Debunking Classic Leftist Tropes from Veganism to Urbanism

I’ve noticed that leftists tend to be superficial thinkers: They see an image and draw conclusions from it without looking into the dynamics that made the image possible in the first place. So let’s debunk two of their silliest beliefs.

1. There’s Plenty of Empty Space to Build More Housing

No, there’s not. Developed countries may have a lot of seemingly “open space”, but all of it either serves a purpose (such as farming or water filtration, etc.), or cannot be used for housing. Take the wetlands of the Rhine delta in The Netherlands, for example. These fields are excellent for pastoralism, but the soil is too soft for urbanization. Buildings would sink into the groundwater, or suffer flooding from the river banks.

There’s a reason why people tend to live huddled together in big cities such as New York City. If you’d evenly distribute all people across the available land, you wouldn’t be able to feed them. Logistics constraints are real. Humans depend on a strongly centralized supermarket supply system. Big cities couldn’t exist without freight trains and long-haul trucks. A horse and cart might try taking your tomatoes from Kansas to Times Square, but the food would be long spoilt by the time it got there.

We have to concentrate people in cities for reasons of economic efficiency, logistics, and energy conservation. That’s why we build housing blocks with central heating, for example. You simply can’t fill the “empty space” with more people, and if you tried, you’d overtax the national infrastructure.

2. We Need to Convert Pastures Into Farmland to Feed More People

No, you can’t. The difference between urban-agriculture and pastoralism is that pastoralism traditionally occupies unpredictable territory, namely, in terms of water and rain. Since herds of cows are mobile, you can move them around to wherever it has rained. You are not dependent on irrigation. So, in areas where irrigation is impossible to do, you’d try pastoralism. And that’s exactly what humans have always done.

Moreover, a lot of pastures are either too wet or too dry for agriculture, or difficult to reach for farm equipment (think mountain slopes), or barely fertile enough for grasslands but not for fruit trees, etc. You can’t simply do away with cattle, either, since replacing leather shoes with synthetics isn’t going to make the climate better. Cows don’t actually emit methane, they recycle it. Cattle might as well continue grazing in areas that aren’t of any other use.

I can see a problem with the mass meat industry where cattle are herded into awful conditions, but abolishing those won’t magically make the often barren land available to avocado farms. The point is, you can’t just replace pastoralism with crop farming. What they are likely going to try, however, is turn pastures into chicken farms.

The real motive behind the attack on dairy farming, of course, is that it is a source of superior protein that has traditionally fed the Nordic pastoralists (the “Aryans” of the Eurasian steppe), whom have been a scourge of settled urban society since time immemorial. Pastoralism is an escapist form of society that allows for smaller numbers of people to escape the confines of big cities. And globalists don’t like that.