When we speak about gullibility, under what conditions would you accept the idea of atrocities committed by a non-Western regime as real?
You seem to have a massive prior for "everything is a Western/Zionist conspiracy full of puppets". Which is its own sort of gullibility, readily exploited by propagandists from the other side.
Probably it would be more convincing if it wasn’t part of a months long campaign to bomb and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and regime change Iran.
"any western country would have already folded long ago"
How do you know that? Is it just your general assumption "Westerners weak, must fold, third-worlders stronk, they endure"?
Under what conditions would you say that sanctions are OK? Or are they never? In that case, there still might be white minority rule in Rhodesia or South Africa.
If you go far enough down the Psmiths' online rabbit hole, you'll find (via footnote 7) some speculation on that. Tolkien was apparently of the opinion that the Norman Conquest was a Very Bad Thing for English historical language and culture, hence his frequent references and allusions to Anglo-Saxon mythology. It sounds like he would have been a fan of The Wake as described here.
That was my thought as well, and it's an interesting thought exercise, but unless there is some note on this which I'm not aware of, it's just reasoned speculation.
Yes, for example, ALS. Mice don't naturally get ALS and while a somewhat similar condition can be provoked in them, the model does not fit well and seems to be almost useless for producing actual human treatments of ALS.
Not everything is about money. The killer app of the US used to be that the US was rich and welcoming to foreigners and politically quite free.
China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader.
Their cultural insularity does not help either. You can live in China, but you will never be accepted as Chinese. The US was quite unique (together with Canada, Australia etc.) that it was able and willing to accept you as an American even with a funny accent, as long as you wanted to be one.
Just to add one more point that makes the US attractive to global talent: citizenship. In particular: 1) citizenship at birth and 2) viable path to citizenship via green card.
Of course, both of these are in the crosshairs for “revision”.
Plenty of developed countries limit the easy way to their citizenship to ius sanguinus, and if you aren't a descendant of a previous national, you have to pass stringent language and culture tests.
I don't think you would find a Lithuanian or Finnish language test quite so easy.
> Are you suggesting that anyone who lives and works here in the US can be accepted as “American”?
Whether you're born in Moscow and named Sergey Mikhailovich Brin, or born in Pretoria and named Elon Reeve Musk, or born in Hyderabad and named Satya Narayana Nadella, born in Frankfurt and named Peter Andreas Thiel - America has a place for you. Maybe even your own government department.
In America a man can find acceptance regardless of the circumstances of his birth, and irrespective of race, creed and colour, so long as he has a billion dollars.
That has always been true, and for everywhere. However very few countries are anywhere near as accepting for foreigners as the US as a whole despite the many who are not. Canada is just as accepting from what I can tell - I don't know enough about Australia to know. Most other countries are far worse - though many will not admit it just how bad their country is.
Sadly Australia is very welcoming to foreigners until you get about 50km out of the major cities. Our xenophobe political party (One Nation) has had a significant rally in the last few years, to the point where by some measures it is the second largest party.
Big cities and metropolitan areas are very progressive and welcoming to well educated foreigners, and the countryside is filled with racist idiots who live in fear of something they only know from the television
It’s the same in the US. Proximity to a city correlates strongly with all forms of openness. It holds nationwide. There aren’t really blue or red states, just predominantly urban or rural ones.
I still don’t quite understand why. The contact hypothesis makes some sense but can that explain the whole urban rural divergence?
Rural populations will even vote hard against their own interests in other areas over culture war stuff.
There's more pressure in rural areas to conform in the sense that people know people that can make your time more difficult if you don't. If you get blacklisted in the bush gl finding any work and that's a survival issue. In the city you can walk around anon most of the time and people are more used to others being different. Dump a new high rise of foreigners that don't speak the local language in a metro area and no-one will notice. Do that in the bush and LOL.
The dilution factor is something I hadn’t thought about.
Dump a few hundred foreigners in a town of 5000 and that’s very noticeable and some people will find it jarring. Dump ten thousand foreigners in a metro of three million and nobody will notice.
The point about conformism and exile cost is good too. Cities present endless options for social circles and employment. Little towns not so much.
To expand on this, consider the historic importance of culture for improving survival odds and thus conformism as a natural consequence. So it makes sense that people in smaller groups would exhibit associated tendencies, and also that people who exhibit those tendencies would tend to gravitate towards smaller groups.
To be fair, they're still welcoming to foreigners in the bush, just as long as they're white. Rural Australia has many towns that have a strong Italian or Greek heritage (for example).
One Nation are flat racist rather than xenophobe, I think.
And it's being pushed by our billionaires for some reason. You'd think Gina would want cheap immigrant workers on her mines
> A CEO, a blue-collar worker, and an immigrant sit down together at a table upon which there is a plate of a dozen cookies. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, then whispers in the ear of the blue-collar worker "Hey, I think he wants your cookie."
The problem with billionaires is that they truly have more money than they need. The only thing left for them to pursue is power. Cheap labor only helps them get more money. Racism on the other hand can be used to justify the destruction of democratic institutions which are a billionaires only competition.
That's probably all that matters TBH. If you can attract top talent to major cities where top schools, research firms, and companies in general, what does the opinions and attitudes of people 50km away matter?
Ok It probably matters during elections and the policies that lead up to them (must appease the rural vote with mostly symbolic and emotionally wretching anti-immigrant rhetoric) but cities need skilled (and unskilled) labour and when they get what they need they stand to generate a lot of money (re taxes to the policy makers from earlier).
> what does the opinions and attitudes of people 50km away matter?
Well, using Texas as an example, it's those people 50km away that win elections. Of course, gerrymandering helps, but even with large metro areas leaning left, there's enough of those 50km away that swings that lean to the right.
Ignore the people in the rural areas as your own peril
When the part of the country that was less unique took power, they immediately did what everyone else that was not unique did and became unwelcoming of foreigners.
I guess to you other countries that the US is becoming more like would also not be of a hive mind by having people that are welcoming of foreigners. Where's your hive mind comment about that part of the original comment?
> The killer app of the US used to be that the US was rich and welcoming to foreigners and politically quite free.
Yeah, it used to be the that the US only committed ethnic cleansing against people that were here first, not foreigners, and was so welcoming to foreigners that it would expend resources to have them shipped here as property.
> The US was quite unique (together with Canada, Australia etc.) that it was able and willing to accept you as an American even with a funny accent, as long as you wanted to be one.
Very select parts of the US. Would've thought that the last 9 years taught you that for huge swathes of it, this was never true.
Well, perhaps it is time for large, ethnically-homogenous countries that are on the ascent to adopt diversity policies of the sort that the US was approaching before the "vibe shift"
How could they not be? If people cannot emigrate to the US then they won’t settle there. A relatively open immigration policy absolutely helped make America diverse. I’m pretty sure that’s what OP is referring to, not DEI or whatever the latest boogeyman is.
I don't think open immigration in America's earlier years stemmed from a desire for diversity. It was more like "holy shit we need workers, I guess we can tolerate some Irish and Chinese people if we have to". It seems like a reach to call that a "diversity policy".
Canada is largely still homogeneous but still welcoming to immigrants and very close to the US. Rather than China totally changing cultures, I think it’s more likely that US-based companies will have large satellite offices in middle powers.
I'm Canadian and unless you're talking about the middle of Saskatchewan I don't know what you mean - no city over a hundred thousand here is homogenous.
I have been in small towns in the Maritimes where people looked shocked to see an Indian immigrant with me, probably for the first time ever. I meant more in relation to the US, though, which is a much more diverse country.
Canada is 70% white where the US is close to 50%. That 20% puts them far above the majority line though. Not at all homogeneous, just much more so than the US.
I will say that perogies are amazing and were much cheaper in Alberta than Newfoundland so you get an upvote. But don’t discount that this is also true of the white population in the US.
"White" is not one ethnicity or culture -- a lot of that 70% are French-speaking Quebeckers who surely cannot be considered part of a homogeneous mass with Anglo-Canadians.
I’m upvoting you because you’re 110% right but don’t discount how diverse the US is too, without an obvious divider like that. The New Orleans Cajun are also French immigrants, for example.
> China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader.
I mean we are literally putting people in concentration camps right now. Kinda hard to take the moral high ground at the moment. Scientists are fleeing the United States for their safety, just like they did from 1930s Germany.
Don't get it twisted. While what is happening is not right, explain to me what happens when there is criticism of China from within China on their treatment of Uyghurs.
The Germans ran work camps, concentration camps, and death camps. Right now the United States is only running two of the three. We have work camps (prisons) and concentration camps (detention facilities).
That you know of. The German people didn't even know about the death camps running in their own back yards; they thought they were just "regular" concentration/work camps. The Allied troops rounded up lots of German civilians near these camps after the war and forced them at gunpoint to walk through the camps and see for themselves what they had been supporting.
"Concentration camp” is a term that predates its (somewhat euphemistic, when done in retrospect) use for the camps eventually used in the extermnation campaign by the Nazis (which also started out as concentration camps, in the more usual sense, as part of what was nominally a deportation program.)
Though concentration camps are almost always part of systematic, ethnically-targetted abuse, even when they aren't part of genocide campaigns.
Yes. For example, the U.S. also had ethnically-based "concentration camps" (but not extermination camps) during WWII.
But these are not like the concentration camps of the 1940s.
"Detention camps" are a more accurate descriptor -- both technically and connotatively -- when they are holding foreign nationals prior to repatriation.
I’m having a hard time understanding how the ICE detention facilities do not meet the Wikipedia definition of concentration camp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp. Can you help me out?
“A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for internment”
Internment is long-term (see Wikipedia), whereas the ICE detention centers are short-term (average stay < 30 days but depends on time for deportation ).
The Wikipedia page for Internment [1] doesn't include the words long-term when I view it.
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime.
> ICE detention centers are short-term (average stay < 30 days but depends on time for deportation ).
Seamus Culleton has been held for 5 months so far [2]. I'm willing to accept this is an outlier but to my knowledge ICE isn't providing transparency on much of anything, including how long they are holding people. Do you have a source for your average 30 days claim?
E: According to AP [3] this is not an outlier:
With the number of people in ICE detention topping 70,000 for the first time, 7,252 people had been in custody at least six months in mid-January, including 79 held for more than two years, according to agency data. That’s more than double the 2,849 who were in ICE custody at least six months in December 2024, the last full month of Joe Biden’s presidency.
This looks even worse when we consider [4]:
Bond eligibility changed drastically in July 2025. ICE issued a memo eliminating bond hearings for most people who entered without inspection. They’re now classified as “applicants for admission” subject to mandatory detention.
Cases moved faster before 2025. New policies have expanded mandatory detention. Court backlogs grew worse. The detained docket now averages 60-90 days for initial hearings, but stretches to years for final decisions.
As of November 2025, ICE held over 65,000 people. Three-quarters had no criminal convictions. Average detention length climbed from 47 days in FY2024 to over 50 days by mid-2025. Complex cases take much longer.
Seamus Culleton is allowed to leave detention, he just can't stay in the US. He is choosing to stay in detention while he pursues legal challenges to his deportation order.
I’m not sure who told you that the Nazis only killed German citizens, considering that they famously invaded Poland (a sovereign nation at the time) and started executing Jews there.
I also don’t know who told you that they’re only putting illegal migrants in Alligator Alcatraz. It’s not hard to find examples of people who had legal visas being rounded up because of the Trump administration’s idiotic quota policy.
America is hostile to science and technology. I'm not sure how anyone with a functional desire to improve humanity decides "Hey, those americans, they sure do deserve better vaccines."
> I'm not sure how anyone with a functional desire to improve humanity decides "Hey, those americans, they sure do deserve better vaccines."
Because people understand that people don't get to choose their government or culture and that everyone deserves better healthcare. Every child who is at risk from the rise of anti-vax 100% deserves better vaccines and ought to bear 0% responsibility for what the adults do.
Lots of folks vote against better healthcare. Perhaps they “deserve” better healthcare regardless as they’re human, but perhaps they deserve the outcomes they specifically voted for. Otherwise it feels a little paternalistic.
Some people will switch careers, but I do doubt that in an economy with very low unemployment amongst qualified people, any actual scientist will literally starve and become homeless.
The mosque-turned-cathedral is an interesting (and huge) piece of medieval architecture.
The Roman bridge is fascinating as well.
Plus, if you arrive in summer, you will learn what heat is. Córdoba is hot even for the standards of Spanish summers. Hence, interesting night life. Not just drunkards, normal families and everyone who barely survived the day and now has the opportunity to live and socialize outside.
Might be a limitation of the medium. Mosaics are complicated.
This famous "skeleton" mosaic has the proportions wrong as well, even though the artist almost certainly saw some actual human skeletons, and definitely some living humans with their longer arms and smaller heads than depicted :)
Even in Czechia, where the combination of traditional "heavy" food and, probably, some sort of genetic burden (people with Czech ancestry tend to suffer from colorectal cancers even if they live in regions with very different diets) used to make us the record holders, mortality has gone significantly down.
Humanity seems to be getting this particular snake in its grip.
Which is way more than what original hunters and gatherers ever clock. They do move a lot, but not so much, and they alternate their activities a lot too (running, walking, resting, taking entire days off and just guarding their village).
We're not really optimized for this sort of extreme endurance and long-term development of serious pathologies is unsuprising.
You shouldn't so offhandedly assume a hunter-gatherer lifestyle couldn't lead to issues like increased risk of CRC, or that activities which lead to increased risk of CRC couldn't be what hunter-gatherers did. Evolution is neither fast nor perfectly precise. Plenty of animal populations have common health problems that simply weren't harmful enough to reproduction to be selected out, much less something rare and late-onset like CRC.
I don't assume anything. From what we know about health of the last surviving hunter-gatherers, they suffer significantly less from "diseases of civilization" when taken in proportion to their settled neighbours. Some of those diseases (such as high blood pressure or diabetes 2nd type) seem to be totally absent in them. Cancers do happen, but not as often.
This pattern is quite old. Already ancient Egyptians suffered from civilizational diseases much more than hunter-gatherers, especially the richer ones (heart attacks, gout, cancer).
I won't bother checking or disputing the accuracy of your factual claims, because it does not matter.
Colorectal cancer is not the same thing as high blood pressure, or type 2 diabetes, or any other cancer that isn't colorectal cancer. Diseases are not a monolith and you cannot assume low risk of some diseases means low risk of others. That is wild guesswork passed off as logic, like measuring the shadow your testicles cast on the wall and announcing it is 24.1 degrees Celsius. Ultra-marathon runners also have low risk of type 2 diabetes!
Do you have specific evidence that modern hunter-gatherers have low rates of colorectal cancer that cannot be explained by survivorship bias, screening, genetic differences, and all other confounders, and that they are representative of historical hunter-gatherers? No? Then you cannot confidently conclude that hunter-gatherers didn't experience elevated rates of CRC.
Absolutely, we may have a depressed rate of CRC where ultramarathoners just get back up to the historical baseline. Who knows, but we don’t know it isn’t that.
"Diseases are not a monolith and you cannot assume low risk of some diseases means low risk of others. That is wild guesswork passed off as logic..."
Diseases are not a monolith, but they do tend to arise and fall in some specific clusters, and that is not "logic", good or bad (too many computer-minded people drag logic into the chaos that is biology), but rather a long-time empirical observation, albeit with some exceptions.
You are really obsessed with my testicles. That is a weird comparison, but at least you know that you're not a bot. This would be too weird for a LLM to produce.
In general, I don't think your irony is as strong as you think. Shrinkage of various materials in the cold is the original basis for a thermometer.
Of course it is better to use something better-observable like mercury. But in absence of an industrial civilization, you don't have mercury to measure.
Sigh. Sure, if you had a gun to your head and you knew nothing else, it would be better to guess that a given population (hunter-gatherers) with low rates of some illnesses (T2D, HBP) also had low rates of another illness (CRC) than the reverse. Okay. That's a slightly better-than-chance guess, not anywhere near a solid basis for speculation.
"Anyways, it makes sense that marathoners get CRC because hunter-gatherers probably don't run that much" is bongcloud lalaland tier guesswork.
"makes sense that marathoners get CRC because hunter-gatherers probably don't run that much"
That is a misinterpretation of what I wrote. Let me reformulate.
"Marathons are so much more extreme than what we used to do in the Stone Age, that some pathologies resulting from such long-term physical overload are to be expected." I don't see anything lala about that. You do extreme things, you reap some consequences, sooner or later.
I would say that marathons go beyond our design parameters, but my experience in HN is that the "design" metaphor always conjures some people who consider it a dog-whistle for intelligent design (as opposed to evolution), not just an imprecise metaphor, as metaphors usually are. So I avoid it in order not to attract a senseless fight.
You seem to have a massive prior for "everything is a Western/Zionist conspiracy full of puppets". Which is its own sort of gullibility, readily exploited by propagandists from the other side.
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