I am pursuing a post-graduate Econ degree in a relatively left-leaning institution in India. While much of the conventional rhetoric doesn't surprise me, what does surprise me is exactly the hubris some professors and students possess, as if they are the ones chosen to solve society's problems without really understanding the complex nature of issues especially in a country like India. As each day passes, Hayek makes more and more sense to me.
I have a modest proposal for ameliorating 'the niche for uncertain, Chesterton Fence-wary' problem.
We need to demand that we get more than 'like' and 'dislike' for articles. There are lots of other labels we would like bettter. 'Made me think' and 'Made me Laugh' are good ones. But 'Backed up with a lot of data' and 'Opinion with no supporting data' and 'Good pub conversation' are other ones. And the author, and the readers could then go out and vote for how solidly they believe in what is being said. I think that a great many authors really only want to have a pub talk, to entertain, to get people thinking, and to enjoy their own minds and its interplay with other minds. There nothing wrong with that! But labels would make things a lot easier for the rest of us who have no clue how seriously to take something that somebody said.
It would be a very nice thing to happen to Twitter, for instance. I wonder if anybody has proposed this idea -- which must have occurred to others, as it is fairly obvious, to Elon Musk? I'd love to get it for substack, but I don't know how or where to suggest such things.
That would be good. I liked it back in the days when Scott A. And some others would preface posts with “epistemic status” to kind of signal how seriously to take the points, etc. Granted, some authors would always put down “word of god” no doubt, but after the fact describing options for readers would help.
I greatly respect the way you treat those with opposing opinons. It makes the blog very interesting. On the other hand if every once in a while you need to let loose, have at it. This was a most enjoyable post.
The plant food agenda is such nonsense. It is evolutionary nonsense: we have evolved to be preferential animal fat and protein eaters: there are no diet-essential carbohydrates. It is environmental nonsense. Pastoralism can be done in a far more sustainable, regenerative and biodiverse way than mono-crop agriculture. Always be sceptical of folk who moralise their food.
We are in no way on an evolutionary path nor is it possible to be on one in our technological society.
While meat may be the optimal path to most effective breeding in a resource limited situation, there is zero evidence it is best given our abundance and even more certainly no evidence it is best for a long and healthy life.
Australopithecines apparently used stones to bash open skulls left by predators and eat the (high fat, highly nutritious) brains and break open bones to suck out the (high fat, highly nutritious) marrow. Hence, we used technology before we were human and adapted that technology to larger and larger prey.
We are adapted to long distance running (to run down prey) not sprinting (to run away from predators: chimps are better sprinters). We are the best throwers in the biosphere because our shoulders are adapted to hurling spears. We don’t have fur and sweat so we can run furry herbivores to exhaustion in the middle of the day when furry carnivores are resting. Hence we have diet essential fats and proteins, but no diet essential carbohydrates.
Animals foods allowed us to shrink our guts, investing more in highly energy-expensive brains, and spend way less time chewing, freeing up time for technology, hunting and socialising. So yes, lots of evidence that meat eating is good for our health.
Stay away from the processed crap (plant or animal), that stuff will undermine your health. Particularly oils made from seeds we have no adaptation to eating and which need intense processing to stabilise (i.e. seed oils).
Evolution does not stop, it just changes its patterns. Technology has been part of our evolution since before we were humans.
We are suffering from huge amounts of evolutionary novelty, as our cultural and technological evolution outruns our genetic evolution. The switch to a processed food diet is having similar ill-effects on our health that switching to a neolithic (farming) diet did.
We are mostly talking about different things. Where that's not true, I'm afraid we disagree.
1 In an important historic sense, evolution has indeed stopped in most of the world. It is no longer true that people with inferior traits are unlikely to procreate and the better adapted have far more offspring. Indeed, in today's world it is often the opposite. It is true that evolution does still continue in a fashion by some cultures having larger families and by increased mixing of races.
2 I was in no way referring to simple tools. I was mostly referring to the abundance our tech provides rather than the tech itself.
3 While meat eating has certain benefits, I disagree that this means it is the best option or the only good option. Maybe, but evidence is weak at best, especially for longevity and long-term health.
4 While farming resulted in some nutrient deficiencies which can be easily overcome in our current society, farming also allowed the world's population to grow beyond a few million hunter-gatherers.
3a farming to increase meat production beyond simple grazing also has a long list of problems, both human health and environmental.
I am not sure about what you mean when you refer to meat. Do you mean being strictly carnivore (which seems to depend on individual genetics and epigenetics) or meat as part of the diet?
The evidence for meat as part of a healthy diet is very strong. Because of so many vegetarians moralising their food, there has been a tendency to under-estimate the level of animal products, including meat, in “blue zone” diets.
Clearly, also, sustainable grazing (which is surprisingly easy to do) is better than the top-soil wearing-away monoculture also-feeding-animals pattern.
It is undoubtedly true that farming has enabled our numbers to hugely increase, but there were trade-offs all the way through on that. More niches but smaller niches.
The environmental case against meat eating as compared to plant food is mostly nonsense (and where it has some legs, it is animal feed that also derives from the problems of agrarian monoculture or that it is no longer possible for 7bn+ humans to operate as foragers).
Most plants are inedible or even poisonous. Even of the bits of plants we can eat, other bits of the same plants are inedible or even poisonous. It is magical thinking to think that the edible bits are just entirely fine. Plants can’t run away, so tend to use the evolutionary equivalent of chemical warfare to discourage eating them, or their “babies” (seeds). That’s why fruits tend to be safer: they are structured to be eaten. Though, even there, there can be questions of what strategy with which species is being pursued by the fruit-providing plant.
It is really not surprising that so many folk find problems with various plant foods. Especially as our abundance means year round, rather than seasonal, consumption. I have developed, late in life, a gluten intolerance (the possibility of later onset I did not realise was a thing). I also find that, if I cut the carbs, I lose weight, if I up my carbs, I gain weight.
I meant meat as part of the diet, similar to the typical American, maybe a bit less. At that consumption rate, there is not nearly enough land for grazing in the US, much less in most of the rest of the world.
Lots of grazing land cannot be used to grow crops, so meat eating has to be a significant part of sustainable food consumption.
One of the striking things about the arguments against meat eating is how they pick up on whatever is currently salient. In the C19th eating meat heated the blood and encouraged lust and masturbation. Now it is bad for your health (despite the fact we have thoroughly evolved to consume it) and destroys the environment (also mostly not true and, where it is, it is by its use of mass cropping, which is a bigger problem).
I believe it's a mistake to make charitable assumptions about the motives of people who won't return the favor.
Teachers are in a position to know perfectly well that the Covid risk, either to children or to themselves from children, is effectively zero. Those who wanted to stop in-person classes, whether they got their way or not, were simply trying to get paid without doing their jobs. They deserve to lose them.
The silver lining is that many parents found out their kids were being indoctrinated, and have the opportunity to put a stop to it.
"I believe it's a mistake to make charitable assumptions about the motives of people who won't return the favor."
What's the downside?
The teachers I know personally felt that virtual classes were more difficult and were award of the educational cost. It was system administrators acting on community and parental pressure that chose virtual classes.
The downside is the same downside of making bad judgments overall. At some point you have to stop being charitable and recognize that someone is not a good person, and that point is when you have sufficient evidence. What counts as sufficient evidence is tricky, and why having good judgement is hard, but one should not be prejudicial and forego the whole process by just assuming something forever.
We may be talking at slightly cross purposes. I may personally believe that X is arguing for wrong position Y out of bad motives. I still think that it makes sense to just argue against the position as if it were being advanced in good faith.
I may think that Republicans don't really care about promoting growth an investment when they run up the deficit to cut taxes on the rich by reducing business taxes, but I'll still just argue that it is a bad policy because (I think) the deficits do more to depress growth than the greater efficiency of investment will overcome. I prefer to argue that they are just making a mistake in the way they are trying to promote growth and investment. Of course one is not always so high minded (hate the sin love the sinner) and I DO often argue that Republican motivations are just to redistribute income to the rich and damn the growth drag of the deficits.
Yes, but you are talking Republicans as a group, not individual people. The group no doubt contains some good and bad people, but the relevant level of judgement is the individual. If someone is not arguing in good faith it is proper to judge them as such and respond appropriately, not continually give them the benefit of the doubt.
Teachers are too sacred. Does too much of the sacred lead to numeracy and rationality being seen as profane? Maybe I should stop quipping about the blessed and saintly accountants and switch to talking about the virtuous and holy food service workers. Although I doubt this would pierce the bubble of sacredness and would just expand it if I actually had any effect whatsoever.
Well, clearly the teachers wanted to be treated like the high-status work-from-home clersy, and not the low-status grocery store workers. In Sweden, at any rate, the elementary school teachers did not get sicker more often or more severely from covid than the general population. 'Taxi drivers' and 'physiotherapists' were the employment categories who did the worst.
Thanks for this note - I'm wondering where a good USA summary of rates of infection and rates of death by occupation, or occupation & age cohort, can be easily found?
I've mostly given up on Matthew, tho he does often have some insight. I prefer Noah Smith for my "crazy Liberal" viewpoint diversity, with more good facts about more good stuff.
‘The workers in the food supply chain put up with the risks.’ And infections were no higher than in the general population, despite close proximity in processing and packing plants and before masks where mandated indoors: in fact infection rates were mostly lower. It’s the community immunity thing. Children are unhygienic creatures and with not yet developed immune systems are well known breeding grounds for all sorts of bugs. Schools are primary spreading vectors during influenza epidemics. CoVid 19 was a disease with a relatively small, specific, elderly, immune suppressed cohort with risk approaching zero to 99+% of the general population. Teachers are at far greater risk from other respiratory viruses and disease-causing bacteria carried and spread in classrooms, than from CoVid 19. That these self-absorbed ignoramuses did not know this, had not taught and informed themselves, is witness to the parlous state of the model teaching so-called profession. If they can’t teach themselves, how can they teach children? As for not getting annoyed with the parade of idiots, that’s why we have a parade of idiots - moral hazard... no cost to be an idiot and they take comfort in their number and are emboldened in the absence of opposition.
If we don’t castigate leaders who were at least mistaken in their policies, what is their incentive to be right in the future. Politicians should pay a political price. Influencers should pay in diminished influence. Yeah, I’m tired of hearing about it too, but correcting mistakes is often more important than getting it right in the first place.
Top gov't officials who publicly declared and supported policies that, privately, they thought the data didn't support - such folk should be fired. Hundreds, thousands. (They won't be, tho; justice not done).
No criminal indictments - that's the amnesty they should get, along with the pink slips.
Re your last paragraph, studies that show that managers who give confident but wrong forecasts are rated as more competent than their peers who provide less confident but ultimately more accurate forecasts. Specifically, in IT project management, the data (and my professional experience), show that manager A in the following scenario is rated more highly:
Manager A says very confidently the project will take 12 months and cost $10 million.
Manager B says their best estimate is the project will take 18-24 months and cost $13-17 million.
The project is completed by either manager in 20 months at a cost of $16 million.
Manager A spins a convincing line about how "unforeseeable events" affected the project.
Manager B assumed their would be unforeseeable events and built those into the estimate.
As a lifelong vegetarian and someone who's tried plant-based "meats", I hope that meat alternatives will continue to be priced and available in response to the market and not become a subsidized virtue signal. The whole fake meat proposition begins from an incorrect assumption. It supposes that non-meat eaters consider themselves deprived. Believe it or not, vegetarians don't wake up each morning aching for bacon or panting for pork chops. Once you've removed meat products from your food consideration set, your brain adjusts to derive equal gratification from non-meat foods. It's all good, and though my wife is cooking up a big turkey for the family today, I myself will leave the table happily replete with all the non-meat dishes on hand, and as ready for a nice digestive nap as anyone.
Agreed, it isn’t about helping vegetarians but about forcing nonvegetarians into the fold, as it were. It is a product no one really desires for themselves, but they want others to substitute in instead of meat. Hence even in times of food shortage the stuff stays on the grocery shelves.
Stay angry my friend. I love that you so openly express frustration and uncertainty. What could be more honest? I agree with about 50% of what you say (teachers are full of it but not so sure voluntary exposure to drag queens does anything good or bad) but I love thinking about it. You being a bit unvarnished helps provoke that thought.
Iglesias often throws out some facile “solution” that involves greater scope and deeper intervention for The Regime. Is he naive or does He know what his audience wants to hear?
We are living in peak selfishness. Unfortunately, I expect humanity will set new record highs in 2023.
The western culture of classical liberalism died when the elite figured out that pandering to the fears and desires of social factions yielded more personal reward than exercising benevolence to all people.
Yglesias and meat. I'm not sure it is incumbent on the person who throws out a policy proposal by counting its benefits also to come up with all the costs. In the specific context he was, as I recall, advancing "develop artificial meat" as an alternative to shaming or taxing people into just not eating meat. Hardly annoying, in my book.
I am pursuing a post-graduate Econ degree in a relatively left-leaning institution in India. While much of the conventional rhetoric doesn't surprise me, what does surprise me is exactly the hubris some professors and students possess, as if they are the ones chosen to solve society's problems without really understanding the complex nature of issues especially in a country like India. As each day passes, Hayek makes more and more sense to me.
I have a modest proposal for ameliorating 'the niche for uncertain, Chesterton Fence-wary' problem.
We need to demand that we get more than 'like' and 'dislike' for articles. There are lots of other labels we would like bettter. 'Made me think' and 'Made me Laugh' are good ones. But 'Backed up with a lot of data' and 'Opinion with no supporting data' and 'Good pub conversation' are other ones. And the author, and the readers could then go out and vote for how solidly they believe in what is being said. I think that a great many authors really only want to have a pub talk, to entertain, to get people thinking, and to enjoy their own minds and its interplay with other minds. There nothing wrong with that! But labels would make things a lot easier for the rest of us who have no clue how seriously to take something that somebody said.
It would be a very nice thing to happen to Twitter, for instance. I wonder if anybody has proposed this idea -- which must have occurred to others, as it is fairly obvious, to Elon Musk? I'd love to get it for substack, but I don't know how or where to suggest such things.
That would be good. I liked it back in the days when Scott A. And some others would preface posts with “epistemic status” to kind of signal how seriously to take the points, etc. Granted, some authors would always put down “word of god” no doubt, but after the fact describing options for readers would help.
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts." – Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell was certainly not full of doubts.
See also: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
You should get annoyed more often! This is a great post.
I greatly respect the way you treat those with opposing opinons. It makes the blog very interesting. On the other hand if every once in a while you need to let loose, have at it. This was a most enjoyable post.
The plant food agenda is such nonsense. It is evolutionary nonsense: we have evolved to be preferential animal fat and protein eaters: there are no diet-essential carbohydrates. It is environmental nonsense. Pastoralism can be done in a far more sustainable, regenerative and biodiverse way than mono-crop agriculture. Always be sceptical of folk who moralise their food.
We are in no way on an evolutionary path nor is it possible to be on one in our technological society.
While meat may be the optimal path to most effective breeding in a resource limited situation, there is zero evidence it is best given our abundance and even more certainly no evidence it is best for a long and healthy life.
Also, there is evidence that our adaptation to a Neolithic (farming) diet wears off as we age.
https://youtu.be/4-9S8M78iRY
Australopithecines apparently used stones to bash open skulls left by predators and eat the (high fat, highly nutritious) brains and break open bones to suck out the (high fat, highly nutritious) marrow. Hence, we used technology before we were human and adapted that technology to larger and larger prey.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701477
We are adapted to long distance running (to run down prey) not sprinting (to run away from predators: chimps are better sprinters). We are the best throwers in the biosphere because our shoulders are adapted to hurling spears. We don’t have fur and sweat so we can run furry herbivores to exhaustion in the middle of the day when furry carnivores are resting. Hence we have diet essential fats and proteins, but no diet essential carbohydrates.
Animals foods allowed us to shrink our guts, investing more in highly energy-expensive brains, and spend way less time chewing, freeing up time for technology, hunting and socialising. So yes, lots of evidence that meat eating is good for our health.
Stay away from the processed crap (plant or animal), that stuff will undermine your health. Particularly oils made from seeds we have no adaptation to eating and which need intense processing to stabilise (i.e. seed oils).
Evolution does not stop, it just changes its patterns. Technology has been part of our evolution since before we were humans.
We are suffering from huge amounts of evolutionary novelty, as our cultural and technological evolution outruns our genetic evolution. The switch to a processed food diet is having similar ill-effects on our health that switching to a neolithic (farming) diet did.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1186&context=nebanthro
And there is a great deal of evidence that meat eating is good for health. For instance, in the cognitive development of children.
https://academic.oup.com/af/article/9/4/50/5575468?login=false
We are mostly talking about different things. Where that's not true, I'm afraid we disagree.
1 In an important historic sense, evolution has indeed stopped in most of the world. It is no longer true that people with inferior traits are unlikely to procreate and the better adapted have far more offspring. Indeed, in today's world it is often the opposite. It is true that evolution does still continue in a fashion by some cultures having larger families and by increased mixing of races.
2 I was in no way referring to simple tools. I was mostly referring to the abundance our tech provides rather than the tech itself.
3 While meat eating has certain benefits, I disagree that this means it is the best option or the only good option. Maybe, but evidence is weak at best, especially for longevity and long-term health.
4 While farming resulted in some nutrient deficiencies which can be easily overcome in our current society, farming also allowed the world's population to grow beyond a few million hunter-gatherers.
3a farming to increase meat production beyond simple grazing also has a long list of problems, both human health and environmental.
I am not sure about what you mean when you refer to meat. Do you mean being strictly carnivore (which seems to depend on individual genetics and epigenetics) or meat as part of the diet?
The evidence for meat as part of a healthy diet is very strong. Because of so many vegetarians moralising their food, there has been a tendency to under-estimate the level of animal products, including meat, in “blue zone” diets.
Clearly, also, sustainable grazing (which is surprisingly easy to do) is better than the top-soil wearing-away monoculture also-feeding-animals pattern.
It is undoubtedly true that farming has enabled our numbers to hugely increase, but there were trade-offs all the way through on that. More niches but smaller niches.
The environmental case against meat eating as compared to plant food is mostly nonsense (and where it has some legs, it is animal feed that also derives from the problems of agrarian monoculture or that it is no longer possible for 7bn+ humans to operate as foragers).
Most plants are inedible or even poisonous. Even of the bits of plants we can eat, other bits of the same plants are inedible or even poisonous. It is magical thinking to think that the edible bits are just entirely fine. Plants can’t run away, so tend to use the evolutionary equivalent of chemical warfare to discourage eating them, or their “babies” (seeds). That’s why fruits tend to be safer: they are structured to be eaten. Though, even there, there can be questions of what strategy with which species is being pursued by the fruit-providing plant.
It is really not surprising that so many folk find problems with various plant foods. Especially as our abundance means year round, rather than seasonal, consumption. I have developed, late in life, a gluten intolerance (the possibility of later onset I did not realise was a thing). I also find that, if I cut the carbs, I lose weight, if I up my carbs, I gain weight.
I meant meat as part of the diet, similar to the typical American, maybe a bit less. At that consumption rate, there is not nearly enough land for grazing in the US, much less in most of the rest of the world.
Clearly, that cannot be true, as the US exports more meat than it imports.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/194711/us-total-meat-imports-and-exports-since-2001/
Lots of grazing land cannot be used to grow crops, so meat eating has to be a significant part of sustainable food consumption.
One of the striking things about the arguments against meat eating is how they pick up on whatever is currently salient. In the C19th eating meat heated the blood and encouraged lust and masturbation. Now it is bad for your health (despite the fact we have thoroughly evolved to consume it) and destroys the environment (also mostly not true and, where it is, it is by its use of mass cropping, which is a bigger problem).
I believe it's a mistake to make charitable assumptions about the motives of people who won't return the favor.
Teachers are in a position to know perfectly well that the Covid risk, either to children or to themselves from children, is effectively zero. Those who wanted to stop in-person classes, whether they got their way or not, were simply trying to get paid without doing their jobs. They deserve to lose them.
The silver lining is that many parents found out their kids were being indoctrinated, and have the opportunity to put a stop to it.
"I believe it's a mistake to make charitable assumptions about the motives of people who won't return the favor."
What's the downside?
The teachers I know personally felt that virtual classes were more difficult and were award of the educational cost. It was system administrators acting on community and parental pressure that chose virtual classes.
The downside is the same downside of making bad judgments overall. At some point you have to stop being charitable and recognize that someone is not a good person, and that point is when you have sufficient evidence. What counts as sufficient evidence is tricky, and why having good judgement is hard, but one should not be prejudicial and forego the whole process by just assuming something forever.
We may be talking at slightly cross purposes. I may personally believe that X is arguing for wrong position Y out of bad motives. I still think that it makes sense to just argue against the position as if it were being advanced in good faith.
I may think that Republicans don't really care about promoting growth an investment when they run up the deficit to cut taxes on the rich by reducing business taxes, but I'll still just argue that it is a bad policy because (I think) the deficits do more to depress growth than the greater efficiency of investment will overcome. I prefer to argue that they are just making a mistake in the way they are trying to promote growth and investment. Of course one is not always so high minded (hate the sin love the sinner) and I DO often argue that Republican motivations are just to redistribute income to the rich and damn the growth drag of the deficits.
Yes, but you are talking Republicans as a group, not individual people. The group no doubt contains some good and bad people, but the relevant level of judgement is the individual. If someone is not arguing in good faith it is proper to judge them as such and respond appropriately, not continually give them the benefit of the doubt.
Well, this is outside my experience. The very few one one one discussions I have had HAVE (I think) been with people of good faith.
Teachers are too sacred. Does too much of the sacred lead to numeracy and rationality being seen as profane? Maybe I should stop quipping about the blessed and saintly accountants and switch to talking about the virtuous and holy food service workers. Although I doubt this would pierce the bubble of sacredness and would just expand it if I actually had any effect whatsoever.
Well, clearly the teachers wanted to be treated like the high-status work-from-home clersy, and not the low-status grocery store workers. In Sweden, at any rate, the elementary school teachers did not get sicker more often or more severely from covid than the general population. 'Taxi drivers' and 'physiotherapists' were the employment categories who did the worst.
Thanks for this note - I'm wondering where a good USA summary of rates of infection and rates of death by occupation, or occupation & age cohort, can be easily found?
“Perhaps I am simply suffering from jealous resentment of his popularity.” Nonetheless, I read every word Arnold says, and just skim Matthew.
I've mostly given up on Matthew, tho he does often have some insight. I prefer Noah Smith for my "crazy Liberal" viewpoint diversity, with more good facts about more good stuff.
‘The workers in the food supply chain put up with the risks.’ And infections were no higher than in the general population, despite close proximity in processing and packing plants and before masks where mandated indoors: in fact infection rates were mostly lower. It’s the community immunity thing. Children are unhygienic creatures and with not yet developed immune systems are well known breeding grounds for all sorts of bugs. Schools are primary spreading vectors during influenza epidemics. CoVid 19 was a disease with a relatively small, specific, elderly, immune suppressed cohort with risk approaching zero to 99+% of the general population. Teachers are at far greater risk from other respiratory viruses and disease-causing bacteria carried and spread in classrooms, than from CoVid 19. That these self-absorbed ignoramuses did not know this, had not taught and informed themselves, is witness to the parlous state of the model teaching so-called profession. If they can’t teach themselves, how can they teach children? As for not getting annoyed with the parade of idiots, that’s why we have a parade of idiots - moral hazard... no cost to be an idiot and they take comfort in their number and are emboldened in the absence of opposition.
If we don’t castigate leaders who were at least mistaken in their policies, what is their incentive to be right in the future. Politicians should pay a political price. Influencers should pay in diminished influence. Yeah, I’m tired of hearing about it too, but correcting mistakes is often more important than getting it right in the first place.
Top gov't officials who publicly declared and supported policies that, privately, they thought the data didn't support - such folk should be fired. Hundreds, thousands. (They won't be, tho; justice not done).
No criminal indictments - that's the amnesty they should get, along with the pink slips.
Re your last paragraph, studies that show that managers who give confident but wrong forecasts are rated as more competent than their peers who provide less confident but ultimately more accurate forecasts. Specifically, in IT project management, the data (and my professional experience), show that manager A in the following scenario is rated more highly:
Manager A says very confidently the project will take 12 months and cost $10 million.
Manager B says their best estimate is the project will take 18-24 months and cost $13-17 million.
The project is completed by either manager in 20 months at a cost of $16 million.
Manager A spins a convincing line about how "unforeseeable events" affected the project.
Manager B assumed their would be unforeseeable events and built those into the estimate.
As a lifelong vegetarian and someone who's tried plant-based "meats", I hope that meat alternatives will continue to be priced and available in response to the market and not become a subsidized virtue signal. The whole fake meat proposition begins from an incorrect assumption. It supposes that non-meat eaters consider themselves deprived. Believe it or not, vegetarians don't wake up each morning aching for bacon or panting for pork chops. Once you've removed meat products from your food consideration set, your brain adjusts to derive equal gratification from non-meat foods. It's all good, and though my wife is cooking up a big turkey for the family today, I myself will leave the table happily replete with all the non-meat dishes on hand, and as ready for a nice digestive nap as anyone.
Agreed, it isn’t about helping vegetarians but about forcing nonvegetarians into the fold, as it were. It is a product no one really desires for themselves, but they want others to substitute in instead of meat. Hence even in times of food shortage the stuff stays on the grocery shelves.
Stay angry my friend. I love that you so openly express frustration and uncertainty. What could be more honest? I agree with about 50% of what you say (teachers are full of it but not so sure voluntary exposure to drag queens does anything good or bad) but I love thinking about it. You being a bit unvarnished helps provoke that thought.
"Someone who takes it upon himself to put on a sexual display in front of little children is a pervert, by definition."
Based
Iglesias often throws out some facile “solution” that involves greater scope and deeper intervention for The Regime. Is he naive or does He know what his audience wants to hear?
We are living in peak selfishness. Unfortunately, I expect humanity will set new record highs in 2023.
The western culture of classical liberalism died when the elite figured out that pandering to the fears and desires of social factions yielded more personal reward than exercising benevolence to all people.
Yglesias and meat. I'm not sure it is incumbent on the person who throws out a policy proposal by counting its benefits also to come up with all the costs. In the specific context he was, as I recall, advancing "develop artificial meat" as an alternative to shaming or taxing people into just not eating meat. Hardly annoying, in my book.