Most people in developed countries are not in a situation where if they do not eat the food in front of them now, they will starve. Nearly every grocery store should have things like tofu, lentil, beans, etc easily available. It may be most convenient, or most delicious, or something like that but vegetarianism and plant based are both very viable options for most of the developed world at this point.

Voting for a candidate in a 2 party system is not comparable, as there is literally not another viable choice in most cases.

Meaning that after you've weighed all the tradeoffs, you determine one of the available choices is your best option. Making tradeoffs was already spoken to. I don't think that is a foreign concept to the HN crowd, is it? Engineering is all about managing tradeoffs.

> Nearly every grocery store should have things like tofu, lentil, beans, etc easily available.

None of them are perfectly equivalent to the burger, thus tradeoffs have to be made if you choose tofu over a burger. If satiation is your only goal, then it may not matter, but most people don't eat in that kind of vacuum. They will have a long list of properties they want to fulfill with their food, with no food item perfectly satisfying all of them, hence the need to determine what one is willing to give up.

> Voting for a candidate in a 2 party system is not comparable, as there is literally not another viable choice in most cases.

I guess I don't see how your math is mathing. In my world, 2 implies that you have at least two choices (you could argue that not voting, spoiling the ballot, etc. are also choices, but we can ignore them for now). That means one of the choices you can deem as the best choice.

Ok. Now try that sentence with "leg of a dog". Does that still feel reasonable? I think the difference isn't that one is more moral, it's that one is more familiar.

I also don't think he was talking about activists. There are plenty of "hardcore MAGA" types who are pretty passive about it. And even there that doesn't necessarily involve cognitive dissonance. I know plenty of people who vote for Democrats that are able to oppose it on certain particulars while still deciding it's the best voting option. But I think MAGA in particular is a cult of personality, which is very hard to justify intellectually.

Yes. If dog legs are readily available in the store then sure.

If you'd like a different example that gets the same feeling, try substituting something else considered treif in your culture, like "roasted eyeballs" or "a human hand". My point being that people who are used to eating some kinds of meat see it as perfectly reasonable, but that has a lot to do with what they've been socialized to. In contrast, raised in vegetarian cultures often find eating any meat equally horrific. Which is the position I find intellectually most rational.

My goal is to get others to realize that cognitive dissonance is not an us vs them thing. I freely grant that MAGA followers, as part of a cult of personality, are notably worse. But it's a human problem.

Does that clear it up for you?

Just running with Americans here, because that's what I'm most familiar with, but Americans are happy to eat burgers and would be horrified to eat dog. They are also happy to eat burgers but would generally be horrified by the killing of the cow. This is not because there's any major difference between cattle and dogs; they're both cute, sociable mammals that raise adorable young. This isn't a rational position, and Americans who think at all about it experience cognitive dissonance.

There is a major difference: Dogs have been deemed workers, thus eating them is seen as a threat to one's livelihood. Same reason Americans won't eat horses. You can't plow the fields tomorrow if you eat the horse tonight, so to speak. It has been an imperative that these animals be off limits for consumption. In other parts of the world where the working animals differ, they have no qualms about eating dogs and horses, but may not eat other animals.

Historically, ~100%. I considered caveating that while it is far less true today, the transition is still relatively recent and cultural norms haven't caught up yet, but I assumed you would have the capacity to figure that out on your own. My bad for assuming.

It was kinda too weird to do it at home, but he was really curious.

If that's the best choice in front of me, sure. I'm not going to starve to death just because it is dog. Are you?

> I also don't think he was talking about activists.

There was said to be support. That requires activism of some sort. You don't have to gather in the streets in mass promotion, wear certain colored hats, or fly party flags, but there has to be some kind of activity to suggest that the support is there. That isn't someone quietly eating a burger (or dog leg) in the corner.

We were talking about making tradeoffs amid the choices available to you, where a burger was supposed, for the sake of discussion, to be the best choice available. I assume you haven't randomly changed the subject.

If you can choose between a hamburger and a dog leg, then, sure, a hamburger, at least to my taste, would be the better choice. I would choose it. But that doesn't mean I would never eat a dog leg. Where the dog leg is the best choice, why wouldn't you eat it?

My point is that everybody experiences cognitive dissonance. Eating meat is a convenient example, because almost nobody reading this has no other choice, and almost nobody here hates animals (or at least will admit to it).

I'm not interested in pursing weird desert-island hypotheticals where eating a dog is the "best choice". If you are, godspeed, but it's unrelated to the point I was making.

That is what I was talking about. You replied to it. Why would you reply if you had nothing to add to it?

> My point is that everybody experiences cognitive dissonance.

That point was already made earlier in this thread. For what reason does it need to be pointed out again?

> I'm not interested in pursing weird desert-island hypotheticals where eating a dog is the "best choice".

You submitted the idea of the dog leg. Why would you introduce it if you don't want to talk about it?

Because you replied to me in a spirit of contradiction while apparently missing my point. I had some hope of clearing that up, but I see now that was a mistake.

For the sake of my understanding, are you trying to suggest that you didn't make a point by, counterintuitively and contradictorily, telling us that you made a point? Or what is it that you are trying to do here?