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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26455 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?

This was not a tweet I expected to see today:

Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron [DeSantis], but I co-sign this.

As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.

-Senator John Fetterman

Lol. LMAO even.

I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.

I can't help but be reminded of the law of undignified failure. Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades. Gallons of digital ink have been spilled discussing the feasibility and/or inevitability (or lack thereof) of cultured meat on places like the Effective Altruism Forum. Skimming through the top results, I don't see, "what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?" on anyone's "factors to consider". It's also a harsh lesson that even the most positive-seeming improvements have to face-off against reliance interests who want things to stay the same. There is a lobby for everything.

"what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?"

What if the proles have caught on to the fact that it won't be 'tasty cheap nutritious cultured meat,' it will be 'expensive goo of dubious quality', and used as leverage in support of bans/punitive taxation on regular meat -- the justification being that 'modern alternatives exist, eat shit your beans, proles'.

I need to write something (and then edit out all the rage) about the "appeal to unshared principles." It's that 2020 meme: "bro the communists are being arrested you have to help them bro please I know they'd kill you and your family but what about libertarian values bro?"

Like there is no tactic that makes me instinctively hate someone more than a leftist who wants to mandate outcome B telling people that they shouldn't mandate outcome not-B because "mandates are wrong". It's pure "Darwin says whatever words make the meat puppets do what he wants in any given moment," with zero respect for the target as a thinking human being.

Like there is no tactic that makes me instinctively hate someone more than a leftist who wants to mandate outcome B telling people that they shouldn't mandate outcome not-B because "mandates are wrong". It's pure "Darwin says whatever words make the meat puppets do what he wants," with zero respect for the target as a thinking human being.

This seems like a very strange thing to say. A vegetarian leftist who wants to mandate the end of animal slaughter wants to do so because they think it is unjustified violence, comparable to murder. But they understand that their values aren't universally shared, so they come up with more limited animal welfare arguments grounded in more commonly held values in the wider society they belong to. That's not demonstrating "zero respect for the target as a thinking human being" - it's being pragmatic about how to achieve some limited version of their goals and build a coalition in a representative liberal democracy.

Like, if a pro-choice person A is talking to a morally pro-life, politically libertarian person B, of course A is going to appeal to B's political libertarianism when it comes to discussing how the government should legislate around abortion, regardless of what other disagreements they might have. This isn't trying to turn other people into meat puppets to do your bidding, it's respecting and understanding other people enough to try and meet them where they're at in order to achieve a compromise outcome both of you can accept.

That's not demonstrating "zero respect for the target as a thinking human being" - it's being pragmatic about how to achieve some limited version of their goals and build a coalition in a representative liberal democracy.

It's A pretending to share a value that is important to B to convince B to help toward's A's policy goals, whereas A actually holds both the B and the value in contempt. One of the cleanest examples of this, historically, is the western Communist's appeal for human rights including freedom of speech, but only as it applies to their treatment by western governments. If the Communist were to take power, those rights would disappear instantly and any attempt to appeal to them on the basis of that shared value would reveal that it was never shared in the first place. There's not really a true coalition, unless you consider the conman and his mark in a coalition to steal the mark's money.

This is less clear on issues of bodily autonomy and meat production, but probably not hard to see less charitable angles if you zoom out a few levels and look at a bigger picture than just those issues.

It's A pretending to share a value that is important to B to convince B to help toward's A's policy goals, whereas A actually holds both the B and the value in contempt.

So, the generalized version of the style of argumentation this meme is aimed at?

A smuggie is worth ten thousand words. The classic ones strike right at the heart of the issues, it's incredible.

This seems like a very strange thing to say.

Why are they the only ones who get to be "pragmatic"? Other people can "pragmatically" realize they have gals beyond the limited version they're proposing now, and "pragmatically" move to deny them their goals, and prevent any coalition from forming, even if theoretically they wouldn't be opposed to the limited version on principle.

I mean, sure, people are pragmatic and meta-pragmatic all the time. I don't really see the point of this anti-lab grown meat bill, since I think meat eating is so culturally dominant that it won't be wiped out within our life times just because lab grown meat becomes affordable and widely available. More likely, vegetarianism will remain a costly social signal of a minority of people until the diet becomes indistinguishable from meat eating in terms of price and flavor, and then when it is practically effortless a law might eventually pass that bans animal slaughter altogether.

It's going to be exactly what happened with slavery. Banning slavery when an entire regional economy depends on it is difficult to accomplish, and probably requires a war and imposition of force. Living in a world where everyone has 200 to 8000 energy slaves thanks to electricity and industrialization makes being anti-slavery very easy, basically without cost to the individual. I think I would be more likely to see the point of slavery if I had to fetch my own water, grow, prepare and cook my own food from scratch, clean my clothes by hand, wash my dishes by hand, etc.

"bro the communists are being arrested you have to help them bro please I know they'd kill you and your family but what about libertarian values bro?"

I extend my libertarian values to communists and other people who want to murder me and castrate/imprison my descendants so long as libertarians are in power (and so there's no actual threat of the inherently-corrupt ever being in charge; the entire point of allowing corrupt talk [identity-supremacy being the best example] in the first place is that there's generally at least a kernel of truth in what they say, and we can absorb it without stepping into the trap- in the "it's not what goes into a man that defiles him, it's what comes out" sense).

Indeed, this is the folly of the liberal; to assume that (sociological-economic-technological) conditions that permit non-corruption will exist forever and not just be enabled by a specific combination of those three from 1945 to 1973ish. A smart observer (Orwell) in a country that had yet to be positively affected by those conditions (England, 1948) elsewhere in the world would come up with an accurate description of how the future would work, and this would have been possible pre-computer.

I could have treated my enemies with that respect in 1950. I could have treated my enemies with that respect in 1970. I could maybe have treated my enemies with that respect in 1990.

I cannot do that today, so now I have to accept market shortfall on the net good that "developing lab-grown meat" would bring me because my [domestic] enemy will just use it as yet another excuse to hurt me and tax my virtues at a marginal rate of 100%. EVs are another example, so are smart guns (in the New Jersey sense). Neither rum-runners nor Edgar Friendly can survive a computer-assisted State.

I was trying to find a way to connect the vat-meat and fingerprint-gun mandates without explaining all the background, because it does seem like a perfect parallel. "We're openly pushing this technology to destroy an industry we hate, and don't care if the replacement works as long as we can use it for that purpose"

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