US is well known for its questionable high scale farming practices that often have no interest in any sort of animal welfare. Its one of the primary reasons for import controls across Europe for US meat products. It comes up every time the UK or EU negotiate trade deals with the US and came up extremely often during Brexit.
If those import markets were open European producers would struggle to compete with US-agri due to its sheer volume and lack of interest in animal welfare and/or disease control. The UK specifically suffered issues in the past with such issues via "Mad Cow Disease" in the 90s and has attempted to reform its practices as a consequence.
Conversely US agri still seems to ignore these existential nightmares, as most recently seen with Bird Flu and the new administration's troubling ideas with how to deal with it (e.g. the suggestion to avoid culls in order to "find resistent birds").
The US has a ton of problems with agriculture, but I find half of people's complaints about antibiotic use in US farming reaching far beyond what is actually happening in reality. I often hear people complain about antibiotics being in their milk or beef, but there are absolutely no antibiotics in your milk because a single cow on antibiotics getting its milk in a 10,000 gallon tanker will cause the entire load to be dumped, and it is tested for in every batch. As for beef, maybe once in awhile, but feeding a 1,200+ pound animal enough antibiotics for months to increase its weight that extra 5% is going to cost you nearly as much as the entire animal is worth.
Poultry is an area where it might be a bigger problem because chickens grow WAY faster than cows and they live in absolutely deplorable conditions on factory farms. Birds need to be clean to stay healthy, and they can't stay clean stacked in little tiny cages or packed into dense flocks, and so they end up dosed with antibiotics because otherwise they need like 10x or more the land/floor area to not have swaths of the herd top die from natural diseases. A cow or pig covered in shit is just a cow or a pig, cow shit is basically dirt by time it comes out the other end it is so thoroughly digested, a bird covered in shit is going to be packed with disease and parasites.
> As for beef, maybe once in awhile, but feeding a 1,200+ pound animal enough antibiotics for months to increase its weight that extra 5% is going to cost you nearly as much as the entire animal is worth.
Is this true? I can't find any source for this claim, just some old papers that suggest the number is closer to 30%, and various government sites that imply the practice is still in place around the world.
Im sure there are a few places in India and China that still do it where alfalfa is expensive while antibiotics cost pennies. But it certainly isn't happening in the US where growing grass is as close to free as anything gets but antibiotics cost a decent amount of money. A 800 pound cow is only worth around $250 pounds to a farmer, so even a 30% increase, which is far beyond optimistic, is at best going to net you $75 extra, which is not going to cover the many months worth of antibiotics it took to dose an animal that large.
the two are not unrelated. if it were purely about the money, they EU wouldn't enact any animal welfare and environmental regulations - but they do. of course they have to protect their markets now, but the question is whether the U.S. model is sustainable. china, for example, is outsourcing its pork production to the U.S. because it's deemed too toxic.
Ethical doesn't have to mean non-functional. Like I previously highlighted the "mad cow" disease pandemic of the 90s shows that these "soft" ideas of not feeding cows beef scraps actually have functional outcomes, despite seeming ethnical at first. This is also evidenced by free-range chickens having less potential exposure to bird flu than hatchery chickens who are packed so close together that the virus can sweep through the entire facility.
Hrrm. Learning by accident, I think. I recall news lines about the failure of ventilation causing mass deaths in the 10s of 1000s. Because they die in the vapors of their own shit, that fast, if packed so dense.
i was told not to use cedar bedding for chicks as "the smell is too strong, it suffocates them." I'll extrapolate that if cedar scent kills chicks, it isn't too far a stretch that their waste can also suffocate them, as that's actually putrid smelling, whereas cedar just smells nice.
I don't know if there's much merit in opposing antibiotic use in cattle if that position is just a small coincidental component of your broader pro-disease ideology.
The average person doesn't have capacity to care about policies that lead to the long term development of drug-resistant bacteria.
We couldn't even convince everyone to wear masks, this won't be an issue people will rise up in mass protests for... People are literally being kidnapped and thrown into detention centers without due process and there are not massive protests.
It takes a lot to make people protest, this ain't a battle for it.
> People are literally being kidnapped and thrown into detention centers without due process and there are not massive protests.
For the record, there have been (and will be more) significant protests about this [0]. Corporate media does a fantastic job of ignoring and minimizing protests they're not in favor of (because they are actually effective...).
If you're old enough to remember, think back to how the world held some of the largest anti-war protests in history back in the early 00's. Turns out, corporate media with strong financial links to defense contractors aren't much interested in covering that. At the same time reporters who took too much of an anti-war stance were literally fired... And things have gotten progressively worse with every administration since.
I liked mandmandam's answer, but there is also the short version:
It is a bit like a barrister not asking questions they don't know the answer to. They have a vision of the world they want to promote and typically aren't going to report on anything that they aren't confident to be neutral or non-threatening to that vision.
The corporate media's main tactic is to just put their worldview to people over and over again until any dissenters either run out of energy to push back or become marginalised. These groups exist because a someone or someones with money has a vision of the world they want to promote. Otherwise there isn't enough income to make the thing tick.
> What incentives do Corporate media have to ignore these current set of protests?
I mean... How much Chomsky have you read? He'll give you a much better overview than I could. This shit isn't new. I'll have a crack at the question though:
Major networks are owned by just five or six corporations. Their boardrooms and major shareholders interlock with defense contractors, private prison giants, and border security firms that make billions from deportation policies. Have you any idea how much of our money these fucks are pulling in? ... Every protest covered legitimately threatens their shareholders' portfolios. This also goes for big tech/social media.
Networks also fear losing access to both parties, which are pushing harsh immigration policies. Kamala swore to be tougher on immigrants than Trump, and Democrats have lately been crowing that Trump is deporting fewer people than Biden did.
Any "objectivity" is a thin facade. They don't want to challenge the immigration narrative that drives ratings among their core demographic, which is such a helpful distraction from inequality, and which is driving their shareholders portfolios up.
When forced to cover protests, media employs tactical reporting: dramatically under-counting crowds, obsessively focusing on any hint of disorder, and platforming the most extreme voices while ignoring reasonable demands. The well worn playbook is designed to delegitimize, and a horrifying proportion of Americans eat that shit up and ask for seconds.
The corporate media isn't neutral, or just biased. It's complicit. These issues matter hugely to the status quo they defend, and people recognizing their own power, and what our taxes are being spent on, is a massive threat to an unfathomably evil status quo.
"The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly." - Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, 1988 (and look how media has consolidated since then)
This is outdated. These days billionaires openly and publicly tell the owned media what to write.
Bezos, in his own words:
"I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:
I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. [...]"
It's true, it's not a very well kept secret. And still, even if most Americans distrust it, the vast majority of us remain wildly ignorant of just how bad our media really is.
"The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know" - maybe even more true now than it was in 1993.
Codeword for "Jeff Bezos's continued monopolistic domination of online retail and logistics at the expense of everyone else". In other words, he's doing to right-libertarians what rich billionaires always do to right-libertarians. Play them like a fiddle.
How many millions joined those street protest? Not saying it is a bad cause but there has not been any significant protests about it with any significant % of the popultion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...:
"The British Stop the War Coalition (Stop) claimed the protest in London was the largest political demonstration in the city's history. Police estimated attendance as well in excess of 750,000 people and the BBC estimated that around a million attended."
> it's not a surprise that people are unconvinced that peaceful protest will achieve anything :/
Many people are unconvinced, yes... The thing is, look how hard corporate media and the yacht class work to shut it down. I think they're terrified of peaceful protest.
I think they’re scared of what the protest represents. A protest is “peaceful” as long as it wants to be; the Black Lives Matter protests showed this can change very quickly.
You meet people who are terrified by mice and spiders. Doesn't mean that they are threatened by them. I've yet to see a protest that was the decisive part of a political movement; they don't do anything. It is easier to get a message out there with a stopthewar.tld website than a protest. Websites are articulate, protests are just a mess.
There's like four different New Left misconceptions here.
1. Protests are effective - no they're not, this is a myth because people believed they ended the Vietnam War. If you have power and a belief in doing something, why should you care if a random stranger doesn't like it?
2. Corporate media - this comes from the idea that everything bad is because of "corporations", common with Gen X people. The only successful media right now have strong personal opinions, although frequently those are evil personal opinions, and aren't solely motivated by profits.
3. Defense contractors - this comes from the idea that since war is bad, and corporations are bad, we must be doing wars because it makes money for defense companies. This is in fact totally false - they make less money during wars because they have to make boring products that work, whereas in peace time they get contracted to make fake superweapons we think sound cool. Wars are basically unprofitable for everyone.
4. And finally, if you think everything gets worse all the time this is actually depression and you should get it checked out.
> Protests are effective - no they're not, this is a myth because people believed they ended the Vietnam War. If you have power and a belief in doing something, why should you care if a random stranger doesn't like it?
MLK's civil rights movement was one of the most effective protests in history. If you said that they're not always effective I would agree, but to say that they're not ever effective? It doesn't hold up. Even in modern times they can continue to be effective — the BLM protests were a huge personal focus¹ of Trump's at the end of his second presidency; he hated that people were protesting and blaming him, and his advisers immediately recognized the protests as politically threatening to his reelection. BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states.
The civil rights movement was effective of course, but they were very, very careful about how they did things, and iirc the public protests were part of an intentional media strategy because TV would show them doing nothing and getting attacked by police.
> BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states
Did it? I mostly remember it leading to police doing work stoppages and no one noticing or being able to control them.
Like, the NYPD kidnapped de Blasio's daughter. SFPD just stopped issuing traffic tickets and hasn't restarted, and Oakland police just stopped enforcing everything, so the airport In n Out closed because literally all of their customers got their cars broken into.
There's no doubt that it lead to pushback in a lot of places, but that just highlights why people were protesting in the first place. When the police kidnap the mayor's daughter, or walk off the job in response to calls for accountability, it's not a failure of the protest but rather a failure of the institutions being protested.
Like I said, I do agree with you that there are protests which aren't effective, and there are some that are even counterproductive. BLM was successful though, it did lead to reforms: Minneapolis banned chokeholds and revised their use of force policies, New York reallocated some of its NYPD funding, Colorado and New Mexico passed police accountability laws, etc.
Anyway, I know your main point wasn't about BLM, I'm not trying to drag you into a mire over whether it was successful or not.
> We couldn't even convince everyone to wear masks
They couldn't even decide if they wanted us to wear masks then lied about the efficacy in the opposite direction once they got called out for lying about the efficacy.
It took 30 years between Lenin's brother being executed by the state, and the Russian revolution. History has momentum, and the gains from the New Deal are still enough that many Americans dont feel comfortable putting their bodies on the line. People's dispositions are a function of their material reality and the reality is that most people haven't internalized the damage yet.
Also Americans have always allowed government over reach and corruption on the assumption that the AR-15 they have a pretty good grouping on at weekends is what'll solve the problem if it gets "really bad".
I call it the violence event horizon: a whole lot of people's critical thinking just stops, as though an actual war will make things so much simpler.
As I look at it, rhetorically, when is the point for a US citizen where taking up arms against the US government seems less dangerous than business as usual? I’d say it’s still quite a ways off for most.
What do you picture will happen because of protests, exactly? That the administration realizes the error of its ways? Because it seems more likely to me that they would use it as an excuse to implement more autocratic measures.
Protests let people at home who are feeling alone in their frustration that there are many more people who feel like them. I also felt like you did until someone framed it that way for me.
A protest isn’t supposed to be a singular event, it’s a series of events that crescendos into a movement—and it’s the crescendo that scares the people in power.
Then, since there are more people who voted for the current administration, there can be even more powerful counter protests. Then we can have people fighting in the streets, then a civil war.
Are you really trying to say that people should not protest, unless they are the overwhelming majority or easily ignored, because their protest will (or even just might) turn into a civil war?
-roughly half of the us populace supports the current authoritarian regime and the other half's senators and representatives are largely useless and aren't even doing what they can except for say wearing an adult diaper while giving a 25 hour speech
-I fully plan on eventually moving to canada (or elsewhere) when the time comes - much easier to move than any other option
> -I fully plan on eventually moving to canada (or elsewhere) when the time comes - much easier to move than any other option
I completely understand this sentiment but hope you don't. Things are bad, but they're not going to get better if everyone who thinks they're bad leaves. The problem with a U.S. descent is that the negative impact will hit just about anywhere you try to parachute to.
If you don't bother to vote, then you're [almost literally] saying you're OK with whoever wins. If that wasn't your intention, you would vote for some third party that you were OK with.
It's not an opinion poll. People vote to try and get their desired outcome. If someone views their preferred minor candidate as a lost cause in electoral terms, they won't bother going to vote because it won't make any difference to the outcome. Or, worse, there isn't a single candidate on the list in their district who shares their views.
What we need is to start counting votes of no confidence. Until we can explicitly shoot down what the elites or representatives think is best for us, at best, voting is just a thin veneer of legitimacy over an ossifying oligarchy.
Italy's parliament had for a long time a system where you could vote "no confidence" without picking a constructive option. It did not serve them well and they abolished it eventually.
While I understand the disenchantment, just adding "none of the above" without committing to one of the offered options is not going to change a thing. You getting out on the streets and into politics is what changes things.
That is such a reductionist view as to be totally worthless. You think there are zero other reasons someone might not vote, be able to vote, or not support either candidate?
Can you explain this logic a bit more because it genuinely confuses me, but I hear it articulated so often that I feel I must be missing something. I find it helpful to walk through the logic:
For example, it is frequently framed that there are only two (real) candidates, not voting or voting for a third party is the same thing as voting for <person I don't like>. The <person I don't like> is always Trump if you're talking to someone more on the left, and is Hilary/Biden/Kamala if talking to someone on the right, but the logic is the same (a contradiction should already be starting to be apparent). Both people are using the same logic to make the same claim, but they obviously can't both be correct.
It seems to me that the choice isn't actually binary. At least, if you insist that it is, then you must also conclude that a person actually gets two votes, because consider the following scenario:
Imagine that both major candidates (Candidate A and Candidate B) each deadlock and get 10 votes per, and a third party Candidate C gets 1 vote. I also have a vote, with the following possible outcomes:
1. I vote for Candidate A. This brings the total to A: 11, B: 10, C: 1
2. I vote for Candidate B. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 11, C: 1
If it were a binary, there wouldn't be any more possible outcomes. Yet,
3. I vote for Candidate C. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 10, C: 2
4. I abstain from voting. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 10, C: 1
All four of those outcomes are mathematically different, which doesn't seem possible if it's actually just a binary choice. If the outcome is different when I vote for Candidate B vs voting for Candidate C or not voting at all, then it seems self-evident that they are not the same thing. If I vote for A or B then they win, but if I vote C or not at all then there's a deadlock and a runoff. Clearly those are not the same thing.
You'll notice that in every one of your possible outcomes there's zero chance of C ever winning. That's the reality. When it comes to presidential elections, voting for C means you throw away your chance to vote for someone who actually has a chance to win.
In theory, if massive numbers of people all voted for C then C could get more votes than A or B, but the odds of that happening are so low that it's never once happened in the entire history of the nation. The incredibly low odds of winning millions in the lottery (something that routinely happens in the US) are much better than electing a third party candidate (something that has never happened in the US).
Since only A or B ever have a chance to win, your choice is limited to only A or B if you want to have any meaningful impact on the outcome, and because of that fact your choice becomes binary: Either meaningfully participate in the election (by voting for A or B), or don't meaningfully participate in the election at all (either by not voting or by voting for C).
The system could be fixed to give C a chance at winning, but that would require the same people who benefit from our two party system to support fixing it and not many are eager to hurt their own (or their own party's) odds of getting elected.
The calculus of voting is really simple, even when there are only 2 candidates:
> Vote for the least evil person.
That's it. If everyone did this, then candidates would skew less evil. And after some amount of time, we would not have evil candidates.
Was Harris a good candidate. Certainly not. Was she less evil than Trump? By a mile. Would we be better off with Harris? Seems like that is coming true after a mere 2+ months.
I have seen people consider the outcome is one of "candidate A wins" or "candidate B wins" (so binary). I do not fully agree, but practically it seems to be a good approximation - as in 30 years nobody reached something significant, and there was only one instance in 1872 when the 3rd candidate had more than 30% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_third-party_and_indepe...)
Any of the supporters of "candidate A" or "candidate B" will have a vested interest to model it this way, because it can mean more votes for their candidate.
The simple fact of the matter is that 68% of eligible US voters either voted for Trump or didn't care enough to stop him even though he was upfront about what he would do and already served a disastrous term. They're all equally responsible.
Will this teach them anything? This is a very serious question and I don't know the answer. For the people who didn't vote, will they learn that voting matters? For the people who did, will they learn anything? I remember countless videos of them before the election saying "oh, he won't do that, he's just saying that to get votes" ... well, he will do that. And more. Are they ok with it??
Why, so another country can fall apart because citizens throw their hands up in the air when they disagree with the other side - instead of trying to, say, change minds and fix things?
It does get much easier to throw up your hands and dismiss "the other side" if you dehumanize them and think of them as just a mass cult.
I actually agree that most of the people involved with politics are pretty cult-ish (especially the die-hard MAGAs), but I refuse to believe that 60 million people in the US are like that. Maybe it helps that I live in a very red area so I have regular and routine contact with a lot of people who I know voted for Trump but are generally and genuinely thoughtful and contemplative, but have different opinions/conclusions on the best solutions than I do. It strikes me as incredibly arrogant to assume that you are always right and someone else is always wrong.
Changing minds isn't easy, and it isn't fast, but it is clearly possible. Else how do you explain the shifts back and forth? Bush 41 -> Clinton -> Bush 43 -> Obama -> Trump -> Biden -> Trump? How do you explain the relatively rapid swing from opposition to support of gay marriage?
> It does get much easier to throw up your hands and dismiss "the other side" if you dehumanize them and think of them as just a mass cult.
Funnily enough, I have a harder time convincing people that they do this and that it's significantly contributing to the problem, than I do arguing against those who those people would lump in with the "mass cult"
Americans are too busy going to work, with an increasing number of them needing more than one job just to get by. If people protest instead of working they will be fired which means they'll also lose their health insurance.
Since we're all sickened by the poisons corporations put into our food/water/air/products and by a sedentary lifestyle which has been strictly enforced from the age of 5 we wouldn't last long without health insurance. Almost all Americans are just one uncovered medical expense away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness.
Even still, there have been a huge amount of protests recently. There are protests nearly every weekend in and around major cities. All those fired government workers have a lot more time on their hands so I expect that will continue (until their prescription medications start running out anyway)
The only benefit of health insurance purchased via employers is that you can use pre-tax income to pay for it. Otherwise, it has all the same deductibles and out of pocket maximums as policies purchased on healthcare.gov, except for government employees and some unionized businesses.
The answer is that most Americans still have pretty decent lives, and they like those in power (whether or not they are actually benefiting).
Not necessarily. The risk profile of the group in a specific self insured business is not guaranteed to be healthier than one not part of a business.
Most states publish their approved premiums for healthcare.gov plans, and I don’t think I’ve encountered a self insured business plan with materially different premiums/deductibles/oop max.
Trump administration is branded as "Republican", even though Republican icons like Reagan would be appalled by it.
In the mind of most Americans, the opposition to the Republican party is the Democratic party, which has been comparably insane lately, only a different direction.
A real opposition that the US politics needs is a kind of "common sense party" or "real needs party", but the FPTP election system, and the coasts vs "flyover states" division pushed by the forces that benefit from the "us vs them" division (most political forces) work against that. Forces like Forward Party, that sort of seem to fit the bill, are tiny.
People don't go out to streets just because; they need well-formulated ideas, some local leaders that would organize it, groups of like-minded people (online at least) that let the ideas brew and steep, etc. All this is not in a great shape now.
