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[Tetro Kornbluth]

Putin is the kind of historical figure whose downfall would be caused by an ill-conceived invasion of Russia. This analysis is useless however due to the fact that Putin is already in charge of Russia

EDIT: Sawx

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I was going to link to the Architecture thread but then I saw this gem:

Does marriage have to be denied between blood relatives?  What would be the harm of marriage between blood relatives?

MARRIED PEOPLE TEND TO HAVE SEX

SEXXXXXXXXXXXXX!!!!
Straight married couples have sex and create babies

Some straight married couples have sex but don't create babies

Some straight married couples have sex but can't create babies

Gay married couples can have sex but can't have babies as a result of sex

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Would you like it a pop up book, or book with lift up flaps to help explain it better. I'll pay the shipping charge?

[Tetro Kornbluth]

X SomebodyWhoExists

[Tetro Kornbluth]

The worst thing about the vaccination "debate" (that, by the way, is certainly not "great") is how it stigmatizes autism in a backwards way.

Even if it did cause or contribute to the development of autism, how is autism so bad that it's worse than your child dying of an easily preventable disease? How is it worse than your child potentially becoming the source that spreads an easily preventable disease to other people who then become terribly ill and possibly die? If your child did develop autism, how would you feel if they knew you'd rather they potentially died of an illness most people are immune to? I doubt that they intended that message, of course, but what is so awful about having a living child who is autistic that you'd choose the risks of the alternative?

Just.. ugh.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I know basically nothing about it, apart from the fact it's still a monarchy. Could someone familiar with the country enlighten me?

(Disclaimer: I've met and discussed politics with several Bhutanese people, but it was a few years ago now.)

To put it glibly but only slightly misleadingly, what’s good and bad about Bhutan is what’s good and bad about the Central Tibetan Administration, but taken to extremes.

Bhutan is a conservative Buddhist sacerdotal monarchy that for the past five or six years has been undergoing quasi-democratization under Dragon King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck (who until last year was the youngest sovereign monarch in the world and indeed does look a little like an Asian Elvis), according to terms spelled out by the previous Dragon King (who's still alive), Jigme Singye Wangchuck. House Wangchuck presents its political ideology--which is shared by both major political parties, although the current governing party is considered marginally less pro-monarchy than the other, which won the first democratic elections in 2008 and was in power until last year, despite having been founded by somebody who is Jigme Singye's brother-in-law four times over (see below)--as based on the idea of 'Gross National Happiness', which Jigme Singye advanced as an alternative to Gross National Product based on (obviously) much more subjective measurements. A lot of people both in Bhutan and in the West are enamored with the idea of Gross National Happiness to the point where they fail to recognize that it's by its very nature so subjective as to lack any real accountability as a benchmark for specific policy. A lot of people also think it comes across as vaguely Orwellian, which it does for reasons that I’ll get into in the next paragraph, although it must be said that Bhutan is far from the most Orwellian country in Asia right now.

The specific things for which the Bhutanese government has been criticized are its treatment of the Nepalese minority and the fact that it is deliberately stalling Bhutan's industrial and technological development as a means to preserve traditional Bhutanese culture (the logic here, whose validity or lack thereof I won’t comment upon, is that since Bhutanese cultural mores are strongly traditionalist, preserving traditional culture makes most Bhutanese people, at least in the short term, happy and thus causes the Gross National Happiness of Bhutan to increase). Preserving traditional Bhutanese culture is not an inherently bad motivation in and of itself, and it would obviously be a shame if it were to be subsumed into the broader culture of India or China or wherever else, but in the case of the Dragon Kings preserving it also means preserving their own power at the apex of a combined (but bifurcated) religious and political structure that, as politicus alludes to, doesn’t really have room for a significant portion of the population that isn’t Buddhist, ethnic Ngalop or Sharchop, and primarily conversant in a Bodish language. It’s notable that expulsions of and discrimination against Nepalese in Bhutan started getting worse around twenty-five years ago, which is also around when Jigme Singye started solidifying the terms of the current official House Wangchuck ideology. The justification for doing this had to do with the circumstances under which the neighboring kingdom of Sikkim had collapsed in 1975: Nepali Hindus became such a large proportion of the population that they brought down the royal government and forced not only the abolition of the monarchy but an ultimately successful referendum on annexation to India (which, obviously, is majority-Hindu).

It must be said that among the Ngalop and Sharchop, Bodish-language-speaking, Buddhist majority in Bhutan support of House Wangchuck and its policies does appear to be genuine and deep as well as broad, and that Jigme Khesar Namgyel is in general a little more open to the type of development that the international community is traditionally concerned with for poor countries than his father is/was. But it also must be said that for liberals in the West to think that Gross National Happiness and Bhutanese cultural policy sound like entirely nice and unproblematic ideas just because they have a whiff of the ‘exotic Orient’ and the state-enforced traditional Bhutanese culture happens to be aesthetically downright gorgeous is more than a little shallow and ignores very real concerns about what happens when a country that decides to pursue genuinely traditionalist cultural policies has a minority whose traditional culture isn’t the same.

(It should also be noted that Jigme Singye is a polygamist--he's married to all four of the sisters of the founder of the current ruling party (see above)--and that the almost surreally high regard in which he’s held in certain circles obscures the very real achievements of his father and predecessor, Jigme Dorji, who ended slavery and serfdom, introduced mechanized vehicles and central economic planning, built dozens of schools and half a dozen hospitals, had almost two thousand kilometres of roads constructed, and established the first quasi-independent judiciary and advisory National Assembly with the power to impeach the Dragon King, but was unfortunately very sickly and died young while receiving medical treatment in Kenya in 1972.)

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Isn’t it also somewhat common for vending machines to include used panties from school girls in Japan? The CNN article I read last week mentioned that, but it didn’t mention if that was going to be banned as well.

You could find such things in certain seedier parts of the Kantō Plain megalopolis in the nineties and I think maybe into the first decade of this century, but it's been banned for a while now, and the idea that it was ever widespread is an urban legend. The shoddy pornography and prostitution laws have always been a much more serious and complex problem than that, although it's certainly one of the issue's more lurid manifestations. It's worth noting that most Japanese people are absolutely mortified by their country's sex industry and how much press it gets in other parts of the world.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

There is no optimum amount of social equality. In fact, given that markets are in a constant state of disequilibrium, there can never be an optimum amount of social equality.

lolmarkets

[Tetro Kornbluth]

The 3rd worst state where there in an expression for crazy crap vs the absolute best and most diverse state where you can get Florida, NJ, Vermont, Iowa, or any state you want just by crossing county lines?

California easily.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I applaud the initiative shown by Gully Foyle and the Transcendental Democrats to help out an ailing part of our region.