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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Just because they're annoying doesn't mean they're wrong - a meta-discussion

A few months ago a wild vegan appeared. He was almost self-parodically stereotypical: short, mid thirties, college-educated, and into endurance sports. He posted a reasonably well-argued case that veganism was not harmful to sporting performance, with the usual smug boasting of his numbers in endurance sports. At the end of his post, he finished with "what's your excuse?"

The entirety of his well-reasoned post was ignored, and he was dogpiled for that one final sentence.

Mottizens could immediately detect what was going on - he actually found the killing and eating of animals to be immoral, but didn't think that would be a convincing argument, so he tried to achieve his goal with another argument.

Both positions are actually worth considering. I'm open to the possibility that killing animals for food is wrong, and I'm open to the possibility that a vegan diet is not harmful to athletic performance. Hiding behind one to advance another, however, is deceitful.

I've actually tried to engage seriously with these ideas, and in my desire to see their own steelmen, I have tried to read some vegan sites. Usually I give up quickly, as they are full of the above argumentation - shifting goalposts, emotional appeals, hiding behind one argument to advance another, etc.

I wish I could say I have rejected vegetarianism because I engaged with their best arguments and found them wanting. Instead, I found their argumentation so annoying I ceased to engage with them.

I've had similar experiences with people who hate cars. Like anyone else who can do math, I have often found it absurd to use two tons of car and two liters of fuel to get two bags of groceries. I've also tried to mitigate some of these by moving to a New Urbanist development (with an unpleasant HOA, sadly), and I've got an electric car and solar panels on my roof. Sadly, this doesn't lead to any productive discussion, as I've discussed before.

Years ago, I remember a similar circular argumentative style among supporters of the ACA. They would say that people are afraid to start companies because they won't have health care, to which I'd reply "sure, how about two years of subsidized COBRA?". Then they'd point to catastrophic expenses, to which I'd say "sure, how about a subsidized backstop for all 1MM+ expenses for anyone who has a 1MM plan?", to which they'd change the argument again.

Of course, there's a pattern here. From what I can tell, many vegetarians have an (understandable) response to the raising, killing, and eating of animals. Some people seem to be terrified of owning and operating large machines, and they find private cars and single family housing to be socially alienating. Some people are emotionally disturbed by other people suffering from the health consequences of a lifetime of bad choices.

What these groups all have in common is a strong ability to signal these things emotionally to people similar to them and form a consensus, but also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably.

We don't have many vegans, anti-car people, or socialists here at The Motte - but that's not because their arguments are invalid, it's because the people attracted to those ideologies don't fit well with our particular discursive style. On the flip side, we have plenty of white nationalists, who seem to be able to adapt.

I'm confident that white nationalists are wrong. I have engaged with their best arguments, and found them wanting.

I'm only confident that vegans are annoying, because they are so annoying that I find it hard to engage with their arguments.

I think that's a blind spot for The Motte.

I do not care about animal welfare, pictures of overstuffed chickens in pens or male chicks being sent to the meat grinder do not matter in the least to me. That makes all the arguments downstream of their moral salience irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Sure, with a fastidious adherence to a broad diet and medical supplements, you can barely get an adequate caloric and nutritional intake that makes you not outright unhealthy or anemic, but what of it?

I prefer cars, I find it daft that after centuries of industrial and technological progress, there are people who would try and make them cost-prohibitive to use for the average person. I am intimately familiar with "walkable cities", every city in India is walkable, as they must be when the majority of the population is too poor to afford cars. I've had the "pleasure" of using public transport in London, often paraded as the city with the best infrastructure for the same, and I would far prefer an alternative with more cars. I see nothing absurd about relying on a two-ton vehicle and fuel to get about, any more than I am concerned about the other hundreds or thousands of tons of infrastructure required for a comfortable middle class existence in the West.

Am I aware that the anti-car movement has a point regarding the drawbacks on density, the inconvenience to pedestrians or the relative inefficiency of everyone driving? Absolutely. I don't even deny it, I simply consider it an acceptable tradeoff for my preferences.

On a more meta note, I see nothing particularly wrong with arguing one's point to an opponent and using arguments within their framework of beliefs that I do not consider salient to my own. When I point out the manifest absurdities of aligning Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Omnibenevolence in the context of an argument for atheism, or when I point out that the world as it exists looks nothing like a world made by an Omnibenevolent Creator, I do not for a millisecond happen to have believed in any of those properties, I'm only trying to demonstrate their utter incoherence to someone who holds all of them. Showing inconsistencies is a necessary step to start swaying people, and eventually, one hopes, when the cognitive dissonance becomes too much to bear, they'll stop trying to patch things up and then tear it all down to build a new edifice that aligns closer to mine.

So I don't particularly begrudge the vegans or anti-car people from trying to advance tangential arguments, but believe it or not, those are still niche positions to hold, and I don't see it as particularly surprising that they don't have all that many vocal adherents here. There's nothing in the rules of the Motte that states that any particular brand of advocacy must find positive feedback here, and many of us who remain, including the more extreme of the Wignats, do so because they're willing to accept downvotes and negative feedback, and to the extent they persist, by following the rules in their statements.

One of the major reasons for progressives to take up both causes is due to resource constraints. As an Indian you'd surely have to acknowledge the relative unsustainability of 1.3 Billion Indians living anything remotely like a westerners lifestyle. It simply cannot scale up, and India lacks the ability to take resources from distant parts of the globe to sustain its lifestyle. Even in the West, we have a stark choice between living a relatively resource constrained lifesytyle that would still make the average Indian person jealous; which unfortunately would be considered an affront on the non-negotiability of the American way of life. It's the inconvenient truth, our lifestyles are unsustainable and we are approaching multiple eco-system limits with a blissful disregard for the sheer terror we might have unleashed upon ourselves. We can culture war all day every day about the relative decline of our own lifestyles and who is truly to blame for that, but relative lifestyle adjustments for us are an inconvenience; whereas in the third world they carry a body count.

If I recall some of the details from this correctly, we're actually using less "stuff" than in the past, while obviously still experiencing great advances in quality of life. That is not that we're consuming marginally less per increase in quality of life, we're consuming absolutely less. The reason for this is because we're getting more efficient with the use of stuff even faster than people are consuming more utils.

There was some press release I recall reading, some study which said it would take something ridiculous like 14 Earths to provide all 8-billion-plus humans with a middle-class American lifestyle (might not have said specifically American, I don't remember).