Thankful for everyone decent

I just finished the historical (1980s) fiction novel Atmosphere. It reminded me of the cruelty of homophobia just in my lifetime. Then I came across this:

The hatred, cruelty, and discrimination of "the Moral [sic] Majority" doesn't really compare to slavery, the Holocaust, the Sudanese civil war, etc. etc. etc. But gadzooks - so many of us "civilized, enlightened, democratic, Freedom!-loving" individuals  dedicate our lives to persecuting other humans - even those who look like us, are in our "tribe," and are doing nothing to us at all. (Even after the complete failure of all predictions about the end of civilization if women got the vote, races were able to "intermix," gays were allowed to teach, etc. etc. etc.) 

Now they want to overturn equal marriage, the right to contraception, etc. And they don't have any problem saying all this out loud, here in USA! USA! USA!

It isn't just the US, of course.

Here

(Not to mention factory farms.)

Honestly, I am continually amazed that so many highly-educated individuals so blindly fetishize humanity. 

How bad do we have to be before we question the unquestioned worship of humanity? 

But my point isn't "humanity is terrible" and/or "everyone is stupid except me." We are all just collections of atoms following the laws of physics, our evolutionary nature, and our societal programming. 

Rather, I want to express my gratitude to all the decent people in the world. 

I especially appreciate those who look beyond themselves and try to help those most at the mercy of the majority. 

Caring is, I know, very difficult, to put it mildly. I wish I could make it easier for each of you. 

Loansharking Tuesday

 Please give hugs to chickens here. TY!

Sunday Funny: Fun with Box

 

Video Illusion

This is awesome. They'll show you how they do it at the end; pay attention to when the illusion snaps back into place.  :-) 

Wow - Apple (and stock donations and album)

If Anne could only listen to one album for the rest of time, it would be Paul Simon's Graceland.
 

Here's a graph of Apple's stock under Tim Cook (and by the way, One Step for Animals can directly accept donations of stock, funds, crypto, etc.; we've donated some of our Nvidia):

$8,189 per second

It is impossible raise a child vegan.

Someone recently asked me about this story from 2006. Anne and I revisited the story; rarely is justice so quickly and so beautifully doled out! (End of the story; excerpted from Day 21 Concluded in Losing.)  

In late November 2006, Peter [Singer] invited me to Princeton to speak on a panel with Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Happiness Hypothesis. Jonathan's thesis that evening was, “Why Good Intentions Don’t Lead to Good Actions.” My talk was titled, “Causing Good Actions Anyway.”

Anne was at a big teaching conference, so EK, who was in seventh grade at the time, came along to New Jersey, handing out copies of “A Meaningful Life” to the crowd.

In his presentation, Jonathan said that whenever he spent time with Peter, he would decide to go vegetarian. Then when he would get home, he would slowly fall back into his old ways. (He showed a slide where his face slowly migrated from a picture of Peter over to a burger.) Of course, this is a typical story, given that the vast majority of people who give up meat revert back.

To give a sense of the stakes, my talk began with a short film about the conditions on factory farms. Then I pivoted to how food tech could help us overcome people’s inertia. If we could give people the burgers and the nuggets they wanted without killing animals, then good intentions would be enough.

(Producing meat without animals was an idea JL had told us about when he lived in our basement. [We let him out for meals.] In 2004, he started actively promoting the idea of cultivated meat – aka “clean meat” or, inaccurately, “lab meat” – actual animal cells grown in a clean manufacturing facility. That year, he founded New Harvest to promote research into cultivated meat. JL flew to Europe and convinced the Dutch Agriculture Minister to provide funding for research.)

The author Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Eating Animals) was in the Princeton audience for my talk, and he came to the dinner afterwards. That is also where I met the great Bob Wright in person.

The dinner, however, was a mess. It was as though the cook had heard my talk about giving people tasty animal-free food and said, “Hold my beer and watch this.” The main course was a slab of barely warm tofu with a slight drizzle of sauce. It could not have made vegetarian food look worse. I’m serious.

Sitting across from me was a grad student. She started holding forth on how her mom was a dietitian and had proven that while adults could be vegan, it was impossible to raise a child vegan. She went on and on, digging herself in deeper and deeper.

When she stopped, Peter, at the head of the table, nodded to his right and calmly said, “I think we should let [lifelong vegan] EK handle this one.” 

Beautiful.

Hahahahahahahaha

We are not unique flowers

I saw a story in a major news source about "how bad it is for kids these days." The father had graduated with a degree in chemical engineering and had a successful career. Daughter graduated and is living at home, looking for a job in ... social media.

Ummmm.... Chemical engineer ... social media ... one of these things is not like the other....

(See excerpt below graphics)

The difference between unemployment rates between young people and all workers is lower than the long-term average.

From "More Unpopular Opinions" in LMR:

Passion, love, and/or dedication are not enough.

When you commit yourself entirely to the pursuit of something, that produces excellence, and that is intoxicating for people who want to be close to excellence.

–Jane Friedman, The Business of Being a Writer

Sorry, Jane [who I really like], this is simply not true.

Same for Steve Jobs’ (in)famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford: “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” 

Blargle. 

OK, fine, you got me – this is probably not horrible advice for graduates of Stanford. They not only have a Stanford degree, but to even get in, they must have had both a privileged life with connections in addition to their vastly above-average talents.

But for the vast majority of the tens of millions of people who watched the speech on YouTube, following “your heart and intuition” is a path to disappointment and/or your mother’s basement. For every Steve Jobs or Serena Williams or David Sedaris or RBG there are countless – Hundreds? Thousands? – of people who passionately dedicated themselves to something and failed.

Yet this shit advice is so common. It feels like everyone who succeeds thinks it is just because they wanted it more. Fish-man Michael Phelps was on Colbert saying anyone can be anything they want. Sorry, but no one without once-in-a-generation physical skills will ever out-swim Phelps. And there was no way Phelps could have then turned himself into a Tiger-beating golfer, or a Nobel-winning physicist, or a brilliant and insightful memoirist.

My life is a testament to this. In seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, I lived basketball. I ran, I lifted, I practiced before and after school. But as soon as other kids got close to my height, I wasn’t even good enough to play for a shitty school with a graduating class of 69.

And my passion to change the world, to reduce suffering? This book is testament to that failure as well.

I did meet my soulmate, but as is clear in this book, that was a lucky, unlikely accident, not as the result of passion or dedication.

Sunday Funny: Be Contagious

 

Weekend Reading

If you've read this blog for a while, you know I have increasingly become convinced that the climate doomers are a significant net negative in the world. (Example.) The Ecomodernist has another good example, following-up this excellent piece from August.

And a blast from the past (from here): The Impossible Burger Debate Was a Test for Vegans, and We Failed

I share these not to try to convince any of the Doomers or Vegans, but to make sure that people who seek to do actual good in the world aren't sucked into the narrative. When I posted this, one of the replies was, basically, "Climate change is going to kill us all!" <sigh>

For laughs. When I sent this to our friend in Auckland, they wrote back:
"You've been here the entire time??"  😆

You and I could be happier. It is simple but not easy.

It is not easy.

-Pet Shop Boys, "Happiness is an Option"

Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.

–Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True, quoted p. 215 here

I have written over and over about the Cult of Doom that has taken over the minds of many left-leaning individuals.

Also, I've written extensively (quoting Robert Wright) how evolution has left us with inherent nature that makes it exceedingly difficult to be happy. Any creature who was content was competed out of the gene pool; driven, uptight, and envious individuals tended to pass on their genes. In the dangerous world of our far ancestors, seeing threats everywhere was, sadly, a winning genetic strategy.

Now, "the best minds of my generation" spend their lives perfecting algorithms that manipulate our evolutionary heritage to optimally demand our attention. Anger, outrage, and tribalism gobble up our eyeballs.

We can intellectually recognize this, yet it is exceedingly hard to escape it. Even if we logically know the world is so much better, when the vast majority of "our side" are posting Doom Dogma, we simply can't help but emotionally absorb this worldview.

This comes to mind when Hank Green quotes a Leftie's tweet, "Although there are problems in the third world, at least they eat real food." [OMFG]

Or when Vox's article on the recovery of the green sea turtle is about how "scientists are worried." 

Or in Vox's "Good News," the author whines that people shouldn't need Ozempic, just diet and exercise. (Just like people with mental illness just need to "toughen up.") (Generally, however, the "Good News" is pretty good; example.)

I could go on, but if you doubt that the "news" and "social" media are constant drumbeats of negativity ... well, either "What?" or "Congratulations!"

The prescription, I believe, is clear: 

Diet and exercise.

Just kidding! 

It is actually harder than diet and exercise. We have to log off from the news and get out from under the algorithms. 

If you are trying to lose weight, you wouldn't let a stream of donuts and chips flow into your house. If you were fighting a a chemical addiction, you wouldn't sit in front of a plate of cocaine for hours a day. 

As I've written elsewhere:

Taking in horror after horror doesn’t make you a good person. Making a difference makes you a good person.

Choose where you can make a difference. You don’t need to know everything. You don’t need to read or watch everything. As Nobel Laureate (and one of Anne’s colleagues at Carnegie Mellon) Herb Simon said: “[A] wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” (Quoted in our fellow Illini Nick Offerman’s Gumption.)

Relatedly, as Matthew Yglesias said, “One shouldn’t be complacent about the problems in the world, but one should avoid frustration about them.” (Offered even though you should never trust anyone named Matt.)

You don’t need to be depressed. You don’t deserve to be depressed. You can be happy and still make a difference. Indeed, I would contend that being happy makes it easier to make a difference over the long haul – both in your ability to work constructively and in the example you set for others.

PSA: Crawling Is Better Than Dying

As I've said before, I've two bad falls. In the past year, two younger friends (who are both in the book and know my stories of falling) have fallen and suffered bad injuries (although neither of them ended up in the hospital). Also, a not-old person with one degree of separation fell and actually died. 

Last week, I had a bad reaction to a vaccine, and was in great pain, light-headed, and nauseous. So when I was getting around at night, I crawled to keep from falling. Was it "dignified"? Who cares? Discretion is the better part of valor.

Be careful.

Warning: News. In Memorium

What a world that we ended up on the same side. Crazy.

REM's song about him.

If you are following the news

This report by John Oliver is good.  

If you are smart and not following the news, this is insightful on several levels:

Forever Winning!

Article recommendation: Paul Bloom's Are women unsuited for the pursuit of truth? My comment: "The problem seems to be the assumption that the pursuit of 'truth' is what matters. Why would that be? Why not reducing suffering? Why not increasing human flourishing? (Or flourishing for all sentient individuals.)

"Personally, I think 'the pursuit of truth' is a cop-out to let people off the hook for actually making the world a better place."

These palm trees burned several years ago (see the blackened trunks) but have come back!

As a follow-up to this, is the below something you've seen in SuzieVegan's feed or JamieV's substack:

That [vegetarian] movement has during the last ten years advanced more and more rapidly. More and more books and periodicals on this subject appear every year; one meets more and more people who have given up meat; and abroad, especially Germany, England, and America, the number of vegetarian hotels and restaurants increases year by year.

This sentiment has been expressed consistently (including by me) during my almost 40 years since giving up meat. But this particular quote is from Leo Tolstoy's First Step, published in 1891.

Two bits (health and wealth and pigs)

 This has been making the rounds and it is pretty illuminating:

And a follow-up to this ("Broiler mortality has increased from 3.7% to 6% over the last 12 years") here is another hard fact showing that the industry does not treat animals "well"; from Inside Animal Ag: