domain:betonit.substack.com
I haven't read this book. And I don't have certainty on the origins of woke or even what its definition is. I would classify myself as coming from a old "left wing" background, but I detest "I know it when I see it" woke and have somehow missed the call that affects so many other "left wingers."
With that said, what I vaguely think I've seen and know.
- 1 The great aWokeing was in 2016 or so, way later. Civil Rights is clearly not woke (I am not woke and I in theory like the idea of Civil Rights). Civil Rights is however the origin of "Identity Politics." Identity Politics here is distinguished from a universalist project of rights and or socialism. I.e. anti-racism is synonymous with ending discrimination for all universally, not advocating for black rights individually. Clearly woke feeds off identity politics, but again it existed for a long time before it, and I think it popped into existence for clear reasons that are not woke mind virus.
In orthodox Marxism everything is the economy stupid and changing the economic superstructure of capitalism is the only sure way to change negative social mores. Even Engels himself was writing how discrimination of women has its origins in capitalism and industrialism. The project of personal liberation, for a woman, and being a socialist is one and the same. In a post Identity Politics split, such a person would just be a feminist and maybe also a socialist.
The importance of socialism here is that the previous project of universal rights, enshrined in the founding ethos of the USA itself, was old school Liberalism. But the liberals won completely and already wrote all the laws. The old left-right divide in the French revolutions was between republican liberals and monarchists. But you don't see any monarchists around and the Church as a power estate is near nonexistent. There's a point after the fall of monarchies and therefore true ancien regime Rightwing-ism (I'm going to say around 1848) where those that still had the mentality of "let's keep challenging the system but now with say... women" started calling themselves Socialist instead of Republican or pro-democracy. Like you can clearly see the Jacobins are partly proto-socialist, but they're just too early. This is why you don't see, unlike a Paradox game, revolutionaries in South East Asia quoting Thomas Paine and waving yellow don't tread on me flags. Either they're with the status quo or they are Red. Anyone that didn't like this was an anti socialist (liberal) "Conservative."
And so it mostly was until 1960s when Identity Politics happened. And it's easy to see why. Gulag Archipelago happened. The Revolution was not happening. In general "left wing people," synonymous with the global project of socialism, were starting to suffer under constant judgment on the value of the USSR. And here comes MLK to offer actual immediate "we're doing something" change with positive results not bolted to the fucking USSR and making you a domestic terrorist in the Cold War. The "progressives" that went with Identity Politics curb stomped old left universal project socialist in popularity and mainstream political power. None of this is woke.
- 2 Identity Politics has mutated as time goes on, it's become the only way to be a progressive, and it's further fused with the establishment as not being threatening to the true economic elite. Hot take: I suspect one origin of Woke is that at some point the mental egregor that makes up the "progressive" mind started grappling with the initial huge wins of non-socialist Identity Politics starting to bring back embarrassing failure. This is very familiar in the "disparate results MUST be the result discrimination" equity vs equality dialog everyone loves to hate. At first you succeed in black school integration, or women entering the work place, but then the black students still aren't the same as white students and the prophesied cure to the Feminine Mystique "Is this all there is?" challenge is less than impressive.
Africa I think is especially illustrative of this. If you were a radical in the 60s you were no doubt psyched that colonialism was finally ending in Africa. And then, constant disappointment and at times utter hell. When you look at the capstone failure of South Africa post apartheid some people no doubt have the thought worm into their head "do black people just suck? Were they really the white man's burden?" And I suspect thoughts such of these has engendered a more anti-rational, authoritarian, purity obsessed, and debilitated but highly performative defensive ethos. To shake off such intrusive thoughts.
It's not all that. I'm sure. But this turned out way too long.
P.S. I guess I kind of wanted to comment in general but used one post. Apologies if this wall of text in an inbox shocks you and seems inappropriate.
TitaniumButterfly
1hr ago
It's just as easy to repeal this law and ban real meat as it was before the ban.
No, there can be a huge amount of institutional inertia. Governments generally do not turn on a dime. And that's just looking at the legal side. Scaling up a fake-meat industry would take a huge amount of time and investment and it can't even get started if there's a ban.
To be clear I'm low-key enthusiastic about lab-grown meat (though I also don't trust food scientists farther than I can throw them). I just took issue with your statement that
if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
37m ago
Always remember, dating for long-term relationships is one of the things where rates mean nothing, a single true success is enough. I also was struggling badly to get any positive attention whatsoever from women until I met my wife.
sliders1234
3hr ago
The evidence synthesized infant formula is bad is entirely from confounded studies showing mothers who breast feed lead to better results. But mothers who breast feed have a lot of other advantages for kids.
I am going to die when leftist looters burn my family alive FC.
I have come across pictures like this, and contemplate that some day in the not-to-distant future, they could very well be my wife and children. But you are claiming certainty. Okay. What are the intermediate steps? What happens, specifically, between here and there? Make your predictions, and we can see how it goes step by step. If it doesn't go the way you're thinking, you can hopefully recognize that you are being irrational. And if it doesn't go the way I'm thinking, I can recognize that I've underestimated the threat. Either would be a positive result, no?
In the meantime... Do you live in a Blue area? If so, you should move. Do you own guns? If not, you should get them, not because they're particularly useful in a fighting-the-blues sense, but because you should have the means to protect your family. More than that you should be building skills and cultivating social networks. I worry about my family being burned alive, but not by looters, because I don't live near potential looter populations, the local authorities look favorably on armed self-defense, I have a strong social network, and my wife and I have plans to improve our position over the next few years.
Any opportunity to win and then mulch them first is worth taking, no matter how bad the odds are (I'm assuming "ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force" means no effective resistance to mop-up mulching after victory, since a random 5% is far too low to include that part)
Why? I hate Blues so much it often keeps me awake at night. But you are claiming you think they're going to kill a significant portion of the US population, and so you need to do it to them "first". Okay, how are they going to do that? What's the sequence of steps? Because we're talking about the power and water going out and the trains stopping, and also incidentally dozens of millions of your friends and neighbors dead. That means you get real poor real fast. that means crime goes through the roof and probably stays there. That means everyone's life gets fucked for the foreseeable future. If you're certain something bad enough to be worth all that is coming, you should necessarily be certain about how we get from here to there. So, how?
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4hr ago
I fail to see how this analogy is remotely appropriate.
The primary reason that people who are vegan/vegetarian (for non-religious reasons, and even plenty of those) condemn the consumption of meat is because their heart aches at the idea of eating cute little animals, with souls, emotions and a life of endless frolicking in the pastures to look forward to. Most of the arguments advanced alongside that primary concern, such as "sustainability" and environmental issues or resource consumption, are there just to buttress their core concern.
I wholeheartedly agree with @Quantumfreakonomics when he says that:
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.
After all, I've repeatedly said much the same myself.
Hence the recent fad, only just losing steam, of feverishly trying to find vegan substitutes for meat products. Impossible Burgers and all that jazz. Vegans, begrudgingly, note that they either like meat or that people who otherwise care dearly about animal welfare are dissuaded by the dullness of a life without nice steaks or a side of ribs to go with it.
So lab grown meat completely cuts the Gordian knot. No cute animals were hurt (or at least far fewer, if you don't look too closely at where fetal bovine serum comes from, but presumably we can avoid that too). What's there left to object to, on primary moral grounds? A chunk of vatgrown muscle tissue is probably less sentient than an equivalent amount of fungi.
But of course, like the environmentalist movement and the cleanest and greenest source of energy we had/have/can have*, nuclear, much of the opposition arises from the abhorrent idea that their self-flagellation and virtue signaling will become entirely redundant. What brownie points do you get for not eating a cow, when the average Joe who just wants to grill is using a steak that's indistinguishable from one made the old fashioned way, tastes just as good, and might even be cost competitive?
We're not there yet, and the last overview I read of the topic suggested it's not going to be easy at all, but the sheer idea that their performative ascetism is moot must gnaw at their bones (veganly).
*Barring fusion, or farming black holes I guess.
epohon
1hr ago
the suffering is not an integral part of the process
I beg to differ. The spite I feel towards vegans improves the pleasure from eating meat. Also the suffering is a bulwark against becoming like that girl featured here recently, who had turned her apartment into a breeding colony for pest insects.
freemcflurry
1hr ago
No, it's easier to ban meat if there is already an alternative. If there is no substitute then passing a ban is a much higher barrier. Lab grown meat is from the electric car playbook: make an inferior substitute to something people like, gaslight theme into thinking it's just as good and then ban the authentic version.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
4hr ago
I presume the primary proponents are persons who prefer to partake of provisions procured without the pain of prey.
(Sorry, got to "proponents" and couldn't help myself.)
Jiro
4hr ago
Lab-grown meat strikes me as like deciding that it's evil to draw pictures of Mohammed, but if you use a special light refraction method, you can have something that looks sort of like Mohammed but doesn't count as a picture for religious purposes, so Muslims lobby for use of this method and dozens of scientists spend millions of dollars figyring out how to get people to accept this method instead of normal photography.
I absolutely agree. I am a hiker and there is unsaid camaraderie among hikers everywhere I go. It is something automatic that kicks in if we are in nature and shit can go down the drain very quickly, we have to help each other out. I personally helped administering first aid to a young girl who fell from her bike when she was on a trip with her mother, while her father was away to catch a signal so he could call for help. I cannot imagine myself saying to my daughter or any female relative not to go hiking - they can encounter a man for Christ sake! While I would certainly be against them - or anybody - going to a spot with known lair of brown bear, you can bet on it.
Young daughter has incredibly high chance of any man to help her if she is stuck in a forest, while if there is only a bear then she will die either to the bear or the wilderness. Any rationally thinking man has to know it.
Crowstep
55m ago
can.
Food has been getting cheaper, we're growing more of it on less farmland since the 1990s, and malnutrition is declining rapidly. There's no reason to expect that all of the trends that have been occurring since the industrial revolution will suddenly reverse, especially since global birth rates (gross) peaked in 2016 and global TFR is about to fall below replacement (if it hasn't already).
HalloweenSnarry
56m ago
I suppose this is the same logic as smart-gun legislation in places like New Jersey?
ResoluteRaven
5hr ago
Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons: Cattle farmers and the meat industry want to kneecap their economic competition, conservatives dread a future where steak is banned and scientists in white coats force feed them pink slime, hardcore vegans think that true commitment to their cause should require sacrifices and this sort of moral shortcut would undermine the whole puritan thing they have going on, economists hate it because it's currently expensive as hell, non-Westerners laugh at the whole enterprise, and environmentalists who can do math insist on switching to insect, soy, or mushroom protein instead.
Really the only groups rooting for its success at the moment are biotech investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, biologists who are overconfident in their ability to pull it off, and the aforementioned liberals and environmentalists who haven't crunched the numbers.
Felagund
2hr ago
Eh, is it actually all that weird to consider rationalist nerds elites?
My sense was that EA, at least, had plenty of money, especially before FTX exploded.
And I'm sure they're having a sizable impact on AI policy.
Quantumfreakonomics
9hr ago
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.
SlowBoy
7hr ago
Ban is a bad policy for getting to the goal.
If I wanted to eliminate lab-grown meat, I'd target the organizations that create it. Open investigations into the researchers and funders looking for political extremism. Target the patentability and profitability of the technologies involved. ("You can't patent chicken!") Publicize the process that creates these products. Labeling doesn't go far enough, you want to associate the components of lab-grown with dangerous chemicals and bad health outcomes. (I think when you look into the science of what they're currently doing, and not the glowing press releases, this is basically the truth.) Banning lab-grown just makes it exotic, and does nothing to stop its development in other localities.
If I wanted to popularize lab-grown meat, I'd start by making it exotic and sexy. Growing chicken and steak might be the ultimate goal, but this is a losing proposition: everybody knows what beef is supposed to taste like. I would develop unusual meats: lab-grown shark fin, panda bear, lion steaks, elephant. These meats would have a winning price-tag compared to "real" meat, and nobody can tell if they're not good enough. Run a promotion where the profits from every $70 "Penguin Steak" go to sustaining Penguin habitats.
I've also thought about opening a shell company that would advertise and sell lab-grown human flesh steaks. Sell a fun and fancy experience of getting to be a cannibal, except it's "ethical". This would generate a lot of publicity and interest. But I'm not actually sure whether that would ultimately be a winning or losing move.
functor
1hr ago
The issue is that we can't have 10 billion peole living a western lifestyle on a finite planet. The amount of water, artificial fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics required for 10 billion people eating meat twice a day is simply not feasible. I don't think anyone is really enthusiastic over bug meat, it is simply an adaption to over population. Personally I would go for fewer people living on less industrially produced meat.
ThenElection
1hr ago
I'm a vegetarian, and I would kill for a nice porterhouse. Although I probably know a couple of vegetarians/vegans who'd probably be upset that they'd lose the moral justification for the defining part of their personality, the large majority would absolutely start eating steak given the chance.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4hr ago
from brewing to mycoprotein cultivation
AIUI, most of these involve single-celled organisms, with their own abilities to fight off rival microbes that animal muscle cells, adapted to the presence of a broader immune system, lack. And for the rest, look at how much the products cost — and that's usually chemicals produced by the organisms rather than the cultured cells themselves. Or how much a financial hit is taken if a vat or batch "goes bad." You'll be required to maintain a food production plant more sterile than a medical lab, at industrial scale.
Again, I read a lot of stuff without remembering where I read it, so I don't have cites on hand, but a quick google search gave this link: "Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story."
It’s a digital-era narrative we’ve come to accept, even expect: Powerful new tools will allow companies to rethink everything, untethering us from systems we’d previously taken for granted. Countless news articles have suggested that a paradigm shift driven by cultured meat is inevitable, even imminent. But Wood wasn’t convinced. For him, the idea of growing animal protein was old news, no matter how science-fictional it sounded. Drug companies have used a similar process for decades, a fact Wood knew because he’d overseen that work himself.
…
Wood couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In his view, GFI’s TEA report did little to justify increased public investment. He found it to be an outlandish document, one that trafficked more in wishful thinking than in science. He was so incensed that he hired a former Pfizer colleague, Huw Hughes, to analyze GFI’s analysis. Today, Hughes is a private consultant who helps biomanufacturers design and project costs for their production facilities; he’s worked on six sites devoted to cell culture at scale. Hughes concluded that GFI’s report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility.
…
“After a while, you just think: Am I going crazy? Or do these people have some secret sauce that I’ve never heard of?” Wood said. “And the reality is, no—they’re just doing fermentation. But what they’re saying is, ‘Oh, we’ll do it better than anyone else has ever, ever done.”
…
GFI’s imagined facility would be both unthinkably vast and, well, tiny. According to the TEA, it would produce 10,000 metric tons—22 million pounds—of cultured meat per year, which sounds like a lot. For context, that volume would represent more than 10 percent of the entire domestic market for plant-based meat alternatives (currently about 200 million pounds per year in the U.S., according to industry advocates). And yet 22 million pounds of cultured protein, held up against the output of the conventional meat industry, barely registers. It’s only about .0002, or one-fiftieth of one percent, of the 100 billion pounds of meat produced in the U.S. each year. JBS’s Greeley, Colorado beefpacking plant, which can process more than 5,000 head of cattle a day, can produce that amount of market-ready meat in a single week.
And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, GFI’s facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse. With hundreds of production bioreactors installed, the scope of high-grade equipment would be staggering. According to one estimate, the entire biopharmaceutical industry today boasts roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume. (1 cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters.) The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of that, just to make a sliver of the nation’s meat.
…
It’s a complex, precise, energy-intensive process, but the output of this single bioreactor train would be comparatively tiny. The hypothetical factory would need to have 130 production lines like the one I’ve just described, with more than 600 bioreactors all running simultaneously. Nothing on this scale has ever existed—though if we wanted to switch to cultivated meat by 2030, we’d better start now. If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
All of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator. That’s where things get complicated. It’s where critics say—and even GFI’s own numbers suggest—that cell-cultured meat may never be economically viable, even if it’s technically feasible.
…
“A key difference in the CE Delft study is that everything was assumed to be food-grade,” Swartz said. That distinction, of whether facilities will be able to operate at food- or pharma-grade specs, will perhaps more than anything determine the future viability of cultivated meat.
The Open Philanthropy report assumes the opposite: that cultivated meat production will need to take place in aseptic “clean rooms” where virtually no contamination exists. For his cost accounting, Humbird projected the need for a Class 8 clean room—an enclosed space where piped-in, purified oxygen blows away threatening particles as masked, hooded workers come in and out, likely through an airlock or sterile gowning room. To meet international standards for airborne particulate matter, the air inside would be replaced at a rate of 10 to 25 times an hour, compared to 2 to 4 times in a conventional building. The area where the cell lines are maintained and seeded would need a Class 6 clean room, an even more intensive specification that runs with an air replacement rate of 90 to 180 times per hour.
The simple reason: In cell culture, sterility is paramount. Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said. “Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event.”
Viruses also present a unique problem. Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.
“There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said. “Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”
If even a single speck of bacteria can spoil batches and halt production, clean rooms may turn out to be a basic, necessary precondition. It may not matter if governments end up allowing cultured meat facilities to produce at food-grade specs, critics say—cells are so intensely vulnerable that they’ll likely need protection to survive.
…
Of course, companies could try. But that might be a risky strategy, said Neil Renninger, a chemical engineer who has spent a lot of time around the kind of equipment required for cell culture. Today, he is on the board of Ripple Foods, a dairy alternatives company that he co-founded. Before that, for years, he ran Amyris, a biotechnology company that uses fermentation to produce rare molecules like squalene—an ingredient used in a range of products from cosmetics to cancer therapeutics, but is traditionally sourced unsustainably from shark liver oil.
“Contamination was an issue” at Amyris, he said. “You’re getting down to the level of making sure that individual welds are perfect. Poor welds create little pits in the piping, and bacteria can hide out in those pits, and absolutely ruin fermentation runs.”
…
The risks are even more dire when it comes to slow-growing animal cells in large reactors, because bacteria will overwhelm the cells more quickly. At the scale envisioned by proponents of cultured meat, there is little room for error. But if aseptic production turns out to be necessary, it isn’t going to come cheap. Humbird found that a Class 8 clean room big enough to produce roughly 15 million pounds of cultured meat a year would cost about $40 to $50 million dollars. That figure doesn’t reflect the cost of equipment, construction, engineering, or installation. It simply reflects the materials needed to run a sterile work environment, a clean room sitting empty.
According to Humbird’s report, those economics will likely one day limit the practical size of cultured meat facilities: They can only be big enough to house a sweet spot of two dozen 20,000-liter bioreactors, or 96 smaller perfusion reactors. Any larger, and the clean room expenses start to offset any benefits from adding more reactors. The construction costs grow faster than the production costs drop.
Also "Is Lab-Grown Meat Commercially Feasible?":
The first of Humbird's grievances is the need for a cheap and plentiful supply of nutrients for the cells. [15] Currently, such cell food is produced for pharmaceutical purposes, so is expensive and not produced in the vast quantities required have cultured meat supplant animal meat on the global market. [15] In fact, nutrients are the currently the most expensive part of cultured meat production. [15] On top of that, the most popular source for key biochemicals needed for proper cell growth is fetal bovine serum (FBS). [16] FBS is harvested (lethally) from unborn cattle after the mother is slaughtered. [16] A replacement for FBS will have to be found to keep the ethics people on cultured meat's side. Additionally, the cells' food would need to be extremely clean. In the case of animal meat, any trace toxins in the animal feed are (mostly) filtered out by the animal's liver, and do not end up in the muscle. However, for cultured meat, the cellular slurry inside the bioreactor has no liver, meaning any toxin left in the feed is put directly on your plate.
An effective scale-up of cultured meat production would also require an incredibly clean work environment. The warm, nutrient-rich bioreactor, ideal for animal cell growth, is also the perfect environment for pathogens (bacteria and viruses). If a single pathogen managed to get a foothold in the bioreactor, it would quickly overwhelm the animal cells, killing the entire batch. This restriction requires labs to be at least Class 6 cleanrooms. [15] Importantly, since that level of sanitation requires all pipes, windows, etc. to be perfectly sealed, as well as ventilation replacing the air 25 times an hour, they get much more expensive with size. Essentially, you can have a large factory or a clean factory. Cultured meat requires both. In animals, pathogens are mostly dealt with by the immune system. Since the cell slurry has no immune system, great care and expense must be invested to ensure the cells' safety.
The final problem I'll discuss is the limits on the size of the bioreactors. Larger bioreactors are more space-efficient, allowing you to have smaller cleanrooms, reducing those sanitation costs. However, larger bioreactors are also more susceptible to disease, since pathogens can ruin the entire batch. Beyond that cost balance lies another problem with larger bioreactors: waste management. When left to their own devices, cells build up waste products which slow down future cell growth. Cycling out this waste effectively is only possible in small bioreactors, requiring more reactors, therefore larger and much more expensive cleanrooms. [15] Another possible solution is to use slow-growing cell cultures, since they are more waste-efficient, however less frequent batches means again more reactors are required, again ratcheting up the price. [15] In animals, waste is extracted via blood vessels. Since cell cultures have no blood vessels, cell waste becomes a problem.
jeroboam
4hr ago
It's all so depressing.
We're banning a future of delicious and nutritious food with zero animal cruelty.
We'll probably end up at a future where we're forced to eat seed oils and government workers are paid to torture animals as a jobs program.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
We can synthesize infant formula but it's not as good as the real thing. We synthesize fake sugar, fake chemical food (by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients). That was instrumental to the global obesity crisis and millions of premature deaths yearly.
Why would we be capable of synthesizing meat that's just as good as real meat? 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. The people who brought us the food pyramid are hardly going to help. After obesity, microplastics and an ongoing crisis of mental illness we should be very wary of any novel synthetic-agricultural processes.
If I, as a male, want to be a bit cheeky, I can actually agree that a random bear is less dangerous to an American woman than a random male.
I call it as absolute bullshit theorizing. And I as an avid hiker I have a proof living in Slovakia, a country full of Brown bears and where we have huge problems with them - including severe injuries and fatal attack in last few months. It actually created quite a controversy, maybe I will make a top level post about that. Just for context, here is a footage of brown bear strolling in a mountain town in broad daylight last month and how such encounter looks like - including encounter with women with strollers. And notice a considerable difference compared to encountering a random male.
If you told some random female hiker in Slovakia that you saw a random a male hiker on a trail she is about to take, she would look at you incredulously. Of course there are male hikers, she meets them all day every day. If you told her that you actually saw a brown bear chilling on the top of the hill, she (or me for that matter) would certainly change our plans. Don't fuck with bears, they are very dangerous and highly unpredictable animals.
The answer women give has nothing to do with actually assessing any kind of danger. At best they are stupid and ignorant, but more likely there is some kind of social game they play. Something along the lines of how even hideous women rate themselves as perfect 10 out of 10 if asked publicly.
Much of Europe? I think is something that is common only in the most lib part of Berlin where all the americanized women and foreign expats gathers. Here vegetarianism is almost unknown, and also in big cities like Bruxelles I have seen meat everywhere, also in èlites institutions canteens.
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