My feed is filled with “hah, hah, they voted for Trump over the price of eggs and must be so disappointed right now.”
It’s quite an extraordinary thing. They invented the idea that people voted for Trump over the price of eggs because it’s comforting to see the opponent as a bunch of dumb hicks who don’t understand anything beyond the most primitive concerns. Then they repeated this utter fabrication so many times that they believed in it. Now they are at a stage of being shocked by the Trump voters suddenly abandoning the obsession with eggs, forgetting that this obsession is their own talking point.
It’s true that liberals don’t begin to understand conservatives. And they don’t try to learn.
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Why do they keep making it about eggs, when the price of eggs went nuts for exactly the same reason during the Biden admin, and it’s got nothing whatever to do with the economy, and everything to do with stupid entrenched USDA policy about bird flu?
This is so cringe.
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Like, seriously, every time bird flu goes around, the USDA forces poultry farmers to slaughter and bury whole chicken-houses full of thousands of birds *even if they’re not sick* which of course leads to a temporary dip in supply and a rise in prices.
Any sensible ag policy would allow the bird flu to ravage the flocks, then take the survivors and use them for breeding stock so that future flocks would be more resistant. That’s how nature does it.
Instead they want to find a way to make $$$$ for pharma out of it, by killing the resistant birds, and then trying to foist a vaccine on the industry, as if they had NO MEMORY of what happened with Marek’s when they tried that.
Bloody imbeciles.
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methylethyl, but another thing nature does is have viruses mutate. A strain may evolve that easily jumps to humans and is dangerous to them. By letting the virus burn through the chicken, you’re also increasing the chance of that happening.
Do you think these risks overblown?
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Yes. Just like with hand-wringing over plastic in the oceans and carbon emissions: it really doesn’t matter what our policies are on this, because in the actual world we actually live in, viruses are a global phenomenon, and we don’t dictate China’s ag policy. Viruses that make the crossover in Asia still come here. Same as if they were grown right here at home. What difference does it make?
Meanwhile, there are very obvious solutions to that problem staring us in the face 100% of the time, but they don’t make money for Tyson or Perdue, so we won’t take them seriously: Local, distributed production instead of giant poultry-houses with thousands of birds each. That’s not healthy for the birds and it’s not healthy for the people eating the birds, but not only do we insist on doing it that way, we make sure there are insurmountable barriers to anybody with small flocks wanting to sell those birds and their eggs to the neighbors. You can effing get arrested for that. Why? Because Tyson’s got to get its cut, and because poultry houses are so gross and unhealthy, that Tyson gets to write the regulations about poultry hygeine so that if you have twenty chickens and you want to sell your old stewing hens to the lady next door, you have to fill out ten hours’ worth of paperwork, use industrial sanitizing solution on your shoes, track every bird in your flock with a unique ID tag and keep records on each one (if you’re industrial, you can do one form for the flock of 5000), and that stewing hen is effectively going to cost $500 because you have to follow all the same regulations, but you don’t benefit from economies of scale. Oh, and you have to get it processed in a USDA-certified-and-inspected slaughterhouse (which will not take you as a customer for fewer than thousands of birds).
OR you have to find some bizarre legal fiction, where you sell your neighbor the bird live, as a pet, and then you go visit them and volunteer to process the bird yourself just as a favor.
The virus risk is almost entirely a product of mass production, but we have an entire system that tried mightily to exclude anything that *isn’t* mass production. That’s where the problem lies, and that’s where the policy discussion needs to be happening.
But since we insist on raising unhealthy birds in unhygienic ways, for the benefit of a few agricultural production conglomerates, we’re stuck trying to find the best solution for a shitty set of circumstances. And the best solutions *in those circumstances* happen to be natural selection for disease resistance.
IMO the same holds true for mass schooling: can you think of a better disease vector for people, than taking all our young and concentrating them into ever-larger groups, indoors, for several days a week, during the winter? Maybe just don’t do that…
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All I have to say about specifically eggs is that for years I bought eggs from an acquaintance who is a Vietnam war veteran and was raising his own hens. Everybody at my department bought from him. Fantastic quality, best eggs I ever ate. But it was not a legal operation for reasons he tried to explain to me many times and I always failed to comprehend. For some reason, the state doesn’t want people to raise their own hens. A friend who raises sheep and goats has the exact same problem. People buy from him but under the table. This is all nuts, the whole thing. My egg source Mike has been driven out of business by this lunacy.
Leaving eggs aside, it’s sad that the opposing side can’t engage with us like human beings and not caricatures. Of course, the entirety of their cultural hegemony is based on their capacity to pretend that we are all Nazi monsters who want the return of slavery. They think this rhetorical trick will work forever.
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I have to confess it was kind of funny that a vet was sneaking illicit cartons of eggs for a bunch of ultra liberal professors who supported the very system in which the vet’s business was illegal.
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Yeah. AFAIK, liberals used to be on the side of environmentally responsible smallscale local agriculture. I remember when they used to protest outside Monsanto’s corporate HQ, and do undercover operations at feedlots and slaughterhouses to expose animal cruelty and unsanitary conditions. When was the last time they did *any* of that sort of thing?
Somehow, along with literally every other liberal cause I actually respected them for when I was young… that’s now a conservative thing. I’m happy that conservatives now care about small businesses, ecosystem health, wildlife, the working class, the rights of workers, etc. but I remain puzzled by how, when, and why the left sold out to Tyson and Pfizer.
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I very clearly remember how just 15 years ago, far left activists would get together to badmouth the Big Pharma, the CIA and the FBI. Then all of a sudden, it was no longer “the murderous CIA” but “our intelligence community”. And not “Big Pharma” but “talking about over-medicalization is literally murder.” The shift was instant and dramatic.
Only yesterday, a former grad school classmate who used to be far far FAR left posted a screed in support of Walmart. He’s still far FAR Left but apparently it’s now a thing on the left to love Walmart because they feel betrayed by Bezos.
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IKR?
What the hell happened to them?
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Criminal imbeciles, rather .
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David Remnick has some cheek.
Instead of analysing the disaster that is the current Democratic Party, for whose candidate he must surely have voted, why does he seem so taken with investigating the presumed disappointment of Trump voters?
As if he would ever care about how they feel. Bonkers doesn’t begin to explain the half of it.
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That’s the problem with partisan politics. People get stuck in bubbles and talk past each other.
SA for many years had one dominant party which just imposed its policies with disastrous results.
Now we have a coalition. I suspect the talk about Mugabeism is mostly scare tactics to hold the coalition together and force people to compromise.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2025/03/06/silver-lining-in-budget-chaos/
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In the US, we do understand the liberals a lot better than they understand us, though. I know that most people who support transing children do it solely because they believe it’s the kind, empathetic thing to do. I don’t believe that any of them want to hurt children. I don’t ascribe any murderous or genocidal intent to them.
I’m yet to find a single liberal who’d be prepared to accept that conservatives are acting with good will and are uninterested in murdering anybody.
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Keeping hens (but not roosters) in your own yard for your own use was decriminalized some years ago in my town. Lots of people have them now, and I expect that the number will increase, probably very rapidly. I buy eggs from local farmers whenever possible. They have gotten more expensive recently, due to the fact that the grocery stores (who get their eggs from the huge factory farms) have experienced shortages and some are limiting how many eggs you can buy, so more people have begun buying them from local producers. But as more people begin keeping their own chickens, the problem will probably self-correct.
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At our new place, house across the street has a flock. In the early mornings, I watch the rooster strut up and down the lawns of the three adjacent houses: he’s a beauty! Our local ordinances are totally OK with both hens and roosters (and I love hearing them), and it is one reason I chafe so hard at renting. The city allows it. Landlords don’t. I want to have chickens again *so badly*.
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My daughter lived outside the city limits for a few years and kept both hens and roosters. They were pretty cool.
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Bunk. The price of eggs not solved in a month.
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The problem is killing thousands of chickens.
To replace them: 21 days to hatch in an incubator, and minimum 10 weeks to start laying. Minimum 13 weeks to replace missing production, assuming fertile eggs can be sourced quickly. And that’ll be a rolling number, because bird flu wasn’t detected in all the poultry houses at once, so it’ll be a staggered recovery, just as it was a staggered decline in laying hens.
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Exactly so.
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