Crowstep
2yr ago
I think your explanation for low rates of white intermarriage is wrong. We should expect the majority racial group to intermarry less, absent any racial preference.
As a toy example, let's say a population is 99% French and 1% Chinese, and everyone has a strong preference for intermarriage. We should expect 100% of Chinese to intermarry, and only 1% of French to intermarry. A higher number for French intermarriage isn't mathematically possible, there aren't enough Chinese spouses to go around.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I think it's fundamentally a mistake to think about these foreign care workers as workers. They are not people who migrated in order to work, they are people who are working in order to migrate.
They are simply people who are desperate to move from poor countries to rich countries. The care worker visas were the only way for them to do that, which is why for some countries (Zimbabwe being the best example) there were ten dependent visas issued for every worker. All they needed to do is work for five years and then the whole family can get indefinite leave to remain, access to the British welfare state, the right to import even more relatives. At that point, there's no reason for them to continue working in care homes (or at all, really).
Now these absurdly large holes have finally been plugged, the Conservative government that introduced the visa removed the ability for migrants to bring along dependents, and the current Labour government abolished the visa route to new entrants (although those who previously came in can still work in the sector) and extended the time needed for indefinite leave to 10 years in most cases (we'll see how many exceptions they grant).
I personally am in favour of increasing wages (or at least allowing the market to do so) for care workers. Pensioners are far too wealthy in the UK. The care sector would allow some of that wealth to be transferred to younger, poorer people, allowing them to buy houses and start families. With fewer low-skilled immigrants, the welfare state bill will be less. If that means fewer waiters, so be it.
Crowstep
8mo ago
Well it looks like embryo selection for IQ is here.
A US startup, using data from the UK Biobank, is offering embryo selection for “IQ and the other naughty traits that everybody wants”, including sex, height, risk of obesity and risk of mental illness.
What surprises me most about this is that they were able to use the Biobank data, and that the head of the Biobank is defending its use. The Biobank is, as I understand, the world's best source of genetic data and I had always hoped that it would be used for this kind of liberal eugenics. However I'd assumed that doing so would be hampered by 'bioethicists' or at least the default political caution of these kind of institutions. However, the head of the Biobank seems to...think this is good?
UK Biobank … has confirmed that its analyses of our data have been used solely for their approved purpose to generate genetic risk scores for particular conditions, and are exploring the use of their findings for preimplantation screening in accordance with relevant regulation in the US where Heliospect is based. This is entirely consistent with our access conditions. By making data available, UK Biobank is allowing discoveries to emerge that would not otherwise have been possible, saving lives and preventing disability and misery.
Well that's a pleasant surprise. I guess I shouldn't be too shocked that the head of a massive genetics project actually understands the implications of his scientific field, but it's great to have my default cynicism proven wrong.
The quotes from the 'bioethicists' are maddening, of course:
Dagan Wells, a professor of reproductive genetics at University of Oxford, asked: “Is this a test too far, do we really want it? It feels to me that this is a debate that the public has not really had an opportunity to fully engage in at this point.”
Not an argument, he's just vaguely gesturing at the implication that it might be bad. It's also unclear why, in a context where IVF is already legal and accepted by almost everyone, this needs to be subject to a public debate. This is just IVF with more informed choices over which embryo to implant.
Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society, in California, said: “One of the biggest problems is that it normalises this idea of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ genetics.” The rollout of such technologies, she said, “reinforces the belief that inequality comes from biology rather than social causes”.
Translation: This scientific advance is bad because it reminds people of facts which I am politically uncomfortable with.
If being slim, happy, kind, law-abiding, rich or intelligent is better than being fat, depressed, cruel, criminal, poor or stupid, and if these things are affected by genetics (which they are) then there is such a thing as superior or inferior genetics.
Either Ms Hasson believes that genes don't influence anything (in which case she should not be working at a centre for genetics) or she believes that all human characteristics are equally good (in which case she should not use the term 'ethicist' in her title). Or perhaps she is a bioethicist who believes in neither biology nor ethics.
By late 2023, the founders of Heliospect claimed to have already analysed and helped select embryos for five couples, which had subsequently been implanted through IVF. “There are babies on the way,”
This is probably the most important part in my mind. It will be extremely hard to argue against embryo selection when there are happy, healthy, intelligent children running around. In the same way that skepticism around IVF vanished as the first IVF babies grew up, there will one day be embryo-selected adults giving interviews on TV, eloquently defending it.
Tiger mothers of the world, rejoice. You can now give your kids a heads-up that actually works, and doesn't require you driving them to extra-curriculars all the time.
The UK, like the US, has essentially full employment, in that everyone who wants a job can get one. There is still huge amounts of unskilled labour to be done due to a few things:
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A huge number of people who could work, don't. This goes beyond the normal numbers of underclass people who are incapable or unable to hold down a job. The UK lags behind the rest of the developed world here. It seems to be a case of our easy to access welfare system coinciding with COVID idleness and people moving onto disability benefits due to 'mental health issues' (what proportion of these are malingerers are left as an question for the reader).
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The previous Conservative government seemed to believe the dire warnings from business and threw open the borders to all comers to avoid labour shortages post-Brexit. It turned out that most of those being imported were inactive (either students or dependents) and lacked the high labour participation rate that previous EU immigrants showed. They later tightened up the rules a bit. So the labour market's needs weren't met by these immigrants.
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Business wanting to keep down wages. This is most obvious in the care sector. The previous government explicitly allowed wages for work visas to be 20% lower than the standard in the UK, although they did abandon this after Labour flanked them on it.
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Low productivity growth. UK business is addicted to cheap labour from abroad, obligingly provided by every government since Tony Blair. This means they don't invest in productivity enhancements, which means that the only way governments can generate more tax revenue and GDP growth is through yet more immigration.
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Left-wing pro-immigration attitudes. In my view, these are best described as anti-anti-immigration attitudes. Left wingers don't make an explicit case for importing deliveroo drivers from Pakistan, but they (and their base) are strongly opposed to any restrictions on immigration, which smell of nativism to them.
The current government is saying that they expect immigration to reduce to 'reasonable numbers' (a net figure of 200,000 per year, still massive of course). It's unclear what Kier Starmer actually believes on immigration at the moment. His authoritarian streak has shown itself in his reaction to the recent anti-immigration riots, but whether he will follow this up with more immigration (to spite the nasty racists) or less immigration (to avoid future riots) is unclear.
Crowstep
1yr ago
It's not either or. Our population has already grown, and we need to build houses for these people. Even if we got net zero migration, faster housebuilding would bring prices down for current residents faster.
Plus, the green belt was a bad idea to begin with. Allowing cities to expand allows people to live and raise children near to where they work. Instead, we force them to live in far away towns and make them take long, misery-inducing commutes while prime land outside of productive cities is used to grow turnips instead of housing humans. I live in a popular city and am currently looking for a house. It drives me mad that you can drive for 20 minutes from the city centre and be surrounded by cows instead of suburbs. What a waste!
If there is beautiful land that we want to preserve, we should make it explicit with national parks and the like, not by freezing all of our cities at the size they were in the 1950s.
Crowstep
1mo ago
The Scandinavian countries have low levels of population density because vast tracts in the frozen north are empty, but that doesn't mean the people are spread out. Excluding city-states, Sweden is the 8th most urban country in Europe. It's significantly more densely populated than Germany by that metric.
Crowstep
11mo ago
That which changed is obvious to everyone but aspies like us: It's individualism.
The fattest countries (outside of Pacific islands) are mostly Arab countries.
The most individualist countries are Anglosphere or Northern European countries. Arab countries score very low on individualism comparatively.
Moralism is tempting, but the real explanation is more likely to be biological.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I can't give a definitive answer to your question (which I guess you're not really expecting). It's far too personal, and reasons you've given are valid to consider.
Louise Perry likens pregnancy and giving birth as the female equivalent of going to war. It's dangerous, intoxicating, glorious, painful and rewarding all at once. It's brings you close to death and closer to life. You're going through something that all of your female ancestors went through and coming out the other side having created a new soul.
If you do go ahead and have another baby, you'll be doing something heroic. That's all I can really say.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Golden rice was developed by a non-profit in collaboration with universities. It doesn't have terminator genes (indeed, no crop with terminator genes has ever been sold, the technology was essentially abandoned in the early 2000s).
It does include patented genes, but patent law is national, not international. Only 12 of the patents are applicable outside of America, and all 12 have been waived by their owners. Any farmer who buys golden rice seeds can replant them forever.
Greenpeace isn't opposed to Golden Rice because they're worried about farmers' welfare. They're opposed to it because of their knee-jerk technophobia.
Crowstep
1yr ago
If that were true, we would expect traditional societies to be more willing to allow women to suffer and die in place of men, because they have less value.
Except we don't. Every human society treats men as disposable relative to women.
However human psychology shakes out in any particular society, I think 'high status vs low status' is simply an inappropriate measure to use when comparing the stations of men and women. Men and women are not competing ethnic or religious groups, where power and status differentials can be clear, deliberate and explicit. The relationship is more complicated than that.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Your premise rests on the assumption that AI and robotics are a magic money cheat that will allow a nation of retirees to be kept in the manner to which they have become accustomed. You might be right, and I certainly hope you are. Infinite wealth for humanity sounds great. But on the (perhaps more than) slim chance that technology doesn't go foom and solve all our economic problems, it's probably worth worrying about birth rates.
If only so that politicians don't have an excuse to import millions of low-IQ workers to maintain the dependency ratio.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I think this explanation excludes the reality that often women simply change their minds.
I've been in the exact situation you describe, I asked her out, she ignored my message. I then asked her out again a week later. She said yes, we ended up dating for several years.
Of course, that just makes it even harder for our would be suitor. Her saying she's busy means she's not interested, unless she's genuinely busy but still expects you to take the initiative to ask her out again. Or she's not sure if she's interested and can't be bothered to make a decision the first time you ask. Or she is interested but slightly more interested in another guy, and asking her out after he ignores her texts could go well for you.
God I don't miss the dating game at all.
Crowstep
2yr ago
Putin famously hardly uses the internet. He doesn't own a smartphone and thinks the web is controlled by the CIA.
Apparently he gets most of his news from spy agency briefings. These have the problem so common in dictatorships that nobody wants to give the boss bad news.
Crowstep
2mo ago
People should be allowed to choose their gender, because more freedom is better than less freedom
Does that include the freedom to describe the world accurately, for example, by describing the Wachowski brothers as brothers?
Or the freedom for a woman to get undressed without a man watching?
The freedom for women to compete in sporting competitions amongst themselves without being outcompeted by physically superior men.
Transexuals were always allowed to describe themselves as the opposite sex, and to dress as the opposite sex if they wanted. It's the desire to force everyone else to play along that generated the pushback. There are genuine tradeoffs here, and if we're going to use 'more freedom' as the heuristic, surely we should weigh the freedom of the majority more than the freedom of a tiny, tiny minority?
Crowstep
7mo ago
Hogwarts
Definitely woke, even if it was inspired by the works of a woman who later became a wrong-thinker. 1890s rural Scotland having the same demographics as UCLA, plus the deliberate inclusion of a wizard in a dress witch with a croaky voice.
It's worth remembering that JKR was very politically correct back when it was called that. She retroactively made Dumbledore gay, and in the stage show made Hermione black (and then tried to gaslight her fans into believing she always was).
Of course, the success of the game in spite of the attempted woke boycott probably strengthened the belief among dev companies that they can just ignore an angry twitter X Bluesky mob and sell games anyway.
Crowstep
8mo ago
The pro-immigrationists know that claiming different ethnic groups have different propensities to violence is still mostly beyond the pale, even for anti-immigrationists. Therefore, they can dissimulate by claiming that anyone born in the UK is 'British' and therefore any crimes ethnic minorities commit cannot be blamed on immigration. They can be safe in the knowledge that the obvious counter-argument to this won't be made publicly, even if it is true.
There's a good chance that many of the pro-immigrationists have secretly noticed who commits most of the crime though. From there, I can see two approaches. Either blame racism for minority crime rates, or secretly read Steve Sailer while keeping quiet for the greater good. I'm sure the latter is pretty rare though.
Crowstep
9mo ago
At what point do you expect African Americans to assimilate (that is to say, start getting outcomes around the US average in terms of crime, educational attainment and earnings)? Why do you think that Haitians will be more successful than they have been?
As a disinterested atheist, it seems pretty clear to me that the Vatican is just trying to slow-walk gay marriage. I'm sure they'll do it bit by bit, with just enough continuation between each change to avoid getting called out too heavily, but the end result will be rainbow flags in St Peter's Basilica.
I wonder at what point all those young, high-TFR, head-covering, Latin Mass-enjoying traditionalist Catholics I hear so much about just straight up break away from the church? Would they just be another protestant denomination at that point? Can they appoint their own Pope? Or get one of their own elected to the Papacy?
This Reddit thread is hilarious. A handful of posters acknowledging what this is, another handful criticising the Vatican for ambiguity (as if this wasn't part of the plan) and another group saying that it doesn't technically involve blessing gay unions so there's nothing to see here.
Crowstep
1yr ago
What point were you trying to make with this post? It seems to be a historical curio with no real relevance to modern culture war.
Crowstep
7mo ago
though I'd note that as a Brit, I find the concept of Presidential pardons to be pretty odd, and in tension with the idea of legal equality of all citizens.
OP's post lead me on a minor rabbit hole about government pardons. Apparently we do have them in the UK, although they are rarely used. The last couple were Alan Turing (posthumously) and Steven (nominative determinism) Gallant, a convicted murderer who, while on day-release, fought against the jihadi who carried out the London Bridge attack in 2019.
Although if I'm honest, pardoning a relative totally feels like something Boris Johnson would have done.
Crowstep
10mo ago
my home state of Pennsylvania doesn't allow kids to go without one until the age of 8!
Meanwhile, in the land of 'you got a loicence for that?' kids are required to have a car seat until they're 12! (Although I just learned that there is an exception for families with three children which seems sensible)
Plus we have the lowest nursery teacher to child ratio in Europe so childcare is crazy expensive. It's like they don't want us to have children! (I say that flippantly, the real culprit is safetyism).
They also managed to have a well-rounded gay character (the 'pansexual imp' Dean) without getting all preachy.
I think the show's strength was that it simply assumed it's audience was on board with the modern liberal package, and so didn't have to convert them. Dan Harmon assumed his audience would be fine with the Dean being gay or whatever, so he was able to focus on funny plotlines that derive from that fact, rather than making his sexuality the point.
To bring it back to the original post about Britta, the finale actually had her imagine the Dean coming out as trans rather than continuing with the vague 'whatever this is' that he was doing before. It can be read as a criticism of the restrictiveness of the trans lobby's ideology if one were so inclined.
Crowstep
1mo ago
They said rap should be subversive, well what did they think subversive meant? Vibes? Essays?
Honestly it's a pretty good song, bizarre subject matter aside. This Youtube link is live as of this writing, although it seems like the platform keeps taking new uploads down.
Maybe I will live to tell my incredulous grandkids about how we were all expected to perceive one specific 20th century dictator through a prism of quasi-superstitious dread.
I wonder if 'racism is the paramount evil' would still be a defining characteristic of western ethics if WW2 hadn't happened? I mean, the Transatlantic slave trade and the scramble for Africa still happened, smallpox still wiped out the American Indians. Maybe we would just find some other kind of racial guilt? My assumption is that it all stems from the fact that we're so outbred and WEIRD, not from the particular events of the early 1940s.
women aged 20-40 (often with a background in healthcare) and unmarried men aged 30-50
I can't help but notice that these are roughly the ages when women and men (respectively) would be married and raising their children, in a society where such things haven't fallen out of favour.
Searching for meaning indeed.
I think you're being too generous. As Tanista said, there is already a separate example of a staged stock photo. They didn't say the photo of the family walking looked fake, they said it didn't represent 'real Londoners'. The mayor's office has since claimed that this caption was added mistakenly, but that just begs the questions of which caption they intended to put there and why the photo was on that list in the first place?
The photo itself doesn't look staged or fake to me. It looks like a photo of a real (albeit photogenic) London family walking around the city.
Moreover, page 35 specifies that photography must be diverse. Page 33 specifies that all photos must 'reflect a recognisable, real and diverse London'. Given that there are (as far as I can tell) no photos in the guide which only include indigenous (BIPOC?) Britons, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the problem with the photo was the ethnicity of the family.
And as someone who works in or with this industry, I don't know if you're just not aware of the implicit rules that the rest of us notice because you're too steeped in them, but this is a textbook example of shoehorned multiracialism. Do you ever notice how every advert on TV these days has either multiple ethnic groups or interracial relationships? Or how every costume drama somehow includes at least one West African character regardless of the setting or era? This is the same thing.
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