MartianNight
No bio...
User ID: 1244
MartianNight
9d ago
"nobody is trying" is kinda consensus-building, but probably fine.
I never wrote “nobody is trying” to ban real meat. I'm sure there are some PETA-style militant vegans who'd love to ban real meat, but they are a tiny minority that does not have enough power to enact such a ban, and I don't see a likely scenario where that changes in the near future.
What I did say was:
Having lab-grown meat available as an option does not force anyone to eat it, and it doesn't take away traditional options.
I've not heard a convincing argument against this, and can't imagine one that doesn't rely on a lot of assumptions and slippery slope type fallacies.
Meanwhile, there is real-world evidence in favor of my claim, in that restaurants already serve vegan and vegetarian options in addition to meat-based options, and this hasn't lead to meat becoming unavailable in general.
If lab-grown meat ever becomes commercially viable (which is a big if) I can see large chains like McDonald's introducing it as a separate option, just like they now offer a plant-based burger. The plant-based option isn't there to force you to eat it. It's there so that if your friend group consists of 9 meat eaters and 1 vegan, you can all go to McDonald's together.
MartianNight
10d ago
Yes, I agree that failing to do something useful in the past shouldn't prevent you from doing something useful today, but by that very logic, the government can still ban any number of unhealthy foods if it wanted to.
That's why I don't buy the explanation that the ban on lab-grown meat was motivated by concern for public health, because if that were true, the government would also be banning alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks, etc. If you want to explain the meat ban in terms of public health concerns, you have to explain why none of the other, much more effective, bans are happening.
Of course, in reality it has nothing to do with public health, but simply waging the culture war. DeSantis is trying to own the libs by banning something that they advocate for. DeSantis himself said as much:
“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.”
Nowhere does it say that public health concerns were the reason for the ban. Instead, it's all about “fighting the elites” and “saving our beef”. If lab-grown meat was provably more healthy than regular meat, DeSantis would still oppose it for the above reasons.
And of course the whole reasoning is bogus. Having lab-grown meat available as an option does not force anyone to eat it, and it doesn't take away traditional options. The idea that allowing anyone to eat lab-grown meat would result in everyone being forced to eat it is a classic example of a slippery slope fallacy.
MartianNight
10d ago
I'm just trying to pin down the argument here. If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods in the interest of public health” that's a position that's easy to understand, whether you agree with it or not, but adopting it would imply banning a bunch of traditional foods too.
If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods, but only if they are new” then the logic is less clear: why does it matter if an unhealthy food is new or not? You should be able to defend the “only if they are new” qualifier, unless your real motivation is something different (e.g. irrational hatred of lab-grown meats or the people who advocate for them).
(Note that all of this assumes that lab grown meat is unhealthy as a given, which I certainly don't believe in the strict sense, though I will concede there is some unknown risk associated with it.)
MartianNight
10d ago
So are you arguing that without the extrajudicial home raids, the ban is useless? Because I'm fairly certain home raids aren't part of the current proposal.
MartianNight
10d ago
Sure, let's say, when left to their own devices, people will choose to eat garbage. Is it the government's job to prevent this? If yes, then why single out lab-grown meat, when hot dogs, jellybeans and soda are just as bad? If not, then what is the basis for banning just 1 of 1000 unhealthy foods that people already consume?
MartianNight
11d ago
by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients
So when is Florida banning jelly beans? And calorie-rich sodas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup? And sugary breakfast cereals? And cancer-inducing smoked meats? Tobacco? Alcohol?
Why should all those foods that we know are unhealthy and that consumers actually do overindulge in to the detriment of their health be allowed, but a meat substitute that is likely to be much healthier and is not even widely available needs to be banned?
We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins.
I don't think “probably” is right; which nutrients and vitamins are essential is pretty well known, so the chance that lab-grown meat is unhealthy in some unpredictable way is pretty low. Especially since nobody suggests you switch to a meat-only diet; the idea is that you eat this in moderation, along with fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables, just like the recommendation is for real meat.
Still, if you personally don't want to take the risk, you would still be welcome to stuff your face with jellybeans, vodka and tobacco because you believe that's the healthier alternative. That's hardly an argument for a ban.
MartianNight
13d ago
Nit pick: /r/the_donald was the banned subreddit.
MartianNight
20d ago
I agree that Ukraine is fairly conservative at the moment, but the question is: for how long? Euromaidan was essentially Ukraine pledging allegiance to Western values. That was the cue for Russia to invade!
This can conservatively be interpreted as “Ukrainians turned away from Russia because they wanted economic growth similar to Poland after joining the EU” but it can also easily be interpreted to mean “Ukraine is now lost to the globo-homo neo-liberal monoculture of which liberal feminism is a fundamental part”. The fact that Ukraine receives the majority of its support from America, and within America from the pro-feminist Democratic party, rather than the Republican party that has the Christians and conservatives, doesn't bode well. I can easily imagine that the Ukrainian women that fled the country end up decrying the toxic masculinity of the men who chose to fight and die for their country (like American liberals would), rather than praising them for their service to their homeland (like American conservatives might).
MartianNight
20d ago
That women get a "free pass" from violent conflict is basic common sense, a conclusion reached by any society that isn't actively suicidal.
In those societies, men had authority over women in return, similar to how parents protect their children but expect their children to obey them.
It's the modern notion that men are obligated to protect women, but women owe men nothing in return, that seems like a rough deal for men.
MartianNight
1mo ago
Do you feel more pride over gaining a PhD, or gaining a bronze swimming certificate? Why?
This is the wrong comparison. You can feel pride in getting a doctorate degree, but does that mean nobody should be able to get a master's or bachelor's degree?
Saying “there should only be hard mode” is akin to saying “nobody should be allowed to get a bachelor's degree, so I can take pride in my doctorate degree” which is obviously (hopefully) nonsense. The fact that people can get bachelor's degrees doesn't invalidate your doctorate degree at all. Everyone understands that getting a doctorate degree is a bigger accomplishment than getting a master's or bachelor's degree. Why deny others the opportunity to get a lesser degree?
MartianNight
1mo ago
What you're seeing is the government making efforts to get it so that software for the government is written in memory safe languages.
This is definitely not true. Have you read the report (pdf) or even just the abstract? From the introduction:
This report speaks directly to the technical community, including technology manufacturers and academic researchers, illustrating two ways their actions can make significant improvements to the Nation’s cybersecurity posture.
Nowhere is the scope limited to purveyors of software to the US government.
MartianNight
1mo ago
Does this work? https://search.pullpush.io/
MartianNight
1mo ago
The US can extend its worldwide hegemony by another two generations if it just replaced its immigration criteria with an IQ test where anybody IQ 125+ was welcomed.
Remember Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
MartianNight
2mo ago
The Oslo Accords ended because of suicide bombings and the start of the Oslo Accord.
Yes, Hamas tried to frustrate the peace process, but so did Orthodox Jews. You conveniently forget to mention that the PM of Israel was assassinated, not by Hamas, but by a Jewish extremist.
This was the moment where moderates on both sides should have stood their ground and enacted the two-state solution. But Israelis didn't want to do it. They reneged on their promise of withdrawing from Palestinian territories.
This of course completely destroyed the support Palestinian moderates had among the people, because it made it clear to the Palestinians that the Jews cannot be trusted and cannot be bargained with. Israel drove Palestinians into the arms of Hamas. And of course that's exactly how people like Netanyahu like it: the more extreme Palestinians are, and the more they support Hamas, the easier it is to justify killing Palestinians and annexing Palestinian lands.
Sorry you are just behaving in bad faith.
Don't throw baseless accusations around. I'm arguing in good faith, and if you are too, you should be able to support your position with arguments, instead of personal attacks.
MartianNight
2mo ago
The first paragraph is false, they have been offered numerous peace deals with self-rule. Turned them down.
Not true. In Oslo, the Palestinians agreed to recognize Israel and accepted only limited self-governance for Palestine, but it was Israel that reneged on the deal, once they realized that it would require actually withdrawing their occupation forces from Palestinian territories.
As long as Palestinians demand is the removal of Israel then Israel has a valid claim to fully evict Palestinians.
Again, see the Oslo accords, where the Palestinian leaders agreed to recognize Israel in exchange for partial autonomy in the Palestinian territories, but Israel reneged since they realized they can just keep occupying Palestinian land indefinitely without any repercussions.
So it's clearly not true that all Palestinians want total destruction of Israel, and aren't willing to compromise. That's just a lie spread by Zionists because it makes it easier to justify occupying Palestinian territories indefinitely.
You are really making it sound like they are just Nazis. Nazis too could have just had Germany but wanted other peoples land and more.
The comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany is a little awkward but there is some truth to what you say: just like Germany could thrive within its 1938 borders, Israel, too, could thrive within the 1947 borders, but just like Hitler felt the Germans were entitled to a larger country, Zionists believed that the Jews had a god-given right to rule Jerusalem and the West Bank, and since they had the military power to take them by force, they decided to just take Palestinian lands by force.
It was mostly uninhabited land. In 1922 a total of 757k people live in Palestine Mandate of which 78% were Muslim. Nobody living there today can claim ownership on what was essentially abandon land.
That's more than twice the number of people living in e.g. Iceland today, and I doubt anyone would call Iceland “uninhabited” or “abandoned”. And by your own admission: there was no significant Jewish presence in that area either (166k by your count) so it's not like the Jews have a better claim to the entire territory.
MartianNight
2mo ago
Palestinians don't just want peace, they also want independence. We both know that if Palestinians turned Jew-loving overnight, released their hostages and laid down their arms, what happens next is not that Israel withdraws from the occupied Palestinian territories, but rather that Israel will conquer the entire country (as Netanyahu has already said he intends to), and Palestinians will live under Jewish rule forever.
All armed conflicts can be resolved peacefully if one side is willing to give up all of their claims. But would you suggest this in any other conflict? Should the Ukrainians hand their country to Putin for the sake of peace, at the cost of their freedom? Should Taiwan give their country to the CCP? Should America have accepted British rule instead of establishing their independence?
And let's be clear: the source of the conflict has nothing to do with whether Palestinians love or hate Jews. The inhabitants of all surrounding countries hate the Jews just as much as the Palestinians do, but Israel is not occupying them, because Israel does not want their land.
The reason Israel is occupying territories like Jerusalem and the West Bank is that the Jews consider those part of their God-given holy land. It doesn't matter whether the citizens living in that land love or hate the Jews; the Jews want to conquer that land either way.
MartianNight
2mo ago
If Hamas agreed to release the hostages, then there would have been a ceasefire for at least six weeks, possibly forever.
Again, how is that supposed to be an enticing offer? “Hey Hamas, we want to murder all of you, but we can't do it while you have hostages! So we propose that you release the hostages, and in return we promise to wait six weeks before we murder you.”
MartianNight
2mo ago
I don't think simply being uncool equals punk, though. Punk is being counter-cultural plus being dramatic about it in a somewhat stylish way. Someone like Sam Hyde is punk, but your run-of-the-mill white guy isn't punk, he's just not considered fashionable by anyone.
MartianNight
2mo ago
He is talking about the women, elderly and wounded among Israeli citizens being held hostage by Hamas, right? Or so I hope?
Because if he is talking about Palestinian civilians, that's absolutely insane. The women and children living in the Gaza strip live there. Why should Hamas kick them out of their own country, just to make it easier for Israel to massacre the remaining adult male Palestinians (regardless of Hamas affiliation) without looking like the bad guy?
Even talking about hostages it seems like a frankly insane demand to make: “Hey, we want to murder all of you, but if we kill a few hostages in the process, that would make us look like the bad guys. Crazy, right? So can you do us a big favor and release your hostages so we can go ahead and kill you all without any repercussions? Thanks, Hamas! ... Oh, you refuse? How unreasonable of you!”
MartianNight
2mo ago
Can you please just summarize the whole thing for people who aren't in the know and aren't motivated to watch a 15 minute video?
MartianNight
2mo ago
we've broadly agreed to define this phenomenon in terms of ratios of genetic variation within and between populations
But then I have to press you: what exactly is this ratio, and how is it computed? How can I calculate it for various subspecies and for humans in order to verify independently that indeed, native Scandinavians and Aboriginal Australians are more closely related than any pair of subspecies of Chimpanzee?
And I have to point out that “subspecies” is a social construct too, in that the definition of subspecies is determined by biologists, who could very well define it as “subspecies are any subpopulations that have greater genetic differences than any two human subpopulations”. It doesn't tell you how to calculate genetic similarly, but it's clear that, by definition, there cannot be subspecies of Homo Sapiens, so problem solved. But of course that creates two problems:
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That's hardly carving reality at the joints: it's plausible that there are relevant distinctions that are more fine-grained than you allow. If there really is no significant difference between human subpopulations, you have to show that from first principle, not simply assert it by definition.
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Is this standard really being consistently applied? Again, think about the Chimpanzee subspecies. Are they really more differentiated than some human races? If biologists aren't using their own definition to determine subspecies in the first place, then appealing to the definition to assert there are no subspecies within the human race is meaningless.
Would have to disclose/prove to the people involved that he is indeed Satoshi, which is hard to do.
On the contrary, Bitcoin makes proving ownership trivial: Satoshi only needs to disclose his public key (which can be verified using public information in the blockchain) and then sign a random challenge string provided by the lenders to prove that he has the corresponding private key. This proves that he has the ability to spend those coins.
(Technically, this doesn't prove he is Satoshi, original author of the Bitcoin whitepaper, per se, but rather that he has the cryptographic keys needed to spend millions worth of Bitcoin, but the latter is what the lender really cares about anyway.)
MartianNight
2mo ago
Rather, students are expected to be able to discuss their values using a common language.
This common language will surely include terms like toxic masculinity, white privilege, and heteronormativity, but certainly not black violence, female privilege or Jewish in-group bias. So it will be strictly of the form “<negative adjective> <disfavored group>”, where the disfavored groups are exactly those hated by the radical left (only Jews are iffy here, depending on how radical they intent to go). And then students are free to express their personal values but required to use only terms that imply that cisgender straight white males suck.
MartianNight
2mo ago
That is from Wikipedia which is by default unreliable on social topics (and the cited sources seem no better at first glance, though I don't have access to the full contents) so I can't help but wonder: how much of that apparent connection is just due to the fact that wokeists like to LARP as both LGBTQ+ and autistic?
Is there any study that doesn't just rely on self-identification, and explicitly acknowledges the difference between “I'm a male who has had penetrative sex with multiple other males” and “I identify as pansexual online because heterosexuals aren't cool anymore and to be fair I do occasionally jerk off to femboy porn though all my crushes are on girls”? And the difference between nonverbal autists and people who claim to have Aspergers after scoring 17/20 on a test they found on tumblr?
Overall I suspect that the most prominent members of the LGBTQ+ community are only mildly autistic at best, if for no other reason than that it's still a social community.
In any case, I think it's a mistake to assume that the woke are natural allies to autists. Look at how much criticism an organization like Autism Speaks gets from the woke left for (very sensibly imo) saying it would be nice if autism could be cured. To the woke, the idea that autistic people might struggle in social situations is an unfair prejudice that ”neurotypicals” hold about autistic people.
And I think this tendency towards self-identification as fashion among the woke leads to less understanding, because it creates a false impression of how debilitating these conditions can be.
You say it's unfair that the police arrest you because you didn't realize the woman you met on the bus was deeply uncomfortable while you were talking at length about your favorite anime? Well, that sounds like a load of crap. My friend Ayden is a transman who suffers from self-diagnosed autism, dyslexia and OCD, and yet shhe has never been arrested for something like that, so it sounds to me like you are using your autism as an excuse for your toxic male behavior.
For someone who uses words like “lies” and “literally” quite liberally I'd expect you to stick closer to the truth yourself. The research grant isn't about banning real meat at all. To quote:
So the purpose is literally “to explore and explicate”. Maybe you think there is some more sinister hidden purpose, but if so, it definitely does not literally say that the goal is to remove meat-based options, and if you think that's the actual purpose you will have to make an argument for it. (How annoying! That's much harder than simply calling people liars!)
The part that you are upset about is this:
This is just standard fluff you put in research proposals to make the topic of your research sound super duper important: why should someone pay you USD 500,000 to study a phenomenon if that phenomenon isn't something earthshaking? It's no different from the hundreds of blockchain startups that claimed they were going to disrupt the financial system in order to secure VC funding (spoiler alert: they didn't).
But even taken at face value, “disrupting” traditional livestock production doesn't imply that real meat will be banned. It's easy to imagine a future with 50/50 fake/real meat; that would be pretty disruptive to the agricultural sector, but it still doesn't make real meat unavailable.
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