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I get really, really exhausted of this argument. That being "Bad things happen, so why do anything about other bad things?" Yes, we live in an imperfect world. Yes, it's fucking weird the shit that is grandfathered in, while new shit faces extra scrutiny. New shit still deserves the scrutiny, and all this argument does is promote fresh new manmade horrors.
Yeah, going to call bullshit on this. In fact, it's just the same hubris that gave us trans fats for 100 years, which most countries are now banning after a wealth of scientific data shows they directly cause heart disease. Or that caused everyone to turn a blind eye towards refined sugar's inherent toxicity because the PhD's assured us that calories are calories. Didn't you know one guy ate Twinkies for a whole year, and with vitamin supplementation "nothing" happened to him? And on and on and on.
Fact of the matter is, nobody knows the long term effects of industrialized foods, but we are increasingly finding out, oops, we've been getting poisoned our entire lives. But trust us, we have a handle on this now! This new industrialized food is totally not poison! Also, now it's in everything.
I'm just trying to pin down the argument here. If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods in the interest of public health” that's a position that's easy to understand, whether you agree with it or not, but adopting it would imply banning a bunch of traditional foods too.
If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods, but only if they are new” then the logic is less clear: why does it matter if an unhealthy food is new or not? You should be able to defend the “only if they are new” qualifier, unless your real motivation is something different (e.g. irrational hatred of lab-grown meats or the people who advocate for them).
(Note that all of this assumes that lab grown meat is unhealthy as a given, which I certainly don't believe in the strict sense, though I will concede there is some unknown risk associated with it.)
Let me make my argument absolutely clear then.
The failure of the government to ban some subset of unhealthy foods does not prevent the government from banning other unhealthy foods. The fact that the government has failed to ban trans fats, refined sugar, etc, etc, etc is not an argument that the government should not ban lab grown meat. Making that argument is taking a government that sucks, and claiming it needs to suck more. It's claiming that because the government has done the wrong thing before, it's not allowed to do the right thing now. That's a silly argument.
Yes, I agree that failing to do something useful in the past shouldn't prevent you from doing something useful today, but by that very logic, the government can still ban any number of unhealthy foods if it wanted to.
That's why I don't buy the explanation that the ban on lab-grown meat was motivated by concern for public health, because if that were true, the government would also be banning alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks, etc. If you want to explain the meat ban in terms of public health concerns, you have to explain why none of the other, much more effective, bans are happening.
Of course, in reality it has nothing to do with public health, but simply waging the culture war. DeSantis is trying to own the libs by banning something that they advocate for. DeSantis himself said as much:
Nowhere does it say that public health concerns were the reason for the ban. Instead, it's all about “fighting the elites” and “saving our beef”. If lab-grown meat was provably more healthy than regular meat, DeSantis would still oppose it for the above reasons.
And of course the whole reasoning is bogus. Having lab-grown meat available as an option does not force anyone to eat it, and it doesn't take away traditional options. The idea that allowing anyone to eat lab-grown meat would result in everyone being forced to eat it is a classic example of a slippery slope fallacy.
It literally does, they literally say that's the goal, I am literally looking at a half-million dollar federal grant right now that talks about using vat meat to "disrupt traditional livestock production in a just and equitable manner" https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_20196702329856_12H3/
I hate lies so much. People telling low effort, stupid lies right to your face and sneering at you for daring to point out they're lying, it makes me so angry I feel like throwing up and smashing things.
Why do you do it? It can't be strategic because the strategy is stupid and ineffective. Do you just enjoy the feeling of gaslighting people? Fucking stop it, because it's poison.
For someone who uses words like “lies” and “literally” quite liberally I'd expect you to stick closer to the truth yourself. The research grant isn't about banning real meat at all. To quote:
So the purpose is literally “to explore and explicate”. Maybe you think there is some more sinister hidden purpose, but if so, it definitely does not literally say that the goal is to remove meat-based options, and if you think that's the actual purpose you will have to make an argument for it. (How annoying! That's much harder than simply calling people liars!)
The part that you are upset about is this:
This is just standard fluff you put in research proposals to make the topic of your research sound super duper important: why should someone pay you USD 500,000 to study a phenomenon if that phenomenon isn't something earthshaking? It's no different from the hundreds of blockchain startups that claimed they were going to disrupt the financial system in order to secure VC funding (spoiler alert: they didn't).
But even taken at face value, “disrupting” traditional livestock production doesn't imply that real meat will be banned. It's easy to imagine a future with 50/50 fake/real meat; that would be pretty disruptive to the agricultural sector, but it still doesn't make real meat unavailable.
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Calm down, and stop ranting at people and accusing them of lying and making bad faith arguments when there is no evidence of this. (The quote you cite as evidence does not say what you claim, and while you can legitimately argue that that's the actual intent, you cannot legitimately claim that anyone who disagrees is gaslighting you).
I will post a thousand quotes saying exactly what they're trying to do. One a day for the next three years, nonstop, until the lying stops or you decide to side with the liars and ban me.
I fucking HATE lying leftists who do the "it's not happening and it's good that it is" trick. They are evil. They are not humans you can have a conversation with because they do nothing but lie and lie and sneer. They should be banned from every community they try to pull that shit in.
You know it too. You've watched it happen over and over again. There is no value in tolerating it.
Feel free to post quotes and argue about what you think they mean, what they say about some group's intentions.
Other people may choose to engage and express a different view. They may think those same quotes do not say what you think they do.
Discuss. Civilly.
If you just start talking about how you want to throw things because people with different reads are lying gaslighters, yes, eventually that will result in you being banned if you can't control yourself and can't cope with dissenting views.
Lies aren't a "dissenting view." They're evil tricks by people who don't believe anything except how they want to manipulate other people.
The mods should ban liars, because right now the community has to self-organize to do it, as with Guesswho. And that kind of shunning, while necessary, also has corrosive effects on discourse. It's much healthier for mods to say "we see how you're lying to manipulate people, we don't allow forcing consensus with lies, you're banned"
A good example: you would ban someone who showed up saying "nobody is trying to take your guns, you stupid paranoid hicks. And anyway there must be something wrong with you if you don't want guns to be banned. Why do you want school shootings so much?" Because the trolling he's trying to pull is fucking obvious and you've seen the same script a thousand times before.
This is exactly the same. Get rid of it, or it makes real discussions impossible, either because the troll is allowed to enforce consensus or the community's immune response shuts it down destructively.
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