EA - Bill Burr on Boiling Lobsters (also manliness and AW) by Lixiang

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Bill Burr on Boiling Lobsters (also manliness and AW), published by Lixiang on January 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I think there's a vibe out there in many cultures (including American) that being vegetarian/vegan or certain kinds of sympathy towards animals is unmanly and just kind of lame. This is probably more true in the right-wing demographic. I'm guessing this has been discussed in the animal welfare movement somewhere, so I won't attempt to delve into the issue further in this post. Instead, I merely want to favorably acknowledge some commentary by comedian Bill Burr about boiling lobsters alive.Bill Burr is a super-famous comedian and one of the most prominent cultural icons of masculinity in the U.S (perhaps in some respects the most prominent). Although I would say he is a party-neutral comedian, his comedic themes have included anti-wokeness and challenges to certain aspects of feminism, and probably has a huge following among working-class right-wing men.Here is his commentary on boiling lobsters alive (6 min), excerpted from his podcast.Edit: Actually I will go into it for a minute. If anyone wants to see a great example of how to deal with this sort of thing in a different context, take a look at how Ford dealt with the issue of environmentalism/green-politics being considered soft, lefty, snowflake stuff when they wanted to advertise the fuel economy on their F150 pickup truck: "you won't be put in a chokehold everytime you fill up".Other versions of the commercial here and here.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.