““the meat paradox”: the mental dissonance caused by our empathy for animals and our desire to eat them.
Australian psychologists Steve Loughnan, Nick Haslam, and Brock Bastian coined the term in 2010, defining it as the “psychological conflict between people’s dietary preference for meat and their moral response to animal suffering.” We empathize with animals — after all, we are animals ourselves — but we’re also hardwired to seek calorie-dense, energy-rich foods. And for most of human history, that meant meat.”
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“Almost one in four American adults tells pollsters they’re cutting back on their meat intake — while the country sets new records for per capita meat consumption. We abhor the treatment of animals on factory farms, where 99 percent of meat in the US is produced, yet we dislike vegans. And even those of us who say we’re vegetarian or vegan are often stretching the truth.”
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“One of the founding studies of the meat paradox literature, Percival told me, was the one published by the psychologists Loughnan, Haslam, and Bastian in 2010. They gave questionnaires to two groups, and while the subjects filled in answers, one group was given cashews to snack on while the other group was given beef jerky. The surveys asked participants to rate the sentience and intelligence of cows and their moral concern for a variety of animals, such as dogs, chickens, and chimpanzees.
The participants who ate the beef jerky rated cows less sentient and less mindful — and extended their circle of moral concern to fewer animals — than the group that ate the cashews.”
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“Even exposure to strict vegetarians or vegans can elicit a “heightened commitment to pro-meat justifications,” Percival says about one study. This might explain why we see per capita meat consumption rise in tandem with rates of veganism and vegetarianism.”
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“We make myths to justify our relationship with animals, too. One of the more popular ones is the “ancient contract,” which goes something like this: Animals give us their meat, and in exchange, we give them domestication and thus an opportunity to evolutionarily succeed. This concept was coined by science writer Stephen Budiansky in 1989 and has been touted by food writers Michael Pollan and Barry Estabrook, as well as iconic animal welfare scientist Temple Grandin.”
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“We also use language to obscure; one study found that replacing “slaughtering” or “killing” with “harvesting” reduced dissonance, and that replacing “beef” and “pork” on restaurant menus with “cow” and “pig” generated more empathy for animals. Adding a photo of an animal next to the dish further elevated empathy, while also making vegetarian dishes more appealing to study participants.
Percival says the meat paradox can be found across cultures and time periods, and that “there is no culture in which plant foods are problematic in the same way.””
“On Tuesday, an unprecedented number of Kansans voted against a constitutional amendment that would have allowed lawmakers to end abortion protections. That’s a big win for women’s rights, but the outcome also carries major implications for elections nationwide this November. It’s especially true in those states where abortion rights are on the ballot after the overturning of Roe Vs. Wade and where Democrats are seeking to stay in power.
Contrary to what some conservatives had thought, abortion is an issue that can mobilize voters.
More than 900,000 Kansans showed up to the polls to vote on the state’s abortion referendum. That’s the biggest turnout for a primary election in the state’s history, according to the Kansas Secretary of State’s office. That number is closer to what we’d expect to see in a general election turnout, which is always vastly higher than primaries. And it suggests we could also see high turnout in upcoming primaries where abortion is on the docket.”
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“What’s perhaps most surprising about the referendum vote is that it happened in a very Republican state. Just a quarter of registered voters in Kansas are Democrats, while 40 percent are Republicans. Nearly a third are unaffiliated.”
“Hospitals across the country are grappling with widespread staffing shortages, complicating preparations for a potential Covid-19 surge as the BA.5 subvariant drives up cases, hospital admissions and deaths.
Long-standing problems, worker burnout and staff turnover have grown worse as Covid-19 waves have hit health care workers again and again — and as more employees fall sick with Covid-19 themselves.”
“In Arizona, Senate nominee Blake Masters and likely gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake are Trump-endorsed 2020 election deniers. In Michigan, gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon is cut from a similar cloth. Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, one of 10 House Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment in 2021, lost his bid for reelection to yet another Trump-endorsed Big Lie supporter (two other House impeachment supporters, Washington Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse, seemed on track to fend off Trump-backed challengers in Washington state’s open primary). Rusty Bowers, the Arizona House speaker and star January 6 committee witness, lost a state Senate primary to — you guessed it — a Trump-backed election conspiracist.
It’s a splash of cold water on the narrative of a waning Trump.
“Pundits trying to will into existence a GOP that has moved beyond him are way beyond the facts,” the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein wrote on Wednesday morning. “This remains a Trump-ified GOP, with most openly embracing him and almost none openly confronting him.”
Brownstein is right. And he’s right for a fundamental reason: Trump’s vision of politics, a war between true Americans and a system that has betrayed them, describes how many Republican voters see the world.”
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“The simplest barometer of whether Trump still dominates the party is the 2024 presidential polls. And by that metric, Trump’s grip is pretty hard to question.
The RealClearPolitics poll average has Trump leading the field by an average of 26.2 points. All but one national poll cataloged by FiveThirtyEight in July had Trump beating DeSantis by a similarly large double-digit margin (the sole outlier, from Suffolk University, had Trump ahead by a “mere” 9 points).
Granted, any challenger against an “incumbent” like Trump probably wouldn’t pop up on many voters’ radars this far ahead of an election. But much of the “Trump is slipping” coverage skips past all this vital context. For example, the New York Times recently ran a write-up of its poll with Siena College headlined “Half of G.O.P. Voters Ready to Leave Trump Behind, Poll Finds.” And indeed, the poll did find that 51 percent of Republicans would vote for someone other than Trump if the primary were held today.
Yet the headline is misleading. The Times poll found that Trump still commanded 49 percent support in the party; his next closest rival, DeSantis, garnered a mere 25 percent. In the article, reporter Michael Bender notes that the results show that “Mr. Trump maintains his primacy in the party,” contradicting the piece’s headline.”
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“If you read studies of the American conservative movement, Trump’s continued strength should be no surprise. The political strength of the movement never came from its policy ideas. Many of its positions, like tax cuts for the rich and stringent abortion restrictions, have ultimately proven to be extremely unpopular.
Instead, its strength has been rooted in grievance: the bitterness of those who believe that modern America is changing too fast, beyond recognition, turning “traditional” citizens into aliens in their own country.
A charitable observer might call this sentiment nostalgia for a bygone America. A more critical one might call it the venting of reactionary white male rage against a more egalitarian country. But whatever your assessment, it is this politics of cultural grievance that animates the GOP base.”
“the Wisconsin Supreme Court..rendered most ballot drop boxes illegal in the state. The Court found that state law, which requires that mail-in ballots be delivered to a “mailbox,” does not allow “delivery to an unattended ballot drop box.””
“Fedora Castelino left India when she was only four months old, eventually settling in the United States at the age of six as a dependent on her father’s H-1B visa. Now almost 19, she’s staring down a deadline: In just two years, she might have to deport herself.
Castelino is one of over 200,000 “Documented Dreamers,” dependent visa holders who were brought to the U.S. legally as children and have resided here lawfully since. If they can’t secure a work visa or sponsorship for a green card before turning 21—a process made far more difficult by extreme application backlogs and wait times—they’re forced to self-deport. “It’s so hard to realize that I’ve lived here basically my entire life—this is actually not my home,” says Castelino. “Even after finishing all my schooling in America, I’m still not in a home country, which is really hard to accept.”
“These are individuals who’ve essentially been raised and educated here,” says Dip Patel, founder of Improve the Dream, which advocates for Documented Dreamers. “This is typically the only place they’ve known.” According to a survey conducted by Patel’s organization, Documented Dreamers were, on average, just five years old when they came to the United States.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, introduced by the Obama administration, shields undocumented “Dreamers” from deportation. Around 650,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children through no fault of their own are protected. But Documented Dreamers have received comparatively little attention from politicians.”
“In March, DeSantis signed into law H.B. 1577, which described itself as “an act relating to parental rights in education.” The bill limits discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in public school instruction and authorizes parents to sue school districts that break the vaguely written rules.
Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Chapek initially tried to keep the company publicly neutral on the bill. But after it passed, Chapek and Disney, responding to pressure from the company’s employees, both spoke out against H.B. 1577.
Irked by the criticism, DeSantis and Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature took aim at the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID), which state lawmakers established in 1967 to give Disney substantial autonomy within the nearly 40 square miles it owns in Orange and Osceola counties. The special district allows Disney to control zoning, construction, infrastructure, emergency services, and taxation to pay for all of it.
While Florida has more than 1,800 special districts, Republicans targeted Disney by restricting the bill to districts established prior to 1968. DeSantis made it clear when he signed the bill that it was punishment for criticism of H.B. 1577. “You’re a corporation in Burbank, California, and you’re going to marshal your economic might to attack the parents of my state,” he said. “We view that as a provocation, and we’re going to fight back.” The bill would dissolve the RCID and five other pre-1968 districts in 2023.
While DeSantis and other Florida Republicans seem to view the RCID as an undeserved privilege, it freed Orange and Osceola counties, along with their taxpayers, from responsibility for Disney’s massive park. For instance, Disney pays the Orange County Sheriff’s Office millions of dollars each year for policing services. Orange County Mayor Jerry L. Demings said it would be “catastrophic” for the county’s budget if it had to pay for first-responder services in the park. DeSantis suggested in May that the state could take over the district.
The RCID also has $1 billion in bond debt. In an April statement to bondholders, Reedy Creek representatives said the district cannot be dissolved under Florida law unless those debts are paid off.
What happens next is not entirely clear, although an early attempt by a group of nearby taxpayers to sue DeSantis was dismissed due to lack of standing. Some First Amendment scholars suggested that Disney could challenge the law as a form of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.”
“Tariffs aren’t merely making summer fun more expensive—they are also making it potentially more dangerous too.
“Life Saver is not a misnomer,” writes Neil Mooney, an attorney representing Life Saver Pool Fence Systems, Inc., in testimony submitted earlier this month to the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC), which later this week will hold a hearing on the economic impact of the multitude of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration in 2018.
For a company like Life Saver, which manufactures fencing meant to keep children away from unsupervised pools where they might accidentally drown, the tariffs have hiked the cost of raw materials imported from China. In his written testimony, Mooney estimates that the company has paid about $1.2 million in tariffs over the past four years—and has twice had to raise prices “specifically because of the tariffs.”
“The imposition of the Section 301 tariffs has forced Life Saver to raise its prices which inevitably has led to lower sales volume and therefore fewer protected pools,” writes Mooney. “The economic impact of the Section 301 tariffs is not only felt by Life Saver and other similar businesses and their employees, but also by the end consumers—American families.”
Are higher taxes on Chinese-made imports worth leaving American children marginally less safe?
Apparently so, at least for the past two presidential administrations. Former President Donald Trump used Section 301 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1974 to impose tariffs on a wide range of goods imported from China in several phases during 2018 and 2019. As a result, the average tariff rate applied to goods from China effectively doubled. Cumulatively, Americans have paid about $136 billion in higher costs as a result of those import taxes—that’s about $1,000 per household, according to research by the National Taxpayers Union, a nonprofit that opposes the tariffs.
Tariffs are adding to inflation, too. A study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a trade-focused think tank, found that repealing tariffs could reduce overall inflation by about 1 percentage point. Despite that, the Biden administration has so far been unwilling to do more than talk about repealing the tariffs imposed by Trump.”
“American taxpayers pay to be spied upon. That’s one takeaway from new documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has been examining how federal agents spent millions to purchase massive troves of cellphone location data and dodge Fourth Amendment requirements.
As part of a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the ACLU obtained thousands of previously unreleased records showing how DHS agencies—including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—are purchasing and accessing “huge volumes of people’s cell phone location information quietly extracted from smartphone apps.”
These agencies are “sidestepping our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable government searches and seizures,” suggests the ACLU.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court held (in Carpenter v. United States) that under the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement must have a warrant before accessing a suspect’s phone location data from cellular service providers. But federal authorities have been getting around this by purchasing aggregated cellphone location data from data broker firms like Venntel and Babel Street. And they’re spending millions of taxpayer dollars doing it.”