Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Does consuming dairy hurt cows more than eating beef?

2. Louis Menand on Fukuyama and identity (New Yorker).

3. James Mirrlees has passed away.

4. NAFTA and the auto sector.

5. Does finance make us less social? (speculative)

Comments

Viking

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#1: More interestingly, does drinking milk and consuming other dairy products add as much cancer risk as eating beef?

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/dec/29/red-meat-cancer-varki-neu5Gc-sialic/?#article-copy

Since a few years ago, I have severely limited my beef consumption, only having a few steaks of the best cuts, like prime grade rib-eye and so on. But I have not limited my dairy consumption.

Ray Lopez

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@Viking - you stole my top post and I'm not happy ;-) Your prose implies, by way of a question, that in fact dairy gives more cancer than red meat, though I'm pretty sure that' s not how you intended it. What will help you, Viking, is more sunlight, but not too much, otherwise you'll get the good cancer, basil cell carcinoma (a form of skin cancer from too much sunlight), which happens to roughly 33% of white men but has a 99% cure rate unless you let it eat your entire face.

Bonus trivia: eAT MOR CHIKEN! Gary Larson had class, retiring early in 1995. By contrast that Simpson's artist is a fraud. Mike Judge of Beavis and Butthead also had some class (and second thoughts about retiring early, as he tried to come back). I myself have class, retiring from my field in my forties (it helps to have parents in the 1% in net worth, minimum net worth US $10M). How about you reader? Yeah, thought so.

Viking

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Regarding relative cancer risk of beef and milk, I truly don't know. The hypothesis is that Neu5Gc in beef increases cancer risk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Glycolylneuraminic_acid

Thus it is not the redness of the meat. I am substituting pork for beef for that reason, as the Neu5Gc concentration of pork is 25% that of beef. Also lamb meat is good. Chicken does not have Neu5Gc, but it does have lots of Omega6 fatty acids. I have no idea how much milk I have to drink, or consume as Greek yoghurt to get as much Neu5Gc as I get from a pound of beef. I do think human welfare trumps cow welfare, I guess I am specist.

I do agree Vitamin D is good for general health, alas I never get enough from sunshine.

Viking

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From one of the comments:

https://twitter.com/JXBach/status/1034829811007537152

Degen listed milk calories per liter as 68, but in reality, that is per 100g milk.

His argument is a quantitative comparison between animal deaths per calorie for beef and milk, with some ethics overtones.

If the beef steak calorie count is correct, but milk calories are under-counted by 90%, then the logical conclusion is the opposite of what was suggested, that milk production is more ethical than beef production.

How can Degen be a famous science journalist, and be unaware when spotting such ignorance and/or innumeracy that directly affect the conclusion of the paper?

Anonymous

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Yes, their calculation was off by an order of magnitude so their conclusion was wrong. How could anyone look at the conclusion that 1 liter of milk has 68 calories and not perceive an obvious mistake?

Anonymous

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Not to mention that if the paper's conclusion were correct, man would probably never have evolved the gene to digest milk in the first place

mpowell

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This is the most significant head-desk aspect to the whole debacle.

Ray Lopez

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I agree, and aside from my point that animals love giving birth, even if it kills them, but don't like just being eaten after a few months like beef cattle are, without the chance to raise young.

Bonus trivia: a food calorie is not to be confused with a more scientific "kilojoule" which is (from memory) roughly one-fourth a food calorie. You see kJ used in Europe for food labeling (the EU has the most comprehensive food laws and labeling I've ever seen, they even list sardines by their scientific name). Here in the Philippines, there's no real requirement to label food (imported food has its original label of course) and you really don't know what you're eating. Plus the lettering in sometimes smaller than agate type, and you can tell the ingredients are not being listed by scientific names but stuff like "natural flavors" (which if you use IFF chemicals can still be natural). And what gives beer flavor? Wine? The yeast, not the grapes or grains.

Viking

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"And what gives beer flavor? Wine? The yeast, not the grapes or grains."

This is a mixed bag. For red wines, I think the grape flavor matters a lot, perhaps less the dryer the wine. Can't comment about beer, as I don't drink much of it.

Here is a product where the great majority of the flavor comes from the yeast:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huangjiu

The yeast makes the red color.

Ray Lopez

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#1 - But cows are happy calving, not happy being slaughtered, so the Rolf Degen argument is invalid. Cats love to give birth too (I got one with five kittens, and the kittens will, unless you spay them, give birth in about 6-9 months too).

First.

TMC

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Reminds me of the story of the egg and bacon breakfast. The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.

Dzhaughn

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Would that Elizabeth Warren got this. She probably would say that shareholders are pigs, actually. She doesn't see that the rest are chickens.

Jake

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The meat vs milk argument seems based on there being 68 calories in 1 Liter of milk. That is wrong, by about an order of magnitude.

Josef

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It blows my mind that the author, and Tyler, missed this. 100ml =/= 1 Litre.

Very lazy, and a complete waste of time.

EverExtruder

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#1 Regardless of either, having seen cattle operations in at least 10 countries, no one has happier cows than the United States.

#2 Very very good. As he puts it - "Thymos" - is absolutely what we're talking about here. Yes, desire for respect of different identity group values is going to break liberalism. And, in fact, is breaking the liberal order that has been predominant since the end of WWII. Why? Because the ability of people to create new, ever smaller subsidiary groups with a new beef is literally infinite.

Values and systems are not relative. Sorry. There are values and systems that work and those that don't. There are those that are life-affirming and those that lead to death, destruction and torture. Those values and systems never exist in a vacuum and those that do not work do not deserve respect simply because they exist or because they can be created upon a whim or because a majority of people had a vested interest in their sustainment.

Cortez was absolutely right to destroy the Aztec empire and end its horrifying tradition of human sacrifice. He, and the other Mexica tribes, had a legitimate beef (referencing #1, pun intended).

#5 A person has friends. A person has money. Don't ever let the two intersect. That old wisdom was and is still perfectly true.

Ray Lopez

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Fukuyama's "End of History" was outstanding, and a rework of Hegel and Nietzsche philosophy. Bonus trivia: "thymos" is the phonetic spelling of the Greek word for "anger", which dovetails with Fukuyama's thesis nicely.

Anonymous

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+10. Fukuyama was wrong that history was "over", but his speculation in the book about what could cause his thesis to be wrong, namely that the struggle for recognition could topple liberal democracy, has proven remarkably prescient. He mentioned Donald Trump specifically as an ambitious individual whose self-regard could hopefully be restrained by his extravagant wealth, discussed the problem Afrocentrists of the late 80s posed in their their criticism of "white values" (which sounds remarkably like Ta-Nehisi Coates and his followers today), the burgeoning "Asian values" movement in SE and East Asia (which is the direction China has taken), and a few other predictions. The one area where he was definitely wrong was in the death of Marxism: his theories have had a distinct revival among numerous factions of the left, and were not completely refuted and rejected by the collapse of the Soviet Union and Communist countries throughout the world.

Ray Lopez

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+1, yeah, I recall the Donald Trump quote in Fukuyama's book, it was very cool and prophetic. I even emailed TC over it.

Anonymous

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I don't really understand people who say the book is worthless junk and Fukuyama is a hack simply because History isn't at its "end". I read it for the first time in the fall of 2015 after being impressed by his two books on Political Order, after Trump had declared his candidacy but well before anyone regarded it as anything but a joke (I sent a picture of one of the passages referencing Trump to one of my friends for a laugh), and thought Fukuyama's analysis of thymos and Nietzsche's excoriation of "men without chests", along with the examples he raised of how these phenomena might play out based on events at the end of the 80s/early 90s, was particularly insightful.

mkt42

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"a legitimate beef (referencing #1, pun intended)"

Menand's article also mentions La Vache Qui Rit cheese, another connection to #1. Very clever of Tyler, if he was setting those articles up deliberately.

mkt42

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"#5 A person has friends. A person has money. Don't ever let the two intersect. That old wisdom was and is still perfectly true."

Yes, although the article suggests that people may be not just substituting one for the other, but via revealed preference showing they prefer the monetary solution to the friends/social network solution. At the margin of course.

Leonard Smalls

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Wouldn’t it be important to distinguish people who ultimately don’t want differences to matter, like the people involved in #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, from people who ultimately do want them to matter, like isis militants, Brexit voters, or separatist nationalists?

The line between the BLM types and the separatist nationalists is not a bright one, New Yorker writer.

EverExtruder

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It, for sure, is not. Since its inception I've actually viewed BLM as a sort of 21st century black nationalist revival. I've always viewed hyper-nationalism (i.e. German National Socialism) as a philosophy in which a principal component is the ability to do bad things or behave badly in certain areas and get away with it.

BLM is about black people being able to steal swisher-sweets, shove Rajasthani convenience store owners, and assault police officers and get away with it. In such a case I would advise BLM that most certainly they should have their own country, and emigrate there immediately.

Gary Jones

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As Jake points out, the cited data is fubar, but so is the general ag knowledge and reasoning.

All cattle are beef in the end, unless they die on the job. They have to be able to walk into the processing facility to be food grade.

Semen can be selected for sex. If a dairyman wants more heifers to raise for his milking string he can use sexed semen from quality sires.

You don't need quality dairy semen to freshen a milking cow. Any semen will do, but if no heifers are needed then a beef breed is used to produce calves that finish better for beef. The milk is the same.

There have been times and places where it cost more to finish a calf for beef than it was worth when mature. In those cases the bull calves were not finished.

If your concern is deaths of sentient lives per calorie then the larger the animal the fewer lives will be taken for equivalent calories. It takes 200 chicken lives on average to equal one bull life.

The lives taken or prevented by field and row cropping far exceed the lives taken for livestock production. Lots of mice and other wild animals are killed or denied existence by growing crops. A veggie patch is comparatively lifeless.

If your concern is not just sentient lives but life in general then the deaths in the veggie patch go up an order of magnitude (roughly). You may have less empathy for insects, microbes, and non-crop plants but they die too.

I use the metric of total life. A system that produces the most human calories and the most total life is the best. It will also have the fewest sentient deaths, but that's a less robust measure.

Pastured ruminants seem to be the least harmful, unless we decide to eat nothing but blue whales and elephants.

Ray Lopez

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Points well made Gary Jones. As an aside, how do you ethically dispose of excess domestic cats? Here in the Philippines they are too cheap to spay them, so they separate the kittens from the mother cat, and expose them in a rice field before the two months it takes for the kittens to mature. I figure it's more humane to suffocate the kittens by burying them alive (c'mon people, a few minutes of discomfort and they'll pass out). Any thoughts? Granted, I could shell out money and have the female cats spayed, and I guess I might do that though I'd have to drive two hours to the nearest big town and it will look real weird to spay semi-feral cats, believe me, in this country.

Bonus trivia: I misspoke when I said I have to train my kittens to hunt: their mother and in once kitten's case foster mother teaches them, and some are catching birds that I catch and release before them, and one even caught a mouse the mother cat caught and released in front of it. Amazing critters! Very cute, I'm a cat person.

Ray Lopez

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PS--Sleeping overnight on this, I don't think I could bury the critters, even though that's more humane actually than exposing newborns in a rice field as is done here, so I'll compromise and just abandon them in rice fields once they're big enough to hunt... or maybe neuter the females if it doesn't cost too much.

Anonymous

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So your compromise is to release more feral cats into the wild where they will spread disease and murder untold rodent and bird babies?

Viking

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+1. Good thoughtful analysis. Cowen should quote you instead of Degen!

EverExtruder

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Upvoted. Your comment also made me think of what industrial "blue whale" farming would look like....it's interesting.

Hazel Meade

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Agree, "calories per life" is a poor metric. And I'm pretty sure he's wrong about male calves being slaughtered, or at least counting 0.5 deaths per year per cow. The farmers are likely either using sex selection or selling the male calves to be raised for beef.

cjared

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#4 When new parts plants are built in North America they will not be old parts plants. They will be modern, full of tech, etc. The prices will not go up. Why do we forget previous conversations about how jobs were lost to automation, not trade?

spencer

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Presume parts plants are not built in the US because they can not compete at current prices.

Raise the price by imposing a 25% tariff. OK,now maybe now some US parts plants can compete. But it will be because they are able to get higher prices.

Cjared your freshman or into economic analysis is not at all realistic.

The main impact of Trumps trade war will be to create inflation.

cjared

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Spencer, you cannot "presume parts plants are not built in the US because they can not compete at current prices" ... the decision on where to build parts is not just about cost, especially for engines. Engines are built mostly in high cost zones. Germany & Japan for example.

And history shows the opposite ... in the 80s "Fortress North America" as a threat, caused European & Japanese manufacturers to build plants in North America, the highly efficient plants we have today. Prices for cars on an inflation adjusted bases are down. Not up. At the end of the day no tariffs were imposed, and production capacity has soared, highly efficient plants. Costs to the consumer are down. That is history, the data is all there.

Brian

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cjared,

I am certainly not forgetting some worker displacement is caused by automation rather than trade: I simply accept that both are causes.

Before Trump, if a hypothetical new North American parts plant made sense, it would have already displaced imported parts. If it didn't displace imported parts then the inference is that it didn't make sense because the tech in practice was already close to the frontier. If the tech in practice is already close to the frontier then Trumps restrictions are simply taxes.

cjared

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Brian, It is not about efficiency or tech. NA parts firms can compete with any region on those two factors. The inefficient plants were mostly shut down in 2009. The truth is that subsidies in Asia materialize is many formats. Protected markets, tax rebates, labour force "control"... this is all well known within Asia, if not well known outside Asia. In NA we like to blame the unions. But this is a political statement, not an analysis costs and efficiency.

Brian

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May be some of those "efficiency" gains of the past were specific to the the historical circumstances: the historical bargaining power of the unions and the cost difference between the northern states and the southern states and local government incentives. Those factors may be diminished in the present day.

cjared

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Brian, In practice efficiency gains are not required. To fix the trade balance, when you examine the numbers, it is about engines, not rear view mirrors or other small parts. Engines are being made in Germany, Japan & South Korea, high cost zones, not low cost. Building a factory of equivalent efficiency in low cost Southern United States would reduce the cost of the car.

Brian

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spencer, I agree about the inflation. Note that since Friday the 24th to Thursday the 30th, we see Autonation (new cars) down 44bp and the S&P 500 up 98bp. So Autonation is underperforming by 142bp. CarMax (used cars) is up 228bp, so it is overperforming by 130bp.

rayward

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2. Fredo Corleone: "I’m smart. Not like everybody says, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!"

Hazel Meade

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4. Pretty much what I said yesterday. The deal will make it more expensive to produce cars in north America. This is an aspect of a point I've been making for a while. Trade restrictions dont just raise prices for consumers, they raise prices for exporting industries. At its heart, this is the same problem that has afflicted all us industries where labor (like trump's white working class) has been allowed to make the rules. They destroy their own markets by trying to drive up prices to benefit themselves.

Robert_evidence_based

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No 1

I'm not sure I follow the math at the end. You take 0.5 deaths + 0.303 deaths = 0.803 deaths

Then 532,236 calories / 0.803 deaths = 662,809 calories per death

Not 427,407 calories per death.

They seem to be multiplying: 0.803 * 532,236 = 427,385 (even then it's a tiny but off)

Perhaps I'm not following something correctly?

Anonymous

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The person responsible for that "study" should be fired

Robert_evidence_based

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I really hope I'm wrong somehow. Because if the math is wrong, it's disturbing that it got through peer review.

Maybe someone should check the rest of the math in the paper.

And as to the author of the study, I don't know what to say.

mkt42

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2: An interesting critique of Fukuyama's latest work; Menand makes a number of good points but is I think a little too dismissive of economics and the semi-rationality of economic behavior and also a little too dismissive of the neuroscience that Fukuyama relies on.

This Kojeve fellow is presumably completely unknown to most of us, but like Woody Allen's Zelig character seems to have been connected to a good chunk of the notable people of the 20th century: Arendt, Lucan, Strauss, Bloom, and via Bloom, Fukuyama -- and that's in addition to his work on GATT, the European Economic Community, and of all things La Vache Qui Rit cheese, those foil-wrapped cheeses that I'd always assumed were some sort of post-WW II modernistic convenience food, the type of culinary innovation that Americans like to do. But according to Wikipedia, it dates to the early 20th century and truly was a French cheese, at least initially (according to wikipedia, in 2005 they were planning to build a plant in Syria, I wonder how it's doing). Wikipedia also says that in Japan it's called "rafingu kau".

Joël

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Kojeve is relatively well-known in France. I mean, not ultra-famous, but everyone with an intellectual leaning here would recognize the name, though without being able, most of the time, to say anything about him.

FYI

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Cannot wait until the MooToo movement starts. Don't think I am joking, it will come!

Compression

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1. Cows contain a lot of repeated units, so with some compression and some improvement in processing power it may be possible to simulate cows at a lower cost than that of physical cows.

With a few further tweaks to reduce computing power required I don't see why we couldn't eventually have a close packed hexagonal array of 10 to the 24 simulated cows within the approximate space and energy consumption of a current large dairy cow.

Of course, to achieve such compression we'd first have to assume a spherical cow...

JWatts

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"Of course, to achieve such compression we'd first have to assume a spherical cow..."

Are you accounting for atmospheric friction or assuming a vacuum....

IVV

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Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FavUpD_IjVY

Compression

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Exactly. Animal welfare could potentially be greatly increased by replacing animals with bouncing spherical arachnocows.

For certain values of the word potentially.

JWatts

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The Spider cows were creepy.

Teaching Spastics to Dance

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2. Louis Menand usually manages one item in an otherwise forgettable piece which reminds you he lives in a bubble or can't complete the task without at least one fraudulent statement. This one's in the penultimate paragraph: "Wouldn’t it be important to distinguish people who ultimately don’t want differences to matter, like the people involved in #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, from people who ultimately do want them to matter, like ISIS militants, Brexit voters, or separatist nationalists? "

Paul

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Funny, that sentence struck a false note for me as well. I thought I was the only one.

Anon7

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The intersectional identitarians also want differences to continue to matter because they derive their identities in large part from their sense of grievance and victimhood and they valorize being marginalized (which is an utterly perverse slave morality). Microagressions will become nanoaggressions, then picoaggressions, then femtoaggressions, etc., which will guarantee their valorization indefinitely. It is indeed a status game rooted in thumos.

EverExtruder

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"Microagressions will become nanoaggressions, then picoaggressions, then femtoaggressions, etc...."

Nail meets hammer x1000. That and valorizing "slave morality" are absolutely on point. It being indefinite is also the whole point...a never-ending bucket filled with contention that can be called upon at any time and for any reason when they don't like the way something feels.

But I think that the valorizing is not just individuals, but certain group actors in society such as the MSM and Hollywood also, among others. It is absolutely a status game and they have specifically weaponized grievance as a means of maintaining a perception in themselves and others that they are somehow better people than the rest of us. But the problem is that this perception isn't just cracking - you can literally drive a truck through the holes in it now - it's that they are so heavily invested in it that despite knowing it's complete bullsh*t they have to keep lying and saying "what cracks?"

This is why things are "feeling" the way they are now. Everyone knows these people have no clothes. The louder they get the more naked they appear.

Hazel Meade

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I can see why you would object to that, but there are both kinds of people in #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. A lot of black people (among other marginalized groups), actually do just want differences to not matter. Strangely enough, many of the people who emphasize national identity want the same thing - they want national identity to transcend race and bind people together to overcome racial identity. I get it. But you make it hard for people to embrace that national identity by making it a narrow overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Christian conservative identity. You want people to identify as Americans, but then you tell people they don't really count as Americans because of their racial or ethnic or religious heritage. If you want to bind people into a unifying national identity, you have to make that identity big enough to encompass them. And if you keep kicking people out of the tent, you shouldn't be surprised if they set up their own.

Teaching Spastics to Dance

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I can see why you would object to that, but there are both kinds of people in #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

There are three types of people involved in #MeToo and Black Lives Matter: fools, grifters, and aspirant predators. Black Lives Matter in particular was inflated by sorosphere rent-a-crowd.

A lot of black people (among other marginalized groups), actually do just want differences to not matter.

Yeah, and they're all rank and file wage-earners who have no impact whatsoever on public policy or public discourse. Regrettable, but that's the world we live in.

But you make it hard for people to embrace that national identity by making it a narrow overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Christian conservative identity. You want people to identify as Americans, but then you tell people they don't really count as Americans because of their racial or ethnic or religious heritage

Amazing all the things I'm up to that I don't know about.

It's difficult to explain color to a blind man and it's difficult to explain the affinity of person X to person Y to someone like Hazel or Bryan Caplan, because other people just don't compute to them (made manifest also in Hazel's comic role as self-appointed tribune for a black population of which she hasn't the slightest understanding). To anyone else, mass importation of foreigners and having the bar, the media and the teaching professions taking a hatchet to every shared convention that they locate just might make it a tad more difficult for people to 'identify' with eachother. In Hazel's scatterbrain, there's some sort of delict adhering to people who state the obvious: that social life is animated and lubricated by culture, and culture has content.

I have a relation currently resident in Ecuador. He doesn't count as Ecuadorean because - get this - he has a certain 'racial, ethnic, and religious heritage'. Doesn't matter how much his Ecuadorean girlfriend adores him, the man she adores grew up in an evangelical household in the Rustbelt. Should he bring her home, she'll be a South American woman navigating life in Pittsburgh or Cleveland or wherever his work takes him. His mother and sister will do their best by her and so would I should he land near me. She'll still be a foreigner trying to nestle as agreeably as she can in a matrix she didn't grow up in, just as he is down there.

Hazel Meade

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I hate to break this to you, but there are millions of people who were born in the USA who aren't white or Christian. There are inflact, quite a few Asian Buddists, and even a few Hindus and Muslims. To say nothing of Spanish-speaking Catholics. My point is that many conservatives want all those people to identify as "Americans", not their ethnic sub-group. But they won't broaden the definition of American culture to include them.

JWatts

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"But they won't broaden the definition of American culture to include them."

I think you need to prove this point, because it doesn't seem particularly true. The idea that conservatives in general are othering Spanish speaking Catholics is a stretch. At least not to the same degree that lefties are othering red necks or Libertarians or blue collar workers, etc.

Hazel Meade

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Definitely not conservatives in general, but the alt-right, yes. And some others.
For some people, the key signature element of American culture is that it is "white" and "Christian". It's just a fact that that's how some people see it.

George W. Bush made an excellent speech earlier this year where he spoke out against that idea and said that Americans of all races and backgrounds are "fully and equally American". THAT is what the position of the Republican party ought to be. America is defined by ideas, not by race or religion.

JWatts

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Those are good points.

Particularly this one: "America is defined by ideas, not by race or religion."

But ultimately, one of those ideas has to be acceptance of race and religion. We can't be a society that's intolerant of any race or creed. Nor can we banish religion to the hinterland, by refusing to allow people to celebrate it publicly. And representation should be roughly proportional. There's room for compromise, but every side must be willing to give a little.

Anon7

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Ideas are not enough. A civic culture requires other elements like a common language, customs, etc., and much of American civic culture for historical and other good reasons will and should remain mostly "Eurocentric" (e.g., every American should be expected to learn standard English in addition to whatever other languages they may pick up). That's where the alt-right is right. The alt-right is dead wrong, however, to believe that other races cannot assimilate into that civic culture, or to conceive of that civic culture in a way that necessarily excludes large groups of people (e.g., only whites).

JWatts

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"like ISIS militants, Brexit voters, or separatist nationalists? ""

As soon as I saw him lump ISIS militants in with Brexit voters, I knew he was an idiot. A serious person, might make such a comment , in exaggerated hyperbole in a more casual setting, but no serious person would lump those groups together. He's a caustic ideologue.

Teaching Spastics to Dance

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What's amazing about Menand is that he's had a stellar career in academe even though his scholarly output is modest. He's also had a long career as a 'public intellectual' beginning with a temporary position he had at The New Republic during the Peretz / Kinsley years. Peretz and Kinsley put together a magazine with considerable personality. He was just filler, producing nothing of interest. One consistent feature of his advocacy has been his antic reaction to Allan Bloom (still going like the energizer bunny after 31 years) and his inveterate defenses of the status quo in our most bloated and corrupt industry (higher education). It's impossible to believe he is or ever has been a seminal thinker in the world of literature.

M

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At the very least, ISIS do *not* want differences to matter. They want to conquer the world and impose an Islamic state on all humanity. No differences, see? They throw "differences" off tall buildings.

Better lumped with Black Lives Matter, really.

Hazel Meade

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Yeah, Black Lives Matter is all about throwing people off buildings. And how dare we take seriously or acknowledge that black people in America have anything to complain about. If you do that, you're a white-hating racist.

George

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Their signature accomplishment is taking police brutality and turning it into a racial issue, in spite of all evidence, so that it can never be solved

Hazel Meade

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Wrong on both points. Acknowledging that black people's interaction with police has a special history does not mean you can't do anything about it. White people aren't obligated to respond with extreme hostility to the very idea that there might be some sort of racial bias going on. You could, for instance, cut black people a little slack even if you think its not racial. You could stop taking it as some sort of attack on whites for some reason. I mean gosh, why would black people be predisposed to perceive racism. I have no idea.

JWatts

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"White people aren't obligated to respond with extreme hostility "

You are clearly assuming bad intent on the part of people, just because they are not in full agreement. Political disagreement is not "extreme hostility". Essentially you are treating 'white people' as one monolithic group and attacking the entire group. That's called racism.

"You could, for instance, cut black people a little slack even if you think its not racial."

Sure and BLM could cut other people some slack. When people respond with White Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, the correct response should be:

"Yes, they do. All Lives Matter, and let's get to work. But we'd like to start with an emphasis on the occasional incidents of police brutality and unjustified shootings. Things we can all agree that society would be better off without."

" You could stop taking it as some sort of attack on whites for some reason"

Well sure, but often there were BLM associated attacks on whites.

"A co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto argued that white people are “recessive genetic defects” and purportedly mused about how the race could be “wiped out,” according to a post on what appears to be her Facebook page."

https://torontosun.com/2017/02/11/black-lives-matter-co-founder-appears-to-label-white-people-defects/wcm/2748a714-f567-4344-8c08-decfe73d1e52

"I have no idea."

No, you are too smart not to have any idea. You know what the reasons are, you just are choosing to ignore the bad behavior of your in group and you are emphasizing the bad behavior of your out group.

It's a free country, you can say and believe what you want. But you won't open anybodies mind if you keep yours closed.

Hazel Meade

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Well the hostility to BLM does seem to be "extreme" to me. You see a bunch of people protesting what they believe to be racism (for totally understandable reasons), and you respond by saying that the entire group of people is a violent anti-white racist movement? That is extremely hostile. Unhinged. Bizarre, really.

You're correct to say I shouldn't say white people, after all a lot of whites are on my side on this. What I mean to refer to is certain white people who have responded to BLM with the insane, hysterial overreaction I have described above.

And black people don't need to be corrected with the "All Lives Matter" slogan. Think about how you would perceive it if someone took an innocent statement of yours and corrected it. BLM people aren't saying that white lives don't matter and never were, and the act of correcting them is both condescending and an implication that that's what they mean, which is insulting at the same time. It's not even remotely surprising that black people would be offended by being talked down to and corrected like that. It looks like your putting them in their place.

As for the BLM co-founder's statement - it sounds to me like he's doing what I often do, which is to do a reverse parody of what someone I argue against is doing. Basically he's taking the common notion on the alt-right that black are genetically less intelligent and turning it on it's head to mock them. It's not meant to be taken literally as an actual statement of belief.

JWatts

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"As for the BLM co-founder's statement - it sounds to me like he's doing what I often do, which is to do a reverse parody ... It's not meant to be taken literally as an actual statement of belief."

Hazel you are in denial or spinning.

"Khogali has a track record of inflammatory, divisive rhetoric.

Only last week during a protest in front of the US consulate Khogali shouted into a microphone that “Justin Trudeau is a white supremacist terrorist” and urged the crowd to “rise up and fight back.”

“Look at us, we have the numbers,” she said."

"“Plz Allah give me strength to not cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today.”"

"“Whiteness is not humxness,” the statement begins. “infact, white skin is sub-humxn.” The post goes on to present a genetics-based argument centred on melanin and enzyme."

"black ppl simply through their dominant genes can literally wipe out the white race if we had the power to.”"

JWatts

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Just to be clear here, if Donald Trump were to make statements this obviously racist, I would condemn him as a racist immediately.

The fact that a prominent BLM activist can get by with this kind of racist rhetoric is appalling.

Anon7

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There's very little that is innocent about BLM. It's premised on widespread "institutional racism," which in effect means that people are racist until proven otherwise, so it's hardly surprising that people would react in kind. And last time I checked, Thomas Sowell was a black man and he characterized BLM as follows:

"Chief among those who generate this poisonous atmosphere are career race hustlers like Al Sharpton and racist institutions like the "Black Lives Matter" movement. All such demagogues need is a situation where there has been a confrontation where someone was white and someone else was black. The facts don't matter to them."

George

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What "both points" are you talking about?

"Acknowledging that black people's interaction with police has a special history does not mean you can't do anything about it."

Is that relevant in any way to what I said? BLM says absolutely nothing about black people's interactions with police having a "special history". What they say is that white cops (and others) are murdering innocent black people because of racism. You're really bending over backwards to create this alternative reality where the people you agree with are totally reasonable and intellectual and nice people.

"White people aren't obligated to respond with extreme hostility to the very idea that there might be some sort of racial bias going on."

Okay, but here in reality, white people get annoyed when they are accused of racism without any evidence- worse, being accused of murdering black people because of racism, when in reality, for example, Hispanic people are defending themselves against their head being slammed into the ground by black people. When you make outrageous racist accusations, yes it turns people away from your movement.

Now they have poisoned the well and it's impossible to talk about police brutality without it becoming an identity politics culture war racism issue, which pits 50% of the population against the other 50%. If you think that's not true, you need to take your blinders off. That's what happened.

M

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Hazel, I await your criticism of Menard lumping Brexit supporters and separatist nationalists with ISIS on the same grounds, that they do not literally throw people off buildings.

Oh wait.... silly me, sorry, I forgot about your open hypocrisy and bias for a second there. Of course those being the case you'd not raise a peep about Menard's grouping, but you would about the reverse.

MR

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Related to #1: From an animal welfare concern, dropping poultry is most important (one bird = small # of meals, compared to one cow).

Bill Benzon

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#2 mentions Kojève on Hegel, who talks about recognition. I believe Rene Girard was influenced by Kojève.

P Burgos

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2. I think that I will want to read Fukuyama’s book and judge it for myself. It strikes me as odd that Menand praised Fukuyama’s Political Order books but doesn’t connect them to Identity. I know that as a reader of Fukuyama, I would be very interested in how Fukuyama’s new book connects to his old book, and if Fukuyama didn’t discuss that in one way or another, I would be disappointed. That the reviewer didn’t talk about the connection or lack of connection is strange, as the first thing I would want to know about the book is what opinion Fukuyama has on the compatibility of identity politics and kulturkampf and “getting to Denmark.” It is a review that doesn’t tell me what I think is the most basic thing a reader would want to know about the book. Unless of course it is a Straussian review, meant to alert readers to the weaknesses of the arguments against Fukuyama’s position?

Jeremy

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The previous respondents are correct about the numerical error in calculating the nutritional value of milk, but the study has committed a much more fundamental error by suggesting that vegetarians substitute all meat for dairy products. That is a ridiculous suggestion. Meat proteins would be substituted with plant proteins, not dairy products, or else you would be on a very unhealthy, protein-poor diet.

Dude

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From the dairy and beef operations I've seen in Wisconsin, dairy cattle have lower quality day-to-day lives than beef cattle. Not sure how this fits into their analysis b/c I did not read the article.

Jay

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Confirmed: crypto fan boy / girl believes M0 is sufficient money supply to smoothly handle all payrolls in the economy.

M

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#2: "Fukuyama thinks that political movements that appear to be about legal and economic equality—gay marriage, for example, or #MeToo—are really about recognition and respect. Women who are sexually harassed in the workplace feel that their dignity has been violated, that they are being treated as less than fully human."

It's an error to imagine that #MeToo-ers really hold a concept of "dignity" as such.

See - https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2015/09/honor-dignity-victimhood-and-death-of.html - a review of Jon Haidt on Honor, dignity and victimhood.

Victimhood itself is their desired state in its own terms. They're largely not trying to correct any insult to their honor. (Independent of whether there is arguably as much unjust insult by various Weinsteins to be addressed as their rhetroic suggests or no!) They are trying to establish themselves as victims, which in early 21st century Western culture is a direct source of social status, moral authority and even occasionally, material compensation.

If Fukuyama believes that they want to achieve dignity, and that this threat to the "Liberal Democratic Order" can be warded by helping them obtain it, then he is probably in error here.

Hazel Meade

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Yup, no woman ever had anything to complain about either. They're all just selfish people trying to claim victim status, at the expense of men. All a big plot against men, because they just hate men. No other possible explanation.

msgkings

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Hazel, you can't argue with certain types, they are so far down their bigoted rabbit holes they actually don't see 'the other' as human the way they are. Women aren't people just like them trying to make their way in the world and trying to maximize their enjoyment of life just like men, they are predators plotting to take advantage of men at every turn. Black people aren't people who just want to work, play, marry, have kids, have fun, save some money, and retire like white people, they are all drug dealing thugs looking for handouts.

You are too intelligent to engage these types.

Whiskey T.

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Precisely because black people, women, etc., are human, they have predictable behaviors. They seek status and power and BLM or #metoo are a means to that end.

You don't have to be racist, bigoted, or sexist to realize that.

msgkings

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You do however have to be a Hobbesian misanthrope who sees life as a brutal struggle of all against all. No thanks

M

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#MeToo is "not all women". So to speak. I make a criticism of a specific, moralized movement ring led by a toxic bunch of social media talking heads and you state that you believe that I am making a universal statement to all women? #MeToo is toxic, it's driven by a desire to obtain a social position as the exalted "victim", it's a moral panic. There's nothing positive about it. If the system of public morality we have developed did not give these women status and power as "victims" (e.g. giving them power with the Hollywood system) they would not say half of what they are saying. If you don't see that, you are a fool.

Perhaps when the Christian fundamentalists come to try and exploits an moral panic to leverage themselves a position as victims, silence and overpower a plural media, you will shout this down as criticism of people who don't think Christians are even human. But I'd guess you wouldn't.

M

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#MeToo is a specific movement, in a specific time and place in society and the world.

I know I can't argue with you certain types that wish to ignore context, though, and make it about some transhistorical "social justice" rather than a phenomena that arises from a specific context (the shift to victim morality in the US consciousness).

I'd hardly have written - "(Independent of whether there is arguably as much unjust insult by various Weinsteins to be addressed as their rhetoric suggests or no!)" (and you can add various Argentos to that as well) - if I didn't think sexual harassment actually happened, would I? That's just not what drives these people who are striving to create a movement here, in the actual fact.

It's like people like you don't even think the people you're arguing with are even human.

A Vegan

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1. Re whether raising cows for beef vs dairy hurts them more. How about not hurting cows at all?

BTW, life of a dairy cow is horrendous--cycle of impregnation, birth, stripping calf away from mother...

Anonymous

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"How about not hurting cows at all?"

And the way to do that is? Cow genocide? Release the cows into the wild so something else can hurt them?

I'm on board with grass-fed everything but it's expensive

A Vegan

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The way to do that is not raising cows for slaughter for food/consumption purposes.

If the world suddenly decided to do that, of course you would have the problem of how to "wind down" the existing population.

JWatts

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It's a free country. No one is forced to raise cows for slaughter nor to eat meat.

Anonymous

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So, cow genocide it is? You don't think free-range pastured cattle are better than that?

A Vegan

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I guess I don't understand your argument. I am arguing for stopping the raising of cattle for consumption.

As of now, the cow genocide is ongoing, as long as they are being raised for slaughter.

If you are saying what happens to the existing population of cows if we stop consuming them, then I say this is a problem that would need a solution, but is not a reason to not stop raising cows for consumption.

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