I don't mean to beat a dead horse here, but on Labor Day I had sent out a reply tweet debunking the usual union propaganda of pro-labor public policy "accomplishments" (e.g., minimum wage, 40-hour workweek, holidays, overtime pay, etc.) I pointed out that it was the free market of labor, not union contracts or public policy, that led entrepreneurs like Henry Ford to aggressively hike wages and benefits (e.g., Ford didn't think overly tired workers would be as productive, good for business).
Some smart-ass "progressive" fool decided to mock reply to my tweet, namedropping Upton Sinclair. The implied message had to do with Sinclair's famous NOVEL, "The Jungle", which purported to expose unsanitary conditions in meatpacking, It implied or outright stated. that the blind pursuit of profit led to disregard of hygienic conditions, a threat to the nation's meat supply. This novel was largely responsible behind the legislation approved and signed into law by Teddy Roosevelt creating the FDA. Keep in mind this was not based on some public contagion of ingested spoiled meat products but basically irresponsible, unproven rumors promoted in Sinclair's novel. Sinclair was a socialist Statist with an anti-capitalist agenda.
Now I have been an FDA critic for some time. My longest-wed sister is married to the son of an East Texas rancher who, among other things, raises a few head of cattle. I can still recall visiting them during my UH graduate student days; they were living in couple's housing at East Texas State (now a satellite Texas A&M system campus). My sister prepared for dinner a roast which had been cut from "Blue Eyes".
So a few years back, my brother-in-law decided to market grass-fed beef; my oldest niece did the website design, and my sister had authored certain cooking tips and recipes for grass-fed beef, which has less natural fat and requires certain nuanced preparations.
All of a sudden the website disappeared, and my brother-in-law revised his business model to resell premium cuts, presumably from conventionally finished packers. I really didn't understand the change in business model; wouldn't the packer simply set up its own distribution for the market niche? My brother-in-law argued that the niche wasn't worth the packer's pursuit; to this day, he has not gone into specifics over why he dropped his initial endeavor, although he implied that the logistics didn't support convenient USDA inspections for smaller volume ranchers, and without USDA inspections, interstate shipments of meat products were impossible. (There are intrastate opportunities, but they often require options under regulations like buying, say, a quarter or more of a head of cattle. I just don't have the freezer space. There are ways to order smaller cuts, like maybe 10 lbs, e.g., in MD, but I often had to drive to a residence or meet at a refrigerated truck stop during certain hours.
Now I've been on a grass-fed kick since my initial low-carb diet days about 15 years back. (I have a companion nutrition blog.) Grass-fed meats differs by market. When I lived in SW Aeizona, I basically subscribed to Butcher Box. (Walmart for some reason didn't stock any grass-fed meat.) But when I moved back to MD, I found I could buy grass-fed beef at Walmart, ShopRite, and Aldi (ShopRite offers Australian beef at about $4/lb and Walmart about $5.50 lb), and a variety of cuts at Walmart (including roasts and steaks ranging from $6.50 to $18/lb). I've occasionally seen grass-fed steaks at ShopRite at under $10/lb, and a new Lindl in the neighborhood often offers grass-fed steaks at good prices. Butcher Box is very good, but shipping meat is expensive and you're buying an assortment of 7-10 lbs at about $129/shipment.
I would have been a happy customer to my brother-in-law's original concept, but I had zero interest in his reseller conventional premium-meat concept. The FDA/big meat packer model is a classic example of regulatory capture. The familiar reader may have noticed my favorably referencing a tweet (including my brother-in-law's story) from one of my favorite pro-liberty Congressmen, Tom Massie, which was advocating a pro-small meat producer FDA reform. In fact, Massie himself"liked" my response tweet.
So the "progressive" respondent to my tweet unwittingly stepped onto a sore point with me by bringing up Sinclair. To paraphrase the last cited reference, I was busting the myth "without government, who would safeguard the food?" The fact is: (1) government inspections don't work (think of various produce safety recalls over the years); (2) sellers are held liable for selling unsafe foods; (3) the market punishes unsafe producers. Do I have to remind people about Chipolte's recent issues and huge business drop? It's not good business to harm one's customers.
My substantive response to the troll was to point out that "The Jungle" was not journalism but a novel, that Upton Sinclair had no expertise or facts behind his politically motivated opinions, and I cited a FEE article by Lawrence Reed debunking the myth. So any attempt by Twitter to discredit my tweet as being primarily s "threatening" tweet is beyond patently absurd. There was absolutely no "threat" against the stupid Twitter user of any kind.
What it seems to has to do with my use of the pejorative word "retard", but the term was incidental to the tweet itself. I will sometimes use terms other people object to as the verbal equivalent of Cher's infamous bitch slap in "Moonstruck"--i.e., "snap out of it". Citing a novel to "prove" the free market doesn't work? Seriously, dude? The last time I checked, the government doesn't produce an acre of food; farmers do. In a highly competitive market, they can't afford to risk food safety and alienate their buyers. This country did fine without the FDA for over a century of history.
But more to the point, in fact, Twitter users use the term "retard|retarded" ALL THE TIME, without Twitter Mommy fascists cracking down on them. Twitter would find it impossible to whac-a-mole its puritanical policy on a consistent basis (just do a simple Twitter search on the term, and chances are you'll pull up tweets over the past 10 minutes.
I'm fairly sure that some butthurt "progressive" tattled to Twitter Mommy over my "abuse". Let's be clear Twitter Mommy suspending me for a week had more to do with its ideological tilt; it was an arbitrary, unjust, capricious decision to suspend me for a week! Fuck the contemptible, hypocritical bastards.
I probably won't win any politically correct people (win friends/influence people) over my use of language, but who the hell empowered the language police? The point is, my suspension for a week was unquestionably a double standard. Twitter allows any number of breaches of civility, including smears calling Trump, Kavanaugh and others of being rapists, racists, etc.
But let me close this essay with a quote from Caitlin Johnstone which described an eerily similar Twitter suspension of Daniel McAdams, Ron Paul's anti-interventionist foreign policy adviser, over apparently his use of the term ("retarded") in reference to Sean Hannity, a well-known neo-con:
Daniel McAdams, the Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, was banned from Twitter last week. Officially, it was because he used the word “retarded” to describe the odious establishment propagandist Sean Hannity after noting the hilarious fact that the Fox News host had been wearing a CIA lapel pin while “challenging the deep state”. Unofficially, it was because McAdams has been operating for years at the apex of one of the most effective antiwar movements in the United States.
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“It is against our rules to promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease,” the notification reads. “Additionally, if we determine that the primary purpose of an account is to incite harm towards others on the basis of these categories, that account may be suspended without prior warning.”...[Hannity] was merely insulted with a common pejorative that is not widely considered to be politically correct. It is also certainly not accurate to say that the primary purpose of McAdams’ now-defunct Twitter account was to incite harm toward others based on the aforementioned categories. Indeed, the article notes, the word “retarded” is used constantly on Twitter by users all around the world who never suffer any consequences for it; a quick Twitter search easily confirms that the word is used as an insult multiple times per minute. The reasons given for McAdams’ suspension can therefore be regarded as bogus.
Which is annoying. It’s annoying to know that at some point I’ll probably slip up and say something imperfectly in an increasingly restrictive speech environment which gets me permanently banned from that platform. I like Twitter. I’m good at it. I’ve recently concluded that it’s pretty much useless for dialogue, but it is a great way for one person to get unauthorized ideas seen millions of times per month by people who might not feel like reading an entire article. I’ll be very put off when the banhammer finds my pretty face.
