Monday, March 18, 2024

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing


Kindle notes for Hank Green's An Absolutely Remarkable Thing*:


I’m going to attempt to come at this account honestly, but I’ll also admit to a significant pro-me bias.

The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and frightened and weak is amazing.

the average middle-class person in the US is one of the 3 percent richest people in the world.

When you get stuck fighting small battles, it makes you small.

no matter how much you proofread, the first time you open the final version of your book, you will find a typo on the very first page you look at. Ugh.

Humans are terrible at believing reality.

More people died in car accidents on July 13 than in those bombings.

We are irrational beings, easy to manipulate if you’re willing to do whatever it takes.


* Note: both Anne and I liked this novel much more than the sequel, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Weekend Reading: The Case against TikTok

 

Following up on this from Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias makes a longer case. (Even Kevin Drum can make the case.)

The more important point is that TFG is clearly a paid agent of China (as well as an agent of Russia, paid or not). 

Thursday, March 14, 2024

"Filth" - More on what's at stake



Is any of the below more important than Biden's age? Especially after he kicked ass in SOTU?

Via Andrew Tobias:

TRUMP’S MAN IN NORTH CAROLINA

Trump calls the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

“I think you’re better than Martin Luther King,” he told Mark Robinson at a rally in Greensboro, N.C., last weekend. “I think you are Martin Luther King times two.”

The INK offers a compendium of Robinson’s views: on the Holocaust (“hogwash”), women (not suited for leadership), abortion (eliminate it entirely), gays (“filth”), Parkland school-shooting survivors (“prosti-tots”).

Frank Bruni lays out The Grotesque Rise of Mark Robinson.

Trump’s choice.  The Republican Party’s choice.  Scary times. ...

Equal Rights Not Fair (20 seconds): the MAGA view.

Also:  The anti-abortion playbook for restricting birth control

Monday, March 11, 2024

The End of Veganism, from Losing My Religions


I’m a level-five vegan.

I don’t eat anything that casts a shadow.
Jesse Grass to Lisa Simpson, mocking her mere vegetarianism




When the weather turned briefly cooler a while back, Anne and I did a taste-test of the Beyond Meat chicken tenders versus Impossible Foods’ chicken nuggets. I blogged about this and posted the blog on social media. (Excerpt from blog: On Beyond's package, they loudly say “NO GMO’s.” I remember listening to multiple interviews with Beyond’s Ethan Brown, who said, “People tell us they don’t want GMOs.” I have to say, with all due respect, you are talking to the wrong people, Mr. Brown. What people want is cheap meat. Full stop.)

The picture that came along with those social posts was a bag of the Impossible Foods nuggets, winner of the taste test. (Anne still prefers Gardein’s.) That picture prompted some vegans to think that the best use of their time was to angrily comment about how Impossible’s products AREN’T VEGAN! This is because their plant-derived heme – the ingredient Impossible uses to give their beef products that slight “metallic,” bloody taste – had been tested on animals so it could be approved by the FDA.

So: Animal killing that is somehow connected to a company at any point = all their products are NOT VEGAN!

But of course, harvesting “vegan” food kills many animals. Rodent control programs on farms growing vegan food and in facilities producing vegan food kill many animals. Trucks transporting products kill many animals. And so on.

I briefly tried to reply constructively. (“I understand that you’re upset about this. But I don’t care if something is vegan. I only care about what can actually help a lot of animals.”) As is always the case, engaging enrages them further.

Of course, NOT VEGAN Impossible Foods has helped many animals by producing products chosen by people who would otherwise eat animal meat. But it sure hasn’t made them popular with (many) vegans. (“The Impossible Burger Debate Was A Test For Vegans, And We Failed.”)
 
“Vegans or animals” is what ended my career. “Vegans or animals” was the driving force behind our current very non-vegan organization, One Step for Animals. I’ve seen this dynamic for the 35 years since I first stopped eating animals. It took me quite a while to recognize it, being in the vegan bubble myself. But if looked at objectively and without personal ego invested or identity involved (which is not easy) the reality is clear:
 

Veganism has been terminally poisoned by people obsessed with protecting their vegan identity.

 
For this very vocal and visible minority – and yes, it is only a minority of vegans – veganism is only about them and defending their strict rules of being “vegan.” (Or “Vegan,” as some write it.)

At least this is true in the United States. From my time in Germany, for example, it doesn’t seem to be the case there. While editing this chapter, I came across Kenny Torrella’s “How Germany is kicking its meat habit” at Vox. But Deutschland shows the “unintended consequences” of focusing on meat instead of animals: Although per-capita meat consumption is down there, each German is consuming one more factory-farmed animal than ten years ago [2022]. That means that despite a large drop in meat consumption, many millions more animals are suffering on factory farms. Not cool.

Another perfect example of (some) vegans caring about themselves über alles:
 

One: Publicly refuse to eat animals – live vegan

Two: Publicly refuse to sit where people are eating animals

Three: Encourage others to take the pledge

–The Liberation Pledge


Doesn’t that say it all? “Publicly refuse to sit where people are eating animals.” So it isn’t just about the purity of what you consume, but also the purity of anything you see.

Of course, this removes opportunities to actually help animals, because the only way to actually help animals is by being with non-vegans and persuading them to take animals into consideration.

The Liberation Pledge is only one example. My pal Ken recently suggested I listen to an interview with a “vegan advocate” he thought I’d like. In the interview, it was all “advocating veganism,” “promoting veganism,” “making veganism mainstream,” “repeating the case for veganism over and over.” The advocate went on to say his new book was going to be the comprehensive and irrefutable case for veganism.

If only someone had thought of that before.

I wonder how many vegan advocates actually listen to what they are saying. It is all about promoting their diet, their lifestyle, their beliefs. Not actually about animals.

Back in 2016, I was excommunicated from the national animal rights conference and fired from my full-time job. My sin? Quoting, with source, what celebrity chef Anthony Bordain said about vegans. With all the suffering in the world, and all the many people allowing and even perpetuating this cruelty, it was a founder of One Step for Animals who became the bête noire for Gary and his fellow fanatics.

In case it isn’t clear: I did not say anything bad about vegans. I was merely noting what a famous celebrity said about vegans. And for that, I was banned.

That is truly some insecure theocratic bullshit.

Paul and I have a saying: The biggest impediment to the spread of veganism is vegans. While I was writing this today, he sent me yet another news story to prove it: A vegan saying drinking pee as the key to longevity. (There was once a table at Vegetarian Summerfest promoting this.)

Don’t get me started.

Over a quarter century ago, our Best Man Mark said, “I grow weary of the term ‘vegan.’ It has just become a label for moral superiority.” And he said this after being a founding board member of our national vegan group.

You might wonder why I’m so strident in my attack on the vegan fanatics, especially since I’m on good drugs and supposedly so mindful.

It is because I helped create them.

Of course, even before Jayne went on her crusade, some vegans have hated me. Eventually, even my long-time best pal turned on me for annoying the Vegan Police. But despite all my efforts to make the focus actually helping animals, I did spend two decades working every day to build up a “vegan” group.

Oops.

It would be one thing if “vegan first, vegan only” was actually helping animals. But if promoting veganism worked – if the next leaflet, book, video, movie, website was really going to make a difference – we would have seen it by now.

How do I know? Because I did the projections.

​Decades ago, I calculated what would happen if every vegan converted just one other person every five years. Have we seen anything like that? No. When Animal Charity Evaluators did the most thorough metastudy of surveys about vegetarianism and veganism, they found: “Around 1% of adults both self-identify as vegetarians and report never consuming meat. [This is important because many people call themselves “vegetarian” but still eat meat.] It seems that this percentage has not changed substantially since the mid-1990s.” [The mid-1990s being when we started our vegan group.]

What I didn’t realize when I built those projections was that the vast majority of people who “go vegan” subsequently quit veganism. Unbiased surveys show that over 80% revert. (And then, of course, spend the rest of their lives badmouthing veganism.)

Why? One survey of former vegans found that the top reason for quitting was that they couldn’t take the pressure to maintain the level of purity demanded by other vegans. Again, vegans are “the greatest impediment” to the growth of veganism.

But really, vegans don’t matter. It is irrelevant how many vegans there are.

The only thing that matters is how much suffering there is.

Think about it. If you were to promote a position that would lead to more suffering than an alternative, would you do so? There might be strange edge cases, but choosing to create more suffering than an available alternative strikes me as pretty much the very definition of immoral.

And on that measure, the world has gotten way worse for non-human animals since Anne and I stopped eating animals and co-founded a group promoting veganism. On average, every person in the United States eats more animals today than ever before in history. This is true globally as well. Those are the simple, bottom-line facts, the facts that all vegan advocates have to answer for.

Everything I’ve learned indicates the United States would be a better place for animals if we ended veganism.

Not that you should eat animal products. (You can, as we’ll get to. [Later in the book.]) But we should never utter or use the word “vegan” again.

Still think we need to promote “vegan”? A 2017 survey found that vegans are viewed more negatively than atheists, immigrants, homosexuals, and asexuals. The only group viewed more negatively than vegans is drug addicts. Another 2017 survey found, “Meat-eaters are being put off going veggie because of certain aggressive vegans.” In 2018 – the year I stopped collecting these stories – researchers found that “vegan” is the single worst word you can possibly use to describe a product – worse than “diet,” “sugar-free,” or “low-calorie.”

As a long-time reader noted:
 
I’ve become almost embarrassed to say I’m vegan ... not because of what it stands for, but because of the negative impression people have been left with due to other vegans and their negative behavior and words.

I talk about this more, with many documenting links and graphs, in my 2017 post, “How Vegans Hurt Animals.” In that blog, I go into more about why vegans are so unpopular. (Tl;dr: It is because they are [justifiably] rage-filled and just can’t get past that.) It is my second-most-popular post of all time, having been hate-linked by many vegans in their ongoing campaigns against me.

Think about it this way: If we want to help animals, why would we use – let alone promote – a word that has such negative baggage? A word that makes people think of pee drinkers, screamers in restaurants, and terrorists. (The latter is what Anthony Bourdain called them.)

What reason could there be to use that word? What possible reason, other than an unwillingness to put helping animals first?

So what is the alternative?

We could and should put the focus entirely and always on the others who need our help.

I certainly don’t think it would hurt if we were all “animal advocates” instead of “vegans” or “vegan advocates.” Never talk about ourselves, never talk about our diet, never talk about our rules or dogma.

It should never be about us.

And of course, I say this as a person who cofounded Animal Liberation Action but allowed the name to be changed to be about veganism instead.

Sorry.


PS: Since it is unlikely everyone will take my advice above, a variety of admirable people are working to support current vegans, in part to lower the recidivism rate and also change the public’s view of vegans. World of Vegan is the prime exemplar of this.


PPS: In case it isn’t clear, I’m not “Vegan.” I’ll outsource this to Vincent, the head of One Step for Animals, Australia, who blogs at theanimalist.medium.com:

Even if all vegans were nice and friendly, the point of my article is that veganism in itself as a movement is not something I want to be a part of. A broader, more inclusive approach focusing more on the animals and less on every detail of an individual’s current lifestyle is more effective. Either way, [veganism] remains nothing but a tool amongst many that can be used against speciesism, for animal rights. It isn’t a goal, and it shouldn’t be a dogma (a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true).

“I have called myself a vegan and worked at changing veganism, but I have come to the conclusion that veganism is what it is and that it is a closed club, which is detrimental when it turns it into a rigid dogmatic venture based on personal purity and exclusion. Veganism as a movement to fight speciesism is not something I embrace or even condone any more.

“I still don’t consume sentient animals and their by-products and I still want to encourage others to do likewise, in a friendly and pragmatic manner. Promoting an animal-friendly lifestyle is a tool, not an end.”

 

Or, as Margaret Atwood put it on Ezra Klein’s podcast:
 
Is it about how virtuous you are?
Or is it about actually trying to better conditions?



Find the rest of the book at LosingMyReligions.net


Also published on One Step for Animals' website

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Theory of Change: "But this time will be different!"


Green Day - Minority


From Matt Yglesias:

When activists do things like throw soup on the Mona Lisa to protest climate change, it barely even seems worth delving into a detailed argument about why this is unlikely to generate useful reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions. It’s like believing that if you shoot William McKinley, global capitalism will collapse.

And I think there really is common intellectual DNA here.

The activist shop Momentum, which incubated the Sunrise Movement and has trained a lot of other young progressives, advocates an organizing model that stipulates that disruptive actions will help build popular support for a cause. I have no idea why they think that’s true — if anti-abortion protestors shut down a major art museum demanding a national ban on abortions, I think that would make them look scarier and even more extreme. But it’s basically Propaganda of the Deed, with the violence toned down.

Friday, March 8, 2024

Weekend Reading: Personal Finance Rules

 

Will Ackerman: The Impending Death of the Virgin Spirit


Anne about to enter The Void.


This
 list of personal finance rules is not a substitute for Andrew Tobias' The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need (or even TBTSNBN) but it is really good. Worth reading (I don't agree with everything). My edited (their list has much redundancy) summary list (with my own additions):

  1. Always Pay Off the Credit Card
  2. Spend within Your Means
  3. Prioritize
  4. Live a Little
  5. Understand How Emotions Impact Financial Decisions / Understand How to Make Good Financial Decisions
  6. Recognize the Relationship Between Money and Time 
  7. Never Loan Money to Family or Friends
  8. "Diversity" in Portfolio Is Overrated
  9. Don't Project Current Conditions into the Future

The last two are from me. #8 - for example: you are told to hold more in bonds the closer you get to retirement because they are (supposedly) less volatile. But the last few years have shown that not to be true. Our bond funds were down as much as our stock funds but without the upside in good years. We used to have target-date funds, and those suck (not just performance, but also the "management" expenses).

Re: 9: I'm writing this when the markets are hitting irrational highs. (Our couple of shares of Nvidia stock - recommended by our pal Ken - is up more than 1000% on - crazy. Truly crazy.) I wrote TBTSNBN when the market wasn't doing well: 

Don’t pay attention to the market. There will be several scary financial times in your life. As an earning adult, I’ve lived through 1987’s Black Monday, the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000, the collapse following 9/11, the Great Recession of 2007-08, the market cataclysm early on in covid, and the current (2022) bear market. The worst thing you can do is react to market conditions. The best thing you can do is keep to your investment schedule no matter what. Some of the best market gains follow the worst declines.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

The other Matt on how to end liberalism (and Debbie Downers)



(Please also see and share: Debbie Downer progressives aren't helping)

The rise of cosmopolitanism and the crisis of liberalism

How much can a democracy ask voters to care about non-citizens?

excerpts:

Suppose someone proposed the following policy idea: an immediate 35 percent cut in Social Security benefits that would eliminate more than 100 percent of the program’s existing funding gap, with the extra money saved dedicated to highly effective public health programs in poor countries. The programs recommended by GiveWell (where we send 10 percent of your subscription fee — thank you for your support!) save lives for a few thousand bucks a pop and provide some ancillary health benefits. These are very beneficial, cost-effective programs, and more funding would save a lot of lives.

This idea would, obviously, be politically catastrophic. ...

Right now, if I say “giving money to promote rigorously evaluated public health programs in poor countries is an admirable thing to do,” I think most people would be inclined to agree. But if we had a hot-button political conversation about cutting Social Security to support Vitamin A supplementation, opponents wouldn’t want to just say “well, I’m selfish so I don’t want to do it.” The backlash would involve people making the claim that Vitamin A supplementation is actually bad. We’ve already seen Marc Andreesen, because he disagrees with some prominent effective altruists about AI safety, promoting absurd theories that helping poor kids avoid malaria is bad. ...

David Frum wrote a piece in 2019 that really bugged me, titled “If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.”

His point was that if you decide it’s constitutive of liberalism to espouse humanitarian values toward foreigners seeking refuge, then ultimately, the mass public will decide that means they need to reject liberalism. So if you want to save liberalism, you’d better come up with some other theory.

I did not like this idea. I found it to be a bitter pill to swallow, in part because I find the right-wing attitude toward this question of border security to be really irrational and weird. ...

But this is where the Social Security thought experiment helped me see what Frum was saying — that idea is so obviously a non-starter that nobody pushes for it, and if they did, it would be a kind of right-wing provocation to own the libs. I could imagine Tyler Cowen or some other smart libertarian writing about this as a way to criticize the idea of the welfare state. And conversely, I could even tell you from college political philosophy classes where to go to get an official defense of the proposition that it’s okay to prioritize domestic over global redistribution, even though the global poor are poorer. That’s John Rawls’ view as outlined in “The Law of Peoples,” and he further argues in “Political Liberalism” that this should hold true as your political philosophy, even if in your personal worldview you are a cosmopolitan consequentialist. Just as we ask a Muslim or a Mormon to set aside their religious convictions about alcohol and try to formulate policy ideas about booze grounded in secular public reason, we should ask cosmopolitans to come to the table with arguments grounded in the public reason of national interest.

One thing I’ve changed my mind on over the years is I used to be the kind of person who looked askance at “billionaire philanthropy” as a kind of poor alternative to democratic politics. But I now think there are lots of things — like helping the neediest people in the world — that you can’t reasonably expect democratic politics to accomplish, and it’s appropriate to count on private charitable undertakings to fulfill some of those values.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

What do people know and why don't they know it?


Here is my question. What percentage of the electorate in the six swing states know these facts:

1. Hunter Biden is a criminal and drug addict.

2. Donald Trump was found guilty of sexual assault.

3. Donald Trump was found guilty of fraud.

4. Donald Trump has multiple fines against him totaling over half a billion dollars.

4. Donald Trump personally killed a bipartisan bill to secure the border - a bill endorsed by the Border Patrol Union, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

5. Donald Trump has been barred from doing business in NY.

6. Joe Biden is 5% older than Trump. Biden eats healthy and exercises. TFG thinks exercise is bad and is famous for chowing fast food.

7. Inflation is way down.

8. Unemployment is historically low.

9. Republicans' star witness lied about bribes paid to Hunter and Joe Biden.

This is the problem, IMO. All people hear is the narrative: Biden is old, everything is terrible. They don't hear the facts. This is Ds fault as much as the Republican-owned media. Really, only Kevin Drum [update from Drum after the above was published] and Andrew Tobias (and Hannah Ritchie re: "doom") are pushing back. and Colbert.

Monday, March 4, 2024

I wish I had been wrong, but here we are


Of course, when push comes to shove, most right-wingers are "pro-life" for others, but not for themselves. 

The great rationalization re: in-vitro fertilization has started, summarized by Kevin Drum (with one addition):

  • Life begins at conception!
  • IVF inherently involves the destruction of fertilized embryos.
  • But I want/need IVF.
  • Therefore those embryos aren't human life.

But when it comes to others, as written you-know-where:

Think about it: take two pills and expel a tiny clump of cells with less sentience than a cockroach. The world is spared yet another unwanted child, and on average, poverty is reduced. The woman regains control of her life, and in the future, can bring a wanted and provided-for child into the world.

Furthermore, consider examples of what they want.

Some states are banning all abortions in all cases. Imagine a 10-year-old child who has been raped. It is discovered after only six weeks. Despite Republican lies, this really happens. It happened hardly a month after SCOTUS overturned Roe. Republicans want to force raped 10-year-olds to carry to term and give birth, rather than let her have a 10 mm clump of cells removed. This is not a joke. The Family Research Council has a 50-page document saying why a raped woman must carry the pregnancy to term.

Those who ask, “Well, how often does that happen?” are missing the point. (But again: it does happen! The world sucks more than you know!) This example clearly shows that there is complete asymmetry between the woman (a child, in this case) and the blastocyst.

Or consider an ectopic pregnancy. The pregnancy can’t come to term – the pregnancy will kill the woman before viability. But Republicans would rather kill an actual human being rather than let her take a safe drug to save her life. Indiana state Rep. Davisson explained: “[None] of us are guaranteed tomorrow. We must accept death as a consequence of life.” 

That is just completely nuts. Cuckoo-bananas. 

Banning abortion isn’t about protecting life.

It is about expressing hatred and exerting power.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

Another


Rosanne Cash performing "A Feather's Not A Bird" Live

We were lucky enough to see her perform this live. 


National unity: 

Republicans make up shit to complain about Biden
Democrats make up shit to complain about Biden

Biden has brought the country together!



 


Saturday, March 2, 2024

Anthropocene Reviewed

Mary Chapin Carpenter - Why Walk When You Can Fly?

 

All these palm trees burned in 2022 (see the charred trunks) and are now back.

Here are my Kindle notes from John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed (based on his podcast of the same name) simply listed in order:

consciousness is temporary and precarious.

when people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir

To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars.

Humans are a threat to our own species and to many others, but the planet will survive us. In fact, it may only take life on Earth a few million years to recover from us.

Two hundred and fifty million years ago, during the Permian extinction, ocean surface waters likely reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius. Ninety-five percent of Earth’s species went extinct, and for five million years afterward, Earth was a “dead zone” with little expansion of life.

Halley’s comet will be more than five times closer to Earth in 2061 than it was in 1986.

I am extremely happy that my children are no longer three,

As many as a quarter of women died in childbirth, and around 50 percent of children did not live to the age of five.

You often hear people say, “There are so many chemicals in it.” Of course, there are also lots of chemicals in wine, or coffee, or air.

“It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”

Scientists sought out more productive strains of the mold, and eventually the bacteriologist Mary Hunt found one on a cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois, grocery store. That strain became even more productive after being exposed to X-rays and ultraviolet radiation. Essentially all penicillin in the world descends from the mold on that one cantaloupe in Peoria.

We imagine other animals as being without consciousness, mindlessly following the leader to they-know-not-where, but in that construction, we sometimes forget that we are also animals.

‘In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”

I hope you never find yourself on the floor of your kitchen.*

Kurt Vonnegut wrote that one of the flaws in the human character “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

For every grain of sand on Earth, there are trillions of viruses.

Philipp Dettmer’s book Immune, there are so many viruses on Earth that “if they were laid end to end, they would stretch for 100 million light years—around 500 Milky Way galaxies put next to each other.”

We often hear that we live in unprecedented times. But what worries me is that these times feel quite precedented. For humans, being in uncharted territory is often good news, because our charted territory is so riddled with disease, injustice, and violence.

I am highly suspicious of attempts to brightside human suffering

I don’t believe we have a choice when it comes to whether we endow the world with meaning.

“No bright line between imagination and memory.”

One day I was at church, and the gospel reading included Matthew 19:24, which goes, “Again, I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” The minister said that people take every line of the Bible literally except for that one, when it is the only line that is meant literally.

Densmore was a passionate vegetarian who survived primarily on raw apples and was known for getting into arguments at restaurants whenever he overheard a stranger ordering a meat dish.

Now always feels infinite and never is. I was wrong about life’s meaninglessness when I was a teenager, and I’m wrong about it now.

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

“You’re going to be okay, you know. Not in the short run . . .” and then she paused before saying, “And also not in the long run, I guess. But in the medium run.”


* I hope that for you, too.   😢