People like Thoreau and Emerson aren’t fringe; they are extremely influential in American political philosophy, to the point where there’s a long-ass Wikipedia page about them.

Now there’s a lot that could be said about them and I don’t want to start writing essays here, so to cut to the chase I will just write down a couple of bullet points.

• As we can both see, that page considers itself “part of a series on socialism”, which I believe is because these thinkers courted socialist ideas at their time, seeking to come up with an alternative more along the lines of their personal very American individualist philosophy. I think it should not be contentious to say that time has proven that individualism and socialism are not compatible ideologies.

• I think time has also proven that this brand of anarchism did not survive contact with industrialization – this is what I meant by it giving birth to libertarianism, because the same (very American) principles of individualism underpin both.

• Nonetheless, this philosophy is a school of anarchist thought. They themselves called it that, other people at the time called it that, and scholars that came after call it that. Ergo, anarchism is a far broader category that contains more than just the clearly leftist schools of anarchist thought like anarchist communism, and therefore using just the word “anarchism” to refer to contemporary leftist anarchism is incorrect and going to confuse people.

If you think it’s thoroughly left-wing then I think you must not be familiar with individualist and libertarian anarchist thinkers. I don’t think free-market anarchism involves much social production for example. In American political theory anarchism is what gave birth to libertarianism, which is pretty much a right-wing ideology.

What? It’s possible for both modern democracy and Athenian democracy to be democracy, because it is an umbrella term that covers many different implementations of rule by the people.

The exact same thing applies to anarchy. It is possible for both The Culture and Lord of the Flies to be anarchy, because anarchy is an umbrella term that covers many different situations of “no rulers”.

the phase space of vague stuff like political ideology would have an arbitrary large number of parameters, not whatever 2 you see in memes.

Weird to hear this from the person who moments ago was arguing that there’s no problem projecting this concept on an even smaller number of dimensions.

The political compass has both an X and a Y dimension, you know. As it happens, the Y dimension exists almost specifically because of anarchy.

Secondly, I’m not referring to what the random person thinks anarchy is, but what actual anarchists believe, and among anarchists anarcho-capitalism is fringe, and an offshoot of liberalism.

You’re doing the monopoly thing here again. When by “anarchist” you refer exclusively to left-leaning anarchists, of course anarcho-capitalism is going to be fringe among them.

Not to mention the fact that free-market anarchism is a distinct ideology from anarcho-capitalism and, to my understanding, much less fringe among self-described anarchists. The primary distinction seems to be that anarcho-capitalism exists at a lower energy state, a sort of a decay product that free-market anarchism would likely almost immediately decay into upon contact with the real world.

Plato having talked about anarchy at one point doesn’t suddenly mean that the entirety of anarchist history suddenly doesn’t matter.

One ideology misappropriating the term also doesn’t mean that all other meanings of the word suddenly don’t matter. Don’t get me wrong, I sympathize with many of the ideas of left-leaning anarchists, but they do suck at naming things. When the same concept covers both extreme right-wing libertarianism and extreme socialism, you really should be qualifying it with something to avoid confusion.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here? But to go along with what I assume your analog is, if you’re talking about height then you need to say you’re talking about height regardless of what unit you’re using. “Two metre box” means constrains only one dimension, much the same as the word anarchy by itself does.

This is a pretty biased way of putting it. The concept of anarchy predates the interpretation used by modern left-leaning self-identified anarchists by a couple of thousand years. In online circles such anarchists often seek to monopolize the term (like you are doing right now), but they factually weren’t the ones to coin it; when it was originally coined by Plato, nobody had any idea what the fuck capitalism or socialism even are, and in fact Plato used it as a cautionary example.

I am guessing your gut reaction will be to recoil at this grave attack on your ideology. I implore you to stop and consider that most people are not in fact at all familiar with left-wing anarchism as defined by Proudhon etc., but are vaguely familiar with the concept from many other sources. Therefore when you talk about anarchism without a qualifier to mean anarchic socialism, most people will assume you are talking about some Mad Max law of the jungle nonsense and then summarily dismiss anything you say as insane rambling.

I call this the libertarian version:

this is just begging for some kind of an anti-meme edit

My biggest issue with it is actually this part from a paragraph where they bemoan the fact that food safety authorities are doing nothing about this issue:

The maximum amount of lead permitted in food supplements according to the EFSA is 3,000 ppb (3 mg/kg), a level that CR’s food safety experts say is far too high to be health protective.

This is technically true and 3 mg/kg is indeed insanely high and obviously intended for like vitamin pills and such with serving sizes measured in single-digit grams. However, the EFSA has a ton of lead-related regulations, and not all shake powders fall under the food supplements category. I do not have any statistics at hand of how common it is for protein powders to label themselves as food supplements rather than as some kind of composite dish, but I do have one anecdote.

After I read that CR article I checked what the situation was for my shake powder of choice (Queal, a meal replacement product rather than a protein powder per se), and it is not considered a food supplement. Instead it’s some kind of composite food product (I quote: 2106.9098.49 (Generic Miscellaneous edible preparations Food preparations not elsewhere specified or included)), which under EFSA rules has to test both the raw ingredients as well as the final product, and the final product basically isn’t permitted to introduce extra lead that wasn’t there in the raw ingredients, though the actual regulation is quite complicated in this regard.

That protein shake will probably replace some other kind of food you would otherwise eaten and which will naturally contain some amount of lead, so it’s not just a straight up increase on top of your normal daily intake.

But yeah, you’re right, avoiding the ones with unusually high lead levels like the Huel powder obviously makes sense.

The way the CR report presents their data is super terrible – they present it as a per-serving percentage of their arbitrarily-defined concern level of 0.5 µg/day (which by the way is 2.5% of that 21 µg average you cite; unrealistically low) and the serving size they use is whatever the American label of the product reports (serving sizes on American back labels are notoriously arbitrary).

Anyway, the most sensible number I can find in their article is this:

The average concentration of lead in the chocolate- and vanilla-flavored products we tested was 17.3 parts per billion and 15.4 ppb, respectively.

17 ppb is 0.017 mg/kg, which is far below what the EU considers the maximum safe level for any food category, except for infant formula where it’s only just below the maximum of 0.020 mg/kg (and exceeds the liquid infant formula max of 0.010 mg/kg, but then these are mostly powders).

According to the report you linked section 3.1.2, 17 µg/kg seems to be pretty closely in line with the average for general foodstuffs. For example dairy has a median lower bound of 2.50 and upper bound of 9.77 µg/kg, while cereals and grains are 11.0 to 28.2.

One funny thing in that EFSA report is this line:

Products for non-standard diets, food imitates and food supplements 8691 55 272 298 874 874

which shows that food supplements (which presumably includes protein powders, but will also include a lot of other stuff like vitamin pills) had, in that study, a median lead content of LB 272 µg/kg and UB 298 µg/kg.

You should know that the Consumer Reports article was a bit of a nothingburger and/or a classic State of California-style overreaction. Even one of the worst products on it (Huel Black) had 7 µg of lead per 100 g of product, which is equal to 0.07 mg/kg, which is less than half of what the EU considers a safe level for e.g. cereals and pulses (0.20 mg/kg).

The assertion that there is no safe level of lead may or may not be true, but our natural environment even without human pollution has lead in it, which makes its way up the food chain into our foods, and ingesting it is unavoidable unless you only eat produce grown in a hydroponics lab or something. As a result, humans have some natural resistance to the toxicity of lead.

Oh no, they’re not just going to let it happen. They’ll actively stop us from solving it.

Everyone shows different faces in different company.