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Cake day: August 31st, 2023

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  • Sorry then I’m mistaken. However modern Nazis, at least the Swedish ones, love going on about the Aryans and by saying Aryans, they mean the proto Indo Europeans. At least the ones in my country. They even made posters in the 90s with the typical horse chariots with text that says something similar to “your ancestors, the Aryans, conquered India and Europe” or something to that effect. I have limited knowledge of what the 1940s german Nazis thought so I trust what you say. However is it not true those OG Nazis at least connected the Aryans to proto Indo European and the actual historical Aryans of the hindu Vedas? In that case they still meant the proto Indo Europeans but were wrong about where they originated.

    But don’t worry I’m not a nazi. I have no belief that any ethnic origin is superior to another. I would even want to shame the proto Indo Europeans because they could not possibly have spread and conquered that far without insane amounts of rape and murder, which I don’t condone.



  • Nah I’m just very interested in agricultural history (I work in agriculture ) and I learned this stuff as a byproduct of learning about the origins and spread of farming into Europe. If you are interested there are lots of good long-form history videos about the neolithic on YouTube, just search Neolithic. So far Neolithic youtube has not suffered the same AI slop-ageddon as medieval YouTube has.


  • There was a time where both modern humans and Neanderthals lived together in Europe and it’s likely they mixed. But this was before the last ice age. After the ice age the Neanderthals were already extinct globally and the first people to repopulate Europe were these WHGs who genetically had little to do with the pre ice age population. Therefore I would assume strictly European Neanderthals have little to no modern genetic impact in Europeans. The Neanderthals genes Europeans carry today would instead derive from middle eastern Neanderthals.


  • Modern native European genetics can be roughly said to derive from 3 main sources. One is western Hunter gatherer (WHG). These were not the first people in Europe but were the first to populate Europe after the latest ice age ended. By analysing their genome we think they were dark skinned, black haired and had blue eyes. The light skin adaptation didn’t actually develop in Europe but in the middle east. Here is where the second group comes from.

    Early European Farmer (EEF) originally came from Anatolia and were the ones spreading farming around Europe. Interestingly the spread of farming was not spread by knowledge transfer but by the migration and expansion of EEFs. The EEFs and the WHGs would coexist for hundreds of years with little admixture, living completely different lifestyles. The early European farmers, whose genetics derive from Neolithic Anatolia, were light skinned, brown eyed and relatively short. Modern groups with the most genetic similarity to EEFs are modern day Sicilians so you can imagine that. Overtime the EEFs and the WHGs would eventually mix however.

    The third group are the yamnaya, also called steppe Ancestry. The yamnaya were a people group in modern day Romania and Ukraine who just so happened to invent the concept of riding a horse and after they did so they steamrolled about all of Europe in aggressive conquest. The Indo European languages derived from them and their expansion vastly changed the genetics of the continent. And all Europeans derive at least part of their genetics from them, of course in different amounts depending on the region. They were believed to be quite tall and have blond hair and are the “Aryans” that the Nazis talked about.

    All modern Europeans are a mixture of these 3 groups, in different proportions. So returning to the pictures in the OP it makes sense for the cheddar man would be dark skinned as he would be 100% WHG as he lives way before any of these groups moved in. This does not mean however that the guy on the right is not a direct ancestor, he very well may be. But since he is also a result of the later migrants, the EEFs and the Indo European expansion, he will of course look vastly different.


  • I did not know the history of the term tragedy of the commons. Thanks for educating me on that, I will now reconsider using that specific term in the future. However overgrazing is a real issue historically and still today. Overgrazing in the modern Sahel is a great contributor to the advancing of the savanna for example.


  • Are those generations really worse than those before it? Yes the environmental destruction is unparalleled but so were also the tools that enable that. In the Stone Age people could not have even come close to doing what we are doing eight now to the environment even if they wanted too.

    The term the tragedy of the commons originally referred to English cattle herders letting their cows overgraze public land because if they don’t overgraze it some other herders would do it instead. Stories like this are everywhere in history. The Vikings cut down every single tree in Iceland and the Faroe islands when they arrived with no care for the environmental whatsoever.

    Whaling, the clubbing of seals, the extinction of the dodo. There are countless examples. And if we are talking pure human to human cruelty, no war in the 20th century comes close to what the mongols did.

    The people of the 20th century were not more cruel or selfish than previous ones. They were simply the first ones given the tools and ability to pollute the whole earth.



  • The original point is that billionaires, as I interpret it, is that billionaires are worse than animals. Or at least that if we look at billionaires as if they were animals we would still diagnose them as ill. My point is that that’s not true. Animals can be just as psychotic. Most have absolutely no morals and a subset of them regularly do things that are way worse than what the billionaires are doing, hence my examples.

    However animals are not humans. Billionaires are humans. If we say billionaires are like animals that’s already a really bad grade. We humans are supposed to be much better than that. I’m not defending billionaires at all. I’m saying one should compare them to something else. There are much better and more effective ways to criticize them than this.



  • Hey I’m no big supporter of billionaires but “that behavior in any other species we would classify it as some kind of divergent behavior” is extremely wrong. Altruism is extremely rare outside humans. Most animals would absolutely love to get every single piece of food in the forest all to themselves. They steal food from each other constantly. Whole species are based on the very concept of stealing as their main or sole life strategy. There are fish out there whose main food is the juveniles of the exact same fish species. Literal baby-eating as their main strategy.

    We humans are supposed to be better than animals. Comparing someone to an animal is comparing them to something bad.



  • 4 most important parts of artificial fertiliser are nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and sulfur.

    Nitrogen is Infinite. It’s made from the air which is 78% nitrogen. Energy is needed to fix it. Usually its natural gas but it doesn’t have to be. Electricity can also be used. There are real world plants who use hydro or wild energy to make it, even if they are few today.

    Phosphorus is plentiful on Earth, both in soil, rock and sea water. However in most natural sources the concentration is too low to actually refine today. Phosphate rock which is the main source today is limited. 70% of the current Reserves are in one single country, Morocco. All world reserves combined should last for a our 300 years. After that we will either have to extract phosphorus from less phosphorus dense sources or we have to recycle it better from human excrete. Nevertheless we have plenty of time to come up with that technology. Main problem right now is not it running out but the risk of how concentrated it is. What if Morocco doesn’t want to share?

    Potassium is extremely plentiful around the world. It’s 2,6% of the Earth’s mass and even the potassium rich minerals we currently use are expected to last hundreds if not thousands of years. Mined all over the world but mostly in Canada, china and Russia and Belarus. Not really a problem. Also plentiful in seawater.

    Sulfur has many different sources and in most it’s a byproduct. Main source is as a biproduct of refining fossil fuels but it’s also created as a byproduct of mining for other minerals. The amount needed for agriculture is also comparably small. There is so much sulfur out there it’s even mixed into concrete just to get rid of it. I don’t see sulfur as a main concern.

    So to summarize I’m really not concerned about any of them except for phosphorus and for that one it’s mostly the question of how willing Morocco is to share it. Long term when sulfate rock runs out 300 years I’m quite secure we have found out how to commercially extract it from a less dense mineral. Either that or we have finally started seriously recycling it from human excrete. Phosphorus is very easily recycled. The technology is already here. More sewage plants would just have to do it. And if we are starting to slowly reach peak phosphorus the pure financial incentives will make sewage plants start recovering it. Now it doesn’t happen because the mineral phosphorus is just too cheap and convenient.



  • I would also argue that a great asshole has the potential to turn his asshole supporters into even greater assholes with time.

    As an example I would say whoever ran the QAnon conspiracy changed a lot of people. On the QAnon casualties subreddit there were lots of people writing how their family members who beforehand were just “normal” republicans suddenly turned into absolutely bat shit insane conspiracy theorists after falling down that rabbit hole. Without that external exposure they would never have ended up in that state.

    Crazy religious cults are often intentionally designed like this. Scientology for example had the whole aliens thing hidden from new initiates. You had to be part of the cult for a certain amount of time before learning about those “inner parts” probably because if you started out day 1 with the whole aliens bit people would see the bullshit for what it was but exposed gradually they accept it.

    I think a lot of that also applies to the maga movement. I think we can all agree that Trump was always bad. But I also think most can agree that its only gotten worse with time. As trump gets more and more insane his supporters, who refuse to admit they were wrong about him, have to constantly double down and accept and support whatever he is doing, constantly turning his supporters views worse with time.



  • You would think Catholics would be absolutely outraged by this but the pope, who before was totally taboo to ever criticize, has been getting lots of criticism from Catholics for a long time now, ever since pope Francis was elected and but especially now with pope Leo. Ironically the absolutely fiercest critics of the pope are the so called “tradcaths” or ultra conservative catholic zoomers. If you look at their social media bubble it’s shit thrown at whatever the pope is saying every single week.

    I don’t think US conservative Catholics care at all what Trump is saying about the pope. They hate the pope themselves. Maybe they will even cheer on.


  • It absolutely states that being gay is a grave sin and even calls for death for them in the old testament. However the message of Jesus in the new testament is one of radical forgiveness and non-judgement. Jesus is not afraid of those who commit sexual sins as seen by one of his companions being a prostitute. Jesus says to love everyone, forgive everyone and only hate the sin itself, but not the sinner. Judging a person is also considered a grave sin, something many modern christians have forgotten.

    Therefore there is absolutely a theological basis for allowing homosexuals to attend church, following Jesus example of himself hanging out with prostitutes, another kind of sexual sinner. And since Jesus tells you to love everyone and judge no one there is no reason to hate or shun a gay person. This also applies to other sins. If you rob a bank you can still go to church as well, with the same argument.

    However if you talk to a priest or pastor of a liberal LGBTQ affirming church and ask them if gays are allowed in the church they will shout a resounding yes. But if you press them on the question of if homosexual intercourse is a sin or not they will probably get uncomfortable and may give another answer. It’s a very hard biblical reality to deny.

    However since you could in theory be gay and have a same sex partner and just simply not have sex with them you could give gay couples the benefit of the doubt. This is the basis for allowing gay marriage. However gay marriage stands on much more shakier grounds than simply allowing LGBTQs in the church, since marriage in the bible is explicitly stated as being between a man and a woman. Some prists/pastors however take a different route to justifying it and that involves reasoning that since God created all humans and some humans are gay, those people most have been created gay by god himself, and everything that God creates is good, therefore gays are good. This argument requires some reasoning outside the Bible but is used by many. Conservatives can attack such a stance saying it directly goes against direct bible quotes while also claiming one is not born gay but you turn gay by your own decision or others influence. Gayness would in this view be a free will sin rather than a god creates attribute.

    I’m writing this comment as a non Christian who supports LGBTQ btw. Just trying to explain what I know about the discussion.


  • Before this the only ships let through were the ones that were OKed by iran. You could be OKed by iran either if you were going there to buy and transport Iranian oil or if you paid Iran a huge fee. Either way Iran was making huge amounts of money on this especially since the oil prices were so high and they were the only ones able to export oil from the region.

    So this recent move of blocking the straight completely is not a dumb move if one wants to weaken iran. There were headlines going around saying Iran was making more money during the war than before the war. Such a situation of course meant iran is in no hurry whatsoever to sign a peace deal with the US, especially not a disadvantageous one.

    This new blockade will however highen oil prices even more now that not even Iranian oil can leave. But this will put pressure on Iran towards making peace deal. If a peace deal is met the strait can be completely open again and oil prices can start going down. That’s the thought behind it. We’ll see if it actually works. It doesn’t look like Iran is too desperate to sign a peace deal and why would they? They can probably handle not exporting oil for a longer time than Trump can politically survive constantly increasing fuel prices and inflation. And they know that fact. The Iranian leadership are crazy religious fanatics but they don’t strike me as stupid.


  • Since oil palms only grow in humid tropical environments it really comes down to which land we value the most. By using 3 hectares in Europe we could save 1 hectare of land in rainforests. What is worth more, 1 hectare rainforest in Indonesia or 3 hectares of native woodland in Europe? It’s not really clear cut. One could argue that 1 hectare of rainforest is more valuable because of the higher biodiversity. However there is not one natural answer to this question and ultimately subjective.