Wet Markets, What Are They?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Wet Markets, What Are They?

Sharyl Attkisson just now asked a question on Twitter, a damn good one.

What is a wet market?

As Sharyl said, people started using the term although nobody knew what it was. I stayed away from using the term "wet market" unless I was quoting someone, but even so, I confess that in the back of my mind, I never felt the urgency I normally did to identify an idea correctly when the term for it it was common in discussions and communications I was following and I didn't know what it was. I just accepted that everybody knew what it was.

I'll talk about that  below, but first, what is a wet market? The short video below mentioned in the tweet by Texasmoke is a very good place to look.

So a wet market is where people sell live animals, including wild animals, and slaughter them on the spot.

btw - That sucker has about 22 million views on YouTube right now. So, at least, we are not the only ones who work at being smart.

 

To check further, I took a peak at Wikipedia:

Wet Market

There is some good information in that article. For example, the word "wet" in wet market came from the need to constantly wash the floors due to animal filth, blood and so on.

But that article is extremely irritating to read. It's a rather long article and every other sentence says a wet market does not necessarily mean a place to buy wild animals for food... blah blah blah. 

As information goes, I'm OK with a term meaning more than one thing. But in an article aimed at informing readers, that level of ham-handed repetition sets my bullshit meter in overdrive. And even worse, almost always when that statement is made in the article, it is sourced to a friggin' scientific article.

Who needs a scientific article to be told that some people use the term wet market to mean a normal produce market? Now take that further. Who needs fifty scientific articles to make the same goddam point? At the present, Wikipedia has 89 references in that article and, on skimming through the list, it's clear that most of them are scientific articles. So, rather than counting (who needs more busywork at this stage?), I took a guess. I know I erred on the low side, but fifty works for the rhetorical point.

To repeat, who needs that amount of sheer repetition and that many scientific articles to say one term can have more than one definition?

Propagandists serving up bullshit, that's who.

Who are these propagandists and what do they want? Who knows? In my mind, they are probably people licking China's butt and trying to engineer a more positive image of China than it deserves re COVID-19 by clouding terms related to the causes. But, frankly, I don't care who they are during this phase. I'm just trying to learn what a wet market is and these idiots keep barging in to deflect. 

 

Which leads me back to Sheryl's point, that people accept the term "wet market" and adopt it immediately without knowing what it means. Why? That's a good thing to look at on a philosophy-themed forum. I believe there are a couple of main reasons.

1. Epistemology-wise, wet market is an easy term to overlook since everybody knows what wet means, and what market means, from daily living going back to childhood. The words are very familiar to everybody and no thought or effort is needed to use them.

So when these two words are together as a term, curiosity isn't triggered. Deep inside in the automatic part of the brain, there is a feeling that the gist is already known, so finding out more is not really worth the effort.

2. Psychology-wise, people love to fake knowledge and authority they don't have. When they come across a jargon term, many will adopt it without knowing what it means just to impress others or give an image that they are in the know. This comes from a cognitive bias that has been studied in depth: people hate being wrong even when they are.

To add to that, there's "the interpreter" in the left brain that does narratives. When this part of the brain can't organize information in a correct manner, it will simply make up something in the narrative it creates that sounds about right. Notice that all humans are accustomed to stating things as fact when they don't really know what they are talking about. We can thank the interpreter for that. (See the work of Michael Gazzaniga for more on the interpreter. He's the one who uncovered this faculty.) The point is, this urge is innate. It evolved because it worked well for our ancestors for many survival and reproduction situations. But this urge is also a disaster for other situations. 

If you are like me, trying to discipline your thinking into identifying correctly before judging, it's good to be aware of these two impulses. We all have them. The rub is whether we allow them to turn off our brains and cloud the identification part in certain situations or whether we train ourselves to not act immediately on these urges in those situations. But we are the good guys and do the heavy lifting in our brains that others will not.  

 

 

From looking into the meaning of wet markets above, there's one other thing I learned. Apparently, the vast majority of Chinese people do not eat wild animals. That is something only done by the well-off. I didn't check this, but my inner interpreter feels good about it.  So I'll assume this is the case until I learn the contrary from a credible source.

And that leads to me asking, who is well-off in China? Those who go along with the Chinese communist government and have been successful at the art of pull, that's who. (And their families, of course.)

Thus the wild animals in wet markets are for moneyed people to eat, not the masses. It's good to keep that in mind during the current news media barrage on the coronavirus.

 

So there you have it. Let the bullshitter critters do their thing. You no longer have to play their game to be superior to them. You now know what a wet market is and they don't.

You are so cool...

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Oh, poor people do too only not as much. Now if it's primarily the more well off they're the ones getting on airplanes and flying off to Italy. But who gets the most exposure? I'd imagine the workers in wet markets. I'd not imagine they're so well off.

--Brant

now, what am I to do with all my chickens?

[Peter]

On 4/15/2020 at 7:44 AM, Brant Gaede said:

now, what am I to do with all my chickens?

Farmers cut off their heads and cook them. But watch out. A chicken is kin to the dinosaur, and if you cut off its head and don't restrain "the body" if will start running . . . headless. Hence the phrase "a chicken with its head cut off." It is gross but true. I think the last time i saw a headless, running chicken is when I was maybe 4 years old in Norfolk Virginia Naval housing in a district called Little Creek if I remember it right.    

[Jon Letendre]

I have visited the wet markets in Hong Kong. When a chicken is purchased they slit its carotid, drop it into a bucket and snap the lid on top. The bucket jumps around, knocks over, rolls around. Two minutes later they open the lid and bag your now dead, blood-soaked chicken for carrying home.