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I'd read Aaron Gell's piece (confessions of a former carnivore, and I think it's good, but the reasons people persist in eating meat that Ozy found interesting seem too complicated to me. People mostly eat meat because meat is what there is to eat. People mostly don't go vegan even if they agree it would be good for the same reason people mostly don't adopt a keto diet or whatever, even if they think it would be good for them- because adopting a severely restricted diet (and veganism specifically is much more restrictive than most health focused diets like keto) imposes a heavy day-to-day mental load in an area to which we're not used to having to devote much mental energy. I don't think it's usually much more complicated than that
Agreed. I'm a conflicted omnivore (as our host puts it), and the availability of vegan or vegetarian food to me has improved markedly over the past 10 years or so. I put this down to three factors:
1) I moved to a bigger city.
2) I realised that cooking nice vegan food is easier than I'd realised (the secret ingredient is more paprika). Also, beans on toast is technically vegan, and I like sophisticated meals like that.
3) Society Marches On. I know that the article said veganism is trending down, but I live in the UK and haven't seen that tendency here.
Where I find vegetarianism difficult and veganism almost impossible (for a picky eater like me) is eating on the go. Things like grabbing a bit to eat at a train station, or getting a meal deal from a grocery store for your lunch break.
Eating on the go and eating in social situations/with family. These people invited me into their home and are offering me a meal they prepared? I'm not going to be an asshole about it
My transition into vegetarianism specifically had a carveout for exactly these prepared meals by family or friends.
It actually worked really well for me! Was there a slightly perverse incentive to eat more meat with my family? Maybe? But speaking from personal experience, I highly recommend weird half-stages of vegetarianism as ways to be more internally morally consistent/healthy/environmentally friendly/whatever the motivation is, while also not ruining your life. Adaptation is hard and it's easier to do it in chunks.
In the end, I did make it to full vegetarianism, but from where I'm sitting now, I don't think I'll make it to vegan. If mostly-vegetarian-but-not-a-social-asshole is where other people land as their permanent spot, good on them too! Mostly-vegetarian-but-not-a-social-asshole is worlds better than most other people. If everyone were mostly-vegetarian-but-not-a-social-asshole, the world would be a much better place.
I've been neither keto nor vegan, but I've looked into both, and keto seems to have a much higher cognitive load to me. You can be vegan without testing your urine or blood for ketones, or even counting calories or carbs. You can pick any fruit or vegetable off the produce rack or any dried legume or grain off the shelf without worrying that a few bites of the wrong one will "knock you out of veg-osis." Heck, you can be vegan by eating nothing but highly palatable junk foods readily available even in food deserts (Google "Accidentally Vegan Products").
(Would the latter be good for long-term health? No, but many omnivores survive, if not thrive, on nothing but junk food for decades.)
Yes, this is fair. When I've thought about how much harder it would be to be vegan rather than vegetarian I suppose I have been mentally stipulating 'vegan and still eating a nutritious balanced diet of not just, like, chips.
1) most arguments for boykotting meat could also be made for boykotting anything non-fairtrade, unethical, whatever. People are against child labor and slavery but don't spend a great amount of time avoiding products that supports these things. Mostly because of the mental load, and also because they don't believe their individual boykott will matter. Interestingly, EA and rationalists seem very dismissive of boykotts except in the case of veganism
2) the article mentions the supposed many "decent alternatives" to meat. There's lots of delicioys vegan food, but I think these mostly don't exist. The beyond meat burger patty is pretty ok, but there are no alternatives to a juicy steak or salmon sashimi. Many rationalists will proudly talk about surviving on soylent or beyond meat burritos, a lot are neurodivergent with sensory issues around food. But some (most?) of us really, really enjoy the complex world of taste and food. Vegans should really stop saying oyster mushroom is a decent alternative to fried chicken. They aren't, unless you don't remember what meat tastes like or never liked it to begin with. In Ozy's last linkpost their was a link stating a correlation between not handling raw meat much and going vegetarian. Leading me to believe many vegans/vegetarians just never cared for the taste of it to begin with
Yeah, I tried the Beyond Meat burger when it first came out and everyone was saying it was a game-changer, and it's... a veggie burger that looks kinda like a real burger and tastes like a pretty typical veggie burger. Unless they've improved the recipe since then, colour me unimpressed. I'd rather have a spicy bean patty or something.
I was a vegetarian around 30 years ago when options were limited and lived off a lot of pretend meat things. Linda McCartney and so on. I'm now an omnivore who tries to avoid eating too much meat. The lesson I've found is: pretend meat is a lot less enjoyable than naturally vegan things, like spicy vegetable stew.
Dunno. As I don' bother cooking, I mostly pick up shop made sandwiches. Todays, there are always vegan options. I could pick them up just as easily as I pick up the tuna or chicken sandwich. The trouble is, I believe the tuna or chicken sandwich is better for my muscles. Sure vegan protein exists, but vegan cholesterol for the sake of having testosterone is hard to find, vegan body-builders exist, but they are on complicated diets with many supplements. I think a vegan sandwich that a shop could easily make and would have as much protein and fat/cholesterol as chicken or tuna (and of the good kind, that also matters) is harder to invent.
I guess the protein could be lentils or beans, and the fat/cholesterol could be palm, coconut or cocoa oil, lab mice reacted well to these oils. But how many beans one needs to be equivalent of 1/4 of a chicken breast? And all the gas it would cause.
It's hard to get vegan food in most places, and like it or not it just doesn't taste that good. The simplest answers are often the most explanatory with basic stuff like eating, to be honest.
Every couple of years I try to go veggie for health reasons, and usually relapse within a week. I'm just too tired from work etc. to devote energy to thinking about food.
Also outside of a few blue cities, if you're a man, people make fun of you.
There's also what I call the Miley Cyrus problem - she went vegan, then quit because it seems her health and body just couldn't take it, even though she was very upset about this.
She is rich to the point she could offload any mental load as you mentioned onto others from her spare change. Blood tests? Supplements? Extra effort while shopping to check what is really vegan? Preparing meals that are textured and tasty? And keeping track of calories and proteins and other nutrients? Have nutritionists and doctors check and perhaps experiment whether she's eating the right kind of vegan diet for her body, assuming there is one? All problems that can be solved with money.
The way I read the story though, her body just couldn't function under a vegan diet, just like some bodies cannot handle peanuts, or lactose.
This makes me want someone to do a study: is "allergic to vegan diet" a thing, and what proportion of the population could be affected?
> I was particularly interested in Karlan's suggestion that, to prevent this kind of thing in the future, politically controversial aid (anything that touches gender or LGBT issues or sex ed, for example) should be put in a separate funding stream so that it can be easily shut off without touching crucial programs like antiretrovirals or therapeutic food.
Unfortunately those primarily interested in gender causes have an incentive to keep them bundled together by the same logic.
One thing I'll add, though: You shouldn't be voting because of the 1-in-a-billion chance that your individual vote will matter. You should vote because society functions better when people follow their civic duty and vote rather than get all game theoretic about it, haha.
"I was particularly interested in Karlan's suggestion that, to prevent this kind of thing in the future, politically controversial aid (anything that touches gender or LGBT issues or sex ed, for example) should be put in a separate funding stream so that it can be easily shut off without touching crucial programs like antiretrovirals or therapeutic food."
You are a bit naive here. The truth is, there are many many people on the progressive side who are more interested in gender issues than antiretrovirals, because they see things from the moral crusade perspective than the pragmatic perspective, and they will keep practicing entryism in the antiretroviral program the same way how they keep practicing entryism in say sports (kneeling) or really everything.
There is really no escape from fighting the culture wars to the end. Either progressivism or conservatism simply has to disappear, otherwise this will keep happening. We cannot really have "neutral" things.
Regarding north koreans watching k-dramas, One of my favourite k-dramas is 'crash landing on you' which is about a south korean who gets stranded in north korea. Firstly it's very funny and well made but also it's very interesting to see a view of north korea you don't often see, and there's definitely a vibe that it was made deliberately with a north korean audience in mind.
The message is very much on the 'we're not so different, won't it be awesome when we finally get to unify again' etc., the main cast are mostly north koreans who are portrayed positively, one of the heros is a high ranking uncorrupt general and they don't touch on the actual leader but rather villains are corrupt officials.
There's a north korean audience insert character who is super into k-dramas and goes around explaining south korean culture, idioms etc. to the other confused north koreans.
So I have a paid account (to support your work) that never posts (because a paid account is linked to a payment system, which can be used to doxx someone) which I use to read your paywalled stuff. (That's not a dig on you personally, I don't trust anyone on this thing, or in the rest of life, really.)
The love-shy thing was deeply affecting, honestly--thank you for writing. Yeah, there's a lot of selection bias with these communities, and the way 'incel' gets extended to mean 'misognyistic entitled incel' is kind of dangerous. Nobody wants to tell young men how to be attractive, because it would be misused, so the ones that don't pick it up naturally just figure nobody wants them and they get angrier and angrier.
On a personal note, if I'd had something like that when I started dating in my late twenties, rather than the PUA crowd (and the liberals who had lied to me earlier), I might not have turned into such an ideologically radicalized redpiller. Or blackpiller? Maroonpiller? Burgundypiller? Basically my being comfortable enough to talk to women was attained by specifically rejecting feminism, so...you do the math.
I have my doubts it'll be all that effective, frankly--my experience is that the vast majority of heterosexual women are attracted to confidence, and being myself was a lot less effective than trying to add some alpha male into my attitude. (I never expected to succeed completely--the point was to be not-me enough to start dating, like maybe 30%, and it kinda worked.) But good things never happen if you don't try. That's the EA way, right? As you say yourself, if you even create a few good unions, then writing the article is a net positive.
I think your article about the parasocial relationships is also very good. If we're going to have celebrities, this is going to happen, you're right. Yes, the whipsawing effect people had with JKR probably had a lot to do with the strength of the response--she was your friend, and then she wasn't. I've never actually gotten into the Harry Potter books (I was *just* too old when they came out--read the first two and thought 'this is very well done and I would have been really into this if I were about five years younger'), so the whole thing is kind of weird to watch.
I didn't really go into it in the post because the post wasn't about that, but I do think being "30% more alpha male" is pretty helpful for dating. I know a lot of guys who read a PUA book or two, filtered out the misogyny and sexual harassment, and became a lot better at flirting. IMO none of the PUAs' good advice is actually incompatible with feminism. It isn't sexist to set boundaries, show off how cool you are, or tease women!
With regard to conservatives being discriminated against, I would just point out that the account you link is from a student perspective. The dynamics around hiring conservative faculty may be rather different.
I can vouch for the films working, as I personally went vegan in 2020 after watching Dominion. I went in claiming that if I was going to eat meat I should watch and comprehend the cost of doing so and be able to stomach watching a slaughterhouse.
I made it maybe 30-45 minutes in before I had to turn it off. The critics say the film is cherry-picked; I fail to comprehend why that matters if the screaming and torture is only 50% as bad some of the time.
I’ll also agree with the comments. In the Initial transition, there’s a lot of mental overhead and physical discomfort in your body not being used to eating a certain way. This happens with all diets, but making it dummy simple for people to eat vegan and eat well will increase adherence. We need a lot more tofu and tempeh and soy curl pre made product out and available for newbies, teaching people how to easily transition.
Most people transitioning to veganism are used to having a big hunk of meat on the plate. Having a big chunk of seitan to fall back on, or a slab of nicely crusted tofu, or a block of tofu that’s been turned into “deli slice equivalents” will help people out massively (and isn’t even hard to do).
Interestingly, one of the people behind Dominion (Kat Von D) has not been vegan for several years. I think a second person out of the team of five isn't either.
I must confess that "people are deliberately trying to make sure that funding the democratic populace will dislike is not noticed is, well, not exactly encouraging -- and now that this has been mentioned or admitted, the impulse is to spread the claim far and wide and to be very aggressive and incisive in auditing.
I noted that around the time of the earlier DOGE cuts, a lot of broadly left-wing organizations, including some focused on domestic culture war or politics and some focused on foreign culture war or politics suddenly seemed to be having funding crises and also that a lot of distinctly left-wing political or culture war organizations were explicitly uncovered by DOGE.
Cutting the medicine for sick children is really not good, but neither is bundling all kinds of pork with the medicine for sick children, especially if my side doesn't get an equal slice.
I think the vast majority of the "gender" funding is stuff that, if the average Republican sat down and had it explained to them, Republicans would support-- it's for helping girls go to school and preventing domestic violence, not for hiring people with blue hair and pronouns to lecture Africans about trans-inclusive language. But it doesn't matter. We need to silo everything that the stupidest person on X might conceivably object to so that it can get turned off without threatening therapeutic food.
I originally typed "vaccines" in that post but then it occurred to me that we should silo vaccines too in case Republicans want to stop vaccine funding whenever they're in office.
I'd read Aaron Gell's piece (confessions of a former carnivore, and I think it's good, but the reasons people persist in eating meat that Ozy found interesting seem too complicated to me. People mostly eat meat because meat is what there is to eat. People mostly don't go vegan even if they agree it would be good for the same reason people mostly don't adopt a keto diet or whatever, even if they think it would be good for them- because adopting a severely restricted diet (and veganism specifically is much more restrictive than most health focused diets like keto) imposes a heavy day-to-day mental load in an area to which we're not used to having to devote much mental energy. I don't think it's usually much more complicated than that
Agreed. I'm a conflicted omnivore (as our host puts it), and the availability of vegan or vegetarian food to me has improved markedly over the past 10 years or so. I put this down to three factors:
1) I moved to a bigger city.
2) I realised that cooking nice vegan food is easier than I'd realised (the secret ingredient is more paprika). Also, beans on toast is technically vegan, and I like sophisticated meals like that.
3) Society Marches On. I know that the article said veganism is trending down, but I live in the UK and haven't seen that tendency here.
Where I find vegetarianism difficult and veganism almost impossible (for a picky eater like me) is eating on the go. Things like grabbing a bit to eat at a train station, or getting a meal deal from a grocery store for your lunch break.
Eating on the go and eating in social situations/with family. These people invited me into their home and are offering me a meal they prepared? I'm not going to be an asshole about it
My transition into vegetarianism specifically had a carveout for exactly these prepared meals by family or friends.
It actually worked really well for me! Was there a slightly perverse incentive to eat more meat with my family? Maybe? But speaking from personal experience, I highly recommend weird half-stages of vegetarianism as ways to be more internally morally consistent/healthy/environmentally friendly/whatever the motivation is, while also not ruining your life. Adaptation is hard and it's easier to do it in chunks.
In the end, I did make it to full vegetarianism, but from where I'm sitting now, I don't think I'll make it to vegan. If mostly-vegetarian-but-not-a-social-asshole is where other people land as their permanent spot, good on them too! Mostly-vegetarian-but-not-a-social-asshole is worlds better than most other people. If everyone were mostly-vegetarian-but-not-a-social-asshole, the world would be a much better place.
I've been neither keto nor vegan, but I've looked into both, and keto seems to have a much higher cognitive load to me. You can be vegan without testing your urine or blood for ketones, or even counting calories or carbs. You can pick any fruit or vegetable off the produce rack or any dried legume or grain off the shelf without worrying that a few bites of the wrong one will "knock you out of veg-osis." Heck, you can be vegan by eating nothing but highly palatable junk foods readily available even in food deserts (Google "Accidentally Vegan Products").
(Would the latter be good for long-term health? No, but many omnivores survive, if not thrive, on nothing but junk food for decades.)
Yes, this is fair. When I've thought about how much harder it would be to be vegan rather than vegetarian I suppose I have been mentally stipulating 'vegan and still eating a nutritious balanced diet of not just, like, chips.
Two more things to add:
1) most arguments for boykotting meat could also be made for boykotting anything non-fairtrade, unethical, whatever. People are against child labor and slavery but don't spend a great amount of time avoiding products that supports these things. Mostly because of the mental load, and also because they don't believe their individual boykott will matter. Interestingly, EA and rationalists seem very dismissive of boykotts except in the case of veganism
2) the article mentions the supposed many "decent alternatives" to meat. There's lots of delicioys vegan food, but I think these mostly don't exist. The beyond meat burger patty is pretty ok, but there are no alternatives to a juicy steak or salmon sashimi. Many rationalists will proudly talk about surviving on soylent or beyond meat burritos, a lot are neurodivergent with sensory issues around food. But some (most?) of us really, really enjoy the complex world of taste and food. Vegans should really stop saying oyster mushroom is a decent alternative to fried chicken. They aren't, unless you don't remember what meat tastes like or never liked it to begin with. In Ozy's last linkpost their was a link stating a correlation between not handling raw meat much and going vegetarian. Leading me to believe many vegans/vegetarians just never cared for the taste of it to begin with
Yeah, I tried the Beyond Meat burger when it first came out and everyone was saying it was a game-changer, and it's... a veggie burger that looks kinda like a real burger and tastes like a pretty typical veggie burger. Unless they've improved the recipe since then, colour me unimpressed. I'd rather have a spicy bean patty or something.
I was a vegetarian around 30 years ago when options were limited and lived off a lot of pretend meat things. Linda McCartney and so on. I'm now an omnivore who tries to avoid eating too much meat. The lesson I've found is: pretend meat is a lot less enjoyable than naturally vegan things, like spicy vegetable stew.
Dunno. As I don' bother cooking, I mostly pick up shop made sandwiches. Todays, there are always vegan options. I could pick them up just as easily as I pick up the tuna or chicken sandwich. The trouble is, I believe the tuna or chicken sandwich is better for my muscles. Sure vegan protein exists, but vegan cholesterol for the sake of having testosterone is hard to find, vegan body-builders exist, but they are on complicated diets with many supplements. I think a vegan sandwich that a shop could easily make and would have as much protein and fat/cholesterol as chicken or tuna (and of the good kind, that also matters) is harder to invent.
I guess the protein could be lentils or beans, and the fat/cholesterol could be palm, coconut or cocoa oil, lab mice reacted well to these oils. But how many beans one needs to be equivalent of 1/4 of a chicken breast? And all the gas it would cause.
It's hard to get vegan food in most places, and like it or not it just doesn't taste that good. The simplest answers are often the most explanatory with basic stuff like eating, to be honest.
Every couple of years I try to go veggie for health reasons, and usually relapse within a week. I'm just too tired from work etc. to devote energy to thinking about food.
Also outside of a few blue cities, if you're a man, people make fun of you.
There's also what I call the Miley Cyrus problem - she went vegan, then quit because it seems her health and body just couldn't take it, even though she was very upset about this.
She is rich to the point she could offload any mental load as you mentioned onto others from her spare change. Blood tests? Supplements? Extra effort while shopping to check what is really vegan? Preparing meals that are textured and tasty? And keeping track of calories and proteins and other nutrients? Have nutritionists and doctors check and perhaps experiment whether she's eating the right kind of vegan diet for her body, assuming there is one? All problems that can be solved with money.
The way I read the story though, her body just couldn't function under a vegan diet, just like some bodies cannot handle peanuts, or lactose.
This makes me want someone to do a study: is "allergic to vegan diet" a thing, and what proportion of the population could be affected?
> I was particularly interested in Karlan's suggestion that, to prevent this kind of thing in the future, politically controversial aid (anything that touches gender or LGBT issues or sex ed, for example) should be put in a separate funding stream so that it can be easily shut off without touching crucial programs like antiretrovirals or therapeutic food.
Unfortunately those primarily interested in gender causes have an incentive to keep them bundled together by the same logic.
I also wrote about probabilities, and how it can be morally and mathematically consistent to not worry about extremely low probability events, here:
https://ramblingafter.substack.com/p/fanaticism-and-st-petersburg-destroyed
One thing I'll add, though: You shouldn't be voting because of the 1-in-a-billion chance that your individual vote will matter. You should vote because society functions better when people follow their civic duty and vote rather than get all game theoretic about it, haha.
You should have a section about developments in philosophy of religion and call it “Particularly, God”
"I was particularly interested in Karlan's suggestion that, to prevent this kind of thing in the future, politically controversial aid (anything that touches gender or LGBT issues or sex ed, for example) should be put in a separate funding stream so that it can be easily shut off without touching crucial programs like antiretrovirals or therapeutic food."
You are a bit naive here. The truth is, there are many many people on the progressive side who are more interested in gender issues than antiretrovirals, because they see things from the moral crusade perspective than the pragmatic perspective, and they will keep practicing entryism in the antiretroviral program the same way how they keep practicing entryism in say sports (kneeling) or really everything.
There is really no escape from fighting the culture wars to the end. Either progressivism or conservatism simply has to disappear, otherwise this will keep happening. We cannot really have "neutral" things.
Regarding north koreans watching k-dramas, One of my favourite k-dramas is 'crash landing on you' which is about a south korean who gets stranded in north korea. Firstly it's very funny and well made but also it's very interesting to see a view of north korea you don't often see, and there's definitely a vibe that it was made deliberately with a north korean audience in mind.
The message is very much on the 'we're not so different, won't it be awesome when we finally get to unify again' etc., the main cast are mostly north koreans who are portrayed positively, one of the heros is a high ranking uncorrupt general and they don't touch on the actual leader but rather villains are corrupt officials.
There's a north korean audience insert character who is super into k-dramas and goes around explaining south korean culture, idioms etc. to the other confused north koreans.
So I have a paid account (to support your work) that never posts (because a paid account is linked to a payment system, which can be used to doxx someone) which I use to read your paywalled stuff. (That's not a dig on you personally, I don't trust anyone on this thing, or in the rest of life, really.)
The love-shy thing was deeply affecting, honestly--thank you for writing. Yeah, there's a lot of selection bias with these communities, and the way 'incel' gets extended to mean 'misognyistic entitled incel' is kind of dangerous. Nobody wants to tell young men how to be attractive, because it would be misused, so the ones that don't pick it up naturally just figure nobody wants them and they get angrier and angrier.
On a personal note, if I'd had something like that when I started dating in my late twenties, rather than the PUA crowd (and the liberals who had lied to me earlier), I might not have turned into such an ideologically radicalized redpiller. Or blackpiller? Maroonpiller? Burgundypiller? Basically my being comfortable enough to talk to women was attained by specifically rejecting feminism, so...you do the math.
I have my doubts it'll be all that effective, frankly--my experience is that the vast majority of heterosexual women are attracted to confidence, and being myself was a lot less effective than trying to add some alpha male into my attitude. (I never expected to succeed completely--the point was to be not-me enough to start dating, like maybe 30%, and it kinda worked.) But good things never happen if you don't try. That's the EA way, right? As you say yourself, if you even create a few good unions, then writing the article is a net positive.
I think your article about the parasocial relationships is also very good. If we're going to have celebrities, this is going to happen, you're right. Yes, the whipsawing effect people had with JKR probably had a lot to do with the strength of the response--she was your friend, and then she wasn't. I've never actually gotten into the Harry Potter books (I was *just* too old when they came out--read the first two and thought 'this is very well done and I would have been really into this if I were about five years younger'), so the whole thing is kind of weird to watch.
I didn't really go into it in the post because the post wasn't about that, but I do think being "30% more alpha male" is pretty helpful for dating. I know a lot of guys who read a PUA book or two, filtered out the misogyny and sexual harassment, and became a lot better at flirting. IMO none of the PUAs' good advice is actually incompatible with feminism. It isn't sexist to set boundaries, show off how cool you are, or tease women!
With regard to conservatives being discriminated against, I would just point out that the account you link is from a student perspective. The dynamics around hiring conservative faculty may be rather different.
I can vouch for the films working, as I personally went vegan in 2020 after watching Dominion. I went in claiming that if I was going to eat meat I should watch and comprehend the cost of doing so and be able to stomach watching a slaughterhouse.
I made it maybe 30-45 minutes in before I had to turn it off. The critics say the film is cherry-picked; I fail to comprehend why that matters if the screaming and torture is only 50% as bad some of the time.
I’ll also agree with the comments. In the Initial transition, there’s a lot of mental overhead and physical discomfort in your body not being used to eating a certain way. This happens with all diets, but making it dummy simple for people to eat vegan and eat well will increase adherence. We need a lot more tofu and tempeh and soy curl pre made product out and available for newbies, teaching people how to easily transition.
Most people transitioning to veganism are used to having a big hunk of meat on the plate. Having a big chunk of seitan to fall back on, or a slab of nicely crusted tofu, or a block of tofu that’s been turned into “deli slice equivalents” will help people out massively (and isn’t even hard to do).
Interestingly, one of the people behind Dominion (Kat Von D) has not been vegan for several years. I think a second person out of the team of five isn't either.
I must confess that "people are deliberately trying to make sure that funding the democratic populace will dislike is not noticed is, well, not exactly encouraging -- and now that this has been mentioned or admitted, the impulse is to spread the claim far and wide and to be very aggressive and incisive in auditing.
I noted that around the time of the earlier DOGE cuts, a lot of broadly left-wing organizations, including some focused on domestic culture war or politics and some focused on foreign culture war or politics suddenly seemed to be having funding crises and also that a lot of distinctly left-wing political or culture war organizations were explicitly uncovered by DOGE.
Cutting the medicine for sick children is really not good, but neither is bundling all kinds of pork with the medicine for sick children, especially if my side doesn't get an equal slice.
I think the vast majority of the "gender" funding is stuff that, if the average Republican sat down and had it explained to them, Republicans would support-- it's for helping girls go to school and preventing domestic violence, not for hiring people with blue hair and pronouns to lecture Africans about trans-inclusive language. But it doesn't matter. We need to silo everything that the stupidest person on X might conceivably object to so that it can get turned off without threatening therapeutic food.
I originally typed "vaccines" in that post but then it occurred to me that we should silo vaccines too in case Republicans want to stop vaccine funding whenever they're in office.
It gives me no joy to answer "Thanks, I hate it" in the most honest terms.
Man, I wish the battle lines hadn't formed around vaccines.