TL;DR;
My entire original point can be summarised as:
Check your privilege, not everyone has the same circumstances as you.
Starting with unfounded absolutist proclamations weakens anything that surrounds it.
They never implied 100% of people
As i said:
ME: Regardless, i suspected it wasn’t as absolutist as it seemed, which is why my reply was prefaced with “If you truly believe that statement applies 100% of the time (in this context),”
they said if your personal choice can be criticized if it has victims. Most people don’t view “buy food I can afford or I/my family starve” as a personal choice.
Generally that's a reasonable point to make, which then leads in to the conversation about what constitutes a choice.
like your example of people making a "sacrifice" for their ideals, at which point does a conscious sacrifice no longer qualify as a "choice".
Is it choosing to starve ? long term malnutrition ? Heating vs food ?
It is not even close to “let them eat cake.” 8/10 people are not in poverty, and 7/10 could without much hardship reduce their meat consumption to near zero. 9/10 peasants could not eat cake.
Just to be clear, are those ratios legit or just an example?
Either way the way you are using them doesn't make sense.
The "let them eat cake" reference was to imply they were making statements without any consideration of their relative privilege.
Not to the same degree as a royal that doesn't understand the peasantry, but in the same vein.
“You live near a walmart” is true for the majority of Americans, and probably 99.9% of people on lemmy.
I can't even begin to address that level of ...i'm not even sure what to call it.
I'm just going to assume you don't really believe that 99% of ALL people on lemmy live "near" to a walmart.
The implication is almost anyone reading that statement has no excuse, and that if you don’t live near anywhere you can get vegetables, then you are one of the exceptions implied by you not starving not being considered a “personal choice.”
As i said previously, physical accessibility is only one factor affecting the ability for impoverished people to access enough food for a nutritionally healthy diet.
I'll quote it here for you :
ME: Assuming you have a home, even if you lived next door, that’s not even close to a guarantee you’d be able to afford a continuous level of food that matches your ideal and also reaches a level of healthy nutrition.
If you need examples of another, there is fiscal accessibility (affordability).
Even if you can physically get to it, if you can't afford it , it's not accessible.
This includes :
- outright not being able to afford something
- having to choose between the cheaper (and nutritionally more acceptable) meat options vs the more expensive non-meat option.
- being able to consistently afford this level of food without detrimental effects on your overall fiscal situation.
There's also temporal accessibility, can you get to the food in the time around your 3 jobs ? do you have the time and mental bandwidth to prepare a meal rather than microwave something.
And before you start in, yes prep and shopping time apply to all types of foods, I’m saying this is a exacerbating factor when taken with the other two.
Regardless of how you feel about it, the meat industry is big enough in scale and reach that they can price their meat mush at a lower price point that non-meat alternatives in a non-trivial amount of situations.
I'm not even making the argument that it's a majority, I’m saying it exists and shouldn't be disregarded.
Arguably you could consider that a personal choice, but when their example is “which T shirt to pick” I don’t think that’s their implication.
It was, they mention personal choice and them immediately follow up with this:
THEM: If your personal choice has victims, claiming it’s a personal choice ceases to be a valid reasoning to do it
They follow up with hyperbolic examples of when someone might get a "pass".
THEM: This is the “what if you were on a deserted island and there was only a single cow in it. Would you eat it”
Then follows up with a reply with "vast majority" and "Maybe the Inuit had to 300 years ago. You have a Walmart near you. Be real."