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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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No, the eggshell thinning was not a lie. It really is a great insecticide, it's a shame that's it's real bad shit for non-insects.

You'd probably lose your bet if only because it's not actually internationally banned for pest control. You just can't dump tons of it onto your crops anymore.

Yes, car regulations come with a cost - as a sedan driver I'm not happy about mega trucks sharing the road with me thanks to CAFE standards. But you can't pretend that urban smog is nowhere near as bad as it was in the 70s. That's obviously a tragedy of the commons mitigated. The mitigation isn't perfect, but that's an absurd standard.

If you're talking about hypothetical (and probably non-existent) deaths from lack of DDT you ought to weigh the people who didn't die of air pollution much more than the fact that you don't have a minitruck.

It's not that we've never solved a tragedy of the commons, it's that I don't think we've ever solved it well.

That may be because you appear to be largely unaware of the details of the examples I posted. The irony of being obsessed with showing your kids eagles that were nearly eradicated thanks to DDT crippling their eggshells while claiming that was a lie is heady stuff - history is truly doomed to repeat.