RE: https://mastodon.social/@Green_Footballs/115998586927326681
You know, if you're a white supremacist and your goal is to deniably exterminate the untermenschen in camps by negligently letting plagues rip through them instead of gassing them, it shows a REMARKABLE lack of foresight to put an anti-vaxx nutcase in charge of your master race's public health policy, doesn't it?
These guys are evil but they're not terribly smart.
@cstross @Green_Footballs People who are clever can usually find something more fun, profitable, and easier, than being evil, as a living or hobby.
The occasional one who doesn't is a problem.
Meanwhile in Germany: "Conservatives" want to exclude visits at the dentist's from the health insurance system. People should pay out of their own pockets if in need for any dental healthcare ...
They were careless people
@Green_Footballs @cstross More than 25000 people were murdered in KZ Dachau, primarily by malnutrition and letting diseases run unchecked.
@sophieschmieg @Green_Footballs Yes, and that was one of the less-bad KZ death tolls … (although Dachau opened early: the real murder camps were deliberately built in the east, out of sight of good Germans. As I'm sure you know.)
@Green_Footballs @cstross yes, Dachau was not designed for industrial murder (until the very end, where they added the facilities, but thankfully the war ended before they were used). But it was still designed for murder, just of the slow "let them die" kind. When that strategy didn't kill people fast enough, they started with the industrial murder camps.
@Green_Footballs @cstross my point is mostly that putting a lot of people deemed undesirable in one place, not giving them enough food, and letting diseases do the actual killing, has a horrifying historic precedent.
@sophieschmieg @Green_Footballs Yes: the British pioneered it in South Africa during the second Boer War.
To be fair, all of humanity lets a different, more dangerous plague rip through it every 3 months because worrying about it really fucks with their vibes.
Eugenics is the name of the game no matter which political party is in control.
@cstross @Green_Footballs Guys who believe in bullshit race science absolutely believe that anyone who dies of infectious disease was genetically inferior and polluting the gene pool. They come to antivax stances by thinking vaccination is bad because it saves lives
These are stupid, stupid people. As you'd expect from folks who believe their ancient ancestors' vitamin d deficiency that caused them to mutate their sun protection away is the thing about themselves they have the most pride in
@Jer @cstross @Green_Footballs It's just Malthusian theory all the way down.
... I actually wonder if anyone's done a sociology / philosophical study on this: what if racial hierarchy has the value it has as a national philosophy because a big chunk of the world's nations (explicitly or implicitly) adopted the fundamental concepts in Malthus's treatise as true and, having accepted into their hearts the notion that some percentage of the population has to die or the whole population dies... Now need a gospel to explain why that percentage shouldn't include them?
@mark @Jer @Green_Footballs It makes sense IF by "a big chunk of the world's nations" you mean "the European empires, who simultaneously inflicted it on their hapless colonial victims, whose post-independence elites inherited the Europeans' values because they had to emulate the colonizers in order to ascend through the colonial hierarchy".
@cstross @Jer @Green_Footballs Yes, that's a good qualifier. I'd have to sit down with the numbers to know whether that should actually count as 'a big chunk'; the world's much bigger than a map of the Colonial era and its consequences, even when it's also small.
If they think letting disease rip through the population will "evolve" us, by selecting for good genes... well, that takes a while to happen.
Here's a walk-through of a paper on the evidence for an ancient viral pandemic in Asia. Yes, it changed the genome... slightly (42 genes with evidence of some selective mutation).
But... that pandemic apparently ran for about 20,000 years.
@weekend_editor @cstross @Green_Footballs If they think letting disease rip through the population to "evolve" us... I assume they've forgotten smallpox, measles, tetanus, and a host of other diseases which have been killing us for millennia but we still haven't developed any meaningful resistance to.
@wordshaper @weekend_editor @cstross @Green_Footballs
Remember in the first year of Covid, how many white southerners started saying they weren't going to mask, and they were confident they wouldn't catch it anyway, because they had "good genes". They said that smugly.
When they say "evolve", they mean "kill off the untermenschen".
@wordshaper @weekend_editor @Green_Footballs Yes. They don't understand any of evolution, or microbiology, or epidemiology. At. All. (An understanding of any one of these fields would undermine the belief system underpinning their sense of identity: an understanding of two or all of them would force them into apostasy.)
@wordshaper @weekend_editor @Green_Footballs @cstross starting by the fact that being resistant to a specific disease does not necessarily produce any other positive side effects, and in fact is more likely to negatively impact fitness when the disease is not a threat. See for example sickle cell anemia and malaria.
This approach seems to be traditional in USA .
How Commonly Was Smallpox Used as a Biological Weapon?
Once introduced into the Americas, smallpox spread everywhere. Is it possible to know how often that was done intentionally to kill people?
https://daily.jstor.org/how-commonly-was-smallpox-used-as-a-biological-weapon/
@cstross If you want patriarchy, you have to reverse the demographic transition.
That means killing a lot of kids, including white kids.
(It also means reversing industrialization, because a whole lot of the demographic transition is lowered fertility rates due to industrial effluent. "Warming" will do that.)
"Take away healthcare for everybody who isn't an overlord" is deliberate, conscious policy, mostly made by people incapable of thinking their kids won't be fine.
Bear in mind that the Nazis exterminated non-whites, but also whites who were “unfit”.
Similarly, RFK doesn’t think all white people deserve to be alive.
His belief is that vaccines are responsible for keeping “unfit” individuals alive, thus degrading the human race — including the white part of it — and that superior people will survive infection. So he has no problem with measles escaping these camps and infecting white people.
@bodhipaksa @Green_Footballs And it has never occurred to RFK to wonder where human parasitic diseases came from (hint: coevolution from earlier zoonotic infections that predate hominids, all the way back to before multicellular life). You can't out-evolve parasitisim, it's a red queen's race.
@cstross @Green_Footballs I don't think it's about out-evolving infectious diseases. The idea is more that as diseases evolve, the people they kill off will be the "weakest" genetic specimens in each generation. You *never* get to the point where everyone is immune, but you end up (they assume) with a race that's genetically superior. And this "superior race" is now better suited to out-compete other races. Allowing infections to spread is (they think) a tool for white supremacy.
@bodhipaksa @Green_Footballs That is absolute and utter nonsense on stilts. Evolution doesn't work that way. (Nor does speciation: "races" are a shibboleth invented as a post-hoc attempt to justify imperialism and slavery.)
@cstross @bodhipaksa @Green_Footballs whiteys love a caste system where whiteys are on top
@cstross @Green_Footballs I know that's not how evolution works. But that's how *they* think it works.
@bodhipaksa @cstross @Green_Footballs
I still find it amazing/horrifying that one crowd of idiots, who ideologically misunderstand biology and evolution, are able to cooperate with the other crowd of idiots, who deny evolution exists. Surely there is a way to drive a wedge between these two, to break up their evil alliance?
@cstross @bodhipaksa @Green_Footballs "Nonsense!" whispered the RFK brain worm...
@cstross @Green_Footballs While Trump is too dumb to be able to plan for this, his micro-penis of an advisor, Stephen Miller isn’t.
@Green_Footballs @cstross According to DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, “This is the best healthcare than many aliens have received in their entire lives."
@Green_Footballs
The "not terribly smart" are usually the marks, not the con men.
Stupid evil is just as bad, but targeting them before the smart evil is not a winning tactic.
I simply can't believe the US current speedrun to be the product of mere stupidity.
So: Never underestimate your enemies.
@iwein @Green_Footballs "not terribly smart" is however a common characteristic of the gilded failsons of the ultra-rich. Inherited wealth means not having to care where the toilet paper you wipe your ass with comes from.
Apparently as of a few years ago NONE of the US billionaires aged under 30 were self-made. It's all inherited wealth now, and the competent-evil grown-ups who built those giant fortunes are dying off.
Just like the people at the orgies in Rome, these nitwits are not the architects of history. I sure would like to understand who is, and kick them in the balls.
@cstross @Green_Footballs Their stupidy is something that protects us to some degree. However, we should not rely on it.
@cstross @Green_Footballs
I think it makes sense if your ultimate target is most of the population. After all the nutcase made sure all his family was immunised.
@Steveg58 @cstross @Green_Footballs What these idiots haven't realized is, that they need quite some amount of population to keep things going.
@snaefell @Steveg58 @Green_Footballs I think "keeping things going" is meaningless to them. They'd be quite happy with an 1850s level of prosperity and infrastructure as long as they themselves were still kings of the dung heap.
@snaefell @Steveg58 @Green_Footballs @cstross
They'd be satisfied with a 1350s level of prosperity so long as they're the kings & nobles.
@HighlandLawyer @snaefell @Steveg58 @Green_Footballs Yeah; that resolve will last until the first time they need a root canal, 1350s style. (Oh dear, how sad, never mind.)
@cstross @HighlandLawyer @Steveg58 @Green_Footballs Or anything else from the catalogue of modern medicine. Let alone drugs which will not be available for just a few million people.
@cstross @HighlandLawyer @snaefell @Steveg58 @Green_Footballs or in fact anything needing an anaesthetic.
Imagine having to have some easy thing like an appendicectomy performed by a barber-surgeon without anything resembling anaesthetic. So sad.
@cstross @snaefell @Green_Footballs
Yeah, that's my feeling as well.
@cstross @Green_Footballs I think it is more of class warfare than race warfare case, so "white trash" is also to be exterminated by plagues + lack of healthcare + undernourishment.
@blotosmetek @Green_Footballs Race as socially constructed (it has no biological reality) is based on social class. But being inherited it's more accurately a caste system.
@cstross @Green_Footballs "The deadly plague will recognise the superiority of the white race."
@Illuminatus @Green_Footballs That's EXACTLY how MAGA handled COVID19 in 2020. (It worked about as well as any epidemiologist could have predicted.)
@cstross @Green_Footballs Indeed. Another one like that and the GOP will have created the perfect conditions to auto-select against its voters and power base. So sad… ANYWAYS!
