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This might sound weird, but why is vegetarianism invalid while "piracy" isn't? (lemm.ee)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've had a certain debate a few times where you might say we argue over the "semantics" of the meat industry.

I am what you would call a vegetarian. While vegetarians won't eat things that caused harm to produce, a vegan won't eat anything having to do with an animal. A lot of those who would fall under the latter category hate us because they say anything that remotely resembles someone enjoying an animal product is supporting the meat industry which then kills animals, which means merely eating an animal product makes someone a murderer.

Meanwhile, there's this concept many call piracy. It's the idea that, as the meme proverbially puts it, "you can download a car". The idea here, which I say in the way I do because there's still an ongoing debate about it, is that it affects nobody. But then there's the whole industry thing I mentioned. People on the other side of the debate often say "well what about the industry". I'm not sure where on the scale in this topic you might put me, but I feel like there's a glaring contradiction here. When it comes to animals, people think of the industry, but otherwise that's not a factor.

My question is... why?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (9 children)

I don't really understand why you're comparing these two things? One is a group of people refraining from consumption of certain goods for personal reasons - health, ethics, climate impact, whatever. The other is a group of people consuming arguably more goods than they (we tbh) deserve since we're not willing or able to pay for it for one reason or another.

A better analogy would be comparing piracy to... I don't know, a veg-eater of whatever type who still enjoys the taste of bacon and resorts to stealing it because it's better to hurt the meat industry than to pay? It's a product that person really doesn't really need and absolutely would have never paid for, yet the person still wants it and obtains it in a way that hurts the industry.

(The analogy doesn't hold up since stealing physical goods has a different impact than distributing digital copies, but it's the best I've got off the cuff)

E: okay, after reading your other comments, I'm both confident this didn't address the point you wanted and confident I don't really understand your deal well enough to do so. Both of these groups have some members who have a problem with industry practices and others who are into their chosen lifestyle for other reasons. It seems like you've made some odd decisions about which groups are most prevalent among each and are framing your premise around that, and I don't think we're going to see eye-to-eye on it when the premise is Like This.

Or are you trying to say veganism should be more widely accepted because "DRM is wrong" is roughly equivalent to "animal suffering is wrong" re: "industry bad"?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (3 children)

(The analogy doesn’t hold up since stealing physical goods has a different impact than distributing digital copies, but it’s the best I’ve got off the cuff)

Then it's relevant to point out this isn't about either industry being a victim of your run-of-the-mill theft. Both of the things I mentioned combined ask about direct impact on an industry versus indirect or arguably non-necessitated impact on an industry. Both things are strongly relevant in Lemmy culture in particular.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Your comparison is still really, really unclear. Are you comparing the consumption of "extra products" for vegans vs vegetarians to the consumption of "extra products" for piracy?

If so: Do you really not understand that limited physical demand differs from unlimited digital demand? If a vegetarian eats, idk, an egg a day.... that's an extra 365 eggs that had to be produced and were paid for, thus supporting the industry, when you could have hypothetically decreased demand and possibly caused a drop in production. Whereas the media consumed by pirates incur neither profit nor cost (in that if we assume they would never have paid for those goods in the first place, it isn't a lost sale). There is no production cost for there to be 1 sold copy and 1 pirated copy vs 1 sold copy only.

Though tbh, I'm just devil's advocating the vegan position here. I really think you had a handful of bad encounters with militant vegans and assume the majority of the threadiverse thinks like that. And, well... we don't? What even is this "lemmy culture"? The amount of confusion and responses that aren't addressing the point you meant to make should show you that most of us are not engaging with this on the line of thought you assumed we would.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Not so much “extra products” as “products which when acquired wrongfully have an impact on the business owner that some argue does exist and others argue doesn’t exist”.

I refer to Lemmy culture in part because it's the two things Lemmings are the most talkative about, one even taking up the majority of the daily happenings on Lemmy. That in turn links to capitalism, or rather Lemmy's aversion to it (an aversion which I hold too, just not in the exact same way as everyone else).

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