• Pezevenk [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      . It’s extremely frustrating as a vegan to say “hey, harvesting this particular animal product tends to have harmful outcomes” and then meat-eaters try to nitpick you by finding the most marginalized human being on earth who needs that animal product in some capacity to shame you as a privileged imperialist or something.

      It's not very hard though. There's just so, so many subsistence fishers in the world. Of course it isn't good for them either that huge companies are destroying populations of fish with their massive nets. But that's the main problem, not them.

      • Alaskaball [comrade/them]MA
        ·
        4 years ago

        Of course it isn’t good for them either that huge companies are destroying populations of fish with their massive nets. But that’s the main problem, not them

        It's literally the "you should stop using plastic straws to save the environment, sweaty." Argument, and it fucking pisses me off especially more when it's coming from someone who's far away and has literally zero clue what the material conditions are but want to dictate how others live based off of their arbitrary perceptions.

    • kuttarbaccha [they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      Yes I think I understand what you are saying, every argument that is made can only be fully understood within the context of the cultural experience of the person making it. And I am from what you would call a "third world" country, so when someone says fishing, I am not really thinking of the same thing that a western person is. So apologies if I misunderstood the concept entirely. That sort of mechanized and factory fishing is very rare where I am from, so I was thinking about millions of people who have been fishing for thousands of years in the many rivers of my country. I don't have the data to show it, but I am entirely certain the practice is very sustainable, since as I just mentioned these people have been doing it for thousands of years, their whole culture and custom is around fishing. They even have this very interesting collection of rhymes and songs that they pass down orally from generation to generation which contain valuable information regarding how to fish and when to catch what and stuff like that.

      Poor subsistence fishermen will need some kind of alternative method of surviving/feeding themselves once we kill all life in the ocean, so I’d want to help them find other options even without the inherent cruelty of fishing.

      Sorry maybe this is another cultural misunderstanding, but what you are saying sounds really callous to me. It's easy to say they have to find alternative method of survival, but how will they exactly? It's not like they are doing this for fun, it's a grueling existence, if they could do something else I am pretty certain they would be doing it already. This is the sort of statement the local capitalists make when they keep polluting the river and make fishing impossible, that these people need to find another line of work, without telling anyone what that work is exactly.

        • kuttarbaccha [they/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          4 years ago

          I am not saying it's your responsibility, I am not attacking you either. It's actually very encouraging to see people from rich capitalist countries embracing things like environmental conservation. I am just trying to explain to you that it's not possible for people to just stop doing the only thing they can to survive. There is no one who is waiting to give them jobs or an alternate way of living, if there was we could talk about how they are being cruel.

          And if climate collapse does destroy their livelihoods completely that would be a disaster leading to the death of millions of them, and should we not instead try to stop that from happening instead of saying oh it's going to happen anyways so might as well disrupt their already precarious existence early?

            • kuttarbaccha [they/them]
              ·
              4 years ago

              All perspectives are welcome, I am here to learn all I can about the western leftist perspective. All my life I have organized only with people who are like me, think like me and grew up in the same culture as me, it's good to broaden my horizon.