Yeah but this also works on a lot of vegan substitutes and staples.

Quinoa is a good example in that its popularity amongst american vegans and health food enjoyer’s (myself included) caused damages to local food supplies in poorer countries. Forcing south american and I think African communities to consume shitty processed flour with little to know access to the same nutrients and proteins of quinoa.

TBH, I don’t know how bad this still is, I haven’t followed it for a while. But the point I think is that the industrial scale food production chain is always going to be questionable ethically.

And if you chose the local only route of going to farmers markets only you’re probably limiting yourself to the point of risking malnutrition on a vegan diet (love my local FM, but they do not have beans in the quantity I eat them) and, based on my interactions with all the Kentucky Farmers I’ve met, you’re probably financially supporting a fascism supporter.

The point of “No ethical consumption” I think has always been that things are very complicated supply chain wise and it will take a LOT of work to beat the system. I believe that was intended to make the people trying feel better when they can’t possibly beat the system. But you’re right, people take it to an extreme and justify not even trying.

There’s a “The Good Place” moment where a guy gets sent to the Bad Place for buying flowers for his dying mom. The joke being that the flowers were harvested by slaves and flown on a plane causing un told pollution (I never actually watched the show, just saw the clip on a meme board at some point). But that’s the consequences of “doing good” under capitalism. We just don’t know how bad it is to do good all the time.

I can’t count how many times I’ve seen a ‘leftist’ try to shoehorn this into anarchist or Communist discussions

Libertarians co-opting concepts in order to put their own cynical spin on it and “win so easily”

people who interpret “no ethical consumption under capitalism” as a license to do whatever they want, because it’s all unethical.

Have you actually encountered someone who did this? Everyone I’ve ever known of who was in the ‘do whatever they want’ mindset, certainly wasn’t because of how they interpreted that ‘slogan’, it was just because they don’t give a shit to begin with—they almost certainly had never even heard it before.

Sure, but the point of that idea is that capitalist exploitation can’t be addressed through personal consumption choices to begin with.

I guess fine, that person is making a shitty choice. But moralizing over consumption habits is pretty counterproductive IMO.

This looks like a twist of what I call the “cat shit problem”:

A cat shitting on your front yard is bad. But an elephant doing it is even worse. Both are shit and you want neither; but elephant shit is a considerably worse problem.

However, every bloody single time this subject pops up, you’ll see two sets of muppets:

• “They’re both shit, so there’s no difference.”
• “Elephant shit is worse, so cat shit is not shit.”

So. The orange guy in your comic is in the first set.

If that is the intent, then I fear the presentation is incomplete

But that isn’t really the comparison being drawn. That comparison would be someone buying a shirt from a factory in a free northern state; because that shirt was produced by cotton grown by slave labor in the south.

Sure, except a part of the critique is an acknowledgement that exploitation begets exploitation - most of the working class has only a limited amount of time, resources, or energy to participate in this level of market research before buying anything.

I find this satire to be similar to Milton Freedman libertarians who think consumers should simply know what theyre buying instead of having government consumer protections.