Richard Dawkins wants to eat Human Meat
I'll run out of stuff to post about this topic pretty soon (until more articles promoting eating people are published) so don't worry but I found this op-ed that would seem to get at Dawkins' motivations. (Which yeah I don't think is about climate change)
Standard disclaimer about the National Review being CIA

You clearly were not properly tuned into the twitter mob zeitgeist in 2017. I hope you have since rectified things.

If FBS makes you squeamish, it is probably best for you not to spend too much time digging into what we eat and how it is prepared.

As part of my research today I've been looking into HEK 293, and if you know about what's going on there please tell me.

"Normal" cells can divide a limited amount of time and then they stop working. And you have to start whatever experiment you were doing over with a new cell line, which is changing variables.

At some point scientists basically accidentally developed an immortal cell line that will divide unlimited amounts without losing function. (As an aside, this is actually basically what cancer cells do in your body, which is bad). Which is very useful when doing experiments because all the cells are theoretically identical, so you are reducing variables.

There are a number of common immortal cell lines, HEK's being one, with different properties. I never worked with immortal cell lines, but I think I got the basic gist of it right.

Yes but why have they decieded that it makes for a good soda flavoring is what I still am working on figuring out.

I am guessing they use that cell line to produce one of the ingredients?

If yes, then they probably decided it was a good idea because it worked. Biotech is a lot of trial and error, and you just go with what works, often without really understanding why.

They figured out how to add taste receptors to the cell line, and use it in testing food products, but not as an flavoring themselves.
Bio-tech's fear factor

Well, they could use HeLa cells instead, but those come from cervical cancer from a black woman, so I am going to go out on a limb the republican right isn’t going to be too thrilled with that either.

I'm biased in the sense that I am a master student in cultural psychology, but I'd say culture is what makes us human.

Culture is what separates the modern man in the year 2019 from cavemen without capacity to form coherent thoughts or at least reflect on them. Culture is, in essence, the entire heritage of humanity.

It is language, it is how we think, feel and see, it is how we see ourselves, and others, and it is through components of culture (such as language or thought patterns, we get through our surroundings) we understand the world. We shape the culture and the culture shapes us and future generations.

Our capacity to form coherent thoughts and categorize and communicate, the very fundamental attributes of the human species, is dependent on culture. Culture is shared knowledge, both about norms in a group and things which are accepted as facts and so on.

You could argue that, at least if we are talking about human beings, it's easier to define what culture is not than what it is, because it is in everything we think, say or do, and it permeates and shape our lives before we're even born.

In that sense, everything human or related to human beings that isn't fundamental* biology, is culture.

*I say fundamental biology, because even some of our biology is shaped by culture. For example, a lot of our basic, primal behavior is the result of the culture of our lives when we lived as hunter/gatherers. And even on a neurobiological level, we are shaped by our culture. I remember a study which suggested that our prefrontal cortex has grown disproportionately fast in the recent couple of hundred years, presumably because we are far more intertwined in the social world than before, and socializing is an activity which requires a lot of cognitive capacity.

There's also a theory called the social brain hypothesis which basically says that the reason primates have so big brains is the complexity of their (our) social lives. So our brains are big because we are social (cultural)

So in a way culture is embedded in our biology, and vice versa. It's essentially evolutionary adaptation, and the social environment is in many ways as important as the physical environment.


In an everyday sense of the word, culture is often used when it comes to identity, specifically group identity. This goes back to where we shape culture and culture shapes us. We feel like we are a nationality and we feel a cultural connection with other people with the same cultural values as us.

I personally think the discussion about holding on to culture or "protecting" culture is, for the most part, actually more about alienating other people/feeling cultural superiority than it is a constructive fear, because throughout the entirety of human history cultures have mixed and evolved and that is completely natural.

Now, of course if you're one of the last 50 individuals from an ancient tribe living in the Amazon forest, protecting your culture is necessary, but it seems more like people pull out the "protect the culture"-card when it comes to discussions of the dangers of immigration and general societal progress and whatnot, at least that's my perception of how it is used in the political dialogue in European countries, especially in response to immigration from the east.

That’s what I’ve been saying this whole time!

Viggorous: nice post

+1 (this forum could really do with a way of acknowledging a good post without having to make these sort of non-content posts)

Yeah, I too am jealous of Discourse

The desire to protect ones own culture, even while the culture is mixing evolving, seems fairly ubiquitous throughout human societies/history. It seems to be a very conserved adaptation.

This is a pet peeve of mine, but labelling a ubiquitous aspect of human nature as a "white" problem seems inaccurate, not to mention regressive and divisive. IMO, people that talk about "white privilege" and "white pride" are part of the problem, not part the solution. Not to mention tools elites use to divide and rule the masses.

No, I’m pretty sure that’s just you.

Organisms organize while hanging out in organization. Adapting. Culture!

Excellent plan until organizations start trying to organize organisms. And then one or more organizations organizes the supremacy of their organizations.

And then lol an organism telling an organism what it supremely means to be an organism. Sounds like a good time to reorganized.

Ah, the supreme organization can’t reorganize, how can it? It won’t be it to be supreme anymore. It already has the supreme organization, how can it reorganize? Ah shucks.

That which doesn’t adapt goes... extinct in a culture of organisms?

Turns out you're the person I've been looking for in most threads.

Ironically,

Claiming that white "culture" is exceptionally supremacist or xenophobic is actually the opposite of reality. Willingness to trade ideas and take things from other cultures that are better is perhaps one of the most important attributes that allowed "white" cultures to flourish as much as it did for the last few hundred years.

I recall in one of his books, Jared Diamond hypothesized based on a variety of factors, including location, natural resources, scientific progress and political organization, there was no reason not to assume that China would be the predominant "culture" of the world; and the main thing that held this back was an extreme self imposed xenophobia and unwillingness to culturally mix, which European societies did not have.

I would like to jump back into the conversation to make voice a few observations.
1) agreed, Viggorous, very clever screen name by the way, summed it up perfectly.

2) as pointed out by Viggorous, culture is constantly changing. Only when it will be extinct will it stop changing. Imagine we still wear the same clothes as 200 years ago.

Final observation. Kelhuss and Luckbox have much too much time on their hands

I think that if you came up with a better term for "white privilege" that fits the same definition, then people would start using that better term. I'm not sure that there is one though.

It's also clear to me that there are parts of mexican culture that are better (healthier) than the midwestern culture I grew up with, and vice versa. I'm just not sure why you'd want the protect the clearly worse aspects of a culture, other than it just being what you're familiar with, which doesn't really seem like a good reason.

We already tried to come up with a nicer, gentler term for "casual racism" and cultural conservatives lost their ****.

The issues with "white privilege" go far beyond it's name. It's not a coincidence the concept known as "white fragility" was created as response to criticism of the concept.

The pathology of these types of concepts are all the same. Someone comes up with an idea that paints a group of people in a derogatory, or unappealing way, but phrase it to the point of giving plausible deniability of that characterization. Then when that concept is criticized, create another concept to paint the people being critical of the concept as crazy (figuratively).

Almost all discussion about criticism about white privilege is met with equivocation ( you just do not understand) and ad hominems (something is wrong with you, that's why you don't get it). The criticism goes unanswered, in most cases.

I'll use the wiki for the definition:

"Some what fluid" refers to the equivocation. The definition changes, depending on the criticism it's receiving.

The definition and what it's trying to highlight, is entirely too broad, and has a series of implicit assumptions, especially about definitions within the definition. One example of this is, "racism" has evolved to include "power" in its definition, which was interjected by the people who are proponents of white privilege, but that definition of racism is contentious as well.

It talks about groups, but when you reduct the argument to the individual, the concept is shown to be wildly inaccurate when determining privilege. An example of this is prison. One might argue that white people have privilege when dealing with the CJS for criminal matters. Disproportions would support that contention. That's not always the case, though. There are many situations where you see a white male treated more harshly than a black male by the CJS for the same crime.

Further, the privilege can be described, but it cant be quantified. It relies on an absoluteness of it, as in everyone it's describing has that privilege, and this presents obstacles to rebut the other criticisms I'm making. How does this privilege stack up against other privileges? There is no weighting to it, so can't really determine if it's a privilege, or just a circumstance.

Lastly, it speaks to a society that has innumerable variables when it comes to "privileges", but focuses on one particular aspect of society, race, in a broad sense, and in a mutually exclusive way, and in a vacuum, and it does it with very poor precision in regards to the individuals in the group it's trying to describe. The privileges/disfranchisement people bring up to support the concept, are enjoyed by every individual, at one point or another in their life time, to different degrees, irrelevant of their race, or becasue of their race.

The concept just does not have much value, other than to create derision. If people want to talk about the impact of racism, talk about that, instead of making up, and talking about these platitudes.

It depends on what your goals are. Ask the average person who uses the term "white privilege" (normally a white upper middle class elite) to give an example of what they are talking about and they will invariably say that police pull over poor black people more than poor white people, or there are more poor black people than poor white people in prisons. They will invariably fail to address their own privileges.

The term as it is used in the world is mostly just a mechanism to pit poor whites against poor minorities. And it is a good term for that, which is why no one using it is interested in finding a better one.

Divide and rule.