domain:alexberenson.substack.com
SteveKirkland
4m ago
I've always wondered how much reprovisioning affected their judgement. The tortoise would have been their first fresh meat after months at sea depleted their stocks of everything except dried peas and biscuits full of weevils. Hunger is the best spice, after all.
TIRM
5m ago
Okay. So it is not 100.0% parasitism. But are they economically net positive? The US East coast ultra orthodox communities that I'm vaguely aware of are net negative if I understand correctly. As you say, they subsist on welfare fraud and have large families of severely inbred special needs children.
dukeleto
5m ago
I generally agree with this sentiment, but I think that the panic is also partly being driven by the fact that young Jewish Americans also don’t seem to be that big on Zionism either. I haven’t seen any numbers, but just the fact that these protests erupted at Columbia makes me strongly suspect that a fair number (which I define as a greater % than you would get if you just sampled the population randomly) of the pro Palestinian protesters are probably American Jews.
jericho
9m ago
Galapagos Tortoises are apparently tasty enough that it was a real problem getting living specimens back because they kept getting eaten.
I'm sure their deliciousness was at least somewhat exaggerated due to hunger being the best sauce, but they were certainly praised highly.
The 17th-century English pirate, explorer, and naturalist William Dampier wrote, "They are so extraordinarily large and fat, and so sweet, that no pullet eats more pleasantly,"[136] while Captain James Colnett of the Royal Navy wrote of "the land tortoise which in whatever way it was dressed, was considered by all of us as the most delicious food we had ever tasted."[137] US Navy captain David Porter declared, "after once tasting the Galapagos tortoises, every other animal food fell off greatly in our estimation ... The meat of this animal is the easiest of digestion, and a quantity of it, exceeding that of any other food, can be eaten without experiencing the slightest of inconvenience."[102]
FD4280
20m ago
English is much less conducive to good lyrics in the first place. Weird Al Yankovic is the only example that comes to mind (but he sometimes does a fantastic job): https://youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg&pp=ygUOYW1pc2ggcGFyYWRpc2U%3D
2rafa
31m ago
Would this change things?
I suppose that depends on whether you consider the defining cause of the loss of white tribal identity to be those
anthropologists and social scientists
rather than something that precedes them.
What does Shia LaBeouf tell us, who has a much larger cultural influence?
I don’t think it tells us anything, but historically Jews converting to Christianity has been much more common than Christians converting to Judaism.
Dumping an EA veganism quote for people to reference.
Vegan advocacy can spur the transition sooner. I submit that one of the most important efforts that Effective Altruists could be doing is triggering the veganism S-curve, i.e. reaching the tipping point earlier. It’s a unique S-curve in that it’ll be both technologically and socially driven. In this post, I delve into the social component and the impact that individuals and institutions could have by steering toward more uncompromisingly vegan diets.
I see the transition reaching completion when all mainstream restaurants and institutions serve 100% vegan meals due to significant demand from consumers. I expect stragglers such as Chick-Fil-A, who doubled down on their stance against same-sex marriage. But for the most part, I expect all progressive-leaning institutions to switch over. Eventually, the Ivy League universities, the Apples/Googles, and leading newspapers will cease serving animal products in their dining halls/events.
The biggest tipping point can occur through institutions. Jacy Reese Anthis’ great book The End of Animal Farming emphasizes the tractability of advocating toward institutions. Imagine the cascading effect if Harvard University or The New York Times had a full vegan mandate, e.g. vegan food for all events, dining, and travel expenses. Those would be big jumps in some of the values above, e.g. D. Institutions are sensitive to social winds as we saw during the MeToo and George Floyd movements. For example, the Golden Globes was effectively annihilated for not acting fast enough on inclusivity.
But there is room for flexitarianism. What matters is hardline vegan demand on planned occasions. A flexitarian may have a vegan Wednesday, in which case, the same awkward restaurant interaction may play out then. I see D as the proportion of occasions where the vegan demand occurs. Whether it’s a binary or tailing distribution among people is immaterial. Newly elected mayor Eric Adams started Vegan Fridays at New York City public schools. I anticipate this having a positive, significant effect on the S-curve transition
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.
Phosphorus
33m ago
if the bear wants to kill you, you will die. they can all climb trees. if they couldnt you wont climb fast enough. if you could climb fast enough it will wait at the bottom of the tree.
Afaik, only 3 kinds of bears attack humans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_bear_attacks_in_North_America
bears attack for lots of reasons
And they don't climb trees
"polar bears in trees" -> google image search
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
34m ago
Can't say I have. My experience with the bus begins and ends with taking it from one stop on the side of the street to another. I'm not saying they're necessarily unusual, just that I've never interacted with one.
SteveKirkland
35m ago
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.
DradisPing
42m ago
You've never seen anything like this?
Where each of those signs is a departure point for a different bus route. I didn't realize it was unusual.
1/100 encounters resulting in attack sounds like a lot? I looked at the citation for that and the statistic is based one naturalist's observations of his own encounters during a period of study. It's more accurate to say, of this one man's 270 encounters with bears during his study on bears, he was only attacked 1% of the time. I assume this researcher is experienced in the field, knows what to look for, and maintains awareness of his surroundings. Your average person may have different results if they were to stumble upon, rather than seek out, 270 bear encounters in the woods. Even so, 1% still sounds like a lot. There's got to be a few Alaskan bushmen who have had hundreds of encounters without an attacks. Probably because they stay the hell away.
Bear behavior in an encounter relies on a lot of different factors. Distance, whether either part is surprised, what time of the year it is, male or female, whether it has cubs nearby, how hungry it is, etc. The infamous Grizzly Man guy (and his girlfriend) were attacked and eaten by a hungry, sickly, aging bear at the end of feeding season.
A person's behavior will influence the outcome as well. The author of the study aggressively yelled at two bears that attacked him which scared them off of the charge. Do bears do false charges? I know my regional black bears can be pretty responsive to aggression. He doesn't differentiate if so.
In a third instance:
In the second case, a female was defending young. My companion and I disturbed her cub. The cub ran away, but the mother jumped out of the brush, knocking me down, destroying my pack on my back, and then walking away slowly. I played dead; maybe it saved my life.
Lucky guy! Bears are cool. Way cooler than bear vs. bad man discourse.
"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.
Skibboleth
45m ago
Free Market Conservatism strikes again. This is primarily about protecting the economic interests of agrarian elites, secondarily about visceral disgust, and little bit about aesthetic anti-environmentalism. Other reasons offered are not necessarily insincere, but they are... noncentral? Which is to say, having them conclusively disproven wouldn't change many minds.
“Although the FDA has said that this type of product is safe, that doesn’t mean it’s healthy,” Black said. “In Florida, we don’t want our citizens used as guinea pigs.”
Far be it from Florida to allow its citizens to pursue unhealthy habits.
Justin Tupper, president of the United States Cattlemen’s Association, called the bill a “win” for similar reasons. Although he said he doesn’t fear competition, he is concerned about chemicals in the new product.
-
But Rossmeissl and Shapiro said there’s little merit to health concerns, because cultivated meat has near identical nutritional value to real meat. Furthermore, conventional meat often has fecal and intestinal pathogens, and antibiotic residues, that need to be cooked out for safe consumption, Shapiro said.
SteveKirkland
48m ago
It's funny how they missed a profitable startup niche because of the deliberate rush to "NORMALIZE" vat-grown meat (in the leftist Twitter sense of "normalize X", meaning to make mandatory through social pressure and regulations).
They couldn't start with exotic meats for rich people because the funders wanted it to be a 1-1 replacement for burgers and chicken cutlets instead, and being a niche product would have undermined their moral power.
remzem
53m ago
Probably just lobbyists? Farmer lobby is big money and Fetterman seems very willing to go to bat for his donors even if it goes against progressive dogma.
Seems like an accidental good thing though. Lab meat© would have a lot of the same issues GMOs have, not so much health impacts, but legal impacts that put control of the food supply increasingly in the hands of our would be masters. With our climate too delicate to handle cow farts lab meat© becoming competitive would give authoritarian centralizing forces a better argument to ban meat. Or maybe just put carbon taxes on cows and subsidize meat© to the point no one can make a profit on meat and all the farms go under. Then an entire section of the food pyramid will require specialized clean rooms and labs to even exist. Things that the average person will not have access to.
Pynewacket
58m ago
Straight men having a lot of sex is praiseworthy
Because it's an accomplishment. The opposite is easy.
I'm often a bit confused by people's understanding of segregation.
Suppose you have two populations living in the same area. Population A is clean, efficient, industrious, honest, largely non-aggressive, respectful, intelligent, and so on. Population B is the opposite of all of those things. But, both populations are Christians.
Pop A notices that when they let people from Pop B roam around their neighborhoods, things get damaged, things go missing, people get attacked, garbage is left everywhere, people get creeped out by weird and threatening behavior, etc.
Over time instead of living near each other they start to live side-by-side. In places where Pop B shows up in any significant numbers, everything falls apart very quickly. Schools become dangerous and dysfunctional because Pop B kids hit puberty sooner, are much more violent, much less intelligent, and generally vastly more disruptive. So Pop A families have to pull their kids out of school. Ugly and inconvenient security measures are suddenly installed in stores where Pop B types tend to shop. Suddenly none of the bathrooms have mirrors in them any more (because they get broken) and graffiti is everywhere. Litter is everywhere. Stores start shutting down. Rates of violent crime skyrocket. Home invasions, once nearly unheard of, become all too commonplace. Little boys are beaten to death for fun. Little girls are raped, sometimes to death. Elderly women tortured to death for sport inside their own homes in once-safe neighborhoods. Social safety nets become overburdened and then collapse because it turns out that, on average, Pop B people extract vastly more resources from the system than they ever put in, such that it takes several Pop A people's excess wealth to support them. Pop B people destroy the housing Pop A gave them out of generosity. They begin to strip and dismantle the local infrastructure to sell off for money for status symbols and cheap thrills. Pretty soon the only choice Pop A people have for the sake of their very lives and the futures of their children and community is to pack up and leave and try to settle somewhere new without as many Pop B people around. This is maybe okay for the wealthy, since they can afford to. The poor are now stuck in a dystopian hellscape which was once a beautiful, thriving, cohesive community, and rapidly find themselves outnumbered. I could go on in this vein for quite some time; there is much we have not touched upon.
Or.
Or Pop A can look at Pop B, say "We love you and we're happy to worship together, but our kinds are not configured to live together. We'll still help when we can -- but at a distance." (In this scenario, both are Christian, remember, and even act like it inasmuch as any of us can.)
The key thing here is that segregation was not set up to maintain racial hierarchy; it was set up in recognition of existing and immutable racial hierarchy.
Pop A could step in and manage Pop B's reproduction, of course, so as to bring them up to approximate parity within a few generations. But this would mean preventing the overwhelming majority of them from reproducing, which is going to entail all kinds of hideous particulars which I hardly think will be more popular than the clean, simple, humane solution of just living apart.
Look at what integration did to integrated communities and cities. Look at the good things that were lost. Look at the lives and livelihoods destroyed. Look at the collapse of politics into a racial spoils system. Look at what happened.
So, three options:
-
Segregation -- tried and true, works pretty well, allows Pop A to thrive and Pop B to benefit from their largesse to a degree unimaginable in Pop B's homeland without Pop A intervention. Pop B is healthier, better-educated, better-fed, and safer than they ever could have managed on their own.
-
Get rid of Pop B by deportation or forced selective breeding. Sucks for almost all of Pop B but at least some of them will go on to join society as equals.
-
Watch as the entire system goes to pieces, there are fewer and fewer places for Pop A to run, integration ruins everything insidiously through innumerable subtle channels until Pop A's forgotten that things ever even used to be any better. Welcome to South Africa, and more and more Western countries all the time.
None of these options is good. But option 1 stands out to me as a clear winner. I can sympathize with people who prefer option 2 even if I'd rather do it more softly and gradually through market forces. I have zero respect for those who champion option 3 and treat anyone who disagrees with them as irredeemably evil or somehow non-Christian. As though anything else were unthinkable.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1hr ago
That's almost a prisoner's dilemma, but I suppose technically counts as Chicken. You're doing a (very slightly) negative sum interaction in order to siphon zero sum rewards away from other people. Nash equilibrium, everyone does this and ends up worse off than if they just respected the queue. (Although I suppose queues themselves are a bit of a prisoner's dilemma with respect to arrival time)
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Mammoth DNA exists well enough to in-theory be cloned. Green sea turtles are legendarily tasty. Bear meat is hard to get but supposedly pretty good.
SteveKirkland
1hr ago
If there were groups trying to mandate a jellybean and vodka diet for everyone out of moralist zealotry, I would be 1000% in favor of a jellybean ban as a first step towards eliminating the group entirely. As long as it was followed up by extrajudicial home raids on anyone who was detected funding opposition to the ban.
sun_the_second
1hr ago
Yes.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Impossible burgers just aren’t very good, though- I tried one on a Friday(they got rolled out in restaurants near me right before lent, probably for that reason) and decided to go back to fish thereafter.
I’m curios what did Hasidic Jews used to do? Well fare is a pretty new invention, where they just like Amish who did subsistence farming?
More options
Context Copy link