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It is striking to me that the only locals you seem to care about in your set of responses here are the white locals? Your hypothetical contrast between "remote activists" who want to remove the dams and the "local stalwarts" totally ignores the people who have been most impacted and lost the most through the existence of these dams.

The tribes that relied on the salmon in the klamath watershed lost their jobs, subsistence food, and cultural heritage for nearly a hundred years, and this factors precisely nil in your analysis.


You are right, I didn't cover them in my analysis. That was not the dynamic I chose to focus on.

To be clear, Im not even necessarily opposed to dam removal. My intent was to explore the dynamic where large numbers of remote people make decisions despite having little skin in the game. This dynamic also has a long history of negatively impacting native Americans too.


This is factually incorrect.

From the 2013 department of the interior report discussing dam removal "Klamath Dam Removal Overview Report for the Secretary of the Interior: An assessment of science and technical information":

> In particular, the Klamath Tribes of the upper basin have experienced their 92nd year (period starting with initial dam construction) without access to salmon and have continued to limit their harvest of suckers to only ceremonial use for the 25th consecutive year because of exceptionally low numbers and ESA protection.


Salmon were not still breeding there, this is the first return in over 100 years.

October of this year:

> a fall-run Chinook salmon was identified by ODFW’s fish biologists in a tributary to the Klamath River above the former J.C. Boyle Dam, becoming the first anadromous fish to return to the Klamath Basin in Oregon since 1912 when the first of four hydroelectric dams was constructed, blocking migration.

https://www.dfw.state.or.us/news/2024/10_Oct/101724.asp


> Alcohol's a good one - without question a hugely harmful substance overall, but we allow it. Is gambling more or less harmful than alcohol?

an exceedingly lazy skim of the literature has alcohol with all cause mortality at about an odds ratio of 1.27 [0], gambling disorder about 1.8 OR for all cause mortality w/ 15 OR for suicide [1]. So gambling is comparable to substantially worse than alcohol.

Perhaps the better rephrasing of your counterargument is "we live in a society that places an incredibly low value on public health." Gambling is an emerging public health crisis and allowing i-gaming is most certainly the wrong choice. Which probably means we'll allow its expansion at great cost to society. At least the gambling companies will get some cashflow though :3

[0] https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/53/2/dyae046/7632292?lo... [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01045-w


> am I truly out of touch here?

Yes, you are absolutely out of touch. drawkward gave you three incredibly specific examples but you just kept on sticking with your hunch.

A paper that is the "epitome of progressivism" probably isn't going to have multiple conservative opinion columnists heavily featured and isn't going to have recurring problems with fawning interviews of white supremacists over barbecue.

I suppose if you're any further than center-right, a paper that is narrowly center-left is going to appear to be the "epitome of progressivism", but many years of critique would probably suggest otherwise. politely, i don't think this would be something you'd get tripped up on if you'd paid attention for a few years longer than a singular skim of the podcasts recently.


I've snarked at your silliness down-thread, but there is a lot of good history that gives credibility to the notion of the social model of disability.

You may enjoy "Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard" (Groce '85)

In communities where many individuals share a common sign language, deafness doesn't function as a disability in the same way it does when few individuals speak sign language.


> In communities where many individuals share a common sign language, deafness doesn't function as a disability in the same way it does when few individuals speak sign language.

Isn't that somewhat obvious? If you only speak Greek, it's a disability if you're not in Greece, but an advantage if you're there.

I think it's a pity that sign language is almost never taught outside of for hearing impaired kids. Every person could have great use of sign language being commonly spoken. It lets you communicate silently and at long distances.


GP is mostly ranting around some methodological individualism garbage when they could have been reading about the social model of disability and finding it's not that contradictory to their stated beliefs and probably not deserving of outright dismissal.

> Individuals exist, "society" has never existed and will never exist. It's only individuals who can take actions. "Society" does not have any means at all, because it's just a mirage within the imagination of some people.

It's one of those critiques that hits really hard when you've been doing lines of cocaine off of stacks of Hayek and Mises books and doesn't really inspire anyone outside of those niches. "Oooh! Checkmate! Got you now, Statist! That's not a society! it's a collection of individuals!" etc.

If you were to say something like "an individual with impaired eye sight is not considered disabled when they have access to eye glasses. disability does not consist solely of an individual's medical impairment, but in the relationship between the individual, other individuals, and available infrastructural and technological means" maybe it'd hit better for them.

"the obstacle is not some property of the individual experiencing an access issue, but are created by a system made by other people who didn't provide alternative access methods" (roughly the same thing) is just super objectionable though /eyeroll


I'd like to say that your comment speaks for itself - in many ways. It demonstrates how somebody who holds a strong belief in "society" reacts and acts towards another person when their core belief is questioned. Your behaviour is predictable.


> Why are people even spending money on this research?

"This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors."


You're also missing that the lawsuit alleges mullenweg lied to the employee about the nature of the job, and rather than being a personal assistant it was nearly 24/7 caretaking of his mother under constant abuse (including, but not limited to, having sleep disturbed by calls from the mother, being denied meal breaks, and being forced to work during thanksgiving without meals.)


Yup. A 400M net worth should be enough to hire multiple hardened caretakers. Or maybe, just maybe, professional psychiatric assistance? Seems like someone's in denial of their mother's condition.


It is sublime that mullenweg would be deeply concerned about his "free speech" and then seek to SLAPP down anyone archiving a list of his misdeeds.


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