Not true. All historical white supremacy movements have been built on the narrative of genetic superiority. Skull shapes, race theory etc.
Although cultural superiority is entwined in this its only recently this became centre stage as a means to still advance the same old tired bigotry but with a mainstream friendly face.
What you're missing here is in reality, your life experience, outcomes and how you are treated in society can be very much a consequence of your "identity".
All groups are advocating for is equality of treatment from institutions and from society at large.
Is that too much to ask?
Once we get to that place there's nothing more marginalised groups would love to do then to stop being defined by race.
What you are missing is that "All Groups" are not simply asking for "equality of treatment from institutions and from society at large" in fact many groups are asking for equity not equality, there is a difference.
Sometimes this is referred to was "equality of outcome vs opportunity"
This a (frankly lazy) narrative often used to dismiss demands for equality.
You might be able to point to isolated incidents but to view group advocacy as a whole as malicious power grab is simply not true and a gross misrepresentation.
A better question is probably do you think certain groups are wrong in their perception that they are unfairly treated?
If yes then you are not acknowledging a vast amount of very clearly expressed life experience and if no why be against them advocating for themselves as a group?
Serious question - Why can't we put our minds to it and kill them all?
Why can't we banish this mass killer and cause of immense suffering to humans and animals alike.
I haven't seen any compelling evidence that they form any vital component of ecosystems apart from obviously spreading disease and applying some adapation pressure - which we could eliminate like we have done with lots of other killers.
>As part of their useful role, the larvae of mosquitoes live in water and provide food for fish and other wildlife, including larger larvae of other species such as dragonflies. The larvae themselves eat microscopic organic matter in the water, helping to recycle it. Adult mosquitoes make up part of the diet of some insect-eating animals, such as birds, bats, adult dragonflies and spiders. They also help pollinate some flowers, when they consume nectar.
AFAICT, the more serious proposals to eliminate mosquitoes target the individual mosquito species that spread disease in areas where there are several other mosquito species that would quickly expand to fill the ecological gap.
Yeah, that's the difficulty. In fits of scratching and waving my arms on camping trips of yore I too have felt the urge to just pour a trillion liters of pesticide over the world and kill all of the little flying bastards in one fell swoop (har har). Problem is, it's actually really difficult to imagine such a plentiful and prodigious species _not_ playing a major food chain role. They're everywhere, and things that eat bugs are everywhere; it would be really hard to imagine their absence not collapsing some part of the food chain.
The only thing that would make sense to me would be to introduce some "invasive species" that eats the mosquitoes, doesn't spread the malaria, and can still be eaten by most of the things that eat the mosquitoes. Still, introducing any invasive species is playing with fire; it's literally impossible to know all the consequences in advance.
I am somewhat uncomfortable with the tech for eradicating a species (genetic bombs etc). It feels like a Pandora’s box.
I get similar vibes to nuclear weapons, like, should we be on this path at all? Does an ethical person walk that path, even for “righteous” ends, or is the ethical move just to sit down in place and make someone else drag you down it.
BUT, letting so many people die when you could help is also unethical. That’s very different from an atom numb... bombs don’t save lives.
Still, the idea of weapons that are sexually transmitted and eradicate branches of the tree of life is just a bone chilling concept.
I wonder if you would have written that, if your partner or sibling was dead from malaria.
I guess it feels different, when the affected people live far away.
I'd worry about global climate change, and do something related to that, not worry about "too few mosquitos". I read it's 400k people dead yearly from malaria.
Almost certainly I'd feel different. To be absolutely clear, I find the case for eradication to be extremely compelling for exactly that reason. The risk I have in my head that I want to mitigate, and which makes me unsure of where I stand on this issue, is not any sort of ambiguous "humans shouldn't play god" or "live and let live" or anything like that. The obverse risk we should consider when fiddling with an ecosystem on such a grand and potentially irreversible scale is whether we will accidentally disrupt the food supply in a way that's more catastrophic than the current catastrophe that is malaria.
There aren't many catastrophes worse than the current state of malaria, I absolutely agree and we in the western world ought to take it much more seriously. However, there are possible catastrophes that are much much worse, and fiddling with low level food chains is one of those actions that might open us up to such risk.
Again, not sure where I stand. What I do know is, presumably like you, I think we are not taking this seriously enough and addressing it with all the might that it deserves.
That stance is only correct if you are reasonably certain that killing off those mosquito species will not result in more deaths from knock on effects.
at the same time: Imagine if in the US: there was a new poisonous snake that killed 400 000 people.
Someone said: Let's exterminate that type of snake.
Then, do you think someone from the US/Europe/Australia would have replied "but maybe the snake is an important part of the ecosystem" ?
Would that have been a bit like not putting out a fire burning down a city,
because maybe the fire might cause certain unknown nuts to grow into plants and trees, the following years, and maybe maybe those trees were important somehow?
Immediately start exterminating those malaria carrying mosquitos, without finding out how that'd affect the ecosystem.
Then, in parallel, start studies and research about how the ecosystem might get affected, and if very surprisingly (?), those effects seems like worse than 400 000 people dead, then rethink the exterminate-mosquitos project.
(GGP, ethanbond: Sorry if I sounded a bit harsh / not-so-polite in my reply. Turns out that was actually an a bit interesting comment / thing to think about, to me.)
No harm no foul, my friend! This is an issue worth being legitimately upset about :) There are plenty of people who argue against sterilization with frankly bullshit arguments when you weigh them against the suffering that malaria inflicts. Those people should be outright dismissed. However there are also good arguments for treading very, very carefully here. It's really tricky and we need more people caring, more people thinking about how we can navigate this.
Makes me wonder if you live in one of the bigger cities? There're fewer mosquitos in the cities?
Whilst if living in a village on the country side, and one uses the malaria nets, maybe that's different? (malaria bigger problem?)
Edit: now I just noticed in a recent comment you wrote that you have "lost count of the number of times [you] have contracted malaria". Ok so that's a very different reason, than what I would have thought. Makes me even more curious about if you live in one of the big cities, or on the countryside /edit
> antipoverty infrastructure
What'd be the most important such things from your perspective?
Stagnant water isn't a rural exclusive, and increased population density isn't a great way to slow transmission of a disease spread by an insect that relies on blood to reproduce. Either way, I've lived/been raised in a range of environments, from rural to the megacity I currently live in.
And yes, I've contracted malaria numerous times since I was a small child (much more frequently as a child, actually - it's slowed down to twice or so a year as an adult, due to partial acquired immunity). I'm not even an outlier in that regard; many people I know have a similar case history. We "survived" largely by virtue of being well-fed on varied, balanced diets and having informed, attentive parents who could afford to care for us properly (this sounds more complicated than it actually is - it's mostly making sure the child keeps to the medication schedule, taking steps to reduce the fever and providing enough sugar and iron to offset the worst of the hypoglycaemia/anaemia). If that sounds like a ridiculously low bar, that's because it is - and yet, it's a bar that millions of people fail to clear due to poverty.
> What'd be the most important such things from your perspective?
Short to medium-term, access to power and internet. The power grid is an embarrassment, internet infrastructure even more so. And a lot of other potential measures rest on those two - for example, it would be much easier/faster to provide financial services to the millions of unbanked/underbanked (or to provide supplementary education) over the internet, and having enough power to preserve food properly would go a long way in improving nutrition (all the way up to improving the efficiency of the supply chains).
Long-term, education. Illiteracy is a near-insurmountable barrier to economic advancement.
One more thing comes to my mind: Overpopulation. Number of people growing faster than what hospitals and universities etc can be created?
And from what I've read elsewhere, the things you mentioned: health care, safe food supply, and education, is a good way to handle the problem with overpopulation -- since when people know there's a basic safety net, with health care and food, there's no need to have many children who can help out, when one is old.
> If that sounds like a ridiculously low bar
Yes and I'm actually a bit surprised. And now I understand better why good health care & anti-poverty things are that important for handling malaria
> How could we kill all mosquitos without killing all other insects?
Narrowly tailored insecticides are actually quite feasible. They are just quite a bit more expensive to develop than the indiscriminate kind so we rarely do so.
The key for a narrowly tailored insecticide is to base it on the hormones that regulate the insect's behavior. Insects are in many ways like little biological robots with a bunch of preprogrammed subroutines built in, with hormones triggering calls to those subroutines.
Say you have an insect that on the first summer evening above some certain threshold temperatures forms swarms two meters above patches of blue flowers next to ponds, where it mates, then the females lay eggs and die.
All those steps will be triggered by hormones. If you can identify the hormone that is released by the summer evening hitting the temperature threshold and synthesize that, then you might be able to spray an area with that hormone during the spring. That can then trigger the whole sequence of swarming, mating, egg laying, and dying to start early--before the weather is warm enough for the eggs to by viable, or even before the insects of reached sexual maturity so that the mating does not even produce fertilized eggs.
There are at least two very good things about this approach.
1. The insects do not evolve immunity.
2. The hormones for one insect are generally not harmful to things that eat those insects. Since those hormones already occur naturally in the insect, their predators are already exposed to them. All we are doing is messing with the timing.
These are expensive to develop because you have to really know the target insect. You need people to study its lifecycle in detail to identify what subroutines it has in its little insect behavior library. You need to identify the hormone triggers that affect the behaviors that you might want to use.
You probably also should verify that you have right insect. There was a case where an invasive species of moths (I think) was devastating crops in one state. In the state the moths were native to they were naturally kept under control by a parasitic wasp species that was also native there. An attempt was made to import the parasitic wasps (this was deemed low risk because the wasps could not survive without the moths, so once the invasive moths were gone the wasps would die too).
It was a good plan, and it would have worked except for one little detail. It turned out that there were actually two species of parasitic wasps that were almost indistinguishable. Only one of the two was a parasite for the invasive moth species. The other was a parasite for a different moth.
It wasn't until after the imported wasps failed to do anything about the moths that entomologists took a closer look and realized there were two species, and all the wasps that had been trapped for export to fight the moths had been collected in a place that had the wrong species.
Anyway, the bottom line is that you have to know your target really well to do the hormone based approach. And because it is so effective you can easily end up with an insecticide that will wipe out most of the target in a region, so you don't get repeat customers until maybe years later when the insect starts to make a comeback.
So you end up with an insecticide that was expensive to develop, might have a highly variable market, targets just one species, and most of the R&D for it does not really help with the next one you develop for the next species. That's just not economically worth it in most cases for most insecticide companies.
It might be worth it in this one case, though, perhaps as a publicly funded project. A lot would depend on how many different species of mosquitoes are involved. If only one or two are responsible for most malaria spread, it could be worth it. If there are dozens that are significant spreaders it might not be feasible.
I believe that argument here is that globalisation causes a bunch of interactions that wouldn't have happened otherwise, that leads to strife ("they took our jobs" is one of the plethora of scenarios) and that leads to racism.
Sure, but let's be honest here: nobody cared. I know I didn't care, and my neighbors and friends didn't care. And we are the ones voting for people to govern our country.
Nobody cares until shit hits the fan.
And the above theory complies with practice. If you look at the countries that were able to properly handle Covid19, they had similar cases before. The people over there were already wearing masks. Not because they are smarter, but they were just always closes to the action.
I know myself (=male ;)): I don't learn from somebody telling me something. I learn by hitting my head against the wall, and then say "hey this person was right, let's avoid doing that". The rest of the world seems to have the same strategy.
Just my observation.
But you are right that other people looked into it, but I just have the impression that most of us really didn't care (including myself)
>But you are right that other people looked into it, but I just have the impression that most of us really didn't care (including myself)
I'm with you about not caring enough about pandemics before. But this is where bureaucracy can shine: hire somebody whose entire job is to care about a niche thing. They usually don't need a huge budget to get a good foundational plan set up: one person, a computer, a phone, and proper security clearance.
One of the problems with the current administration isn't that they value some things less, but they have a drive to undo their predecessors' work.
In the case of Trump, my impression is he purposefully set out to undo anything Obama had done as some sort of weird, childish, vendetta. That aside, in general though I think these things happen because rulers are looking to reduce taxation for the rich, and things like "pandemic response team" are pretty well hidden from public view, and can usually blagged ("we kept 10 million face masks as an emergency reserve" fading to mention that's a day's worth, say, or that they were out of date, or not the right type of mask).
There's a painful cognitive dissonance that people seem to have about this disease - there isn't an option (unless you don't care about lots of people dying) where the economy doesn't take a big hit in order to contain the exponential phase.
It's not clear what the alternatives are?
I assume you're not advocating a no measures approach.
No lockdown even with social distancing still does huge economic damage and even then you would not get herd immunity - 60% infection rate is required.
Although cultural superiority is entwined in this its only recently this became centre stage as a means to still advance the same old tired bigotry but with a mainstream friendly face.