Lack of bathrooms has been called tragedy of the commons in this thread, but it's not the "commons" that are the problem.
The worst 10% of society determine what we can and can't have. The "commons" aren't having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying the bathrooms with lack of... etiquette. The commons are victimized when these things happen and then there's eventually no choice but to shut them down unless there's willingness to crack down on the explicit problematic behavior.
You're right about who is causing the damage etc. but the 'commons' does not refer to the people; it refers to the shared resource. So a public park is the commons. And when it gets polluted with plastic rubbish etc. because externalities are not internalized that's a tragedy of the commons.
The fallacy in "the tragedy of the commons" is that there's something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms the shared resource. At least this is the popular understanding. And I'll add that if we look at shared resources both with more breadth -- e.g. across history and cultures -- and in more depth -- e.g. cross-analysis, they come out looking much more successful than you'd think.
That's not true. As with all game theory payouts, it's not saying that a Nash equilibrium is inevitable, it's saying that to avoid it you need incentives outside the game, it's saying that the incentives of the game itself don't suffice.
In terms of "the tragedy of the commons", that outside incentive is usually public shaming in smaller communities, or rules and laws in larger and more anonymous communities. If you look at shared resources across history and cultures, you usually find communities enforce very strong outside incentives against spoiling the commons instead of just relying on the kindness of strangers.
That isn’t what the tragedy of the commons is. It isn’t about something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms it.
It is about the idea that when there is a limited, shared public resource, individuals making rational self-interested decisions will often lead to a situation which no individual would choose.
That doesn’t mean it always has to end in tragedy, though. It just means you can’t just go fully “laissez faire” and let everyone do whatever they want, and expect the common to be preserved. The only way to protect the common is to take some sort of collective action; pass a law that limits how much an individual can take from the common, or set a quota and allow people to bid, etc.
The collective action doesn’t even always have to be a legislative action; you could create a taboo around using too much of a common, or use social shaming to get people to only use their share.
The point is that you have to take SOME collective action to prevent the tragedy.
"The tragedy of the commons" isn't a claim that "the commons universally leads to worse outcomes", but rather "the commons universally leads to worse incentives". The existence of a separate set of contradictory cultural incentives may prevent worse outcomes, but it doesn't change the nature of the incentives created by the commons, nor does it contradict the truth of "the tragedy of the commons", let alone render it fallacious.
You are of course right about what the word "commons" refers to. Still, I want to quibble.
Maybe the definition covers both, but I still think it's worth distinguishing between incentives creating a bad equilibrium and simply antisocial behaviours. When I hear "tragedy of the commons", I think of the former.
A reduction of public restrooms didn't stop the worst 10% of society from having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying an area with their lack of defacatory etiquette -- did it?
In places where these things were problems with public restrooms, they remain problems without public restrooms.
The 10%'ers are still doing their dastardly things. The remaining 90% of society still has the same messes to clean up (or to willfully ignore).
You’re making the mistake of thinking there’s a top down process. That’s not what’s happening. It goes like this: “if I close my public restroom then all of the people asking for a public restroom will have to go across the street and they will not bother me anymore“
The problem of course then is the guy across the street is forced to make the same decision
You don't see how maintaining a bathroom where the worst of society engage in public sex, do drugs, and shit it up in general - is more of a liability than without those things happening?
Try hiring someone for a job where the job could sometimes be cleaning up bodily fluids and odors in a bathroom. Even the government deems it infeasible.
Or, think about how much someone would have to pay you to do that job.
My first job was "stockboy" at Kmart in 1996, at 1996 American minimum wage, and part of the job involved cleaning toilets.
And, honestly? If more people had to clean toilets in use by other people, maybe we wouldn't have so many folks expecting other people to clean up after them. I see countless posts in my Facebook group about trash on the street. In the time it took to take a photo and post it to social media, they could have picked up the trash and taken it to a nearby bin.
But I suppose that experience goes two ways. Some people think they're above the human condition, to the point where they won't even clean up after themselves, even in their own homes. And other people recognize that it's actually not that hard to clean things up, if you just do it. We all have good and bad days.
OK, come on, you don’t know that. I doubt we have any serious data that bodily fluids in public bathrooms are likely to come from drug users. And if you’re cleaning it up, presumably you have equipment and are not using your tongue, the residual drugs won’t jump on you. Don’t stigmatise hard drug users, many of them (maybe most) were given a rotten hand early on and now want help. Policies such as Portugal’s decriminalisation have shown we can make a bigger difference when we treat those people as people.
Either way, the point of your parent comment is that most people don’t even pick up trash, which is itself a problem.
I do know that. For a time I was GM for a convenience store. I started requiring people to come ask me or the manager on duty for a key to the bathroom, which I started having locked by default.
There was an immediate 90% reduction in bodily fluids outside the toilet bowl and 100% reduction in stolen plumbing (they were taking part of the p-trap for drug use) and in finding discarded paraphernalia. Correlation isn't causation, maybe all the crack heads were still using the bathroom but decided to be civilized, IDK, but keeping the bathroom under literal lock and key was a big benefit.
It was inconvenient for customers, that was true, and I didn't like that aspect, but it was hard getting staff (or even myself) that had the will to hose poop off a bathroom wall.
Which I can tell from your comment you've never done. "presumably you have equipment" Yeah, a hose. A mop and bucket. You're still in close proximity, you still step in it, it still splashes. And nothing prepares you for the smells. And you can never unsee it. I won't even describe the things I saw in the womens bathroom. Way less common for things to go down in there, but when it did... It's wretched work.
The toilets you cleaned in 1996 were no where near as disgusting/dangerous as what the public toilets look like now from fentanyl zombies and meth heads. I doubt you had to worry about pricking yourself on a recently used needle ever. Those people simply didn't exist on this level back then and there were more options. Please stop with the 'I hiked uphill both ways' routine... life is worse now than in 1996 in almost every way. We shouldn't be expected to ignore it and just put up with it. People should stop making excuses for it and address the root of the problem.
Meth and heroin were massive problems in the 80s and 90s. Go and watch Trainspotting which was literally made in the year you mentioned and then come back and defend your point about public toilets in the 90s not being drug litter riddled.
Yes, they existed, but definitively not in the same potency (i.e. fentanyl) or volume and were more expensive and harder to get. Not every public toilet in the 80s/90s was completely taken over by deranged homeless drug addicts like it is now. The problem is much more difficult. It's not the same at all.
When I was a kid growing up in the 80s/90s, you rarely saw homeless camps like they are now where they openly use drugs. You never saw public restrooms that were completely disgusting. Fast food bathrooms were clean back then.. now they are horrible. Things are not the same... The worst bathrooms back then were at the public parks where they were covered in pee and not cleaned well, but weren't destroyed by drug usage like they are now. I don't remember seeing piles of needles (or even one needle) like you do now.
Yeah, I did this at 16 at a gas station and got paid 8.75 an hour, there are lots of people out there doing this type of work in the private sector. Its not glamorous thats for sure but supply/demand will dictate the labor market. The government doesn't deem it infeasible because hiring is difficult, its because they aren't willing to pay a reasonable wage for the work.
I won't do your homework for you but there's people that have done the work of reporting out the numbers it takes to operate a clean government bathroom. It's not just "reasonable wage" territory. It's "civilization can't afford this" level expensive, the type of problem you can't throw money at because it's so bad it's obvious that the real problem and solution exists elsewhere.
And it's only in the West that public restrooms are that expensive. Japans are less expensive because the locals use them like civilized people and they don't have enormous on-going cleaning and repair costs.
So, the problem isn't in paying the cleaners. It's upstream. No pun intended.
I don’t disagree that the problem is difficult and has various surface areas to address, but everyone can’t blame the drug users when even putting up the stall costs north of $500,000. That’s just governmental bureaucracy at play.
Additionally, not all areas of the country are infested with the “homeless and drug addicts”. People can spin that all they like but areas where people take care of their local services are plentiful.
Lastly, don’t talk to me about prohibitive pricing in government initiates. When we stop spending hundreds of billions bombing other countries, then come talk about things being too expensive.
Nice condescending comment about the homework though, you must have been pleased with that one.
Infeasible for a government would mean it is sufficiently expensive that it is not politically popular to spend that much money on public bathrooms.
Also, Buc-ees does not offer free bathrooms in urban, dense areas with higher proportions of mentally ill and drug addicted populations, so that comparison makes no sense.
I used Buc-ee's as an example because they're famous for their clean bathrooms. But there certainly exist clean bathrooms in urban areas. I'd venture to say that those aren't all in high-end establishments that exclude any "riff-raff". It's possible to find clean toilets in urban McDonald's or Wal-Mart; maybe not all of them, but certainly not none either.
And regarding expense on public bathrooms:
* San Francisco spent $1.7M on a single toilet
* Seattle spend $5 installing 5 toilets.
* NYC's public restrooms routinely cost $2M-$4M
Now, those are building projects rather than ongoing operations. But it shows that governments are willing to spend absurd amounts on toilets.
I don't know exactly what the problem is, but there's something about government (mis)management in the issue.
Sure, but why is it that government-run institutions are (we're being told in this thread) uniquely vulnerable to the problem? Why isn't it happening at Buc-ee's or at McDonald's in the same degree?
Obviously there exists a price at which people will do it. But if the government isn't willing to pay it, it seems unfair to expect businesses to pay it.
How many likely Heptitis-infected needles and excrement smears did you clean up? per week or per day? Try 10x that and see if 8.75/hour is still setting your 16 year old mind with visions of dancing Super Nintendos and Segas.
I think it is infeasible because I saw restrooms become less numerous and more restricted over the past 4 decades. If it was feasible, the OP’s article wouldn’t be describing a real phenomenon.
As for the class I was raised in, my parents worked 24/7, my mom cleaned 20+ bathrooms every day, and my parents, myself and my sister slept in one room until I was 16 years old. I have also worked at places where public restrooms were obliterated, and caused quite a bit of rancor among the staff, resulting in restrictions on who could use them.
But that is neither here nor there on the current supply and demand of people willing to do that job.
>I think it is infeasible because I saw restrooms become less numerous and more restricted over the past 4 decades.
Cool.
My point was that I was a minimum wage worker and still cleaning toilets. Did it for minimum wage. There were many other coworkers doing the same.
You said
> Try hiring someone for a job where the job could sometimes be cleaning up bodily fluids and odors in a bathroom. Even the government deems it infeasible.
That's only plausible if you were unwilling to do so yourself and couldn't conceive of anyone else doing the job.
Its literally one of the lowest paid jobs there is.
If you are claiming its infeasible to pay for someone to do that job, you are just saying you dont think that anyone should be paid to do the job.
No, I am writing that supply and demand curves can shift such that the job you used to for minimum wage is no longer a job one can expect to hire for minimum wage in Aug 2026.
>Its literally one of the lowest paid jobs there is.
Today, real life says that is not sufficient pay if we want more public bathrooms (in the places lacking them, such as urban, high density areas).
My conclusions are not based on my feelings or opinions, but a simple observations of real life market trends.
Doesn’t literally every bathroom need someone to clean up body fluids and odors from time to time? At the last gas station, big box hardware store, and McDonalds I visited in the West, log sheets hung inside the bathrooms indicating they’re supposedly cleaned as often as hourly.
It doesn’t really bother me. At many of the places I work and volunteer, our norm is to establish a rota, so as not to shove the job onto whoever’s lowest paid, least experienced, or most willing to be bullied into it.
Every single front end employee in the new england grocery chain has cleaned the toilets.
Every single employee in a fast food establishment has cleaned toilets, including the horrors you blame on homeless people, like shit smeared on things.
Every single Circle-K employee has cleaned toilets.
The cost for hiring someone to clean toilets is minimum wage.
What are you taking about? Literally every restaurant and retail worker has had to do this. I was cleaning toilets in high school. You think restaurant restrooms are clean before the workers go in to clean them? You think people aren't shitting in urinals in Best Buy?
Obviously, it is priced into operating a restaurant, where there have to be restrooms. In the context of the comment I replied to:
>How is maintaining public restrooms a "massive liability"? Surely its an inconvenience but massive liability seems a bit of a hyperbole.
The labor costs of having a bathroom be cleaned (in certain regions) might very well be cost prohibitive, hence the OP’s linked article. For example, Best Buy has to spend money to keep bathrooms clean, whereas online only vendors don’t. Maybe it can make sense for Best Buy (or smaller operations like coffee shops) to not have a restroom.
Given enough money, there would be people willing to do all that, buy proper gear and disinfectants, etc.
But that would cost so much that most municipalities or businesses would not afford that.
Some places, of course, do afford that; they are relatively few, as one might expect. Especially as people become more wealthy and the cost of their work grows.
If the government is underfunded enough to not be able to hire bathroom cleaners, how can anyone expect a barely surviving retail business to afford it?
The problem was not eliminated. If anything, the effects were amplified.
It just moved the poop mess and dirty needles from one defined space back to everywhere else. In this way, they're easier to accidentally encounter while out-and-about, and yet simultaneously harder to intentionally find and clean up.
I think this kind of result has strong resemblance to what is colloquially known as a footgun.
A friend owns pizza restaurants. They leapt at the opportunity during covid to shut their bathrooms to the public, and have continued to (illegally) keep the bathrooms closed as much as possible.
People made horrific messes in them. Employees and/or owners had to clean them. They don't wish to do so. Public messes; private employees and/or owners being made to clean them is pretty much the story.
Closing bigger public bathrooms and switching to individually lockable bathrooms - cells, basically, often with codes if at a business did work.
It filters out that bottom 10% that can't coherently speak or present themselves to pass a vibe check in asking for bathroom access.
Things did improve for those with standards, at the cost of having to deal with the bathroom equivalent of barbed wire topped walls around your home compound. That IS better than walking in on the bottom 10% or the disasters they create, but only slightly.
Collectively, squeezing the bottom out by denying them access building by building, block by block has helped turn parts of cities around. It's not that different than locking up your food high in the air when camping so animals don't get into it - they don't come around and stop coming around if they are.
It isn't about improving things or fixing the problem, it is about mitigating cost.
Public sex, shooting up drugs, and vandalism still occur; but the owner/operator of the bathroom no longer has to maintain the bathroom or deal with individuals complaining about the poor state of the bathroom as a result of the behavior.
> A reduction of public restrooms didn't stop the worst 10% of society from having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying an area with their lack of defacatory etiquette -- did it?
It certainly had some limitating factor. Until late 2010-early 2020s, public displays of gay sex were considered improper rather than brave, injecting drugs in public was a matter for the police, and shitting on the streets was considered a nuisance that could be avoided by the shitter having self-agency and choosing to shit elsewhere.
I tried to find a good term for this trend and the best I could do is "defining deviancy down" defined as "the tendency of societies to respond to destructive behaviors by lowering standards for what is permissible."
It's like a behavioral Overton window that grows downwards.
Virtually all offices I've worked in, the bathrooms have been less than ideally used by colleagues. The people you'd class as 'commons' may not be having public sex, shooting up drugs, but many can be dirty and/or selfish. And this is in an office where cleaners regularly clean the facilities (I'd hazard more frequently than public toilets are cleaned). There's always be pee on the floor, pee on the seat, etc etc.
For several months, we had someone pissing on the floor of the men's room. I work at an engineering firm in the suburbs, these people all make $100k+ and most are senior professionals. I don't know if they found him by figuring out badge swipes (he hit a lot of bathrooms) or if he just stopped on his own.
It's also entirely possible it was mass hysteria. Sometimes people miss the urinal and maybe some did it to be funny after the signs went up.
And people with means, move from common to private spaces. Others will not have the same choice and things become more stratified, because a subset of society decided to cede public spaces.
The replies here really exemplify the core reason we have this problem - about 50% of the population (on HN, probably more outside of HN) doesn't understand that everything has an economic cost, and cleaning hepititis-infected needles and excrement smears up all day is an extremely costly activity, not just because no one wants to do it, but because if someone gets sick they'll sue the city for tens millions of dollars.
This thread is more a reminder of how easy it will be to find people to man the gas chambers when Republicans turn their sights on the homeless. Some wretched dehumanizing of people here.
There's a reason why people lock themselves up in gated communities as soon as they can afford to. People want nice things, and out there they can't have nice things. Society sucks. Everything public sucks. Better to create your own little oasis of goodness in private property so that those who would ruin it literally cannot enter.
Elitism is the private solution. Public spaces are still unsolved. You'd do well to present a solution. Ignoring it and then accusing society of "dehumanization" is not gonna solve anything. There's a limit to the general suckiness people are willing to tolerate before they radicalize and vote for the guy promising to clean it all up.
Correct, as evidence, look how easy it was to make you overlook the current abuses of the homeless (at the hands of corrupt nonprofits) because it doesn't look sufficiently fascist to trigger you.
You’re suggesting imprisoning over 160 million people. That’s orders of magnitude higher than even the largest Holocaust estimates. It’s more than the population of Russia.
HN is getting insane. One person is suggesting “removing from society” 2% of people, the other is outright explicitly calling for their deaths, and the comment on the insanity and scale of it all is the one getting downvoted.
Removing people with whom the group with the power of the sword is exactly what happens. Religion A does not like Religion B which eventually leads to laws, wars, genocide.
Most of these inside thoughts are not well accepted in a diverse, multicultural, professional setting so they go unspoken.
I would also argue that the desire to remove 'them' is universal because of safety or desire. I think we disagree on the criteria which is really where the factions start their battle. Do we use criteria based upon belief, genetics, or agency?
Repeat offenders, those who are violent, rape, or murder are removed forever from society. There is no reason for a rapist or thief to be permitted to murder after their 2nd 3rd, or 4th offense.
Locking away someone for a large portion of their life to deny them employment, rob them of education, limit their positive contributions, and subjecting their families to the inability to bring wholeness is unjust and unkind.
Homelessness and the post-2008 wave of poverty ruined it. A few people who need to use a public bathroom everyday is fine, but when you have 100x of ppl who are desuetude, on drugs, mentally ill etc. emptying their medications and needles and so on it becomes a public health hazard, attracts crime, and overwhelms staff. Better to just shut it down altogether or limit to staff only. .
but the US is not poor. The US has the richest "poor" people in the entire world. There is a massive social security net with massive redistribution. There was no "post-2008 wave of poverty".
huge surge of homeless camps, people going on various disability programs, job loss and ppl not returning to labor force. it's possible for the US to be collectivity wealthier yet a lot of people poorer.
Portland put out portable toilets during the pandemic. They had big signs on them about how toilet access was a human right, or something like that.
One by one, they were all burned down. Homeless people seem to be really good at destroying stuff. My apartment building is taking on new low income tenants and the rate of fires - with sprinkler activation - is boggling. The public park I walk by often is losing a little bit more greenery to homeless fires every few months, but I’m still saddened by the loss of a large, beautiful tree - torched by a camper.
The problem isn’t removing public resources, it’s keeping them in working order against a persistent opponent.
The utter lack of it? There's an entire industrial complex around homeless "support" to do magic tricks on money.
Portland's county allocates $9m annually. LA's county allocates $4b annually. Should it be 2x that? 20x? 200x before any positive change occurs?
"Mental health" is a non-answer designed to shift accountability and agency from individuals into everyone else vis a vis whatever system is expected to provide this vague "support", despite the failed track record of these systems to improve anything but their employees' and contractors' pockets.
The point isn't to stop them, it's to prevent them from ruining public places for everyone else. A homeless man pooing/injecting behind a dumpster is way better than the floor of a restaurant bathroom.
We are all at the mercy of the bottom quintile. The rules you follow (or are expected to follow) are based on the behavior of the bottom quintile, the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile, the greatest risks to your life and property come from the bottom quintile, the dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there, and our zoning laws (in the US) are developed for fear of the bottom quintile.
Sometimes I wonder what fraction of America's economic dynamism is based simply on people's desperate desire to make enough money to not have to live around street violence and other kinds of in-your-face social unpleasantness.
Much the biggest chunk of US federal spending is Social Security, the great majority of which is pensions. Pensioners are very variable but they're mostly not in the bottom quintile. Then "nondefense discretionary" spending which is a mixed bag but again is mostly not bottom quintile. After that comes Medicare which again is mostly pensioners. Then defense, which isn't really "to support" any particular subset of the population. Then Medicaid, a lot of which is for poorer people, so I'll give you that one. Then "other" which from the description in the chart is mostly not bottom quintile. Then income security programs, which is probably mostly bottom quintile. If we say that all of Medicaid and income security are "bottom quintile", 10% each of Social Security and Medicare, and 20% each of "nondefense discretionary" and "other", go to support the bottom quintile -- which I think is probably all on the generous side -- then that comes to about $1.56T out of $6.1T of spending, or out of $5.5T if you prefer not to count debt servicing.
The greatest risks to my life and property are from disease (for my life), wear and tear plus accident (for my physical property), and stock market instability (for my investments). None of those things has much to do with the bottom quintile.
In the US, homicides are about 0.02% of deaths, and most of those happen to people within that bottom quintile you evidently resent so much.
The dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there and not-bottom-quintile people like you want to make those spaces as unwelcoming to them as possible even at the cost of making them less comfortable for everyone. And also because your society has failed to provide the bottom quintile with better places for the things you don't like them doing than those public spaces.
It may well be true that zoning laws are developed for fear of the bottom quintile. You might want to consider the possibility that the fear is as much of a problem there as the bottom quintile itself.
> The rules I'm expected to follow based on the bottom quintile are generally rules that are no trouble for me to follow.
This is not just laws, but stores putting everything behind plastic barriers to stop theft. Or "customer only" rules for bathrooms. Literally the article in question is discussing this type of rule.
As someone else described, the bottom quintile decides the overall level of trust in a society.
> I think bottom quintile refers to the worst people not necessarily the poor or whatever.
Yes. In the UK the rate of incest is increasing due to migration from Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan. An NHS Genomics Education Programme blog in Sept 2025 acknowledged the risk of birth defects doubling, but cited the benefits of 'stronger family support', 'economic advantages' and argued against a ban in favour of 'counselling and education'.
Despite the vast majority of the British public not participating in incest, the NHS seemed to think it is right that they pay for the care of the people that do.
A common shared resource - the NHS - is exploited by the worst people (who value economic advantages over their child's health) and everyone suffers.
Honestly one of the most egregious things I've read about the NHS - actively promoting behavior that makes the lives of innocent children unnecessarily harder, and forcing everyone to contribute to supporting frankly disgusting behavior.
Readers may judge for themselves how accurate the description above is.
A few further remarks.
--1-- Many many many things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources are not illegal.
You have the right to try to fix a broken tile on your roof by climbing out of your window without any sort of safety equipment, even though you might fall and need medical treatment, even in countries where the government will pay some or all of your hospital bills.
You have the right to eat too much or too little, or to drink a lot of alcohol or smoke a lot of cigarettes, even though in the long run these things will be bad for your health, which as well as possibly requiring expensive medical care will also make you a less economically productive member of society.
You have the right (in most places, including the UK and the US) to agitate for fascism or communism, even though if your agitation succeeds the resulting government will probably be very bad on net.
--2-- "Some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost saying that X should maybe not be made illegal" is quite a long way from "the NHS thinks [any particular thing]".
--3-- The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". Indeed, the people who might need extra care as a result of first-cousin marriage are not the people who enter into those marriages, but some of their children.
If your preference is for such children not to receive NHS healthcare, you're punishing the children for the actions of their parents. I think this is generally considered bad policy.
Thanks, I wasn't able to find an archive. I'm sure you noticed the quotes were accurate and I thank you for the support.
> Many many many things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources are not illegal.
Nobody said they were. The argument was that cousin marriage should be illegal since it which doubles the rate of birth defects as the genomics article mentions.
> "Some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost saying that X should maybe not be made illegal" is quite a long way from "the NHS thinks [any particular thing]".
But the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal is very far from "some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost", as I'm sure you're aware.
> The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do"
Yes, it was. Not banning incest marriages increases the risk of birth defects.
> the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press):
I'm sure you're as thankful for the right wing press for raising awareness of the matter, and likewise am disappointed about the left wing press for ignoring it.
No. But what the NHS blog thing said was that this particular thing shouldn't be illegal, and you appear to be arguing that that's bad because it's unwise and can increase pressure on the community's resources. And I am pointing out that in general the bar for making things illegal is, and should be, higher than that.
> the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal
That is not what happened. Someone wrote a blogpost saying "here's a thing that isn't illegal; some people are saying it should be illegal; here are some arguments for and against". That differs from "proposing that incest not be illegal" in the following three ways: (1) "proposing that X not be illegal" gives the strong impression that X is currently illegal, whereas in fact the thing in question is currently legal; (2) the relevant proposition is not "that incest not be illegal" but "that first-cousin marriage not be illegal"; first-cousin marriage is not incest in UK law, nor in many other jurisdictions' law, and no one[1] is even slightly proposing that incest in general should be legalized; (3) the blog post does not take the position that first-cousin marriage should definitely be legal. It does quote some other people and organizations that think it shouldn't be made illegal.
[1] Well, I bet someone somewhere is. "All universal generalizations are false". But no such proposal is made or discussed in the blog post in question.
I do agree that it seems likely that the author of the blogpost thinks that it wouldn't be a good idea to illegalize first-cousin marriage; but there is an important distinction between "putting up a blog post that seems on the whole not favourable to doing X" and "proposing that X not be done".
> Yes it was. Not banning incest marriages increases the risk of birth defects.
It probably does. (Though you might recall, having now read the article, that it points out an expert's opinion that most of the increase in birth-defect risks in these communities comes not from the existence of first-cousin marriages in particular but from the general practice of marriages between somewhat-related people, which banning first-cousin marriages would not change.)
But that's an entirely separate matter from whether the blogpost was about whether the NHS should pay for the resulting birth defects. Suppose the UK bans first-cousin marriages, and some people have children with their first cousins anyway, and some of the resulting children have birth defects. Should the NHS treat those children? I say: of course it should. Perhaps you would prefer to let the children suffer or die without whatever help the healthcare system could have offered them. But the blogpost doesn't address that at all. It isn't even slightly about who the NHS should treat.
> I'm sure you're as thankful [...]
Nope. The blogpost in question seems pretty sensible to me, and in any case its presence or absence surely makes zero difference to whether first-cousin marriages actually get made illegal or not, and to whether any given pair of first cousins actually get into one or not. I doubt the right-wing media feeding frenzy did either very much good or very much harm directly, but I bet it helped to stoke the widespread hate and fear of immigrants which seems like it might lead to the next government being run by Reform, who I firmly expect to be incompetent buffoons who will do a great deal of harm to the UK whether or not their positions on social wedge-issues like immigration, transgender people, etc., have any merit.
As for the left-wing press, there isn't much of a left-wing press in this country; I suppose there's the Guardian and the Mirror but both are pretty milquetoast (which on the whole I am glad of; I think the more extreme forms of leftism are mostly misguided).
> The blogpost in question seems pretty sensible to me
Why do you think allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible?
I personally imagine it is things like widespread organised rape that was ignored by the police for many years, and a steady increase in Islamic terrorist attacks, that has led to people not disliking the immigration system that allowed the rape and terrorism. But perhaps you are right, people that disagree with incest are at fault.
> Why do you think allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible?
Well, first of all, that isn't in fact what I said. I'll come back to that later. Anyway:
As I said in an earlier comment, not everything bad should be illegal. First-cousin marriage is (or at least seems to me) a bad idea; it seems very unlikely to me that its benefits outweigh its costs. But in something that's trying to be a free society we very frequently allow people to do things that are bad ideas.
Do you think it should be illegal to have children when over the age of 35? That causes increased birth defects, I think about as many per instance as first-cousin marriage does. Do you think it should be illegal to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol while pregnant? Ashkenazi Jewish people have a very substantially increased risk of some genetic problems; should they be forbidden to have children?
I dunno, maybe you do think all those things should be illegal, in which case there's no inconsistency in calling for first-cousin marriage also to be illegal. But I'm guessing you don't, for reasons along the lines of "it's usually better to allow people to do things they want rather than having the government intervene heavy-handedly in their lives". That is also the main reason why it might be a bad idea to make first-cousin marriage illegal.
With that said: I repeat, I did not in fact say that "allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible". I said that the blogpost is sensible. There is not a valid inference from "document X is sensible" to "everything that document X, overall, seems to be in favour of is sensible".
The blogpost looks at arguments for and against banning first-cousin marriage. It doesn't, explicitly, take a definite position on that question, though it does seem like its author thinks that first-cousin marriage shouldn't be made illegal. I think it's a sensible blogpost; I would think the same if its author had the opposite apparent leaning, if it had the same overall shape of presenting reasonable arguments on both sides. If I think about the matter some more and decide that actually banning first-cousin marriage would on net be a good idea, I expect I will still think the blogpost is pretty sensible.
> I personally imagine it is things like widespread organised rape that was ignored by the police for many years
The Rotherham scandal was scandalous, I agree, and it seems likely that the police deliberately avoided investigating properly because they were afraid of being called racists, and all of that is very bad. But I don't see how you get from there to "therefore the British immigration system is bad". Consider another scandal involving a lot of sexual abuse of minors: the one around Jeffrey Epstein. The people involved in that were mostly (not exclusively, but mostly) rich middle-aged white men. Do we conclude that we should be trying to keep rich middle-aged white men out of the country? Most people don't. Rather, we say: here was a particular network of people, most of whom happened to be rich middle-aged white men, doing Very Bad Things; we should deal with those particular people, and we should improve our systems for spotting Very Bad Things, and if some of those got overlooked because bits of those systems are too generous to rich middle-aged white men then we should change that.
Likewise, in Rotherham there was a particular network of people, most of whom happened to be Pakistani immigrants or children thereof, doing Very Bad Things; we should deal with those particular people, and we should improve our systems for spotting Very Bad Things, and if some of those got overlooked because bits of those systems are too generous to Pakistani immigrants and their children then we should change that.
But being a rich white middle-aged man, or a poor Pakistani young man, isn't some kind of guarantee of being a sexual abuser, and we would do no one any favours by attaching the crimes of the individuals to the whole group and saying: let's get all the rich white middle-aged men out of the country. Or all the poor Pakistani young men.
(In both cases you could make an argument that it wasn't all coincidence that the people came from those particular demographics. E.g., if your mode of sexual abuse involves sequestering the victims on a private island then it's much easier to do if you're a billionaire; some Pakistani communities have traditionally had very high rates of child-marriage and maybe those traditions make men from those communities more likely to become child abusers or something. But in both cases we can also observe that there are an awful lot of rich white middle-aged men and poor Pakistani young men who somehow manage not to abuse any children at all, and conclude that it's probably better to target the crime itself rather than some broad demographic within which we found a bunch of criminals.)
> a steady increase in Islamic terrorist attacks
Yeah, maybe getting up to an average of one event a year, with a total (coming mostly from a couple of particularly severe cases) of something like 100 deaths from terrorism in the last 25 years. Four deaths a year! That's almost one third as many as people dying from having their clothes catch fire, and almost a quarter as many as people drowning in their bathtubs!
Obviously 100 deaths from terrorism is 100 too many. (And 100 deaths from people drowning in their bathtubs is 100 too many.) But, with terrorism as with bathtubs, the number is actually not all that large, and it doesn't make a great justification for large-scale social change such as radical overhaul of the immigration system.
(It does make a great tool for stirring up xenophobia, though.)
> Well, first of all, that isn't in fact what I said
Yes it was. You said a blog post the advocated incest being illegal was sensible. It was the only actual point you made, amid a long rant about:
- how the law doesn’t define cousin incest as incest (this has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal)
- that cousin incest is legal right now (which has no bearing on whether it should be illegal in the future)
- that it was the political right that pointed out the horrifying article (which is apparently a complaint for some unstated reason and also has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal)
I explained in some detail why "I think the blogpost is sensible" is not the same thing as "I think this particular thing that the blogpost argues might be a good idea is a sensible thing".
Your response is to ignore all of that and just reiterate "you said the blogpost was sensible, therefore you think this particular thing is sensible". The very thing I had just been explaining that I think is an error.
I am not sure whether you're not reading what I write, or unable to understand what I write (presumably, if so, not out of sheer mental incapacity but because politics makes idiots of us all), or deliberately misrepresenting what I write, but whether it's any of those or some other thing I haven't thought of it's making it seem increasingly unlikely that any actual fruitful discussion is possible.
> It was the only actual point you made
Of course this is utterly false, not least because your description of my "long rant" (a characterization that obviously I dispute, but no matter) you mention several other points I made. I assume you mean something like "the only point you made that I consider relevant", in which case we have different views of what is relevant.
> how the law doesn't define cousin incest as incest (this has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal)
It has bearing on whether or not it is reasonable to do as you have been doing and simply call it "incest" on every occasion, thus turning "I think a blogpost arguing that first-cousin marriage should not necessarily be made illegal was, on the whole quite sensible" into "you think allowing incest is sensible".
> that cousin incest is legal right now (which has no bearing on whether it should be illegal in the future)
It has bearing on whether or not it is reasonable to do as you have been doing and write about suggestions that the thing not be made illegal as if they were suggesting that the thing be made legal. Those are quite different things: just as we don't try to make every bad thing illegal because making things illegal has costs, we also don't try to reverse every bad law because changing the law has costs.
> that it was the political right that pointed out the horrifying article
Oh, come on. I mentioned that the article was retracted soon after it was published (which is obviously relevant since you were trying to cite it as somehow representative of official attitudes in the UK). It seemed relevant why it was retracted, so I gave an eight-word summary of why. And now you purport to list the topics of my "long rant", and one of the three things you mention is the fact that that incidental eight-word summary included the words "right-wing".
If you don't like it that my comments are devoting space to complaining about your dishonest rhetoric, then perhaps you should use less dishonest rhetoric. If instead of "the NHS Genomic Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal" you had written "a post on the NHS Genomic Education Programme's blog exploring arguments for and against making first-cousin marriage illegal, and evidently leaning toward not making it illegal" -- which is the nearest not-actively-misleading thing I can come up with to what you wrote -- then I wouldn't have had to say any of those things you complained about.
Of course, if you'd written the honest version rather than the dishonest version then it would have been obvious that it didn't give much support for your attempt to represent immigrants in the UK as "the worst people", so I guess that was never really an option.
> I explained in some detail why "I think the blogpost is sensible" is not the same thing as "I think this particular thing that the blogpost argues might be a good idea is a sensible thing".
Stating that a blog post with an argument is sensible normally indicates you feel the argument itself is sensible. If you feel otherwise, communicate better.
> your description of my "long rant" (a characterization that obviously I dispute, but no matter) you mention several other points I made.
But they weren't points, they were irrelevant offtopic facts as discussed.
> whether or not it is reasonable to do as you have been doing and simply call it "incest"
Fucking your cousin is incest. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.
> incidental eight-word summary included the words "right-wing"
You didn't mention the public furore, or the press in general. You specifically mentioned the right wing press. Obviously you thought it was relevant. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.
> we don't try to make every bad thing illegal because making things illegal has costs
Yes, but making choices that cause birth defects to double obviously has a massive cost that outweighs the incredible benefits of cousin fucking. Which you know.
> you were trying to cite it as somehow representative of official attitudes in the UK
It was representive of government attitudes: the NHS Genomics Education Programme is part of the government. You're intelligent enough to know that too so I'll go back to the point made in the other thread you replied on and leave it there: https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918
> Stating that a blog post with an argument is sensible normally indicates you feel the argument itself is sensible.
Yup. I feel that the argument in the blogpost is sensible. That is not the same thing as thinking that a particular policy that the blogpost leans toward is a sensible policy.
> If you feel otherwise, communicate better.
Good idea! I might try writing a couple of paragraphs distinguishing what I actually said and meant from the similar-sounding but very different thing you said I said. Oh, wait. I did, and you proceeded to ignore it.
> Fucking your cousin is incest. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.
There are two separate points here. Let's begin with the one you're presenting as if it's the only one, namely whether first-cousin marriage is incest. That's a question of definitions; let's see what the dictionaries say. The Oxford English Dictionary: "The crime of sexual intercourse or cohabitation between persons related within the degrees within which marriage is prohibited; sexual commerce of near kindred." Marrying, or having sex with, your first cousin in the UK is not the first of those things; whether it's the second depends on what counts as "near". (I think it's very reasonable of the OED to leave that unresolved; the point is that what counts as "incest" for a given person will depend on what feels to them like "near kindred".) Chambers says: sex between people closely enough related that marriage is prohibited, so fucking your cousin in the UK is not incest by that definition. Merriam-Webster says the same. Wiktionary: "between close relatives, especially immediate family members and sometimes first cousins", so they're on the fence.
So: no, actually, there is nothing like general agreement that fucking your cousin is incest.
However, that isn't actually the key point here; my own inclination is to define incest (outside specifically legal contexts) broadly enough that it does include first cousins. The reason I object to the way you've been wording things isn't that I think the thing in question isn't incest, it's that there's a difference between claiming something about incest and claiming something about a particular variety of incest.
Specifically, you'd talked about "the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal" and one of the many things I found misleading about that was that the blogpost in question was not talking about incest in general but about one particular case of it.
A proposal "that incest not be illegal" would mean, e.g., permitting marriage between brothers and sisters, or fathers and daughters. No such proposal was made, or considered, or so much as gestured at in the blogpost we are discussing.
> Obviously you thought it was relevant. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.
Of course I thought it was relevant, otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned it. I'm not pretending anything, and I'm getting very bored of your baseless accusations of dishonesty.
You called my comment "a long rant about" three things. One of those things was represented in that "long rant" by, in total, one word in a throwaway remark. Yes, I thought that word was relevant. No, it was not in any way one of the main topics of what I wrote.
> Yes, but making choices that cause birth defects to double obviously has a massive cost
Like the cost of allowing people to have children when over the age of 35. Do you want that to be illegal? (I have asked you this question before. Of course you have ignored it.)
> that outweighs the incredible benefits of cousin fucking.
Here is a complete list of things I have said in this discussion or elsewhere about benefits of cousin fucking.
(That was the list.)
> It was representative of government attitudes [...]
It was a blogpost. The full extent of what anything in it tells us about government attitudes is: there's someone, working for the government, who thinks X and doesn't mind saying so on a blog with the NHS's name attached to it.
That's not nothing. The opinions of people who work for an entity have some connection with the entity's own opinions, in so far as it has them. But they're not the same thing. You can get a sense of where they agree and disagree if, for instance, some sort of public outcry draws attention to the thing that someone wrote so that the institution has to decide whether to stand by it or not. In this case, the institution decided not to stand by it.
No two of the following things are the same. (1) The opinions of some random staffer at the NHS Genomics Education Programme. (2) The opinions that that staffer thinks worthy of inclusion in a blogpost. (3) The opinions of the NHS Genomics Education Programme. (4) The opinions of the NHS. (5) The opinions of the UK government.
In this case, it seems clear that the random staffer was not in favour of making first-cousin marriage illegal. (That's #1.) The blogpost they wrote didn't actually say "first-cousin marriage should not be made illegal", though it also didn't go out of its way to hide its author's opinion. So #2 is already a bit ambiguous. Once the attention of the NHSGEP's management was drawn to the thing, they retracted the blogpost. (That's #3. Of course you can argue about how far they retracted it because it really didn't match the NHSGEP's collective opinion, and how far they just wanted that opinion not to be visible.) #4 and #5 aren't even in the picture.
For the benefit of anyone who prefers not to follow that link: it complains that a lot of "leftist discourse" consists of people pretending not to understand things.
At no point in this discussion have I pretended not to understand you or the points you're making. For that matter, I'm not sure I've ever suggested or implied that I don't understand you or the points you're making. I just don't agree with them.
There absolutely is a rhetorical pattern where someone acts like they don't understand something, perhaps in order to make the person they're talking to have to make explicit something that they would rather not say in so many words. Sometimes it's a reasonable thing to do. Sometimes it's just being a dick. But I don't think I've done anything of the sort anywhere in this discussion.
There is, unfortunately, also a rhetorical pattern where someone insists that obviously the person they're talking to knows that they're right and is just pretending otherwise. That one's pretty much always just being a dick, and I'm afraid it's what you've done a lot of in the comment I'm replying to right now.
> no point in this discussion have I pretended not to understand you or the points you're making
You pretended that whether the law allows incest right now is relevant about whether incest marriages should be illegal, you pretended that the legal definition of incest was relevant to whether cousin marriage should be illegal, and you pretended you didn't know if a government agency publishing something is a government opinion. You pretended that there was a cost of making incest illegal as if there was no cost of doing otherwise and pretended in your most recent mesage that you didn't do that.
> For the benefit of anyone who prefers not to follow that link
You need to read a wider set of media. This isn't helping.
> You pretended that whether the law allows incest right now is relevant about whether incest marriages should be illegal,
I did not. I already explained why I brought that up, and it was not because it makes a difference to whether such marriages should be illegal.
(Well, almost. As I mentioned elsewhere, there are costs to changing a law, so actually whether something is legal now does have some effect on whether it should be legal next year as well. But that wasn't my point.)
> you pretended that the legal definition of incest was relevant to whether cousin marriage should be illegal,
I did not. I already explained why I brought that up, and it was not because it makes a difference to whether such marriages should be illegal.
(General point: there may be only one thing that you want to talk about, but that doesn't oblige your interlocutor to talk about only that thing. And, more specifically, if in talking about that one thing you say things that are misleading, it's reasonable for the other guy to point out that you did so.)
> and you pretended you didn't know if a government agency publishing something is a government opinion.
I did not. I disagree with you about whether everything posted on a blog belonging to a government department "is a government opinion". There is no pretence involved.
> You pretended that there was a cost of making incest illegal
(There is, obviously. Also, I remark once again that "making incest illegal" is not an accurate characterization.)
> as if there was no cost of doing otherwise
I absolutely did not; I acknowledged that first-cousin marriage is a bad idea and that it would be better if people didn't do it and that it increases the frequency of genetic problems in resulting children. Saying "doing X has costs" is not remotely the same thing as saying "not doing X has no costs". It's a tradeoff, like everything else in life.
> and pretended in your most recent message that you didn't do that.
I did not.
> You need to read a wider set of media.
Maybe I do, maybe not, but you have absolutely no information about what set of media I read.
You need to stop translating everything you read into the stupidest possible one-bit black-and-white "everything about X is good" / "everything about X is bad" version of itself.
You are (and perhaps the other person also is) mixing up three questions.
1. Does doing X have costs? 2. If so, and if X is done, who should pay those costs? 3. Should we make X illegal?
In the present case, first-cousin marriage does have costs, one of which is that it increases the number of children born with genetic problems that make their lives worse and (if the government pays for medical treatment to mitigate them) costs money. So the answer to the first question is yes, and so far as I can tell no one disagrees.
If some pairs of first cousins marry, and their children have genetic problems, then some of the costs are paid by those children. In a country with socialized healthcare like the UK, the default is that some other costs -- those of helping the children to have longer and/or better lives -- are paid by the government, and hence by everyone's taxes.
You might want to argue that those costs are the fault of the particular people who entered into those marriages and they should have to pay them. Unfortunately, in many cases they probably can't afford to do that. You might want to identify some community that they belong to and somehow make them pay, but that's pretty difficult to do; the UK isn't set up to levy different taxes on (say) Muslims or people whose ancestors lived in Bangladesh or whatever, and on the whole that seems obviously a good thing.
You might want to argue that in any case the nation shouldn't be paying, and that the NHS should refuse to treat whatever problems those children might have. In that case it will be the children who suffer; I personally am not a fan of making children suffer for their parents' bad decisions, but some people are.
So the second question is certainly one that we could argue about. But the blogpost we are discussing never touches on that question.
What the blogpost is about is the third question. Answering that is a matter of weighing the costs of X against the costs of making X illegal (loss of personal freedoms every time anything is made illegal; making some communities feel persecuted; loss of whatever benefits, if any, communities in which first-cousin marriage is practised get from it; making X happen illegally rather than legally, as opposed to making X not happen).
That again is something that could reasonably be argued about, and the blogpost does argue about it. But, I repeat, it's an entirely separate question from the second one.
So I continue to assert that the article wasn't about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". It didn't discuss that question at all. It discussed the entirely separate question of what measures if any should be taken to make there be fewer "people that do".
> You might want to argue that those costs are the fault of the particular people who entered into those marriages
Yes, hence wanting to ban incest marriages.
> and they should have to pay them. Unfortunately, in many cases they probably can't afford to do that.
No, I and the other commenter are not arguing that. Make incest marriages illegal in the UK, make incest married people ineligible to migrate to the UK. It's very simple. This thread is begininning to resemble the "left wing discourse" quote so I'll stop here.
My impression was that OP was using it rather fuzzily, conflating "poor" and "bad" and "unpleasant to be around" and whatever other notions of "bottom" might be floating in the air, in the service of a general air of contempt toward Those People. I took it to mean wealth when talking about taxes, to mean behaviour when talking about laws and risks to life and property, and to be deliberately ambiguous when talking about public spaces and zoning laws.
In any case, neither the factual veracity of the claims nor their support for whatever policies OP could plausibly have had in mind seem to improve on taking "bottom quintile" to mean specifically "worst-behaved quintile". Notably, "the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile" is even more false if it means "the worst people" rather than "the poorest people".
Incidentally, my comment above is currently sitting at -1. I vigorously endorse everyone's right to downvote things they think are bad, but if anyone reading this downvoted my comment because they thought it was wrong rather than because they disliked it politically or because they didn't want to see this sort of argument on HN, I would be interested to know what they think I was incorrect about. (The trouble with downvotes as a signal for improvement for authors is that it's often very unclear what specific problems they are trying to point at.)
> My impression was that OP was using it rather fuzzily, conflating "poor" and "bad" and "unpleasant to be around" and whatever other notions of "bottom" might be floating in the air, in the service of a general air of contempt toward Those People.
That assumption says a lot more about you that it does the person you were responding to.
It's a guess rather than an assumption -- I wouldn't be astonished if it turned out to be a wrong guess -- but there was a reason for it: some of the comment seemed to require "bottom" to be about wealth, and other bits seemed to require it to be about behaviour. But, again, I could very well be wrong.
Would you care to suggest a concrete definition of "bottom quintile" according to which the claims made by black6 are true?
It's because 50% of voters are choosing to decriminalize laws and make everything into the oppression olympics. California legislature just proposed allowing 'crimes of necessity' this week. We can't have nice things now because crimes are not enforced/prosecuted and there are no consequences. We're moving from a high trust to low trust society in rapid time.
People who vote in favor of these soft on crime polices should be required to provide a room in their home to these people they want to keep out of jail.
make people pay and this problem is solved. it blows my mind that there is an obvious solution here that we simply refuse to touch because... principle?
> I wish we had capital punishment for corruption like in China.
The selective enforcement is insane. If it really applied to everybody then China would be a free country because the entire CCP would have been executed.
In practice, it's only for enemies of the powerful (which is mostly the coalition around Xi). Even then, most CCP members who are convicted get a much milder punishment
The worst 10% of society determine what we can and can't have. The "commons" aren't having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying the bathrooms with lack of... etiquette. The commons are victimized when these things happen and then there's eventually no choice but to shut them down unless there's willingness to crack down on the explicit problematic behavior.