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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.

Zvi covered this in his roundup (ctrl-F "vegetarian"), including the counterargument.

Quoting for people even lazier than me:

Claims that ‘we are not coming for your X’ when creating morally-superior-from-some-angle alternative Y are simply not credible. Creating Y, in practice, inevitably means calls to tax, restrict and often ultimately ban X, even if customers still want X.

In this case, it is obvious, many are not bothering to hide their intentions. Many of the people I know who are vegans absolutely want to come for your meat, and even your dairy. They are building alternatives in order to do this. They bide their time only because they do not have the power to pull it off, but they will absolutely impose first expensive mandates and then outright bans if permitted to do so, and would do so even with no good alternatives.

They certainly would do so if they could point to ‘meat alternatives,’ even if we all knew they were expensive and not the same. They would gaslight you about that, as other movements continuously gaslight us about other cultural trends via the full four-step clown makeup. And they think they are morally right or even obligated to do this

I love "four step clown makeup." He understands exactly how they think: that it's noble to lie to the proles to con them into "progess" by hook or by crook.

The same people will tell you it's a paranoid conspiracy that menthol cigarettes are being banned even though it's literally happening right now, and the fuckers celebrate it when they're not trying to gaslight you.

It's what I meant by the disgusting dishonesty and disrespect that makes me so furious at their lies. Treating other people as meat puppets to be manipulated "for Progress."

I'll say this for the SJers; not all of them are liars regarding this. Yes, there are some who are just flat-out lying, but there are others that are more correctly categorised as "pushovers"; they honestly don't support X now, but they will once the cool kids say that supporting X is cool.

It's kind of a weird edge case, because on the one hand they're not actually lying, but on the other hand they're not telling the truth; they literally don't know the truth of their own allegiance.

(And there are some who'll legitimately peel off and switch sides.)

I remember a blogpost about this, possibly from Scott, but I can't find it. It talked about different kinds of societal conformity curves where with some curves a perturbation can send everyone over to the other side and with some it can't.

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