Amsterdam Insect Protest

Claude

Summary. The post promotes an August 5 Amsterdam protest against Protix, the world's largest insect farm, arguing that black soldier flies likely feel pain based on a 2022 literature review by Gibbons et al. It argues insect size shouldn't diminish moral concern, that the insect-farming industry has failed its economic and environmental promises, and that investors like InvestNL (backed by Dutch taxpayer money) may bail out a company with no viable path forward. The author closes with a rough expected-value case for attending: each protester might save tens of millions of insects.

Fact check. The piece urges readers 'in the Netherlands, Belgium, or West Germany' to attend or spread the word — West Germany hasn't existed as a distinct political entity since reunification in 1990; the country is simply Germany.

Related

• evidence that insects can feel pain ↔ exploiting an organism's own instincts against it (The mosquito bucket of doom works — LessWrong) If insects meet the pain criteria this piece cites, the mosquito bucket's trick of exploiting an insect's own instincts to kill it en masse carries the same moral weight the author assigns to farming — the sentience evidence undercuts any assumption that mass insect death for human convenience is costless.
• collapse of the insect farming industry's economic case ↔ investor opinion as a trailing indicator of founder insight (The Hardware Renaissance) Investors still pouring money into a demonstrably failing insect-farming sector is the mirror image of Hardware Renaissance's claim that investor sentiment lags founder insight — here it lags obvious industry collapse instead of a real opportunity.