I think there's so much ill-founded assumptions in eugenics BS that it's hard to know where to start, but as a genealogist, I can personally verify that upper or middle class, wealthier people, presumably the sort eugenicists identify with, clearly had at least a 2-3 generations head start on the demographic transition where I come from.
There are other trends, there's always some groups of people who started having fewer kids earlier or later for reasons not obviously related to class - but class is the big one.
tbf its not "letting the stupid people breed" and more that smart ppl stop breeding. still wrong and like other comments said, Dont Look Up is more practical bc its people with money, power, influence dooming us with greed
That depends on the rural environment. Especially grazing lands, like north European coastal heathlands, may have been managed with controlled burns in between grazing for a thousand years, to the point that they have their own biodiversity, that may get lost if they are disused.
Well, those who quit their jobs and open coffee shops almost certainly make a bad choice for themselves economically and work/ life balance wise... But they do wonderful things for their community, and - a questionable benefit to society but a huge benefit to some - real estate prices. People love these places. They capture a tiny fraction of the value they create, if we look at it in cold terms.
That can't really be said for downscaling rice farmers, can it? I mean, at best maybe the other rice farmers enjoy having them around.
I meant it as a pipe-dream that people jump into without knowing the hidden asymmetries. Farming of any kind is hard and learning that specific skillset is necessary to succeed.
For most folks it's just an add on. I have grandparents in Europe that have a garden where they grew potatoes and about 50 other things I'm not gonna list. They make jams, pickled things, and various other preserves. It's something to do and kept them sharp until they hit their late 80s.
Agreed. There's a world of difference between 'farming' for personal to small scale production as not quite a recreation but also not quite a job, and farming a low margin staple at high volume as your primary and sole means of earning money.
And I think when most people speak of the dream of returning to rural society to e.g. farm, they're speaking very much of the former rather than the latter.
That has been my experience as well, having immigrated from Eastern Europe to an enclave in the US. We know at least a dozen families (including our own) with 2-10 acre homesteads and all of them had previous experience with gardens and dachas in the Soviet Union that they used to grow supplemental produce, so no one came into the deal with delusions of making any profit. Everyone gives away the excess to neighbors of which there is usually a lot because yields are high on hand tended trees (and dutch bucket hydro).
The single biggest reason these farms exist is because American retail produce is mostly garbage. It’s so economically micro-optimized that all flavour has been wrung out of it. The only way many of us immigrants can get back the flavors of our childhoods is by growing the fruits and vegetables ourselves, if only to have control over the varieties, the vast majority of which are not sold in stores (>95%). That nostalgia is what pays the margin.
We're not neighbors unfortunately because we're spread out all over Southern California. By "enclave" I mean the area between West Hollywood and Arcadia, where many Eastern Europeans immigrated during the post-Soviet brain drain, not a dense conglomerate like San Gabriel.
BTW you do NOT want ten acres. That is a back breaking amount of work and even with modern technology you'll struggle to cope (it's not enough to afford most heavy equipment, but too much to do manually). You want an acre or two where you have enough space to plant trees. It takes a few years from nursery to fruiting, but they are far lower maintenance.
You don't really need 10 acres. My grandparents made do with 1/4 of an acre and would have yields of 350-500 lbs of potatoes per season. That's so much that they would give it away. I have fruit trees that require almost no effort to maintain once established. My neighbors give me oranges that fall to the ground and rot otherwise. It's not all or nothing. You can have a basil plant in an apartment.
Lots of places have community gardens. Hell, I go to one in the middle of NYC, a rooftop garden run by a friend. We even grow our own wheat for bread making.
STS has a wonderful modding scene. Especially the yearly(ish) community mods which lots of people collaborated on, and the officially recognized Downfall mod, are very impressive and a great deal of fun. I think modability is a big part of the indie game success script, if there is such a thing. Even if modded players are a small share in numbers, I think they're often a backbone in the community an indie game needs to stick around.
That's not what you say it is. It is an estimate from UNHRC, which has a wide range. The estimate also seems to be for all dead, including counter protesters and government officers. Verification of any kind is in short supply.
It also does nothing to address the Iranian government's claim - strongly supported by US and Israel's public statements(!) that it's a foreign coup attempt rather than peaceful protests.
"Foreign coup attempt" is an extraordinary claim that is not backed by publicly available evidence. Indeed, it's not even backed by the statements by Iranian government officials, who are on record upholding the killings [1]. Furthermore, Iranian Ministry of Health officials have upheld these estimates of the death count. Eyewitness accounts uphold the fact that the Iranian government has perpetrated mass killings of protestors [2].
It is understandable that a person who distrusts the United States government would be led to believe the statements of a government in opposition to it. Indeed, the United States is engaged in an illegal war in which it is the aggressor. However, the statements of the Iranian government attributing protestor deaths to foreign-backed paramilitaries is not backed by any credible set of facts.
> "Foreign coup attempt" is an extraordinary claim that is not backed by publicly available evidence
It is not an extraordinary claim, and it's backed by absurdly strong evidence. As I said, it was pretty ridiculous that Mossad openly said not just that they wanted regime change (as the US also did), but that they were actively assisting in it. And in addition to the thousands of protesters who have been reported dead, hundreds of policemen or revolutionary guards have also been reported dead.
An ordinary, popular protest, even a damn angry one - even one armed with handguns! - does not kill hundreds of policemen. If you think that's possible, you don't understand the power difference between civilians and people with a full time job and training to use violence on civilians. Even if you would ignore the public statements (which I won't let you!) you simply do not succeed at killing so much of the state's violence apparatus without serious material and organizational support.
And anyone who's been following Iran for a while knows that yes, Mossad actually has shockingly many native agents in Iran (e.g. the murder of scientists wouldn't have been possible without it) and in addition there are political cults like MEK, and supporters of the dictator son Pahlavi, who are certainly organized and certainly not pacifist in their fight against the government.
It's your loyal party line messaging which is detached from reality.
(fails to produce any sources for unfounded claims, followed by a lot of rhetoric)
Note the failure to rebut the provided sources in my comment.
I accept that it's unlikely that you'll examine your own priors. My response is for the benefit of people who haven't had the chance to read extensively and travel, who might take your claims at face value.
You're good at trying to seem authoritative with your footnotes and links, but in this age of chatbots it's important to be able to see through that because it's trivial to bluff. Any idiot can be good at it. That's rhetoric. But you'd better get with the times: I think you'll find it's better to write like a regular human these days, rather than like a corporate news anchor or a chatbot, if you want to convince the commoners --- excuse me, I mean the "people who haven't had the chance to read extensively and travel".
The evidence I "provided" was evidence I think you already admitted. You do not deny that the US and Israel openly (and to repeat myself, insanely - it's so bad you'd almost think it was a deliberate attempt to sabotage any legitimacy) took credit for the attempt to replace the government of Iran to an unprecedented degree - why don't you find an example of an attempted revolution where a foreign country claimed to "be with you on the ground"?
I could have linked to the insane tweets with [1] and [2] myself, but why bother. I trust people to find them themselves if they're in doubt.
Never engaging with the credible evidence presented, claiming that heads of state said something they didn't. Other readers can be trusted to see through your lies.
Neither the precise scale of the killings or the degree of militancy of the protesters has been well documented. It's reported that a lot of policemen and revolutionary guard soldiers were killed too.
Remember, Mossad publicly boasted that they were on the ground with the protesters, which was a pretty insane thing to do and basically gave Iran carte blanche to say these aren't protests, it's a foreign sponsored coup attempt. There's very little we can say to that when Mossad basically publicly said it was.
Maybe they were so sure the protests would succeed they figured it would earn them/justify goodwill with the new government?
FWIW, my information comes from Iranians who speak regularly with their families who still live in the cities where these killings happened. They talk about protestors pushed into a market place by IRGC with just one exit—the market was set on fire and anyone who fled out the exit was shot by IRGC.
Also, if you know anything at all about the history of the Iranian regime, it’s entirely unsurprising that this happened. They respond murderously to every large scale protest, and have been mass murderers since they turned on the leftists and other allies who helped install them in ‘79.
> it's a foreign sponsored coup attempt
This is what the regime says every time large protests erupt internally. I’m not defending Israel, but these were innocent unarmed people protesting even if Israel played a role in organizing the protests. I detest the Israeli regime as well, but justifying either side’s mass murder is insane.
Man, if you've followed Iran, you'll know that some exile Iranians are a bit like exile Cubans. Like the latter, they have plenty of legitimate things to be angry about, but that doesn't mean they aren't, a good deal of them, batshit crazy. Lots of them support the son of the CIA-supported dictator who was so bad he landed Iran with their theocrats in the first place. Some of them are supporters of MEK, a goddamn case study in political cults.
> This is what the regime says every time large protests erupt internally
Yes, but that doesn't mean they're not right. US and particularly Israel outright took credit for it, to a degree you'd be hard pressed to find any time in history. It wasn't just a spontaneous uprising, it was also very openly a foreign sponsored regime change operation.
Which doesn't mean they're aren't a lot of innocent people who have wanted to get rid of the theocrats all along getting murdered. I'm sure there are.
There are just enough in the opposition who have decided to ally with Israel (which would rather see Iran a Somalia-style failed state before a free and democratic Iran) and the dictator's sonthat any kind of moral legitimacy the movement could have had is out the window.
There's a lot of incorrect information here, but I prefer not to veer farther from our core disagreement by litigating details that seem tertiary (though I'm happy to discuss them in another thread or after we've resolved our core disagreement--it's an interesting topic).
You were originally arguing that the Islamic Republic isn't evil because the protestors deserved to be killed because Israel and the US claimed to have coordinated the protests. I don't see how you're getting from "Israel and the US claimed to have coordinated the protests" to "therefore Iran's mass murder was legitimate". Even if the tens of thousands figure is exaggerated by an order of magnitude, it would still make the Islamic Republic an evil regime. Even if Iranians who criticize the regime are "batshit crazy", even if the US and Israel organized the protests, even if the Shah was really worse than the Islamic Republic, none of that justifies murdering unarmed protestors by the thousands. My position is that mass murder is wrong even if the protestors held opinions I disagreed with.
For Brexit in particular, it seems clear to me that EU politicians, but the UK ones in particular, used EU as a scapegoat for unpopular economic policy that they themselves actually want, but can't justify effectively to their constituents. "We can't help it, it's an EU requirement" when leaving out that in the EU, their guys totally supported it.
That was bound to backfire at some point or another.
I think you're right that politicians prefer not to defend complicated (and possibly good) policy to the public. But if they choose easy ways out to avoid it (and they do!) then they're to blame too when it collapses. To blame the public for not blindly trusting them won't do.
The public is almost fully to blame, and gets the government it deserves. I only hedge a little because education is in control of the state, so to some degree people don't choose whether to be educated on the relevant matters.
It may be familiarity breeding contempt but I find members of the British public in particular very myopic in obtaining benefits for 'their group'. There's very little interest in society as a whole.
Politicians simply bend in order not to upset any of the key voting blocs. But you understand that's a selection bias: you wouldn't exist as a successful politician if you didn't do this. All those who go another path are doomed to obscurity.
> The public is almost fully to blame, and gets the government it deserves.
Which has been a popular argument against democracy since at least Plato: just look at the average voter/person and their intelligence, understanding of the world, and their character.
> The public is almost fully to blame, and gets the government it deserves.
I'd frame this another way -- the public are largely responsible, but we put all the blame on politicians/government. we vote for these people while we all know they're all talking complete and utter nonsense just to get past the job interview. it is the game. i wish it wasn't. i wish i could stand in the house of commons during PMQs and point out every BS line every single one of them says. stand up during question time and shout at all the idiots on the panel, disproving every single bullshit line they've fed the audience with stats and analysis and data [0]. but then we'd probably end up everyone in the country showing up to PMQs/question time shouting over each other all at the same time... which wouldn't really work lol.
the system is not perfect, but it's what we've got.
> I only hedge a little because education is in control of the state, so to some degree people don't choose whether to be educated on the relevant matters.
> It may be familiarity breeding contempt but I find members of the British public in particular very myopic in obtaining benefits for 'their group'. There's very little interest in society as a whole.
yeah, like, i'm kind of lucky that i don't have children or any other dependants and i went to posh schools, got a decent academic education [1]. i can afford to sit around, pontificate and moralise about what the large scale right or wrong way of doing things should be. i earn enough and don't have kids. hell, i'd be happy if they increased the rate of tax in the top bands. more money to spend on public services for everyone else who actually needs it. seriously, take my spare disposable income! i'm only gonna spend it on expensive food and cigarettes that's gonna make me overweight and have lung cancer and become a drain on the nhs anyway!
my mate with three kids doesn't have the time for that. she just wants the school to give her daughter the help she needs and has to fight through a bunch of bureaucracy to get there. bureaucracy which exists because the system is under strain because lots of people are asking for the same resources and they've got to figure out some way of apportioning out the resources. same with my mate who is a single parent to a son with pretty hefty ADHD. it's no wonder they fall into the "my group first" attitude and/or rhetoric with, for example, immigration. they're constantly told there's all this money is being spent elsewhere on "some other people" and then they look at their kid's school struggling with one support worker for hundreds of kids and it's like ... well, wtf. same thing with income taxes etc. "we need money for our kids, why on earth is my tax money being spent on X, Y, Z" etc.
to be clear: i don't agree with the political views of my friend, and i don't really care to debate the politics either. i'm responding to the "myopic" comment from my own perspective, having previously noticed the interesting differences between myself and my friends. they're really lovely people! really nice and kind and loving folks. but they have a selfish/fear-based-protectionist side to them, like all humans do.
that last bit is the important bit for me. fear leads selfish behaviour. people are worried, the "system" is unstable and constantly under strain. and that makes them act in their own selfish interests because they're having to jostle for position within the "system" :shrug:
> Politicians simply bend in order not to upset any of the key voting blocs. But you understand that's a selection bias: you wouldn't exist as a successful politician if you didn't do this. All those who go another path are doomed to obscurity.
this has always been the critical problem from where i sit. like, we're forced to vote for people who, ultimately, may only be in the job for a maximum of 5 years total. we don't get to vote on the next 30 years cos the next lot could just undo it all. just look at upcoming negotiations with the EU apparently might involve us moving back towards the single market again, which was the whole "once in a generation" brexit vote thing. turns out it's not quite so "once in a generation" [2]
the trouble for me is that the commonly implemented "long term" model for governance tends to be stuff like authoritarianism, dictatorship etc. ... so...
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i wrote way more for this than i thought i would lol
[0]: yeah! let's properly hold them to account! i can finally use my autistic powers of calling bullshit for the benefit of all! instead of getting into trouble with my boss at work. again. o_o
[1]: the non-academic parts were really damaging though. expensive doesn't always mean good. highly rated academically doesn't always mean good.
As a side note if you did just get fat and smoke you wouldn't be a drain on the NHS because being fat and smoking disqualifies you from many procedures and you are likely to die right around retirement age, after you paid most of your lifetime taxes but before you start consuming the very expensive age-related healthcare.
Ironically it is the unhealthy that are overpaying and the very healthy who are underpaying because age related care is such a huge proportion of lifetime medical costs, and that is still before adding in potential sin taxes paid.
The alternative is everything falling apart at home and our manufacturing industries declining dramatically. Maybe the "unpopular economic policy" wasn't such a bad idea after all.
There are other trends, there's always some groups of people who started having fewer kids earlier or later for reasons not obviously related to class - but class is the big one.
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