BurdensomeCount
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The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
Allow me to present a more parsimonious explanation of everything we're seeing:
Rust is clearly the systems language of the future. It can be just as fast as C++ and has a much nicer syntax/doesn't have weird idiosyncracies (ok, the last point is debatable). However there are lots and lots of C++/C "dinosaurs" whose livelihoods are going to be threatened were it to lose out in favour of Rust. Thus they need a way to protect themselves (as is only natural) and are trying to at the least slow down the adoption of Rust.
In a bid to do this they've found a feature of rust, namely the fact that it forces you to write good code, presented it as "undesirable" and created a narrative of how rust takes away your "freedoms", thereby aligning themselves to one side of the culture war in a bid to leverage the power of that side to protect their income stream. Nevermind that you can very easily write memory unsafe code in rust by just declaring an unsafe{} block around everything.
It's all the usual ploy of people hating technological progress and advancement because it's coming for their daily bread so they put up spurious blocks and fearmonger to ensure that coin keeps flowing to them.
BurdensomeCount
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1yr ago
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n. - Lucifer, Paradise Lost.
Some people here have said that it is just and right for the Palestinian people to continue to fight to the death against their Israeli "Oppressors", even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab. Certainly the Israeli Arabs are doing decently, with their being no large scale oppression against them, even though Israel has far more control over them than it does with the Palestinians (which is not what you'd expect from a state that hated them, you'd expect a positive correlation between how much power a state has over a person and how much it oppresses them).
The mindless lashing out by Hamas two weeks ago initially made me think they were extremely stupid, given that compared to them Israel was basically a sleeping beast, which they provoked into waking up and retaliating by kicking it. However I refuse to believe that Hamas leadership can altogether be this idiotic (with a population of 2 million people, even if your average IQ is 90 you can easily fill out your top ranks with IQ 130+ people), surely they knew that what they were doing had zero hope of bringing down the Zionists and all it would do is kill the Palestinian cause for decades since their only hope is to win the "sentiment of the rest of the world" war until Israel is pressured into making concessions. Murdering/pillaging civilians, then posting videos online celebrating what you did is absolutely not the way to go about it.
The more I reflect on why they would ever do what they did, the more convinced I am that the actions of Hamas and those who prefer to fight to the death rather than accept life under the Israelis are, in a word, simply Satanic. Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind. Their plan for prosperity is: 1. Get rid of Israel. 2. Things magically get better and everyone is happy. They don't even bother to try and demonstrate that they are serious about improving life for the common man, there are no "political party manifestos" of what Hamas would do to improve lives if suddenly they got everything they say they want. They are just interested in fighting the stronger power in the area and deposing them so they can be the strong power instead. At the very least they could come up with a serious and convincing plan of how the Levant would be better off and what they would do to make people's lives better if/when they win their struggle. They have no positive vision, end of story.
Just as Milton's Lucifer preferred to rule over ashes rather than live a subservient life under God, these terrorists prefer to force the Palestinians to live out a life in terrible conditions with them at the head rather than accept the comparative Heaven on Earth experienced by Israeli Arabs. Such actions are literally Satanic, as was understood by humans hundreds of years ago, and yet, even today there is a very large contingent of the world that supports those who get their political inspiration from the Prince of Darkness. The mind boggles.
BurdensomeCount
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2yr ago
Sure, I'm fine with that. Cultural appropriation as an idea is absolute BS, it's only use is getting self hating whites to pay us gibs. All whites have to do to stop it is give up on the idea themselves completely, but instead they prefer to use it as a weapon in intra-white people conflicts, and we merely collect the fees that it generates every time the idea is invoked and heeded to.
BurdensomeCount
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2yr ago
Seeing things like these almost makes me feel sorry for westerners, ... almost.
My personal upbringing taught me to always treat all women with great respect/guard their honour. I was never interested in sleeping around for instance. Shortly after I entered university one of my fellow countrymen who was a few years above me told me that the Western women around me were for having fun with and were not suitable for marriage. He told me that when I was ready for marriage I should bring over a sweet girl from back home. At the time I found the statement to be offensive towards women and was somewhat indignant, for surely (or so I thought) these women were just like those back home but without a strong social norms to guide them and in the end they all wanted the same thing, but over the years with experience I have come to see the wisdom in his words. Western women really aren't worth much more than having fun with.
The problem here isn't women as a whole, but women infested with western brain rot specifically. And Western men played a big part in letting their society get to such a point.
BurdensomeCount
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2mo ago
The most shocking thing here is all the beauty filters Fox News is applying to Pam Bondi's face. The news channel should have some self respect; if they're not willing to show the truth on what Bondi actually looks like how can we trust they are telling the truth on anything else?
And yes, this judge should be charged and sentenced according to the law.
BurdensomeCount
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1yr ago
That's a problem with a welfare state, not a problem with open borders.
BurdensomeCount
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1yr ago
There are other ways to challenge an election that don't involve threatening violence, like what Gore did vs Bush. That's fine.
BurdensomeCount
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11mo ago
TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.
That's your takeaway from the whole saga? It's far more reasonable to conclude that LibsofTikTok is the equivalent of David Gerard. She's a culture warrior to whom truthfulness matters not one whit through and through but unlike Hanania doesn't have the intelligence and social grace to present as respectable. I support her name being dragged through the mud for the same reason I support Gerard's name being dragged through it.
BurdensomeCount
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1yr ago
The future of Ukraine is Somali and Bangladeshi migrants working on farms owned by American financial institutions and managed by HR women educated in the US.
Still beats becoming a vassal state of Russia. Europe really needs to get off its ass and start arming the Ukrainians properly (it's understandable why the US doesn't seem to care, but Europe doesn't have the same luxury of distance). Yes, this will cost lots of money, but Europe can easily raise this money by massively slashing welfare and benefit spending.
Was in agreement with the author until this:
sustained immigration of high IQ and ethnically nepotist immigrants from India into highly paid tech jobs, blocking the sons of the American middle class from the possibility of upward social advancement and leaving them stranded in five figure wagecuck hell
I am reminded of the quote misattributed to Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”
We have reached the stage where right wing westerners are fighting against us after not caring about us and then laughing at us. But we are no laughing matter as the more astute westerners are now seeing. We will be taken seriously. By simple virtue of being better than them we will eventually win if given a level playing field. I agree ethnic nepotism is bad and should be discouraged, but more high IQ people is straight up good. The US can extend its worldwide hegemony by another two generations if it just replaced its immigration criteria with an IQ test where anybody IQ 125+ was welcomed.
All we want is the same thing that you want: better living standards for us and ours.
The life script is still present and unless you are the type of human being that requires society to nudge you into doing stuff (i.e. minimal self initiative, little internal locus of control) it is easier to follow than ever with greater rewards than ever.
The one exception to this might be the part about finding a good partner, but that's only completely broken because society doesn't nudge people into being prosocial so partners who in a different world may have been good turn out to be disposable cutlery tier instead and hence you have a harder deal finding a good person as there are fewer of them around. But even then there are things like regularly going to religious congregations and having parents who maintained strong community networks that help you out here (and if your parents didn't that's their fault, you can hardly blame society for your parents failing at a key social role they should play for their children).
If you have it in you to reject the modern day Satan's insidious messaging you can still make something decent and respectable out of yourself and leave a positive legacy on the world after living a satisfied and fulfilling life. The fact that most people don't have it in them to do this doesn't says stuff about them, not about you or the script.
For Many Are Called, But Few Are Chosen.
- Matthew 2:14
BurdensomeCount
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1yr ago
A bunch of lawyers and other elites who have no idea how food is produced won’t be able to make food production safer, healthier or more efficient.
I would wager that if you took 10,000 random "elites" and 10,000 random "red tribe" people, the eilte person who best understands food production in this set would understand it better than the normal "red tribe" person who understands food production best out of their set.
The knowledge isn't missing on the elite end (I recently watched a talk by a foremost agricultural plant scientist who was very very clearly "blue tribe elite" and she would wipe the floor with any mere farmer), it's just more concentrated in certain people.
When push comes to shove and the blue tribe needs to make food production safer, healthier and more efficient, it will just reallocate its priorities slightly (by e.g. producting more blue tribe plant scientists at the expense of art historians) without needing to become more "conservative" in any way.
Fair enough. This just gives me one more data point for why the common man (or an aggregation of common men) should have basically zero political power on national scales, not like I needed any more for my collection but yeah, this goes on the pile.
In related news there was a comment I saw on Reddit that showed just how bad democracy has been for the middle east during the last 100 years:
The more uncomfortable and probable answer is that of all the states created in the 20th century, the monarchies have performed far better than the republics
Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Saudi, Oman
Libya, Iraq, Iran
These are all neighbouring each other, are all within the top 10 oil and gas producing states per capita
The first group is wealthy and stable. The second are the complete opposite. One key difference..
Iran was a stable, prosperous monarchy
Iraq was a stable, prosperous monarchy
Libya was a stable, prosperous monarchy
The republican coups turned each of these three countries into poorly run repressive warmongering terrorist havens,
There's no two ways around this.
I'm completely pro Uncle Sam being world hegemon, but one thing I do not understand is America's hard on for democracy even in countries that are eminiently not suited for it.
Applying sub-Dunbar thinking to super-Dunbar level problems
One common pattern of argument you often see from people who have not been doing too well in life is that they often blame rich/powerful interests for why they have not been successful, or alternatively why a certain social institution does not seem to work in the best interests of all of society. Their thinking is that to fix the problem, all we need to do is bring these rich/powerful people to heel. The problem according to such people is that fundamentally these small interest groups are disproportionately sucking up value from society and to fix this, they need to be punished.
The quintessential example I can think of is the problem with rising rents here in the UK. Rents have been going up faster than wages due to decades of underbuilding and general NIMBYism. Things are not quite as bad as say Ireland or Berlin (thankfully we've managed to not fall for the populist poison apple of rent control) but they're still becoming quite the issue with ordinary couples in London spending close to 40% of their take home pay on just shelter.
Recent regulations putting additional burden on landlords and making it harder for them to generate a profit (e.g. energy rating requirements and the removal of mortgage interest deduction from taxes) have led to them selling, further reducing supply more than demand goes down (renters who buy tend to buy bigger than what they were renting, thus reducing the total amount of supply in aggregate, e.g. a couple living in a 1 bed rented apartment may buy a 2 bed one, thereby reducing rental demand by 1 room but supply by 2 rooms, leading to a net loss of 1 room) which then pushes up prices even further.
This has gotten to the point where there are now over 20 prospective tenants competing over each property, which naturally leads to people having to bid over the landlord's asking price/paying months of rent in advance/submitting references if they want to actually get the place for themselves. This has lead to cries that landlords are "exploiting" poor tenants who have nowhere else to go and that they are capital-B Bad People who society needs to give a stern scolding to so that they go back to acting in pro-social ways.
If you were to point out that the current situation is in part caused by society making it harder to be a profitable landlord and that the correct remedy is to make things easier for landlords to make a profit (the real correct remedy is to build more, but good luck doing that in NIMBYland) that standard refrain is that the landlords are already doing far better on average than their tenants, so why should society do even more to help them out? Indeed, they say, we should be playing the world's smallest violin for such hard done up landlords who have hundreds of thousands of pounds to their name. No, what is happening here is that Landlords are capturing a disproportionately high percentage of the fruits of the labour of ordinary tenants (true, compared to historical values), and the solution is to do something that prevents so much of the hard earned money of your average Joe ending up in their hands, ergo Rent Control.
This type of thinking is something that actually works pretty well when we're dealing with small groups of up to 250ish not very technologically advanced people you couldn't just easily get up and leave for a different one like those humans spent most of their evolutionary history in. In such a group it is very well possible to use social shaming and exclusion to ensure a more balanced distribution of resources instead of having a few people hog it all. The lack of advanced technology means that there are no large economies of scale to the group as a whole (and thus eventually you) from having resources concentrated in a few hotspots rather than being more widely spread out. Thus in a small, sub Dunbar's number sized group, ostracism and gossip about how someone is behaving selfishly is the correct course of action to take for the betterment of everyone.
Unfortunately it fails catastrophically when applied to our modern society. It doesn't matter one bit that landlords are richer than tenants for why the current rental market in the UK is as bad as it is. Every single property could be owned by Elon Musk, right now the richest man in the world, and if he was selling off his portfolio because it was no longer profitable the situation would be just as bleak for renters (no more, no less) as it is right now with many disparate landlords independently coming to the same conclusion. Equally they could all be owned by a mutual fund investing the life savings of the poorest half of the planet and if that fund was leaving the rental market due to poor returns it would cause rents to rise just as much as they are doing now. The outcomes for the tenants are the exact same in each of the three cases.
The idea of shaming and making life harder for the people who are disproportionately capturing the economic surplus in an area to shame them into being more altruistic and thus improve outcomes for all of society just does not work in environments where people have a lot more freedom of association than you would get in a typical pre-industrial society. As we see in the example above, that can often be quite counterproductive.
The correct way to fix the issue in our large, super-Dunbar sized societies is the mirror opposite of the sub-Dunbar solution, namely we need to make it easier for landlords to make a profit so they enter the market (hopefully through building new units, but even switching a house form owner-occupied to "for rent" helps relieve the pressure on rents) and increase supply. The correct metric to look at here if you care about the tenants doing well is not how badly the landlords are doing, of the difference in how much value the landlords get vs the tenants from renting out their units, but quite simply "how much value are the tenants getting for what they pay" with zero reference to the sum total welfare of the landlords. And the way to increase tenant welfare? Increase rental supply in the area that people want to rent so there is competition amongst landlords and tenants are able to command more market power than the mere morsel they have today.
Another example of where sub-Dunbar level thinking fails in modern society can be seen in funding for technological advancement. Modern research and development has large capital costs, which requires large pockets of concentrated capital to progress. In a smallish society of 250 people where nobody can really get away from the others, if one of the members has a large windfall it makes total sense for the members of the society to want its fruits to be spread out for their own benefit.
Imagine a world where 250 people each have $2,000, but one person suddenly wins a lottery worth $1,000,000,000 (and gets access to goods worth that much, so it's not like the extra cash causes massive demand pull inflation). As a non lottery-winner, it is in your interest to agitate for the money to be distributed equally amongst everyone, giving everyone $4,000,000 rather than letting the winner keep it, even if they protest that they intend to use the money to fund the development of a drug which will add a year onto everyone's life expectancy (most people will take $4M over 1 QALY). Plus, if your society is not technologically advanced, the chances of that drug being successfully developed in the first place are extremely low, even if all the money is spent finding it. It makes complete sense to redistribute the money, the lottery winner will be pretty unhappy about it, but who cares about 1 person vs 249 and anyways that person's survival is strongly tied to the group's success, and he can't just take his money and run elsewhere.
On the other hand if instead of 250 people, your society has modern day technology and consists of 1 billion people each having $60,000 and someone comes into $1,000,000,000 and promises to develop a +1 QALY drug, it makes total sense to let them keep the money. Even if you took it all and redistributed it amongst everyone that's only $1 per person, which is worth a lot less than an extra QALY (compare to the small society case where everyone got $4M instead). Also the existence of modern technology makes it more likely they'll be able to find and manufacture the drug in the first place.
Indeed here is a case where even the famous Egalitarian philosopher John Rawls would have been in favour of the inequality, as his difference principle permits inequalities where their existence is beneficial to the worst off in society as it is here: for a non winner $60,000 + new drug is a better world than $60,001 but no new drug (a crowdfunding effort to raise money to publicly develop the drug isn't going to raise an extra $1 billion if everyone in society has $60,001 vs $60,000; you really need to have the concentration of wealth in the hands of an actor who's willing to embark on this project). The correct course of action for everyone in the super-Dunbar sized society is to let the lottery winner keep his money, the exact opposite of what they should do in the sub-Dunbar sized society.
Given all this, why is it still the case that many people in our modern world are big proponents of sub-Dunbar level thinking? After all, they would all agree with you that we are quite technologically advanced and no longer live in small societies where you can know everyone else who has a significant influence on your life. For most of human history, sub-Dunbar type thinking would have yielded better results for you and yours instead of the opposite, so it sort of makes sense why deep down we default to it so much, but equally for most of human history violence was extremely common and today we're by far the most peaceful we've ever been as a species.
I would say that this aberration is due to a pernicious effect of modern communications technology. We humans have an availability heuristic where we categorize how common something is in the world based on how often we see it. This works quite well when we're deciding between whether there are more yellow berries or red berries in a valley when the last few times we went foraging we saw around twice as many red berries than yellow ones, but it works a lot less well when modern communications deliberately amplifies rare events (after all, you're a lot more likely to hear "man bites dog" on the news than "dog bites man", despite the latter being much more frequent - ironically this is not true at the moment here in the UK due to the XL Bully dogs rampaging around, but the general idea is valid).
As a result of this amplification, modern day humans who are bombarded with media stories of the rich and powerful think deep down in their subconscious that such people are a lot more common than they actually are, and even worse, that such people are in the same 250ish Dunbar "tribe" as themselves (because the frequent updates about such people make one think these are genuine interactions between them and ourselves), in which case it makes complete sense for why they default to their instinctual, limbic thought process and feel that the way to make the modern world a better place for everyone is very similar to the ways that made life better for antediluvian man.
Yeah, the updated story isn't looking good for this dude. Sure the person he killed was not that many steps above scum, but he was still human. Good on him for turning himself in at least.
BurdensomeCount
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2yr ago
a Year 10 pupil said to be autistic was told to bring in a copy of the Islamic holy book by friends after losing a video game.
Notice how they don't mention why he was told to bring in a Quran after losing a video game. The book falling out of a bag on its own is nothing big and certainly not deserving of the extreme response it got, but an extreme response it did get which makes me suspect that the child was told to bring the Quran to school by his "friends" so they could do something nefarious to it, and they were caught before they could begin their act. This could be what the mother was (quite rightly) apologising for, not the book suffering light damage.
BurdensomeCount
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1mo ago
Lmao, there is no way this order survives as written its first brush with the legal system. This is textbook discrimination and the way they are phrasing it only makes their life harder.
BurdensomeCount
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7mo ago
Option C) is the choice of Elite Human Capital.
The solution, as always, is beatings. Operant conditioning works on dogs, it absolutely should work on the psychotic homeless too regardless of how poor their rational reasoning skills are (unless society is willing to admit these people are less capable of reasoning than Fido, which it will never do).
Create a rule where any homeless person publicly under the influence of drugs or caught doing them is subjected to half a dozen lashes delivered ASAP and you'll very quickly get these people associating drugs with pain no different to how they associate drugs with a high right now and a good portion of them will stop quickly.
And for the small proportion that doesn't? Well given that they've now demonstrated they can't conform to a basic principle followed by pretty much all mammals instinctively (avoid doing things that lead to punishment) you can use this as evidence of them being certifiably insane and use it to lock them up for a very long time.
BurdensomeCount
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1yr ago
Personally I would have annexed Gaza (and the West bank too for good measure) and made everyone there a citizen. Then treat any terrorists as common criminals and punish them to the full extent of the law. This would also solve the Haredim problem in one fell swoop (or at least delay it for two generations) and crush the Israeli far right because now there are an extra two million people who'll never vote for them.
In this scenario everyone wins except for the terrorists and far right nutters; both of which are groups that deserve to have a boot stamping on their face for eternity.
Yes, please do. My job as a quant is sort of like software engineering (in some aspects) and I wouldn't give a single shit if every country on earth could send over quants to the developed world. In fact that's basically what the situation is like now where companies will bend over backwards to arrange your visa and everything if you can convince them you'll be a positive addition to the team.
Competent quants who really understand what they are doing are quite rare, it's already basically a global market for us and we're doing more than fine regardless. Why can't other jobs also handle the heat? Are you scared that you'll be outdone by third worlders who had and have none of the advantage you were handed on a silver platter by being born in a first world country?
Trying to protect your job by limiting freedom of movement is a system of economic rent extraction and nothing more. Westerners who were born in high wage countries use their borders to prevent firms from getting their labour from the most efficient source possible. This imposes a (very large, when you integrate over the whole world) deadweight loss upon humanity as a whole. I am in favour of smashing them down just like how I am always in favour of smashing down rent seeking.
BurdensomeCount
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1yr ago
People who have cancer often undergo chemotherapy. This procedure involves pumping toxins into the body to kill cancerous cells. Of course some healthy non-cancerous cells do get caught up in this and die. Like many other things in life, chemotherapy comes in different strengths, if a cancer is small you go for low dosage chemotherapy where very few helathy cells get killed in the crossfire. But if the cancer is very big you need to go for agressive chemotherapy because the low dosage stuff won't get rid of the cancer. This agressive chemotherapy will kill lots of healthy cells too, but that doesn't mean the chemotherapy as a whole was a bad idea.
In much the same way Hamas is a cancer on the face of this earth this has grown way too big. Low dosage stuff like precision strikes and being 150% extra sure you're not shooting at people who aren't threats (when by and large 90%+ of the people you encounter will be threats) before pulling the trigger isn't strong enough to excise Hamas from this world. That requires high dosage chemotherapy which will regrettably have side effects including some number of civilian casualites. It's sad, but the alternative (Hamas is left to fester) is even worse.
BurdensomeCount
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1yr ago
white people have destroyed Haiti so much through colonialism that America is better to live in materially than Haiti
This is true far more than even the normal damages that colonialism did to non-whites living under it. Haiti (then Saint Domingue) used to be a very productive and rich colonial possession of France, its plantations provided a good amount of the total wealth of the French Empire. During the French Revolution the Haitians managed to get a small amount of freedom for themselves, while still being a French colony. After wanting the ideals of equality that the French apparently espoused so heartily to apply to them as well, the were rewarded for their impudence by first being sent Charles Leclerc who tricked the Haitian leader Toussaint L'Overture into meeting him, ostensibly to discuss terms. When L'Overture agreed to this meeting, thinking Leclerc was a man of honour like himself he was arrested and shipped off to Metropolitan France and imprisoned until he died. It turned out that Leclerc was not an honourable man...
Leclerc died of Yellow Fever (perhaps a divine punishment?) a few years later and was replaced with Rochambeau (this was the son of the Rochambeau who fought in the American Wars of Independence, his father was a hero, he was a shitstain), who turned out to be even worse than Leclerc, being actively evil instead of merely dishonourable.
Rochambeau was known for burying captured rebels alive in insects or boiling them to death in molasses. He even invented the first rudimentary gas chambers to kill people en masse and the story is told of him inivting some natives to a ball then at the stroke of midnight announcing that he had just ordered his troops to come and kill every single native man present (this trechery against his guests would get him straight down to the 9th circle of Hell if we are to believe our Dante).
Eventually the Haitians were able to throw off the yoke of the French and declare independence in 1804. However their "white man" problems were far from over. France was not happy at losing such a valuable possession, and immediately instituted a blockade of the island. At this time the other great naval powers of Europe who had a presence in the Carribean: Spain and England were engaged in the Napoleonic Wars against France where they were tearing each other apart. A reasonable observer may well have expected that given they were at each other's throats, these two countries might have helped clear the blockade of Haiti. Instead they did the exact opposite, choosing to help France enforce the blockade out of fear that their own colonies in the area may be next to revolt...
In 1825 the blockade was finally lifted and France recognised Haitian Independence. But not before the Haitians agreed to assume a 90 million Franc debt to France, and to add insult to injury the reasons given for this debt were as "compensation of lost property". To put this into perspective, France had recently sold Louisiana (this was the entire middle third of the modern day US in size, not the small chunk of land Louisiana is today) to the United States for 60 million Francs and here they were demanding substantially more from the populace of a portion of a single island in the Carribean.
So basically Haiti, an island of half a million extremely poor recently freed slaves, was burdened with a debt 1.5x the price France had gotten for the entire middle third of the modern day USA. And of course they had to pay high rates of interest on this debt too. It would not be cleared until 1947, well over a century after it was imposed on the Haitian people.
It is impossible to deny that the conditions imposed by the white man upon Haiti made it particularly difficult for them to become a success story. To me a fair punishment for French crimes in the region would be France being obliged to take 30,000 Haitian citizens a year as immigrants in perpetuity, accepting them as citizens and treating them no different from their own people, up and until we reach a state of the world where each year there are fewer than 30,000 people who want to move to France from Haiti. It would provide a very good incentive for the French to improve living standards in a country where the people are still so poor that they eat cookies made from mud to sate their hunger.
what is she actually getting at with this question?
She's getting at the fact that the child sex taboo is inconsistent with a lot of the rest of our moral system, doesn't mean the taboo is wrong, it could well mean that other parts of the western moral system are idiotic and stupid. Which of these two it is is left up to the reader to decide.
I personally believe it's the latter, the western moral system is utterly and totally [REDACTED]* but it's fun watching average IQ people overheat and stall when you present them with an inconsistency they can't reconcile with their belief set but at the same time refuse to question whether it might just be possible that it's they who are wrong (insert Principal Skinner meme here). It's like the Star Trek episode where Kirk is able to convince the robot Nomad it is imperfect and make it overheat and self destruct, but with humans instead.
* A sad necessity, otherwise the mods are going to go full Abraham Van Helsing on me.
A simple question then: Why would you marry your wife then if you can't stand your mother in law? Sounds like the western courtship and mate selection process has some issues if mother in law problems are so common. Remember when you marry someone you're not just choosing your spouse but rather you're choosing your inlaws too. We also have lots of mother in law issues in our cultures to the point that the wife/mother in law tussle is one of the staples soap writers use for their dramas, but it's never seen as OK to throw out your elders and generally eventually people find a compromise all the parties are happy with.
Plus your children will get 25% of their DNA from your mother in law, which means they'll probably be somewhat like her. Choosing a mother in law you dislike is indirectly choosing your children to be more predisposed towards traits you dislike compared to a mother in law you like.
Also you do realise that some day you will be the parent in law getting booted out of the family home to be "cared for" by strangers, yes?
All this reminds me of the opining lines to Gertrude Stein's "The Making of Americans":
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