame from the actual culprits and then resolves the blame by having you do something that they can gladly ignore.
I agree that would be good to see some advocacy for veganism. That has the potential to become a larger social movement even though it is often, incorrectly, framed as just another consumer choice.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Such a huge business deal did not go unnoticed; news coverage and an eventual congressional hearing questioned the sale with a mix of good, old-fashioned American xenophobia and reasonable concern for the nation’s food supply.
These seemingly unrelated developments form The Grab, a riveting new documentary which outlines, with startling clarity, the move by national governments, financial investors and private security forces to snap up food and water resources.
The Grab has the feeling of a revelation, though the reveal is not a conspiracy; the pattern is less a plan than a series of reactions, from a variety of actors, to the fact that every single human needs food and water, and there is not enough arable land on Earth for the projected increase of 2 billion people by 2050.
The film connects their confusion to the despair of Zambian farmers displaced, via a complicated and westernized deeds system, by mercenary militias to make way for commercial farmland controlled by outside actors from various countries – China, Gulf states, the US.
The emails, from 2012, reveal a clear plan to obtain, by whatever means necessary, land in Africa to fulfill competing national interests; the CIR team eventually pieces together that one of Prince’s backers was Sheikh Tahnoon, a member of the Emirati royal family, as well as China.
While the first two-thirds of The Grab unmask the pattern, the final third unravels the fear and overwhelming pressure to submit to it with efforts to push back: a bipartisan movement in Arizona to curb unlimited water usage, legal wins in Zambia to restore land and pay restitution.
The original article contains 1,411 words, the summary contains 266 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
