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Why would you downvote a meetup post?

You may be thinking of Nick Bostrom's "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant", Daniel C. Dennett's "Where Am I?", and David Deutsch's "The Final Prejudice", respectively. Best wishes, the Less Wrong Reference Desk.

“Our vision is inevitably contracted, and the whole horizon may contain much which will compose a very different picture.”

Cheney Bros v. Doris Silk Corporation, New York Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit

how ostentatiously

Not at all -- not that I tried to hide the fact that I was eating meat, but I tried to be as nonchalant as I would be if I didn't know they were vegetarians. OTOH I'm not terribly good at hiding emotions, so probably some of them could tell I was feeling a little embarrassed.

The type of meat would also make a difference to me.

What kind of difference? Pork vs beef vs chicken? Steaks vs minced meat? Free-range vs factory farmed vs hunted (but how would you tell)?

Interesting...

Just one quibble: “other than pure aesthetics (“I just like it”) ... which are idiosyncratic (i.e. not true for most people)” sounds like a overwhelming exception to me. Given that I've never met anyone trying to convince other people to become vegetarians (though I've read a couple such people), I guess that's by far the most common reason. (I've eaten meat in front of at least a dozen different vegetarians from at least four different countries, and none of them seemed to be bothered by that.)

I've been playing the Uncharted series for PS3 to help me learn Spanish. So far, it seems ideal for this purpose. The speaking is very clear, the (foreign language) subtitles reflect what is actually being said (almost always), and the gameplay and story are quite good (imagine Indiana Jones, but with a lot more parkour). There are also many other language options besides Spanish (including French and Portuguese).

Note: My PSN ID is 'Thomas_Bayes'.

I had to stop (though I may resume later) at "People who buy less meat don't really spend less money on food overall, they mainly just spend more money on other non-meat food" -- it made me go "are you fucking kidding me" and wonder whether he has ever been to a supermarket. See also this -- differences in retail prices aren't quite that extreme, but that's because governments subsidize meat production, so even though not all of the money comes out of meat eaters' pockets, it still comes out of somewhere.

EDIT: I finished reading it, and... if I didn't know who Hanson was and he had posted somewhere that allowed readers to comment, I would definitely conclude he was trolling. Along with things that others have already pointed out, “per land area, farms are more efficient at producing "higher" animals like pigs and cows” -- where the hell did he take that from? Pretty much everyone I've ever read about this topic agrees that growing food for N people on a mostly vegetarian diet requires way less land, energy, and water than growing food for N people on a largely meat-based diet, and there's a thermodynamic argument that makes that pretty much obvious.

(I do agree that “meat eaters kill animals” isn't a terribly good argument because if it wasn't for meat eaters those animals wouldn't have lived in the first place (but that doesn't apply to hunting and fishing); but that's nowhere near one of the main reasons why I limit my consumption of meat.)

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