Some people, like the brilliant Alex Nowrasteh, have pointed out that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, regardless of their legal status. This is likely correct, but it also misses the bigger picture.

The correct position on immigrant crime is that it’s a good thing, or at least plausibly a good thing compared to the alternative, which is immigrants committing crimes in their home countries.

Why? Because the United States is better at deterring and incapacitating criminals than a typical sender country, so more criminals moving from sender countries to the United States is going to result in less crime.

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The case for this is rather straightforward. Some people are always going to try to commit crimes, but whether they get away with it depends in large part on the social and political environment of the country in which they live. If you accept that crime doesn’t simply go away when people aren’t in the United States, you’re left with two options. Either immigrants will try to commit crimes in their home countries (where they’ll sometimes get away with it), or they’ll try to commit crimes in the United States (where they’ll also sometimes get away with it but typically less often).

You can see below how homicide rates in the United States compare to Mexico and Central America. In 2023, the U.S. homicide rate was less than one-fourth as high as any of the sender countries for which we have data. As long as you think at least one-third of the difference in homicide rates is explained by environmental variables (for example, social attitudes toward lawbreaking or the effectiveness of law enforcement), then for every person who’s victimized by an immigrant criminal in the United States, there’s at least one person who’s spared from crime in the immigrant’s home country.1

So what have we ought to do? For one, be much more indiscriminate about who we let in the country. Ideally, there should be thousands of illegal criminals poisoning the blood of our country every day. Give me your tired and poor? Sure, but we’re much more interested in the wretched refuse — criminals, rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. We’re looking for folks like the late, great Hannibal Lecter.

Next, devote significant resources to deterring and incapacitating the criminals. This doesn’t look like more immigration enforcement, which is very bad at catching actual criminals, but likely more money and authority for police and whatever other programs effectively stop crime. Maybe it means more welfare (or less welfare), or looser restrictions on racial profiling, or gun control. Whatever works without unacceptable tradeoffs.

Taken together, these policies should result in a lot fewer people being victimized by crime. All good, right?

You might object that we shouldn’t care about crimes committed against foreigners because they’re not from our country or part of our social contract. Maybe we can care about the rest of humanity once we have our own house in order, but we’re Americans first and we ought to care about crimes committed against Americans.

This makes intuitive sense to a lot of people, but it doesn’t jibe with why most people think crime is bad. If you asked most people, they’d say crime is bad because it’s bad for the people who experience it and have to suffer being crime victims. But the fact of suffering doesn’t change if the victim is a different nationality or lives in a different country than the observer.

You might also say that a crime committed in the United States matters more than a crime committed in a sender country because the United States is more productive and crime is more socially costly.

This is a much better objection, but the difference in costliness of crime in the United States and sender countries probably isn’t enough to change the equation. The Value of Statistical Life in the United States (the amount people are willing to pay to avoid a probabilistic death) is about three times as high as it is in Mexico. However, we ought to take this as an upper bound for the comparative cost of crime, since VSL is only designed to capture the economic costs of risks to life (constrained by people’s ability to pay), rather than moral value. Among other things, VSL may struggle to capture whatever value we ought to place on our conceptions of human rights and universal human dignity.

Still, even if you accept VSL as a good coefficient for the comparative moral cost of crime between countries, the case for immigrant crime remains plausible. The homicide rate in the United States is at least four times lower than it is in Mexico, so as long as you think most of the difference is environmental, there’s a strong case for bringing more Mexican criminals into the United States.

Ultimately, you can sanity check the case for immigrant crime with a simple thought experiment. In the trolley problem below, if the trolley was headed toward the one American, would you redirect it to kill the three Mexicans? This is what you’d be doing if you tried to prevent homicides in the United States by blocking Mexican immigration. Most people would say no to switching the trolley, and that’s the correct answer.

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Yes, America has gone to war with Iran, and it’s about damn time. We’ve been due for some excitement going on 20 years now, only our stupid and pathetic leaders have been too stupid and pathetic to understand that you can just do things. The late so-called “President” Joe Brandon (or whoever ran the autopen) suffered a particularly extreme strain of the neurosis that afflicted his boss, the Kenyan Muslim Communist Barry Soetoro Obummer. “Uhhh, let me be queer, Jack. I’m a weak liberal and I hate Israel and America. I wear a tan suit and I’ve been to 57 states. I ruined the military by transing all the soldiers and making them gay-marry Mexicans. I’m gay and my wife is a man.”

Are you triggered yet? Cry more, lib. Your reign of gayness is over. Don’t you know we got 200,000 votes in the same three goddamn states in the Upper Midwest? I’m nothing if not a hipster, so as I understand the kids are saying these days: “Let’s go suck and fuck Joe Brandon.” America is back, baby. Mothers, lock up your daughters, or at least don’t send them to school. Good job Pete and your team!!

You might be asking why Iran and why now. The short answer is fuck you, that’s why. The long answer is that Uncle Sam is a declining power in the grips of a crippling self-esteem crisis and he needs an outlet to prove that he’s still the toughest guy on the block, and Iran is simply the most convenient target. If it wasn’t Iran, it would be Cuba or Mexico or Greenland — any crappy little country would suffice. Yes, the liberal international order is dead, and yes, long live the liberal international order!

Does it have to be any more complicated than that? America is mired in an era of bad feelings. We’ve seen this one before, and it ends the same every time. I won’t say I saw this one coming, but I offered a fairly prescient observation over a year ago when I said that America goes to war for its self-esteem:

After Vietnam, America was stuck in some deep psychological doo-doo. Norman Podhoretz — a neoconservative intellectual whom the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard once compared to a Joseph Heller character “whose sole literary output is a series of autobiographies celebrating his own life and thought” — complained that the Vietnam Syndrome had rendered even the likes of Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford into isolationist surrender monkeys. Reagan and Bush tried to pull America out of its funk by bombing a hospital in Grenada and blasting Guns N’ Roses at the CIA’s old friend Manuel Noriega’s hideout in Panama, but it took a right proper war with right proper social mobilization — slick Kuwaiti propaganda, round-the-clock TV coverage, Whitney Houston belting the national anthem, etc. — to do the trick.1 According to political scientist John Mueller, the broad-based destruction of the bombing in Iraq, compounded by sanctions after the war, killed more people than chemical, biological, and atomic weapons had killed in all of human history. (And Poppy’s approval rating climbed to 89%.)

So, too, was America in some doo-doo after 9/11.2 This was temporarily resolved by the second Iraq War, which served the enemies of freedom worldwide, from Phil Donahue to the Dixie Chicks, their due comeuppance.3 “The Right Brothers,” a pro-war conservative rock duo from Nashville, won acclaim for their 2005 single, “Bush Was Right.” It declared, not in so many words, that the Ledeen Doctrine had succeeded —

Democracy is on the way, hitting like a tidal wave
All over the Middle East, dictators walk with shaky knees
Don’t know what they’re gonna do
Their worst nightmare is coming true
They fear the domino effect, they’re all wondering who’s next

— and yes, that America was back. Meanwhile, the opposition leader on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a 60-year-old whippersnapper by the name of Joe Biden, told the Brookings Institution that his harshest criticism of the administration was that the president hadn’t leveled with the American people and told them: “We have to finish the job.”

Maybe you know how the rest of the story goes. At some point, America got a loser stink. Obummer and Brandon pulled out when they should have fucked them all to death. Don’t you get it? It’s the Bigger Dick Foreign Policy Theory. “What, they have bigger dicks? Bomb them!”

Again, I don’t mean to say I told you so, but I don’t know how else to put it. More from me a week after the inauguration:

America’s ongoing crisis of confidence is among the most dangerous trends in the world today. It wasn’t enough to push Biden into a Ledeenian-style war for self-esteem, but that’s just because he had some practicality left in his rapidly diminishing mind. Not so for his successor. Foreign policy experts fear that when Xi Jinping speaks of Chinese “national rejuvenation,” it’s a euphemism for international belligerence and territorial expansion. They should be at least as concerned when Trump talks about an American “Golden Age.” In his inaugural address, he threatened to steal the Panama Canal and expand American territory, “to once again act with courage, vigor, and the vitality of history’s greatest civilization.” He constantly talks about annexing Canada and invading Greenland as projects of national renewal. During his first week in office, he threatened tariffs and sanctions against Canada, Mexico, Denmark, Russia, China, Colombia, and the European Union.

Then there are his advisors: Pete Hegseth likens himself to a crusader. Mike Waltz — once an advisor to Dick Cheney — advocated a 100-year war in Afghanistan framed as a civilizational battle between good and evil. When Marco Rubio, America’s new top diplomat, ran for president in 2016, he lifted his campaign slogan, “A New American Century,” from the name of the neoconservative think tank, the Project for the New American Century, that served as a government-in-waiting for the George W. Bush administration and drafted the blueprints for the Iraq War.4 At his confirmation hearing, Rubio asserted that the “post-war global order” — supposedly defined by the usurpation of American national interests to a rootless cosmopolitanism — is not only “obsolete,” but a “weapon” being employed against the United States by bad actors like China and Iran.

Let us grant this conspiracy of knaves and dunces an undeserved benefit of the doubt: say they don’t want a war. How else is this supposed to end? Since 1945, the peace has been kept by American economic and military preponderance — ironically sustained by the United States restraining itself to avoid provoking allies and adversaries into militarization — unprecedented commercial globalization, norms of territorial integrity, and mutually assured destruction. The Trump regime promises to undermine every one of these pillars. You cannot remain preponderant by estranging your allies while antagonizing your enemies. You cannot maintain globalization by further weaponizing the international trade and financial system. You cannot uphold international norms by trampling them with impunity. You cannot preserve the balance of terror and pursue nationwide missile defense at the same time. Something has to give: either the Long Peace or the Long March for American Greatness.

A deceptive alternative is to attempt to remain aloof of great power conflict and instead pursue a “splendid little war” in the Western hemisphere or a good, hard thrashing of the Iranians in retaliation for their never having thanked us for getting half a million of them killed in the 1980s. If not Panama or Greenland, Rubio surely has a list of targets he’d like to strike in Cuba, Venezuela, and any other paisito de mierda under a leftist administration. Waltz wants to go for Mexico. Trump says: “Stranger things have happened.” The Wall Street Journal reports the president is “weighing options” to bomb Iran. During his first administration, he toyed with the idea as late as two weeks before leaving office.

But a feel-good strike against a crappy little country is also a strike against the pillars of international peace. There aren’t enough carrots and sticks in the world to make it go down easy with allies or adversaries. Maybe you could buy off some votes in the U.N. General Assembly, but that’s about it. The Chinese get the moral high ground, and with our resources tied up in the desert or the Caribbean, it becomes a lot harder to stop them from taking Taiwan.5 Meanwhile, the Russkies, having just gone through their own Afghanistan in Ukraine (not to be confused with their other own Afghanistan) might see fit to put us on the receiving end of a proxy war for once — and at some point, the sky’s the limit on the escalation ladder.

It feels anachronistic to be talking about a great power war, but that’s where we’re at. The American people got in a funk, and they chose the Insane Clown Posse to cheer themselves up. This isn’t like the first Trump administration, which kept some semi-competent experts around who slow-walked or shot down the president’s worst ideas, and didn’t have four years ahead of time to cook up a revisionist fever dream. This isn’t even like the Bush administration, which wanted to rough up some international miscreants but didn’t know they’d have the opportunity until it arrived. No, this is America’s Golden Age.

For the time being, however, we’re still a nation of bad vibes. Someone needs to reckon with it, and bad cess to them. Crappy little countries round the world, beware: it seems that you’re overdue for a thrashing.

Well, maybe I got ahead of myself at the end there, although I am speaking probabilistically, and there’s plenty that I got right and plenty more that could prove right in due time. Soon enough we’ll get tired of winning and find out. Until then, have a happy war, and thank you for your attention to this matter — we sure showed those libs what’s what.

I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, yeah — another Substacker coming at me with a clickbait title trying to get me to subscribe to his shitty newsletter.

Didn’t you just tell me RFK Jr. is a hero to the shrimp? What’s this about bugs? And why don’t you ever write about the state of exception?

Allow me to explain myself in the form of a dirty limerick:

The man from Nantucket, a friend of the shrimp —
Who, when not spouting fiction, would find him quite limp —
For all his distraught
O’er the Davos bug plot,
Would still have us slurping on worms like his gimp.

What I’m trying to say here is that RFK Jr. wants to make you eat bugs. You might be skeptical given the disproportionate share of anti-bug-eating sentiment that comes from people like RFK Jr. who don’t even believe in the germ theory of disease. But trust me: This time, it’s real.

Due to a largely under-the-radar policy change initiated this spring, food manufacturers may soon be adding insect-derived dyes to countless products offered for sale in the United States. This could result in billions of insects being farmed for dye and trillions more being killed in the production process each year. Although research is scarce, there’s a good chance that some of these insects are capable of feeling pain. If so, the likely proliferation of insect-derived dyes may be the single most underrated calamity of the second Trump regime.

In this post, I try to share much more than you wanted to know about food dyes, estimate just how bad things might be, and engage in some very preliminary strategizing about how to mitigate harms to insects. I think this issue is very important, so please share it with anyone you know who might be in a position to do something about it. I especially recommend reading this post if you’re a funder or professional in food systems and you care about insect welfare. If you want to follow up privately on anything in this post, please DM me on Substack or contact statesofexception@proton.me.

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In September, the so-called “Make America Healthy Again Commission” chaired by RFK Jr. released a strategy report on children’s health. Among the more than 120 proposed reforms to U.S. food, agricultural, and health policy, it calls for the removal of artificial dyes from food products approved for sale by the FDA.

Here’s the MAHA Commission’s exact recommendation to President Trump:

In April, Kennedy and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced that the government would begin working with the food industry to eliminate artificial dyes by the end of 2026. Several large food manufacturers, including General Mills, Kraft Heinz, and Kellogg, have since pledged to remove artificial dyes by the end of 2027, the effective date of a MAHA-inspired law banning the dyes in West Virginia. California and Virginia have also enacted laws banning artificial dyes from school meals.

One of the dyes, Red 40, is primarily used in place of beet juice and carmine, an extract obtained by boiling or heating adult female cochineal insects alive and crushing their bodies for pigment. While beet juice is sometimes preferred because it costs less by volume, isn’t a known allergen, and fits halal, kosher, and vegan diets, carmine is often used because of its more vibrant and stable color and unnoticeable flavor.

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Okay, so what?

Abraham Rowe estimates that between 4 billion and 18 billion adult female cochineals are farmed for carmine each year. Additionally, between 4.6 trillion and 21 trillion nymphs and males are spawned and killed as part of the production process but not used for dye. Most of these are nymphs who die within 3 to 5 days after being spawned by farmed females. According to Rowe’s desk research, most of them likely die of starvation.

While no known research to date addresses the likelihood of cochineal sentience, there is evidence that adult and even juvenile members of some insect species fulfill several criteria associated with feeling pain, and no known evidence that any insects fail on any criterion. Even if there’s a 1% chance that cochineals feel pain, and they feel just 1% as much pain as other farmed animals, cochineal farming may cause as many as 6.3 billion to 10.5 billion sentience-adjusted suffering-days in expectation per year, or more than the entire global force-fed foie gras industry.1

While reliable market research is difficult to come by, experts widely believe that the dye phaseout is likely to result in carmine being added to more products. Many manufacturers that still use Red 40 prefer carmine to beet juice because it keeps its color in extreme temperatures and under extended light exposure and low pH. Some industry experts even refer to carmine as “the gold standard for natural reds.”

So how much more cochineal farming will we need to replace Red 40?

In the 19th century, before the development of artificial dyes, historians estimate that carmine exports from the Canary Islands alone reached as high as 3,000 metric tons per year. In 2018, the Embassy of Peru told BBC that the country exported 647 tons of carmine and controlled 95% of the international market. In fiscal year 2025, the FDA reported certifying nearly 8.4 million pounds of Red 40 in the U.S. food and drug supply, or 3,800 tons. A recent analysis found that 14% of all products marketed by the top 25 U.S. food and beverage manufacturers in 2020 contained Red 40, representing at least tens of billions of dollars in annual sales.

It’s widely reported that harvesting a pound of carmine requires killing 70,000 cochineals. However, this claim is poorly sourced and (according to Brian Tomasik) appears to come from a 1948 article about premodern cochineal production. It also excludes nymphs and males who are spawned and killed during the production process but not used directly for dye. Assuming that 700 metric tons of carmine are produced worldwide per year and between 15 and 25% of this is farmed rather than wild-harvested, Rowe’s estimates suggest that on the order of 10 million to 90 million cochineals are killed for a pound of carmine, and this includes between 10,000 and 70,000 adult females.

ChatGPT guesstimates that you need at least twice as much carmine by mass to get the same color intensity as Red 40. In 2013, researchers estimated the mass of artificial dyes in various sugar-sweetened beverages sold in the United States, with results of up to 52.3 mg of Red 40 per 8-ounce serving for the most dyed beverage, Kool-Aid Burst Cherry. If you replaced Red 40 with carmine, achieving the same color intensity would require putting the remains of between 2.3 and 16 cochineals in a drink and killing an additional 2,300 to 20,000 nymphs and males. Assuming again that there’s a 1% chance that cochineals feel pain, and they feel 1% as much pain as other farmed animals, that means a single serving of cherry Kool-Aid dyed with carmine would cause as many sentience-adjusted suffering-days in expectation as 0.2 to 3.3 kg of beef or 0.4 to 5.7 kg of pork, according to the Faunalytics Animal Product Impact Scales. Compare this to the Red 40 concentration of other drinks below.

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If the FDA certifies 3,800 tons of Red 40 in the U.S. food supply each year, and you need twice as much carmine to replace it, then for every 1% of FDA-certified Red 40 replaced with carmine, worldwide cochineal farming will have to increase on the order of 20 to 40%. That’s going to require killing billions of additional farmed cochineals and trillions of nymphs and males every year, and conservatively result in hundreds of millions or billions of sentience-adjusted suffering-days in expectation. (And just to put it in writing, that’s bad.)

So what is to be done?

One thing that’s not going to happen: RFK Jr., the FDA, and states that have enacted restrictions on artificial dyes aren’t going to reverse course. Nor are food and beverage manufacturers going to start making dye-free products just to sell in states with dye bans and keep them the same everywhere else. If just West Virginia stops permitting artificial dyes, it sets the standard for the whole country. Barring the unforeseeable, Red 40 going away ain’t going away.

There are two conceivable ways around the ban, and neither of them is likely to work.

First, artificial dye companies can challenge states’ dye restrictions in the courts. In October, the International Association of Color Manufacturers sued West Virginia officials in federal district court, claiming that the West Virginia dye ban usurps the FDA’s authority to regulate food safety and unconstitutionally infringes on interstate commerce. However, experts say the challenge is unlikely to succeed as the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act doesn’t expressly prohibit states from restricting food additives, and the West Virginia law doesn’t discriminate against out-of-state manufacturers.

Second, the food industry can lobby Congress to strip states of the right to regulate food additives and ingredient labeling. Some companies are already trying this through a coalition ironically called “Americans for Ingredient Transparency,” but so far nobody in Washington is willing to bite. Senator Roger Marshall, the founder and chair of the Congressional MAHA Caucus, planned to include federal preemption in a food additives bill he introduced in November, but removed the provision after facing unprecedented pushback from MAHA influencers and a wide range of consumer advocacy organizations.2 (Yes, that’s the Moms for Liberty one line under something called the “Society of Latinx Nurses.”) As Marshall told the New York Times last month: “I couldn’t believe how much pushback I got.”

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In fact, the only person in Washington who’s signaled openness to food additive preemption is RFK Jr., who recently told a reporter that a national food standard is “on the table for discussion.” This may be because, on the off chance that either industry lawsuits or lobbying efforts do succeed, they would only tee off another battle at the FDA that industry is likely to lose. MAHA is a must-win constituency for Republicans in 2026 and 2028, and restricting or banning artificial dyes is among the most popular items on the MAHA agenda, so Trump may just give RFK Jr. free reign over artificial dyes and sideline the corporate lobbyists.

To wit: In June, 80% of Americans said they support new restrictions on artificial dyes, with just 2% saying there should be no change to product formulation or packaging rules. In July and August, 85% of parents said they support “increasing government regulations on dyes and chemical additives in food.” As RFK Jr.’s former communications director and MAHA Action CEO Del Bigtree stated in a recent New Yorker profile of a MAHA influencer, “the food issue” has become such a critical part of the MAHA agenda because it’s popular enough to launder in more controversial policies like banning vaccines.

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Yes, but what should we do?

The best way to address the Red 40 ban almost certainly isn’t going to be saving Red 40 (which was already on the way out before legislation started to codify consumer sentiment), but disincentivizing and restricting carmine as manufacturers search for alternatives to artificial dyes. Much like the wider animal protection movement, this effort can be advanced by various public-facing, corporate, and governmental efforts, as well as support for alternative dyes that don’t involve farming insects.

First, activists can work to shift the narrative around carmine by linking it to widespread disgust at “eating bugs” and politically valanced alarmism over the Great Reset conspiracy theory. In practice, this could mirror recent narrative shifts around microplastics, ultra-processed foods, and other food dyes and additives including Red 40. These campaigns have all benefitted from slick public relations efforts that have amplified alarmist claims through earned and social media by leveraging sympathetic influencers, researchers, and policymakers. Many of the most prominent figures in the MAHA movement (the “MAHA Moms”) got their start spreading health misinformation online and branding hard-to-pronounce food additives as “toxic” or “poison” to drum up large audiences of concerned parents. The so-called “Food Babe,” Vani Hari — a key ally and informal advisor to RFK Jr. — broke into the mainstream in 2013 when she bit a yoga mat in a highly sexualized YouTube video to draw attention to the common bread additive azodicarbonamide, which is also used in yoga mats as a foaming agent. The following year, Subway announced that it was removing azodicarbonamide from its bread offerings.

Once artificial dyes are phased out, MAHA influencers will need a new bogeyman for their scientifically illiterate and dopamine-addled audiences. You can bet that they won’t be too thrilled to hear that Big Food is only taking out artificial dyes so they can make you eat bugs instead. Some deep-pocketed funder who cares about cochineals should consider dropping some five or six figures on a PR firm to recruit the MAHA Moms to sound the alarm about the little red bugs.

Second, activists should adopt the über-successful corporate campaign model used for caged eggs, crated pork, unhealthy chicken breeds, and ablated shrimp and deploy it against companies that dye foods with carmine. These campaigns might even present an opportunity to mainstream insect welfare — the ultimate radicalism — though they’d be more successful focusing on gross-out narratives about eating bugs. Regardless, all the technical details could be carried over from pre-existing campaigns. Activists behind the scenes could engage corporate leadership, draft policies, and propose shareholder resolutions to extract carmine-free commitments, and then escalate to public “naming and shaming” campaigns as necessary.

It wouldn’t even be the first time activists have targeted corporations for using carmine. In 2012, after a vegan recipe blog and associated Change.org petition blew the whistle on carmine use in Starbucks Frappuccinos, the chain announced that it was removing carmine from the menu a month later. In 2013, the Center for Science in the Public Interest ran a campaign against Dannon calling on the company to remove carmine from its yogurt. The campaign failed but did force Dannon to respond defending its use of insect-derived additives.

Third, activists can lobby Congress and the FDA to strengthen labeling requirements or revoke authorization for carmine as a food additive. In 2009, the FDA adopted a rule requiring food manufacturers to list either “carmine” or “cochineal” on ingredient labels instead of just “color added.” Since 1998, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has been pressuring the FDA either to ban carmine altogether or require “insect origin” labeling due to carmine’s incompatibility with halal, kosher, and vegan diets and moderate to severe allergen risk. Research suggests that between 0.7 and 3% of consumers and 40% of people with routine exposure exhibit allergic reactions to cochineal-derived dyes. This compares to just 0.2 to 2.9% of consumers with allergies to any one of the “Big 9” major allergens that federal law requires manufacturers to identify in bold print.

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Adding carmine to the major allergen list would require Congress passing legislation recognizing carmine alongside more conventional allergens like dairy, eggs, and nuts. This is unlikely, as the total number of carmine allergen incidents per year is significantly less than those of other major allergens, but still not impossible. In 2021, due to advocacy by Food Allergy Research & Education, Congress amended the law to require boldface labeling of sesame, which is only allergic to 0.2% of consumers. As long as major food allergy organizations are on board for labeling carmine, there’s a good chance that it could happen.

Counterintuitively, it may actually be easier for cochineal advocates to ban carmine altogether than require tougher labeling. Congress vests the FDA with unilateral authority to revoke authorization for food additives — effectively for any reason — under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. In January 2025, the agency revoked authorization for Red 3 due to evidence that it causes cancer in rats, even though the agency’s top food regulator admitted that the same effect “does not occur in humans.” In September, the agency initiated the revocation of Orange B due to the additive becoming obsolete. The FDA likewise could initiate the revocation of carmine due to allergy risks or alarmism over globalist conspiracies to make you eat bugs.

Finally, activists can support the development of insect-free (and preferably cheaper and allergen-friendly) natural alternatives by industry researchers. Food companies have increasingly looked toward plant-source and precision fermented natural dyes since the FDA started banning artificial dyes earlier this year. In an ideal world, there’d be enough money for a Good Food Institute for alternatives to insect-derived products. Barring that, some insect-concerned impact investors may be interested in promoting the alternative natural red dye industry.

In conclusion…

RFK Jr. wants to make you eat bugs. That’s very bad, and activists can respond by disincentivizing carmine use through cultural, corporate, governmental, and technological interventions. We just need to act quickly before companies reformulate their products and start using carmine more widely.

This ought to be a major priority among those who care about insects. Yet, no major figures or organizations in food systems or insect welfare appear to be working on this issue at all or even raising the alarm about RFK Jr. putting bugs in your food. In the eight months since the dye phaseout was announced, there have been zero posts (and just three comments) on the EA Forum including the words “carmine,” “cochineal,” or “Red 40.” To my knowledge, this is the first and only article about the welfare implications of the dye ban that’s been published anywhere this year. (And while that’s good and all, it shouldn’t be up to a lowly dirty limerick writer like me to be raising awareness.) While I suspect that a handful of organizations may be strategizing behind the scenes, that still leaves out most funders and professionals who could be taking coordinated action on this high-priority, time-sensitive issue while it still matters.

As the very failed Substacker Amos Wollen tells us, we’re living at the hinge of insect history. As things stand now, Red 40 is set to be eliminated by all of the largest U.S. food and beverage manufacturers by January 1, 2028. It can either be replaced by other synthetic or plant-source dyes, or it can be replaced by carmine. If you give any non-negligible credence to the experience and wrongness of cochineal suffering, then you should care immensely that we go down the right path.

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Sometime in December, the federal government is expected to release the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the government’s official advice to our fat stupid countrymen about what to shove down your disgusting gullet. The guidelines are ideally written according to the latest research in food and nutrition science, but almost always shaped by political pressure and industry lobbying. This year, they’re expected to be heavy on beef and whole milk — partly to own the namby-pamby liberals who care about ruminant methane emissions, partly because Donald Trump and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins need to keep U.S. ranchers happy while they bail out the Argentine beef industry to prop up Argentina’s right-wing government, and partly because Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and his gang of Victorian witch doctors think that the Standard American Diet doesn’t contain enough saturated fat. (They also think people should drink more, or at least don’t care about alcohol or sodium, don’t think people need more fiber, and don’t care about added sugar as long as it’s not corn syrup. They also might be bringing back the absurdly unscientific and fundamentally ill-designed food pyramid.)

Animal welfarists are understandably concerned about the new dietary guidelines. In April, Kennedy threw out a report by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee that called for replacing animal-source proteins high in saturated fat with low-fat, fiber-rich proteins like beans, peas, and lentils. The Trump regime is also suffused throughout with meat and dairy industry interests that have spent much of the past year delivering on top animal agriculture and factory farm priorities, including faster line speeds at slaughterhouses, a rollback on food safety rules, approval for the Brazilian-owned meatpacker (and Trump donor) JBS to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, bailouts for companies that exterminate millions of birds at risk of bird flu, support for overturning state animal welfare laws, extended subsidies for methane gas, and even more welfare payments for fish farms, fisheries, and Alaskan whalers in the Big Beautiful Bill. Nutrition expert and mother of food politics Marion Nestle interprets Rollins and Kennedy’s vow to exclude “leftist ideology” from the guidelines as a dog whistle to industry and conservative voters that they’re going to prioritize red meat and won’t be saying anything about plant-source foods.

Activists are right to be worried insofar as the new guidelines are poised to increase beef and dairy consumption and the number of cattle raised for food (as well as ruminant greenhouse gas emissions, which are plausibly very bad but probably not worse than factory farming). Still, we shouldn’t expect the new guidelines to be bad for animals overall. That’s because when people eat more red meat, they eat fewer smaller-bodied animals like chickens, fish, and — you guessed it — shrimp. In fact, because nearly every other animal product is more suffering-intense than beef and dairy, the more Rollins and Kennedy can do to promote the cattle industry, the more good they’ll do for farmed animals.

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Why does it matter? Many federal programs, including the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs, WIC, and the military food services, use the dietary guidelines to determine what foods can be procured, served, and recommended using federal dollars. Direct federal food procurement alone is responsible for $9 billion in purchasing power per year, including more than $3.5 billion on animal products, $1 billion each on beef and poultry, and $500 million on fish and shellfish. Federal nutrition programs (including those above) account for another $140 billion for a total of 14% of U.S. grocery spending and nearly 6% of overall food expenditures.

The guidelines are also widely used by policymakers, medical professionals, and journalists to shape the cultural zeitgeist around food and nutrition. It’s obviously difficult to tease out causality between research, culture, and politics, but almost every major phenomenon in popular food and nutrition science over the past half century has either been set off, reflected, or reinforced by the dietary guidelines. In 2000, the government issued the first dietary guidelines recommending that Americans minimize trans fats in their diet. By 2008, there was an episode of King of the Hill about banning trans fats in Arlen. By 2013, the FDA initiated the process of banning trans fats nationwide, which it concluded by 2018.

Let’s say Rollins and Kennedy’s advice that Americans eat more beef and dairy can somehow restore U.S. per capita beef and milk consumption to record levels. Since the 1970s, per capita beef consumption has fallen by more than one-third, and fluid milk consumption has halved. The national cattle inventory is also at its lowest point in more than 50 years, or less than 100 million head (versus 2 billion chickens and 500 million farmed fish). Even if the dietary guidelines double per capita beef and dairy consumption, they’ll only result in another 100 million cattle being raised for food at any time.

If that was the whole story, that would be very bad! Dairy is very scary, beef is even scarier, and 100 million is a big number. But Americans don’t simply eat more beef and dairy without making any other changes to their diet. Since the 1970s, while beef consumption has fallen by a third, chicken consumption has almost doubled, seafood consumption has increased by half, and total meat consumption has remained the same since 2000. In kilogram terms, consumers make a nearly one-to-one substitution between beef and chicken, and a smaller substitution between beef and seafood.

If consumers actually heed the new guidelines and replace some share of their lean animal protein with beef and dairy, it would end up being very good for most farmed animals. According to the Faunalytics Animal Product Impact Scales, it takes about 0.58 chicken lives and 28 days of suffering to produce a kilogram of chicken meat. For fish, it’s 0.23 lives and 75 days of suffering. For shrimp, it’s 61 lives and 9,134 days of suffering (or more than 25 shrimp-years). For beef, it’s just 0.003 lives and 3 days of suffering.

For every 1% of lean animal protein replaced with beef, consumers could spare about 100 million chickens, 15 million fish, and 400 million shrimp from slaughter per year, as well as avert more than 60 billion suffering-days net of any additional days of cattle suffering. If you weight suffering-days for animal sentience according to the Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range Estimates, then the suffering averted by lower chicken, fish, and shrimp consumption is still nearly 10 times as much as the suffering caused by increased cattle farming — and that’s an underestimate because the conditions of other farmed animals are much worse than the conditions of farmed cattle.

Does this make Kennedy and Rollins (the latter once dubbed a “psychopathic ghoul” and “evil hag” by Shrimpstack’s own Bentham’s Bulldog) heroes to shrimpkind? In a perverse way, yes. Anyone who saves 400 million shrimp must be a hero to the shrimp even if they’re a villain to cows, dogs (or goats), whales, Central Park bears, women, babies, and everybody else.

That’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s also cause for action. If someone as repugnant as Kennedy can be a hero to the shrimp, then what’s stopping you? It only takes $1 donated to the Shrimp Welfare Project to help 1,400 shrimp per year (for up to 10 years) by providing electric stunners to producers to render shrimp unconscious before slaughter and getting retailers to source only stunned shrimp. That’s less than $150,000 to match the likely impact of the dietary guidelines over the five years they’ll be in place. If — and only if — you help raise $150,000 for the Shrimp Welfare Project, then you can confidently say you’re a better person than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. If not, then we’ll all be left to wonder.

As of press time, International Shrimpact Day has raised around $20,000 for the Shrimp Welfare Project, not counting a generous 50% match. If you want to help us meet our goal and prove your moral bona fides, you can donate by following this link to the competition page, or by pressing the button below this paragraph.

Maximize Your Shrimpact

I know, I know — I haven’t been blogging for the better part of six months, and it’s been an unparalleled tragedy across these United States of Exception. I hear it’s even worse than all the fish reproduction in the Hudson River.

I may not be able to muster up an excuse, but I owe you all an explanation. I haven’t been blogging because I didn’t want to. On the occasion that something offended me on a visceral level, like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s illegal war of aggression against Iran, I deigned to make a post about it.

Otherwise, I’ve been dedicating myself more or less full time to the very incremental task of nudging U.S. food, agricultural, and wildlife policy in a more humane direction, and doing the handful of things that are more efficient than keeping a Substack at raising my profile among the people who are influential enough to advance my career and help me accomplish more in the future. You might understand that writing an anonymous blog about heterodox foreign policy and dream welfare doesn’t dovetail too nicely with acquiring political influence.

Still, I had to return to Substack for this hallowed day. Last year, after ’s now (in)famous shrimp post helped raise nearly $20,000 for the Shrimp Welfare Project, I christened November 15th “International Shrimp Welfare Day.” Since then, , , and the rest of the crew at FarmKind have rebranded it “International Shrimpact Day” and extended it to a full week (November 25th through December 2nd), and recruited a slate of influencers to make it a truly worldwide phenomenon.

Participating bloggers are competing to raise money for the Shrimp Welfare Project. (For the likely minority of readers who aren’t aware, the Shrimp Welfare Project is a highly cost-effective charity that reduces the suffering of farmed shrimp who are raised at high concentrations in poor quality water and slaughtered while still conscious. It may sound weird, but the best evidence we have points toward shrimp feeling pain.) There’s an overall goal to raise $100,000, which is just over 3% of the organization’s 2024 revenue. There’s also a Substack Live debate tomorrow featuring Jeff Sebo, Lyman Stone, and Peter Singer (see here), and another on Sunday with Bentham’s Bulldog, Jeff Maurer, and Josh Szeps (see here).

If you’re already aware of the Shrimp Welfare Project and convinced to donate, please use my promo link to get a 50% match on your donation. The page also gives you a list of all participating bloggers (whose articles I’ll be linking to in another post at the end of the week), and more info about the charity.

As I promised when I announced the contest, I’ll be donating a total of $200 in the name of the blogger who raises the most money, who raises the most relative to their subscriber count, and who makes what I deem to be the most interesting argument for shrimp welfare. Hopefully those are all me, and I’m not above using underhanded tactics like emotional manipulation to make it happen. (By the way, if you don’t want to hurt my feelings after I ended my Substack hiatus just for you, you can go to this link to donate or press the shiny button below this paragraph to put “United States of Exception” at the top of The Shrimpact™ Leaderboard.)

You know you want to.

My official contest entry will (hopefully) come soon. Despite having a full year of advance notice, I still haven’t written it yet.

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The Israeli attack on Iran earlier this month was unprovoked and unjustifiable. The U.S. intelligence community and the International Atomic Energy Agency have confirmed repeatedly that Iran is not working to develop a nuclear weapon. Up until a day before the attack, Iran was in negotiations with the United States. If the Trump regime hadn’t insisted on including poison pills like zero enrichment in any potential nuclear deal, they likely would have reached an agreement.

Even if Iran was systematically working toward developing a nuclear weapon, it wouldn’t have been grounds for attacking Iranian civilian and dual-use nuclear infrastructure, which is probably a violation of Article 56 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. Historically, preventive attacks on nuclear facilities, like Israel’s attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in 1981, have only intensified countries’ nuclear ambitions and driven their programs further underground. Even if you believe the Israeli government — in which case I have some aluminum tubes to sell you — the strike only set back Iran’s program by two to three years, while also likely leading to Iran withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Yes, Iran is enriching uranium up to 60% — maybe that’s why the United States shouldn’t have blown up the nuclear agreement that was capping Iranian enrichment at 3.67% and then spent the next seven years needlessly provoking Iran at every opportunity.

Iran, like plenty of other states, engages in nuclear hedging behavior. If it’s a good thing that Israel — an extralegal nuclear proliferator — has started a war against a country that doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program but might hypothetically start one in the future, then I fail to see why we shouldn’t be egging on North Korea to bomb the South, whose conservatives have been at least as giddy as Iran’s hardliners about acquiring a nuclear deterrent. Of course, encouraging a new Korean War is obviously insane, so we ought to re-examine the principle.

Israel’s leadership calls its strike preemptive. But anyone who knows anything knows that there was no impending Iranian attack on Israel. At best, Israel’s war is preventive, like America’s invasion of Iraq and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is ostensibly aimed at preventing an undesirable change in the balance of power, not fending off an imminent threat to Israeli sovereignty. At worst, it is a predatory, revisionary, and ill-fated bid for regional hegemony.

The principle of non-aggression is written into the foundation of the post-1945 international order. Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter prohibits states from threatening or using force against each other except in cases of self-defense or pursuant to the authorization of the Security Council. The charter and judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declares that initiating a war of aggression “is not only an international crime [but] the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

It is impossible to know so far how many innocent people will suffer and die because of Israel’s war. It may range from the thousands to the millions. The direct culpability for each individual act of violence of course lies with whoever pulls the trigger. But there is an additional responsibility in any war of choice that is borne exclusively by the aggressor.

Last night, Donald Trump — flanked by his motley cabal of millenarian war freaks — announced that the United States had directly joined the war against Iran on the side of the aggressor.

It’s unclear what happens next. Iran will almost certainly move to acquire nuclear weapons, whether the regime survives or not. (Remember, Iran’s nuclear program was started under the Shah, not the Ayatollahs.) It will also be compelled to retaliate against the United States, if only because America and Israel have now supercharged Iranian nationalism. The 40,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East all now have targets on their backs. If any of them are killed, you can bet the regime change maniacs will be calling for blood. At that point, Trump may either flinch at the prospect of more Americans coming home in body bags, or fully commit to toppling the Iranian government. The latter would require U.S. boots on the ground and invite the Iranians — who would have nothing left to lose — to wreak as much havoc as necessary to protect the regime and make the cost of war intolerable to the United States. If the war doesn’t become America’s Ukraine, it will most likely become one big Syria.

Whatever happens — and however many innocent Israelis, Iranians, and Americans are blown to bits — it will ultimately be the fault of the Israeli terrorist regime and its American enablers who made the deliberate choice to go to war.

Historically, the world’s few true believers in international law and justice have endeavored not to take the crime of aggression lightly. Charges for crimes against the peace lay at the center of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after World War II. Twelve of the Nazi defendants at the International Military Tribunal were convicted of aggression ex post facto, and six were hanged. In 2010, with the adoption of the Kampala Amendments, aggression was elevated to a core international crime and afforded to the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction alongside war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

There is already a movement in Congress to invoke the War Powers Resolution to end Trump’s unauthorized war of aggression, though it’s unlikely to go anywhere. Last night, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez floated the prospect of impeachment. Even the hapless Chuck Schumer has managed to mount a scathing procedural critique of Trump’s actions. This is all well and good, and Congress needs to act posthaste.

But this is the bare minimum response that should be expected from our representatives. Trump’s strike is unconstitutional and procedurally inappropriate, yes. It is also unprovoked and blatantly illegal under U.S. and international law, a clear violation of the U.N. Charter, a crime of aggression under the Rome Statute, and a middle finger to the so-called rules-based international order the American foreign policy establishment pretends to love so much.

Trump, Vance, Rubio, Hegseth, and anyone else involved in the attack at the top level needs to be removed from office and put on trial. If they can’t be tried in the United States, then the next administration needs to voluntarily submit the United States to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and have them hauled off to The Hague. Netanyahu is already the subject of an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from the internationally recognized genocide in Gaza. Now, they ought to charge him with aggression as well.

Robert Jackson, the American jurist who served as chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg tribunal, made clear in his opening statement that the trial of the Nazi war criminals represented a fundamental transformation in the meaning of international law, not just victor’s justice:

Unfortunately, the nature of these crimes is such that both prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes. The worldwide scope of the aggressions carried out by these men has left but few real neutrals. Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. After the first World War, we learned the futility of the latter course. The former high station of these defendants, the notoriety of their acts, and the adaptability of their conduct to provoke retaliation make it hard to distinguish between the demand for a just and measured retribution, and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of war. It is our task, so far as humanly possible, to draw the line between the two. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.

Over the past week, Netanyahu has taken to invoking the Nazi Holocaust to defend the undefendable in Iran, meanwhile his best friends and allies in the United States post Nazi dog whistles on Twitter. It’s not hyperbolic to say that the present moment may either reaffirm or fundamentally undercut the lessons and legacy of 1945. We must decide in the coming weeks, months, and years whether international law and the Nuremberg principles mean something or not. If they mean anything, then we need to start locking people up.

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I recently learned that due to a (probably long overdue) policy change under the Biden administration, I’m now eligible to donate blood for the first time. Huge win for equality, I guess. As you might surmise from what I’ve written before about charity and altruism, I think more people should donate blood. And now that the government finally wants my blood, I guess I should give it away. Right?

The only problem is that I’m extremely averse to needles — like really badly, extremely averse.1 Whenever I get blood work done, the nurse has to tell me multiple times to unclench my fists and stop shaking. When I got the COVID shot, I started to tear up, and not for any of the stupid political reasons. One of the reasons I work out so much is to have more prominent vasculature so I never have to be stabbed multiple times while getting blood drawn because a medical professional can’t find a vein. I’ll willfully admit that this is irrational, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

I used to be able to pass up blood drives guilt-free because ought implies can. What you might call systemic discrimination, I called a Get Out of Moral Responsibility Free card. Leave it to the Democrats to mess up the last good thing about structural heterosexism.

Now I have to reckon with the fact that I could potentially save people’s lives, but I really don’t want to. So what are my options?

First is that I could just keep doing nothing. But this would be wrong, of course. Donating blood presumably does a lot of good on the margin, since blood banks are almost perpetually running dry (because our idiotic government and namby-pamby bioethicists would rather let sick people die than allow blood donors to be compensated). If you take the blood banks at their word, a typical donation has a 1-in-30 chance of saving a human life, and it’s not like someone else will just take your place if you don’t donate.

The 1-in-30 estimate is almost certainly too high, but even if it’s just 1-in-300, that’s still high enough that I don’t want to take the risk of doing nothing. Besides, I might have a very useful blood type. I don’t actually know what my blood type is, but as long as I can’t foreclose the possibility, I feel a rather strong obligation to give.

Second, I could just suck it up and give blood. But again, this is something I really don’t want to do. When you donate, they stick a needle in your arm for 10 minutes. I can confidently say I would pay at least $100 to avoid this (and that’s a very conservative estimate).

Third, I could indirectly cause an equal or greater amount of blood to be donated by other people as if I had donated myself. For one, I could convince friends, family, or Substack readers, who otherwise wouldn’t have donated, to donate blood. I could also give enough money to an organization that runs blood drives such that the expected marginal return to my donation exceeds the amount of blood I would have given personally. In an ideal moral world, I’d of course both give money and donate blood, but in an ideal world, I wouldn’t hate needles so much and I wouldn’t face this dilemma in the first place.

So how do I decide what to do?

The obvious solution is to determine how much money I’d have to give to make up for my hematic stinginess, then compare that to how much I’d pay to avoid having to give blood, then go with whichever option is cheaper. The same amount of blood would get donated no matter what I do. The critical difference would be that in one situation, I’d personally give up less than I would in the other. Or, if I’m feeling generous, I could hold constant some baseline level of discomfort I’m willing to accept, and then choose whichever method results in the greatest amount of blood being donated.

I already said I’d pay at least $100 to avoid having to give a unit of blood (typically a pint). So the operative question is whether it costs a charity more or less than $100 on the margin to get a single person to give a pint of blood.

According to the American Red Cross, it costs $3,900 to put on a blood drive. The Red Cross holds 520 blood drives per day and collects 4.6 million units of blood per year. That amounts to 24.2 units per drive, or $161 per unit. This is in line with the approximately $200 per unit that hospitals pay for blood.

Wait, what? I thought for sure that offsetting my refusal to part with my precious bodily fluids would be a lot cheaper than sticking a needle in my arm. Maybe it is, since $100 is the absolute lower bound. But there’s at least room for ambiguity.

It’s possible that the marginal cost of a single blood donation is less than the average, since it’s cheaper to accommodate the 25th person at a blood drive than it is to set up a blood drive for the first person to give. But most of the cost of a blood donation consists in testing, processing, typing, and matching the individual sample to a recipient, which probably doesn’t have a very good economy of scale. Also, the cost of outreach and recruitment for a marginal donor is almost certainly greater than for a donor who gives in the status quo. So $161 is probably a fair estimate.

I’m probably not going to give directly, but I’m certainly not going to do nothing. You can give blood every 8 weeks, or 6.5 times per year. Now that I’m eligible — damn you, Biden — that means I owe the universe either one hour with a needle in my arm and 6.5 pints of blood, or $1,047 per year on top of my current giving, or some combination thereof. If I opt for the money, I’ll give it to some charity that does more good on the margin than the Red Cross, like GiveWell.2 I suppose at that point I’m not giving blood anymore, but if it does more good anyway, what’s the big deal?

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Last night, I watched an episode of the original Twilight Zone series, “Shadow Play,” from 1961. The protagonist, one Dennis Weaver, is trapped in a recurring nightmare in which he’s sentenced to be executed for murder. He pleads with officials to grant him a pardon, but it arrives a second too late. After he’s fried in the electric chair, the dream resets and he goes through it all again — then again, and again, and again.

In the universe of the episode, there are presumably two Dennis Weavers. The waking Weaver does not recall what happens to him while he sleeps, and the sleeping Weaver does not know anything outside the nightmare. If we could release the sleeping Weaver from his interminable torment, we would ought to do so, even if it would mean imposing trivial costs on him while he is awake.

That we should care about our experiences in an altered state of consciousness — even if we forget them when we return to normal — is such an anodyne point that it can be made clear to the most bumbling and dunderheaded audience known to man, namely the consumers of American screen culture.1 Apple TV’s Severance has recently brought the concept of split-mind ethics to the fore by imagining a world in which a working “innie” may be oppressed by his corporate Little Eichmanns while his civilian “outie” is unaware of his plight. Black Mirror’s “White Christmas” bravely asks: What if you could build a computer that tortures a miniature version of yourself? David Fincher’s Fight Club, meanwhile, gets the point across merely by relying on good old-fashioned mental illness.

These pieces of media are compelling precisely because we understand that something morally wrong is happening within their universe. We know intuitively that it is not right for a secondary or subordinate consciousness to suffer merely because it is considered secondary or subordinate. You should not torture your clone, your innie, your alter, or the protagonist of your dreams simply because you want to torture them — and to the greatest extent possible, you should try to improve their welfare when you can do so without incurring significant costs to yourself or others. This conclusion follows as long as you accept the basic value of beneficence.

Still, if you asked most people what they would do to better themselves while they dream, they’d probably just look at you like you’re crazy. Every night when we dream, we’re conscious for over half the time we sleep. We can fare better or worse while we’re asleep based on the things that happen to us in our dreams. There are proven ways to better remember and influence what happens in your dreams and therefore to improve your sleeping welfare at minimal cost to your waking self. Almost all of us fail to do these things, however. This is not because we have a good reason not to care about our dreams, but simply because, as Eric Schwitzgebel puts it, we don’t care about what happens to ourselves when we sleep.

But this is no good reason to ignore our own dream welfare. Once we’re awake, we may not care about what happened to ourselves while we dreamt. But we certainly did care while we were asleep. The fact that we are indifferent to our own well-being under certain circumstances should not be taken to mean anything more than the fact that we empathize less with suffering people who are far away from us than those who are close, or those who are outside our tribe rather than within it. The problem with Professor Schwitzgebel — and most of us — is that we simply aren’t woke enough.

There is just one major difference between dream welfare as it is represented in popular culture and dream welfare in reality. In the media, sympathetic dreamers have a strong sense of the future, or at least strong enough to complete a single story arc. In reality, dreamers are stuck in a perpetual present. Dreaming activates the parts of the brain responsible for short-term memory, which means we typically forget dreams within 30 seconds of having them.

But does this mean our dreams don’t matter?

Children typically don’t have retrievable episodic memories until they’re at least three years old. Do we think that young children’s experiences don’t matter? If you could stop a toddler from experiencing extreme mental anguish at little or no cost to yourself, would you do it? If you think the example is disanalogous because young childhood experiences have long-lasting effects on wellbeing, I invite you to consider the link between dream welfare and waking mood.

Or take something more pedestrian. Do you remember what you had for lunch two weeks ago? Hell, do you remember what you had for lunch two days ago? If you don’t remember, but you keep expending resources to have a lunch that’s better than the cheapest nutritionally acceptable lunch you could acquire, then your demonstrated preference is for the transitory hedonic value of lunch-having over whatever future goods you’re giving up by acquiring the lunch. As long as you continue to eat anything other than gray slop and vitamins every day, you should care about your dream welfare.

While I was away, a friend of a friend of the blog — Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla of the Shrimp Welfare Project — made his television debut on The Daily Show with Ronny Chieng. If the point of the appearance was to raise mainstream awareness and get some non-negligible part of the audience to think about supporting or donating to SWP, it appears to have been a remarkable success. When I search the exact phrase “shrimp welfare” on YouTube and organize results by view count, the Daily Show clip is #1 with nearly 500,000 views, while #2 is a two-year-old Spanish-language interview by a vegan channel with just over 1,600 views. The comment section on the Daily Show clip also appears unusually positive and enthusiastic for shrimp welfare.1

If you want to know whose moral ledger to credit for exposing such a large mainstream audience to shrimp welfare, look no further than local Substacker and friend of the blog . Apparently, the showrunners decided to contact Zorrilla only after learning about SWP through one of Bentham’s articles. Perversely, you might also have to give a share of the credit to the inveterate invertebrate hater , as there’s a non-zero chance the article they saw was Bentham’s epic reply to Lyman, “Lyman Stone Continues Being Dumb About Shrimp.”

Coincidentally, the Daily Show segment aired exactly six months to the day after Bentham and a few other Substackers — mostly not me — raised at least $15,731 in one-time donations to SWP, plus at least $414 per month in recurring donations. Over the course of a year, that’s around 2% of the organization’s budget, or more than one-third of the cost of a single stunner that can render hundreds of millions of shrimps unconscious before they’re slaughtered. According to a highly uncertain yet conservative estimate of SWP’s cost-effectiveness, the money donated just in the first year will probably avert a painful death for between 22.8 million and 43.5 million shrimps per year.

That’s an extraordinary amount of good. Shrimps show evidence of anxiety-like behavior. When injured, they engage in grooming. When given analgesics, this behavior is reduced. According to a review commissioned by the British government, shrimp sentience is a likely possibility. Conditional on shrimp sentience (p = 0.37, 90% CI: 0.20, 0.70), shrimps likely suffer no more than two orders of magnitude less than human beings, according to the most thorough report to date on the comparative moral weight of animal experiences. That means every $1 donated to SWP likely averts as much suffering in expectation per year as anesthetizing between 7 and 279 human beings instead of allowing them to experience a painful death. The $20,000 we raised last year is akin to anesthetizing the population of an entire mid- to large-size American city.

Still, there’s a lot more to be done to improve shrimp welfare across the industry. At any moment, there are hundreds of billions of shrimps being farmed worldwide, most of them confined at extreme stocking densities in poor quality water and destined to be slaughtered in excruciating ice slurry while still conscious. Typically, around 50% of farmed shrimps don’t even survive to slaughter age. It’s not unreasonable to think the total amount of farmed shrimp suffering that occurs each year is greater in expectation than the suffering of every human being on Earth.

Last year, I said I would organize an annual shrimp welfare fundraiser on Substack, and I intend on keeping my word. Yes, you heard me: International Shrimp Welfare Day is a go, and I want YOU to participate. (Actually, it may end up taking place over the course of a week, so we’ll see about the name.) Basically, I want to recreate the success of the impromptu fundraiser we had in November, just with better organization and a wider reach. The folks at FarmKind have reached out to help create some cool web features so each participant knows exactly how much they raise.

• What do you need to do? If you’re a writer, complete this Google Form to let me know you’re participating. Then, I’ll follow up with any necessary information closer to the date of the fundraiser (which should be no earlier than November 15th and no later than the end of December). Other than that, just publish a Substack post during the fundraising period and include a custom FarmKind donation link I’ll be sending you ahead of time. (And if you’re not a writer, you can donate to SWP by following the link here.)

• What do you get? Besides knowing that you’re helping millions of shrimps, I’ll promote your shrimp welfare article through my newsletter and cross-post it if it’s one of my favorites. I’ll also be donating $50 to SWP in the name of whichever blogger raises the most money, another $50 in the name of whoever raises the most relative to their subscriber count (as long as you have 100+ subscribers), and $100 in the name of whoever makes the novelest contribution to the case for shrimp welfare. (For example, if you can convincingly argue that Robert Nozick would have been a shrimp welfarist — or, more likely, even more radical — then the money is as good as yours.)

• What exactly are we raising money for? You can see SWP’s latest funding proposal here and here. With the next $50,000 to $1,000,000, they plan on scaling up the so-called Humane Slaughter Initiative, which means buying more stunners for shrimp producers, obtaining more commitments from retailers not to source shrimps killed in ice slurry, developing new stunner technology (especially for smaller producers), and supporting research and developing third-party verification systems to make sure producers follow shrimp welfare best practices. By 2030, they aim to reach a tipping point in stunner adoption so that it becomes the industry standard.

Again, if you’re a Substack writer, I’d appreciate it if you’d fill out the Google Form to let me know you want to participate. And if you want to donate to SWP right now, you can do so here. Every $1 you donate will help reduce the suffering of between 1,100 and 2,100 shrimps.

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If you really want to help, you can share this article with other writers or write a call for articles of your own, include a link to the Google Form, and tag at least 10 people who might want to write about shrimp welfare. For my part, I’m calling on , , , , , , , , , , , and to join me.2 If you have a relationship with a larger Substacker who might be sympathetic to shrimp welfare, like , (see his shrimp content here and here), , or Scott Alexander — or someone in the real world like Ezra Klein or Nick Kristof — please reach out to them as well.

Together, we can have an enormous (shr)impact!

1: If you’re reading this, you’re invited to the official paid subscriber hangout for May 2025. I’ve been hosting these video calls for 2 hours a month since I opened paid subscriptions in January, but I don’t know how many people are aware of them because I’ve only been advertising them in the paid subscriber chat. For this month only, it’s open to anybody — but if you want to attend in the future, you’ll have to pony up.

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The hangout will be on Sunday, May 11, starting at 6:00 p.m. UTC (that’s 11:00 a.m. Pacific, 1:00 p.m. Central, 2:00 p.m. Eastern, 7:00 p.m. in Britain, and some ungodly witching hour in Australia). I’ll also be sending out the meeting information on the day of, but then immediately paywall the article so only paid subscribers and email recipients can see it.

Looking forward to meeting some of you!

On with the Show

2: Following a suggestion by Bentham’s Bulldog, I started using Suno to make AI-generated songs about EA charities. So far, I have GiveWell, Legal Impact for Chickens, and the Shrimp Welfare Project, but it doesn’t seem like the AI understands the prompts. For now, I insist the best use case for AI music is to turn Wikipedia articles into songs you can listen to during workouts. See, for example, my modestly successful country song about the plot of Paul Blart: Mall Cop, and my friend’s folk song about the role of the sitcom According to Jim in post-9/11 America (part of our concept album about According to Jim).

3: , a recent subscription of mine, puts my exact thoughts into words on AI and motivated reasoning:

People who are generally anti-car are suddenly ignoring that AI driven cars are crashing way way less often than human drivers. People who believe that anyone can make art, that anything can be art, that we shouldn’t gatekeep the experience of art or require people to jump through arbitrary hoops to access it are suddenly basically aesthetic conservatives when AI art appears; accusing it of being lowest common denominator slop in language I can’t imagine them ever using about any other medium. People who have identified as philosophical materialists and atheists are suddenly talking like there’s something ineffable and magical about the human mind that machines will never be able to replicate. People who will say that all property is theft and pirate a lot of what they consume are suddenly really worried about AI disrespecting IP rights. The list goes on. All of these strike me as simple “AI isn’t in our tribe, we need to attack it” invented principles that no one believed a few years ago.

4: He also has some very hit-and-miss DC-area vegan food recommendations. I agree on VegZ and Falafel Inc, but Shouk and HipCityVeg (especially HipCityVeg) are overrated.1 I also won’t stand for a single ill word about Pow Pow.

5: Wayne Hsiung writes about Mountaire Corporation’s ties to Donald Trump. Mountaire is the fourth-largest chicken producer in the United States and its owner, Ron Cameron, was the sixth-largest Republican campaign contributor in 2016 and the seventeenth-largest in 2020 and 2024. He gave more money to Republicans last year than Howard Lutnick, who bought himself control of the Commerce Department, and nearly as much as Linda McMahon, who bought herself the Department of Education. Trump has already paid Cameron back by jacking up the maximum line speeds in chicken and pig slaughterhouses, and plans to shell out tens of billions of dollars in welfare payments to factory farmers to help them exterminate more flocks and make up for losses from the trade war.

6: Relatedly, the largest corporate donor to Trump’s inauguration committee was the chicken producer Pilgrim’s Pride, a subsidiary of the Brazilian-owned meatpacker JBS that’s recently pleaded guilty to criminal price-fixing and been found to use child labor. The largest individual donor was investment banker Warren Stephens, who famously saved the beagle torture company Huntingdon Life Sciences when activists pushed it to the verge of bankruptcy in 2001.2 Stephens was rewarded for his generosity with a nomination to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

7: writes about new evidence of extraterrestrial life on a planet 120 light-years from Earth, K2-18b. The New York Times reports:

While inspecting K2-18b, [Cambridge astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan] and his colleagues discovered it had many of the molecules they had predicted a Hycean planet would possess. In 2023, they reported they had also detected faint hints of another molecule, and one of huge potential importance: dimethyl sulfide, which is made of sulfur, carbon, and hydrogen.

On Earth, the only known source of dimethyl sulfide is life. In the ocean, for instance, certain forms of algae produce the compound, which wafts into the air and adds to the sea’s distinctive odor. Long before the Webb telescope was launched, astrobiologists had wondered whether dimethyl sulfide might serve as a sign of life on other planets.

Last year, Dr. Madhusudhan and his colleagues got a second chance to look for dimethyl sulfide. As K2-18b orbited in front of its star, they used a different instrument on the Webb telescope to analyze the starlight passing through the planet’s atmosphere. This time they saw an even stronger signal of dimethyl sulfide, along with a similar molecule called dimethyl disulfide.

“It is a shock to the system,” Dr. Madhusudhan said. “We spent an enormous amount of time just trying to get rid of the signal.”

No matter how the scientists revisited their readings, the signal stayed strong. They concluded that K2-18b may in fact harbor a tremendous supply of dimethyl sulfide in its atmosphere, thousands of times higher than the level found on Earth. This would suggest that its Hycean seas are brimming with life.

8: Alexander Wendt, author of arguably the most influential work in international relations theory over the past 30 years, Social Theory of International Politics, did a podcast interview with the Cato Institute about the ontological-political implications of UFOs, and has a forthcoming book called The Last Humans: UFOs & National Security. He has previously written an article, “Sovereignty and the UFO,” and delivered a TEDx Talk calling for breaking the UFO taboo.

9: Friend of the blog has a new podcast, Changed My Mind, with interviews of Peter Singer and shrimp podcaster James Özden. I haven’t listened yet because I didn’t think it was coming out until May, but I recommend it nevertheless. Find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

10: Lewis Bollard did an interview about ending factory farming on the Win-Win podcast with Liv Boeree. Find it on Substack, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

11: The inveterate invertebrate-hater Lyman Stone (who by his own admission is otherwise villainous) was quoted in the New York Times about pitching pro-natalist policy to the White House. One proposal would require that a minimum share of federal grants and scholarships go to married and childrearing recipients. Stone told the Times this would help signal that it’s cool to have kids again:

In an attempt to influence highly educated couples, Mr. Stone proposed that the government impose a quota for married applicants or applicants with children across all of its fellowship programs, including the Fulbright fellowship. The recipients are largely recent college graduates, many of whom are single and travel abroad alone.

“What the government is doing with these programs is conferring status,” Mr. Stone said. “That being the case, it’s bad for the government to blindly confer status on people for their singleness.”

It’s an interesting idea, but also transparently anti-meritocratic. Imposing any non-merit-based quotas or requirements on research fellowships runs the risk of undermining real-world research outcomes… which is bad. But also, it’s presumably not the main proposal under consideration, and there are no bad ideas in the brainstorming stage.

12: Richard Hanania talks to a Manhattan Institute reporter, Christina Buttons, about the troubled teen industry. It’s a fashionable meme that the whole mental health industrial complex — courts, youth treatment centers, drug rehab programs, psychiatric hospitals, drug companies, private prisons, therapists, etc. — is systemically harmful and oppressive, but I suspect there’s more to the story. I didn’t follow #FreeBritney, for example, but I get the impression that a lot of her supporters overlooked the fact that she’s obviously mentally unwell and the media blindly went along with it.

13: For some reason, the Substack algorithm really wants me to read an infuriatingly poorly researched and obviously AI-generated article about the Koch Brothers. Among other basic factual errors, it says that they blindly followed their father’s racist anti-communist ideology, that Charles Koch was a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, and that they supported Trump. In fact, Charles Koch abandoned his father’s chapter of the John Birch Society and denounced the Vietnam War shortly after his father’s death in 1967, neither of them was involved in conservative politics at the time Heritage was founded, and they’ve famously opposed Trump since he first ran for president in 2015.

14: As an amateur historian of libertarianism, I feel compelled to add that, contra the popular notion that the Koch Brothers only cared about the bottom line, every indication is they were the real thing: that is, full-on peacenik anarcho-capitalists. In 1964, Charles Koch attended the pacifist anarchist Robert LeFevre’s “Freedom School” in the Colorado mountains, and according to a declassified FBI file, was so taken by LeFevre’s philosophy that he became a major donor and trustee of the institution by 1966. In 1973, following the death of Austrian school economist F. A. “Baldy” Harper, he took up the mantle of Harper’s Institute for Humane Studies and organized a series of conferences aimed at rebuilding the flagging Austrian school to train a cadre of libertarian intellectuals to espouse the virtues of a free society. In 1976, he convened a libertarian scholars conference that included the pugnacious radicals Murray Rothbard, Joseph R. Stromberg, and Leonard Liggio — the latter of whom wrote that a consistent libertarianism “would have to be anti-war, anti-imperialistic, pro-legalization of drugs, and anti-military expenditures” — to design a revolutionary political strategy and lay the groundwork for what would eventually become the Cato Institute. As Charles Koch wrote for an article in a 1978 strategy special issue of Cato’s Libertarian Review, he believed it was essential for the business class to articulate not merely economic but moral arguments against an interventionist economic and foreign policy. It wasn’t until Rothbard went ballistic on the Koch Brothers and Cato president Ed Crane in 1981, then defeated their candidate at the 1983 Libertarian National Convention, that the Koch Brothers forsook radical libertarianism and started to embrace the conservative movement as their primary political vehicle.

15: The very British Substacker spoke to the world’s most controversial philosopher, Stephen Kershnar. I haven’t watched it yet but recommend it preemptively based on Kershnar priors. Also, I wholeheartedly endorse everything these two fine gentlemen have ever said, including that Ayn Rand was wrong about lint and whatever this is. (Professor Kershnar, if you’re reading this, I humbly suggest you do an appearance on the Worst Boyfriend Ever podcast. For no particular reason.)

16: Local vulgarian has posted a height reveal (he’s 5’10”). I typically prefer to keep these things mysterious, but now that the magic is gone, I suppose I can admit I’m 5’10” as well. Ask me in the comments and I’ll tell you how tall I think you are.

17: I’m increasingly becoming an AI millenarian. Scott Alexander and Daniel Kokotajlo’s AI 2027 played no small role in this, but it’s mostly because I’ve noticed ChatGPT get a lot smarter in the past few months. I started using it about a month after it came out as a sounding board for asinine jokes I would have otherwise posted on Twitter. Until recently, the main source of humor has been seeing it fail to get the joke and respond to a nonsensical or contextless statement like it was serious. But that’s happening less and less — in fact, sometimes it plays along so well that I don’t even realize it gets the joke until well into the conversation. Which is to say: We have already achieved artificial irony poisoning.

18: politely suggests that it might possibly be a good thing if AI displaced all life on Earth, as long as the AI was conscious. But I think this is way too cautious. Wild animal suffering means global net welfare is probably extremely negative (in fact, even without counting wild animals, global welfare is probably negative and declining). Obviously, the best-case scenario would be that we build God and reengineer the universe to make things good instead of bad. But to die trying is nevertheless better than the status quo, even if superintelligent AI doesn’t have qualia. If I was a Yudkowskyite and thought superintelligence would inevitably be misaligned and wipe out all life on Earth, I’d think we should go full bore and try to get it as soon as possible. The only reason to pump the brakes would be if you think it’s reasonably likely that superintelligence would give us an extremely positive future, or at least more positive if we paused than if we didn’t pause.

19: Members of Congress have reintroduced the EATS Act under a misleading new name, the Food Security and Farm Protection Act, and are poised to attempt to insert it in the farm bill. It would overturn California’s Proposition 12 and force as many as 40 million chickens and 500,000 pigs back into cages, as well as repeal more than 1,000 public health, safety, and animal welfare laws by prohibiting state and local governments from regulating agricultural products sold in interstate commerce. Calling and emailing your members of Congress is likely to have an outsized influence on the bill, as it’s very low-profile and ripe for conservative opposition. You can use this tool to find contact information for your representatives. If you have Republican legislators, try using conservative talking points. Here’s some sample language:

Hi, my name is [your name] and I live at [address]. I’m calling to oppose S. 1326, the Food Security and Farm Protection Act, and its inclusion in the farm bill in any form. This bill is being pushed by Smithfield Foods, a Communist Chinese-owned company, to undermine responsible farmers in [your state]. It would violate states’ rights and overturn countless of our laws for the benefit of foreign-owned corporations. Thank you.

20: If you use audio for any commercial purposes, you might want to use this free library of 500 Moby songs. I typically use AI to generate my background music and sound effects, but this is probably easier and you don’t have to worry about running out of tokens.

21: It should probably be bigger news that Trump is trying to weaponize the Justice Department to shut down the largest Democratic fundraising platform, and some top Democrats think he’s going to succeed.

22: The platform, ActBlue, has raised nearly $17 billion for Democrats since 2004. The ActBlue Ticker Tracker keeps track of how much it raises by the hour, day, and week. Here’s weekly contributions since 2020:

23: In 2018, Iceland nearly became the first country to ban circumcision for non-medical (including religious) reasons, punishable by up to six years in prison. Few circumcisions are performed in Iceland each year, as the country’s Jewish population is around 250 and the Muslim population is around 1,500. Anti-circumcision advocates in Iceland and other Nordic states have framed the issue in terms of gender equality and children’s rights. But the bill was defeated following vocal opposition by local religious minorities and an international pressure campaign including a statement by the Anti-Defamation League and a letter from the top Democratic and Republican members of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. They argued that the bill would serve as a rallying cry for global anti-Semitism:

While Jewish and Muslim populations in Iceland may be small, your country’s ban could be exploited by those who stoke xenophobia and anti-Semitism in countries with more diverse populations. […] As a partner nation, we urge your government to stop this intolerant bill from advancing any further.

From the Drafts Folder

24: This month, I attended my DFL precinct caucus here in the People’s Republic of Minneapolis. The DFL is Minnesota’s affiliate of the national Democratic Party, only it’s called the DFL because it was formed as a merger of the original state Democratic Party from the 19th century and the agrarian socialist Farmer-Labor Party from the interwar period. That it’s still called the DFL is, of course, anachronistic — the farmers are all Republicans now, and union membership is split down the middle — but there doesn’t seem to be any constituency in the ranks that actively dislikes farmers and laborers, so nobody’s itching to change it. Maybe if I make it to the state convention next year, I’ll write a resolution for it to become the Democratic-Farmer-Gamer Party. In addition to bringing a modern technological chic to the function, it strikes me as the sort of branding that Democrats need to embrace if they want to win back sensitive young men like me.

25: The mayoral election this year is between incumbent Jacob Frey, backed by the DFL Old Guard (so called both because its members include most of the city’s experienced political operators and because they’re literally old), and self-described democratic socialist state senator Omar Fateh. Delegates are split about 50-25-25 between undecided, Frey, and Fateh, with maybe half of the undecideds being explicitly anti-Frey. This means the party endorsement, which decides who gets access to DFL resources ahead of the election, will probably go to Fateh or no one. If it goes to Fateh, then he probably wins the election. If it goes to no one, then it could be either Fateh or Frey.

26: I don’t like Frey, who I think has been way too conciliatory to the police union. But Fateh is an actual crazy person. He’s one of the most corrupt and incompetent people in the city; his housing plan consists of imposing rent control and trying to build enough public housing to make up for the supply shortfall; he wants to create a city-level income tax; and he supported a failed 2021 ballot measure that would have defunded the police. By contrast, Frey has heroically blocked rent control, distinguished himself as a leader on restricting fur sales, and vetoed the city council’s idiotic attempt to ban Uber and Lyft unless they operate at a loss. So, Frey it is! (Not incidentally, I’m one of the blue dots above.)

27: In October 2021, a bipartisan group of 18 Senators, including 10 Republicans (enough to overcome the filibuster), introduced legislation to repeal the president’s authority to impose tariffs without authorization from Congress. At the time, Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress and could have enacted the legislation if they made it a priority. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the bill’s lead Democratic sponsor, remarked in a press release:

As our economy continues to recover from the economic crisis, we must ensure that Congress has a say in any future actions that could restrict trade or impose consequential changes. This legislation […] will help prevent any future president from abusing national security authorities to impose unilateral tariffs. It will also help guarantee that any efforts to crack down on unfair or illegal trade practices are strategic, and done in concert with our allies.

28: And then… nothing happened. Democrats stopped caring about the imperial presidency, Republicans became increasingly beholden to Trump, and Biden gave legitimacy to Trump’s most destructive and unilateralist trade policies. The Biden administration kept the vast majority of Trump’s first-term tariffs in place, raised some of them, added new ones to certain technologies and raw material imports, and imposed stringent export controls and non-tariff barriers on China without ever asking Congress for permission.

29: If you asked the Democrats, this was all fine because Drumpf was defeated forever in a landslide victory of 42,918 votes, and Democrats had a rock-solid majority of 50 seats in the Senate (including a 90-year-old dementia patient), and Blumpft was going to prison because people just cared that much about January 6th, and Biden and his motley trust of brain geniuses knew exactly what they were doing because he’s just that fucking good. (Take a look at the date on that tweet, will you? Is it before or after Biden shit himself on national TV?)

30: Anyway, suffice it to say that the Pax Americana is now ending because of Dark Brandon memes.

Some of the commenters said that’s just because the photos in the survey didn’t control for whether a man has tattoos or not. But the finding was consistent even when they used illustrations to control for tattoos and other extraneous variables.1

Kirkegaard says this is because the bodybuilder physique signals that a man only hangs out at the gym all day and wouldn’t deign to spare any time for a romantic partner:

It is not necessarily because they aren’t strictly speaking physically attractive, but that bodybuilders have other personality traits women don’t like. Mate choice is a package deal, so even if women prefer men as strong as possible, women also prefer men who spend their time on them and their families instead of going to the gym 20 hours a week. After all, lifting weights costs money (gym membership, equipment, and especially opportunity cost) and produces only a temporary gain in muscle, so there are clearly diminishing returns to this behavior and it probably turns negative. If a man spends 50 hours in a gym/week, he has no time to make money in a job.

But this overcomplicates things. A much more reasonable explanation is that the lean twunk physique simply looks better.2

I don’t think it makes much sense to assume, as Kirkegaard does, that women prefer men “as strong as possible.” Why would that be? Men have never looked that strong at any point in our evolutionary history until they started using anabolic steroids like 50 years ago. Until then, the ideal male body was a guy with a handlebar mustache in a singlet or very high trousers who ate a lot of disgusting meat slop and occasionally tossed around a medicine ball. In fact, nobody even knew what a tricep was until Arnold Schwarzenegger invented it in 1977.

If women only preferred the less muscular body type because it’s a signal of romantic commitment, you’d think that in contexts where men’s romantic commitment isn’t part of the equation (like hookup culture) there would be a lot more women on the prowl for roided up bodybuilders.

But do you really think Schwarzenegger in his prime would have done better on the apps than, say, Michael Phelps? Or even the notorious chlamydia superspreader Timothée Chalamet?

My hypothesis: If you actually collected the data, women’s preferences would be basically indistinguishable from above.3

Admittedly, I am not a woman — or at least not an adult human female or adult female humanoid.4 However, on account of my certain proclivities, I still think you should take me at my word on this. Gays are the one demographic that’s both a producer and consumer of male sex appeal — that is, attracted to men, and therefore instinctively knowledgeable of what’s attractive about men — and therefore ought to have uniquely good instincts about what to do to attract those who are attracted to men.

If you don’t believe me, open Grindr in any major American city and set the age range from 20 to 40. You’ll be greeted by dozens of headless torsos like the ones above, basically in proportion to how many women say they want them.

In fact, it’s basically written into the culture at this point that it’s straight to be gay. Why, don’t you believe the science? Don’t you trust the experts?

There are therefore two paths for the heterosexual man. One is to remain in denial — and of course, reap what you sow.

And the other is to take your cues from the gays.5 Ahem —

Do you bite bullets? I pity the fool who doesn’t. Bullet biting is the mark of someone who’s smart and interesting. If you want to be a smart and interesting person, you should be biting bullets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you’re of a certain persuasion — not that there’s anything wrong with that — you might enjoy biting bullets at brunch, too.

Bullet biting means accepting weird and counterintuitive conclusions that logically follow from the premises you endorse. It’s not always the right thing to do — sometimes, if you get a conclusion that’s really suspicious and you have a good reason to reject it, you should reject your premise or suspect there’s a flaw in your internal logic. But if you’re earnestly committed to a truth-seeking enterprise, you should be prepared to bite many bullets.

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The most straightforward case for bullet biting, which has been voiced recently on Substack here, here, here, and here, is that most people have been wrong about most things for most of history, so it shouldn’t be surprising if most people’s intuitions are wrong about most things right now. Just because you think a conclusion is wrong or weird, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should reject it any more than someone in the 19th century should have rejected the principle of racial equality because it would have cut against the grain of contemporary moral fashions.

The best argument against bullet biting — some perverted form of which seems to be adopted here — is that our present institutions, including moral intuitions, are generally trustworthy because we’ve spent eons improving them through a process of trial and error, and any given revision is likely to be a regression to the mean. We’ve spent a long time developing genetics as a discipline, so if you concluded as a lay person that our current way of doing genetics is totally wrong, and you chose a random theory to replace it, odds are that things would go badly. So too with our moral intuitions! Unless you know why some Catholic weirdo put up a fence, you shouldn’t go tearing it down.

This response is confused, however. There is a difference between technical progress — an institution’s ability to do its job with increasing competence over time — and moral progress — or an increasing alignment between what its job is and what’s morally appropriate. In reality, our institutions are not selected for how good they are from the point of view of the universe, but how well they promote the values and interests of whatever class decides what institutions we have. We should therefore expect them to be increasingly good over time at executing their technical mission, but not necessarily that this mission should be a good thing. The institution of slavery became increasingly technically competent over the course of thousands of years, and by the 19th century, operated with remarkable efficiency. But that doesn’t mean slavery was a good thing!

Most institutions are like slavery in this respect. No matter how much moral progress we make, the institution-shaping class is almost certain to be committing countless atrocities and inappropriately excluding countless values and classes of beings — likely making up the vast majority of moral value in the universe — from the moral circle. Philosopher Evan Williams, author of the cult-famous ongoing moral catastrophe paper, argues that because there are so many ways we could be getting things catastrophically wrong, we should think we’re getting a very large number of things extremely horrifically wrong.

For a few purely illustrative examples of what an ongoing moral catastrophe might look like, consider our indifference toward the suffering of people very far away from us, our sleeping selves, factory-farmed animals and animals in the wild — especially fish and invertebrates — and people in the far future, as well as the disturbing possibility, raised by Williams, “that the function of the corpus callosum in a human brain is not to unite the two hemispheres in the production of a single consciousness, but rather to allow a dominant consciousness situated in one hemisphere to issue orders to, and receive information from, a subordinate consciousness situated in the other hemisphere.”

If any one of these is a legitimate cause for concern, then we’re currently perpetrating unfathomable moral atrocities. Conservatives say we should think our institutions are generally morally sound, or at least much better than if they were selected at random. But if we’re committing more moral atrocities right now than we could ever possibly think of, and our institutions fail to consider the vast majority of moral value in the universe, it seems that things would be better off if they were fundamentally different!

Since we can’t expect our intuitions to take into account the interests they don’t take into account, we shouldn’t consider it disqualifying if we think we have a good reason to take those interests seriously and it leads us to some conclusions we think are weird. We should, of course, pay mind to the Catholic weirdo and make sure the reason a value or class of beings is excluded is truly arbitrary, but if a good reason cannot be explicated that’s stronger than, say, “suffering is intrinsically bad and we ought to do something about it when the cost of doing something is minimal,” we shouldn’t hesitate before bullet biting. Refusing to bite the bullet in such cases would be like saying in 1800 that we can’t accept a principle of racial equality because we theretofore did not consider the interests of racial minorities. If the whole question at issue is whether you should consider the interests of racial minorities, it seems like the reason for saying no is merely because you disagree with it. (And why do you disagree with it? Well, because you disagree with it, of course!)

This was supposed to be the part of the essay where I make the jump from bullet biting to woke radicalism. Mere minutes before I was going to publish, however, a fellow bullet biter and friend of the blog published an article smearing the good name of woke radicalism by associating it with the likes of “Antiracist Baby” author Ibram X. Kendi and Gaming Hall of Fame member Donald J. Trump. So let me take the opportunity to say in no uncertain terms: Kendi and Trump do not represent the good, hardworking extremists of the woke radical movement! More on that when you get to footnote 1.

To bite bullets in order to expand the moral circle is to be a woke radical. Bentham has previously called himself a woke conservative, but this is a misnomer. Wokeness, in this context, refers to an awareness of injustice, including injustices against poor foreigners, sleeping persons, shrimp, insects, and other non-human animals, and people in the far future. Radicalism refers to an eagerness to fundamentally revise existing institutions and accept conclusions contrary to our intuitions. Wokeness entails radicalism because moral circle expansion requires revising our beliefs and the conclusions we draw from them. The more conservative you are, the less woke; the more woke, the more radical.

If you are deeply woke and you believe, as Bentham does, that insect welfare is the most important thing on Earth (personally, I think the most important thing on Earth is the girl reading this ❤️), then you should be appalled that none of our major institutions consider insect welfare so much as one iota. In fact, the methodical technical progress championed by conservatives makes insect welfare significantly worse by constantly giving us new and better ways to torture insects by raising them for food and feed.

If our institutions are almost ubiquitously indifferent toward the most important moral ends — or even actively misaligned, as in the case of animal agriculture — it seems that any random change to any random institution ought to be expected to have either negligible or significantly positive moral value, since it would either have no effect on the considerability of values or beings outside the moral circle, or else regress to the mean and expand the circle (since most moral value in the universe is currently outside of it). While it would be ideal to make sure we revise institutions in an optimal way, it is nevertheless likely that if you selected an element at random from the set “all possible ways to change society,” it would have positive expected moral value. Even if you think we live in a suspiciously convenient universe and most of our present institutions simply happen to be aligned with morally important ends — for example, that the growth of human civilization reduces the number of insects who live net negative lives — it would surely be better if the institutions were aligned intentionally rather than unintentionally.

The only exception to the principle that random revisions would be net positive in expectation are institutions that are already above replacement level, meaning a regression to the mean would only end up shrinking the moral circle. This describes only a tiny minority of institutions — since most institutions are wrong about the most important things — but includes those that directly perform a morally aligned function and those that help us identify where our intuitions go awry. The latter includes both direct knowledge-producing institutions — namely universities, especially moral philosophy departments and auxiliary fields — and the norms and institutions that enable them to succeed, like free speech and academic freedom. Since these institutions are already aligned to morally valuable ends, a woke radical should merely seek to promote technical progress within them rather than fundamentally revise their character.1

As for the vast majority of institutions that are below replacement level — where any random change would improve on the status quo — the task of the woke radical is complicated by the fact that we can’t actually think of random elements from the set of all possible ways to change society. If you don’t believe me, then go ahead: Try to think of a truly random revision to a given institution — let’s say the Department of the Interior. It should be random given the reference class of everything you either can or can’t think about the institution, and every way it either has or hasn’t been, or will or won’t be structured in the future. You have 60 seconds to come up with as many reforms as possible… go!

If you answered “yes” above, thank you for your participation. Now, please take a look at the list of reforms you came up with. How many of them have to do with wild animal welfare? If it’s less than 99.9%, you fail. If you only thought of things that have to do with wild animal welfare, you probably still fail because you didn’t think enough about insects. If you only thought about insects, how many other people do you think there are who only thought about insects?

Since we can’t truly implement random revisions to our institutions, we have to settle for the next best thing. If we can articulate a good reason for revision, and there’s no more compelling reason not to revise, we ought to do it no matter how weird it sounds — the Catholic weirdos be damned! No matter how technically competent our institutions are, the vast majority of them are misaligned with the vast majority of moral value. Woke radicalism is simply the observation that this is bad and the suggestion that bad things should be made good instead.

I am an exponent of the peculiar belief that it is generally better to be smart and interesting than it is to be dumb and boring.

I know this is a peculiar belief because most of the smartest and most interesting people in the world are also the most controversial and despised. Any half-wit who knows what agreeable platitudes to spout can build an audience for himself and even occasionally come to be regarded as an intellectual. (Please ignore the following image — I don’t know how it got there!) But it takes a measure of wisdom and virtue to speak cogent truths to an unreceptive audience.

Paul Graham observes that every era has its own moral fashions. If you only believe the things you’re supposed to believe, it’s probably because you believe what you’re told. This is, of course, a good heuristic — no one can independently verify all of their beliefs — but the mark of a smart and interesting person is that they dissent from the moral fashion of the time when their reasoning and observational faculties suggest that they ought to do so.

It is virtuous to believe in shrimp welfare when nobody cares about shrimp. It is similarly virtuous to believe, as I do, that dream welfare matters, that we ought to spend a lot of money on fish contraception, and that we have good pro tanto reasons not to clean up the Hudson River.

It is even sometimes virtuous to believe — as opposed to “act on” — widely discredited and historically destructive ideas and ideologies, including Marxism-Leninism, racial supremacism, and the belief that and even are anything but Very Failed Substackers — so long as you believe these things as part of an earnest and good-faith truth-seeking enterprise, and you would be dissuaded out of your beliefs by the proper evidence.

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One particular smart and interesting person I’m proud to call an acquaintance is the lowly second-year grad student and esteemed Substacker of the blog (one of only seven fine publications to be Officially Recommended™ by these ). In addition to many dry posts about economics literature and Wikipedia editing, Decker is the author of several punchy, thought-provoking essays about niche and taboo topics. He has suggested, for example, that it’s wrong to have your own biological children if you could instead use the genetic material of someone whose children would have a better life —

There are many people who they could be born to. Who would they pick? Do you have any right to deny them the father they would choose? It would be like kidnapping a child — an unutterably selfish act. You have a duty to your children — you must act in their best interest, not yours.

— and that there is a duty to commit immigration fraud by marrying a different non-citizen every two years in order to bring them to the United States and improve their standard of living1 —

If you are a citizen, you can essentially marry anyone, and they will be able to live in the United States. Once they have a ten year green card — or even while they have a two year, conditional green card — a divorce does not lead to them being expelled from the country. They are free to stay.

Isn’t it obvious, then, what we must do? The value of immigrating to the United States is very large, so large that I am not even going to bother quantifying it. I — you — we — can greatly help people. We can admit one person to the United States every two years.

Needless to say, being smart and interesting is a dangerous enterprise. When you’re not just being ignored, you constantly get lunatics in your mentions —

— and if you’re sufficiently smart and interesting, like Socrates or Galileo, the best you can hope for is to be remembered as a heretic and a martyr.

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Earlier this week, Decker’s no-holds-barred pursuit of the truth finally caught up to him. After he posted a thoughtful, if intentionally provocative and undiplomatic, essay, “When Must We Kill Them?” — which appraises the ongoing collapse of the American constitutional order and raises the harrowing question in the title in reference to the Trump regime — Decker became the target of an onslaught the likes of which haven’t been seen since the heretofore record-shattering response to my article about Jeff Tiedrich last September.

In addition to hundreds of angry replies on Substack — an astounding number of which seem to be inexplicably obsessed with gay sex — Decker received thousands of replies on Twitter, including one from a sitting U.S. Senator, outrageous coverage by a fair share of the lowest-IQ outlets in conservative media, and a condemnation from the official George Mason University Twitter account. Multiple conservative influencers have also called for him to be arrested.

Attempting to determine when it is appropriate to engage in political violence is, of course, a legitimate, legally protected — in fact, quintessentially American — and worthwhile endeavor. The United States was founded on the principle that if a government becomes tyrannical, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,” including through revolutionary violence. As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams, following the Shays Rebellion in 1787, Jefferson believed it was essential for citizens to instill the fear of God in government by conducting a violent rebellion at least once every 20 years, and thereby “refreshing [the tree of liberty] from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Unless you accept unconditional pacifism — you agree with Gandhi, for an extreme example, that the victims of the Nazi Holocaust “should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife” — then you must believe there is some point at which it becomes permissible to counteract the violence of the state with violence in kind. This is such an anodyne point that it’s not even considered controversial among most people to say you would have killed Adolf Hitler — you have to consider whether you would have killed Baby Hitler to make the question even minimally interesting. And still then, a sizeable plurality of people say they would have done it no questions asked.

Decker’s point is obviously not that the American left (of which he does not consider himself a member) ought to initiate politicide, but that we’re closer to the sort of King George III tyranny that justifies revolution according to the American founding tradition than we’ve been at any point in recent memory. He illustrates this cunningly — evidently too cunningly for his critics — by establishing a parallelism between the conduct of the second Trump regime and the conduct of George III as it’s indicted by the Declaration of Independence. Below is the relevant passage by Jefferson, with lines bolded where Decker draws an analogy to Trump:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.

And here’s Decker — an astute reader might catch the similarities!

Evil has come to America. The present administration is engaged in barbarism; it has arbitrarily imprisoned its opponents, revoked the visas of thousands of students, imposed taxes upon us without our consent, and seeks to destroy the institutions which oppose it. Its leader has threatened those who produce unfavorable coverage, and suggested that their licenses be revoked. It has deprived us, in many cases, of trial by jury; it has subjected us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and has transported us beyond seas to be imprisoned for pretended offenses. It has scorned the orders of our courts, and threatens to alter fundamentally our form of government. It has pardoned its thugs, and extorted the lawyers who defended its opponents.

This alone doesn’t get you in trouble, of course. Unless you’re a partisan of the MAGA right, there’s nothing that contradicts the current moral fashion about identifying the tyrannical character of the Trump regime, or even comparing Trump to historical figures against whom it is widely accepted that revolutionary violence would have been justified. No more than a decade ago, even the mild-mannered, respectable, moderate conservative author and pop sociologist J.D. Vance was comparing Trump to Hitler!2

Decker only gets in trouble when he follows these widely accepted facts and values to their logical conclusion: that it is not unreasonable to believe that at some point in the near future, it will become justifiable to engage in revolutionary (or, more accurately, counter-revolutionary) violence against the principals and agents of the Trump regime, so long as this violence is not conducted glibly or indiscriminately. Admittedly, Decker could have made these qualifications clearer. But the point should not be lost on someone who reads the essay in good faith. Below is the section that’s triggered his critics and gotten him a visit from the Secret Service. Are you ready? Here it is:

If the present administration chooses this course, then the questions of the day can be settled not with legislation, but with blood and iron. In short, we must decide when we must kill them. None of us wish for war, but if the present administration wishes to destroy the nation I would accept war rather than see it perish. I hope that you would choose the same.

The rot of the present administration runs deeper than one man. The sacrifice of a hero is insufficient to save our nation, and a gust of wind on a summer day would not have saved us. For let us make no mistake; the problem is not one man, but a whole class of people. If one head is cut off, another would take its place.

The only part that’s concerning here is the last paragraph, and particularly the locution that the threat to the republic is posed not merely by the president, but by “a whole class of people.” Ideally, the task of identifying the members of this class would not be left up to the audience, few members of which are likely to be as thoughtful as Decker, or to have internalized the principle of distinction, or to be able to mute the part of their self-identity that’s tied up with the regime and sees a merely implicitly limited hypothetical call to violence against regime officials as an explicit and immediate call to violence against its supporters.

It is nevertheless clear to me, having either been a part of or adjacent to Decker’s intellectual milieu for my entire adult life, based on the homage to the American revolution and the repeated references to the “present administration,” that the class of people being identified as potentially legitimate targets for violence is narrowly limited to regime decisionmakers and the agents who would execute their illegal and revisionary orders. This is also clear in the following paragraph where Decker identifies the conditions he believes would justify a resort to violence:

And when is that time? Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one. If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution. It may be best to stave off, and wait for elections to throw out this scourge; but if it should threaten the ability to remove it, we shall have no choice. We will have to do the right thing. We will have to prepare ourselves to die.

Yet his critics all insist he’s calling for the death of anyone on the right “because he lost an election,” even when it’s explained to them why this is false.

Why is this? The obvious explanation is that they disagree with Decker on the substance of what he thinks the Trump regime is guilty of. But that doesn’t tell you why they responded as caustically and obstinately as they did. I am a fan of the teen romance fantasy series Twilight, which I believe is better than Romeo & Juliet, but if someone wrote an article suggesting that it would be appropriate to use violence against Robert Pattinson in a hypothetical scenario where he imminently threatened to destroy the American constitutional order, I wouldn’t interpret it as a death threat against me.

A more reasonable explanation is that the people who don’t understand Decker’s article are simply dumb and boring people. Like everyone else, they believe what they’re told — or at least what they want to believe, and then what they’re told to believe in whatever echo chamber they happened to end up in. Unlike Decker and other smart and interesting people, however, they’re pathologically incapable of also thinking for themselves. It’s okay to think you should kill Baby Hitler. It’s okay to admire the American founders and their values. It’s okay to think we need a Second Amendment to deter state tyranny. Hell, for most of these people, it’s okay to think you should murder the vice president if you’re convinced he’s complicit in helping the other side steal an election.

Can you say the same thing about your own side? Of course not!

Why not? It doesn’t matter!

A smart and interesting person is someone who notices these inconsistencies and doesn’t simply paper them over. You don’t have to be precisely right about everything — you just have to make a well-reasoned, good-faith, unconventional argument and be willing to change your mind if someone gives you a good reason to do so. That might not seem like much of a challenge, but most people fail miserably. If telling inconvenient truths was popular, then it wouldn’t be very inconvenient, would it?

Being smart and interesting person often means having to deal with the mob. Most people would just give in; Nicholas Decker didn’t. Whenever you have a choice, don’t be like the mob — be like Nick.

A Petition

From the Practitioners of Illustration, Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Collage, and Graphic Design, and from the Producers of Inks, Paints, Pencils, Brushes, and Generally of Everything Connected with Visual Artistry.

To the Honorable Members of the House of Representatives.

Gentlemen:

You are on the right track. You reject abstract philosophies and show little regard for aesthetical enjoyment as merely an end in itself, divorced from the labor that produced it. You are rightly concerned above all with the fate of the human artist. You wish to free him from soulless competition, that is, to reserve the domain of art for works made by human hands and imbued with the human spirit.

We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity to apply your — what shall we call it? Your philosophy? No, nothing is more misleading than philosophy. Your aesthetic? Your framework? Your conviction? But you reject aesthetics, you distrust frameworks, and as for convictions, you insist that there are none in art criticism; therefore, we shall call it your taste — your taste without philosophy and without conviction.

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival which, by some twist of fate, operates under conditions so far superior to ours for the creation of graphic output that it is flooding the realm of artistic expression with it at an incredibly low cost and impossibly high volume. The moment it appears, our works lose demand, and every viewer turns to it instead. A whole enterprise of the human experience, with its countless nuances and industries, is suddenly brought to a standstill. This rival, which is none other than nature itself, is waging war on us so relentlessly that we suspect it is being manipulated against us by the forces of artificial intelligence (a dreadful conspiracy these days!), particularly since it seems to hold such disdain for our human-made creations.

We ask you to be so kind as to pass a law requiring the closure of all outdoor landscapes, parks, gardens, forests, beaches, mountains, lakes, rivers, and anything else through which the so-called beauty of nature is wont to manifest, to the detriment of the noble art forms with which, we are proud to say, we have enriched this society — a society that cannot, without betraying its highest cultural values, abandon us today to such unfair competition.

Be good enough, honorable representatives, to take our request seriously, and do not reject it without at least hearing the reasons that we have to advance in its support.

First, if you shut off as much as possible all access to nature, and thereby create a need for human-made art, what cultural and moral benefit in the United States will not ultimately be encouraged?

If America embraces more art, it will foster greater appreciation for human creativity, and as a result, we shall see a renaissance in cultural expression, with more opportunities for storytelling, symbolism, and emotional depth — elements that nature, for all its magnificence, cannot provide.

Our urban centers will be filled with art galleries and public installations. Countless artists will emerge to express the values and struggles of our time through their works. Thus, there is no area of cultural life that would not be enriched by the flourishing of human-made art.

The same holds true for our moral progress. Thousands of artists will create works that challenge our perceptions, elevate our empathy, and provoke necessary debates. In no time, we shall have a thriving cultural movement capable of upholding the intellectual and ethical ideals of America and satisfying the patriotic ambitions of the undersigned petitioners, artists, etc.

There is no aspiring artist in the quiet corners of his studio, no struggling sculptor working through the night, who will not see greater recognition and moral fulfillment in his pursuit of artistic greatness.

It needs but a little reflection, gentlemen, to be convinced that there is perhaps not one American, from the celebrated painter in Harlem to the humblest vendor of paintbrushes, whose life would not be enriched by the success of our petition.

We anticipate your objections, gentlemen; but there is not a single one of them that you have not borrowed from the tired arguments of hedonism. We defy you to utter a word against us that will not immediately reflect poorly on yourselves and the very ideals you claim to uphold.

Will you tell us that, though we may gain from this protection, America will not benefit at all, because the viewer will bear the cost?

We have our answer ready:

You no longer have the right to invoke the interests of the viewer. You have cast aside those interests time and again when they conflicted with the dignity of the creator. You have done so in the name of preserving craft, tradition, and the sacred labor of the human hand. For the same reason, you must do so once more.

Indeed, you yourselves have anticipated this reply. When told that the audience delights in a thing made cheaply and without toil, “Yes,” you answer, “but the artist has a stake in its rejection.” Very well. If spectators have a stake in the enjoyment of natural beauty born without human effort, creators have a stake in its suppression.

You have told us that works born of circuits and code must be rejected, for no human spirit strained to bring them forth. Then, we ask, by what standard do you accept the splendor of a forest after rain? The symmetry of a snowflake? The elegance of a bird’s flight? No toil carved these things, and yet you grant them reverence.

So let us be clear. If you forbid art that is soulless, that is slop, then forbid the trees. Ban the breeze. Censor the clouds. Either beauty needs labor, or it does not. Make your choice, but be consistent.

For as long as you scorn visions born of an algorithm, in proportion as their making demands no toil nor tale, how inconsistent it would be to admit the beauty of nature, whose creation costs nothing at all!

The above revision of Frédéric Bastiat’s “Petition of the Candlemakers” was made primarily by ChatGPT, as was the artwork throughout the article.

Let it therefore be known that I don’t extend ol’ Jeff the olive branch out of anything but compelling necessity. In ordinary circumstances, I would let sleeping chucklefucks lie. But as it is written in the Bible (or something), desperate times call for desperate fuckerinos.

We have all witnessed the clusterfucking dumbfuckery that has fuckwilily fucked these United States of Dumbfuckistan since the 5th Day of November in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Four, a day that will live in fuckery. Cheeto McFuckface and the Space Nazi fuck around daily in a wicked fuckfest of epic fucktitude. The feckless fuckers in Congress have fucked fecklessly to the point that they no longer have any fucking fecks left to fuck. And we fucktastic chucklefucks, having chucklefucked ourselves restless, now chucklefuck the days away wondering how much more fuckery the fuckers can fuck.

What I’m saying, Jeff — nay, pleading — is: Let’s start over. We may each chucklefuck to our own fuckwidgety band of fucktards, but we’re on the same side of this clusterfucking fuckcrustable of dumbfuckery. And by God, if that doesn’t mean it’s time to cut the chucklefucking and fuck the chumpfuckery dead in its tracks, I don’t know what does. I am but one chucklefuck, Jeff, but I speak for millions. Help us, Jeff Tiedrich. You’re our only hope.

I trust it is apparent from the title of this post what I’m asking for. I understand this is no small request, not the sort of fuckwitless fuckery to be taken without first fucking it over fuckstidiously. Please, take all the time you need to chucklefuck with your friends and family, and if you’re worried the fucking fuckers will clusterfuck you off to Fuckoffistan, I get it.

However, if you do choose to run, Jeff, I will move heaven and earth to help you. I’ll quit my job, stop writing, take over editorial duties at The Smirking Chimp — whatever it takes. I don’t know your position on child labor, but I’ve got a few neighborhood kids who are willing to help out for the right price. They’re cheap, Jeff — the fuckers will do anything for a few V-Bucks.

One condition, though: You have to ditch the whole “Wendy’s drive-thru” schtick and go for the jugular. You need to call Trump a [redacted], Jeff. And do not, under any circumstances, let up. It’s the one thing that might puncture his ego and show all the fucking fuckers out there that the Democrats are still the totally fucktubular chucklefucks everyone expects them to be. There’s going to be pushback, but the feckless fuckers must not be allowed to fuck us chucklefucks over. Not again.

It’s a risky move, Jeff. But at some point, we fuckers no longer enjoy the luxury of having any fucks left to lose. We need to pull out all the stops and fuck our way to victory — or one day, we may find that we chucklefucks have truly fucked our last chuckle.

On paper, I’m probably one of the few people who should consider a Ph.D. in political science. I started reading scholarly journal articles for fun as soon as I figured out how to access them in my freshman year, I own N ≥ 1 signed print copies of journal articles and university press monographs on such topics as anti-statism during the Cold War, I have a shirt with Kenneth Waltz printed on it, and I bore people to death talking about the paradigms whenever they ask me about Ukraine and expect an update on current events. (Also, when people want to talk about the paradigms, I start telling them why I don’t like the paradigms.)

Like Bryan Caplan, I try not to follow the news because I understand there’s an opportunity cost and I’d rather read literature and get summaries of real-world events from Wikipedia. I consider myself statistically literate — though by no means adept — but International Relations is the second least quantified of the political science subfields (and let’s keep it that way!) and I’m competent enough with AI to get it to tell me what statistical methods I need to use and when I need to use them, and also to do all my coding for me. Besides, if worse comes to worst, I can just take a page from Lacan and Badiou and make shit up so people think I’m smart.

Still, I think it would be a bad decision for me to get a Ph.D. in political science. I’ve suggested the opposite in the past, but I think the analysis is flawed. If you want to become a public intellectual, the Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein route seems a lot less circuitous than the Noam Chomsky, Bryan Caplan, or even Noah Smith or Richard Hanania route. At any rate, the fact that I’ve changed my mind ought to suggest that I’m making the case because I think the facts are really compelling, not because I have an emotional connection to one side or the other.

As I see it, there are basically no good reasons for anyone to become a political scientist right now, and very few good reasons for anyone to become any type of scientist, at least for the time being. We need a total and complete shutdown of academia until we can figure out what the hell is going on. And that means taking decisive action to prevent any more impressionable young minds from being sucked in by the allure of credentialism. Tanks in Harvard Yard? Well, maybe not Harvard College, but definitely the Kennedy School. I’m sure Larry Summers would love another 15 minutes of fame larping as the guy in the Tiananmen Square photo.

The biggest problem to me seems that we don’t even know if we’re going to need political scientists come a decade from now (if we even “need” them right now). I think we’ll get AGI sometime around 2030, which means that for anybody who’s not already in a doctoral program, it’s going to be obsolete by the time they finish.

• A question that faculty ought to be asking: Why give out degrees that are immediately going to become useless?

• A question that students ought to be asking: Why get a degree that’s immediately going to become useless?

I know we can’t be certain about these things, and stupid mistakes are really costly. But it sure seems like AGI is coming soon. And when it does, knowledge sector jobs aren’t going to be safe anymore. Sure, tenured faculty are probably going to be fine. They won’t be getting research grants like they used to, but the ideal-typical “research” will probably consist of some mix of prompt engineering, proofreading, and presenting at conferences. As for new hires, the academic job market is already hell. What happens when anybody with Deep Research can hit a button and generate a 50-page paper about why countries sometimes trade with the enemy during wartime? A job whose core functions involve person-to-person contact and wheeling and dealing is probably going to have a lot more security than one that involves knowledge production, at least until we get cheap humanoid robots.

It also seems that if you think there’s a good chance AGI is coming soon, you should spend the interim socking away as much money as you can to prepare for economy-wide structural unemployment and disturbingly plausible techno-feudalism. That means you probably shouldn’t sign up for a decade of poverty as a grad student and postdoc. Especially not when there’s an ongoing Yarvinist assault on the universities and a concerted national effort to defund research and dismantle scientific institutions.

Even if you think AGI isn’t coming, there’s already way too many people with a doctorate, at least in the humanities and most of the social sciences. According to a recent study of tenure track faculty members in political science:

The majority of PhD students, from 65% to 89% depending on the broad disciplinary category and 72% to 76% for political science specifically, enter their program with the goal of securing a [tenure track] academic position. Yet, there is a terrific imbalance between students’ desires and actual jobs that are available: depending on the discipline, only 3.5% to 20% of those who finish their program achieve this goal.

And unless you can get into a top program — which you probably can’t, or else it wouldn’t be a top program — your prospects are even poorer:

Six programs account for 33% of all faculty positions in PhD granting political science departments; 12 programs account for more than 50% of all positions; 27 programs (22%) account for 75% of all faculty positions; and 54 programs have fewer than five graduates in [tenure track] positions at a PhD-granting institution.

Then there are the pathologies of the academy. There are plenty of interesting, underexamined, and policy-relevant questions in political science, like theories of stereotyping in international politics — “and I mean theory here in the scientific sense, not that there aren’t enough articles about postcolonialism or the international as a Space of Queer Black Joy or whatever” — and state death. The advantage of the academy is supposed to be that you have virtually unlimited intellectual freedom. But that doesn’t mean you have an audience. You can write about these topics as a Substacker and get a fair reception, but if you’re an academic, no one’s going to care except the two or three people who have written about those topics in the past.

Thanks to modern communication technology, you can find an audience for almost anything as long as you’re smart enough. But the academy doesn’t reward work that’s substantively (and even often methodologically) interesting or important. It rewards work that mimics and fills in gaps in an already mind-numbingly boring literature. If you don’t want to spend your life running regressions to figure out how leaders with X qualities from Y regime type interact in Z international processes and institutions, you’re out of luck. Don’t you know the great debates are over?

So I guess this is all to say: If you want a job, and you want a job that’s not going to make you want to blow your brains out, don’t get a Ph.D. in political science. You can still do research — in fact, it’s going to be more accessible than ever if we get AGI. But you won’t be trapped in a dying and increasingly ossified profession.

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1: Should you not use AI because it’s bad for the environment? Nope!1 , who’s developing AI for animal advocacy, estimates that the entire training run of his Open Paws LLM only emitted one-third as much CO₂ equivalent as a single hamburger. Or, in other words, “[i]f this LLM convinces just one person to skip one burger, it’s already carbon-negative.” In fact, Open Paws is expected to reduce demand by far more than one burger. According to Tucker-Davis, “even if our AI only helped 10% of animal charities become 10% more effective, it would save an additional 10 million animals per year.” You can learn more about Open Paws by watching or reading their fundraising pitch.

2: , a very failed Substacker and philosopher of lint, attempts to convince me that I should care if there’s a God or not. I ultimately find the argument persuasive but I think he overstates it. See the article and my response.

3: Last week’s national political scandal: Top U.S. defense and foreign policy officials discussed sensitive plans to bomb Yemen using the messaging app Signal, unaware that The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was in the chat. Daniel Larison says the real scandal is that the administration is killing dozens of people in Yemen without a strategic rationale or legal authorization. For a recent history of the war in Yemen, also see this article by friend of the blog .

4: Peter Singer and Kasia de Lazari Radek interview David Duchovny (Fox Mulder on The X Files) for their podcast “Lives Well Lived.” Among other topics, they discuss Duchovny’s Ph.D. studies in English Literature at Yale, his novel Holy Cow — about a dairy cow who learns her fate and plots to escape to India — and his opinions about insect farming and cultivated meat. You can find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Substack.

5: Some of you precocious lads and lasses might be interested in applying to become a research assistant for the lovely Garrison Lovely. He’s writing a book about AI risk, “focuse[d] on how commercial and great power competition shape the race to build increasingly powerful and autonomous AI systems.” See here for more info.

6: Bentham’s Bulldog, Connor Jennings, Aidan Alexander, Charles Amos, and Richard Hanania all suggest that people who care about animals but don’t want to go vegan should “offset” their consumption of animal products by donating to an effective animal charity. According to the FarmKind Compassion Calculator, it only takes $23 per month in donations to the top animal charities to reduce as much animal suffering as the average person causes by consuming an omnivorous diet.2 I plan on adding my voice to the crowd in the coming days with an article detailing exactly what each animal charity needs your money for, as well as the reasons for and against giving to each of them. As always, anyone who makes a new recurring donation of at least $25 per month to the EA Animal Welfare Fund or a FarmKind or Animal Charity Evaluators recommended charity and sends me a receipt will get a free year-long paid subscription to the blog.

7: One of my favorite things about the offsetting trend is that most of the pushback appears to be from people who say the author should also have asked readers to go vegan. I agree that people should be vegan, of course, but I’m totally unconvinced that “asking people to go vegan” is a good use of my time. Still, I’m glad the commenters are there. Why? Because it juices the algorithm and drives more traffic to animal welfare articles. Because it makes offsetting look like the moderate thing to do, even though you can do a lot more for animals by donating than you can by going vegan. As Aidan put it:

Go vegan and you spare roughly 255 animals a year. Impressive! But donate enough and you could save 1,000 animals. Or 10,000. There’s no upper limit to how much good you can do, if your wallet is willing.

Also, if you donate, you can make up for past harms you’ve caused, but you can’t do that just by ceasing to cause more harm and going vegan.

8: This month’s farm animal welfare newsletter from Open Philanthropy is by , who’s commented on a few of my articles in the past. He shares five insights from animal welfare economics that should make animal advocates think more carefully about their strategy and activism. These include that blocking local factory farms can sometimes worsen the treatment of animals by driving industry to less regulated jurisdictions, that meat industry consolidation often reduces total animal farming, and that curbing wild-caught fishing sometimes results in more fish farming. I suspect you could make a similar criticism of farmer transition programs on the basis that supply disruptions are mostly going to be made up elsewhere in the economy.

An Abundance of Vagueries

9: Abundance is the word on everyone’s lips. The book, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, was published on March 18 to widespread acclaim and only slightly less widespread criticism. Unfortunately, one criticism I haven’t seen — and it strikes me as very important! — is that the Abundance Agenda is apparently fundamentally opposed to the interests of the Democratic coalition. To be clear, I wish Klein and Thompson the best of luck, but they probably face an uphill battle if they want to make the Democrats the party of YIMBY and supply deregulation when the biggest Democratic constituencies are affluent white liberals who don’t want their property values to go down and social justice interest groups and unions that want to impose onerous environmental, equity, and labor standards on everything. Even if the regulations in toto make everybody worse off, there’s still a collective action problem when you try to get rid of any one of them. The people they make worse off are only harmed a little bit by each rule, but the people they don’t make worse off have a huge incentive to fight you tooth and nail!

10: There’s a brief passage in Abundance about the meat industry, framed in opposition to degrowth advocate Jason Hickel’s book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. The degrowth plan, say Klein and Thompson, “is to shut off or scale down areas of production it deems destructive, like military investment, meat and dairy production, advertising, and fast fashion.” They agree that shutting down meat and dairy would be a good thing, but it’s obviously not going to happen. In fact:

For all the radicalism of his book, even Hickel inches from the task he sets for himself. He does not suggest anything akin to ridding the world of the factory farms that produce most of our beef. Instead, he proposes “to end the subsidies high-income countries give to beef farmers” and notes that “researchers are also testing proposals for a tax on red meat.” Fine proposals. But not the revolutionary upheaval that will cut our emissions rapidly enough to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And that is even assuming you could pass a global or multinational tax on meat. Which you could not.

Klein and Thompson’s implied solution is to subsidize alternative proteins, especially efforts to scale up cultivated meat. However, they’re very cagey about policy prescriptions and cultivated meat never receives more than fleeting mention throughout the book.

11: In 2021, Klein wrote a New York Times column suggesting that President Biden and Congressional Democrats should add a $2 billion “moonshot for meatless meat” to the Build Back Better plan, as recommended by the Good Food Institute. That’s of course a pittance in government spending terms — at the time, the legislation had a price tag of $2.3 trillion — and Klein, to his credit, said it wasn’t nearly abundant enough. In fact, according to the Good Food Institute, “to unlock the full potential of alternative proteins, it is estimated that $10 billion per year in global public spending on R&D and commercialization is needed.”

12: An Abundance-adjacent journalist, Michael Grunwald, writes in the New York Times that DOGE should take an axe to farm subsidies. Does that fit with the Abundance Agenda? Probably not, but it’s still a good idea. From Grunwald:

Mr. Musk’s minions inside the USDA have most prominently targeted its nobler activities, including efforts to prevent wildfires and food contamination, respond to the avian flu, improve animal welfare and study methods to make agriculture more productive and less environmentally damaging. […] But the real problem with the USDA is that its subsidy programs redistribute well over $20 billion a year from taxpayers to predominantly well-off farmers. Many of those same farmers also benefit from subsidized and guaranteed loans with few strings attached, price supports and import quotas that boost food prices, lavish ad hoc aid packages after weather disasters and market downturns as well as mandates to spur production of unsustainable biofuels. A little reform to this kind of welfare could go a long way toward reassuring skeptics that the administration’s efficiency crusade isn’t only about defunding its opponents and enriching its supporters.

13: Tyler Cowen interviewed Klein about the book and they got into a discussion about whether DOGE is mass firing government employees to prepare for AGI. Earlier, Klein interviewed Biden White House AI advisor Ben Buchanan, who says AGI is coming and the government knows it. If that’s true, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to think DOGE-style headcount reductions are soon coming to the private sector. That sounds very bad, at least in the short term!

14: On the topic of DOGE and AGI, Henry Farrell writes:

After the announcement of DOGE, but before it properly got going, I talked to someone who was not formally affiliated, but was very definitely DOGE adjacent. I put it to this individual that tearing out the decision making capacities of government would not be good for America’s ability to do things in the world. Their response (paraphrased slightly) was: so what? We’ll have AGI by late 2026. And indeed, one of DOGE’s major ambitions, as described in a new article in WIRED, appears to have been to pull as much government information as possible into a large model that could then provide useful information across the totality of government.

Getting High on Low Culture

15: Due to my ongoing obsession with the bizarre 2001–2009 ABC sitcom According to Jim, I’ve recently become interested in the depiction of masturbation in American screen culture. There’s a monograph on the subject by an Australian academic, Lauren Rosewarne, titled Masturbation in Pop Culture: Screen, Society, Self. According to the introduction:

Through the exploration of over 600 scenes from film and television, I present the case that masturbation has a very strong presence on screen. From sitcoms to horror movies, teen comedies to erotic thrillers, autoeroticism is easily detected.

The portrayal, however, is not simple.

Just as in real life a paradox exists where most of us masturbate and accept it as normal and natural, there simultaneously exists a silence about it; that we do it, but we don’t talk about it; that we enjoy it but we laugh about it. The screen reflects this conflicted relationship. It is there — hundreds and hundreds of times — but it is routinely whispered about, mocked, presented as a punchline, and is inevitably portrayed as controversial at the very least

I haven’t read much more than the introduction and I don’t plan to, but the author also wrote a short article about more ordinary and impartial screen depictions of autoeroticism.

16: Does it matter, though? I think so! Popular screen culture may have less influence than prestige media proportional to the number of viewers, but it’s likely much more relevant in absolute terms because it has a wider reach. One of the reasons Americans became more accepting of homosexuality, for example, is that millions of people were exposed to positive depictions of gay men through the NBC sitcom Will & Grace. In fact, survey data at the time showed that “increased viewing frequency [of Will & Grace] and parasocial interaction were found to correlate with lower levels of sexual prejudice — a relationship that was most pronounced for those with the least amount of social contact with lesbians and gay men.”

17: In 2012, then-Vice President Joe Biden became the first national political candidate in the United States to openly support gay marriage. He told David Gregory on Meet the Press that he thought Will & Grace “probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.” Obama staffers were reportedly furious that Biden invoked the program and “ruined what should have been Obama’s historic moment because he can’t control his loud mouth.”

18: Did 9/11 ruin TV by chilling dissent? Yeah, probably. I assembled a spreadsheet of the 10 top-rated U.S. television programs for each year between 1991 and 2018, using data from Wikipedia. Then, I coded each show for its genre (Drama, News, Procedural, Reality TV, Sitcom, Sports, or Miscellaneous) and whether I consider it slop or not. I had ChatGPT help me operationalize “slop,” and it came up with this:

A TV show is considered “slop” if it lacks intellectual, cultural, or societal value, offering little beyond basic entertainment. This includes shows that are purely for entertainment purposes, including but not limited to sports and reality shows, where there is no meaningful exploration of societal issues, norms, or ethics. These shows may be vulgar or simplistic but fail to challenge, question, or reflect societal changes in a meaningful way.

On the other hand, a show is not “slop” if it engages with cultural or societal issues, challenges prevailing norms, or offers intellectual or aesthetic value. This includes shows that portray controversial topics or marginalized groups in a nuanced way, provoke thought, or contribute to social change. These shows push the boundaries of what’s typical and provide a deeper reflection on culture, society, or human nature.

Using four different ChatGPT accounts, plus one trial where I wasn’t logged in, I then had it perform an analysis to decide whether each show in the dataset is slop according to the above criteria. If it considered a show “slop” at least three out of five times, I coded it as slop, and if it didn’t, I coded it as not slop. In total, 50 shows were considered slop and 23 were not slop. (I expect an apology from , as this exercise scientifically proves that Young Sheldon, at 5/5, is pure unmitigated slop.)

Here’s how each TV show is coded:

And here’s how sloppy each genre is:

If you look at the breakdown of the top 10 programs by year according to genre, it doesn’t look like 9/11 had much of an impact. Sitcoms had already fallen out of favor by 2000, and reality TV, sports, and procedurals were already on the rise. It’s possible that this trend would have reversed if not for 9/11, but it’s not obvious why. Survivor and CSI were instant hits when they premiered in 2000, and the downward trend in sitcoms was at least a decade old.

However, if you look at the sloppiness of top programs over time, there’s a clearer correlation with 9/11. The Simple Slop Score is the share of the top 10 programs considered slop, while the Weighted Slop Score is the share of viewers that sloppy programs had out of the total viewership of all the top programs. Before 9/11, the mean Simple and Weighted Slop Scores were 0.57 and 0.56, respectively. Afterward, they were 0.87 and 0.88, or an increase of 52% and 58%. These differences are both statistically significant, with p = 0.021 for the Simple Slop Score and p = 0.018 for the Weighted Slop Score. Ipso facto, TV did in fact become worse after 9/11, and there’s a plausible case that it became worse because of 9/11: The repressive environment of the so-called “war on terror” made it harder to air and market media that pushes back on societal norms.

The Drunk Sex Pest in Charge of the Pentagon Accidentally Did Something Right

19: Maybe you remember a month ago when New Cold War fanatics like Noah Smith were saying Trump and Pete Hegseth are isolationist surrender monkeys who secretly work for China because they were talking about cutting the military budget by 8%. Actually, it was clear at the time that Trump supports a massive increase in military spending and the 8% “cut” was just supposed to be a shift in the budget from certain priorities to other, stupider ones. Of course, a month later, even the pretense of fiscal responsibility has been dropped. According to Responsible Statecraft, the total gross budget cuts announced by Hegseth so far amount to $580 million, or less than 0.07% of the budget.

20: One of the programs Hegseth has cut is the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s internal think tank tasked with analyzing and extrapolating long-term national security trends. From its establishment in 1973 until 2015, ONA was run by military futurist Andrew Marshall — known as the “Yoda of the Pentagon” because his protégés include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz — who didn’t retire until age 93. According to the Washington Post in 2012:

While Marshall’s backers praise his office as a place where officials take the long view, ignoring passing Pentagon fads, critics see a dangerous tendency toward alarmism that is exaggerating the China threat to drive up defense spending.

“The old joke about the Office of Net Assessment is that it should be called the Office of Threat Inflation,” said Barry Posen, director of the MIT Security Studies Program. “They go well beyond exploring the worst cases. […] They convince others to act as if the worst cases are inevitable.”

21: ONA’s main accomplishment was developing the utterly insane AirSea Battle concept, which involves the United States spending an extraordinary amount of money to develop and procure long-range strike aircraft so that if war breaks out in the Western Pacific, it can strike deep in Chinese territory to destroy Chinese missiles and radar that might prevent it from deploying naval assets to defend its allies along China’s periphery (except those systems probably wouldn’t even do that). As Caitlin Talmadge has pointed out, this would involve the United States attacking Chinese military bases where nuclear and conventional missiles and nuclear command and control infrastructure are co-located, which might make China fear the United States is preparing to conduct a conventional counterforce attack on its nuclear capabilities and believe that it would have to launch its nuclear weapons first or else open itself up to a U.S. first strike. It’s unclear why anyone would think this is a good idea, since you could probably defend states in China’s region just by giving them a lot of defensive weapons (and thereby neutralize the threat that war would break out in the first place).

22: ONA was joined at the hip with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, perhaps the most nefarious of the D.C. think tanks, formerly run by Marshall’s closest protégé Andrew Krepinevich, who’s also the co-author of Marshall’s biography The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy. As of 2012, ONA furnished approximately 40% of CSBA’s budget, or around $3 million per year. Today, CSBA counts among its contributors at least 15 U.S. and eight foreign government entities, 20 defense contractors, and three influential conservative policy foundations.

23: Of course, the reason Hegseth got rid of ONA is the dumbest possible reason you could come up with.

Yet Another Insect Welfare Post

24: Tomorrow is your last chance to help insects in the United Kingdom! The U.K. government is consulting until April 1 about whether to allow insects to be used in feed for farmed pigs and chickens, which would result in an extraordinary amount of insect suffering in expectation. It takes about 5 minutes to fill out the consultation form to discourage the government from allowing this to happen. You don’t have to be a U.K. citizen to complete the form, and you can use the U.K. Voters for Animals GPT to write your responses for you. For more details, see this EA Forum post from February and this one from yesterday.

25: Animal Ethics, consistently one of the most forward-thinking organizations in the animal protection movement, has a short post on insect farming and several posts on invertebrate sentience that I recently discovered and think might be a good place to start for a skeptical layperson.

26: Insect Institute researchers recently published a paper calling out three erroneous assumptions in the insect farming literature that make insect farming look more viable than it really is. These are:

• that a handful of old studies can be relied upon for accurate data about environmental impacts;

• that insect farms can be expected to use food waste as feed (they actually use higher-quality feeds like those already used for livestock); and

• that insect farming is cost-effective (the researchers have already shown elsewhere that insect meal is three to four times more expensive than fishmeal and ten times more expensive than soybean meal).

The authors describe these assumptions as “bugs in the system” of insect farming research and include the following diagram:

27: Dustin Crummett also published a Reuters op-ed about the article, “Why insect farming is no silver bullet in drive to wean the world off meat.”

28: In 2018, there was an effort in Congress to prohibit federal funding for insect farming (although basically zero funding goes to insect farming anyway). It seems like it would be an easy victory in the current environment to get this attached to the next Farm Bill — whenever that’s getting passed — as long as it’s not lumped together with restrictions on plant-based and cultivated proteins. In fact, the conservative Washington Examiner ran an op-ed in January titled “Why is the government pushing bugs onto our plates?” by a senior fellow at a pro-animal think tank, The Wilberforce Institute.

I, , the humble author of this essay, do hereby kindly request that you like and restack this post and subscribe and become a paid subscriber to Going Awol on Substack and give me money and become a paid subscriber. In addition to indicating that you like the post, you’ll show me that you like the post and I will get money from you liking the post.

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Yesterday, I did something extremely embarrassing. So embarrassing, in fact, that I’d rather not share it here. But I will, because that’s how much I care about you, dear reader. What’s so embarrassing? I wrote a post on Substack. And it would be so embarrassing if you read it at this link here. So whatever you do, don’t click the link and don’t read it. It would be so embarrassing.1

This embarrassing situation reminds me of an essay I read recently about the philosophy of lint, “Pocket Lint and the Ship of Theseus: If You Remove and Replace Every Fiber, Is It the Same Lint?” by Dr. Dusty Threadwell of Greendale Community College. (Also the host of the blockbuster podcast “Lint Trap.”)

The commonly accepted definition of lint, according to the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, is “the common name for visible accumulations of textile fibers, hair and other materials, usually found on and around clothing.”

But there’s a problem with this!

You see, if lint is an accumulation of materials, that suggests it’s a cohesive mass that grows over time. However, lint is constantly gaining and losing fibers, just like Going Awol is constantly gaining subscribers and is constantly losing them.

Dustin Crummett also tells me there are many insects in lint. When we look at lint, however, we don’t say “that’s a bunch of textile fibers, hair, and other materials, and also bugs” — we just say it’s a bunch of lint. So we must think the bugs are part of the lint.

But if 60% of the mass of what’s indicated by the term lint is actually insects, it doesn’t make sense to say it consists of textile fibers, hair, and “other materials.” The other materials are the biggest part!

Let’s say we want a working definition of opponents of the Shrimp Welfare Project and I propose classifying them as “non-dunderheads who don’t spew verbal diarrhea” and “other individuals.” The dunderheads are the biggest constituency!

Unfortunately, this is just the beginning of what people get wrong about lint. Consider what Ayn Rand had to say about it:

Lint is the residue of the unthinking — the physical manifestation of stagnation, of passivity, of the collectivist decay that seeks to settle upon all men who refuse to act. The man who permits lint in his pocket has already surrendered to the morality of the parasite, content to carry the detritus of entropy rather than rise to sweep it away. Do not ask who will remove the lint. The man of reason does not ask — he acts. He alone reaches into his pocket and casts it aside, not for the sake of others, but for himself, for the inviolate purity of his own existence. To tolerate lint is to tolerate the slow erosion of the self. To remove it is an act of moral triumph.

Now, what’s the significance of this?

There is none!

And that’s the point.

I, , the humble author of the preceding essay, do hereby extend my sincerest thanks for your having read it and do encourage you to like and restack this post and subscribe and become a paid subscriber to Going Awol on Substack and give me money and become a paid subscriber. In addition to indicating that you like the post, you’ll show me that you like the post and I will get money from you liking the post.

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Going Awol

every Curtis Yarvin essay

It goes without saying that Elon’s DOGE is a masterpiece of Bayesian bromanship—a triumph, a tragedy, a fin du fin of blackpilled middle-Platonism. And no, I will not explain. Em dash…

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a year ago · 82 likes · 22 comments · Amos Wollen

Going Awol

every anti-Substack Substack

has anyone else noticed a vibe-shift? when i first took to Substack, it was a meadow of magical shower thoughts wrapped in a tea-towel of wonder; now all i see is men, and i hate it…

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a year ago · 76 likes · 7 comments · Amos Wollen

Going Awol

every anti-EA thinkpiece

Effective Altruism—which comes from the Greek “effectos” meaning utilitarianism and “alte” meaning utilitarianism—is a utilitarian theory of utilitarianism according to we should maximise utility by stealing attention from progressive causes to promote utilitarianism…

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2 years ago · 107 likes · 26 comments · Amos Wollen

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On March 15, several high-ranking U.S. national security officials discussed plans to strike the Houthi militia in Yemen using the encrypted messaging app Signal.1 Also in the chat was Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and an Iraq War cheerleader who should be thrown into a volcano.

According to records released by The Atlantic, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth updated the chat (with Goldberg in it) with information about strike plans 31 minutes before warplanes were supposed to leave the ground and at least 121 minutes before bombs were supposed to be delivered. Vice President JD Vance replied, “I will say a prayer for victory.”

Then, about two hours later, the United States bombed Yemen, killing 13 civilians and injuring nine. In the week that followed, U.S. operations killed at least 25 civilians, including four children, and injured 28. More than 55% of strikes hit non-military civilian targets, including a school, two medical facilities, a wedding hall, and a university. Only one of 38 strikes was confirmed to hit a military target.

Killing these civilians was a needless choice. American military personnel do not target civilian infrastructure on purpose, but military planners and defense policymakers routinely make decisions to kill large numbers of civilians when they design and authorize campaigns with inappropriately broad objectives and a high tolerance for so-called “collateral damage.” No serious observer believes airstrikes are going to stop the Houthis from attacking international shipping — apparently the goal of the “Houthi PC small group” — unless the United States engages in a sustained bombing campaign and kills a lot of civilians in the process. Houthi capabilities were not seriously degraded by the Biden administration’s year-long precision bombing campaign, and the group only emerged stronger from a seven-year air war by Saudi Arabia — backed to the hilt by the United States — that plunged Yemen into a humanitarian crisis and killed at least 377,000 people.

Whether you think it’s the right decision or not to bomb Yemen and blow the limbs off dozens of innocent people, the decision to do so ought not to be taken lightly or without robust public debate. There are conditions under which it is appropriate to kill civilians, even for economic ends like protecting shipping. But it is not appropriate to kill civilians without a good reason, or to engage in military action when you haven’t methodically considered the risks and costs of intervention or the possibility that it won’t achieve its goals.

Nearly 23 years into sustained military operations in Yemen, there still hasn’t been a reckoning in the United States about the risks and costs of war. Last year, there was only one off-handed mention of Yemen in the presidential debates. None of the major media outlets pressed Trump, Biden, or Harris on their Yemen policy. Nor was it mentioned at all in the Democratic or Republican Party platforms.

Congress, despite having passed a broad authorization for the use of military force after 9/11, has never authorized the use of force against the Houthis, nor has the administration even pretended that it has Congressional authorization to attack Houthi targets. There was a bit of a dust-up last year when Biden started bombing Yemen and some members of Congress demanded he seek their permission to continue, but the White House ignored them and the whole thing blew over in a few days. It’s an unwritten rule that the administration doesn’t even have to make up a legal rationale anymore. Not in these United States of Exception.

You might think that Yemen turning up in the news again would be the right occasion to ask if we have a good reason to kill dozens of people and bomb schools and medical centers in a country where over half the health facilities are completely non-functional and two-thirds of the population relies on international humanitarian aid. Not so, however. The media is much more concerned about the security of the process by which the strikes were ordered than the fact that they were ordered in the first place. Even the members of Congress who once demanded a justification for war now content themselves with sending strongly worded letters about the handling of classified information.

The thing about the death of the republic, according to our media and popular culture, is that you don’t know about it until it happens. But that’s not true. It happened a long time ago, and still nobody seems to notice. If the president can engage in an illegal war and kill dozens of people without raising an eyebrow, he’s no longer the head of a constitutional republic but the sovereign of an extraconstitutional empire. And we’re all too preoccupied arguing over the stitching on his new robe to see that he has no clothes.