When I read about Inuit culture of non-violence in the 20th century [1], and wheb I read about them today [2], I have this disgusted feeling that Western culture of drugs and anger is like a virus that spread into their completely non-immunized population. A bit like the diseases brought into the new world in the 19th century, but this time psychological.
Your thoughts are interesting, but I am having trouble seeing how this relates to the Wikipedia article. The Wikipedia article is about police murdering a number of Indigenous Canadians. I am not sure what the connection is to a "virus" of drugs and anger spreading among Inuit people.
I believe that none of the men in this Wikipedia article are Inuit. Wikipedia reports 2016 census showing the following Indigenous population of Saskatoon: 85 Inuit, 14,430 First Nations, and 12,255 Métis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatoon#Demographics
> I am not sure what the connection is to a "virus" of drugs and anger spreading among Inuit people.
I think the parent poster is referring to the non-native population’s history of inflicting trauma on native populations and how this trauma is like a seed that begets it’s own cycle of behaviour that causes still more trauma (hence a virus that spreads). Prior, native populations weren’t known to have traumatized their own peoples (though wars between tribes are well documented).
Edit: are you strictly limiting your comment to the Inuit? I think collectivism was the base case among native populations. Non-violence within tribes as well.
First, the practice of "Starlight Tours" wasn't isolated to Saskatoon. It was, and is speculated to still be a practice in many communities, with verified occurrences in Montreal and Winnipeg, as well as claims of it happening in many other small communities.
Second, the genocidal practices of the Canada towards it's indigenous population included the Inuit. There is a laundry list of genocidal tactics:
* criminalization of cultural practices
* residential schools
* isolating communities into reserves
* underfunding or denying funding for critical infrastructure
* forced separation at birth
* forced sterilization
* extrajudicial punishment by federal, provincial, and municipal police forces
The list goes on, and on, and on. There isn't a direct line between the spread of drugs and destruction of Inuit culture, and the prevalence or incidence of starlight tours, but they are all part of the threads of racism and genocide that are tightly woven into the fabric of Canadian culture.
Thank you for this. Especially your first two paragraphs I agree 100% and I think those points are closely related to the Wikipedia article.
Along these lines I could add that in Saskatoon, despite at least three men being murdered by police and many more kidnapped by this practice, only two officers have ever been convicted (for unlawful confinement). There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of things to say about this story.
Which is why I found it surprising that the top comment was about drug use and violence in Inuit communities. As I measure it, this is at least two logical "hops" from the topic of the 'starlight tour' story in Saskatoon. Furthermore these topics are extremely sensitive in this context. Violence and substance use have been (and still are) used to justify the practices that you described above--in particular separating children from parents.
I don't know how to say well what is in my heart now. In what I have written, I am afraid of sounding like a person yelling accusations on the internet. This is not my intention. I am bringing this up in a spirit of honest dialog. I often choose to say nothing rather than risk saying the wrong thing, or even saying something in the wrong way. I think in a perfect world we would discuss these topics without fearing the shame of feeling this. Even as I type this, I feel a thin film of sweat on my hands. I am again afraid of saying something wrong. People on the internet might yell at me. I am equally afraid of giving anyone else the feeling of being yelled at. I wrote and deleted, rewrote, and redeleted this comment and my earlier comment a number of times. But I click "reply" with the hope that we can all somehow make a better world, and that we won't get there unless we try to talk about it. I am trying to learn my history, I am trying to learn how to talk about it. I hope I have written this in line with what is in my heart, which is a desire to better understand and be understood. And for every one of the comments on this topic, I am glad that so many people clicked the same "reply" button to openly share their thoughts.
The documentary "The Economics of Happiness" [1] deals with this subject but in the context of Ladakh. Specifically how the introduction of globalized culture introduced sentiments of poverty, unworthiness, cultural repression, and substance abuse within the Ladakh community.
My dad grew up in the region around Ladakh. His village got a single paved road in 1982 and a single electric connection in 1985. Relatives would have to walk MILES in the cold and high elevation to get an elementary education, and child malnutrition and mortality was significant (my grandmother and a number of her peers had lost at least 1 child to diseases like typhus, cholera, etc). All this happened before the development that globalization brought. Globalization helped a number of people in our region gain access to a better quality of life than anything their parents or grandparents could imagine. In addition, the benefits of globalized culture and communication meant even positive aspects like women empowerment could start to gain a foothold - no longer would you have to aim only to study up to the 10th grade if you're lucky and become a housewife, now you can aim for college and become a professional. There are a number of issues in the modern world, but firangis in their ivory towers with their weird orientalized conceptions of the worlds are not in a position to talk about this subject.
Thank you for your contribution. I understand that viewing it from said perspective doesn't account for the complete picture. That said, I believe we can agree that both sides can be true simultaneously? Standard of living is improved and worsened in certain regards. OP and the reference I'm sharing discuss some of the negative impacts to local cultures.
I can agree that some aspects of development may appear negative, but at least with regards to the negative aspects described in the Local Futures documentary (which btw is not something I'd treat as a reliable source - being a linguist trained under Chomsky doesn't make you an economic analyst for example) were already common before globalization came through - drunkards and opioid addicts always existed, the disparity between haves and have-nots always existed, and the traditional local power structures were inherently exclusionary. A lot of these kinds of documentaries tend to look nostalgically to some form of a utopian past, but if you have rose tinted glasses on, you don't see the red flags.
PS - I wouldn't extrapolate this conversation about indigenous communities in Inner Asia with those of the First Nations. There are a bunch of different political, economic, and social dynamics that cause this to be an apples to oranges comparison.
"Western culture of drugs and anger?" That entirely discounts all the positive aspects of the culture. If you have disgusting views, you're likely to be disgusted a lot.
If you find a population that largely lives somewhere where drugs don't or can't grow, the results should be obvious once they do become available. Whether through a "culture of drugs and violence" or a "culture of drugs and love" or mere "natural market realities."
And in both cases, it's not as if we created drugs or smallpox with the specific intent of eradicating entire native societies. Or that our cavalier attitudes were at all in service of that goal.
Lead posisoning was a disease the white man brought to the entire world.
Thomas J. Midgley, the inventor, perpetrator and chief apologist for leaded gasoline, also brought the world CFCs. Veritasium did a bit on him and was not kind. In fact he implied Midgley may have been the worst mass murderer in human history.
The other day I had a chilling thought, after a day with both gardening and another conversation with my friend whose estranged boomer mother is probably a narcissist: we know about lead poisoning and violence, but has anyone studied lead poisoning and narcissism?
I haven’t heard of this being looked into specifically, but IMO there could certainly be a plausible connection.
Adults exposed to lead as children have less brain volume in the prefrontal cortex and several other areas. It’s definitely not impossible that this could kickstart maladaptive cognitive patterns such as narcissism.
I found the following, from a WHO page about lead poisoning [1], particularly interesting:
“IHME also estimated that in 2019, lead exposure accounted for 62.5% of the global burden of developmental intellectual disability whose cause is not obvious.”
The connection of lead poisoning and narcissism does seem plausible.
It's also worth noting that, broadly speaking, the parents of Boomers (depending on their age) went through 1 or 2 world wars, the great depression, the spanish flu, etc. and probably didn't come out unscathed. The trauma of the parents is bound to have ripple effects on the mental health of the kids.
There's more than a few stories of dads who went off to war and came back silent, drinking, and traumatized.
Friendly reminder that leaded gasoline is still used today in airports all over the USA. If you live near an airport you are still affected by this in 2022.
When I was shopping for garden hoses I looked for contamination possibilities and it turns out some of those green hoses have lead in them as a stiffener. That may help explain the high lead tests in some areas. Especially where paint is not a likely vector. Old car exhaust does settle into soil particles.
There was no widespread soil remediation so if you live near any road at all (that would be everyone) you are still affected by this. No need to be near an airport
How mobile is the lead today? There are a number of extremely insoluble lead salts, such as the sulfide, the phosphate, the chromate, the titanate, some of the oxides, and even the carbonate and the sulfate.
My mental model is that lead metal and the above-mentioned salts are basically immobile in the soil: you can have all the lead sulfide or metallic lead you want in your soil without it leaching into the groundwater or contaminating the tomatoes you grow in it. And lead ions (in the form of the acetate, for example) are only mobile until they bump into one of the anions mentioned above, at which point they get locked up for geological periods of time. Organic lead compounds like tetraethyllead are a much scarier problem, but they also get broken down into ionic lead over a period of years.
Is that right? Am I misunderstanding the dynamics?
Lead in soil gets stirred up by wind, rain, humans and animals into the air all day long.
Of particular risk as far as food contamination is concerned are leafy vegetables and shrubby fruits that grow near the ground (surface contamination, eventually binding to the food - not internal uptake necessarily).
There are studies measuring these effects, you don’t have to take my word for it.
This CDC page seems to say that swallowing or breathing lead-contaminated soil is a problem (most of the minerals I mentioned won't withstand strong solutions of hydrochloric acid, such as stomach acid) but it doesn't even suggest that lead-contaminated soil is a potential source of groundwater contamination or contamination of plants grown in it. Nor does it suggest that soil being stirred up by wind and rain is a significant danger, though presumably a sufficiently strong windstorm would be.
It links an EPA page https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-10/documents/le... which does talk about "eating fruits or vegetables grown in contaminated soil". More specifically it recommends not growing root crops such as potatoes in soil with over 100 ppm lead, low-growing leafy vegetables in soil with over 400 ppm lead, or fruits and vegetables in soil with over 1000 ppm lead. It still doesn't mention anything about groundwater.
Unfortunately it doesn't cite any of the studies so we can find out what levels of lead contamination occur in crops grown in contaminated soil or to what degree they're dependent on lead not being locked up in the mobile forms I described (can potato roots digest galena?), nor to what degree lead-compound dust on poorly washed lettuce results in human lead poisoning.
Since the CDC didn't link any, which studies would you most recommend reading?
Yeah, but you won't get internet virtue points, likes, retweets and shares screeching about the dirt the way you will complaining that general aviation still uses leaded gas hence why you never hear about it but you always hear about avgas which would be a solved problem if the FAA would just do their jobs.
Again, we are allowing leaded gas, which we know to be harmful, to be used in 2022, with demonstrable increases in lead levels especially for individuals living near airports.
While leaded gas is technically still sold your comment is misleading to the point where it's basically just a lie.
100LL (aka avgas) has nowhere near the lead concentration that automotive fuels use, is used in much lower volume and with much less proximity to people than leaded automotive fuel.
If you are concerned about lead exposure test for lead in and around where you live and what you consume. That is the primary vector of lead exposure in 2022.
If you want to waste time with low effort comments direct them at the FAA because they are obstructing the current drop in unleaded replacement.
"On the basis of distance to airport coefficients, children living within 500 m, 1,000 m, or 1,500 m of an airport had average blood lead levels that were 4.4, 3.8, or 2.1% higher, respectively, than other children."
On the other hand, in 1971 lead averaged 2.5 g/gal. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6522252/ which has a nifty graph of leaded gas use and air lead concentrations with the neat note, "The increase in air lead concentration between 2000 and 2001 is likely due to changes at sites near stationary industrial sources. The decline in air lead concentrations between 2001 and 2002 is likely due to lower lead concentrations at sites in Herculaneum, Missouri.")
The low effort isn't in the concern, but just in literally the amount of effort OP put into their comment. They could at least attempt to quantify the effect they believe this has on people living near airports.
I don’t know if there is any known level of safe lead exposure. In terms of direct impact, this is going to be hard to measure but the risk is nonetheless real. In fact the difficulty of measuring the consequences of mass lead exposure was one of the best arguments out forth my oil refining companies back in the day to support leader gasoline. Not sure why all the burden of proof is on anyone who wants to avoid exposure to a dangerous chemical.
"From 1976-1980 to 2015-2016, the geometric mean blood lead level (BLL) of the US population aged 1 to 74 years dropped from 12.8 to 0.82 μg/dL, a decline of 93.6%. Yet, an estimated 500 000 children aged 1 to 5 years have BLLs at or above the blood lead reference value of 5 μg/dL established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Low levels of exposure can lead to adverse health effects. There is no safe level of lead exposure, and child BLLs less than 10 μg/dL are known to adversely affect IQ and behavior. When the exposure source is known, approximately 95% of BLLs of 25 μg/dL or higher are work-related among US adults. Despite much progress in reducing exposure to lead in the United States, there are challenges to eliminating exposure." (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6522252/)
You're right that no level of lead exposure is considered safe, but that doesn't mean that any lead exposure is going to have any kind of measurable effect on an organism.
Shouldn't the impact of leaded avgas be easier to measure, since the concentrations should be higher around airports which send up a lot of leaded avgas planes? It's a different situation than where every car was burning leaded gas and everyone was pretty much exposed to it. The effects should be much more localized and therefore easier to study.
The risk may be real, but it may be dwarfed by other sources of lead, making it a silly thing to worry yourself about. For example, you might get more lead into your body from 8oz of fruit juice than you would living a year near an airport.
Mad scientist supreme or no, he had any number of corporate interests financially invested in his success in stonewalling against reform.
In the Veritasium video he mentions how Midgley pulled the age old trick of exposing yourself to your own chemicals on stage to show they are safe. He poisoned himself with one of these stunts and was never the same. Literally hoisted on his own petard.
Specifically, it's Lead Acetate vs a lump of metal lead.
"Lead acetate, also known as sugar of lead, is a salt that (ironically) has a sweet flavor—a fairly unusual quality in poisons, which are more likely to taste bitter, signaling to the taster that they are unsafe for consumption. The ancient Romans used the compound—which they called sapa—to sweeten wine"
And yet every time I get water down the wrong pipe - basically attempting to drown myself just trying to take in one of our most basic life-sustaining inputs - I realize that not only are we still basically monkeys but we haven't really evolved half as much as we think we have as a species. It's a miracle we live long enough to reproduce.
You are literally a winning lottery ticket, so enjoy it while you can.
For some inventions, such as LSD-trips for your lunch break, I truly wonder how people can be so f-ed up that they consider that a good idea. But then again, I see so many people with depressing faces every day, it's hard to deny that we have widespread psychological sanity issues in our society.
BTW, it's not just Inuit having high suicide rates:
"Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S., with more than 41,000 Americans taking their own lives each year and more than 494,000 Americans receive medical care for self-inflicted injuries." https://www.medicaldaily.com/suicide-america-high-rate-teen-...
> I see so many people with depressing faces every day, it's hard to deny that we have widespread psychological sanity issues in our society.
No society in history has ever had so much abundance as the West today. We've really moved up Maslows hierarchy beyond survival and safety towards needing meaning in our lives (more than what comes with doing the labor you need to survive).
I wonder if there's just not enough meaning in the world to go around and that's the cause of our society's malaise.
Maybe abundance itself makes us depressed. In the modern world you have to go way out of your way to experience any sense of sense of danger, adventure, chaos, or self-reliance. Sitting behind a screen while shoving food in your mouth might keep you alive but it kills the soul.
Our culture is going down the tubes. However, since the current systems benefits the .01% at the expense of the 99% its full speed ahead with no course correction.
Our system is highly beneficial to the top quarter roughly.
The median of that group has gotten significantly richer over 20 or 50 years and is better off in the US than they would be anywhere else in terms of wealth and scale (scale as in how many of them can reach that level of wealth and have access to the kind of economic opportunities that the US presents). Europe has nothing remotely like it, outside of small population nations like Norway or Switzerland (and you need to reach the top 10% there to be comparable). Wealth isn't everything? Correct, of course; the US culture is rotting rapidly, and devolving into predictable tribalism, an unavoidable result of government policy choices over the prior many decades.
If you can get into the top quarter in the US, use that position for all its worth. If you can't, it's not going to be a great existence unless you live in a nice college town or the equivalent.
However, the middle class (and the near groupings below or above that) across most of the developed world are facing a severe smashing, which will result in recurring French-like riots and protests in the decades to come. Most of affluent Europe hasn't seen consequential economic growth in two decades or more at this point. It's destroying their welfare systems gradually, weakening their social safety nets and loading their systems up with debt, just as their demographics are breaking. The huge French riots prior to the pandemic were one of the first big warning shots of what's coming. Japan, as another example, has seen a minimum of 1/3 of its standard of living wiped out over the past 20 years, and there's a lot more damage to come; the US and EU are both suffering from variations of Japanification economically (high debt, low dynamism, aged demographics, persistently mediocre productivity growth, low GDP growth, low GDP per capita growth, falling or stagnant standards of living for decades, struggling to allocate enough resources to the welfare state to maintain social promises, and so on).
Or take Germany as an example. They've had a remarkable - supposedly remarkable - economic run for decades now. Riding on an artificially weak currency (for their economy) which they've used to build up a freakishly abnormal export juggernaut. And yet their median net wealth figure is mediocre, below that of the US; their workers are not benefitting as they should be. And at this point Germany has seen net zero per capita economic expansion for coming up on 30 years. How long can that situation continue before something breaks? Not much longer I'd wager.
While the US is seeing many of the same problems, it's absolutely correct that it's better to live in cities in other affluent nations, rather than in the US. US cities are horrific by and large, with few exceptions.
> And at this point Germany has seen net zero per capita economic expansion for coming up on 30 years.
What exactly do you mean by "net zero per capita economic expansion"? According to the World Bank https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locat... , German GDP per capita was $38,294 in 1991 (adjusting for purchasing power and inflation) and $52,931 in 2021, which looks more like 38% expansion to me.
Germany GDP per capita 2022 (IMF estimate): $51,000
BLS inflation adjustment calculator: $26,000 in 1992 = $55,000 in 2022.
Germany has seen a net per capita contraction over 30 years.
Germany's GDP per capita was not $38,000 in 1991. It was $46,000 in 2019 for reference. That 1991 $38k figure is drastically higher than the US figure was at the time. Their GDP per capita hasn't been higher than the US on a sustained basis in the past 40+ years except for a brief period in 1995 (where it was a few thousand dollars higher).
And this scenario isn't unique to Germany, nearly every economic power in Europe has seen the same intense, generational stagnation (that includes Britain, France, Spain, Italy).
Please do not compare 1992 with 2022. The problems of reunification did not become truly apparent until mid/end of the 90s.
Comparing separate European countries individually in general is difficult, wealth and productivity is redistributed within the EU by various means. An hierarchical model that takes all EU countries into account might be the most sensible approach.
It seems like the reason your results differ from the World Bank is that you're taking German GDP per capita figures translated into dollars according to the exchange rate at the time without adjusting for purchasing power, and then you use US consumer inflation to compare them across time.
Whereas the World Bank appears to derive its figures by applying the German inflation rate (which was lower for most of the 30-year period) to make GDP per capita comparable across time, and then translates the values into US dollars while compensating for purchasing power differences.
If you earn income in Germany but spend it in the US, the former scenario would be quite relevant, but under normal conditions I think the World Bank's calculation is more useful.
It's interesting though that the two ways to compare the value of money over time and space lead to such different results.
I read that as disdain for the repackaging of authentic experiences by relentless and impersonal capitalistic forces.
Psychedelic drugs are a paradigmatic example of "mind expansion", a concept that promises and threatens to allow individuals a broader perspective than that of the ego, the cog-in-the-machine, the member of society. Almost by definition, this is countercultural, or at least an expression of something that capitalism can't conquer.
But capitalism can sure try, via concepts like micro-dosing or doing entheogens with a therapist or "LSD-trips for your lunch break", which I think is probably a reductio ad absurdum.
I think GP is just confused and meant DMT. edit: for context it is short lasting and known as the “businessman’s trip” because it genuinely fits in a lunch break.
"I see so many people with depressing faces every day"
How much information are you making up based on how a persons face subjectively looks to you? How someone's face looks is a superficial thing and really doesn't give you any solid information.
> According to the report, a "police spokeswoman acknowledged that the section on starlight tours had been deleted using a computer within the department, but said investigators were unable to pinpoint who did it."
Can't even solve a case within their own dept, what's the hope for anyone else?
Maybe not, but they haven't even laid charges on the officers who dropped these people off outside of town in deadly conditions. That is a criminal matter. It's more cover up for a situation they'd rather ignore.
Racism. It's racism plain, simple, and uncomplicated racism. Police are just the ones with the right opportunities and power to do this stuff and get away with it.
The motive is the same general motive you see in genocide of indigenous people around the world - from what China does to Tibetans and Uyghurs, to Canada's history of rounding up kids to put them in extremely abusive schools who freely said stuff about how they beat the indian out of the child, it's all just the way people behave when they're colonizing others. The motive is only recently seeing any organized challenge to this, it's pretty wild to look at comment sections on things and seeing the amount of genocide denial out there on this particular topic. If they exhume those alleged unmarked graves with archaeologists and find actual children's remains traceable to the nearby schools, then these people saying they could be anything have a lot of words to eat.
No, the systemic cleansing party didn't hold onto their seat very long. This is “merely” the organic actions of individuals, when those individuals are a substantial portion of the population.
The racist undercurrents in this city are _strong_.
Starlight Tours have been documented in many major cities in Canada, with actual evidence and related cases in Saskatoon, Montreal, and Winnipeg. It is also widely suspected that it is still a practice in some communities.
That's a complete non-sequitur. Assuming they're alcoholics is pretty racist and, even if they are, doesn't even begin to justify these actions by police.
Worth noting from a cold climate survival perspective that alcohol and a long walk in the cold is a death sentence. Your body will normally constrict bloodflow to the extremities, significantly reducing heat loss. Alcohol counteracts that. It makes you feel warm, in the same way that the final stages of hypothermia make you feel warm.
Yes I always wonder how commonly known this interaction is and how easily lethal. Where I grew up there was still a lot of stigma against openly committing suicide. But a handful of our fathers and grandfathers had "gone hunting" at night in january with a bottle of whiskey and predictable outcomes. If it's reliable and deniable enough for suicide it'll work fine for police murder too.
I hesitate to post this, but Canada is in a lot of ways a museum of the American West. The first time I visited BC, I turned on public radio and heard a story about tailings ponds collapsing into rivers. The logging is beyond what you get used to in modern OR, WA, and MT. The boarding schools that tried to eradicate native languages in the 1900s were like the ones the States had a few decades earlier.
The treatment of native and african Americans in the North American continent is so unjust and severe, and has been persistent for decades in a way that it's almost like a long drawn-out genocide.
unbalanced representations only fuel the fire of antagonism; far too many examples on both sides of justice in the last sixty years, for a single summary right?
I think I understand the gist of what you're saying, but it's hard to follow your wording. Especially, "far too many examples on both sides of justice". Can you try to clarify?
[1] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674608283
[2] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/10/inuit-highest-su...