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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25097 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Just because they're annoying doesn't mean they're wrong - a meta-discussion

A few months ago a wild vegan appeared. He was almost self-parodically stereotypical: short, mid thirties, college-educated, and into endurance sports. He posted a reasonably well-argued case that veganism was not harmful to sporting performance, with the usual smug boasting of his numbers in endurance sports. At the end of his post, he finished with "what's your excuse?"

The entirety of his well-reasoned post was ignored, and he was dogpiled for that one final sentence.

Mottizens could immediately detect what was going on - he actually found the killing and eating of animals to be immoral, but didn't think that would be a convincing argument, so he tried to achieve his goal with another argument.

Both positions are actually worth considering. I'm open to the possibility that killing animals for food is wrong, and I'm open to the possibility that a vegan diet is not harmful to athletic performance. Hiding behind one to advance another, however, is deceitful.

I've actually tried to engage seriously with these ideas, and in my desire to see their own steelmen, I have tried to read some vegan sites. Usually I give up quickly, as they are full of the above argumentation - shifting goalposts, emotional appeals, hiding behind one argument to advance another, etc.

I wish I could say I have rejected vegetarianism because I engaged with their best arguments and found them wanting. Instead, I found their argumentation so annoying I ceased to engage with them.

I've had similar experiences with people who hate cars. Like anyone else who can do math, I have often found it absurd to use two tons of car and two liters of fuel to get two bags of groceries. I've also tried to mitigate some of these by moving to a New Urbanist development (with an unpleasant HOA, sadly), and I've got an electric car and solar panels on my roof. Sadly, this doesn't lead to any productive discussion, as I've discussed before.

Years ago, I remember a similar circular argumentative style among supporters of the ACA. They would say that people are afraid to start companies because they won't have health care, to which I'd reply "sure, how about two years of subsidized COBRA?". Then they'd point to catastrophic expenses, to which I'd say "sure, how about a subsidized backstop for all 1MM+ expenses for anyone who has a 1MM plan?", to which they'd change the argument again.

Of course, there's a pattern here. From what I can tell, many vegetarians have an (understandable) response to the raising, killing, and eating of animals. Some people seem to be terrified of owning and operating large machines, and they find private cars and single family housing to be socially alienating. Some people are emotionally disturbed by other people suffering from the health consequences of a lifetime of bad choices.

What these groups all have in common is a strong ability to signal these things emotionally to people similar to them and form a consensus, but also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably.

We don't have many vegans, anti-car people, or socialists here at The Motte - but that's not because their arguments are invalid, it's because the people attracted to those ideologies don't fit well with our particular discursive style. On the flip side, we have plenty of white nationalists, who seem to be able to adapt.

I'm confident that white nationalists are wrong. I have engaged with their best arguments, and found them wanting.

I'm only confident that vegans are annoying, because they are so annoying that I find it hard to engage with their arguments.

I think that's a blind spot for The Motte.

Some variant of "why do we have so many right-coded extremists and so few left-coded ones" has been discussed in this community and its predecessors every few months since its inception, and one standard answer is that the left-coded extremists have alternatives and superior BATNA on their side. If you are a vegan or tankie, you do not need the acceptance of this forum, as there is a large number of subreddits or real-life communities or whatever available to you with little threat of expulsion or censure - so why bother submitting to our onerous and humiliating rules?

Strong disagree. The reason we have few vegans and anti-car people is because those ideas always crumble under pressure. The reason, "[w]hat these groups all have in common is a strong ability to signal these things emotionally to people similar to them and form a consensus, but also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably[,]" is because generally these positions are based on emotion rather than logic and almost always develop within bubbles where they don't get challenged. Its almost like being an anti-slavery advocate in 2023 America. What kind of real debate skills do you have? You just assume slavery is bad, everyone else around you assumes the same, so if some sincere pro-slavery advocate came around, you would be confused and, in 99.99% of cases, your only "plan" would be to go with ad hominem attacks. We see this pattern quite often with certain online topics that are associated with left of center groups.

Huh, I'm pretty surprised to see anti-car in this bucket (though I don't feel particularly negatively towards vegans either). I've been around this forum and its predecessors for about a decade IIRC, back when the "discursive style" was quite a bit better[1], and I would say I hate cars. I drive plenty when I'm back in my hometown (LA), and even enjoy it, but would prefer to see equalization with other forms of transport of the gargantuan subsidies it gets for its enormous use of real estate, destructive right-of-ways, and effect on local health via air pollution. Driving is fun, but building a society around driving walkable/bikable/transitable distances is quite obviously insane, and I definitely hate it.

Given that you think these ideas "always crumble under pressure", I'm curious why you think this is so obviously wrong. I'm hoping you have an actual answer to this, and that this isn't just a (ironic, given the thread topic) sign of the precipitous decline of the intellectual quality of this community.

[1] from the perspective of autistic intellectual honesty and open-mindedness

but would prefer to see equalization with other forms of transport of the gargantuan subsidies it gets for its enormous use of real estate, destructive right-of-ways, and effect on local health via air pollution.

Well, since you lead off with a false premise, its not going to end up going all that well for you. We spend less per passenger mile on cars than busses or trains.

Less flippantly, the problem with the premise is that every other form of transit has extreme failure modes when it isn't in an absolutely ideal environment. Walking has the issue of it being hard to go any significant distance quickly. Biking too. Both fail at the important task of lugging around lots of consumer goods (as does public transit in many ways) and also those two fail the weather test. Transit also often fails the weather test because getting to it requires exposure to the elements. When it doesn't, it requires expensive shelters, paired with frequent stops. The frequent stopping is a detriment to the system as a whole because it makes your transit slow, often meaning much slower than a car.

Turning to public transit only, it suffers from an intermittency problem. Buses and trains can't come all the time, as is they already are losing to cars on a fuel per mile basis. This pairs with inconsistency to create a crises in commuting. Sure, if the bus always came at 8, and always got me to the train at 8:10, and that train always came at 8:15 and got me to work at 8:30, hunky dory. But that isn't how it works. Sometimes two buses come at 7:56 and 7:58, then one at 8:15. Now you missed that 8:15 train and have to wait till the 8:45 train, that is delayed, and now you're very late. So its the TSA problem at the airport, except every day of your life. OTOH, cars are simple. You leave 2 minutes late, you are 2 minutes late, more or less. There's no transfers, no cutoffs, etc. You don't know how many times I've seen a train leaving the station right as my bus is pulling into the station only to see the next one is coming in 25 minutes, on a line that is supposed to run every 10 during rush hour.

And then there is the next major problem with public transit, which is lack of directness. Because they are financially irresponsible even when simply transporting people in a hub and spoke system to the major downtown areas, they are downright impossible to operate while connecting spokes. So, lets say you live in Lil Ireland, and have a friend in North Burgandy. A 20 minute drive, being a hypothetical 30 minute bus, but no such bus exists. Instead, you need to take a 30 min bus to Corpopolis, then a 20 min train to South Burgandy, and a 10 min bus to North Burgandy. And you have to hope you don't have long layovers in between.

But how does XXX town make it work? They probably don't. You probably just don't visit people out of your neighborhood that often. This is enforced with violence, or by some sort of violence-adjacent policy that keeps a neighborhood's "character" pure. The kind of things which would face endless lawfare in most of America. Plus you make more of your own food, live in a smaller home, smaller room, etc.

Slavery as punishment for crimes is very widespread in America and the abolitionist position on that is a controversial one.

Yes, and that is another example of a subset of people without very good arguments.

Definitely beg to differ on that one. Absolutely fucked incentives arise from the state maintaining large captive slave labor workforces that get paid pennies or nothing at all, contracting them out to private businesses instead of using normal waged labor, etc.

That is an argument for minimum wages in prisons. A totally different argument than an argument against slave labor. You paired it with an argument against the state subcontracting incarceration to private corporations. Again, a different argument.

Forced labor is part of a great number of criminal sentences, because it is often the humane alternative. Lets say you are in Illinois and pick up your first ever DUI, and there is nothing special about it. The statute says you are eligible for the following penalties: Up to 364 days in jail, $2500 in fines, revocation of your drivers license for at least a year, or any combination thereof. However, prosecutors and judges are allowed to offer/sentence different terms. For example, a prosecutor on a 1st time DUI can offer 2 years of court supervision + 100hrs community service in lieu of asking for jail time or a large fine (which many DUI offenders could never end up affording). In most counties their are 3 tiers of community service: 1) Independent CS, 2) Supervised CS; 3) Sheriff work program. In the first, you just go to your soup kitchen or church, work your hours get a certified letter from your boss and come back with that at the day your supervision is being terminated. Done, you are back to being a free citizen. Terms satisfied. In the second, you report to a social services worker, they assign you to a job. You report in with both regularly. Again. Do the work and you are done. In the third you report to the sheriff, and they essentially run a garbage pickup grew for 8 hours a day. 100 hours would take you 12 days, then you report in, and you are done. Again, this is all forced, unpaid labor. And almost every defendant prefers it to going to jail.

I definitely recognize the behavior in your story, but my reaction is less that it's a rejection of someone being annoying, and more the rejection of an inconvenient argument by fixating on the single least-defensible sentence or part of a sentence in the entire post, while ignoring the rest.

I feel like the very basic design feature of

quoted text

ends up encouraging this behavior a lot. It's such a convenient and coherent way to reply to a post that many people (myself included) use it as the primary organizational scheme for their replies to comments. But it carries a great danger of making it feel natural to pick out individual sentences and only reply to those, either taking them out of context of the overall argument or else only engaging with the weakest or less-central parts of the argument.

And it doesn't help when people (laudably!) like to write very long and engaged posts that cover a lot of ground, making it harder to hold everything about it in your head and respond to the whole gestalt at once, and easier to glaze over and skim stuff until you see a sentence that pops out at you.

I do this myself more than I want to, it's a bad habit that's easy to fall into. And I feel like a lot of people do it when responding to me, and it gets frustrating. It is especially harmful when people are trying to talk across the aisle on some issue, because they ussually have a pre-cached response to at least one sentence in the other side's comment, and firing that off in response to a single quoted sentence really feels like contributing!

But, yeah, I think it limits discussion and is pretty bad for the health of the site.

But it carries a great danger of making it feel natural to pick out individual sentences and only reply to those, either taking them out of context of the overall argument or else only engaging with the weakest or less-central parts of the argument.

Yeah, I realized that the post that I got AAQC'd for last month had exactly that problem—I looked at the specific sentences and mostly failed to address the overall argument or look at them in the context (hopefully at least partly fixed in my next one in that chain). It's easy enough to do.

In defense of using quoted texts, I think it’s actually a pretty helpful feature in arguments because it helps the future readers know exactly what parts of the argument I’m talking about in my response. The post is there for readers to refer back to as needed, which works pretty well to keep people honest. I think my personal rule of using the whole paragraph is useful for me in preventing quote mining and taking things out of context.

It's such a convenient and coherent way to reply to a post that many people (myself included) use it as the primary organizational scheme for their replies to comments. But it carries a great danger of making it feel natural to pick out individual sentences and only reply to those, either taking them out of context of the overall argument or else only engaging with the weakest or less-central parts of the argument.

This may sound bad, but I'm more interested in making my own points than in proving someone else's points wrong. I'll often respond to a particular point, not to nitpick, but to add to the discussion with a point I think is valuable enough to be worth saying.

The more common case is a middle ground between what you describe and what I describe, where someone uses a particular sentence as a jumping-off point to make their own point which actually responds to the general vibe of the entire comment. It could say "here's where you're wrong", "the error in this sentence is representative of an error you make throughout your comment", or "here's the best place to chime in with something you've missed."

The only real issue is when the reply is a sort of reverse gish-gallop where a single slight inaccuracy supposedly proves your whole point wrong. I don't honestly think we have much of an issue with that though.

Fixating on the least defensible sentence is also a defense against Gish gallops, where the author will of course tell you that whichever of the 25 arguments you refuted is the least defensible one.

Hiding behind one to advance another, however, is deceitful.

How so? Isn't it just tailoring your argument for your audience? Does it matter how or why or for what reasons someone agrees to your end goal, so long as they do? If your goal is prohibition, of course you're not going to use the same argument on the baptists as you are on the bootleggers.

So the Motte struggles to productively engage with ideas that are usually held and advocated by the types of people who are a poor fit for the culture here, is that right? Sure, I can believe that.

In general, the Motte is a very male social group that is structured around creating conditions for a masculine "fair fight". The rules are all about structuring an environment where people openly challenge each other, state their position and opposition plainly, and have a battle of wits, skill, and knowledge. The roles of popularity, status, and broader coalitional politics of the people involved are supposed to be temporarily suspended. Some kind of analogous form of this kind of competition occurs throughout the animal kingdom, but almost entirely between competing males, and it's more common as intra-group competition. The outgroup may be regarded more like dangerous animals that need to be eliminated by any means necessary.

Feminized social spaces don't tend to have much time even for the concept of a "fair fight". In fact, for women (or feminine males), the very notion of a fair fight is foolishness. Female social competition is much more about misdirection, subtefuge, and ambush. You should never challenge an enemy openly and square off against them; there should be no declaring a time and place or choosing your weapons. The goal is to wait until your opponents' back is turned and strike, or even better get someone else to strike for you. The roles of popularity, status, and coalitional politics are front and center, and even the very means by which the battle is waged.

This is essentially why too many women in academia is ruining science and related fields. Once there are enough relatively ordinary women, they shift the culture away from the "fair fight" model of science, and so science is now more about popularity, status, and coalitional politics and the battle of ideas is engaged by way of back channels. I recall recently listening to an interview with a philosopher lamenting the terrible influence that critical theory has had on the philosophy profession, and how it has all but taken over without seeming to have won any arguments. Infamously, such people do not engage in debates, i.e. "fair fights", but rather they use indirect, institutional, and social power to defeat their enemies often without even giving them a chance to defend themselves.

In my experience, advocates of veganism (as opposed to all vegans) tend to disproportionately belong to the latter group, and so they aren't going to feel comfortable and competent at interacting with the Motte. Sometimes people like these will actually stumble upon good ideas, and those ideas will perhaps not get a fair hearing on a forum like The Motte because their advocates usually don't fight fair. This could undoubtedly cause a blind spot. There is no solution. White nationalist types tend to be rather masculine in their disposition, and so they usually intuitively and more comfortably engage with the fair-fight culture.

The rules are all about structuring an environment where people openly challenge each other, state their position and opposition plainly, and have a battle of wits, skill, and knowledge

I don't think this is true as stated. It's more of a place where we can discuss ideas and share perspectives. People do stake out opposing positions, but don't really battle as much as they do elaborate and try to convince. I understand why this feels right, the analogy fits. But this place is, if anything, one of the least "battle"-based "political debate" spaces on the internet. Does anyone, for instance, mentally keep track of who's winning the most arguments? I certainly don't - I do have a sense of who's writing well or poorly, but that's almost never based in winning, it's just based on how informative or enjoyable I find reading individual posts. George_E_Hale would be up there if I had to make a status ranked list, even though he just posts little life stories totally unconnected to anything else. Whereas, in say, a community for a small online game, there's a strong competitive spirit and desire to win, people carefully watch who's beating who and try to copy their skills, and form teams based on winrates and stats. Or even in other political debate spaces, there are formalized 'debates' and people discuss after the fact who won the 'debates', who had better arguments, etc. In both of these, while it's not normative, people regularly get very mad when they lose repeatedly, which I don't really see here. So IMO themotte is significantly more feminine in the respect you describe than the kind of 'fair fights' you see in sports - and that's a good thing.

And, indeed, themotte has significantly more women than most other high-intelligence online spaces I participate in, and women are if anything overrepresented among posters I enjoy reading the most versus average posters. (although it's still obviously very male skewed)

Also, iirc most of the major innovators in critical theory, postmodern philosophy, and other in-large-part-BS academic fields (I think there are some good parts in critical theory and postmodernism, but it's undeniable something went wrong) were male. I don't think women have much to do with why Derrida, Freire, or Lacan are like that.

In my experience, advocates of veganism (as opposed to all vegans) tend to disproportionately belong to the latter group, and so they aren't going to feel comfortable and competent at interacting with the Motte

Eh. There are a ton of extremely 'masculine' (in terms of discourse style) vegan advocates, even though you're right that vegan activists are disproportionately female (iirc), so I don't think this is actually an issue at all. Random examples - avi bitterman, vegan gains (both of whom are also very "masculine" in the physical sense), also Effective Altruists (less so in the physical sense)! One of the much more aggressive and combat-oriented debate communities I was referencing above is significantly composed of vegans.

I recall recently listening to an interview with a philosopher lamenting the terrible influence that critical theory has had on the philosophy profession, and how it has all but taken over without seeming to have won any arguments.

Do you still have links to the interview?

Reference here for all the people who got really mad at me for characterizing anti-woke sentiments as believing women are not as competent in high-status professions.

Also:

science is now more about popularity, status, and coalitional politics and the battle of ideas is engaged by way of back channels.

Pretty sure it always was, and only doesn't look that way to us because victors write the history books and because there wasn't social media to record and promote all of it to a wide audience.

Always was, but less so. It's all on the margin, as the economists say. It's not like men were always honorable, but they could at least sometimes be held to that code of honor. It sometimes worked, and that was usually enough. Now it's mostly gone.

The competency of men vs. women is a complicated issue; female social norms don't scale as well but work better in some contexts than others. Science loses much when the "fair fight" model is rejected in order to be more "welcoming" to people who shouldn't be there. Women also tend to bring down the status of professions, because a large part of what makes a profession high status is that it makes men desirable to women, but the reverse is rarely true. It's one of the reasons why high status seems so frustratingly elusive for many women; they do the same things as the men but don't enjoy the same results.

It's worth noting that "fair fight" spaces have their own failure modes, notably that people interpret their opponents uncharitably and take opportunistic potshots. One of my favorite things about quokka spaces is that they avoid those failure modes.

Also "status" is absolutely a thing in masculine spaces, which is one reason why "I'm sorry, I was wrong" is never seen here.

"Never" certainly isn't true. Example 1 and 2 from me.

Also "status" is absolutely a thing in masculine spaces, which is one reason why "I'm sorry, I was wrong" is never seen here.

How many examples do I need to find before I hear this from you? I want a number. I recall seeing this dozens of times in my time here. Status is a thing everywhere, and in healthy cultures apologizing can earn you status.

Also "status" is absolutely a thing in masculine spaces, which is one reason why "I'm sorry, I was wrong" is never seen here.

I did get something quite close! It does happen!

Status is a thing, but once a challenge has been accepted the rules are fair. You're equals at least temporarily. The idea is to suppress the role of status in the conflict.

The rules are 'fair' in the sense of 'it is illegal for rich men and the homeless alike to sleep under an overpass.'

Sure, it's not fair in the cosmic sense of all that might have been but for the random vicissitudes of life. A "fair fight" does not need to satisfy that standard to achieve its intended purpose.

I'm not saying the rules aren't fair. I'm saying the failure modes of the "fair fight" philosophy also hinder productive discussion.

I think that's a blind spot for The Motte.

Tbf it is a blindspot for everyone; the Motte simply isn't as special in its intellectual virtue as its members might like to think.

We all have behaviors that we instinctively regard as amoral, which is go say we don't think about them at all in a moral sense. To have someone come up and tell us (or even just suggest by their own conduct) that these behaviors are morally bad is highly uncomfortable. Since most people like to think well of themselves, the easiest thing to do is plug your ears and shoot the messenger.

also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably.

Per the above, I'm not sure that is really true so much as they're starting in a massive hole when it comes to bringing their arguments. They're often criticizing core behaviors. It doesn't matter how dispassionate you are about discussing the costs of cars and the benefits of transit when your audience treats the very idea as a personal attack. (Yes, there are annoying advocates, but that is hardly distinctive).

--

(Anecdcote: contra everyone else here, apparently, every vegan I've ever met has been an absolute paragon of health and fitness. Doubtless there are confounding factors, but there are only so many times you can see an obese man warn an ultramarathon runner about the risks of his diet before it loses credibility)

every vegan I've ever met has been an absolute paragon of health and fitness

That's certainly not the case for me. They aren't fat, but I can think of three that all look underfed. Not lean healthy people, but excessively thin.

But maybe I happen to not know vegans who are also into fitness.

I don't personally know any consistent vegans*, but I regularly meet vegans in all manner of shape. Fat, skinnyfat, occasionally some in good shape. All of them seem like they might have some nutrition issues because of eg weird looking eyes.

*I do know one family which is vegan at home but eats what is served to them out and about; their kids are short, but don't seem noticeably dumb or malnourished.

A plurality of the vegans I’ve known were skinny-fat, one who is straight up fat, and the rest were pretty emaciated. In general they seemed malnourished.

I’ve known one vegan in decent shape who was into yoga, she was decently strong and vigorous but she also semi frequently had moderate to severe health issues. I assumed they were related or exasperated by her lifestyle choice as she was generally pretty healthy. She was eating constantly.

At risk of repeating what's been said downthread, your entire disposition towards the topic betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. Veganism isn't based on some argument. Either you care enough about animal suffering to do something about it or you don't. Factory farming is, in a lot of places, a torture farm. If you care a lot about animal suffering there is no "argument". There's just a fundamental factual truth about the nature of harvesting animals for food and from there on all else follows. Same is true for 'white nationalism'. Either you care about white people, their bio-diversity, history and continued existence or you don't.

You are not asking for an argument, you are asking for a bonk on the head that makes you see the world in a different light. For some that's videos on Facebook and documentaries, real world experiences or socialization. Whatever it is, you're not dealing with arguments and I think it would behoove you and people who talk like you to stop pretending you are a machine that digests paragraphs and sorts out the fact and logic. You're not.

Same is true for 'white nationalism'. Either you care about white people, their bio-diversity, history and continued existence or you don't.

While some white ethnic groups will likely disappear due to immigration(cockney speakers I think?), white people will continue to exist in every plausible future. In fact whites will make up a decent chunk of the population of America in most plausible futures. You don't have to be a white nationalist to recognize that it doesn't require any actual changes to the way the world will likely work for white people to continue to exist in a fairly wide diversity.

Veganism isn't based on some argument. Either you care enough about animal suffering to do something about it or you don't.

Sure, but no one has a utility function of 0/0/0/0/100.

You can make all types of arguments about why veganism also gets you other things you want beyond reduced animal suffering (maybe it's better for the environment or fights the obesity epidemic or has other health benefits or etc), you can make all kinds of arguments about why it doesn't lose you other things you want (it's easier and cheaper and tastes better than you think, common intuitions about it making you scrawny or low-energy are wrong, etc).

If you care about animal suffering 15, then whether becoming vegan would lose you more or less than 15 in other areas is the determining factor in your decision. And all kinds of arguments are relevant to that calculation.

My answer to that would be 'motivated reasoning'.

Most arguments aren't 'real', for a lack of a better term. They're just stepping stones to get to the promised land, which any actual believer already knows is real. The whole game of 'arguments' is to help the unbelievers, or yourself in days of need, to that place. In other words, arguments are traced back from the thing you already know is true.

I'm not saying there aren't vegans who are vegans for some reason other than the animal suffering, and that those guys aren't making data driven arguments in some sense that's disconnect from the moral impetus driving many vegans, but, in my experience, those are not the vegans we are talking about in the OP.

Either you care about white people, their bio-diversity, history and continued existence or you don't.

I'm white. I care about white people continuing to exist. I'm also not a white nationalist. We'll thrive just fine next to Mexicans and Asian immigrants. The Indian families on my block are not wounding my ability to thrive as a white man.

This appears to be the very falsest of dichotomies.

  1. I’m very worried about shrinking white population coupled with an ideology that says “white man bad.” Other groups already have a pro group in bias (except for whites since we bought into the whole color free paradigm). But add to that extra hatred and it isn’t pretty.

  2. I live in an Indian majority community. Often, I feel like a stranger in a foreign land. My wife gets visible in uncomfortable when I mention this alienation that occurs in my country. This isn’t anything the Indians are doing wrong and most of them seem like nice people. But it isn’t my culture and that is a net negative for me.

You are defining "care" to mean "form an ethnostate excluding non-whites". That's a pretty extreme form of "care". That's so extreme I will reject it as a good definition. There are valid ways to "care" without being a white nationalist.

Which one of these 'ways' does not, in some form, effectively exclude immigration and enforce some sort of segregation to maintain a white population? I am curious considering the state of Texas, which has recently gone majority hispanic.

We'll thrive just fine next to Mexicans and Asian immigrants.

At risk of sounding to snarky, that's like, your opinion, man.

This appears to be the very falsest of dichotomies.

You fit the description of someone who says they care whilst they don't, rather well.

I am curious considering the state of Texas, which has recently gone majority hispanic.

You know a lot of those hispanics are actually literally indistinguishable-from-southern-Europeans white, right?

And a lot of them are not.

Detroit was once called the 'Paris of the West'. I don't think anyone calls it this anymore, except as a sarcastic snub at Parisian decline. The Detroit that was has been permanently lost due to demographic changes.

Everything seems fine until it isn't. Suppose the Indian community, or the Mexican community vote for candidates who'll redistribute resources for whites to Indians on the basis of oppression (or any reason they can find) - why wouldn't they? That's in their interests. Why wouldn't they seek to advance their own collective self-interests? Helping the ingroup and harming the outgroup is basic human nature.

It seems worth noting that the Mexican community has not done this when they have had the opportunity, except incidentally(eg Spanish as an acceptable language of instruction in schools). The equivalent of those black activists pushing for reparations can't get elected.

As a practical matter we should limit immigration. Canada really opened the gates. They are something like 20% immigrant at this point. And then didn't build significantly more housing. They really screwed themselves on that last point.

I think avoiding Canada's horrible immigration policy is orthogonal to forming a white ethnostate.

We'll thrive just fine next to Mexicans and Asian immigrants. The Indian families on my block are not wounding my ability to thrive as a white man.

How are the 20% Indian families / other immigrants in Canada wounding the Canadians' ability to thrive?

Is quantity a quality of its own?

Every other Indian family on your block has a family member that they're trying to get to the US using existing laws. These people are probably not going to vote to shut down legal immigration until they've brought all the people they need first. Perhaps they'd even vote to make it more like Canada.

Either you care about white people, their bio-diversity, history and continued existence or you don't.

There are many, many people who care about white people who aren't "white nationalist".

I feel like your sentence needs a little of defining before it holds any relevance.

If I say I care about X, but I wont lift a finger to help X, do I actually care?

If I say I care about X, but refuse to acknowledge that X can ever be at risk or in need of help, and constantly browbeat anyone who acts like there might be risk or need of help, do I care?

Most people are not "white nationalist" because the term is actively marginalized. Most people, in fact, don't like to label themselves as anything at all. They just have their beliefs and opinions and look for the best representation for those beliefs and opinions they can find. Sure, you can care about white people and not associate with some label, but to actually care about white people you have to act like a 'white nationalist', for a lack of a better term, in some form. Ingroup bias expresses itself very uniformly.

As a side note, it's very easy to make up bad faith arguments for what constitutes to 'care'. On that front I think we have a good example from a recent Tucker Carlson interview where he bites into Ben Shapiro a bit.

(A more relevant clip from the interview.)

Does Ben Shapiro care about Israel? Obviously he does. Does he care about America? Well... To an extent he has to, right? He lives there, after all. And he gets animated over various political things over there. Saying he does not care is kind of stupid. But that's also not really the point. Ben Shapiro obviously cares more about Israel than America. Same can be said for many voices in American politics who were happy to tell the world that the Oct. 7 event was equivalent to 10 9/11's. The numbers here, given we know the rough deathtoll of both, can only represent the emotional weight placed on the events by those who make such claims. Why else make a low brow comparison like that.

The point being made here is that you can care about a lot of things. Giving yourself an excuse to say you care is easy. But its how you prioritize things that allows us to see what you 'really' care about out of all the things you say and act like you care about.

If what you meant to say was “advocate for white people”, “donate to white nationalist organizations”, or “advocate against affirmative action”, you could have said that.

From my perspective it seems like you chose a deliberately milquetoast word to make people seem crazy for not liking white nationalists.

If what you meant to say was “advocate for white people”, “donate to white nationalist organizations”, or “advocate against affirmative action”, you could have said that.

That's not what I meant to say. There are certainly a lot of people in the world that do not care about white people.

From my perspective it seems like you chose a deliberately milquetoast word to make people seem crazy for not liking white nationalists.

I am at a loss for what to do for you, if that's the case.

To maybe rephrase what was being said; Vegans care about animals. I know they do because they don't eat animals as an act of protest against the practice of farming and killing animals for food. I might 'care' about animals in some way. I certainly don't like the idea of torturous factory farming. But how much do I care? I certainly am still eating animal meat and produce. Judging by action, I certainly do not care as much as a some type of vegan.

In a sense you can say you care about something if you feel like you do. But that, to me, feels like we are just debasing the word 'care' to a point where it is meaningless. For example, if you told me you cared a lot about your dog, but acted indifferent to it at best and barely walked it to a point where it was obviously having issues, I'd conclude you are either lying or that your words don't mean very much, or that you are stupid to a point where you don't understand that you need to walk your dog, and that this needed explaining to you.

In any case, I don't think people are "crazy" for neglecting their dogs. I would, however, feel justified in concluding that their own description of themselves as caring about their dog is inaccurate at best.

but to actually care about white people you have to act like a 'white nationalist'

You are defining "care" to mean "form an ethnostate excluding non-whites". That's a pretty extreme form of "care". That's so extreme I will reject it as a good definition. There are valid ways to "care" without being a white nationalist.

White nationalism doesn't just mean "pro-white", it is generally defined by its advocates as including a desire for the existence of white ethnostates. It's like conflating "cares about jewish people" and "zionist": many jews believe zionism harms jewish people instead of helping them (and doing it with white nationalism is even less accurate because zionism is currently more mainstream).

It's not just a matter of prioritization but of beliefs about the world. There are plenty of normal people who genuinely think that racial diversity benefits everyone, including white people. Furthermore, even within the realm of people who both know about HBD and think it potentially justifies government discrimination on the basis of race, most are not white nationalists. For instance white nationalists have termed Emil Kirkegaard an "IQ nationalist", though in the linked post he ends up concluding that explicit IQ nationalism would just amount to much the same thing as skilled worker laws, and the important thing is keeping out the far-below-average immigrants without IQ tests or racial discrimination being nessesary. Even if you go to a more populist community like /pol/, there are both white nationalists who think each race should get its own ethnostates, but also plenty of people who only have an issue with specific races like black people and don't care about racial separation otherwise. If your definition of "white nationalist" includes people who want to ban black immigration but allow mass-migration from Hong Kong, on the basis that they believe that such immigration would benefit everyone in the destination country including white people, it's not going to be very recognizable to conventional white nationalists.

White nationalism doesn't just mean "pro-white", it is generally defined by its advocates as including a desire for the existence of white ethnostates.

If you have some way of maintaining white populations without borders or segregation laws I'd be interested to hear about it. Would be a new theory in a now rather dead school of thought called White Nationalism 2.0

How about "White people should breed more, for they certainly have the capacity to support more children. If they want. And if they don't care enough to proliferate, how can I?"?

But they are not breeding more, just like every other population group that's dealing with modernity right now. So people who actually care would seek solutions in the real world, rather than fiddling with rhetorical sneering to excuse their lack of care, like you are doing.

There are immigration policies other than "white ethnostate" and "open borders". Mass immigration sufficient for your concern to happen would presumably come from countries that suck to live in, and countries that suck to live in rarely have many high-quality immigrants. Even under the current U.S. immigration system, demographic replacement has little to do with the small numbers of highly-selected immigrants, it's the reproduction rates of the population groups already in the U.S. and the ways for low-quality immigrants to bypass that selective system.

I asked for policies that could maintain white populations. A constant stream of immigration is a constant dilution of the population that has to suffer it. That's not maintaining white populations but slowly eroding them.

No? That depends on birth rates, intermarriage rates, and the actual rate of immigration from different nations and races. Non-hispanic whites and asians currently have the same birth rate, which presumably means east-asians specifically are even lower. Furthermore, assuming you count people with 98% white and 2% east-asian ancestry as white, intermarriage is going to reduce the proportion of the minority demographic, and unlike with black people I don't know of any research indicating there's a disadvantage to having east-asian ancestry. (There was that one survey of online hapa communities where they seemed to do worse than average whites or asians, but that was obviously because of the selection bias of participating in those communities.) So even if your immigration policy ended up letting in more east-asians than white people, that doesn't mean the country would end up more east-asian over time. And of course there are plenty of hypothetical selective immigration policies where the end result would be the majority of immigrants being white without being an outright ethnostate, in which case the end result will be a higher proportion of white people than if there was no immigration at all.

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If your definition of "white nationalist" includes people who want to ban black immigration but allow mass-migration from Hong Kong, on the basis that they believe that such immigration would benefit everyone in the destination country including white people, it's not going to be very recognizable to conventional white nationalists.

In fairness, there's certainly white nationalists who would consider mass migration from east Asia acceptable to their white ethnostate on the basis that they'll die out except for the women who marry white men and then have phenotypically white children.

While I agree that one can be pro white without being a white nationalist, I strongly disagree with many of your other claims.

One could claim that anyone who supports anything that is destructive for a group, "cares" actually.

The reality is that people who particularly dislike intensely a group and it comes part and parcel with such dislike, tend to support its demographic replacement and abolishment/extinction. This is because it is genuinely harmful to the group as a group to become a minority in their own homeland, or go extinct. When Noel Ignatiev is saying that "abolishing the white race is so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that anyone other than committed white supremacists would oppose it." he was infact an anti-white racist. And this is me understating it. His agenda was genocidal.

If someone cares about a group but supports something that is genuinely destructive for them, we should consider whether it matters how much they care. It could also be the case that they aren't honest.

Conversely, people who support a group and are part of such group tend to oppose such replacement. Because it is beneficial to a group to not become a hated minority in its own land, or go extinct.

This way of thinking is definitely able to be understood when it comes to other ethnic/racial groups, and how colonization by foreigners or their replacement or even possible extinction is bad actually.

As for white nationalism in particular. The reality is that it is the boogieman, not because we have a rational society reacting to the greatest threat of racism by white people, because we see the dominant rhetoric and policy to be of an anti-white form, and president Biden to have made comments more in line with Ignatiev's comment than against it. Comments about how mass migration should happen to replace white Americans. The threat of its extremism is used as an excuse to promote an anti-white agenda and part of the denouncements have to do with fear and a desire to prove to be one of the good ones and not be cancelled and slandered. And it is in fact the case that a society that is hysteric no matter what about X group nationalists, tends to be racist against said group. More so the case when that group is actually mistreated in policy, and denounced in rhetoric. When it doesn't have representative organizations.

In reality, unconditional limitless nationalism for any group can be immoral and therefore white nationalism can be immoral in this manner but also a lack of any nationalism comes along with said ethnic group being oppressed and mistreated. It is a common aspect of the worst mistreatment and destruction of an ethnic group to attack its nation and denies its existence and legitimacy. To disallow it national self determination and to promote the tyranny of being governed without its interest being represented. Another aspect of this is toleration of other nationalisms to excess, and this is also something that is happening.

So if one group rights should ideally end where another group right's begin this necessitates a general broad quite different and more qualified and nuanced take on white nationalism, over the approach of treating it as the worst nationalism ever which brought things in the current anti-white racist situation. Nor should the correct approach be unconditional support of anything that could be pro white and anti non white groups and constant double down in that direction in a limitless fanatical manner.

The preferable way to frame things and a workable system for different groups is one of international justice that recognizes the reciprocal rights and limits of different nations, including white and not white nations.

White nationalism doesn't just mean "pro-white", it is generally defined by its advocates as including a desire for the existence of white ethnostates. It's like conflating "cares about jewish people" and "zionist": many jews believe zionism harms jewish people instead of helping them (and doing it with white nationalism is even less accurate because zionism is currently more mainstream).

Certainly there can be forms of white ethnostates that are analogous to zionism in behavior, and there can be imperialistic white nationalist behavior that can be rightfully opposed but the existence of european countries that wanted to remain european has a) been the dominant model b) population where political class moved away still support this in many cases like in France where they oppose the replacement of French by non French, including presumably non french whites c) we still have some white countries that the political establishment supports remaining such.

The change in attitude is recent. Even in the USA is from a couple of decades.

The idea of opposing being replaced is certainly less controversial than zionism in that it doesn't step over the rights of others in the way zionism did.

And has been treated as less controversial in general outside of the movement that Ignatiev represents. Ironically, allowing mass migration in turn made the accusations of racism more of a reality that the opposite. I would argue that opposing your own extinction and your nation's colonization is opposing anti native racism and in line with international justice. While having an agenda in favor of whites not having any homelands represents a very extreme form of racism.

This is in fact compatible with european countries not having their own people going extinct and a minority, but remaining majority, and the USA as multiethnic but again opposing mass migration explicitly because it is immoral for the white Americans who created historical USA, to become utterly disminished in the country they created and dominated. Although under this framework it was legitimate for Americans to have made a choice in the past to not open their borders to the rest of the world.

As we see with the results today, such migration was an important factor in the rise of anti-white racism.

If I could tinker with history, I'd really love to see what would have happened had Thomas Jefferson's early-1780s plan to free the slaves and then repatriate them all to their African homelands been adopted.

I'm picturing a time-traveler handing out to Southern (and other slaveholding) members of the Continental Congress Civil War histories and copies of Gone with the Wind , accompanied by unvarnished descriptions of the nation's demographics and race relations circa 2023, how they are viewed even by their own descendants, some footage of the 1992 Rodney King riots, and possibly selected clips from gangsta rap.

Veganizm can't be argued with because it is an ascetic religious belief, not a material one.

Dietary restriction is as old as superstition. The "holy" will always try to display their moral superiority through dietary restriction, dress, and conspicuous consumption.

As a belief, it is an incoherent heresy of Jainism, which the modern vegan is by far too much of a pussy to take to the proper conclusion. If they believed truly, and were consistent, they'd be filtering their water to avoid swallowing a gnat, sweeping the ground gently in front of them to avoid stepping on an ant and starving themselves to death. Make Veganism Great Again.

I declare your utility function to also be a religion and therefore not engaging with, if that's how we're playing the game today.

Or maybe instead, we could recognize that the utility function and the decision theory are distinct objects, and continue to talk and argue about the decision theory as per usual.

Since this thread is has devolved into discussing veganism instead of the meta point, I'll jump into that fray.

I think humans have infinite moral worth compared to animals, and I would save one human child at the expense of, say, 10,000 endangered orcas or whatever. Humans have dominion over animals and have the right to use them how we see fit. Abusing animals is not the same as abusing people, it's morally wrong in the similar way that dumping garbage in a public park is wrong or how dumping perfectly good milk down the drain is wrong. It's a waste of common resources and a poor use of them, it's disrespectful and reflects poorly on humanity.

One mental block I have against listening to vegans is that so many of them seem to have a heavy outgroup bias against their fellow human beings (though in practice this can really be further reduced to "that shithole flyover state I went to school in," it doesn't really include their like-minded friends). I cannot relate at all to people who think we should drastically reduce the population to avoid "harming the planet, "or that having children is selfish/evil, or that "humans suck." I like humans. I think we're pretty great. I think that human suffering is an infinitely greater problem than chickens in cages, and any cent spent on stopping the latter instead of the former is a travesty. So when someone tells me about the evils of cattle farming I want to pull up a list of neglected tropical diseases or statistics on opiate deaths and ask why I should care about chickens when we haven't solved these other (solvable!) problems, and then have them lay their cards on the table and admit that they simply hate people.

Let me poke at this a little.

Why stop at speciesism? It seems obvious to me that fighting tropical diseases and opiate deaths is a waste of effort, indicates miscalibrated priorities or a lack of appropriate newtonian morality. I'd say that if we should not prioritize animals over humans just because they suffer, then we should also not prioritize distant humans over nearby ones just because they suffer. Or would you argue that while there is a vast gulf between the importance of animals and humans, there is none such between the importance of different humans?

By the way I actually think that it is more prudent to care about people close to me as opposed to people far away. And it is mostly due to the fact, that helping means involving oneself into other people lives, which also brings certain level of responsibility. As Scott Adams says: There is nothing more dangerous than resourceful idiot, in my language we also call them "idiot with initiative". You know the type: a good meaning person who decided to water your succulents so they rot, the moron who cleans your cast iron skillet with soap only on larger scale. You can also think about it as skin in the game principle where you are responsible for outcome of your actions however well meant. Only in the case of charity it also goes the other way - that people who disagree with your type of help can actually address you directly and hold you accountable. In Catholic teaching this is reflected in the principle of subsidiarity.

I agree overall, but it seems to me that the obvious counterargument is that by providing mosquito nets or money via charities, there is no potential for damage and thus you're helping with no downside to the beneficiary.

Kind of. Humans all have some innate level of value simply by virtue of possessing an immortal soul and being made in the image and likeness of God, whereas animals have neither of those qualities. So there is indeed a vast gulf between humans and animals.

But I also agree that we should prioritize which humans to help. I think this has been discussed before on the Motte, but I believe that people have a different levels of responsibility towards others based on family and community ties. So off the top of my head a rough order might look something like this:

  1. Your children and wife/husband
  2. Your extended family
  3. Your religious/ideological compatriots
  4. People living in the same community as you (e.g. same schools, same neighborhood, same social class)
  5. People living geographically close to you (same city, state, region)
  6. Your fellow citizens in the same country
  7. Foreigners who share your culture
  8. Etc etc.

Those are overlapping catagories that are kind of malleable depending on the exact situation. But I'll always think it's more valuable to donate money for mosquito nets in the 3rd world than to help chickens.

When you say 'dominion' is this a strictly religious interpretation, or is it meant to be based on some set of empirical factors?

In either case, if we contacted aliens who had either the same revealed religious/empirical factor-based relationship to us that we have to animals, would you be happy to admit that they also have infinite moral worth compared to us, and walk happily into the thresher for their most minor benefit?

Also, generally speaking: Questions of the form 'why should I care about X when Y exists' are ussually not very meaningful. The people and resources being devoted to X are generally not easily translatable to Y, or at any rate you caring about X does not conflict with you caring about Y unless you are already devoting so much time and effort to personally solving Y that you have no time in the day for X.

No, it's not empirical. Not everything has to be, IMO.

I don't really understand your alien example. If they believed in a god that said humans were cattle to be exploited, I think I would just... disagree? Unless I were somehow converted to their human-hating alien religion? Which I think would be a really hard sell?

Re. caring about X while Y exists, nah, I reject your general point. This always smells like a motte and bailey to me that relies on conflating "nonzero" moral weight with "significant" moral weight.

The motte for this usually imagines a framing like "Why help starving children in famine-stricken Gondwanaland when there are plenty of starving Laurasian war orphans to feed?!" Starving children from any foreign country can be assigned roughly equal moral weight, so it's easy to say "we can care about both without neglecting either." The ratio of caring might be close to 1:1.

A less clear-cut example is "We can care about starving Gondwanan children AND the opiate crisis at home." It's a bit murkier -- who do we have a duty to first? Children overseas? Our own citizens? What about the children of our opiate-addicted citizens? Are they more or less important than starving children overseas? It's debatable, but the ratio her might be 1:2, or 2:3, or 1:4, or something similar. Both are serious problems.

The bailey usually smuggles in some problem of dubious moral weight, e.g. "We can care about both starving Laurasian orphans AND reducing plastic straw usage, you know!" It's impossible to just totally reject doing something about plastic straws, because their impact isn't zero, but it's hard to articulate exactly how much less important reducing plastic straw usage is than feeding starving children (in the opinion of most people outside the Motte, at least). Maybe for most folks the ratio would be something like 1:100, or 1:10,000.

So tl;dr while it's strictly true that you can care about X and Y at the same time, I find that a lot of people who make that argument are trying to steal some of the gravity of (actual) problem X to bolster their pet problem Y.

And so it is with human and animal suffering. Animal suffering is so unimportant to me compared to human suffering that I'd rather round the ratio off to zero rather than have to calculate some absurd number of bovine lives I'd need to save in exchange for the life of a single human.

If they believed in a god that said humans were cattle to be exploited, I think I would just... disagree?

What I meant was, what if whichever religious figure you respect said they had a revelation from the same God you believe in saying that the aliens had dominion over you?

For the sake of argument, whatever series of factors make you believe that you have dominion over animals on religious grounds, the same factors happened within your own religion, saying the aliens have dominion over you.

It's impossible to just totally reject doing something about plastic straws, because their impact isn't zero, but it's hard to articulate exactly how much less important reducing plastic straw usage is than feeding starving children (in the opinion of most people outside the Motte, at least). Maybe for most folks the ratio would be something like 1:100, or 1:10,000.

Sure, but my point is more about the fungability of efforts to address problems.

There already exists a regulatory body in charge of passing regulations on restaurants, and they have free time. That legislative body can easily pass a plastic straw ban; it is not clear how they would direct that effort instead towards feeding children in foreign nations. They have neither the authority nor the mechanisms nor the expertise to do that.

Perhaps you can imagine firing half the people who work in that regulatory body, re-training them on international diplomacy and supply chains, and assigning them to figure out how to feed those starving foreign children. But there's going to be huge costs to that transition that probably the benefits to those children, those people probably don't want to do that kind of work and wouldn't be good at it anyway (there are reasons people have the jobs/interests they do), and theoretically the regulatory body shouldn't have a lot more staff than it needs anyway to begin with.

So I'm not arguing about the ratio of importance between the two things, I'm challenging the idea that all issues are in competition with each other for resources, and that ignoring one means you are definitely making more progress on another one. Society as a whole isn't perfectly efficient and friction-less like that.

If a straw ban is good and you have a mechanism by which to issue it, but no mechanism by which to transfer the resources for a straw ban into food in the mouths of starving foreign children, you might as well do the straw ban. Saying 'what about the starving children' as a way to oppose the straw ban is disingenuous, if the resources saved by not doing the ban won't actually be used to materially aid teh children instead.

FWIW, I have a good friend who is a vegan after reading Singer. He is also pro human and pro natalist (more pro life than I am as an example). The only humans he hates are criminals (he is a prosecutor).

I don't agree at all with your estimation of the value of an Orca, because you’re mixing two concepts – the intrinsic value of a non-human animal and the value of having a flourishing biosphere which have plenty of magnificent things like Orcas. No way I would sacrifice 10,000 Orcas for one human, but that's less about the inherent moral value of an Orca and more about the fact that they are endangered. In a world where Orca are as common as Cattle I wouldn’t think twice, but we don’t live in that world. If we value ocean wildlife - even if the reason is simply to give more utils to humans in the long term - then an Orca is a precious natural resource, not one to be squandered over something so commonplace as a human.

I’m not sure how many humans I would be willing to sacrifice in order to restore the world’s oceans to the state they were in 500 years ago, but it would be many, many thousands.

I think your make "a flourishing biosphere" do a lot of work there. Do you mean "a stable ecosystem that humans can use to feed themselves and keep the planet in good shape," or do you just mean "preserving animal species because they're cool and having lots of different types of cool animals around is a good thing?" Or something else? I don't know how to extract utils from orcas outside of SeaWorld, they're cool to read about but day-to-day they mostly spend time hanging out in the ocean where I have very little chance to interact with them.

If it's the former, I'm on board because I think destabilizing and destroying the environment will probably lead to a lot of human suffering and death, so we should probably prevent that.

Do orcas' presence in the oceanic ecosystem benefit humans? It seems like they compete with us for seafood resources(probably mostly salmon, but I guess if you eat dolphin it'd be notable) and otherwise have relatively little effect on human interaction with the ecosystem. They're apex predators but I think most of the animals whose populations they keep in check are either things we eat or things with populations that don't need to be kept in check, either because they're sensitive to human activity(eg great white shark) or because they reproduce slowly(sea turtles, right whales).

I mean if an evil genie told me he'd kill either 10,000 water buffaloes or one human child, I'd have to ask if the deaths of those 10,000 water buffaloes would cause a famine in India or something. But orcas just seem like a bad example of that.

Probably.

The textbook example for ecological side effects is the wolf/deer thing. Kill wolves, deer population explodes, mass starvation, much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Or consider the Australian examples of creatures missing their natural predators. It’s not ironclad, but I would expect removing an apex predator to have consequences, and I would be awful skeptical of anyone who claimed to have a foolproof plan for them. Chesterton’s fence should probably apply.

The wolf/deer thing can be resolved by handing out more hunting licenses though, right? The Australian example is better, but more because humans are not those creatures' natural predators since we have nor reason to hunt them. Fish on the other hand--we can hunt a virtually infinite amount of fish. At least, our demand is easily elastic enough to compensate for the disappearance of all orcas.

I would be more concerned that their disappearance leads to an explosion of seals and other [non-apex] predators which would reduce the number of fish.

Humans have hunted seals and whales extensively in the past, though, so in theory we could just do it again to compensate.

Although this obviously isn't exhaustive, the wiki-walk I went through on Orcas showed that great white sharks(which are endangered) and certain larger whale species(which are also endangered) are the main species which don't have non-orca predators, and orca predation isn't a major factor in their populations because it is relatively rare, but that leopard seals and elephant seals are mostly controlled by orca predation even if they're occasionally picked off by larger sharks. So your scenario seems fairly plausible.

That's true, I'm sure sealing is lucrative enough.

Why do you think humans have infinite moral worth compared to animals?

That's a pretty unusual viewpoint for a modern westerner to espouse (though in a "revealed preferences" sense I guess it's very common). Christian background, Cartesian background, contrarianism, Chinese background.... how come?

I believe that the Great Chain of Being is more or less true. Also this

though in a "revealed preferences" sense I guess it's very common

is part of it. I try to be honest with myself even when it sounds ugly. If someone showed me a video of chickens in cages overlaid with dramatic music and anthropomorphizing narration ("the newborn chicks are kidnapped from their mother mere minutes after hatching...") I might feel sad for a few minutes, but I would also know I was being manipulated, that chickens don't actually experience motherhood or childhood, or really much of anything, probably, and I'd recall my belief that it's part of human nature (in the philosophic sense) to eat other animals, and so it wouldn't sway my behavior.

All of that said, there's room for nuance. While I wouldn't sacrifice a single human infant to save a billion cows, I would definitely be willing to spend a small amount of extra money to buy meat that could somehow be proven to be "more humane" (probably in that the animals' living conditions were more like their natural habitats, although I'm no expert). But I'm also very cynical about greenwashing, "organic" labelling, and other tricks to prey on the wallets of ethical consumers, so I'd need some pretty good proof that it's actually qualitatively different than a cost-minimizing factory farm.

Chinese background

I lol'd, that's a good guess, but no. They don't just value human lives over animals lives, they also think animal lives have roughly zero value and so they can be treated rocks or dirt. The gifs you've seen online aren't uncommon occurances.

I would actually like to debate you on vegan/vegetarianism, because I have been unable to rigorously justify the ethics of eating meat to myself. I do it anyways, because I’m not a saint and morals are arbitrary anyways.

I’ll copy paste another comment I made in the thread:

Isn’t animals not having moral equivalence just another axiomatic assumption you can make? How would you prove that someone is in the wrong for assigning moral equivalence to chickens?

And supposing you value humans more due to our intelligence, does that mean it is more ethical to make unintelligent humans suffer than intelligent ones? You can substitute any other attribute other than intelligence here.

If instead you go the route of saying “I am arbitrarily drawing the line at humans because I am speciesist, but all other animals are fair game,” can’t someone else arbitrarily tighten that circle further and say “I am arbitrarily drawing the line at whites because I am racist, but all other humans and animals are fair game”?

Is there an argument that both allows you to ethically kill or factory farm animals for food, without also allowing someone else to ethically kill or factory farm animals for food? (Disregard how inefficient and pointless factory farming humans for meat would be, this is just a question about the ethics of it.)

Gladly.

Your argument is fundamentally utilitarian, and utilitarianism leads to insanity or tyranny.

On the side of the suffering, utilitarianism quickly devolves into making things up. I'm pretty sure animals experience pain, but that's vague. At the decision-making level, you must assign some number of qualia to their pain, if you want to trade it off against a human action. The problem is this number is totally made up. Make up a number in one direction, and it's OK to torture animals for sport (bullfighting), make up a number in another direction, and you're a Jain. Both numbers are of course completely made up with no reference to reality.

The second order effects get stranger. If you're in the business of making up qualia, you could find yourself morally obligated to kill predators, worrying about the suffering of subatomic particles, etc. That way leads insanity and SBF.

On the side of the morally responsible, utilitarianism quickly devolves into tyranny. If you've appointed yourself the arbiter of the moral balance of the universe, you might find yourself starting out by murdering ranchers, and end up with the Repugnant Conclusion, murdering unhappy children, and ending up at Stalin.

Utilitarianism is fundamentally unbounded.

I choose reciprocity. I will act with honor towards those who act with honor towards me. I'm entirely OK with raising those who act without reciprocity towards me in cages. In the case of animals, for meat. In the case of people, those cages are called prison. In the case of people, I'm against killing them (the death penalty), because I believe the system for judging them is fallible, and I want the convicted and accused to have the chance to prove their innocence. Since I am against killing them, I can't kill them for food.

Would I eat a murderer, if it was 100% certainty that he was guilty? That's an interesting question that I hadn't gotten to until now.

For now, I find the arguments for vegetarianism unconvincing, and I'm going to leave the Chesterton's Fence of meat eating up - but I'm not sufficiently convinced to stop thinking about it.

Just to follow up in case you’re still interested: I just concluded a nice discussion with aquota where we both acknowledged it comes down to power and realpolitik rather than any higher ethical cause.

If you’re able to come up with a loftier rationale as to why the moral line should be drawn specifically at the species boundary, I would still love to hear it.

Thanks. I was interested. To me the moral line is drawn at reciprocity, because morality is between actors. I have no moral obligation to a rock or a plant. If an animal or an alien is capable of reasoning from principles to determine reciprocal actions to my actions, then they are moral actors. If they aren't moral actors, then morally they are no different than a rock or a plant.

Ah I see what you mean now. I haven’t encountered this specific line of reasoning before, so thanks for introducing it to me.

I’m curious about a couple of follow-up questions: if animals aren’t moral actors, are animals entitled to any amount of ethical treatment? Or is it moral to torture animals for any or no reason at all?

And are only the humans that are moral actors deserving of moral rights? Would it be fine to kill an orphaned infant before it has developed enough moral understanding to be a moral agent of its own?

Please correct me if I’ve misunderstood you, but it sounds like you only care about reciprocity if the entity you’re interacting with can and does behave with honor towards you, and you believe animals are incapable of honor.

Doesn’t this just push the delineation down to where you draw the line with “honor”? How do you define honor in such a way as to exclude animals from being capable of it, while including all humans in the mix? Is it fine to kill a human infant (or any human with sufficiently low agency) because they are incapable of honoring you any more than a dog can?

This post shows a huge potential problem with veganism actually.

Ideological veganism of this type as does apply to Peter Singer's version is anti-human.

By trying not to be speciesist as you say and making animals and humans morally equivalent, you enter into valuing human life less, to make it more equal to animal life.

Hence Singer supporting infantcide, killing comatose.

Humanism, what you call speciesism, forms an ideological barrier that restricts anti human ideas from entering.

Ironically, what is often called anti-racism has some of the same problems. The fear of putting a group, such as whites first can lead to putting them last and is an aspect of our anti-white racist age. Which makes all the whining about white tribalism threat pretty immoral and ironically racist and a case of misaligned priorities. In the current circumstances, and in line of your own prejudices, you should be more afraid of that reality and the possibility of this increasing, rather than the opposite threat. Radicals rather than carefully opposing only what should be reasonably opposed have promoted antiwhite racism, in line with their own prejudices.

Similarly, but worse pro animal prejudice and anti human mistreatment is one of the promises of many advocates of veganism in combo with animal liberation. Less so for those which is more about their own personal preference and ethics and are much more restrained in their political vision.

Another thing to consider is that if animals are morally equivalent to human beings, then under that framing current humanity is engaging in mass murder of gigantic scale and is extremely monstrous. This false perspective could very well lead to supporting mass violence at its expense both to stop it, and to punish those engaging in using animal products (i.e human civilization as a whole). It is a path to self destruction and it isn't surprising that one of the biggest anti-natalist figures David Benatar who thinks humanity should stop giving births also adopts the framing of humanity as an oppressor of animals.

And of course would come along with totalitarianism where non veganism is ruthlessly persecuted both as a practice and as an ideology. Which could also come along with a lot of violence.

In regards to David Benatar:

Benatar is vegan, and has taken part in debates on veganism.[15] He has argued that humans are "responsible for the suffering and deaths of billions of other humans and non-human animals. If that level of destruction were caused by another species we would rapidly recommend that new members of that species not be brought into existence."[16][17] He has also argued that the outbreak of zoonotic diseases, such as the COVID-19 pandemic,[18] is often the result of how humans mistreat animals.[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Benatar

The ideology of this not canceled academic who thinks humanity better not exist is in my view worse than many of the most advertised as worse ideologies in the world, including ones I directly sharply attacked. There is a connection with the marxist idea of utopia after destroying class enemy and class, or cultural marxism and destroying race and whites/whiteness/oppressive western civilization, and now for humanity as the oppressors to be eliminated by not reproducing. Benatar's is the worse version of this way of thinking. I certainly wouldn't trust people sharing Benatar's ideology with nuclear weapons, or biological research on diseases, or even A.I. research. Any veganism that comes anywhere close to Benatar's ideology should be treated with extreme intolerance.

It would be saner, less dangerous and better for advocacy of animal rights to be done under a perspective that rejects their moral equivalency to humans and is very careful not to be anti-human. Humanism is good actually and the speciesism framing is too absolute to not lead to such destructive paths. Hence, we would be better off if we outright blacklisted pro animal rhetoric that is anti-human and not careful. Especially the type that supports, or provides arguments that help justify harming various categories of human beings because they sympathize more with animals.

I mean, I agree with you on the potential implications of speciesism. But what arguments do you actually have against its validity as a moral concept? What convinces you to draw the line at human vs non-human, versus any other arbitrary boundary?

he actually found the killing and eating of animals to be immoral, but didn't think that would be a convincing argument, so he tried to achieve his goal with another argument.

It seems that a rational participant could follow this path:

  1. Eating of animals is immoral (because ....)
  2. One reason people are resistant to arguments about (1) is that they believe eating animals will harm their athletic performance.
  3. The belief in (2) is factually wrong under at least some conditions (e.g. vegans must ...)
  4. If the belief in (2) diminished, then people would be more willing to accept (1).

In the literal sense, sure, it would be "trying to achieve his goal (1) with another argument (3)" but it also seems like an unobjectionable syllogism. The premises might be wrong, but the logic is fine.

I do not care about animal welfare, pictures of overstuffed chickens in pens or male chicks being sent to the meat grinder do not matter in the least to me. That makes all the arguments downstream of their moral salience irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Sure, with a fastidious adherence to a broad diet and medical supplements, you can barely get an adequate caloric and nutritional intake that makes you not outright unhealthy or anemic, but what of it?

I prefer cars, I find it daft that after centuries of industrial and technological progress, there are people who would try and make them cost-prohibitive to use for the average person. I am intimately familiar with "walkable cities", every city in India is walkable, as they must be when the majority of the population is too poor to afford cars. I've had the "pleasure" of using public transport in London, often paraded as the city with the best infrastructure for the same, and I would far prefer an alternative with more cars. I see nothing absurd about relying on a two-ton vehicle and fuel to get about, any more than I am concerned about the other hundreds or thousands of tons of infrastructure required for a comfortable middle class existence in the West.

Am I aware that the anti-car movement has a point regarding the drawbacks on density, the inconvenience to pedestrians or the relative inefficiency of everyone driving? Absolutely. I don't even deny it, I simply consider it an acceptable tradeoff for my preferences.

On a more meta note, I see nothing particularly wrong with arguing one's point to an opponent and using arguments within their framework of beliefs that I do not consider salient to my own. When I point out the manifest absurdities of aligning Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Omnibenevolence in the context of an argument for atheism, or when I point out that the world as it exists looks nothing like a world made by an Omnibenevolent Creator, I do not for a millisecond happen to have believed in any of those properties, I'm only trying to demonstrate their utter incoherence to someone who holds all of them. Showing inconsistencies is a necessary step to start swaying people, and eventually, one hopes, when the cognitive dissonance becomes too much to bear, they'll stop trying to patch things up and then tear it all down to build a new edifice that aligns closer to mine.

So I don't particularly begrudge the vegans or anti-car people from trying to advance tangential arguments, but believe it or not, those are still niche positions to hold, and I don't see it as particularly surprising that they don't have all that many vocal adherents here. There's nothing in the rules of the Motte that states that any particular brand of advocacy must find positive feedback here, and many of us who remain, including the more extreme of the Wignats, do so because they're willing to accept downvotes and negative feedback, and to the extent they persist, by following the rules in their statements.

I think there's a bit of a "grass is always greener" problem on both sides of the equation. I understand where you're arguing from, and I don't disagree with you. But you didn't grow up in the midst of American car culture the way most of the anti-car people did. You never had the pleasure of sitting in a long line at a stoplight that stays red for ten minutes, turns green long enough to let three cars go, then turns red again. You've never been 500 feet from where you want to go, but the only way to get there is to get in your car, make a harrowing left turn onto a 4 lane highway, and follow that with another left turn across traffic into the parking lot. Conversely, you've never had the same problem but you can't make a left turn due to the highway divider so you have to make a right turn with the intention of making a u-turn at the end of the block (followed by another u-turn at the end of the next block), only to find that u-turns are prohibited and you have to take a long detour in heavy traffic to get to the store that was directly next door to the one you were just at. You've never been in a hurry to get somewhere and had a Cadillac abruptly pull out in front of you and not top 20 mph for the next 5 miles, with the invariably 87-year-old driver hitting his brakes frequently and arbitrarily. You've never sat in a 10 mile traffic backup caused by people's inability to not slow down and look at crashed cars and ambulances on the other side of the highway. You've never changed brake pads on the street. You've never paid significantly more for an apartment that had a garage. You've never paid $250/month for a parking lease at work. You've never spent 45 minutes at a dead standstill between the bend at Bates and the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, not once, but every. Fucking. Day. As part of your commute.

I'm not literally saying that you have never personally experienced any of these things, nor am I saying that everyone who lives in a car-centric country deals with them every day. I'm saying that if you grow up in places where the infrastructure revolves around cars, shit like this happens often enough that you wonder if everyone paying thousands of dollars per year to maintain his own car is really an optimal use of resources. Yes, I understand there are tradeoffs to being transit-based, and I think that most of these transit hounds don't understand that these massive lifestyle tradeoffs aren't worth it for most Americans. But I try to understand where they're coming from, especially when they're probably urban people who look at the way things are in Europe and wonder why they can't be similar here.

I've never driven, or owned, a car.

I hate "car culture" as it developed in the years after 1945 because of how ugly and unlivable it made nearly every American community. Six- or eight-lane arterial roads, lined with strip malls, fast-food places, Walmarts etc. (interspersed with car-related businesses such as gas stations, auto dealerships, tire stores, muffler shops, etc. which take up huge amounts of space), every one with an enormous parking lot that one has to walk through (I can't even count how many hours of my life have been wasted just walking through parking lots) while keeping an eye out that some distracted moron might run me down.

The sidewalks are invariably empty except for the homeless, the poorest of the immigrants, or once in a great while a dog-walker.

All that wasted space which could have been used for housing.

Bus stops, most without a shelter, for buses that run every half hour or even every hour (less than that if it's snowing or raining).

Neighborhoods with nothing but houses, on winding streets (many without sidewalks). For mile after mile after mile. No corner grocery stores, no corner pubs, nothing to walk to unless you're buddies with all your neighbors.

In the US, there is no such thing anymore as an affordable, safe, walkable urban neighborhood. There are smaller cities and towns with affordable housing - but with no jobs, very little shopping or cultural institutions, with a huge fraction of their population bombed out on opiates or meth.

If I want to visit any "outdoors" destination - beach, mountains, national parks - that's just out of the question because there are no trains or buses that go there.

Thanks a fucking heap, Henry Ford and postwar urban planners.

I agree. But in America, the car is the main method of insulation from the domestic underclass. If Los Angeles and San Francisco, let alone Chicago and Philadelphia, let alone St Louis and Baltimore and New Orleans, were as clean and safe as Hong Kong and Singapore, and had their quality of public transport, this debate would be unnecessary.

It's not even that Americans can't build public transport - Los Angeles has built out its subway and light rail network pretty vigorously since the late 1990s, and it has some of the worst imaginable 'natural conditions' for mass transit given its sprawl - it's that inevitably it is taken over by scum and governments do not appear willing to prevent them from ruining it. The only major exceptions are NYC, which is still pretty grotty but 'saved' by the sheer volume of regular passengers, and D.C., which is by far the cleanest system in the US because it's patrolled very heavily (particularly downtown) and was built largely by the federal government.

All that wasted space which could have been used for housing.

For what reason would we want to tile the land with housing?

If I want to visit any "outdoors" destination - beach, mountains, national parks - that's just out of the question because there are no trains or buses that go there.

  1. There's actually plenty of buses which go to such places. They're slow and inflexible, but such is the nature of public transit.

  2. Yes. What good is paradise if there's no place to park? People want to go places, and not only do they want to go to different places, they're coming from different places and they want to go at different times. This makes the problem of mass transit difficult, and the usual solution of a 3-seat ride (low-speed collection, high-speed trunk, low-speed distribution) for more popular destinations (and worse for less popular ones) is terrible.

For what reason would we want to tile the land with housing?

Because there's a severe shortage of affordable housing in every city in the US and Canada which is worth living in.

Somebody needs to build the walkable equivalent of a thousand Levittowns, starter housing which can be easily paid for on the salary of a single working-class adult - and not a highly-paid one, either.

There's plenty of housing available in the existing "levittowns". The problem is that there are a small number of cities in US and Canada that you and many others consider "worth living in", and a relatively small amount of housing within those cities, hence high prices. Eliminating commercial development in the suburbs and building housing there only makes nearby suburbs less desirable (because people need places to buy things); it does nothing about the cost of housing in the places you consider "worth living in".

in every city in the US and Canada which is worth living in

Without onerous zoning regulations, the office buildings could simply be built outside those cities, making the cities superfluous.

Dense, expensive urban centers are dead. The true vision of the future is an unending low-density sprawl of cheap single-family houses interspersed with office-building complexes.

Well, no, the evidence is clear. The richest people in the world, who could live and conduct business from anywhere, choose to live disproportionately in expensive urban centers rather than in sprawling suburban or exurban estates. They would rather a five bedroom penthouse over central park than a hundred-room gilded age mansion on Long Island or in Westchester. When they ski, they have chalets in dense, walkable, chocolate-box little towns like Gstaad and Courchevel. Even many of the most 'elite' warm destinations, like St Barths and Monaco and Cannes and even parts of Miami, are pretty dense. One of the great innovations of the American upper class - in Newport in the late 19th century - was building their mansions close together, not because they had to but because it seemed to make more sense.

I get this is a well-intentioned comment, but I assure you that most of the experiences you mention are hardly foreign to me.

Have I had to suffer through traffic? Yes. Bad stoplights? Yes. Cross an inconvenient highway to get to the other side? Yes. And while dodging cows while I'm at. Annoying u-turn restrictions? There's one walking distance from my door. Geriatric Cadillac driver? Well, I've never encountered a Cadillac, but rest assured I've been tempted to misuse my license to double check theirs.

You've never sat in a 10 mile traffic backup caused by people's inability to not slow down and look at crashed cars and ambulances on the other side of the highway. You've never changed brake pads on the street. You've never paid significantly more for an apartment that had a garage. You've never paid $250/month for a parking lease at work. You've never spent 45 minutes at a dead standstill between the bend at Bates and the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, not once, but every. Fucking. Day. As part of your commute.

Discounting the obvious Americanisms, I've been in traffic delayed by rubbernecking at accidents. I've fortunately never had to change brake pads at all. Apartments with guaranteed and reserved parking do cost more. Thankfully my hospital doesn't nickel and dime me with parking, but that'll change in the NHS.

No really, I am well aware of the difficulties that car ownership entails, and I would wager it's even worse here with the quality of the roads, the cows, people who consider the laws of the road more akin to flexible guidelines, and no end of other issues. About the only thing I'm certain I'm better off without is the risk of someone pulling a gun out of road rage.

And I still prefer widespread car-ownership. It's a pretty sweet deal the moment you remember you have (or plan to have) a large family, carry a bunch of crap like groceries, travel to places outside a city that don't fall on convenient rail or bus routes and so on. Even in the UK, it's expected that a doctor should have a car, I had to sign a waiver for my training application where I indemnify the NHS against paying for any expenses incurred if I'm urgently forced to rent a cab or take public transport.

Much like democracy, having a car is the worst possible option barring all the others.

Having a car and needing a car to the extent that residents of much of America do are two very different things. Even in most walkable European cities with excellent public transport, many people own cars - a clear majority when you restrict 'people' to parents, for example. Owning a car is normal and fine. But owning one doesn't mean you need to use it to get everywhere.

I'm a car driver. I've lived in various states driving my car to work, etc. None of those describe my experiences with cars.

I once had a commute where sometimes the freeway would get really congested. That's certainly annoying.

A single digit number of times in my life I've gotten trapped on one of those streets that have no U turn at every light. Then you have to make some weird series of turns for seemingly no good reason.

My typical driving experience is positive. Very rarely it is some frustrating bullshit. Some anti-car people act like car drivers are suffering greatly. That's at least partially true in San Jose. And just wrong almost everywhere else almost all the time.

I'm a car driver. I've lived in various states driving my car to work, etc. None of those describe my experiences with cars.

I've had pretty much all of them, adjusted for geography (replace the bend at Squirrel Hill with the Conshohocken Curve on the Schyulkill Expressway, for instance) and obedience (a no-U-turn sign means "here's a practical place to take a U-turn if there's no cops around"). I've also spent hours standing around Penn Station New York with no trains running. Not hours total, hours on more than one occasion. I've spent time standing in the cold and rain at bus stops with no bus coming (or at least, not stopping). I've taken crazy circuitous routes (that were the shortest possible) turning an hour trip by car into a 3 hour saga (with 30 minutes still by car). I've taken long standing-room-only commutes by bus and train, some of them so packed so you could barely breathe.

One of the major reasons for progressives to take up both causes is due to resource constraints. As an Indian you'd surely have to acknowledge the relative unsustainability of 1.3 Billion Indians living anything remotely like a westerners lifestyle. It simply cannot scale up, and India lacks the ability to take resources from distant parts of the globe to sustain its lifestyle. Even in the West, we have a stark choice between living a relatively resource constrained lifesytyle that would still make the average Indian person jealous; which unfortunately would be considered an affront on the non-negotiability of the American way of life. It's the inconvenient truth, our lifestyles are unsustainable and we are approaching multiple eco-system limits with a blissful disregard for the sheer terror we might have unleashed upon ourselves. We can culture war all day every day about the relative decline of our own lifestyles and who is truly to blame for that, but relative lifestyle adjustments for us are an inconvenience; whereas in the third world they carry a body count.

If I recall some of the details from this correctly, we're actually using less "stuff" than in the past, while obviously still experiencing great advances in quality of life. That is not that we're consuming marginally less per increase in quality of life, we're consuming absolutely less. The reason for this is because we're getting more efficient with the use of stuff even faster than people are consuming more utils.

There was some press release I recall reading, some study which said it would take something ridiculous like 14 Earths to provide all 8-billion-plus humans with a middle-class American lifestyle (might not have said specifically American, I don't remember).

I disagree with everything you've just said.

We are nowhere near "resource constrained", the primary concerns with giving everyone First World/American lifestyles is energy and carbon emissions, both of which are solvable problems. Invest in nuclear, or continue waiting for renewables to be even more competitive (they already are, even without market subsidies), and then do one of the many forms of geoeningeering needed to deal with the climactic changes.

I see no fundamental barriers to drastically raising the global standard of living. Certainly none that can't be solved, or won't inevitably be solved.

We are nowhere near "resource constrained", the primary concerns with giving everyone First World/American lifestyles is energy and carbon emissions, both of which are solvable problems.

In the specific case driving this subthread, which is giving everyone convenient private transportation, the binding constraint is not resources (electric cars charged from nuclear power are a thing) but geometry. There are only so many cars (both moving and parked - separate problems with different issues, both of which need to be solved to make car culture work) that can be in any given space at the same time, and the demand for space scales faster with the available space as the metro area population increases. Above a metro area population of about 100,000, you need to demolish any pre-car neighborhoods and purpose-build the whole city around car travel if you want it to not suck. Above a metro are population of about 5 million, there isn't room for enough more roads and suckage is inevitable.

Quite right, one of the great things about our world is that matter is fungible. Once we dig up some iron and smelt it into steel, we can keep on using that steel, reforging and casting it. 20% of China's steel production is recycled from scrap metal.

I think a lot of people subconsciously fall into a video-game logic of 'once I exhaust that gold mine the gold is gone, have to find new gold deposit'. The gold is still there!

Do they actually need to take resources from distant parts of the globe to provide 1.3 billion people electricity, internet access, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, decent food, and urban public transportation? That is the core of what I would consider "a good living standard," and I think these things are all surprisingly cheap. There won't be much left over to play signaling status games with, but you don't need to do that.

The first few Quakers who took a stand against slavery were pretty annoying too. In reading about their early forms of activism one can’t help but be struck by how PETA-like some of their tactics were.

Anyway, there really isn’t really a non-annoying way of telling someone a message equivalent to “Hey actually, to all animals you’re more evil than Hitler. Animal lives matter. Have you considered being not animal Uber-Hitler??”

And that's the core of my problem.

I suspect there might be good arguments for veganism, but they appear to be buried under a huge mass of emotional appeals and AWFL social status games.

If you lived in the 1600s and were totally fine with slavery, what non-emotional appeals could someone make to sway you against slavery?

Do you have any particular reading recommendations about these quaker antics? I spent a year as apart of a quaker meeting, and always heard about the anti-slavery stuff, but never from anything like a primary source.

There's a section in What We Owe the Future about Quaker early slave abolitionism. This isn't the full section but rather a quick teaser from https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/owe-future-bookbite/36216/

Instead, an important cause for abolition was shifting moral sentiments in the 1700s in the US, especially the contributions of Quaker abolitionists. Perhaps the most fascinating of the Quaker abolitionists was Benjamin Lay, who stood at just four feet tall and called himself Little Benjamin, likening himself to little David who killed Goliath. Lay lived in a cave just outside Philadelphia and boycotted all goods produced by enslaved people. He once stood outside a Quaker meeting in the snow and bare feet with no coat. When passersby expressed concern, he explained that enslaved people were made to work outside for the whole winter dressed as he was. Lay played an important role in Quaker opposition to slavery, which, in turn, played an important role in abolition.

More about Benjamin Lay from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lay but also not quite everything mentioned in the book

He first began advocating for the abolition of slavery when, in Barbados, he saw an enslaved man commit suicide rather than be hit again by his owner. His passionate enmity of slavery was partially fueled by his Quaker beliefs. Lay made several dramatic demonstrations against the practice. [...barefoot in snow thing above...] On another occasion, he kidnapped the child of slaveholders temporarily, to show them how Africans felt when their relatives were sold overseas.[8]

In Burlington, New Jersey, at the 1738 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers, dressed as a soldier, he concluded a diatribe against slavery, quoting the Bible saying that all men should be equal under God, by plunging a sword into a Bible containing a bladder of blood-red pokeberry juice, which spattered over those nearby.[9][10]

He did stuff like this his whole life, apparently.

I wouldn't buy the book for a deep dive on Quaker abolitionism though, it isn't that.

Hey actually, to all animals you’re more evil than Hitler. Animal lives matter. Have you considered being not animal Uber-Hitler?

I mean there is a smuggled premise that animals have something like moral equivalence to humans. It's a kind of hack of empathy and personification that we don't like admitting that animals just don't have moral equivalence. It's the same instinct that makes you cringe when a doll's head is ripped off. Hitler was killing people who have moral equivalence to humans, the argument is much simpler.

Isn’t animals not having moral equivalence just another axiomatic assumption you can make? How would you prove that someone is in the wrong for assigning moral equivalence to chickens?

And supposing you value humans more due to our intelligence, does that mean it is more ethical to make unintelligent humans suffer than intelligent ones? You can substitute any other attribute other than intelligence here.

If instead you go the route of saying “I am arbitrarily drawing the line at humans because I am speciesist, but all other animals are fair game,” can’t someone else arbitrarily tighten that circle further and say “I am arbitrarily drawing the line at whites because I am racist, but all other humans and animals are fair game”?

Is there an argument that both allows you to ethically kill or factory farm animals for food, without also allowing someone else to ethically kill or factory farm animals for food? (Disregard how inefficient and pointless factory farming humans for meat would be, this is just a question about the ethics of it.)

How would you prove that someone is in the wrong for assigning moral equivalence to chickens?

I wouldn't, it's none of my business what weird other people value unless they make it my business by attempting to impose their beliefs on me.

And supposing you value humans more due to our intelligence

Intelligence is an important but not the only reason I place moral weight on human life.

does that mean it is more ethical to make unintelligent humans suffer than intelligent ones

Marginally yes. And yes, as I know where you intend to go with this if you find a human with pig level intelligence then I'd barely consider them human and my opposition to their subjugation would primarily be aesthetic. A disgust of the type that causes me to oppose incest or bestialities that have been philosophically spherical cowed to cause no harm.

If instead you go the route of saying “I am arbitrarily drawing the line at humans because I am speciesist, but all other animals are fair game,” can’t someone else arbitrarily tighten that circle further and say “I am arbitrarily drawing the line at whites because I am racist, but all other humans and animals are fair game”?

People already do that with race and I oppose it. The arguments over what moral line we draw is a live debate and I don't find this line of reasoning any more convincing from vegans trying to get me to include nonhumans than from racists trying to get me to exclude Laotians or whomever.

Is there an argument that both allows you to ethically kill or factory farm animals for food, without also allowing someone else to ethically kill or factory farm animals for food?

I presume you meant one of these to say humans. And yes, the argument is that humans are not morally fungible with animals. Not one chicken, not ten chickens, not infinity chickens.

the argument is that humans are not morally fungible with animals. Not one chicken, not ten chickens, not infinity chickens.

And we’re back to the starting point, aren’t we?

What arguments do you present for drawing such a moral line between humans and animals?

You're the one including the premise in your argument, it's on you to prove this, not me to prove the negative.

  • There is a moral difference between hurting humans and hurting animals
  • There is a moral equivalence between hurting humans and hurting animals

I don’t see how one side is inherently more of a “positive” claim than the other. Regardless, if you take the position of moral difference by default, how do you respond to the Nazi who says “There is a moral difference between gassing Aryans and gassing Jews”?

Hey actually, to all animals you’re more evil than Hitler. Animal lives matter. Have you considered being not animal Uber-Hitler?

I flagged the premise as being smuggled in here and lodged my disagreement. I know it wasn't you who did it but that's the point where it needed to be proved.

Regardless, if you take the position of moral difference by default, how do you respond to the Nazi who says “There is a moral difference between gassing Aryans and gassing Jews”?

I would disagree with them on the basis that Jews and Aryans are both human and that human life is sacred. If I needed to ground out that human life is sacred I would say that I and all my loved ones are humans and I have a vested interest in their lives not being forfeit. If they were in power and planned on gassing Jews I would shoot them if able.

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If instead you go the route of saying “I am arbitrarily drawing the line at humans because I am speciesist, but all other animals are fair game,” can’t someone else arbitrarily tighten that circle further and say “I am arbitrarily drawing the line at whites because I am racist, but all other humans and animals are fair game”?

Is there an argument that both allows you to ethically kill or factory farm animals for food, without also allowing someone else to ethically kill or factory farm animals for food? (Disregard how inefficient and pointless factory farming humans for meat would be, this is just a question about the ethics of it.)

Well if someone made the 'racist' argument I would tell them good luck with the law, which cares not about your bizarre dietary principles. But really my argument, which I think solves the dilemma in your second paragraph, is that I won't eat anything that can argue for its life. Humans are the only creatures that can do so to my knowledge, so I won't eat humans. If chickens or pigs developed that ability I don't think I'd be able to eat them either.

Well if someone made the 'racist' argument I would tell them good luck with the law, which cares not about your bizarre dietary principles.

Sure, but we’re not debating the law as it is, only theoretical morality. Veganism is not the law in most (or all?) places on earth, but that doesn’t stop some people from arguing for that.

I won't eat anything that can argue for its life

This sounds like a more refined version of “it’s okay to eat sufficiently unintelligent things.” Does this extend to human infants, non-verbal highly autistic adults, or anyone else whose intelligence falls below the threshold of arguing for their own existence?

I don't think you need full moral equivalence for vegan arguments to work. You just need a sufficient ratio. Even of chickens have only 1% of the moral value of humans the suffering we inflict upon them in factory farms is a great evil. On the other hand if chickens have 10^-100 times the moral value of humans its trivial. Unfortunately we are far from the point where we can actually compute such a ratio with any authority (though many have tried) so often the arguments fall back to intuition and emotion.

I reject even putting it on the same scale. It implies what you then go on to exploit, that they are at all fungible - this would require some kind of argumentation.

Even of chickens have only 1% of the moral value of humans

In practice, it's not even close to this.

Anyone who would direct a trolley problem trolley at one person to save 100 chickens is someone I would consider an aberrant moral monster.

Personally, I would be extremely suspicious of anyone who would save ANY number of chickens over a single human. But anyone who puts the number at anything less than 100,000 is actually mind-boggling to me.

You don’t have to go even that far. Eating a lot of meat is a luxury (I think some small amount is necessary for health) so given that the choice is wants vs morals, there’s no good moral reason to choose to eat large portions of meat.

I don’t think that requires the trolley directed at humans, and I wouldn’t do that.

There is. The moral reason is that I want to, and anything I want to do is more moral than anything I don't. I have an overwhelming moral responsibility to myself to maximise the enjoyment of the single, limited lifespan I have. A life un-lived is the most immoral thing imaginable; it is a waste of the single most precious gift any of us can ever receive.

Maybe I’m not understanding you but I’m not sure how not having meat as the main dish of your meal is that much of a diminished enjoyment. Most of the time, for me, I don’t miss it. I don’t say no entirely to meat, I’m just not making it the star of the meal.

I don't think there's a valuable moral lesson to be learned from me sending a trolley at 7.888 billion humans to divert it away from my children.

In a society where everyone was raised from birth to be vegan it’d be equally obvious a chicken is worth more than 0.1% of a human and anyone who said otherwise would be considered morally abhorrent.

Having personally witnessed vegans in real life comparing eating eggs to the Holocaust: you could just not do that. Just skip the Holocaust and Hitler rhetoric. Say "they really suffer and it comes at a real moral cost to eat a vegetarian lunch with a bit of egg". Jumping to the wild Holocaust and Hitler rhetoric isn't convincing anyone. The wilder the rhetoric, the less convincing it is.

The wilder the rhetoric, the less convincing it is.

They are not at that stage with respect to where the populace is. At this juncture of activism the goals are to wedge regular animal-welfare arguments into the Overton window. Wild rhetoric is helpful here not because you believe it, but because now you'll judge less extreme versions of the same basic tenet as inherently more reasonable by contrast.

Even there, convincing is a long ways away. The stage they are at in the activist pipeline is normalization.

Even under that light, the wild rhetoric is not helpful. Approximately everyone who encounters a vegan like that is so put off by the arguments that they become impossible to convince in the future, even if the arguments are more sane. They go "oh this is the same thing as (crazy guy), I'm not going to listen". All the extremists do is ensure that everyone they rant to will never be a vegan.

Indeed. I don't expect it convinces anyone to go vegan.

At the same time, when they see something like we should make pork 15% more expensive to allow pigs more space, they are now going to anchor that as differently. That no longer qualifies as the wackiest animal welfare thing they've heard.

I've read most of the replies and I wonder if it doesn't boil down to unwillingness to entertain anything short of a perfect case. If a vegan can't provide a watertight case for how turning vegan will generate ideal outcomes on all aspects under consideration then their argument is irredeemably flawed, and if their argument is flawed it can be rejected wholesale and we can all carry on as we were. And of course The Motte is a filter for people who live to pick holes in arguments (cue "no we're not!").

What if vegans could show some net benefits at below net cost to you? Would you/we recalibrate not to eating a fully vegan diet, but simply eating less meat? Or does it have to be the once-and-for-all slam dunk that settles the matter for ever?

What if vegans could show some net benefits at below net cost to you? Would you/we recalibrate not to eating a fully vegan diet, but simply eating less meat? Or does it have to be the once-and-for-all slam dunk that settles the matter for ever?

I'd be glad to consider such an argument, fairly presented and rationally argued. I would even go further and say I'm interested in them.

Every once in a while I get the thought that factory farming seems pretty horrible. Then I go to vegan sites to see what I can learn, I'm confronted with emotional appeals and social games, and I decide that they suck and I'm going to get a cheeseburger, because fuck them.

My initial intellectual itch never gets satisfied.

What if vegans could show some net benefits at below net cost to you?

Are those net benefits to me or anyone I care about? Or are they to some brainless birds that will never know nor care that I made that sacrifice?

Vegans claim great health benefits to their diet. And I remember a vegan I knew claiming eating meat really hurts your body: makes your dick not work, etc.

So they'd say "yes".

What if vegans could show some net benefits at below net cost to you? Would you/we recalibrate not to eating a fully vegan diet, but simply eating less meat

Of course, but that's contingent on actually convincing someone of the premise.

A rather large proportion of my day-to-day happiness and utility comes from eating meat and meat-containing dishes. I am willing to entertain arguments that veganism provides net benefits at below net cost, but I think the benefits would have to be incredibly good. I would probably go vegan for an extra 10 years of life, but not for an extra 5 years of life, so that's the hole you have to dig me out of.

I wouldn't even do it for an extra 5 years, if those 5 years are spent gently shitting myself and praying for death in a retirement home. If they extend the prime, great. If they extend the tail, not so great. The value of an extra 5 years in the body of a 20 year old and an extra 5 years in the body of a 90 year old are not the same.

I've read most of the replies and I wonder if it doesn't boil down to unwillingness to entertain anything short of a perfect case. If a vegan can't provide a watertight case for how turning vegan will generate ideal outcomes on all aspects under consideration then their argument is irredeemably flawed, and if their argument is flawed it can be rejected wholesale and we can all carry on as we were.

Maybe, but I don't think that applies to the specific case @satirizedoor brought up. The poster in that case wasn't interested in advancing arguments for veganism, he was interested in shaming others for not being vegan. Of course people aren't going to respond to that. Once he condescendingly asked "what's your excuse?", there was no argument any more, just good old-fashioned "I'm better than you, suck it".

On the other hand, I don't think it's possible for a vegan to argue that you and everyone you know is doing unspeakable evil without it coming across as shaming.

There are degrees. There's a big gap between "hey man, I realize you enjoy meat but it's actually morally wrong because (reasons)", and the confrontational message from the post under discussion.

GoodGuy's social law #235: public perception of a social movement is, for obvious reasons, conditioned by the movement's most vocal advocates.

Are vegans annoying, or is it that vocal veganism advocates tend to be annoying?

I think a lot of it is perception. Veganism, like Kosher and Halal have a lot of foods that are not part of that diet, and it’s necessary to find out if the foods on offer contain offending ingredients. There’s no way to do this without having to announce it on some level or be annoying about asking.

This is only true of perfect, 100% veganism. I think that you can call yourself a vegan and eat meat occasionally. The idea of being a vegan, as far as I am concerned, is that you are doing your best to not eat meat and you eat meat very rarely, if ever. I would be fine with calling someone a vegan if they, for example, sometimes stopped checking for animal products in food at social gatherings in order to not be annoying, but the rest of the time they avoided animal products.

Vegans are annoying when you have to make an entire parallel menu to your Christmas dinner because of them, knowing that if they were hosting they would never, ever reciprocate for your preferences.

I don't think that social law is true. With the frequent siloing of groups and their members, most people won't interact with the vocal advocates, and 'most people' drive public perception. The most fervent socialist or gun-rights advocate in an American context are probably tucked away on twitter or youtube or possibly a university or thinktank, the public bases their perception I think from people like AOC or Wayne Lapierre.

Based on personal experience having been vegan for a ten year period of my life, most of the time I was so exhausted by the topic it’s the last thing I wanted to talk about.

The most annoying vegan advocates, in my experience, are people who just started and don’t understand why everyone else isn’t joining them immediately.

I don't understand you point at the end:

I wish I could say I have rejected vegetarianism because I engaged with their best arguments and found them wanting. Instead, I found their argumentation so annoying I ceased to engage with them.

Maybe because their arguments aren't that good? Whatever...

What these groups all have in common is a strong ability to signal these things emotionally to people similar to them and form a consensus, but also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably.

OK...

We don't have many vegans, anti-car people, or socialists here at The Motte - but that's not because their arguments are invalid, it's because the people attracted to those ideologies don't fit well with our particular discursive style.

Huh? Is your point that unreasonable arguments are valid arguments?

:marseyshrug: If you want me to take you argument seriously, don't attack me. Or, if you start from a place of 'I am 100% right' you're not trying to have a conversation (or debate), you're just preaching... What's the point? Are you trying to convince people or are you just making yourself feel righteous?

So many conversations boil down to this: Someone is better because they do (or don't do) 'X'. If I bring up a counter-point, the response is along the lines of 'Ew, you're one of those people'. Now, I can try to prove I'm not what I'm being accused of (it's funny how easily things like white nationalist is thrown around) or I can respond with a similar personal attack. Neither one is effective but one makes me feel better...

I don't owe my time or energy to anyone. Why would I give it to someone that starts off attacking me?

I think that's a blind spot for The Motte.

I think you doing the thing...

It is quite unpleasant to argue against the core assumptions of veganism in a way that is epistemically rigorous. One has to tear down the entire concept of ethics as it is typically understood, then rebuild some sort of timeless decision theory-based normative system that reproduces the common-sense undisputed norms of "ethical" human behavior, but hopefully without the gaping security hole of giving in to utility monsters and bottomless pits of suffering.

> But QuantumFreakonomics you wise sage, I inherently care about the suffering of all sentient beings. It is part of my utility function, and I don't want to change my utility function.

You are wrong about your own utility function. You do not inherently care about the subjective experience of shrimp in the Atlantic Ocean. I don't believe you. You are confusing type I goods (goods which have intrinsic value, i.e. are valued for their own sake) with type II goods (goods which have only extrinsic value, i.e. are valued for their ability to produce/acquire type I goods). Your own pleasure and your own lack of suffering are type I goods. The pleasure and lack of suffering of anonymous random sentient creatures is not a type I good, but it is often (but not always) a type II good. Assuming that the pleasure and lack of suffering of anonymous random sentient creatures is a type I good is an error, as is assuming that it is always a type II good. No one wants to say this in polite company because it makes you sound like a massive asshole, but when no one has the guts to point this out you end up with people advocating to redirect the malaria net funding (which saved 100,000+ lives) to saving chickens instead.

no one has the guts to point this out you end up with people advocating to redirect the malaria net funding (which saved 100,000+ lives) to saving chickens instead.

I mean. I have to say I think you should do neither and just give the money to a car dealership for a Corvette.

You do not inherently care about the subjective experience of shrimp in the Atlantic Ocean. I don't believe you.

When most people talk about Utilitarianism they’re talking about maximizing social utility, so this objection is completely irrelevant — the whole point of Utilitarianism is that you are maximizing something you don’t feel intrinsically!

You can, of course, object that social utility should assign zero weight to the shrimp’s utility function, but using your personal feelings to argue for the social utility function's weights should feel pretty unprincipled.

advocating to redirect the malaria net funding (which saved 100,000+ lives) to saving chickens instead.

Precisely how much more does OP value one unit of a human's welfare than one unit of another animal's welfare, just because the former is a human? How does OP derive this tradeoff?

That's actually a good question. Maybe the actual root of the vegan vs carnist bloodmouth divide.

I have a very easy confident answer for myself. My family raised chickens when I was a kid. They hold, to within roundoff error, no moral worth. I watched a long vegan propaganda movie focused partially on chicken farming and heard Sam Harris' claim that chicken farming is an unrelenting moral travesty. I am unmoved. Chickens are such mean, spiteful little animals. To the degree they have any social awareness, it is to needlessly harm their fellows. Any injured chicken got relentlessly pecked on it's injury by it's fellows. They are demons, or the most Hollywood version of velociraptors, but real.

There's some enormous failure in empathy here. People wrongly projecting their human awareness and intellect onto chickens. Which I think to them feels like empathy, but is simply false.

Family also raised (and raises) chickens and I disagree your characterization of them as mean, spiteful demonic creatures. That's projecting human characteristics onto a rather dim animal species from the other direction.

Maybe your bunch was raising them en masse in tight battery conditions? In unrestricted free range conditions they form little distinct packs that wander around and roost together in a separate locations from other packs, some hens have stronger intelligence and better maternal skills than others, they'll readily adopt biddies from other species like guineas or ducks as well as orphaned chicken biddies. Some of them have noticeably different levels of fear or openness towards humans and other animals, they'll fight and form a pecking order, etc. Nothing like a dog, cow or goat but they definitely have some social awareness beyond killing their own wounded. Typical domesticated animal behavior, nothing I'd call nefarious. The phenomena of attacking wounded members of the same species, particularly during the initial injury when they're flailing about, is something I've witnessed in dogs and cattle as well - I think it's some kind of evolutionary quirk about silencing something that will attract predators or may be ill.

I honestly think we can blame Disney for a huge portion of this problem.

Antromorphism is a hell of a drug.

Let's call this the "Bambi's mom" problem.

Alternatively, you could just not be a pure utilitarian.

It is quite unpleasant to argue against the core assumptions of veganism in a way that is epistemically rigorous. One has to tear down the entire concept of ethics as it is typically understood, then rebuild some sort of timeless decision theory-based normative system that reproduces the common-sense undisputed norms of "ethical" human behavior, but hopefully without the gaping security hole of giving in to utility monsters and bottomless pits of suffering.

That's one of the pitfalls of atheism. As a Catholic, I just tell them that animals don't have souls and that they're meant to serve people. It's obviously a little more sophisticated than that, but that's the gist of it. God told Adam and Eve to "fill the earth and subdue it." This doesn't mean that wanton cruelty or destruction of nature is permissible, since it's still part of God's creation and under our stewardship, but it doesn't mean that every tree is sacred or that animals have the same status as humans.

If you want to take a more secular tack, I'd try to bait them into taking the "every tree is sacred" path. First, vegans eat plants. So find out what their justification is for eating plants that were once as alive as the animals were. I'm on my way out the door but I trust you can take the argument from there, but it's much easier if you have religion on your side. Then all of the sudden they're arguing against your religion which is much more daunting than than simply arguing against meat-eating. Since most people assume I'm not religious it usually stops them cold.

As a Catholic, I just tell them that animals don't have souls and that they're meant to serve people.

As a non-religious person, I just tell them that we conquered the food chain and earned the right to do whatever we want. We won. If chickens didn't want to be eaten they should have invented guns. They didn't.

A pig will readily devour my corpse with no compunctions. I am simply reciprocating.

Do you think rich Nigeria wouldn't be doing a lot for african US?

No, I think they'd earmark the money and then steal it all. Of course you could say "Well what about a rich Nigeria that isn't corrupt", but there's really no end to changing the local culture once you let that cat out of the bag.

Once we said "switched places" it is up to argument how much of "being rich" we actually switch. A rich child of rich parents is not the same as a poor man who won 100 million in lottery.

I'm pretty sure most whites aren't Effective Altruists either.

It's kind of how I feel about free speech; I'm not interested in protecting the speech of anyone who would try and censor me. Once you stop abiding by the covenant, you are no longer protected by it.

Yes, but this is pretty much equivalent to saying "As a Scientologist, I just tell them that Xenu said eating animals is ok". It makes no sense to anyone who isn't already on board with your religion. Meanwhile, while it makes sense to you, that probably doesn't matter because you're probably not trying to justify the behavior to yourself, you already feel ok with it.

In Catholicism, animals are usually described as having souls, but not rational, eternal, spiritual ones.

First, vegans eat plants. So find out what their justification is for eating plants that were once as alive as the animals were.

I think the answer is usually that plants don't suffer when you kill them. They see animals as part of a category of "things that experience and suffer" along with humans. Even the non-utilitarian vegans I've met seem to value suffering and experience as key to moral evaluation, in a way that deontologists and virtue ethicists don't tend to.

Of course, we can't really know if animals are conscious (just as I can't know if you are), so who knows -- maybe plants actually are conscious and do suffer. But I think the assumption of veganism is that our similarities to animals make it more likely they do, so we should be on the safe side and not harm them.

Not a vegan, but that's my steelman.

You are confusing type I goods (goods which have intrinsic value, i.e. are valued for their own sake) with type II goods (goods which have only extrinsic value, i.e. are valued for their ability to produce/acquire type I goods). Your own pleasure and your own lack of suffering are type I goods. The pleasure and lack of suffering of anonymous random sentient creatures is not a type I good, but it is often (but not always) a type II good.

This is a common cynical misinterpretation of utility functions. Even if humans were utilitarian, the point of utilitarianism is to maximize utility, not to maximize one's own subjective feeling of utility. I help others because they need help, not in order to experience the fuzzies associated with helping others. If there was a drug that gave me that feeling, I would not take it.

I started taking adderall recently in order to concentrate better. It gives me a feeling identical to what I feel when I accomplish something difficult. It's a great feeling, but means nothing to me without the substance of an actual accomplishment behind it. The most important thing to me in life is accomplishing great things, yet I take Adderall only very rarely.

Shrimp aren't type 1 goods for me, but people who share my values (which is nearly all of them to some extent) are.

Vegans can be successful athletes but it is more effort to do so. I dunno if one can be among the best athlete and a vegan.

Vegan protein tend not to have all protein amino acids and protein is less bioavailable. So it requires more effort to make sure you are eating different vegan foods that have a complete set.

Realistically effort matters a lot of how averages of people behave. So you are likely going to get a less athletic population on veganism. Plus veganism from what I know would be a bad idea for young children.

In general there is a danger of malnutrition with veganism which can be overcome with effort and knowledge. Since people can not be expected to have the knowledge and make the effort, this does mean that wider adoption of veganism would result in more of such problems.

And this is not entering issues about animal fertilizer, logistics, and more.

Vegans can be successful athletes but it is more effort to do so. I dunno if one can be among the best athlete and a vegan.

It certainly is, Novak Djokavic is proof that you can do it, for at least a period of time.

But the rest are all very valid problems with veganism. Adding meat to a diet often is a panacea to various health problems in the same way cutting cigarettes is for respiratory problems.

My opinion of veganism itself is bounded. On the top end, in spite of their extreme overrepresentation among rich white people, they are extremely underrepresented among elite, or even college level, athletes. On the bottom end, they seem as healthy as any other group of PMC whites who care about their health.

I am willing to believe that it’s possible for a non-childbearing, moderately athletic adult vegan to eat a diet as healthy as an omnivore. I don’t think this is the median vegan, however. My experience of vegans is, granted, mostly the ones who work in their restaurants, but they seem by and large to have health on par with criminals, homeless people, etc. I blame this on living on chips, soda, and desert- it’s possible that wealthy vegans who eat salads with rice and beans are more typical.

Anecdote: I remember a friend I had who had been watching lots of vegan Youtube/Instagram videos and was doing a vegan diet for "aesthetics." She was struggling to make it work. We had a mutual friend who was a vegan, so I said, "Why not ask him for advice?" Her response? "Have you seen how he looks?" Our mutual friend looked noticeably unhealthy. While a lot of that had to do with the drugs and drink, the vegan diet was no panacea. Turns out that to look like a Californian influencer, copying their diet is not enough.

Annoyingly for her, I'd lost a lot of weight in that period on a diet where my main principle was just reduce sugar consumption and eat high-satiety foods (fat, fibre, protein, complex carbohydrates).

Annoyingly for her, I'd lost a lot of weight in that period on a diet where my main principle was just reduce sugar consumption and eat high-satiety foods (fat, fibre, protein, complex carbohydrates).

It is a source of endless irritation for one friend of mine that I lost more weight in 3 months on a diet of red meat, crisps, ice cream and pasta (just in, you know, sane calorie amounts) than he did in a year of veganism.

There is a hilarious literature on ice cream and dieting.

And for diabetes!

Haven't a lot of vegan influencers turned out to not actually be real vegans? Not quite to the point of "Male Feminist Abuses Women" headlines, but still a bunch.

Seems like a good hussle. It's hard to verify someone's diet and there is a lot of wishful thinking when it comes to diets.

I think it's not that they weren't vegans, but that they were abusing the fuck out of steroids etc at the same time, from what I recall.

Maybe the bodybuilder ones, but IIRC the pretty-girl vegan influencers just keep getting caught eating fish or eggs(and it is generally quite difficult to have nice skin and hair, or bright eyes, without at least some animal protein in your diet).

I accept that as weak evidence against veganism being a good idea.

Seeing as I find both EA-types and vegans insufferably obnoxious this isn't a surprise to me.

I do, and I don't give a damn what SBF has to say.

I'm not sure veganism or moral vegetarianism is subject to rational argument; it's a matter of axioms. If you don't give a shit about chicken and cow deaths, no one is going to argue you into doing so. And if you do, nobody's going to argue you into meat-eating.

Anti-car people pop up often enough. There are arguments, they don't really convince anyone, but that's not unusual. Personally I think you've inadvertently provided one of your own arguments against the anti-car people:

(with an unpleasant HOA, sadly),

Most "axioms" are not axioms at all. A chicken with human-level intelligence and values would have moral worth, so the true axiom is something like "intelligence grants moral worth." Starting from that axiom one could argue that chickens have some intelligence and thus some non-zero moral worth.

I disagree; a theoretically intelligent chicken would not have moral worth because it is not a human, and ‘humans have sufficiently more moral worth than animals to justify eating them’ is a statement I consider a postulate. It doesn’t matter if whales are as smart as people the japs still have the right to eat them, and it doesn’t matter if chickens are as smart as chickens or as smart as people, I will still fry and eat them.

and it doesn’t matter if chickens are as smart as chickens or as smart as people, I will still fry and eat them.

If chickens were as smart as people there would be absolutely no justification to fry and eat them, if only because their equal intelligence implies there will probably be a time in the future when the tables are turned on who has power and you absolutely wouldn't want the chickens to start eating humans.

Of course intelligence gives rise to moral worth, and yes I will bite the bullet and freely say that some people are worth more morally than others (this doesn't mean that intelligence is the only thing behind moral worth, but it absolutely is one of them).

Of course intelligence gives rise to moral worth, and yes I will bite the bullet and freely say that some people are worth more morally than others

Wouldn’t have expected you of all people to bite the bullet and say whites can be presumed to be morally worth 25% more than Indian people, but that’s what ‘some people are worth more than others’ means when intelligence gives rise to moral worth.

Sure, I'll happily say that the average white gets more moral points than the average Indian on the intelligence portion of what determines moral worth, but there are other things which also contribute to moral worth.

Plus India is very very divided along caste lines, there has been minimal interbreeding between the high and the low over the last few thousand of years, there are identifiable genetic subgroups where the average intelligence is higher than that of white people as a whole.

Wouldn’t have expected you of all people to bite the bullet and say whites can be presumed to be morally worth 25% more than Indian people

In one factor. He said there are others, potentially many others. If you score 25% less than me on an assignment worth 1% of our final grade, that might not even make a perceptible difference in the end.

It doesn't, though. If that's your argument, then you have to explain why unintelligent humans have any moral worth. Profoundly retarded people are arguably less intelligent than squid, which at least have the ability to survive on their own , but I don't think anyone would argue that they have the same moral worth.

Profoundly retarded people are arguably less intelligent than squid, which at least have the ability to survive on their own , but I don't think anyone would argue that they have the same moral worth.

I would. I think all such people should be euthanized. They aren't really people. They're worthless sacks of flesh that just happen to have human DNA

I wouldn't go that far. Those people are still human, with a human soul. It is a sin to kill another human, regardless of how stupid they may be. You can make arguments about withdrawing intensive care if they are a vegetable who can't survive without it, but killing extremely stupid people who are no danger to anybody else when you can keep them alive at minimal cost kills a part of us as well along with it.

Even if religion isn't true, a society where everyone believes they will be questioned by God for their sins on the day of Judgement is better than one where nobody believes this. This is yet another basic "moral fact" that has been lost by the modern west when it threw away the trappings of religion.

We literally kill some brain dead people. On the limit, perfectly unintelligent (not)people have no moral worth.

He gets only the moral benefit of avoiding needless suffering, which is a lower bar of morality, applicable to animals. And he probably has people who care about him, like family, or catholics, so his value by proxy cannot be ignored by other humans.

Would you say that an intelligent alien has less moral worth than a retarded human? On what basis, genetic kindred? The alien can understand cooperation and retaliation, while the retard is morally incompetent and therefore cannot be trusted to cooperate. His own behaviour is random, morally meaningless, so our behaviour towards him loses moral meaning too. It is futile to wait for a dangerous wild animal to ‘defect’ before killing him, as we would if he were intelligent.

It is futile to wait for a dangerous wild animal to ‘defect’ before killing him, as we would if he were intelligent.

Completely agree with this.

Because multiple things grant rise to moral worth as I said in my post not just intelligence. You could have a model of the form: moral_worth = b_1*intelligence+b_2*is_human + ... + error where the ... includes other things that dictate moral worth where b_2 > 0. In this case profoundly stupid humans have a 1 for is_human and so get some moral worth from just that, while profoundly stupid chickens have a 0 for is_human so have less moral worth (according to a human, a chicken may well want to reverse things).

I can well assume that an equally intelligent human has more moral worth to an equally intelligent chicken, this is no different from the belief that an American has more moral worth than an otherwise equivalent Egyptian that so many people seem to hold without it affecting them very much at all. That doesn't mean a highly intelligent chicken has so low moral worth it's fine to eat it.

I am prepared to say that there is an IQ/functionality threshold below which a biologically-human entity could have scarcely more moral value than a squid.

Yes but veganism can also be bad outside of the direct moral issue. The refusal to care about second order effects and the broader consequences of an ideology over the more direct ethical rights issue is a general weakness of left wing ideology that claims it advocates for the rights of a certain group. Which rights can also undermine the rights of others. Maybe not as much tactically, but when it comes to getting desirable results for humanity as a whole it does matter. Tactically, unfortunately many people are susceptible to myopic vision and getting bullied by this kind of moralism. I am not against moralism myself, but I oppose myopic moralism.

The onus should be on vegans to convince us that humanity adopting veganism is realistic, workable and good. Not only as an end point but also that the process will be successful and not more akin to say the communist project of ending "exploitation of workers" and promoting a "classless society".

It is hard for me to oppose some weaker suggestions like reducing animal cruelty in factory farming, but I am much more suspicious of more ambitious left wing movements in general, including veganism in particular.

I think the difference is made by the 'fact' that people like their hedonistic overlords more than their puritanical peers. Moral righteousness and asceticism just don't quite hit the same as a cheese burger, fries and a beer. It's for this reason that the arguments themselves are immaterial, because the decisions are not made on a logical level. The basic argument is the same <You would be uncomfortable if you understood / saw X, Y, Z> vs <I don't want to know> and this kind of sums up the basic left vs right argument. The right understands and responds to the limbic systems of their 'clients' to the benefit of their overlords; whereas the left faces an uphill battle pretty much everywhere outside of professional or academic contexts.

Moral righteousness and asceticism just don't quite hit the same as a cheese burger, fries and a beer.

Damn it, I'm trying to watch my carbs intake after the Christmas blow-out of Too Many Sugary High Calorie Goodies, and now I really want a cheeseburger and fries (you can keep the beer). Not even "make it myself", mass-market junk food takeaway stuff. Nothing hits like it when you're in a certain mood. Thanks! 🤣

One question for vegans is that pretty much any industrial sized farming (needed to support our population) will involve killing a lot of animals in collecting farm products. That is, killing a cow and eating it may involve less animal death compared to eating bread.

This can be solved via two ways: (1) is that animals killed during farm are less advanced and therefore their death is less morally wrong or (2) intent matters.

The problem with (1) is it undermines the entire vegan argument. The problem with (2) is that at a certain level of recklessness the moral consequences are similar.

Therefore, to live means other animals will die. I am on board with not torturing other animals (eg I wont eat veal, I buy pasture raised eggs) as that seems just unnecessary. But at the same time I don’t have qualms with eating meat.

That is, killing a cow and eating it may involve less animal death compared to eating bread.

Cows eat industrially farmed food. Every calorie of meat you eat requires far calories of plants to create than if you had just eaten plants.

This depends massively on where in the world you are. In the UK, most of our beef is domestic, and most of our domestic production is fed via grass forage. Now, I suppose you could consider pastures to be industrially farmed grass, but I don't think that's what most people would think of it as. Humans cannot extract meaningful nutrition from eating the grass instead.

There are lots of questions for vegans. They just won't answer them.

They say that meat-eating is bad for animals. That's worth considering, so I put out some counterarguments.

They respond by saying it will clog your arteries. That's worth considering, so I put out some counterarguments.

They respond by saying it's bad for the planet. That's worth considering, so I put out some counterarguments.

They respond by saying it's bad for animals, and I disengage.

The unfortunate thing is that their arguments all seem to be worth considering. Perhaps it is bad to kill and eat animals. Perhaps animal fat is bad for cardiovascular health. Perhaps it does have an abnormally large carbon footprint. I'd love to know, but all my discussions with vegans have resulted in changing the argument, emotional appeal, and social pressure - in other words, bullshit.

I think the views of the white supremacists here are repugnant, but at least they respect me enough to engage with my arguments, and I feel obligated to show them the same.

The main argument about the cruelty involved in agri-business intensive factory farming and the suffering caused is the best of their case. That does raise legitimate points to be answered, and to see and understand what is really going on for the production of cheap, plentiful animal protein for us to consume.

It's when they get into "of course you're an immoral heartless monster if you don't immediately this second give up all meat and animal products", and when some of them get into the sentimental theatrics around weeping cows etc. that turns me off.

Especially the double standard when it comes to keeping pets; they don't let their cats outside, which seems to me very cruel to animals that are not meant to be indoors all the time. That's because they don't want the cats killing birds and other small animals, which okay maybe, but that's nature. But they want to go against nature when it suits them when it comes to being able to exploit animals, such as pets, as unconditional-love-production machines. Then we get posts about having to put the cat on a diet because it put on too much weight. Well, yeah, of course it did! It's inside literally 24/7 with nothing to do but eat, instead of being put out at night at least, or let out during the day, to run around and be an animal. Though part of that is as much that the people are living in places where they don't have a back garden or any way to let their cat out. But the human at least can get out of the house.

Okay, that's a side track, but the point I think still stands: they're willing to be cruel in a small way to animals for companionship, so their morality isn't 100% perfect. Nobody's is, of course, but they don't get to call other people immoral for not living up to their standards then.

There's also the route of "how dare you take medication when you're sick, that virus needs to replicate inside you to survive, by taking medicine you're essentially conducting a genocide".

Is your main point of contention that vegans bundle together a lot of beliefs that should be independent, likely motivated by a core moral dislike of killing animals? Sure. But the vast majority of people do that; beliefs are tribal, and that's far from unique to vegans.

I'd be curious to see a link to the vegan post you mentioned; did he jump from point to point as you describe here, or did he focus on the (likely wrong) "veganism is good for high performance in sports" argument only to have a bunch of posters bring up unrelated points?

Is your main point of contention that vegans bundle together a lot of beliefs that should be independent, likely motivated by a core moral dislike of killing animals? Sure. But the vast majority of people do that; beliefs are tribal, and that's far from unique to vegans.

Vegans seem especially bad at this.

The other end of my social circle is rather MAGA. I can sit with them and discuss my many reservations about Donald Trump. For example, I usually say that I think he is hopelessly underinformed about foreign policy. In response, they sometimes disagree with me, citing things like the Abraham Accords. Usually they'll agree with me that he's terrible on foreign polic, but on balance, they prefer him to the alternatives.

I can have a productive discussion with them. They'll discuss the point at hand, and treat me with respect. With vegans, I get Gish Gallops, emotional appeals, shaming, and social desirability arguments.

My moral intuitions are closer to vegans than MAGA, but I find vegans so annoying I don't engage with them.

This appears to be the original link that I painstakingly spent several minutes of my valuable time looking up. (just kidding, my time isn't very valuable) https://www.themotte.org/post/476/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/93520?context=8#context

Response 1 isn't self-undermining, just saying that some utils should be weighted more or less than others. Most vegans, for instance, would say that given a choice between killing a roach and killing a human, it's better to kill the roach. The point of dispute is what that weighting scheme should be (particularly, whether non-human animals have zero, or near enough, moral weight). Vegans have to justify granting moral weight to animals, of course, but saying they do have moral weight doesn't commit them to granting all animals equal weight.

But it is hard to say on the way hand why a mouse dying is worse than say eating an egg or for that matter a chicken.

That is, killing a cow and eating it may involve less animal death compared to eating bread.

This is a big ‘may’, I’m not sure how you can get to a confident ‘therefore’ without settling it.

I also think (2) is an easy bullet for a vegan to bite if you aren’t a utilitarian (though the utilitarian question remains unsettled). If you think killing animals is wrong full stop then arguments about how trying to avoid killing animals can backfire will sound the same as a pro-lifer hearing about how legalising abortion will lead to fewer murdered babies (this was an argument I heard a lot of during the build up to the Irish abortion referendum).

Industrial farming of animals requires feeding them, and thanks to thermodynamics this is dramatically less efficient than growing food for humans directly. (Theoretically you can raise some grass-fed cattle on grassland that already exists without clearing new land but this does not scale and still kills the cattle themselves. Note that labeling beef as "grass-fed" does not mean they get their food exclusively from pasture, it includes feeding them hay which itself has to be harvested.) You don't need to throw up your hands and act like there's no way to know if there's more animal death/suffering required for beef or bread, various rough estimates like this are enough to show the intuitively obvious answer is correct.

A life lived only doing the optimal bare minimum to survive is not a life I want to live at all.

It might be more efficient for humanity to subsist on a bland grey nutrient paste, but that's not in any way an argument to say that we SHOULD do that.

Is somebody asking you to consider doing that?

If you're using efficiency as an argument for doing something with no other considerations bounding it (such as enjoyment) then, yes, you are asking exactly that.

Veganism is one point on the spectrum, with people both before it and after it. You cannot dismiss it by appealing to the limit (you’ll note that vegans don’t eat flavorless paste).

Unless you’re arguing that anyone advocating for efficiency in consumption has to eat flavorless paste, otherwise they’re a hypocrite.

The key is not that they're advocating efficiency, it's that they're excluding other things. If they exclude enjoyment, yet they don't eat flavorless paste, indicating that enjoyment actually matters to them, yes, they're a hypocrite.

Responding to "one benefit of X is Y" with "I think you're forgetting about Z" is completely fine.

When somebody (zeke5123) incorrectly says "actually Y isn't a benefit of X" and somebody (sodiummuffin) responds with "actually, you're wrong because etc.", it is completely inappropriate to accuse them of forgetting about Z (assuming that was what astranagant was actually doing).

sodiummuffin never claimed to be doing a fully-fledged accounting of all the pros and cons of veganism.

(you’ll note that vegans don’t eat flavorless paste)

I've seen vegan bacon. It looks like a plastic dog toy.

various rough estimates like this

Many years ago vegans on the internet liked to throw out estimates of how many gallons of water it takes to make pound of beef. But they had various estimates varying by orders of magnitude. It seemed that their "calculations" were actually bullshit. I tried pressing them when they put forth one of the various contradictory claims, but they don't care to explain why the number they stated is orders of magnitude off of other seemingly as valid predictions.

So, maybe your link with bar graphs legit. Maybe it is yet more vegan fantasy math.

Okay, let's turn all pasturage over to tillage (and forget marginal lands such as raising sheep on mountainsides). No more commercial cow, sheep, pig or chicken rearing, all those animals slaughtered and consumed and no replacements.

When talking about mass crop production, we have to consider what crops are (1) commercially desirable (e.g. what wheat for flour for baking) (2) what crops can be grown on particular land (not everywhere is suitable; that's why the American and Canadian plains of wheat for producing 'strong' flour) (3) the evolution of monoculture and loss of traditional varieties of crops, because we're now on mass production scales to feed the world (4) necessity for pesticides, herbicides, and other means of keeping crop loss down (you don't want birds eating the seed once planted, for instance, so how do you cope with that?) (5) downstream damage to environment from mass scale monoculture (rice, for example, is supposedly problematic and involved in contributing to global warming due to greenhouse gases emissions from necessary growth conditions). There's a lot of wild animals, from birds on down to insects, which are considered pests and which need to be controlled (including killing) in order to produce food crops. And that's without touching the GMO question, which may produce hardier crops but which inevitably lead to the same necessity for large scale agri-business production because the economies of scale don't exist for small peasant farmers/small scale farming. Think of those same American plains with no trees, hedges, fences, in sight, just acres upon acres of croppage replacing native prairie and grassland (and think of the Dustbowl era from over-exploitation of same).

I have a notion that there's a vegan ideal of cosy cottage food production which has no basis in the reality of large-scale food production from grains, pulses, vegetables and non-animal foodstuffs, anymore than the majority of meat-consumers know the full details of how meat is produced.

(4) necessity for pesticides, herbicides, and other means of keeping crop loss down (you don't want birds eating the seed once planted, for instance, so how do you cope with that?

除四害! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eradicate_pests_and_diseases_and_build_happiness_for_ten_thousand_generations.jpg

None of that addresses that raising meat for slaughter involves growing more crops, not less. For instance, the U.S. produces 51.5 million acres of hay and 37.3 million acres of wheat per year. Even before trying to account for other sources of animal feed, or that people eat more wheat than beef, or that some of that wheat is itself feeding animals, hay alone is using more land that wheat production.

Most of the 'food' that we feed cattle is agricultural waste that cannot be eaten by people and would otherwise simply be left to rot, and most cattle are raised on marginal land that cannot be used to grow crops. Farmers have a direct financial incentive to reduce inefficiency as much as possible, as inefficiency eats into their profit margins.

However, I think that Zeke was referring to small mammals getting killed during harvesting, which my googling suggests is more due to increased predation from loss of cover than getting chewed up by machinery. Depending on how you balance the utils of cows versus mice versus birds that prey on mice, it's certainly plausible that harvesting a field of wheat could produce more animal suffering than grazing cows on that same field.

The U.S. produces 51.5 million acres of hay and 37.3 million acres of wheat per year. So setting aside all other forms of animal feed, more land goes to producing hay alone than to wheat.

However, I think that Zeke was referring to small mammals getting killed during harvesting, which my googling suggests is more due to increased predation from loss of cover than getting chewed up by machinery.

Which is why I'm pointing out that raising cattle at scale involves harvesting even more land. Estimating the effects on animals from cropland is difficult, but it's not a comparison that favors beef to begin with.

A lot of hay production is a tax write off- it’s cheaper to have a guy come bail up your hay on land you aren’t using for agriculture than it is to pay taxes on it. Some of that land is also fallowed, or hay is otherwise a secondary product(certain kinds of hunting leases, for example).

The Saw Doctors - Hay Wrap

You can grow hay/alphalpha on extremely marginal land, which is largely unusable for other crops. I’m not arguing that these crops never displace food commodities, but in general I would expect that farmers favor food crops which are typically more valuable.

But zeke5123 is talking about accidentally killing animals as part of growing and harvesting crops, not optimal land use. That seems like it would be similar per-acre whether you're growing alfalfa or wheat.

It's a completely different subject but I'm reminded of Scott's 2015 post about California's water crisis:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/

34 million acre-feet of water are diverted to agriculture. The most water-expensive crop is alfalfa, which requires 5.3 million acre-feet a year. If you’re asking “Who the heck eats 5.3 million acre-feet of alfalfa?” the answer is “cows”. A bunch of other crops use about 2 million acre-feet each.

All urban water consumption totals 9 million acre-feet. Of those, 2.4 million are for commercial and industrial institutions, 3.8 million are for lawns, and 2.8 million are personal water use by average citizens in their houses.

Which leads to interesting calculations like this:

The California alfalfa industry makes a total of $860 million worth of alfalfa hay per year. So if you calculate it out, a California resident who wants to spend her fair share of money to solve the water crisis without worrying about cutting back could do it by paying the alfalfa industry $2 to not grow $2 worth of alfalfa, thus saving as much water as if she very carefully rationed her own use.

But in any case the question of whether alfalfa is worth the resource usage has little to do with zeke5123's objection.

But zeke5123 is talking about accidentally killing animals as part of growing and harvesting crops, not optimal land use. That seems like it would be similar per-acre whether you're growing alfalfa or wheat.

Alfalfa maybe, but generic hay production probably kills fewer animals because of less pest control, tilling, etc.- even though being a mouse caught in a mower is pretty bad, just like being a mouse caught in a combine harvester.

California agriculture is feckin' crazy, because they're growing water-heavy crops in places never meant to grow anything, in order to exploit the good climate and growing seasons. And because they don't have sufficient water resources, they have to drag it out of rivers originating in other states.

But hey, that's their economy and their problem to sort out.

You never gain-feed cattle for years, you finish them on grain in a lot for a few months to put some marbling on them. Have you seen grain prices? Even before 2020 you'd quickly go broke trying to raise beef on grain.
And clearing jungle for pasture is a net improvement for animal welfare, because jungles are obscene murder temples of pure agony, while well-tended pastures are grass and flowers and a few voles (if you don't care about insects).

This whole thing gets very silly when you start quantifying it, which is why the people doing the quantifying only ever do it in ways that give the impression of making their moral arguments "sciency"

Sorry, I was going off half-remembered information about how "grass-fed" labeling is meaningless in some countries. A more relevant point is that grass-fed labeling includes food sources like hay, which still have to be harvested, which brings us back to the inherent thermodynamic inefficiency of feeding another animal so you can later eat its meat.

And clearing jungle for pasture is a net improvement for animal welfare, because jungles are obscene murder temples of pure agony, while well-tended pastures are grass and flowers and a few voles (if you don't care about insects).

I was responding based on his assumptions that areas like cropland are bad for animals, rather than being good because they involve creating areas where fewer animals are born into lives of suffering. Yes, with the right set of moral assumptions you can view every animal born into the wild as a bad thing, which would be a point in favor of anything that involves using lots of land in a way that leads to a low density of animal life. But once you're considering things at that level of indirect effects, you should also consider that using resources and land to raise cattle trades off against using it in other ways. Strip-mines and suburbs don't have a high density of animals either, even tree farms aren't that high, it's difficult to predict the effects on land use if people redirected money from meat to something like housing.

In the sufficiently long term the biggest effect might be on social attitudes, as humans gain more and more power over the environment a society in which ethical vegetarianism is the norm also seems more likely to care about wild animal suffering and act accordingly. (Like those ideas regarding genetically-engineering wild animals to reduce their suffering.) If nothing else wild animals with brains capable of suffering are already becoming a smaller percentage of Earth's population, so the average welfare of animals (including humans in the average) is increasingly driven by whether humanity continues to scale up the population of animals we raise for slaughter alongside our own population. For instance look at Earth's distribution of mammal and bird biomass - obviously neither mammals or biomass are the metrics we care about, but it gives a sense of the trend.

There's a third solution. A field mouse living in a wheat field lives a normal field mouse life until one day it's instantly shredded by a thresher. That doesn't resemble the life of the vast majority of farm animals in the US, who are typically raised in very poor conditions and then are slaughtered in more or less stressful environments.

inb4 "I only buy meat from my uncle's farm": good for you, but again, that's not reflective of the reality of factory farming which produces most meat.

A field mouse living in a wheat field lives a normal field mouse life until one day it's instantly shredded by a thresher.

Okay, that's at least a compromise solution where you're willing to trade off some animal suffering and death in exchange for giving up a lot more animal suffering and death. Presumably, you'd be okay with farmed fish and the likes, since fish aren't that high on the "they gots qualia just like us!" scale?

This is a position that can be debated, with room to give on both sides. It's the vegans who, like one online lassie, can't even look at people fishing because of the persons (she meant fish, not humans) dying, or those who seem to think you can switch to all-plant diet with no animals at all harmed, that are the unreasonable ones. And being online, they're the vocal majority who are seen as representative, not types like "Well, Hindu diet is vegetarian" but acknowledging that it uses milk, butter, ghee, cheese, yoghurt etc. and depends on dairy farming and isn't 100% vegan.

It is very easy to source ethical meat and not very expensive either. Treating it as some kind of unfeasible or cumbersome solution is so strange to me. If we want to reduce suffering then surely that must be an easier ask than asking people to eschew meat entirely.

But that's kind of the point isn't it? The vegans don't really want to reduce animal suffering, they want to be on a moral crusade. Veganism isn't an intellectually principled moral stance, it's a religious one.

Veganism isn't an intellectually principled moral stance, it's a religious one.

Some of 'em. It's the zeal of the convert problem, where for some people it is an all-or-nothing crusade. And if you're basing your veganism on the suffering of sentient others, of course it's appalling to them.

It really is the equivalent of the abortion debate, though vegans may not wish to see it in those terms, but they can both consider abortion to be a human right and Constitutional right and healthcare because of bodily autonomy and the foetus is not a person, and object to meat-eating because even if animals are not persons, they're sentient or sapient or both. One question is a matter of private personal morality and the other is plain observable fact and nothing to do with personal morals other than "you should be horrified by this scale of torture and murder".

A normal field mouse lives in constant fear of being eaten alive by a dozen different types of predators, and their population is kept in check either by being relentlessly hunted by perpetually hungry overpopulated predators or hideous, agonizing plagues if their population density gets high enough.

The un-hunted deer where I live all caught a wasting disease that rots their brains as they grind their teeth out and and wander in circles. I watched a baby fawn starve to death next to the already-skeletal body of her mother.

Nature is horrifying. Man is kind.

And how long did the death from starvation take? A few weeks, maybe a month at most? Meanwhile human will force human into a prison to suffer for decades. I would much, MUCH rather starve in a month or two.

To me this gives away the whole game. When someone says “This is cruel and inhumane!” The natural follow up question for someone interested in actually understanding the truth of the matter is “Compared to what?”

For actions between humans it’s incredibly easy to find alternative contexts and thus possible to make judgements about what’s moral and what is not.

But the life of animals, with or without human intervention, is just one rolling atrocity after another, forever and ever, without end.

I think it’s no accident this ideology only came into being after it became possible for people to live lives so alienated from wild nature that their only real experience of it is through a Disney-fied, highly sanitized lens.

When someone says “This is cruel and inhumane!” The natural follow up question for someone interested in actually understanding the truth of the matter is “Compared to what?”

And the natural follow up answer is "compared to not raising those pigs at all".

Then you’d be effectively saying that it would be better for domesticated pigs to have never existed at all, which is a whole other can of worms. Comparing not existing in the first place to existing is largely a fool’s game.

But it also belies almost a closed system of philosophical belief. Barring extreme and probably impossible human action, animals will exist. Their existence will consist of some amount of suffering. So the question isn’t “will animals suffer?” it’s “how much, and for what purpose?”

I understand if you, personally, don’t wish to participate in any action that causes animals to suffer. That has been a relatively common personal and religious choice throughout history. But the idea of systematically lessening animal suffering through collective human action is more than a little farcical.

As compared to human suffering, which while it waxes and wanes throughout the ages and will likely never be eliminated, we are able and have been able to really dull the edge of the lovecraftian horror that is the state of nature.

Veganism always reminds me of anarchism for this reason, an utopian vision of erasing a somewhat tragic aspect of the universe by radically decontextualizing it, then arguing it can be eliminated by ignoring all context.

We don't need to solve every problem in existence, but if we find ourselves in a hole we should stop digging.

Nature is horrifying, Man is part of Nature. Life itself might be described as self-organizing horror.

Yes, the conversation had me trying to remember Land's "Hell-Baked," from one of his lighter meth binges.

Certainly. Of course, if that field mouse has baby mice they will die as they cry out for their mom. That’s pretty awful.

If the vegan argument is “make factory farming more humane” I’m here for it. If the argument is eating animals is wrong because it requires killing, then nah fam I’m out.

I feel about white nationalists much the way you do about vegans - a few of them are reasonable to interact with, but most are horrible. (Disclaimer: I know vegans, but don't, afaik, have any white nationalists in my social circle.)

I am not sure veganism is really comparable to urbanism/anti-urbanism or white nationalism or socialism, though. The latter are things you can have complicated policy discussions about, with data points arguing either side. Veganism is more a personal moral stance, tied with a lot of emotion. (I also have some very strong priors about vegans, based on my observations and personal experiences: though I don't know if there are studies proving this, I believe upwards of 90% of vegans are using it at least in part to mask an eating disorder.)

I believe upwards of 90% of vegans are using it at least in part to mask an eating disorder.

That's something I've never thought of that seems true now that I look back. Thank you.

The vegans/vegetarians in my social circle all started with diets for weight loss. Then the empathy with animals part kicked in, and now there's a social contagion snowball. I don't really discuss it with them because it's some emotional web of body image, caring about animals, and wanting to belong/feel high status.

As I said, I'd like to engage reasonably with veganism, but the bullshit wall is just too high to climb.

He posted a reasonably well-argued case that veganism was not harmful to sporting performance, with the usual smug boasting of his numbers in endurance sports. At the end of his post, he finished with "what's your excuse?"

My excuse here is that I don't care about sports, I don't want to run long distances or lift heavy weights or have bulgy muscles. So if veganism doesn't stop you doing that, great, but that's got nothing to do with me and hence why "veganism is great for sports" does not work as an argument in my case.

It is also belied by the fact that top athletes don’t seem to be vegan.

I know it’s totally anecdata but it’s significant to me that I’ve never, ever met a vegan who is healthier than me.

Because of my social and professional circles I’d bet a mint that I’ve met and interacted regularly with a lot more vegans than the modal person. So it’s not a sample size issue.

I’m not the perfect picture of health but I’m certainly “robust” in more than one way. I have a lifetime of on again off again strength training, extreme sports, endurance sports, outdoorsmanship, martial arts and manual labor . But I’m too poor and too busy to be a consistent athlete, and probably too undisciplined to boot.

But still, every vegan I’ve ever met I could almost literally break them into pieces.

To wit, I believe the poster in question said he was six feet tall and 150lbs, which to me even if you are endurance athlete is not “healthy”. I’m the same height and in my best shape I had almost a hundred pounds on him, even with literally zero body fat I’d weigh more.

I know it’s a joke on the whole ‘sigma grindset’ to say “If you can’t physically overpower me I don’t have to listen to you” but when it comes to diet & excercise, I’ll say “This but unironically.”.

I’m the same height and in my best shape I had almost a hundred pounds on him, even with literally zero body fat I’d weigh more.

You were literally obese in your best shape and you are casting aspersions on other people's health?

235 at 20% body fat is not obese, I had a ton of musculature and a tiny belly. I looked like a gorilla. I was doing 10 mile runs in the mountains on the regular and could deadlift almost three times my body weight.

If I had bird bones I’d be obese but I’ve never had a problem with getting enough calcium or putting enough eustress on my body.

150lbs at 6 feet tall you’d look like you just been interrupted halfway through your stay at Auschwitz.

235 at 6 foot is 31.9 bmi. this is obesity. Every guy on the Internet seems to be 20% BF, but they can't all be right.

150 at 6' is pretty skinny but not Auschwitz tier (myself, I'm 155 at 5'8" and of course 20% bf). It's a 20.3 bmi - this is what a normal American looked like before the obesity epidemic.

You’re right on the BMI scale, but the above poster wouldn’t qualify for most reasonable measures of obesity. BMI is good for population obesity measures, but quickly falls apart when you start seriously weight training. And a 3x body weight deadlift (at 235 pounds!) is extremely far to the right tail of the population strength curve; Strength Standards calls that an ‘elite’ lift (1), and it’s comparing to a population of people who actively train for strength. I would feel confident suggesting this is something that less than 0.1% of the population can do.

Now, I also think it’s likely that the above poster was using PEDs to support supraphysiologic muscle mass, as well. Not to cast aspersions, but merely to point out that with chemical assistance it’s certainly possible.

You’re right about 150 lbs / 6’ not being close to Auschwitz level, but it’s also a little insincere to suggest that it’s a ‘normal’ body weight. At 20.3 BMI, it’s less than 2 points from being underweight (18.5). At least in our society, I think it would commonly be agreed (as you say) that that’s pretty darn skinny.

For a personal anecdote, I’ve been both 130 and 240 pounds (at 6’3) and while the former was extremely skinny, the latter looked very good (as a bodybuilder, 10% or so body fat and yes, PEDs) despite being the cutoff for obesity according to BMI.

1)https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards/deadlift/lb

I wasn’t on PEDs although I understand why that would be an assumption, anyone I’ve ever talked to with a background in this straight up told me I’m a weird outlier in terms of bone density, including my childhood doctors.

Took me a better part of two years to achieve that training 3-4 times a week.

I was also pretty laser focused on getting my deadlift as high as possible, and started off my powerlifting journey with high lower body strength as I had formerly trained as a cross country runner, and was an avid cyclist and amateur martial artist (kickboxing).

It’s really amazing what you can achieve when you’re consistent and keep your goals very narrow.

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If that guy was on PEDs, the health posturing is even more bizarre. Never met a guy on PEDs for his health.

You’re right about 150 lbs / 6’ not being close to Auschwitz level, but it’s also a little insincere to suggest that it’s a ‘normal’ body weight. At 20.3 BMI, it’s less than 2 points from being underweight (18.5).

He was about fifteen pounds above under weight. That's a pretty normal bodyweight.

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I'm not entirely sure top athletes are a good argument for any regime, because a lot of the very top ones where money is on the line seem also to be doping and other unhealthy behaviours.

We don't have many vegans, anti-car people, or socialists here at The Motte - but that's not because their arguments are invalid, it's because the people attracted to those ideologies don't fit well with our particular discursive style.

We’ve had a number of pro-car vs. anti-car arguments here on the Motte, in which both sides have made well-argued and not at all annoying arguments. I’m on the anti-car side in the sense that I personally hate driving and would strongly prefer to live in a place where owning and operating a motor vehicle is not only unnecessary but actually discouraged. Many others here are similarly disposed toward urbanism and against cars, and are far more adept at making practical/technical arguments in favor of that position than I am. The main topics of discussion in such arguments always seem to circle back to 1. Is it feasible/desirable to convert cities built for cars into cities built for walking/transit, and 2. Is a car-free lifestyle feasible for people who have multiple children. People on both sides muster the best arguments at their disposal, and few of the participants resort to cheap emotional argumentation or goalpost-shifting.

I think that perhaps you just personally find one side of that argument annoying for idiosyncratic reasons, and have convinced yourself that it’s impossible for people who disagree with you on the issue to do so for non-annoying reasons. I won’t gainsay any personal experiences you’ve had when discussing the issue in other spaces, but I can assure you that here at the Motte we are in fact perfectly capable of conducting ourselves in a dignified and intellectually-honest matter as it regards cars, and have demonstrated this capability multiple times since I’ve been here.

I'm partially in this boat regarding cars, I hate driving and thankfully do live in a place where I can currently get by without owning a car (indeed, even if I did like driving, there would not be enough reason for me to own one to justify to costs and maintenance).

One thing about anti-car vs. veganism is that while I know many vegans who quite openly say their endgoal is the abolition of meat-eating altogether, I don't know anti-car people who want to totally abolish personal cars. Most anti-car politics simply are about non-drivers being taken into account as a constituence in eg. road planning (driving lanes vs. cycling lanes vs. pedestrian lanes), more support for public transport, enforcement of traffic laws for cyclist right-of-way and so on.

Of course one can get quite silly that way, too (there's a perennial argument in Finland every autumn when it starts getting really dark with the most fanatical cyclists insisting that government's suggestions that everyone wear a reflector are pro-car propaganda since it's the drivers' responsibility to drive without hitting pedestrians and cyclists even if they don't have a reflector or reflective clothing or similar), but even still, when one's politics are about defending a specific constituency's rights, there's certainly often a tendency to go to the bat in even piddling or weird matters.

I don't know anti-car people who want to totally abolish personal cars.

I had thought this was a totally made up demographic until I joined twitter. There are genuinely a surprising number of rabid people who are just as obnoxious as the most passionate vegan jihadist.

I don't know anti-car people who want to totally abolish personal cars.

This must be a selection effect or something (cf. Scott Alexander comparing conservatives to dark matter), because when I think of anti-car people, my mind immediately recalls the various people who have stated in no uncertain terms that they do in fact want to abolish cars (e.g. BritMonkey). And then I don't know what to make of the movement as a whole because they seem reluctant to disavow their more radical sections and/or improve their messaging to be more palatable to the average person.

To be fair, this isn't anything special to urbanism; I have similar problems with the trans activist movement too. At least white nationalists are honest and don't hide how radical they are.

the most fanatical cyclists insisting that government's suggestions that everyone wear a reflector are pro-car propaganda since it's the drivers' responsibility to drive without hitting pedestrians and cyclists even if they don't have a reflector or reflective clothing or similar

Are they nuts? Ireland is not as high up as Finland (I don't think, anyway) and when it gets dark in winter, it's difficult to understand that while you out walking on the road may be able to see, the person coming against you in a car can't make out shapes in the dark. And when it gets sufficiently dark, even someone walking on the road can't distinguish shapes.

Even here, in twilight (dawn or dusk) conditions, you get people wearing all-dark clothing and you don't see them until you're right up on top of them. Wearing something light-coloured, even without a reflective armband or jacket, is just plain common sense. It would be entirely possible for a cyclist to hit a pedestrian, especially as having lights on bikes seems to be a lost art these days, not alone cars to do so.

As said, this is the most fanatical cyclist section, the folks that normie cyclists like me would tend to think are ruining the reputation for the rest of them. And yes, their argument is that the drivers should just drive slow enough to be able to react to even formless shapes.

Incidentally, it's entirely possible that on the whole, even though it's more to the south than Finland, Ireland may actually be darker during the late autumn-winter-early spring period than Finland on the whole, since there's less snow to provide a natural light-amplifying milieu.

Its worth noticing that the UK highway code says "drive slowly enough that you can stop in the distance you can see to be clear" (and most other jurisdictions have a similar requirement) and explicitly points out that this is likely to be limited by the quality of your headlights at night. A cyclist not wearing hi-vis clothes is easier to see from a distance than many other things you would want to avoid hitting.

If you can't stop in time to spot and avoid a cyclist unless they are wearing hi-vis, you wouldn't have been able to avoid a tree either.

Trees don't usually travel on the road, you'd feel and hear a change in terrain before hitting a tree, unlike for a cyclist suddenly crossing your path, or appearing in your headlights after a turn on the road.

I did learn, or at least learn to pay more attention to, one interesting fact on the last Motte pro/anti car argument I was involved in - substantial parts of the world routinely experience weather for extended periods that precludes all but the most hardy people around from doing extended outdoors work, like walking for 20 minutes while carrying a few days worth of groceries.

This is definitely a great point; I live in San Diego, with arguably the best and most mild year-round weather of any place on the planet, so it’s extremely easy for me to advocate walkability.

However, other places, both in North America and in Europe and Asia, do somehow seem to manage to have great public transit and walkability despite having intemperate weather. New York City’s weather is far worse than Phoenix’s, yet the former has the highest rate of public transit usage in America, while the latter’s transit system is pathetic. European cities with a ton of snow and rain still somehow seem to manage public transit, so it must be possible, although I can certainly see the merit of arguments that it’s quite suboptimal.

I live in NYC now, and mostly lived along the gulf coast before I moved here. One thing I have discovered is that there is a big difference between 30F and 10F. I've been told and am willing to believe there is an equally big difference between that and -10F. At 30F, you're okay with regular decent shoes, a set of long johns, a good basic jacket and a light hat. At 10F, you need (well, at least I need) insulated boots, heavy or double long johns, a heavy parka, hat, scarf unless your parka has a good hood, and mittens, and any skin exposed to the air for even a few seconds is actively painful. It's that cold here for maybe a couple of days to a week total over the course of a winter, and it's reasonable to avoid going outside during those times. At -10F I'm told you need petroleum jelly covering your face to avoid frostnip. I'm told in many places in the center of large continental areas, including the US, it's that cold or worse for multiple continuous weeks every winter. So I can totally see how many people, especially those who aren't in prime physical shape for any number of reasons, aren't eager to embrace needing to physically carry every crumb of food they eat home by hand.

I've lived in fairly hot places too, but never Phoenix. I've been told that in Phoenix, it's routinely hot enough that you are at serious risk of heat stroke if you walk outside in the sun for 20 minutes without carrying water. That's probably also worse if you need to carry moderate loads or aren't in great physical shape.

This makes me wonder how people in very cold climates where cars are unaffordable make do- my understanding is that large parts of Russia are both too poor for non-elites to have cars, and have temperatures below 10F for extended periods, and smaller portions have extended periods below -10F, and that sections of eg the Canadian Arctic are similar. How do people not die waiting for the bus in Magadan in January?

No such thing "cold", only "need more clothing".

They only go out during the warmest parts of the day. There are good YouTube videos on life in Siberia etc.

I wouldn't go so far as "all but the most hardy", merely "many on the bottom of the distribution". Carrying three days of groceries for 20 minutes in Minneapolis winter or Miami summer is bearable. Make it week's worth of groceries while tending to two small children, and it's misery if you're the average-sized woman.

In Singapore or Hong Kong this is irrelevant since in many cases the amount of time you need to spend outside is minimal. Even in parts of Canada (eg downtown Calgary or Edmonton) there are extensive climate controlled passages, tunnels and skyways to make sure you don’t need to experience extreme temperatures outside.

The idea that you need cars for climate control is just ridiculous. Many places have solved this problem; it doesn’t require the personal automobile.

As I've gotten older and my joints more rickety, I can tell you that the prospect of multiple trips down to the shop (even the one not too far away) and carrying bags of groceries back is much less appealing than when I was in my 20s and 30s. "Twenty to thirty minute walk home carrying heavy bag of goods in my left hand" was okay when I was 35, now it's "Urgh, lemme see if I can shop online and have that delivered".

'No car' is great when you want to live in a city, when everything is on your doorstep so to speak, and you're doing nothing more strenuous than carrying a day's groceries like bread and milk home, there's a range of choices if you want to go out to eat instead of cooking at home, and if you need something big delivered (imagine you bought a new wardrobe) the shop will drop that off for you. (That still leaves the problem of 'no cars but we do need delivery lorries and trucks', and seeing large trucks trying to park on the streets in order to drop off goods at the stores is something regular in my town).

If you don't have a range of everything on the doorstep (and even the city nearest to me was unusual, decades back, because there were no grocery shops easily accessible in the city centre, something I never understood when I was in town and wanted to buy a few groceries rather than go out to the shopping centre on the outskirts) or if you need to carry a heavier load or bring a lot of purchases back with you, a car where you can load up or fit everything in the boot is much more appealing, even more necessary if you're not living in town or city.

I get sent to cities for a few weeks at a time for my job. I bring a small, soft-frame backpack with me, and for one man by himself it will carry anything as far as I want to carry it.

An older woman, with two grandkids? Not a chance. The problem is once you inconvenience grandma, you end up inconveniencing me, because I want my family to be near grandma, and so we all end up driving.

How do European grandmas pull it off, then?

Pretty much because many Europeans, especially in more dense city centers, and even in the suburbs (which are more dense in many cases than American suburbs) don't go to the supermarket once a week and get an ungodly amount of food. There's a local market, or at least a much closer supermarket they can stop by daily or maybe three times a week, get what they need quickly, and then go home.

I agree, it’s simply such a ridiculous thing to suggest when all across Europe and indeed most of the world the elderly are fine without needing to drive literally everywhere. The American suburb is the abomination, not the dense city, which is the norm for huge numbers of people for thousands of years.

We’ve had a number of pro-car vs. anti-car arguments here on the Motte, in which both sides have made well-argued and not at all annoying arguments. I’m on the anti-car side in the sense that I personally hate driving and would strongly prefer to live in a place where owning and operating a motor vehicle is not only unnecessary but actually discouraged. Many others here are similarly disposed toward urbanism and against cars, and are far more adept at making practical/technical arguments in favor of that position than I am. The main topics of discussion in such arguments always seem to circle back to 1. Is it feasible/desirable to convert cities built for cars into cities built for walking/transit, and 2. Is a car-free lifestyle feasible for people who have multiple children. People on both sides muster the best arguments at their disposal, and few of the participants resort to cheap emotional argumentation or goalpost-shifting.

I think you're right, and I'll walk that one back for The Motte.

I just want to get where I am going. I've been to Singapore many times for work, and I've never rented a car there. When I get sent to our sprawling exurban facility, I rent a car every time. If you want to live someplace without cars, good for you, I hope it makes you happy. I think cars are overused, but the places with lower car use have low European salaries, American blue city crime, or Asian conformity, so I end up in car places.

I must confess my frustration comes from the broader internet. When I look at ways to swap out short-range car use for more efficient modes, I get bullshit evasive argument people, not rational arguments. There seems to be a consensus among them that operating large machines is scary and gives them anxiety, and they want rich/functional people to be forced to travel and live with poor/dysfunctional people, so that the rich/functional people will be forced to fix things for the benefit of the poor/dysfunctional (hence the hatred of the private house/car). They seem to beat around the bush and make emotional arguments though.

As I've mentioned before, they talk about the carbon costs. I have solar panels, a Tesla, and an ebike, I live(d) in an upscale New Urbanist development, and I have the direct carbon footprint of a sunflower. Mentioning that seems to enrage them more, because I'm making it even easier for the functional to escape the dysfunctional, and harder for the anxious to get around.

because I'm making it even easier for the functional to escape the dysfunctional

Sure, but Japan and Singapore having safe and clean public transportation isn’t entirely down to HBD giving them a better population to work with up front- part of running a dense civilization is that sufficiently noncomformist people get beaten by the police until they stop generating negative externalities by either being weird or antisocial. This makes progressives uncomfortable, because they have sympathy for the mentally ill underclass types that insist on being weird and antisocial in public spaces, unlike people who have to deal with them. So the USA spreads out to where whackadoodles can’t bother you that much.

Look, I know it sounds I’m saying the Twitter rightist creed ‘all of America is about spending money to escape niggers’ but it really isn’t. There are white hobos who camp out in public places in dense, affordable areas and make life uncomfortable for everyone too, and in a country like the US where just about every household can afford a car anyways it’s not actually spending money to escape them anyways- it’s spending distance. These aren’t Latin American elite style gated communities. People just want to be far away from places crammed together so much that someone being weird is being weird directly in your face.

Some Dutch acquaintances of mine who moved to Texas for laws friendlier to religious weirdos have noted that the distances in standard suburbs are too great to bike around, which is disappointing to them because of what they were used to. It’s not money that keeps out the riffraff; it’s distance. To solve the distance problem the riffraff would need to be constrained and American society is unwilling to do so.

You don’t need to force ordinary people to deal with the depravity of the underclass, though. This is a political choice. American politicians choose to force public transport users to deal with the worst underclass scum America has to offer. It doesn’t have to be that way. These people can be locked up or killed, they don’t matter. It’s the biggest libshit argument of all to suggest that the scum being in public is “inevitable” and we all have to make peace with them.

It's not a political choice. It's an inevitable political consequence of the culture of the American PMC.

and they want rich/functional people to be forced to travel and live with poor/dysfunctional people, so that the rich/functional people will be forced to fix things for the benefit of the poor/dysfunctional (hence the hatred of the private house/car).

This isn't even an ulterior motive for many people, who will come right out and argue that "a program only for the poor is a poor program".

This argument I find anywhere from compelling to enraging depending on context. It feels like the motte is "mass transit will be much better planned if nobody has incentive to zone it out of practicality" and the bailey is "if rich people's kids can't escape failing public schools either then they'll instead miraculously fix them somehow".

I must confess my frustration comes from the broader internet. When I look at ways to swap out short-range car use for more efficient modes, I get bullshit evasive argument people, not rational arguments. There seems to be a consensus among them that operating large machines is scary and gives them anxiety, and they want rich/functional people to be forced to travel and live with poor/dysfunctional people, so that the rich/functional people will be forced to fix things for the benefit of the poor/dysfunctional (hence the hatred of the private house/car).

So, I largely agree with your assessment that anti-car advocates do make evasive and disingenuous arguments for their position. I have certainly been guilty of this in the past. My real objection to cars is “driving makes me very anxious, and I would prefer to live around other people who feel similarly, and that way people wouldn’t think I’m a neurotic man-child because I’m not good at driving.” All of the other anti-car arguments, about carbon footprints and air pollution and fatality risks from car accidents, are tools I can deploy when trying to argue my case in front of people who do not share my visceral aversion to driving. They are not my actual reasons, but they do seem to be substantially more rhetorically successful than my actual reasons, which is why I have deployed them in the past.

This is presumably what is motivating so much of the extremely poor argumentation you’re noticing. However, I believe that a lot of the same cynicism and evasion is typical of most pro-car people as well. It all comes down to basic aesthetic personal preferences, to which people deploy various disingenuous but superficially-public-spirited practical arguments in order to lend the veneer of intellectual respectability.

Now, in terms of your accusation that many anti-car people want to force rich people to interact with poor people, that is probably an argument that is deployed by many anti-car commentators - and in fairness, there is probably a substantial overlap between anti-car people and socialists - but I do want to point out that at least in America we have a long and storied history of conservative/right-wing urbanism, typified by publications such as City Journal, and that the polarization that has caused conservatism to lurch in the direction of rural/suburban populism is very recent and could easily be reversed. For us right-wing urbanists, a massive crackdown on vagrancy and crime - this making transit more appealing to rich people by removing all the visibly poor/dysfunctional people - is a necessary precondition to the fulfillment of our vision.

but I do want to point out that at least in America we have a long and storied history of conservative/right-wing urbanism, typified by publications such as City Journal, and that the polarization that has caused conservatism to lurch in the direction of rural/suburban populism is very recent and could easily be reversed.

And this is not just big-city Corpocons whose experience of public transport is taking the LIRR back from the Hamptons when they have an urgent meeting. The American Conservative is the house journal of Buchananite paleoconservativism, and has a New Urbanist blog, and used to have a (pro) public transport column. Peter Hitchens (the UK's most prominent paleoconservative, and brother of the late more US-famous Christopher) is also notoriously pro-train.

FWIW, I think this was always a non-starter with the masses. Urban=black=left-wing=bad seems pretty baked into the id of the older, stupider subset of conservative voters who are the core audience for right-populism.

by removing all the visibly poor/dysfunctional people

And it is worth noticing that this is what the European and 1st-world Asian cities where public transport is used by normal people do. (You don't have to remove visibly poor people if everyone knows you have removed visibly dysfunctional people). The faction of the very online left who think that cities are good, but also oppose policing them, is insane. Cities have needed policing since Babylon. Cities have needed policing by a corps of full-time, professional police with powers of arrest since the Industrial Revolution created the urban working class.

Agreed. How ridiculous for American conservatives to cede all their great cities without a fight to live miserable atomized suburban lives. Reclaim the cities first, excise the scum, then you can make arguments about urbanism. There is no reason US cities must be the way they are.

American conservatives lost all the big cities in the Civil Rights struggle, and fled. Now those who won are trying make life outside the cities difficult in various ways. Why shouldn't they argue against that?

So, I largely agree with your assessment that anti-car advocates do make evasive and disingenuous arguments for their position. I have certainly been guilty of this in the past. My real objection to cars is “driving makes me very anxious, and I would prefer to live around other people who feel similarly, and that way people wouldn’t think I’m a neurotic man-child because I’m not good at driving.” All of the other anti-car arguments, about carbon footprints and air pollution and fatality risks from car accidents, are tools I can deploy when trying to argue my case in front of people who do not share my visceral aversion to driving. They are not my actual reasons, but they do seem to be substantially more rhetorically successful than my actual reasons, which is why I have deployed them in the past.

Fair enough, and I applaud you for your honesty. As I said, I don't really care if you want to make your life and town different than mine. It bothers me when others want to change my lifestyle from far away because it gives them feelings.

If I want to live in a safe, convenient, family-oriented place in America at a middle-class price point, I am limited to car-centric places. I know this is path-dependent, and the experience of the Japanese is quite different.

but I do want to point out that at least in America we have a long and storied history of conservative/right-wing urbanism, typified by publications such as City Journal, and that the polarization that has caused conservatism to lurch in the direction of rural/suburban populism is very recent and could easily be reversed. For us right-wing urbanists, a massive crackdown on vagrancy and crime - this making transit more appealing to rich people by removing all the visibly poor/dysfunctional people - is a necessary precondition to the fulfillment of our vision.

That's entirely true, and East Asia is the perfect example of that. The functional, rich and poor alike, can enjoy public parks and clean, safe mass transit, because there are so few dysfunctional, and those few are rapidly removed from the public.

That requires pragmatic and authoritarian East Asian morality and culture though. That's not possible in the West, where the Blue Tribe hides behind the motte of helping the poor and functional, in order to farm the bailey of increasing the dysfunctional so they can thumb their nose at the Red Tribe.

That requires pragmatic and authoritarian East Asian morality and culture though.

It doesn't require East Asian morality and culture - even 2023 NYC subway levels of disorder on public transport, let alone 2023 BART or LA Metro levels, would be a five alarm fire in City Hall in any European city - even Naples. There is a good case that all it requires is fare enforcement - the number of people who are going to buy a ticket in order to shit up a tube train is not high.

That's not possible in the West, where the Blue Tribe hides behind the motte of helping the poor and functional, in order to farm the bailey of increasing the dysfunctional so they can thumb their nose at the Red Tribe.

"Blue Tribe" and "Red Tribe" are US-specific concepts - there are terminally online people in any European country who think they are part of the blue tribe, but not enough to build a serious political party around. And the specific problem of not being willing to enforce basic quality-of-life crimes on public transport stems from the way the tribal conflict interacts with a US-specific race relations issue. It clearly is possible to have non-shittified public transport in the West, because London, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, etc. do.

It doesn't require East Asian morality and culture - even 2023 NYC subway levels of disorder on public transport, let alone 2023 BART or LA Metro levels, would be a five alarm fire in City Hall in any European city - even Naples.

No it wouldn't. Because they just wouldn't talk about it. The politicians and press would conspire to keep silent about it.

Seeing how El Salvador went from being a crime-ridden hellhole to being safer than almost anywhere in America in the span of a few years would seem to invalidate the notion that such measures are impossible. Maybe blue tribe liberals won't be the ones to do it, but their hold on power is not eternal, and they are doing their best to empower nonwhite immigrant groups that have fewer qualms about the methods necessary to clean the place up.

Years ago I saw a beggar in China sitting on the sidewalk. Two Chinese cops stood over him and were politely trying to get him to stop. They weren't dragging him off or even talking harshly. But they were standing over him preventing him from begging.

If I had to spend a few weeks living and using public transportation in San Francisco or a major Chinese city, I would 100% choose the Chinese city. You are spot on about the lack of publicly dysfunctional people making big urban centers tolerable.

That requires pragmatic and authoritarian East Asian morality and culture though. That's not possible in the West

Again, you’re looking at our current cultural/political moment and acting as though it’s indicative of some deep and timeless truth about “Western morality”, when in reality many aspects of it are entirely contingent and reversible. Less than a hundred years ago in America, people with mental and physical disabilities were routinely institutionalized, and even lobotomized and/or coercively sterilized. This was one of the great triumphs of the first half of the 20th century, and it is largely Christian conservatives who revolted against this and who still to this day crow about how progressives are evil eugenicists.

Deinstitutionalization in this country happened under Reagan, as a result of activism from both leftist disability-rights advocates and libertarian anti-government/pro-liberty types. Blame can be spread all around for the catastrophic proliferation of street homelessness and the coddling of the disabled. Yes, there was certainly a Marxist anti-civilization element involved - the Critical Disability Theorists, an offshoot of the Frankfurt School, for one - but they were far outnumbered by do-gooders from across the political spectrum who felt yucky and guilty over how successful their forebears had been at nearly eradicating profound mental illness and high levels of crime in this country.

For us right-wing urbanists, a massive crackdown on vagrancy and crime - this making transit more appealing to rich people by removing all the visibly poor/dysfunctional people - is a necessary precondition to the fulfillment of our vision.

See, I'd love this, and I'd love making urban life safer and more beautiful. It's not really my cup of tea, but I would love to have it as an option.

But my opposition to the anti-car people comes from a political realism. I don't think the PMC culture that runs cities will ever crack down on dysfunction. Given that, I want to protect the rural/suburban car-based life that affords me separation from the crime and dysfunction of the city with everything I've got. Realistically, the options for Americans aren't "safe suburbs with car culture" vs. "safe cities with walking and public transit," they're "safe suburbs with car culture" vs. "unsafe cities with muggings where you walk and schizophrenic tweakers shouting on the train." When urbanists say my way of life needs to be destroyed and everyone should become a city-dweller -- without fixing the dysfunction of the cities -- I treat them like people carelessly, maybe even maliciously, trying to lead me into physical insecurity, and act accordingly.

I wish right-wing urbanists every bit of luck, and should it come to me to aid them in concrete ways I will do so. But I'm not going to hold my breath that America's cities become anything more than crime-infested, hollowed-out lands of despair, with the potential exception of Manhattan, which is probably America's only actual good urban neighborhood by international standards.

I feel exactly the same, by disposition I’m not inclined to be a car person. Hell, I’ve put my money where my mouth is and I commuted by bicycle for years while it was feasible.

I don’t have a neurotic aversion to driving but I don’t move it either and I’d much rather do almost anything else.

But your average urbanist is also the average person who cried, pissed and shit himself when fentanyl Floyd punched his ticket and is quick on the trigger to defend or excuse every lowlife degenerate who makes urban life functionally impossible for families with young children and no trust fund to thrive.

So, rolling coal it is.

Until the public transit people and the law and order people get together I’m basically obligated to be like “fuck you I’ve got mine.”

So it goes.

I've experienced kind of a similar thing on a completely different subject.

One of my other interests is firearms and self-defense. On every controversial shooting incident where somebody gets killed, somebody always chimes in with something to the effect of, they should have shot them in the leg instead. I've used to respond with the conventional gun culture version of the argument against that, which is that it's wrong to think of a firearm as a non-lethal weapon, if you're ever justified at shooting at somebody you should be shooting center mass to stop the threat, and also that virtually nobody is accurate enough in an actual life-threatening situation to reliably hit somebody's leg. These arguments mostly don't seem to have much effect on people though. I started trying another argument, which is that leg shots are not at all less lethal - the thigh has some of the biggest arteries in the body, feeding the biggest muscles in the body and attached to the thickest bones in the body, and sending bullets into that is likely to cause severe enough bleeding to lead to death in minutes, if not life-changing injuries that they will never fully recover from. That argument seems to be much more effective at convincing people that attempting to shoot people who are a deadly danger in the leg or other extremity is not a good idea.

For us right-wing urbanists, a massive crackdown on vagrancy and crime - this making transit more appealing to rich people by removing all the visibly poor/dysfunctional people - is a necessary precondition to the fulfillment of our vision.

Universal suffrage makes this impossible, the average and substandard are natural allies against the great. If truly awesome people wish to not see the worst bodies of their generation, the latter will convince the middle that the slope is slippery. That after the bottom percent, the second lowest will be restricted. And so on until only the top percent is allowed to enjoy transport funded by taxes they pay.

The middle will buy it as oppressing those below, so natural throughout time and space, is considered immoral while sticking it to those above is considered rightful.

Confucius cries.

I find a lot of the pro/anti car arguments get bogged down in the fact that there aren’t many Americans who have lived in Europe and vice versa, for example practical confusions about how stock resupply works on pedestrianised streets or why Americans actually want to be somewhat isolated from the dangerous inner cities (I’ve seen this problem with Irish anti-car advocates too when they oppose pro-car compromises that are normal in very walkable European cities).

Personally I find these conversations very interesting, but you can’t really get anywhere when a good chunk of either side of the debate hasn’t experienced the alternative.

stock resupply works on pedestrianised streets

Right, like obviously you just allow vehicles between 1am and 6am, easy.

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On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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