What's the Biggest Lie People Still Believe?

[yyy]

@finley

@yyy

the article does not say what you say it says.

I’m trying to give you a flavour of the thought patterns running through Europe, the reasons being offered up for policies, and the nature of the organisations behind them.

Okay. Still not convincing though.

@finley

All we’re asking you now is to eat a little less meat. Tomorrow we’re going to make draconian laws that prevent you eating meat. You’ll laugh and say “oh, that Finley, always sees conspiracies and slippery-slopes everywhere”, but look around you at the Covid-19 scenario. This shit happens. The veneer of Democracy is very, very thin. Don’t imagine your country is immune to ideologically-driven social engineering just because it’s not a banana republic.

Yeah, well, the thing is, you do see conspiracies and slippery slopes just about everywhere. And you are bound to be right some of the time, whether through your brilliance or by accident, or a bit of both. But slippery slopes as expressed in the tabloids are pretty boring, frankly. Most of them never amount to anything and weren’t that slippery in the first place. And they’re repetitive. I haven’t bothered checking the “Slippery Slope” thread in ages, because I expect it would be a waste of time.

So while you may lose sleep over "FURIOUS ROW"s about what kind of food German public servants spend taxpayer money on, there are other furious rows that I find equally unimportant… plus a bunch that I do care about, like people hooked on conspiracies and slippery slopes turning into terrorists (which they do, even in Canada – and they’re trending up).

Sorry, vegan world conquest conspiracies just don’t make the cut.

@finley

If you have a product that consumes ten times more resources in its production than it embodies, then eating less of it doesn’t alter the fact that it’s being produced unsustainably.

It stands to reason that reducing demand for a product that people go out of their way to produce will, if the trend catches on, eventually result in less of it being produced. No?

@finley

Of course not. There just aren’t many of them, and most governments aren’t interested in such things.

There aren’t many green bins? There are entire cities full of them, precisely because governments do care about these things. Something good trending up, for once.

---

Now about the thought experiment, please recall that it was supposed to be

@yyy

Step 1: Take your ideal farm with its animals and everything.
Step 2: Take out the parts where you harvest anything from the animals other than fertilizer and (perhaps) wool etc.

And I hate to repeat myself, but let’s be clear about this.

@Wiktionary

Noun

veganism ( usually uncountable , plural veganisms )

1. Strict vegetarianism; the practice of eating neither meat nor other animal products, such as fish, milk and milk products, eggs, and honey.

2. A way of life which strictly avoids use of any kind of animal products and services that are based on exploitation of living animals.

3. A belief that is against the killing of animals for meat consumption; the antithesis to carnism.

You can argue in favor of one definition or another, but it’s always about the animals.

That means

• veganism =/= climate policy

• veganism =/= political ideology (beyond, of course, support for animal rights)

• veganism =/= domestic or international trade policy

• veganism =/= prohibition on feeding vegetable scraps to animals (except, possibly, if it’s somehow cruel to them)

• veganism =/= waste management policy

So what do we have here? You take your ideal, sustainable non-vegan farm and change it to conform with your nightmare

• climate policy – no cows allowed

• political ideology – the state controls everything (so every farm must follow the same model)

• trade policy – if something can’t be produced on one farm, it effectively doesn’t exist for purposes of human survival (aka small scale self-sufficiency, aka hermitism)

• agricultural policy – chickens aren’t allowed to eat certain forms of plant matter*

• waste policy – green bins don’t exist because the state (which controls everything) doesn’t care

(*If chickens aren’t allowed to eat potato peels because of a law, okay, let’s assume that’s true. But it’s not a vegan law. And laws can be changed.)

Now do you see why, in this context, I’m also going to be skeptical of your numbers?

Even if the numbers themselves are sound, you haven’t taken your ideal farm and checked to see if you can veganize it without making it unsustainable. Instead, you have changed the definition of veganism. You have made it unsustainable by design but not have not produced a sound argument for why it would need to be unsustainable.

@finley

@yyy

The point being, you keep missing the forest for the trees.

@yyy

Especially when you insist on cutting down some very useful trees at the start, because of ideological reasons that are beside the point of the thought experiment.

Where did I say this? And in any case, if you do cut down trees, the aim is to

Oh dear, I see you took my metaphor literally. Partly my fault, I suppose. Humblest apologies for that.

@finley

I’ve put a lot of effort into trying to give you some sensible information, but I don’t see this argument going anywhere because your general position is “finley is always wrong about everything”.

I do sometimes wonder why we bother.

[yyy]

@bojack

I’m talking about the overt lying kind of fake news that outlets like NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, and a host of other MSM sources have published, especially with respect to their coverage of President Trump.

You mean you still don’t include Fox “News” in the MSM category?

Haven’t you heard? They flipped and are now (sort of) calling Agent O out for the embarrassing fool he is.

I guess it’s time to cancel your subscription and turn to OAN instead!

[TT]

This also works for religious edicts like not eating pork or shellfish, not sure about wearing blended weaves though…

[TT]

I’ve never understood how Fox claims to be America’s most trusted news source, but not main stream. Doesn’t that right there blow their credibility out of the water, without having to look at the garbage they call news?

[bojack]

@TT

I’ve never understood how Fox claims to be America’s most trusted news source, but not main stream.

It’s tongue in cheek. Always has been. A dig at media cesspits like NYT and WaPo that do actually make lofty, obnoxious claims of virtue, many of which are bogus.

Actually I’ve never understood how Fox’s gentle humor flies over the head of so many. Maybe it’s a red pill thing.

[finley]

@yyy

So while you may lose sleep over "FURIOUS ROW"s about what kind of food German public servants spend taxpayer money on,

I don’t. What I lose sleep about is the fact that environment ministers all over Europe are so completely uninformed about their portfolio that they believe that eating less meat is going to solve a genuine crisis in European farming (and climate). That article just happened to come up on the first page of Google results.

It stands to reason that reducing demand for a product that people go out of their way to produce will, if the trend catches on, eventually result in less of it being produced. No?

For one thing, reducing demand for meat is a bit like trying to reduce demand for oxygen. There’s a good reason people want it. For another, reducing the demand does not fix the nature of the production model …particularly since farmers are pushed into that model by a framework of legislation and by the business/finance climate.

@yyy

Step 1: Take your ideal farm with its animals and everything.
Step 2: Take out the parts where you harvest anything from the animals other than fertilizer and (perhaps) wool etc.

Even if the numbers themselves are sound, you haven’t taken your ideal farm and checked to see if you can veganize it without making it unsustainable. Instead, you have changed the definition of veganism. You have made it unsustainable by design but not have not produced a sound argument for why it would need to be unsustainable.

If you think this is what I’ve done, then insert the features that you think I’ve (deliberately) omitted and re-run the numbers. Or at least describe precisely what those features are rather than just waving your hands and saying “bah, humbug”. Don’t make me do all the heavy lifting here.

In any case, I’m pretty confident governments have no interest in allowing people to run sustainable farms with an ecologically-sound animal loading. They don’t want to dismantle the legislation that caused the problems in the first place; at best, they’re fiddling about with stuff on the margins. Many high-profile campaigners have pleaded with them to let this happen, and they’ve been told to f’off.

[yyy]

@finley

For one thing, reducing demand for meat is a bit like trying to reduce demand for oxygen.

The go vegan and die meme strikes again, yet if I call you out on it, apparently I’m “snarky”. 沒辦法。

There are good reasons for people to want meat, yes, but it’s not a necessity for human life, so the oxygen analogy simply fails.

Getting back to the idea that brought this up (before I joined the discussion), for argument’s sake let’s say humans should eat meat, because evolution. But humans evolved as omnivores, not carnivores, so it logically follows then that there is such a thing as too much meat consumption (even JP doesn’t actually eat a pure meat diet despite the hype). So how much meat should humans eat?

Do humans (let’s say westerners) not already eat more, on average, than they did X centuries/millennia ago? Does that mean they have surpassed the ideal level? If they have, is it not desirable to bring the actual level of consumption back down to something closer to the ideal level? And would that not free up resources that are currently being used to sustain the excessive consumption?

(This is not to say humans don’t also consume excessive quantities of other things.)

@finley

Or at least describe precisely what those features are rather than just waving your hands and saying “bah, humbug”. Don’t make me do all the heavy lifting here.

As I said:

@yyy

• climate policy – no cows allowed

You can have cows. You can have whatever animals you want, if they support sustainability. The vegan challenge angle is that the animals can’t be eaten by humans, and – if we use the general flavor of veganism instead of a strict dietary definition – they can’t be treated cruelly. (Castration and euthanasia pass the test for many vegans. They have dogs and cats, after all.)

• political ideology – the state controls everything (so every farm must follow the same model)

• trade policy – if something can’t be produced on one farm, it effectively doesn’t exist for purposes of human survival (aka small scale self-sufficiency, aka hermitism)

If my reading between the lines of your nightmare is accurate, you’re running the experiment in a 1WG scenario. That kind of future is not within reach. You chose the UK (“Airstrip One”) and expected it to feed itself. It has a certain amount of land and a certain amount of humans, while other countries have other quantities and ratios. Think about it: if we’re talking about one farm, it can easily be predicted to fail the sustainability test if the challenge is simply to feed a certain number of humans that for historical reasons is arbitrarily high.

It’s the city-state problem on a larger scale: a megacity with a bit of farmland and forest attached can’t feed itself if it goes full hermit, so it imports food, and as long as it does enough stuff people in the outside world consider useful i.e. worth exchanging other stuff for, it will continue exporting and importing and… actually be sustainable.

If the farm in the experiment destroys itself by ruining its own soil or what have you, of course that doesn’t give it a high sustainability ranking and in the long run it could make the larger system fail. But if one individual farm produces an excess of foodstuff A and not enough of foodstuffs B and C to feed its fair portion of the population (wherever they happen to live), that doesn’t mean the model of that farm is unsustainable. It just means not all the farms of the world can be cookie cutter copies of one model. (Even soil depletion can be remedied through imports, if those imports are ultimately sustainable.)

(Also, if you insist on a 1WG scenario, then the state controls everything, so it can redistribute the population, and it can control population growth – not necessarily India-style or China-style, as it could be Singapore-style, or some other style.)

• agricultural policy – chickens aren’t allowed to eat certain forms of plant matter

Forget your tyrannical laws. Forget all the laws. Make your own laws. It’s a thought exercise, after all.

Eventually it needs some adaptation to reality if it’s going to work in reality, but if a law realistically can be changed, the first step is to make the case for changing it, e.g. “and the chickens on this farm will eat potato peels among other things, so the law banning that needs to change”.

• waste policy – green bins don’t exist because the state (which controls everything) doesn’t care

Do whatever you like with your human-produced waste. If the city produces an excess quantity that the farm can make use of, export it from the city accordingly. If you can’t fathom this working in real life, go check out the green bins that actually do exist in more and more cities. If the current green bin model is flawed, okay, let’s find a way to improve it.

(And again, if the state controls everything, it can mandate green binning. It can even mandate “night soil” collection and distribution, if that’s useful.)

@finley

In any case, I’m pretty confident governments have no interest in allowing people to run sustainable farms with an ecologically-sound animal loading. They don’t want to dismantle the legislation that caused the problems in the first place; at best, they’re fiddling about with stuff on the margins. Many high-profile campaigners have pleaded with them to let this happen, and they’ve been told to f’off.

So if I understand your argument here, it’s that (1) the chicken-potato law and other laws like it can’t be fixed, so mass deregulation is the only solution. Yet how would you expect mass deregulation, in the era of factory farms, not to open the floodgates to bigger and worse things than we already have?

And that (2) deregulation won’t happen anyway, so… what, exactly?

[Taiwan_Luthiers]

Left winged people just want to socially engineer people into whatever they want.

Like it’s bad for the environment to eat meat, so no one can eat them because they are not strictly necessary.

[Cid]

biggest lie is that shite pilots flew planes into buildings. eye witness…

[Rocket]

@Cid

biggest lie is that shite pilots flew planes into buildings. eye witness…

[finley]

@yyy

There are good reasons for people to want meat, yes, but it’s not a necessity for human life, so the oxygen analogy simply fails.

Actually it is. All vegans take synthetic B12. If they try to do without it, then end up in deep shit. The only natural sources of B12 are meat, dairy, and eggs. And you cannot produce dairy and eggs without killing cows and chickens - or without taking up vastly more land to feed those animals than common sense would allow. You’re welcome to try the calculations yourself.

@yyy

Do humans (let’s say westerners) not already eat more, on average, than they did X centuries/millennia ago?

I have no idea. The range of human meat consumption (historical and modern) is extremely wide, which is why arguments about it go nowhere. The amount of meat a human “ought to” eat is the amount of meat his environment can provide sustainably. In some environments it’s a lot, in others, it’s a little. I don’t see that the answer needs to be more complex than that.

@yyy

And would that not free up resources that are currently being used to sustain the excessive consumption?

You’re missing the point entirely. The way meat is currently produced is unsustainable. It consumes more resources than is delivered in output-product. The gulf is so vast that it doesn’t matter what metric you use to measure inputs and outputs. Factory-farmed meat is so astoundingly wasteful and destructive (not to mention cruel) that it can only exist via the magic of government subsidy and market manipulation.

As I said earlier, eating less meat doesn’t alter that fundamental fact. Anything larger than zero is “too much” - and that, of course, is the vegan argument. But there are two solutions:

• Eat zero meat.
• Produce meat sustainably.

My point is that governments have no interest whatsoever in option 2. In fact there are regular articles published about it, denigrating the very idea. For example it’s often asserted that naturally-raised cows produce more methane than feedlot cows, ergo we shouldn’t do that.

You can have cows. You can have whatever animals you want, if they support sustainability. The vegan challenge angle is that the animals can’t be eaten by humans, and – if we use the general flavor of veganism instead of a strict dietary definition – they can’t be treated cruelly. (Castration and euthanasia pass the test for many vegans. They have dogs and cats, after all.)

But meat-eating does NOT pass the test. And in any case, the political argument for a mass roll-out of veganism doesn’t involve the moral dimension. It can’t: if they introduced that, they’d have to admit that the existing factory farming model (for crops and animals) is immoral. Since they want to carry on with factory farming, the only argument available to them is the climate-change one.

If my reading between the lines of your nightmare is accurate, you’re running the experiment in a 1WG scenario. That kind of future is not within reach. You chose the UK (“Airstrip One”) and expected it to feed itself. It has a certain amount of land and a certain amount of humans, while other countries have other quantities and ratios.

Well yes. But think how that’s going to pan out in a free-trade world. If meat-animals are banned in Airstrip One, or in Europe generally, all that will happen is that more sane countries will ramp up meat production to feed the poor undernourished natives over here, the nominally-vegan countries will end up exporting a load of unwanted vegetables, and we’ll be right back to square one. It would descend into farce and holier-than-thou posturing (and probably more subsidies, and a trade war). It’s a stupid idea whichever way you look at it. The fact that politicians are even discussing it as halfway plausible suggests a higher-than-usual level of incompetence and delusion.

law realistically can be changed, the first step is to make the case for changing it, e.g. “and the chickens on this farm will eat potato peels among other things, so the law banning that needs to change”.

Indeed. But TPTB are not interested in changing those laws, because lots of people are making lots of money from their existence. Sustainable farming is not the political goal. I honestly don’t know what the goal is. I’m just throwing the facts out there for your examination.

… so mass deregulation is the only solution. Yet how would you expect mass deregulation, in the era of factory farms, not to open the floodgates to bigger and worse things than we already have?

Because factory farming, animal cruelty, etc are not just unsustainable but unprofitable. In fact those two words mean almost the same thing: ‘unsustainable’ means that you’re burning through your capital to deliver a product at an artificially-low price.

If the laws and subsidies that support factory-farming were removed, they would all go bankrupt. The profit on a subsidized factory-farmed chicken is a few cents. The same is true of most agricultural commodities. This is, incidentally, why “green revolution” techniques have failed miserably in countries that cannot or will not lavish subsidies on farmers. Basic math says it’ll fail.

As a side effect of letting these pampered businesses fail, the health of the nation would improve, because farmers would start growing things that were inherently profitable instead of things the government pays them to grow.

[yyy]

@finley

Actually it is. All vegans take synthetic B12. If they try to do without it, then end up in deep shit. The only natural sources of B12 are meat, dairy, and eggs.

This is one of those are vegans allowed to consume microorganisms or not? questions, and the answer is of course they are, because it happens anyway.

Travel back in time to before vitamins could be synthesized, and you can still be vegan. If modern health inspectors travel back with you, they might object to the sanitary conditions in your kitchen. But if they don’t interfere, and you know what you’re doing, you’ll survive.

It’s moot though, unless synthetic B12 is somehow destroying the world.

@finley

The amount of meat a human “ought to” eat is the amount of meat his environment can provide sustainably.

That comes across as it’s 100% an environmental issue and 0% a human health issue.

Okay, let’s go with that for a moment. Where do you draw the line? You seemed to indicate a dislike for insects-as-food earlier, but if they can be produced in abundance more sustainably, will you embrace them?

I’m not convinced excess meat consumption has zero effect on human health, but whatever.

@finley

Factory-farmed meat is so astoundingly wasteful and destructive (not to mention cruel) that it can only exist via the magic of government subsidy and market manipulation.

As I said earlier, eating less meat doesn’t alter that fundamental fact.

But for now, and for the foreseeable future, it does exist. Ergo, decreasing it would make a difference.

@finley

But meat-eating does NOT pass the test.

Did I miss something?

You still haven’t explained how not eating cows would stop you from having cows on a farm. And you haven’t explained how manure-producing cows would suddenly “contribute nothing” if they weren’t eaten/milked.

@finley

But think how that’s going to pan out in a free-trade world. If meat-animals are banned in Airstrip One, or in Europe generally, all that will happen is that more sane countries will ramp up meat production to feed the poor undernourished natives over here, the nominally-vegan countries will end up exporting a load of unwanted vegetables, and we’ll be right back to square one.

Why call it “Airstrip One” if you’re not talking about a world that has already been fully dystopianized? (That means all the nominally competing systems would secretly be the same, with no room for the sort of competition you’re now describing.) But it’s moot, because (as I said) 1WG is not within reach.

It’s also moot to imagine the UK or Europe making veganism mandatory, because (as I said) that’s not going to happen, even if your dreaded greenies win a bunch of elections and take steps to encourage people to eat less meat (like Singapore-style population control – not to everyone’s liking, but still well below the threshold of tyranny).

@finley

because farmers would start growing things that were inherently profitable

Ah, back to Free Market fundamentalism!

I hear poppies are quite profitable, as long as you don’t have these pesky things called governments getting in the way, making moral arguments against their cultivation.

Could it be, do you suppose, that agricultural subsidies (and free education and healthcare and other signs of human development) are actually good, as long as they’re wisely planned and implemented?

It’s like the city-state thing again. You could say city-states are inherently unsustainable, or even cities are inherently unsustainable, and by some definitions you’d be right. And yet, here we are: still going, and going, and going…

It doesn’t happen without organization (aka government). And if organized humans find that taking this excess resource over here and putting it to use over there and then switching around some other stuff and so on produces a better net result, they tend to do it. Very, very imperfectly, yes. But reverting to hermitism is (usually) an even more imperfect solution.

@finley

But TPTB are not interested in changing those laws,

So make them interested. I know, easier said than done, but if you believe any change for the better is impossible, then there’s no point in doing anything.

- YouTube

[finley]

@yyy

That comes across as it’s 100% an environmental issue and 0% a human health issue.

It’s only a health issue in that people shouldn’t “eat vegan” if there’s a viable alternative. I understand that some people just don’t like meat, and as I said, that’s their personal choice. But veganism (and bear in mind there are many different ways to do vegan, just as there are many different ways to do carnivore) is not inherently healthy.

@yyy

Okay, let’s go with that for a moment. Where do you draw the line? You seemed to indicate a dislike for insects-as-food earlier, but if they can be produced in abundance more sustainably, will you embrace them?

I draw the line where politicians start telling us what we should eat, and then manipulating the market and the intellectual landscape to ensure that we do. Especially when the things they’re saying are demonstrably untrue. Which I’ve tried to demonstrate.

As for insects as food, well, if you want to eat insects, go right ahead. I’m not even keen on prawns, but that’s just me.

@yyy

I’m not convinced excess meat consumption has zero effect on human health, but whatever.

GIYF. There is a vast amount of research on the subject. The most notable recent announcement on the subject (which I’ve mentioned before) came from the WHO, asserting that meat causes bowel cancer. They made this announcement on the basis of a dozen studies that show that meat definitely doesn’t cause bowel cancer. That’s how bloody ridiculous all this is getting, and it’s why I get irate about it.

Argument - Monty Python

But for now, and for the foreseeable future, it does exist. Ergo, decreasing it would make a difference.

Well, yes. It’ll destroy the planet in slightly different ways. I suppose for politicians, that’s a good result, because with a new problem of their own making looming on the horizon, it means they can justify their existence for a while longer.

You still haven’t explained how not eating cows would stop you from having cows on a farm. And you haven’t explained how manure-producing cows would suddenly “contribute nothing” if they weren’t eaten/milked.

Sigh. I went into enormous detail to explain this. Here’s the TL;DR version:

• Animals eat food, and therefore occupy land area according to their size.
• After the first three years, a chicken’s egg production starts to drop off dramatically. After about age six, a cow can be bred less frequently and will produce less surplus milk. Male animals produce nothing of value at all, at any stage of their lives. At some point, then, you have to kill them (and eat them), or they are occupying land that might be used much more productively by younger animals.
• If you are not selectively breeding and culling your animals to maintain breed vigour, they will be even more worthless after a decade or three than they otherwise would be.

We have similar issues, of course, with humans. There are plenty of dystopian novels about that.

Why call it “Airstrip One” if you’re not talking about a world that has already been fully dystopianized?

Have you been to England lately?

It’s also moot to imagine the UK or Europe making veganism mandatory, because (as I said) that’s not going to happen

Actually I agree. But it won’t be for want of trying. They’ll bugger about with laws and taxes and waste a whole lot of hot air on the subject, while studiously avoiding the most obvious and effective solutions to a genuine problem.

I hear poppies are quite profitable, as long as you don’t have these pesky things called governments getting in the way, making moral arguments against their cultivation.

Actually no, they’re not. They’re only profitable under a very specific combination of circumstances. No farmer in a normal, functioning country (ie., most places outside of Afghanistan) would bother growing opium poppies. Too much hard work, and he can make a good living by growing eg., heirloom tomatoes.

as long as they’re wisely planned and implemented?

Possibly. Hypothetically. But as they are presently implemented, no.

And yet, here we are: still going, and going, and going…

Well, this is the basic argument for all unsustainable practices, isn’t it? “It’s worked so far, and just because XYZ is limited doesn’t mean we’re anywhere near that limit; so let’s just carry on regardless”.

And people do. And eventually archaeologists dig up their cities from beneath the sand and wonder what happened to such a great civilization.

@finley

So make them interested. I know, easier said than done, but if you believe any change for the better is impossible, then there’s no point in doing anything.

Many people are involved in attempting to do this. However my personal view is that the breathtaking incompetence demonstrated by eg., climate change “action”, and coronavirus, may mean that the age of governments and “sovereignty” is over. I think people are going to start making their own arrangements, as always happens when power structures fail to do what they were set up to do. Perhaps that’s a debate for another day.

[yyy]

@finley

But veganism (and bear in mind there are many different ways to do vegan, just as there are many different ways to do carnivore) is not inherently healthy.

So, if you get all the nutrients you need to be healthy, then your diet is… inherently unhealthy. Unless you also consume things you don’t actually need. Fascinating.

@finley

I draw the line where politicians start telling us what we should eat, and then manipulating the market and the intellectual landscape to ensure that we do. Especially when the things they’re saying are demonstrably untrue. Which I’ve tried to demonstrate.

Wasn’t that covered earlier in this thread?

Governments have been telling people what to consume since way before veganism was trendy. Did Brits never have state-sponsored anti- vegan propaganda like this?

Got Milk? Commercial

And yet, despite decades of that sort of thing, veganism was never declared illegal. So obviously, any recent trend in a different direction means the secret planetary cabal of Illumi-Greenies has gone full Vegan Supremacist, ergo non-vegans should all repent their sins asap before they get sent to concentration camps. Or something.

@finley

@yyy

But for now, and for the foreseeable future, it does exist. Ergo, decreasing it would make a difference.

Well, yes. It’ll destroy the planet in slightly different ways. I suppose for politicians, that’s a good result, because with a new problem of their own making looming on the horizon, it means they can justify their existence for a while longer.

Now you’re getting the swing of it!

@finley

@yyy

You still haven’t explained how not eating cows would stop you from having cows on a farm. And you haven’t explained how manure-producing cows would suddenly “contribute nothing” if they weren’t eaten/milked.

Sigh. I went into enormous detail to explain this. Here’s the TL;DR version:

• Animals eat food, and therefore occupy land area according to their size.
• After the first three years, a chicken’s egg production starts to drop off dramatically. After about age six, a cow can be bred less frequently and will produce less surplus milk. Male animals produce nothing of value at all, at any stage of their lives. At some point, then, you have to kill them (and eat them), or they are occupying land that might be used much more productively by younger animals.
• If you are not selectively breeding and culling your animals to maintain breed vigour, they will be even more worthless after a decade or three than they otherwise would be.

1. If we’re talking about a vegan farm, let’s talk about a vegan farm. That means no milk and no eggs (and no meat), so no need for animals whose only benefit to the farm would be milk or eggs (or meat).

2. But you insist animals are needed even if they’re not going to produce items for human consumption, because soil degradation, so okay: how is manure not useful?

3. And like I said you didn’t account for human-produced organic waste being put to use either, your only argument being that humans don’t do it, which as I pointed out they (in more and more places) do.

@finley

@yyy

Why call it “Airstrip One” if you’re not talking about a world that has already been fully dystopianized?

Have you been to England lately?

I can neither confirm nor deny that, but I assure you we aliens do monitor the whole planet, even the dreary bits.

(Oh and I know LHR ain’t no SIN, but would you honestly choose MNL over it, these days?)

@finley

@yyy

It’s also moot to imagine the UK or Europe making veganism mandatory, because (as I said) that’s not going to happen

Actually I agree. But it won’t be for want of trying.

You seem to be missing the point of the population control analogy.

Make fewer babies =/= make zero babies.

Re your vegan conspiracy, you still haven’t shown it to be vegan at all, even if we accept it as a conspiracy.

Eat less meat =/= go vegan.

@finley

@yyy

I hear poppies are quite profitable, as long as you don’t have these pesky things called governments getting in the way, making moral arguments against their cultivation.

Actually no, they’re not. They’re only profitable under a very specific combination of circumstances. No farmer in a normal, functioning country (ie., most places outside of Afghanistan) would bother growing opium poppies. Too much hard work, and he can make a good living by growing eg., heirloom tomatoes.

The point of my example is, when you have a societal collapse that leaves people to fend for themselves, they tend to do exactly that. Like why I don’t endorse your abolish state education and make the bloody peasant kids pay their own way plan – it’s not so much because governments are good at educating as because parents in Dickensian societies can’t be trusted not to sell their own kids into slavery (as you yourself noted recently). Make people desperate enough (like your example – war), and they will do all sorts of things that could be deterred and even prevented by a functioning government.

I’m not saying agricultural subsidies and regulations are the opposite of war, but if you suddenly remove all of them, what happens? Everyone starts growing heirloom tomatoes and lives happily ever after?

@finley

@yyy

And yet, here we are: still going, and going, and going…

Well, this is the basic argument for all unsustainable practices, isn’t it? “It’s worked so far, and just because XYZ is limited doesn’t mean we’re anywhere near that limit; so let’s just carry on regardless”.

And people do. And eventually archaeologists dig up their cities from beneath the sand and wonder what happened to such a great civilization.

Mm-hm. It tends to come down to (1) they cut down the trees a bit too fast and/or (2) they murdered each other a bit too fast.

Cutting down trees is not unsustainable per se – the problem is just cutting them down faster than they grow back (unless you find suitable alternative materials). The other one is the same, technically.

If living in organized communities per se is the problem, humans doomed themselves before they even invented writing. Yet evolutionary scientists tell us it’s human (“social animal”) nature to organize. So who’s wrong? The scientists? Or the humans, because there is no point to their existence?

Or… the hermits?

@finley

However my personal view is that the breathtaking incompetence demonstrated by eg., climate change “action”, and coronavirus, may mean that the age of governments and “sovereignty” is over. I think people are going to start making their own arrangements, as always happens when power structures fail to do what they were set up to do.

Of course the age of de jure governments will end if people allow de facto governments to replace them, which is already the overwhelming trend. [insert “FANG” emoji]

I have no objection to blaming humans in general for that, but blaming governments in general… that’s a bit like blaming teachers for the short attention spans of the instaface generation. They didn’t start the fire.

[moniesz]

You are my second guy.

[yyy]

Really? Wow. Not sure if I should be flattered, frightened or both.

Who was your first?

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ETA: Oh, sorry. I forgot what thread this was!

[moniesz]

[urodacus]

@finley

Because factory farming, animal cruelty, etc are not just unsustainable but unprofitable. I

Well they are profitable in the short term because they are not burning their own capital but sucking life out of the land and the public environment

[finley]

Sometimes yes. Their short-term profits are basically just liquidation of natural capital.

Often, though, they’re not even profitable in the short term. Selling price is so far below the cost of production that even burning through your capital doesn’t make up the shortfall. Hence long-term government subsidies for agriculture.

[urodacus]

Well people have to eat.

Ducks or seaweed or tofu burgers still needs farmers