United States Politics Thread 46

[zompist]

Terms like "plant-based" usually become buzz words over time. They're supposed to. If they were only meant to be non-emotional apolitical statements of fact they wouldn't exist because we already have the word "vegetarian." The proper definition of "plant-based" is: "This comes from plants, but more importantly I am better than you."

I dunno, my impression of the words is the opposite. "Vegetarian" and even more so "vegan" suggests proselytizing hippies. "Plant-based" sounds neutral and also less likely to be absolutist.

Also, though I also get tired of people whose Single Issue is vegetarianism, it's absurd to pretend that there are no health- or climate-based reasons for a plant-centered diet.

[Ares Land]

i think he's on to something. adding animal products to american beer can't make it worse

As an aside, there's some really good American beer too.
(In fact, I mostly got Lagunitas and Brooklyn Lager in the fridge right now. I really like Sam Adams too but it's harder to find.)

Surprisingly, many brewers do use animal protein during the fabrication process. One source of these is fish bladders. (Something to do with filtering and clarifying.)
This is optional, of course, and with all due respect to Mr Ludlow, the right to put fish bladder extract in beer isn't the hill I'd pick to die on myself.

[Linguoboy]

Terms like "plant-based" usually become buzz words over time. They're supposed to. If they were only meant to be non-emotional apolitical statements of fact they wouldn't exist because we already have the word "vegetarian." The proper definition of "plant-based" is: "This comes from plants, but more importantly I am better than you."

I dunno, my impression of the words is the opposite. "Vegetarian" and even more so "vegan" suggests proselytizing hippies. "Plant-based" sounds neutral and also less likely to be absolutist.

I agree. I first started widely hearing the term a few years ago when branded meat substitutes like the Beyond Burger and Impossible Burger began being aggressively marketed, though I think it was already commonly used to describe non-dairy milks. What all of these products have in common is a consumer base that reaches well beyond strict vegans and vegetarians. (In fact, some vegans and vegetarians I know look down upon the meat substitutes in particular because they are highly processed, which is at odds the traditional hippie ethos of being close to nature.) A lot of folks these days are trying to cut down their consumption of animal products for a variety of reasons (e.g. health conditions, environmental concerns, disgust at industrialised husbandry) without going full veg and I think that's the market that "plant-based" was coined to connect with.

Surprisingly, many brewers do use animal protein during the fabrication process. One source of these is fish bladders. (Something to do with filtering and clarifying.)

The substance made from fish bladders has the quaint English name "isinglass". Basically it causes the yeast particles to clump together in a gelatinous mass which can be easily removed. Since it is removed, there's some debate on whether beers and wines clarified with isinglass are truly vegan (bzw. non-kosher, for those products using isinglass derived from non-kosher animals like the beluga sturgeon). Obviously a strict vegan would avoid these products while someone who occasionally eats fish would probably be fine with them.

[zompist]

The substance made from fish bladders has the quaint English name "isinglass".

Huh! I didn't know that, and now I understand a joke in Bored of the Rings: their version of Isengard was called Isinglass.

[Ares Land]

The substance made from fish bladders has the quaint English name "isinglass". Basically it causes the yeast particles to clump together in a gelatinous mass which can be easily removed. Since it is removed, there's some debate on whether beers and wines clarified with isinglass are truly vegan (bzw. non-kosher, for those products using isinglass derived from non-kosher animals like the beluga sturgeon). Obviously a strict vegan would avoid these products while someone who occasionally eats fish would probably be fine with them.

Ah, thanks!


As for the negative stereotype of vegans: I always got along well with vegans.I confess I like vegan food a lot. Even zucchini-chocolate cakes.

[Ryusenshi]

i think he's on to something. adding animal products to american beer can't make it worse

A few years ago, at a college cafeteria, we were offered a choice between "normal rice" and "vegetarian rice". Wait, how is regular rice not vegetarian?? It turned out that "vegetarian rice" had additional legumes and was intended to serve as a full meal, while the plain rice was intended to be served with a piece of chicken.

[Nortaneous]

i think he's on to something. adding animal products to american beer can't make it worse

A few years ago, at a college cafeteria, we were offered a choice between "normal rice" and "vegetarian rice". Wait, how is regular rice not vegetarian?? It turned out that "vegetarian rice" had additional legumes and was intended to serve as a full meal, while the plain rice was intended to be served with a piece of chicken.

My first guess would've been that the "normal rice" was cooked in meat-based broth, which is a very normal way to prepare rice if, like me, you are the sort of person who chooses between restaurants by seeing which one has ayran

[Linguoboy]

If you've been following the news about the latest anti-Asian hate crime bill that passed the Senate, you may have been wondering, as I was, why the media is to terrible.

So now I'm having my own version of this. My sister in St Louis posted urging friends to contact their representatives about a pending bill she felt will have a negative impact on education. She didn't go into detail but she mentioned "whitewashing", so I thought she meant something along the lines of Iowa Study Bill 1205 (which purports to secure "the fullest degree of intellectual freedom and free expression" in education while simultaneously banishing any mention of "white privilege" from the curriculum). Fortunately, she did give the official name, HB 1141, so I could look it up--only to find descriptions of a completely innocuous bill which provides financial relief for students impacted by the pandemic.

Apparently, the objectionable parts are somewhere in the tacked-on amendments, which I can't find the full text of anywhere including on the official site of the State legislature. One of them, HA 3, apparently consists of a transgender athlete ban, which I only know because general news searches turn up headlines about a "trans athlete bill". To its credit at least, the Post-Dispatch article does go on to specify that "proposal was attached to an unrelated education bill" and later names the bill with a hotlink to a government site (which--as previously mentioned--doesn't actually contain the full text of the amended bill, at least not anywhere I can find it). This seems super basic, but it's more than a lot of other sources (such as the ones I found while researching the aforementioned Iowa bill).

The journalistic practices around this are just incompetent, but the issues with the (Republican-controlled) state website are beginning to feel like malice aforethought.

[Ares Land]

transgender athlete ban

There are days where I think I can get where conservative are coming from, and sometimes the depth of the conservative mind are just unfathomable.

[Linguoboy]

transgender athlete ban

There are days where I think I can get where conservative are coming from, and sometimes the depth of the conservative mind are just unfathomable.

Honestly, this is one of the most fathomable parts of the conservative mind to me. Conservatism, at its core, is about fear of change and not being able to freely assume everyone's gender based on superficial markers (so you can treat them differently, of course) is a big change. Just about every conservative argument I've heard deployed against "the transgenders" today is one they were using against "the gays" when I was young. It's one of the main reasons why queer solidarity makes so much sense to me. Yes, being trans is a very different thing than being gay, lesbian, or bisexual, but to our enemies we represent the same sort of threat so we stand a greater chance of fending them off if we all stick together.

[Ares Land]

I don't know, the specific fears considering trans people are just so... oddly specific. Bathrooms? Sports?

(Then again, when I was a kid, the utmost proof of secure masculinity was to be very, very afraid of homosexual rape. Go figure.)

[Linguoboy]

I don't know, the specific fears considering trans people are just so... oddly specific. Bathrooms? Sports?

(Then again, when I was a kid, the utmost proof of secure masculinity was to be very, very afraid of homosexual rape. Go figure.)

Like I said, they're the exact same fears I heard people voice back when I first started paying attention to debates around societal acceptance of homosexuality in the early 80s. You couldn't share bathrooms with gay people because we were all sex pervs. You couldn't let us play sports because that meant sharing not only bathrooms but also changing rooms and showers. And you couldn't have us in the army because that meant all of the above plus bunking with us.

(All the while, of course, some of the same outspoken conservatives who were loudly condemning us for being sex pervs were the ones actually attacking children in these spaces and counting on the shame around homosexuality to keep their crimes from becoming public. Dennis Hastet was the most high-profile of these abusers but he wasn't the only one. Not to mention those who enabled abuse like Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. It's a running joke among the queer left that you have more to fear in a public bathroom from Republican legislators than from trans people.)

YouTuber Natalie Wynn (a.k.a. ContraPoints) has a good video breaking this all down:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us

She's specifically reacting to an essay by J.K. Rowling, but goes on to show how none of her arguments are new or unique to her. In the first half of the video, she talks about "bigotry" in the abstract and how Rowling's arguments are characteristic of a certain kind of "soft" or "indirect" bigotry which claims to love its targets even while still demonising them. In the second half, she gets more into where she thinks the particular fixation on bathrooms comes from--a point expanded on by Lindsey Ellis in a companion video about transphobia in film.

[Moose-tache]

... she gets more into where she thinks the particular fixation on bathrooms comes from...

I think it's obvious. There are trolls and mid-century ghosts lurking in there!

But seriously, linguoboy got to the heart of the issue right away: it's less about bathroom procedure itself and more about change. Nobody likes having reality rewritten under their feet, and for some conservatives having their society start treating trans people like normal humans feels like being the last sane person on Earth. They don't want to be told (by someone who feels entitled to dictate terms to them) that what they see as obvious and true is now officially false. It makes them feel like they're in 1984 and the country has suddenly always been at war with Eastasia. It requires them to accept not only that they could be completely wrong about things they took to be a given, but also that other people have the authority to tell them they're wrong about what is and isn't real. Honestly I would have a lot of sympathy if the concept of reality they're defending wasn't one built on the deliberate denial, demonization, and violent brutalization of innocent people. That's a reality I'd rather not live in, thank you.

[Nortaneous]

the last Republican president was against bathroom bills on the campaign trail, but everyone was all "fuck that guy, we need to make sure he doesn't reshape American politics in the slightest", and the monkey's paw curled.

[dril voice] The Religious Right is back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (wolf Howl)

(but it probably would've come back anyway, since it's the only faction within the GOP that has both numbers and institutions)

[Ares Land]

the last Republican president was against bathroom bills on the campaign trail, but everyone was all "fuck that guy, we need to make sure he doesn't reshape American politics in the slightest", and the monkey's paw curled.

Nah, when I talked about bathrooms I was more thinking of the oddly specific moral panics about how trans women are gonna rape you in the bathroom, the stuff you get from TERF-adjacent circles.

I'm not sure this is specific to America, or to the religious right. Recently I read an utterly insane rant in an anti-religious French rag.

FWIW Trump did reshape American politics (in a very slight way) on that particular subject: bathroom bills were rescinded. Though TBH he never struck me as being particularly interested in the subject.

[Raphael]

A lot of us have known that some right-wingers think like this for a while, but it's still interesting to see them state it so clearly:

(Link to a tweet that contains a link to the original piece, which I don't really want to link to directly):

https://twitter.com/SykesCharlie/status ... 4002692103

"My primary reason for refusing the vaccine is much simpler: I dislike the people who want me to take it, and it makes them mad when they hear about my refusal. That, in turn, makes me happy."

I remember when some people on the Right were pretty good at convincing the world that theirs was the side of responsible, mature, adult behavior.

[Ares Land]

For some reason, about ten years ago conservatives adopted the 'spoiled immature brat' persona. Which is really weird and awkward when they're 50, as often happens.

That guy sounds like a real piece of work, though hilarious in his own sick way. I wasn't prepared for the 'illegal immigrants have mumps' line.

The logic again escapes me. If you hate wearing a mask (guess what? everyone fucking hates the damn things) what's the best, quickest and safest way to get rid of them?

I suspect this is the type of people who secretly enjoy the crisis. I doubt they're very much inconvenienced by the restrictions, but they get to loudly complain about them all the time.

[Ares Land]

Oh, by the way, we are apparently 100 days into Biden's presidency.
I follow American politics from afar and I kind of had pegged him as very, very... bland but I'm actually really impressed by the guy. Could we borrow him for a few months?

[Linguoboy]

Oh, by the way, we are apparently 100 days into Biden's presidency.

About a month ago, it struck me that the First Hundred Days was something we used to hear pundits go on and on about whenever there was a new POTUS and yet I'd hardly heard it mentioned this time round. Maybe it's because Biden was Veep so he's not really new to the job in the way that most of his predecessors were?

I follow American politics from afar and I kind of had pegged him as very, very... bland but I'm actually really impressed by the guy. Could we borrow him for a few months?

He's managed to slightly exceed my modest expectations in some areas, while confirming my fears on others--notably refugee policy. (He initially pledged to restore the annual cap on refugee admissions to 125,000 for the coming fiscal year--which, honestly, is a piddling figure for a country of 331 million--but delayed finalising that number and didn't say what it would be for the current year, although his administration hinted it would be half that. He then announced he would be keeping it at 15,000 for the current year. After fierce blowback, he backtracked, but he still won't set a final figure until next month and now his administration is again suggesting it'll be closer to 15,000 than 62,500. And, of course, he's still using the same for-profit child detention companies for unaccompanied minors from Central America.)

[Ares Land]

Oh, by the way, we are apparently 100 days into Biden's presidency.

About a month ago, it struck me that the First Hundred Days was something we used to hear pundits go on and on about whenever there was a new POTUS and yet I'd hardly heard it mentioned this time round. Maybe it's because Biden was Veep so he's not really new to the job in the way that most of his predecessors were?

It's the other way around here. The first 100 days are making news today, something I don't think was reported on before.

He's managed to slightly exceed my modest expectations in some areas, while confirming my fears on others--notably refugee policy. (He initially pledged to restore the annual cap on refugee admissions to 125,000 for the coming fiscal year--which, honestly, is a piddling figure for a country of 331 million--but delayed finalising that number and didn't say what it would be for the current year, although his administration hinted it would be half that. He then announced he would be keeping it at 15,000 for the current year. After fierce blowback, he backtracked, but he still won't set a final figure until next month and now his administration is again suggesting it'll be closer to 15,000 than 62,500. And, of course, he's still using the same for-profit child detention companies for unaccompanied minors from Central America.)

Oh, I though he'd completely reneged on this one. 15,000 is indeed ridiculous. We admit double that number in France (and honeslty we're treating refugees like animals).