Anaisnein, I went to reblog your comment but Tumblr wanted to say Mutant Aesthetic was saying it. Weird. Anyhow, I used “Communist” and “not uncommon” because Social Democracy, intelligently managed, does not have the same rate of imploding. You can get away with it if you’re smart about it. (But also I was annoyed at the anon, who is in denial.)
The EURO-conversion was used by retailers to raise prices. Aldi, however, reacted with the biggest price reduction of its
corporate history. As a result, it was able to double its profits.
Paragraph edited for clarity - the original is on page 17.
Imagine that - taking market share by improving service and prices.
EDIT: Mind you, some of Walmart’s failure is absolutely because the government has put bars on the free maket that made it illegal for them to succeed:
With organic growth close to being a mission impossible for hypermarket operators
due to stringent* planning and zoning regulations
Soon faced with
rapidly mounting losses, Wal-Mart’s management resorted to staff cuts and closures to
reduce its above-average personnel costs. Due to strict worker protection regulations,
however, making surplus workers redundant can be a complicated, lengthy and costly
affair in Germany – a cumbersome fact of life for its German competitors, but, obviously,
terra incognita for Wal-Mart Germany’s (mostly) American executives
* Stringent is explained elsewhere in the text and it is, indeed, stringent.
Beautiful article. My favorite parts:
- The leading retail strategy in Germany is “hard discounting” which offers a very narrow selection of high quality products at “rock bottom” prices. Aldi rules at this and hard discount retailers control a third of the market. In the UK etc this accounts for less than a tenth of the market. This is the polar opposite of Walmart’s “sell literally everything” strategy. - Germany has zoning laws that favor smaller buildings. This works in favor of hard discounters because they offer a narrow selection and minimalist shopping environment. Compare to Walmart’s “browse an entire warehouse and grocery store then eat at one of several restaurants” model. - Germany has antitrust/fair trade laws that forbid merchants from permanently selling goods below cost. This is Walmart’s favorite strategy famously observed in the gallon-jar pickle campaign. - Germany only allows retailers to be open for 80 hours per week, compared to 196 in the UK, 96 in the Netherlands, and 144 in France. - Walmart refused to recognize the outcome of the collective wage negotiation process with their German unionized employees and were “completely surprised” when said unions promptly organized walkouts in 30 stores. They were probably surprised because of their millions of US employees, only 12 are known to be unionized. This gave Walmart a “union basher” rep in Germany where unions are influential and popular. - Walmart tried to pull their “hire a ton of employees and give them shitty part time hours so we don’t have to give them full-time benefits” but worker protection laws prevented this and Walmart was forced to compete on product margins and services rather than recouping losses by shafting their employees. Aldi was able to match their prices cent for cent, but offered better service and more value. - Walmart repeatedly defied German antitrust laws like “You must provide your balance sheet and annual profit/loss statement” and “You must provide a bottle/plastic refund system for products you sell.” None of the other leading German retailers had a problem sustaining growth and profit while complying with these laws. - Germany put some dude from Arkansas in charge of the acquisition. He didn’t speak German. Anyone who’s spent time with Germans can imagine how well this probably went over.
So basically Walmart rolled up to Germany and tried to play its usual game of “buy out entire supply chains, sell products below cost until competitors are dry, then use their market reach to demand bulk orders from suppliers at near-zero margins, all the while keeping stores open 24/7 to maintain a huge pool of redundant part time workers at minimum wage with no benefits to reduce operating costs and further subsidize more supply chain buyouts” and the heavily unionized, aggressively antitrust, worker protection, high value low price German market laughed in their dumb weasel faces and sent them packing.
Meanwhile, Aldi, who has been commanding the German market while complying with all these regulations, has been expanding seamlessly into the US and has owned Trader Joe’s since 1979, which sells twice as much per square foot as Whole Foods.
This article is a beautiful demonstration that the only reason shitty companies like Walmart keep biting us in the ass in the US is because our leaders refuse to put them on a leash.
Well, I agree with the general point that Walmart couldn’t succeed in Germany because Germany basically had regulations making Walmart illegal.
But I disagree with your normative evaluation of that outcome.
Germany: Makes convenience and low prices illegal
You: HAHA WALMART BTFO I LOVE TO PAY MORE MONEY FOR SHIT
Walmart is de facto subsidized by the US government as many of its employees are on various kinds of welfare.
So how about instead of all this bullshit we issue direct-to-employee wage subsidies to simultaneously improve conditions for the working poor and increase competition. It isn’t fair if only unethical companies that loot the commons and free-ride on the social consequences of their actions get this advantage.
How about gentrification? I've seen the pro-property destruction people discussing that, and it's not illegal so appealing to the legal system wouldn't work. And often worker abuse laws are not enforced well, and bringing the lawsuits harms the workers.
1) I do not think ‘your livelihood is destroyed and you are possibly injured or killed in a mass riot’ is an appropriate penalty for ‘some asshole decided you were participating in gentrification’
2) Random mass violence sure is a way to keep property values down, I guess, but if your goal is ‘low property values, period’ rather than ‘livable communities with affordable housing’ then we just profoundly disagree on priorities.
3) …and rioting and destroying businesses never harms the workers, I’m sure. Look, raise money so exploited workers can quit. Ask them what they want and do that - I guarantee you it’s not going to be ‘smash the business and attract tons of police attention’. Don’t decide for yourself who is guilty, decide for yourself that legal mechanisms won’t work, decide for yourself that peaceful mechanisms won’t work, destroy tons of stuff, and then call that ‘fighting for marginalized people’.
4) If your radical leftist politics amount to ‘Kristallnacht, but trust us, they deserve it’ then I’m sorry but fuck you.
there’s a reverse slippery slope effect where a range of related things all get described as ‘eugenics’:
1. attempting to commit genocide
2. using force or coercion to control the reproduction of others
3. offering incentives or encouragement to influence the reproduction of others
4. making observations that could imply that people should reproduce at different rates
5. simply observing that people currently reproduce at different rates
I think the only way to be completely safe from accusations of eugenics in the first few senses is to avoid any observations of reproduction rates and definitely avoid making any suggestions of how they might be changed, no matter how indirectly or consensually.
One thing that’s interesting to me is how, with the lapsing of most government efforts to forcibly enact eugenic policies, the eugenic aspects of personal family planning become more relevant. People would generally react pretty poorly if the government mandated that all fetuses with serious developmental problems be aborted or genetically modified, but given the ability to notice this and do something about it themselves, people will still do it often enough to have a visible effect over time.
Getting away from the “eu” pretext entirely, sex-selective abortion is already a thing with visible downstream effects. These are things we can grapple with by attempting to reduce stigma, but there will always be some sorts of people heavily stigmatized, and the ability to detect that a real or hypothetical child belongs to those groups before birth or even before conception is going to continue to increase. So at some point people are going to be stuck having to decide which they like better, personal bodily autonomy or forbidding eugenics, and it’ll be a messy situation all around.
I mean, if you offer me the choice between a baby that’s directly related to me and a genetically-engineered gauranteed above-average-or-better designer baby that’s directly related to me, I’m gonna take the second one, because there is no reason for me to have a crippled baby if the baby does not yet exist.
There is no advantage whatsoever to a severe peanut allergy, for instance (though I don’t have one).
Most of the SJ stuff is based on the people already existing, and it isn’t their fault peanut allergies are a thing, but a hypothetical person that doesn’t exist yet doesn’t have the same moral weight as a person that already does.
I can understand being terrified to look up non-msm sources on Venezuela. but you can't just believe CNN Breitbart or vice or other mainstream outlets
“Venezuela no longer has the money to fund its lavish social programs because their oil isn’t worth what it used to be and they have nothing anywhere else” isn’t a terribly controversial take though.
there’s a reverse slippery slope effect where a range of related things all get described as ‘eugenics’:
1. attempting to commit genocide
2. using force or coercion to control the reproduction of others
3. offering incentives or encouragement to influence the reproduction of others
4. making observations that could imply that people should reproduce at different rates
5. simply observing that people currently reproduce at different rates
I think the only way to be completely safe from accusations of eugenics in the first few senses is to avoid any observations of reproduction rates and definitely avoid making any suggestions of how they might be changed, no matter how indirectly or consensually.
Obviously you’re only makimg this post because you secretly want to practice eugenics.
Do not worry, comrade. I, too, believe that the state should subsidize the eventual heritable genetic treatment to remove peanut allergies.
The existence of tall buildings is racist against short people. Also, with a unique culture and phenotypical presentation, short people are a race.
The Mongols should be charged - with interest - for the costly effects of the raids of their ancestors, just as some people consider doing for other countries and ethnic groups.
Eucalyptus is an invasive species within the range of the United States. The President should task the military with eradicating it from the country.
Instead of making protein bars out of crickets, we should breed cricket-sized chickens.
The Institute for Ethical Supervillainy is not a valid cause for Effective Altruism.
Trolley Problem Waifus for Those with No Laifus: Real Facebook page, produced by a neural network, or something I made up just now? Our fifteen-member expert panel debates.
The existence of tall people is racist against short people.
The Mongols countersue for retroactive carbon credits for the forest boom that occurred after they depopulated a swath of central Asia.
People are an invasive species within the United States.
We should take regular protein bars and give them feathers and sentience.
Since supervillains are proactive and superheroes reactive, supervillainy is ultimately humanity’s only chance of surviving the long-term threats it faces.
In the future all panels of talking head pundits will be structured like anime harem comedies.
Since supervillains are proactive and superheroes reactive, supervillainy is ultimately humanity’s only chance of surviving the long-term threats it faces.
The existence of tall buildings is racist against short people. Also, with a unique culture and phenotypical presentation, short people are a race.
The Mongols should be charged - with interest - for the costly effects of the raids of their ancestors, just as some people consider doing for other countries and ethnic groups.
Eucalyptus is an invasive species within the range of the United States. The President should task the military with eradicating it from the country.
Instead of making protein bars out of crickets, we should breed cricket-sized chickens.
The Institute for Ethical Supervillainy is not a valid cause for Effective Altruism.
Trolley Problem Waifus for Those with No Laifus: Real Facebook page, produced by a neural network, or something I made up just now? Our fifteen-member expert panel debates.
“Perhaps the most widely practiced code of ethical behaviour is human rights. However, statements of human rights are often vague, and give little guidance on the question of when it’s permissible to violate someone’s rights, or how to deal with conflicts between them.”—
80000 Hours explains in two sentences why humans are fucked (via wirehead-wannabe)
At this point, I like to imagine you have a big collection labeled “issues” like some people collect butterflies, all conveniently sorted so you can show them to guests.
“And this book is my issues with overly-aggressive criminal justice systems.”
“What about this one? It looks pretty.”
“My issues with collecting issues. It’s a bit too meta so I don’t like to talk about it.”
And what Hayek was saying was that it was very murky indeed even back in 1977 how exactly social justice was defined
Hayek presumably is fighting a rearguard action against any attempt to include redistribution under the label of “justice”.
Of course, there’s always a risk if you include redistribution in justice and then get carried away with it or apply it selectively, so I’m mostly opposed to
collective
intergenerational justice in anything more than weak forms.
the general right-wing sentiment that children aren’t being abused at optimal rates and the cure for being transgender is as much abuse as possible is pretty much reified in Kenneth Zucker’s trans youth conversion therapy program
Now see, someone assumed I identified as right-wing, but if I identified as right-wing, people would either expect me to defend Libertarianism or “youth conversion therapy” and I’m not interested in defending either.
drawing skulls underneath things because this is a simple enough shape that you can manipulate it in your working memory buffer because you’re used to drawing fictional mechanical objects, not faces
> sending me this instead of shitposting about how you’re going to attack me with a Federation mobile suit for supporting the extremely problematic Zeon colony drop like ten posts ago
At this rate, you’ll never be able to stop me from seizing control of Earth and paving over everything you have ever known with trees self-replicating solar-powered CO2 scrubbers, Anon-kun, much less your belovedWestern Australia.
All I need is a few hundred million in venture capital and a marine biologist.
We can make a new biosphere in the empty wastes of the South Pacific Ocean.
First you need some kind of substrate, like concrete barges or a floating grid of bamboo, something cheap and simple and easy to mass produce.
(It would need to be anchored to something, unless it’s practical to use sails or some other active mechanism to maintain position. Probably not?)
Major priority is to get plants growing. Mangrove swamps, coral reefs, forests of kelp, plankton blooms, you gotta get something growing there to kickstart life.
Once you’ve got plants growing, little things are going to show up to eat them, then bigger things are going to show up to eat the little things, and soon you’ve got the whole circle of life shenanigans on your hands.
That’s the bootstrapping phase, now the floating island of biological plenty needs to be made self-sustaining and self-repairing and self-reproducing, so that it can be expanded to thousands of square kilometres in size.
Anyway, that’s phase 1. Who’s in?
a year has passed and I haven’t tiled the south pacific with micro biomes yet
time wasted on Tumblr
How do you keep it from
1. Sinking normally from the floater materials being worn down
As far as advice from right-wing reactionaries goes, “if you’re feeling sad, go work out” is pretty good. Certainly beats “we need to bring back the monarchy”.
I like the idea of making a game based on your city planning prototype, however I don’t think your game will be a great vehicle for your city-planning ideas.
Modelling The Interesting Stuff
In order to make your city-planning ideas work in a game you would either have to model incentives based on individual in-game agents, and thus give agents complex AI for long-term decisions like when to buy or rent or move or renovate or change jobs, how much money to save or to invest with some risk or to spend, how many children to have and so on. You would have to model trust and civic engagement and social cohesion. Or all these factors would just be variables in an abstract cellular automaton based on a system of differential equations, like the original SimCity. In that case, you would have to make simplifications and judgements that look like begging the question.
The middle path would be putting agents into a grid-based world in which they make some decisions individually, but are influenced by grid-based environmental factors. On every grid update, grid cells are first updated based on the aggregate of agents living in the cell, then grid cells update based on surrounding cells. On every decision, an agent consults the values in the current cell it is in, or a weighted combination of the cells it was in most often over a period of time.
You probably want to model trust, safety, length of commute, crime levels, civic engagement, savings, disposable income, taxes, rent and rent controls, property developers, landlords, homeowners, family…
Communicating With The User
You need a way to make the player see what the agents are thinking, when they are making important decisions, and why.
It is important for two reasons:
If things happen but you can’t see them, the game feels boring
If important things happen and you don’t know, the consequences feel unfair
I like the idea of making a game based on your city planning prototype, however I don’t think your game will be a great vehicle for your city-planning ideas.
I agree, but in this case I can use some of those ideas as starting places to give more depth to the simulation, so there can be some simulation of those ideas that isn’t feasible in existing city builders, without the kind of in-depth total simulation we might do if this were a university research project.
Thus, the OTV Game can be differentiated by support for mixed-used buildings where the bottom is commercial and the upper portion is residential, zoning regulations with more potential control, rent bidding, etc.
The middle path would be putting agents into a grid-based world in which they make some decisions individually, but are influenced by grid-based environmental factors. On every grid update, grid cells are first updated based on the aggregate of agents living in the cell, then grid cells update based on surrounding cells. On every decision, an agent consults the values in the current cell it is in, or a weighted combination of the cells it was in most often over a period of time.
This is essentially my plan, along with a goal of 1,000,000 agents and 64km2 of area. Decision trees can be manageable for each agent if they are very small, and various heuristics will be used to make the simulation feasible, including use of grids and hierarchical routing.
Initial simulation will be simpler and focus on the core economic elements, and more complexity will be added over time. For instance, once basic markets are implemented and tested, more industries and specializations can be added and simulation load and difficulty observed.
You probably want to model trust, safety, length of commute, crime levels, civic engagement, savings, disposable income, taxes, rent and rent controls, property developers, landlords, homeowners, family…
Yes, some of that is definitely on the initial slab of what I want to develop, and how to rig up property developers will be one of the interesting questions, since I plan to track firms’ profits and accumulated capital.
However, I think sufficiently complex behavior can be obtained with fairly simple rules - for instance, that firms have a base cost and marginal cost, and scale up production when they make a profit and scale down production when they fail to make a profit, and that when they accumulate enough saved up capital and are profitable, they move to a bigger building to expand.
This pent-up capital accumulated for bigger buildings could then be part of the heuristic used by property developers. (Which probably would skip being physically represented as owning offices in the city, unlike other businesses.)
You need a way to make the player see what the agents are thinking, when they are making important decisions, and why.
It is important for two reasons:
1. If things happen but you can’t see them, the game feels boring 2. If important things happen and you don’t know, the consequences feel unfair
Yes. This will require combing the grid for issues and representing them as visual cues for the users. The form that takes will have to depend on magnitude and kind.
The stylized aesthetic provides plenty of room to provide visual cues in addition to cues such as floating event bubbles above businesses going bankrupt. It also provides room for some interesting overlays.
Ideally, we could also access individual citizens at their home or workplace and get more detailed information about them, but in practical terms this isn’t efficient for a city of 200,000, so there must be other ways to display this data.
Preparations are now in motion. I will be evaluating the difficulty of the development path I want to pursue, level of interest, and so on.
the funny thing about that David Brooks piece is an uneducated lower class person having a crisis over deli food with fancy immigrant names like “baguette” and going to normal honest American food, like tacos and burritos instead
Honestly that never occurred to me, Mexican food is considered totally unadventurous comfort food, here on the west coast, at least
I just got back from having carne asada tacos for dinner in a taqueria that had mariachi music playing, and it still had a bunch of American flags up around it since the town had a 4th of July parade last week
I was thinking it’d be good if I could get my family to try something a little fancier and more exotic like Greek or Thai food instead of the old familiar standbys we’d all been eating since my older relations were kids, like Mexican, Chinese, and Italian…I guess that sounds odd if you think about it objectively
As far as I know, San Francisco claims to have invented the burrito. And, as much as they are loathe to admit it, they are still part of the United States
San Francisco invented the Mission burrito, in the ‘60s, the original burrito is older and probably actually from Mexico
I have seen exclamations like “I bet he does not even have one gay/black/jewish“ friend, used as some kind of bait, to make the target say the unfortunate words.
That’s when to either go meta, attack along another vector of the same topic (“oh, so the only real gay people are the ones that already agree with you?”) or flip the switch and start shitposting about how you are friends with literally every Jew on Earth, including the questioner.
Birthrates have dropped; in the past it was not unusual to have 8+ kids.
Exactly how many people were gay in the past? Most of them?
I was given to understand that higher population density is correlated with a higher proportion of gay individuals, so presumably these two factors cancel out somewhat
we’ll figure this out one day.
No one expected the arrival of what 4chan dubbed the “Fag Maximizer” AI.
(Or, as the beleagured sociology students that accidentally unleashed it onto the world called it, Kinsey Indexer.)
Also, while we’re on the topic of annoying conservative rhetoric, let’s talk about Rotherham. I agree that it happened, and that it was bad, and that people covered it up for ideological reasons. The unspoken assumption that I don’t agree with and that people seem to keep trying to sneak in here is that it happened because Muslims are inherently more evil than the rest of us. Like, this fits the narrative of “social progressives sometimes behave like ideologues-in-the-pejorative-sense and cover up scandals to avoid making their side look bad just like other ideologues do” but not “social progressives are automatically wrong because of this.”
Rotherham bubbled up periodically and was ignored again. People have not shut up about Rotherham because it’s not over! People were still tried convicted in 2017! And some people are still trying to look away!
But the ideology and the cover-up betray something deeper: The progressives *knew* that the facts of these cases went contrary to their narrative. CPS and police *expected* these cases to be viewed as evidence against a happy multicultural narrative. That’s why they covered them up! These people were not high on their own ideology, they acted either under pressure from above, or out of self-interest, but they made the correct inferences from the situation!
Meanwhile, the Right are turning all the Progressive Left platitudes about Multiculturalism into a dark joke.
“Culturally Enriched” - Harmed or even killed.
“Diverse” - Non-white. (And this almost never comes up with some ethnicities, while it comes up a lot more with others.)
“Religion of Peace” - Religion of violence.
“Truck of Peace” - Ramming attack against unarmed civilians. It was even used to describe the ethnic revenge killing by a white man against Muslims.
The actual Progressive Left response we’re going to get is to clamp down on these uses, denounce those using them, and create a new set of platitudes or euphemisms.
Apparently in a video of a religious van and knife attack, some people could be heard saying that they thought the government had got a handle on this whole terrorism thing. And there are a pair of tweets going around of someone who had previously attended a “refugees welcome” event, after the Ariana Grande concert, saying they were scared and wanted to leave the country. (But I can’t confirm it because the account has since been suspended.)
It is important to realize that these practices of suppressing the news of the problem in the name of upholding multiculturalism actually undermine the multicultural project. One can potentially do this multiculturalism thing, but one can’t be an idiot about it and just hope for the best, and one can’t be cultureblind, just like we were told colorblindness isn’t good enough anymore.
contra yourself+anons, you make/reblog a bunch of good posts, indeed it would be difficult to imagine you not doing so given the volume of content you spew forth
“your original posts are not good, and your good posts are not original”
Unironically: in the fictional Black Forest Country I developed to work out some of my ideas, the quad is the basic unit of civil defense and they’re all equipped with an underground shelter with freeze-dried food in case of nuclear war, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.
I want you to know that your weird, detailed, obsessive hypothetical city planning series is relatable to me on a very, very deep level and that even if I understand nothing about city planning it still provides me with a deep feeling of calm and belonging to be reading them. Thank you so much for writing them! (If you've ever played Cities: Skylines or the like, I and others would probably love to see your creations.)
My dear anon, be on the lookout for a new blog sometime in the next week or so.
maybe I’m technically an extremist outlier on all of this and just don’t realize it. apparently pretty nearly the entire thinky universe is yearning for more fucking tribalism, and I just, what the fuck is wrong with you
you and me both! hey maybe we should get together and form a- you know what never mind.
@anaisnein actually tbh I think it’s just me and certain right-wingers, and I don’t think most of them are being clever enough about it
In April 2002, the Journal of Genetic Counseling released a report which estimated the average risk of birth defects in a child born of first cousins at 1.1–2.0 percentage points over an average base risk for non-cousin couples of 3%, or about the same as that of any woman over age 40.
Well now, that doesn’t sound so dangerous - wait, what’s this following paragraph?
Repeated consanguineous marriages within a group are more problematic. After repeated generations of cousin marriage the actual genetic relationship between two people is closer than the most immediate relationship would suggest. In Pakistan, where there has been cousin marriage for generations and the current rate may exceed 50%, one study estimated infant mortality at 12.7 percent for married double first cousins, 7.9 percent for first cousins, 9.2 percent for first cousins once removed/double second cousins, 6.9 percent for second cousins, and 5.1 percent among nonconsanguineous progeny. Among double first cousin progeny, 41.2 percent of prereproductive deaths were associated with the expression of detrimental recessive genes, with equivalent values of 26.0, 14.9, and 8.1 percent for first cousins, first cousins once removed/double second cousins, and second cousins respectively.
Given the high rate of such marriages, many children come from repeat generations of first-cousin marriages. The report states that these children are 13 times more likely than the general population to produce children with genetic disorders, and one in ten children of first-cousin marriages in Birmingham either dies in infancy or develops a serious disability. The BBC also states that Pakistani-Britons, who account for some 3% of all births in the UK, produce “just under a third” of all British children with genetic illnesses. Published studies show that mean perinatal mortality in the Pakistani community of 15.7 per thousand significantly exceeds that in the indigenous population and all other ethnic groups in Britain. Congenital anomalies account for 41 percent of all British Pakistani infant deaths.
Well, fuck. This isn’t good.
The increased mortality and birth defects observed among British Pakistanis may, however, have another source besides current consanguinity.
Oh, you mean it might be some kind of outside oppression? I bet Whi-
Population subdivision results from decreased gene flow among different groups in a population. Because members of Pakistani biradari have married only inside these groups for generations, offspring have higher average homozygosity even for couples with no known genetic relationship.
Oh. Nope, having kids with people who are too genetically similar to each other.
Now remember, we’re talking about information from Wikipedia and the BBC, not Evil Hatefacts from an Evil Hatesite.
So that’s the genetic aspect. So why do they do it?
To keep wealth within the family and stick close to the father’s genetic line.
It isn’t some huge, secret magical diverse cultural benefit that the Middle East has and we don’t. It’s just clannishness. (In fact, I suspect the clannishness is even responsible for some of the issues in their armies.)
Now, the Alt Right seems to think that as a result of this and other issues, all Muslim immigrants must be kicked out of the UK.
That is not necessary. Also it would probably get a lot of people hurt or killed, which is bad. So let’s not do that.
For the Liberals, we should keep in mind that cousin marriage likely promotes clannishness and amoral familism (”my family, right or wrong”), due to increased genetic similarity and insulation from the outer world. In fact, that’s pretty much the purpose of the practice.
Remember that social atomization that was supposed to melt away the religions and make everyone into happy Liberals? That isn’t going to happen if they all marry their cousins, which enables and incentivizes close, repressive, tight control of women, and insular culture.
If we want Islam to chill out and liberalize and soften, like Christianity, and we want the Muslim immigrants to become happy Liberals, then we must ban cousin marriage.
No excuses because “it’s their culture,” or “you’re just a repressive [ethnic majority].” That isn’t helping them.
That’s enabling them. Cousin marriage is bad. It’s self-destructive behavior. It’s other-destructive behavior for the kids, too.
Human beings are resilient. It won’t take that long to start removing the most negative effects, if we start now.
@silver-and-ivory:
Also: why should we have nations instead of familial tribes?
Nations are a lot bigger, more productive, and more flexible.
We want people to be able to roam around some without having to marry in to a tribe for protection, including being able to flee abusive family members. This is feasible in a city-state, bigger nations such as France, or a collection of city-states. Blood ties make this a lot harder.
While we also want them to share cultural elements such as language, they don’t need to share all cultural elements in order to have the necessary level of unity. This makes it easier to satisfy peoples’ needs, which vary.
Nations are also much more productive, easier to physically defend.
In April 2002, the Journal of Genetic Counseling released a report which estimated the average risk of birth defects in a child born of first cousins at 1.1–2.0 percentage points over an average base risk for non-cousin couples of 3%, or about the same as that of any woman over age 40.
Well now, that doesn’t sound so dangerous - wait, what’s this following paragraph?
Repeated consanguineous marriages within a group are more problematic. After repeated generations of cousin marriage the actual genetic relationship between two people is closer than the most immediate relationship would suggest. In Pakistan, where there has been cousin marriage for generations and the current rate may exceed 50%, one study estimated infant mortality at 12.7 percent for married double first cousins, 7.9 percent for first cousins, 9.2 percent for first cousins once removed/double second cousins, 6.9 percent for second cousins, and 5.1 percent among nonconsanguineous progeny. Among double first cousin progeny, 41.2 percent of prereproductive deaths were associated with the expression of detrimental recessive genes, with equivalent values of 26.0, 14.9, and 8.1 percent for first cousins, first cousins once removed/double second cousins, and second cousins respectively.
Given the high rate of such marriages, many children come from repeat generations of first-cousin marriages. The report states that these children are 13 times more likely than the general population to produce children with genetic disorders, and one in ten children of first-cousin marriages in Birmingham either dies in infancy or develops a serious disability. The BBC also states that Pakistani-Britons, who account for some 3% of all births in the UK, produce “just under a third” of all British children with genetic illnesses. Published studies show that mean perinatal mortality in the Pakistani community of 15.7 per thousand significantly exceeds that in the indigenous population and all other ethnic groups in Britain. Congenital anomalies account for 41 percent of all British Pakistani infant deaths.
Well, fuck. This isn’t good.
The increased mortality and birth defects observed among British Pakistanis may, however, have another source besides current consanguinity.
Oh, you mean it might be some kind of outside oppression? I bet Whi-
Population subdivision results from decreased gene flow among different groups in a population. Because members of Pakistani biradari have married only inside these groups for generations, offspring have higher average homozygosity even for couples with no known genetic relationship.
Oh. Nope, having kids with people who are too genetically similar to each other.
Now remember, we’re talking about information from Wikipedia and the BBC, not Evil Hatefacts from an Evil Hatesite.
So that’s the genetic aspect. So why do they do it?
To keep wealth within the family and stick close to the father’s genetic line.
It isn’t some huge, secret magical diverse cultural benefit that the Middle East has and we don’t. It’s just clannishness. (In fact, I suspect the clannishness is even responsible for some of the issues in their armies.)
Now, the Alt Right seems to think that as a result of this and other issues, all Muslim immigrants must be kicked out of the UK.
That is not necessary. Also it would probably get a lot of people hurt or killed, which is bad. So let’s not do that.
For the Liberals, we should keep in mind that cousin marriage likely promotes clannishness and amoral familism (”my family, right or wrong”), due to increased genetic similarity and insulation from the outer world. In fact, that’s pretty much the purpose of the practice.
Remember that social atomization that was supposed to melt away the religions and make everyone into happy Liberals? That isn’t going to happen if they all marry their cousins, which enables and incentivizes close, repressive, tight control of women, and insular culture.
If we want Islam to chill out and liberalize and soften, like Christianity, and we want the Muslim immigrants to become happy Liberals, then we must ban cousin marriage.
No excuses because “it’s their culture,” or “you’re just a repressive [ethnic majority].” That isn’t helping them.
That’s enabling them. Cousin marriage is bad. It’s self-destructive behavior. It’s other-destructive behavior for the kids, too.
Human beings are resilient. It won’t take that long to start removing the most negative effects, if we start now.
In April 2002, the Journal of Genetic Counseling released a report which estimated the average risk of birth defects in a child born of first cousins at 1.1–2.0 percentage points over an average base risk for non-cousin couples of 3%, or about the same as that of any woman over age 40.
Well now, that doesn’t sound so dangerous - wait, what’s this following paragraph?
Repeated consanguineous marriages within a group are more problematic. After repeated generations of cousin marriage the actual genetic relationship between two people is closer than the most immediate relationship would suggest. In Pakistan, where there has been cousin marriage for generations and the current rate may exceed 50%, one study estimated infant mortality at 12.7 percent for married double first cousins, 7.9 percent for first cousins, 9.2 percent for first cousins once removed/double second cousins, 6.9 percent for second cousins, and 5.1 percent among nonconsanguineous progeny. Among double first cousin progeny, 41.2 percent of prereproductive deaths were associated with the expression of detrimental recessive genes, with equivalent values of 26.0, 14.9, and 8.1 percent for first cousins, first cousins once removed/double second cousins, and second cousins respectively.
Given the high rate of such marriages, many children come from repeat generations of first-cousin marriages. The report states that these children are 13 times more likely than the general population to produce children with genetic disorders, and one in ten children of first-cousin marriages in Birmingham either dies in infancy or develops a serious disability. The BBC also states that Pakistani-Britons, who account for some 3% of all births in the UK, produce “just under a third” of all British children with genetic illnesses. Published studies show that mean perinatal mortality in the Pakistani community of 15.7 per thousand significantly exceeds that in the indigenous population and all other ethnic groups in Britain. Congenital anomalies account for 41 percent of all British Pakistani infant deaths.
Well, fuck. This isn’t good.
The increased mortality and birth defects observed among British Pakistanis may, however, have another source besides current consanguinity.
Oh, you mean it might be some kind of outside oppression? I bet Whi-
Population subdivision results from decreased gene flow among different groups in a population. Because members of Pakistani biradari have married only inside these groups for generations, offspring have higher average homozygosity even for couples with no known genetic relationship.
Oh. Nope, having kids with people who are too genetically similar to each other.
Now remember, we’re talking about information from Wikipedia and the BBC, not Evil Hatefacts from an Evil Hatesite.
So that’s the genetic aspect. So why do they do it?
To keep wealth within the family and stick close to the father’s genetic line.
It isn’t some huge, secret magical diverse cultural benefit that the Middle East has and we don’t. It’s just clannishness. (In fact, I suspect the clannishness is even responsible for some of the issues in their armies.)
Now, the Alt Right seems to think that as a result of this and other issues, all Muslim immigrants must be kicked out of the UK.
That is not necessary. Also it would probably get a lot of people hurt or killed, which is bad. So let’s not do that.
For the Liberals, we should keep in mind that cousin marriage likely promotes clannishness and amoral familism (”my family, right or wrong”), due to increased genetic similarity and insulation from the outer world. In fact, that’s pretty much the purpose of the practice.
Remember that social atomization that was supposed to melt away the religions and make everyone into happy Liberals? That isn’t going to happen if they all marry their cousins, which enables and incentivizes close, repressive, tight control of women, and insular culture.
If we want Islam to chill out and liberalize and soften, like Christianity, and we want the Muslim immigrants to become happy Liberals, then we must ban cousin marriage.
No excuses because “it’s their culture,” or “you’re just a repressive [ethnic majority].” That isn’t helping them.
That’s enabling them. Cousin marriage is bad. It’s self-destructive behavior. It’s other-destructive behavior for the kids, too.
Human beings are resilient. It won’t take that long to start removing the most negative effects, if we start now.
the eternal conundrum: should I explain, potentially coming off as condescending and forcing my conversation partner into an awkward, petulant-sounding statement that actually they did know already
or should I deliberately withhold information, potentially forcing my conversation partner to ask for more and thereby humiliating them by forcing them to admit they didn’t know?
That feeling when you watch a video on youtube and then glance over at the recommended videos tab and realise what the site really thinks of you.
if you enjoyed this post, why not click through to see other recommended posts!
algorithms don’t know your stated preferences, only your revealed preferences.
Now I have an image of a dystopian story with a “friendly AI” which, instead of keeping us safe or wireheading us (but same genre as those ones, a la “with folded hands”), provides humans with their revealed preferences rather than their stated preferences, and keeps bombarding us with weird porn we pretend not to like or horribly unhealthy food or outrage addiction-type stuff.
Historically, I’ve considered myself more center-left or centrist. I disagree with much of the economic and social dogma of the American right.
Before coming to Tumblr, I devised a fictional prototype National Technocratic country, which helped shape some of my new ideas as an exercise, but in that country, I deliberately fucked with things to change what it meant to be reactionary. I changed the conditions in such a way that precursors to certain modern practices were thousands of years old, while others had little to no influence.
Admittedly, foreign communists would have sneeringly described it as a right-wing dictatorship, but I promise you that American conservatives would also regard it as a sinister rival left-wing state. (At least after the Cold War.)
