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Notes -
The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?
This was not a tweet I expected to see today:
-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.
Dumping an EA veganism quote for people to reference.
This is what desantis is fighting, and I don't see how anyone could blame him for it. They see no issue using any dirty tactic to ban meat, so why should anyone defending themselves against the attack feel any regret about clobbering them with whatever weapon they have on hand?
They want their enemies "effectively annihilated", what right do they have to protest their victims doing it to them first? You can even have fun #me-too-ing them or copying "firey but mostly peaceful" 2020 riots: they've already endorsed those tactics!
Do not compromise or negotiate with terrorists, do not trust them when they lie about their goals to your face and brag about it to their co-conspirators where they think you can't hear them.
I could find similar quotes online by white nationalists planning their own long march through the institutions. That doesn't mean I should assume any policy proposal such people might agree with is being directed by them and must be fought tooth and nail to keep us off a slippery slope towards racial separatism. Playing culture war whack-a-mole makes you look crazy to outsiders and weakens one's position, whether you are a wokescold arguing about Halloween costumes or a conservative grandstanding on behalf of steak and bacon.
EA had 46 billion dollars in committed funding in 2021, and was growing at 37% per year, according to 80000hrs. If you could find white nationalists with that kind of clout, quoting them would be quite reasonable. And even I would be worried enough by that point to avoid getting a tan in case they won.
Look at the date. How much of this "commitment" was from SBF?
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