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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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For that matter, if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.

Off the top of my head I can think of several things that were worse but ended up being mandated by the government. It's not hard to imagine this happening with lab-grown meat.

In this thread we're talking about a government action. It doesn't really make sense to say that the government banned something so that the government wouldn't mandate it.

It doesn't really make sense to say that the government banned something so that the government wouldn't mandate it.

Makes perfect sense to me. It's not like 'the government' is a person with a coherent agenda. Governments do things all the time with the intention of constraining their future iterations.

This doesn't constrain their future actions. It's just as easy to repeal this law and ban real meat as it was before the ban. Maybe if it were a constitutional amendment or something you'd have a point.

It's just as easy to repeal this law and ban real meat as it was before the ban.

No, there can be a huge amount of institutional inertia. Governments generally do not turn on a dime. And that's just looking at the legal side. Scaling up a fake-meat industry would take a huge amount of time and investment and it can't even get started if there's a ban.

To be clear I'm low-key enthusiastic about lab-grown meat (though I also don't trust food scientists farther than I can throw them). I just took issue with your statement that

if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.

Thankfully, Florida is not the only polity on the planet, and lab grown meat can still be marketed elsewhere when and if it becomes commercially viable. So this ban doesn't prevent the development of an alternative.

The light-bulb playbook as well.

I suppose this is the same logic as smart-gun legislation in places like New Jersey?

There's an argument that we have to stop the slippery slope to banning real meat as soon as possible. I'm not sure how well it holds up.

In some vague sense we'd be on the slope. Vegans aren't shy about describing how horrific any form of raising animals is. There'd be a push to ban the real thing once an alternative existed.

It's gonna be California first.

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