thejdizzler
5mo ago
In a world where Douglas gets the United Democratic ticket, you have a more conciliatory South, which potentially helps flip OH or IN. But perhaps you're right: the North seemed pretty done with compromise too.
thejdizzler
5mo ago
You're telling me man. This forum is proof of what Nietzche posited that all logic is just a cope for our already inbuilt preferences. People don't have a logical reason to dismiss veganism or animal intelligence, they just like meat, and so their arguments follow that. Rationalism is a sham.
As far as I understand it Lincoln wanted to ban the spread of slavery to the territories. From the Republican platform of the Chicago convention of 1860, clause 8:
That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom; that as our republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that no "person should be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law," it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.
So no, Lincoln didn't want to ban slavery, but he wanted to prevent its spread into territories that had not yet been granted statehood.
This is in contrast to the Southern Democratic Party that wanted slaveholders to be allowed to bring their property (i.e. slaves) into all the territories, effectively making slavery legal everywhere that was not already a state. Now, once these territories were granted statehood, the new states could ban slavery as before. From the Southern Democratic platform of 1860, clause 1:
That the Government of a Territory organized by an act of Congress, is provisional and temporary; and during its existence, all citizens of the United States have an equal right to settle with their property in the Territory, without their rights, either of person or property, being destroyed or impaired by Congressional or Territorial legislation.
This clause was completely unacceptable to the North for obvious reasons, on top of recent rollbacks of previous compromises (the Kansas/Nebraska Act undid much of the Missouri compromise), hence the party split and Lincoln's victory in the election.
thejdizzler
5mo ago
Can you expand on this? I can understand your later argument (that expanding slavery = increased profits from the slave trade), but why would expanding slavery be necessary for the profitability of existing cotton plantations?
Sure. Here I was not talking about the Cotton Plantations in the new southwest, but slavery in Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas that mainly was concerned with providing new slaves for plantations in the west. Without the expansion of those plantations, slavery would be no longer be profitable for these states. And these were the states that most powerful and influential in congress: without Virginia and the Carolinas the Confederacy would have been short-lived indeed.
I'm not sure I buy the slave revolt argument fully. The south was continually expanding its slave population to work new plantations. You see an exponential (in the mathematical sense) of the enslaved population from ~700,000 in 1790 to 4 million in 1860. Now during that time the number and size of slave states also increased substantially, but if you look at this map, the percentage of enslaved peoples in Eastern counties doesn't seem to really decrease with Western expansion. Looks to me like the economics of the plantation were more important than the fear of slave revolt.
However, I do see your argument that this was a powerfully motivating political force behind Southern Extremism. Funnily enough, the Republican Party also didn't really want black people to stick around in the union: Lincoln was a strong proponent of colonization and repatriation of African-Americans to Liberia.
thejdizzler
5mo ago
Right thanks for the clarification on Douglas. I think what I was trying to show with that line was how unreasonable the southern position on the slavery in the territories question was. Lincoln's position was to ban it entirely, and Douglas wanted to keep the post-Kansas/Nebraska Act status quo (territories could decide on the slavery question by popular sovereignty). You could imagine a third position between Lincoln and Douglas that reverted to the Missouri Compromise. But no, the slaveholding politicians in the south had to have slavery in ALL the territories, regardless of the desires of the population. I can see how this was intolerable to even the non-abolitionists in the north, and it almost seems to me that the South knew so too (and thus was trying to start a war that they should have known they would have lost).
Anyway, thanks for the book rec and clarification. I'm working my way through Bruce Catton's History of the Civil War right now too.
thejdizzler
5mo ago
Why Slaveholding interests did indeed cause the the Civil War
When America was founded, slavery was on the way out: turns out it wasn’t that profitable of a system for tobacco farming, and sugar couldn’t be grown in the continental US. Many northern states abolished slavery and then the south followed suit. If there was a time for the peaceful national abolition of slavery it was then. Most Southerners even saw slavery as a regrettable institution that would be phased out (Jefferson most famously).
Then Eli Whitney invented the Cotton Gin, and suddenly mass cotton agriculture became a profitable option for slave agriculture. With the old southwest open for settlement in the first decades of the 19th century, those territories filled with cotton slave plantations. Because of soil exhaustion, the states of the old south (Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland) were not as suitable for cultivation of cotton, and so profited mainly from the selling of their excess slave population to plantations in Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missippi and Florida (later Missouri and Texas). In order for this to continue to be profitable, the territory under the yoke of slavery had to continually expand, which perhaps explains the growth of rabid pro-slavery ideology of politicians from these states in this era who started to justify slavery as a moral good).
Now of course this was not a sustainable system because a). there is only so much land that is suitable for cotton farming and b). plantations directly competed with free settlers for land (which explains some of the rivalry between the north and the south better than fringe abolitionism). This also doesn’t fit with the argument that if we had merely waited slavery would have fixed itself more peacefully. A large portion of the southern political class was heavily invested in the continued expansion of slavery (so they could make money selling slaves). This was one cause of the Mexican-American war (to acquire more land for growing cotton), and also resulted in schemes like that of the Knights of the Golden Circle’s plan to capture Central America and the Caribbean to make more slave states, and William Walker’s Filibuster War in Nicaragua. The compromise of 1820, the compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act all continued to give more power to slaveholding interests. You wouldn’t have needed to be an abolitionist to be resentful towards what seemed like the disproportionate power and influence of slaveholding interests in the elections leading up to the Civil War.
Then there’s the actual election of 1860. First of all, I want to note that Lincoln was not elected on a platform of sudden abolition, nor did he actually move to abolish slavery during the Civil War until 1863. All Lincoln promised to do was to prevent the expansion of the institution into new territories (few of which were suitable for plantation agriculture anyway).
Secondly, slave holding interests arguably lost that election because of running John Breckenridge as a third party candidate instead of backing Stephen Douglas. Southern Democrats refused to endorse Douglas at the party convention in Charleston because Douglas was not willing to endorse the maximalist position of allowing slaveholders to bring their slaves into any new territory (potentially against the wishes of the population). This was just a bridge too far for Northern voters after the Kansas Nebraska act opened territory that was supposed to be closed to slavery by the compromise of 1820 to slaveholders, and the Fugitive Slave Act forced Northern States to enforce the institution within their own borders where the population was opposed to it.
Both Douglas’s and Lincoln’s positions seem like reasonable ways of gradually phasing out slavery to me (especially Douglas, who didn’t tend to touch the right for new states to choose to allow slavery AT ALL). Instead the South chose secession and war. It also seems to me that the political impasse that led to the war was less caused by abolitionism, but rather the political extremism of the Southern Planters class.
I’d urge those who disagree to put yourself in the shoes of a northern farmer in the late 1850s/1860s. Wouldn’t you have been frustrated by the stranglehold that slaveholding interests seemed to have on the national government, preventing the opening of new lands in the West for settlement by your sons? Encouraging economic policies that were good for cotton plantations but not for your wheat crop? A vote for Lincoln was less of a vote for abolitionism, and more of a “fuck you” to the insidious and outsized influence of slaveholders on federal economic policies.
thejdizzler
1yr ago
Is not wanting to murder what I think are sentient creatures not a reason? Is going without animal flesh such a sacrifice that you really think I'm miserable?
thejdizzler
1yr ago
2.4 g/kg (over 1 g/lb) is total overkill. No study has ever shown a benefit of increasing consumption over 1.6-1.8 g/kg (Source: https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein-intake-for-bodybuilders/).
thejdizzler
1yr ago
You can also drink Kombucha, eat vegan yogurt, or take a supplement and not think about vitamin B deficiencies ever. It's really not that hard.
Lots of people in this thread who don't give a shit about animals apparently.
thejdizzler
1yr ago
What's unsustainable about any of these foods? I can and have grown almost all of them including mushrooms?
thejdizzler
1yr ago
Default is not killing sentient creatures for your taste pleasure?
thejdizzler
1yr ago
What's your philosophical/scientific basis for this? This clearly contradicts my own intuitions/ the scientific consensus.
thejdizzler
1yr ago
Dude, I have a life too. I honestly don't think about this crap 99% of the time, except when eating out a restaurant or arguing on an internet form. I only tracked my intake for this post. If I wanted to bulk I would use protein powder like 99% of meat eaters, or make a serious effort to include more protein rich foods like soy.
I agree with some of your points. I'm not sure why the line is at animals when it's pretty clear that things like oysters are basically plants. There's a difference between those edge cases, and something that's clearly as smart as a human baby like an octopus or a pig.
thejdizzler
1yr ago
I respect this attitude, and I think it is directionally the same as me, although I am much more uncomfortable killing animals.
On the exercise point I think the real important factor is just the specific stimulus. My mile (running) and triathlon PRs are from when I was meat eater and honestly eating crap (sleeves of Goya cookies for lunch), but my training stimulus was almost perfect.
thejdizzler
1yr ago
How can you categorically say that animals have no moral worth? Is this axiomatic, or do you have justification?
I think simple sugars certainly have a role in metabolic syndrome, but saturated fat is also clearly a huge problem (i.e atherosclerosis and obesity). Pretty much the only source of saturated fat is animal products (dairy and meat).
Factory farming exists because it is cost efficient. Growing grain and soy for animal feed is more efficient in terms of calories per acre than grass fed (because wheat and soy are more efficient plants at converting sunlight to calories and protein than grass is). However, our current monoculturing is clearly not sustainable from a disease or resource use perspective. So we'll have to go back to more traditional animal agriculture methods. Which means less meat.
I'm not sure that your ethical point is really a satisfying argument to me. What is the difference between that statement and me saying "I'm really not concerned about the suffering of black people, I'm a white-centrist?" I also don't believe this is true for most humans ala pets: most humans surely care way more about their dog than someone halfway across the globe.
As far your last point: I think you underestimate how much that we can adjust to changing hedonic stimuli. I used to love beef and pork and salmon before I was vegan, but 4 years of vegetables has made me like... vegetables.
thejdizzler
1yr ago
Almost every time I get into a discussion about veganism, nutrition is brought up. People claim that it’s hard to be healthy, get enough protein, or not be deficient in key minerals on a vegan diet. As an accomplished runner, and 4- year vegan, this always baffles me. In my time as a vegan, I’ve set PRs in the 10k (30:49), 5k (14:56), Marathon (2:36), mile swim (19:00), bench, and squat (they’re embarrassing, I’m a runner). I spend about $50 less on groceries a week than I used to (non-processed meat is expensive yo),my acne has cleared up, and I generally feel better. An my success is one story among the millions of vegans and hundreds of millions of vegetarians that lead healthy lives. But that’s all anecdotal. What I want to show in this post is that it's not actually that hard to get all the nutrients one needs on a vegan diet.
Protein
Let’s start with protein. I’m 150 pounds, and with the recommended RDA of 0.8 g/kg body weight for protein intake a day, I only need 55g of protein. If I ate nothing but white flour (3g protein per 100 calories), I would exceed this amount (60g). There is the issue of grains (i.e. bread) having low protein bioavailability (closer to 40-50%), but this can be partially remedied by eating something like sourdough, or just not something absurdly stupid like getting all your calories from bread. Protein deficiency is so absurdly rare that it’s almost impossible to have it without calorie restricting, even on a shitty Western diet. However, the average American is either some kind of athlete or has aspirations to be one. RDA for athletes is up to double this amount: 1.6 g/ kg body weight, or 110 G protein for me. I can hit this if I try, but my daily consumption is usually around 100g protein, at least during the times I’ve tracked intake. While protein intake has not been demonized like the other two macronutrient groups, research suggests that high-protein intake is actually negatively associated with longevity. People also bring up complete proteins, but I also think this is a non-issue on a balanced diet. Soy beans contain all nine essential amino acids, and rice and beans together also make up a complete protein. There's also the issue of Methionine/BCAA consumption: they seem to be associated with decreased lifespan, but they also are necessary for muscular anabolism so it's sort of a win some you lose some situation. Animal proteins are richer in BCAAs, but I'm not sure if this a good or bad thing.
Vitamin D
Ideally you should be getting this from UV exposure. However that isn’t possible for 3–6 months during the year in locales above 30 N or below 30 S. I supplement during the winter. Animal products like milk and meat have appreciable amounts of vitamin D, but these are either added later (milk) or supplemented in the animal feed. If you insist on a vegan dietary source, mushrooms with UV exposure or sunlight exposure before cooking have enough vitamin D to meet the RDA.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids
There are three types of Omega-3 fatty acids: ALA, DHA and EPA. DHA and EPA can pretty much only be found in marine sources (algae or fish). ALA is common in plant foods such as flax and chia. I personally take an algae DHA supplement daily, but this may not be necessary because I consume about 7g of ALA from plant sources, including Chia and Flax. The RDA for DHA+EPA combined is between 250–500 mg. Assuming middle of the range 5% conversion between ALA and DHA (source), I still get enough omega-3s without the supplement. Flax and chia are super cheap and super easy to add as a garnish to salads, overnight oats, baked goods (although this destroys the omega-3s), and the famous chia pudding.
B12
This is fortified in soy milk and nutritional yeast. This is supplemented in most animal products as well, either in animal feed or post production. If you really want a natural source of b12, duckweed has 750% of the RDA per 100g. I've also started homebrewing Kombucha, which by my own TLC (thin-layer chromatography) analysis has plenty of b12. I'm sure this is true for other fermented foods as well.
Iron
Anecdotally my serum ferritin and hemoglobin levels increased when I became vegan, probably because of dropping dairy. My tracking app says I get plenty more than the RDA of 18 mg of iron (which is already 2x what is needed for males). Main sources are dark chocolate, sea-weed and dark, leafy vegetables. Yes, plant iron is less bioavailable, but heme iron (animal iron) is a carcinogen, and you can increase iron availability by eating iron rich foods together with vitamin C. Oftentimes these two nutrients are in the same food.
Calcium
Again this is supplemented in soy milk, but even without that I get more than enough calcium to exceed the RDA of 1g from a variety of sources including and not limited to nuts, leafy greens, flax, chia, oranges, kiwi fruit, and sea weed. There is a range of bioavailability from these foods, but the main non-vegan source of calcium (milk) is around 30% of bioavailability, which is the upper middle range of plant foods. Dairy is not a health food for a variety of other reasons, so I don’t think this is an entirely fair comparison.
Iodine
I cook with iodized salt, but also eat seaweed. Iodine is also available from plant sources, but the yield varies wildly depending on the iodine content of the soil.
Other Nutrients
Some people also claim vegans suffer from vitamin A, vitamin K and zinc deficiencies. Vitamin A can easily be found in spinach and carrots. Vitamin K in kale, kiwi and chia, and zinc in beans, flax and small amounts in pretty much every other food. Zinc is in nuts and seeds, but I also eat oysters (not sentient and are sustainable), which are almost too rich in Zinc and other essential metals. Plant K2 can only be found in natto, but again the conversion rate isn't that low, and is probably upregulated if you don't intake enough vitamin K2 from your diet.
I’m not claiming that a vegan diet is optimal, but it seems pretty clear from both research and my anecdotal experience that is possible to be successful athletically on a vegan diet. Considering that American levels of meat consumption are unsustainable environmentally (we would need 8 earths if everyone ate as much meat as Americans), and generally seem to result in poor health outcomes, it seems that moving closer to a vegan diet would be better for all of us. While regenerative grazing can generate meat in a sustainable manner, it cannot do so on the scale of factory farming, and thus cannot satisfy the insane American demand for meat. There’s also the issue of ethics to consider: cognitive research has shown that many farm animals (cows, sheep, chickens come to mind) show many signs of intelligence similar to young children and pet animals. I've become much more open to the idea of small-scale animal farming, where animals are treated humanely, but still ultimately killed and eaten, but this still entails eating far less meat. Nutrition isn’t a serious barrier, so what’s your excuse?
thejdizzler
1yr ago
Not my article but: https://www.rintrah.nl/the-end-of-the-internet-revisited/
I'm not sure the machine learning/AI revolution will end up being all it's hyped up to be. For local applications like identifying cavities, sure. For text generation however, it seems much more likely to make the internet paradoxically much more addictive and completely unusable. There's so much incentive (and ability) to produce convincing scams, and chatGPT has proved to be both easy to jailbreak and/or clone, that any teenager in his basement can create convincing emails/phone calls/websites to scam people out of their money. Even without widespread AI adoption, this is already happening to some extent. I've had to make a second email account because the daily spam (that gets through all the filters) has made using it impossible, and Google search results have noticeably decayed throughout the course of my lifetime. On the other side of the coin, effectively infinite content generation, that could be tailored specifically to you, seems likely to exacerbate the crazy amount of time people already spend online.
Another thing I'm worried about with the adoption of these tools is a loss of expertise. Again this is already happening with Google, I just expect it to accelerate. One of the flaws of argument that knowledge-base on the internet allows us to offload our memorization and focus on the big picture, is that you need to have the specifics in your mind to be able to think about them and understand the big picture. The best example of this in my own life is python: I would say I don't know python, I know how to google how to do things in python. This doesn't seems like the kind of knowledge that programmers in the past, or even the best programmers today have. ChatGPT is only going to make this worse: you need to know even less python to actually get your code to do what you want it to, which seems good on the surface, but increasingly it means that you are offloading more and more of your thinking onto the machine and thus becoming further and further divorced from what you are actually supposed to be an expert in. Taken to the extreme, in a future where no one knows how to code or do electrical engineering, asking GPT how to do these things is going to be more akin to asking the Oracle to grant your ships a favorable wind than to talking to a very smart human about how to solve a problem.
I'm not sure I really like what I see to be honest. AI has the potential to be mildly to very useful, but the way I see it being used now is primarily to reduce the agency of the user. For example, my roommate asked us for prompts to feed to stable diffusion to generate some cool images. He didn't like any of our suggestions, so instead of coming up with something himself, he asked ChatGPT to give him cool prompts.
The best days of the internet are behind us. I think it's time to start logging off.
My source for this is "What God Hath Wrought", the 1815-1848 volume of the Oxford History of the US. My understanding of the argument is that Southern soils in the Eastern part of the country had begun to be exhausted by the early ~1820s due to poor farming practices. This made it difficult to grow Tobacco or Cotton profitably because the land just didn't have enough nutrients in it any more for those crops. Other crops like wheat or peanuts that were less intensive or even restorative, were better harvested using animal or partially mechanized labor. There's a reason the north didn't have slaves on its wheat farms, although I can't pretend to know exactly why.
In terms of the Knights of the Golden circle, I think it's left out of history books because of the general discomfort that Americans have historically had with imperialism. This was a country founded explicitly on anti-imperialist principles of popular sovereignty and democracy. Plans to conquer Central America and the Carribean generally don't align with that image. Of course, in practice, the US has and continues to be an imperialist power, so I do wonder, like you, if this exclusion from our education system of these uncomfortable facts is actually a good thing.
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