A map of America’s migrations using genetic data from 770K saliva samples
blogs.ancestry.com
blogs.ancestry.com
This is a really poor piece of PR for Ancestry.
https://www.wired.com/2015/10/familial-dna-evidence-turns-in...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/how-private-dna-data-l...
23andme, Google Health (discontinued), Calico, Google Genomics, Baseline Study to name a few out of the long list of why google is scary.
It was disconcerting to learn that the Sorenson DNA data was public. Just "anonymized".
If it is inaccurate, please provide counter arguments and documentation indicating otherwise.
I'm not saying you're wrong and I agree that these companies will use the info for their personal gain.
But I do have a question for anyone watching: why are Americans so paranoid about falling under a authoritarian regime? Europeans aren't as afraid of it and every European country has at one point or another been ruled by a dictator. The US has never been yet the vast majority of comments by Americans seems to indicate a deep distrust of their own government, to the point where half the country would almost get rid of it (Republicans).
There's a very thick line between a slightly abusive and malfunctioning government and full blown dictatorship. And that line is not that easy to cross as it may seem if the country's citizens don't want it. Heck, my country, Romania, who had a very fragile democracy across the years, only succumbed to dictatorship under massive external pressure - including military pressure - from the Nazis and the Communists.
If little ol' Romania, with a very uneducated populace yet willing to fight for its democracy sort of held on for 100 years out of the 160 since its formation, surely the US would be more resilient, without half its citizens becoming paranoid?
(end-of-rant)
In the US, the idea of freedom is valued highly. I am not from the US, and I don't live there, but I agree with them that freedom is worth fighting for.
Much of the government in both the US and many other countries are becoming more authoritarian with new technology allowing them greater possibilities of surveillance, even though there isn't a dictator.
Technology changes much and I would rather be the individual who was careful and asked everyone to be a little paranoid. Look at how poorly supposedly free governments react to cryptography.
[1] http://www.people-press.org/2015/11/23/beyond-distrust-how-a...
It's not a thing that'll happen today, or perhaps even in five hundred years, but that's the historical flight plan. We're obviously structured for the executive branch to soak up all the power, eventually. (at least it has so far) The executive branch has pretty much completely taken the power of declaring war.
Congress can't really pass a budget any more. i kinda think in the next 50 years they'll give up that power and just rubber stamp whatever the executive throws at them.
Well, they weren't exactly choirboys from what I've heard.
(I understand what you meant, but that quote out of context is just great)
Ah, the age-old question. It's one of the most prominent differences, if not the most, between mentalities on the opposing sides of the Atlantic.
The answer that I've come up with - having touched on this topic in my political science studies and as an American - is that not only was the US founded on the notion of breaking away from an authoritarian regime, but personal autonomy, freedom, and rights are very strongly valued and this narrative gets drilled into us from a young age.
We're taught in elementary school (up unto 5th form) about the glory of the American Revolution and how our Founders, praise be unto them, birthed our nation with the Declaration of Independence and crafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, laying out an infallible system of government with intrinsically limited powers. /s
In middle school (6th to 8th form, give or take), this view is more or less reinforced; in high school (9th to 12th form) this is pretty much never revisited, since you move on to learning about world or European history. Maybe you'll take a class on government and do a slightly more in-depth survey of the structure of US political institutions, but it's superficial at best. And in university? Well, there's no obligation to take a history class. That's for people who care about history, and jeez, who cares about history?
For every piece of data you collect, you should weigh the benefits of keeping it with the risks of doing so. Any personal data you keep represents a privacy risk, and the importance of privacy can not be understated.
Before WW2, the Netherlands had an innocuous field in its citizen database: Religion. Nothing really wrong with that, not particularly useful either. Then came the invasion, the government fell, and Nazi Germany took its place. They were looking for Jewish people...
In the US, protesting doesn't work.
I don't trust protest as a means for political change. There's a dangerous concept when 1000 people throwing rocks can make decisions for 80 million who aren't out in the streets. That isn't democracy, that's a lynch mob.
The Iron Guard as I understand it was an entirely homegrown and popular fascist movement in Romania which in the early days of WW2 was brought into government but then quashed by the assassination of its leadership and broken up through use of extra-judicial arrests by the Romanian government.
Romania seems to have brutally managed to avoid crossing that "very thick line" but the Iron Guard had a lot of support and could have taken over.
The line is actually razor thin as can be seen repeatedly in countries worldwide (I lived under a military dictatorship in Latin America in the 1970s and almost lost my father to a shakedown by soldiers on a roadside).
Sadly the populace can and will support totalitarianism given the right circumstances.
So even in bad circumstances popular support was not enough for them to become the majority party.
As for the Communists, they literally couldn't become the majority party even with Soviet tanks in Bucharest. They had to rig the elections to win the vote.
Yes, Romania eventually was put under the heel of both Nazi Germany and the Soviets, both had to use force to impose their control, but it looks to me like it was becoming a totalitarian state before that.
As I read more, King Carol II played off different factions within the country to advance his own dictatorial control of Romania. The 1938 coup seems to have been entirely internal and it may have been planned as early as 1937.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_II_of_Romania
> Largely reflecting Carol's own political choices, the FRN was the last of several attempts to counter the popularity of the Iron Guard, itself a fascist and antisemitic movement.
The fact that Carol was able to seize power to such a degree was a problem. As was Carol itself. But I don't think it's a coincidence that his dictatorship coincided with the post-Great Depression period and the rise of Fascism and Nazism (i.e. external pressures). Or with the power struggles in the region between pro-French/British factions and pro-German ones.
And, I guess that freaks me out, especially when it's probable that some of these same people will oneday control the tech and data that run the world.
As a Brit looking from a distance, I see three roots to it:
- immigrants from actual authoritarian countries. The most prominent of these is probably Cubans or Holocaust survivors. For them it's a very real thing that happened elsewhere, and they talk about it a lot. Including passing it down as family lore.
- Southerners who mourn the loss of the civil war, the destruction and imposition that resulted. This seems to connect with hate specifically against the federal government, tying in with "states rights" and so on.
- Non-white people and others who are paying attention to how the US is authoritarian, but only towards certain people. The root of "black lives matter" is authoritarian policing. The US is the only "civilised" state to retain the death penalty, but also has a very high rate of fatalities caused by police with little or no accountability. The various US foreign interference agencies (CIA, State Department) also have a bad reputation for supporting authoritarian US-friendly governments over democratic socialist anti-US governments, especially where money is at stake (Iran, "banana republics"). Then there's the drone strikes and ongoing death toll. The US also maintains a tiny little gulag on Cuba specifically to keep certain prisoners away from due process of law.
(Edit: ironically while the second and third groups both worry about authoritarianism, they'd generally take opposite sides on any specific incident!)
(I had a Romanian tell me his stories of the anti-communist revolution once. A brutal, suspicious time by his account - everyone knew that there were enemies but could not agree on who they were)
This is a ridiculous assertion. Back it up with some facts and sources.
In the UK, we are taught that the plucky Brits won WWII. I guess you are taught that US won the war. I cannot speak for other countries, but I guess there is more of the same.
For the record, Russia won the war I think it can be argued quite correctly
this comes from person strongly disliking russia, but it's a simple fact that they won the european theatre and paid horrible price in casualties.
>> 200 years of freedom and democracy [for some]
>> the US won and imposed it
Imposed freedom and democracy, by force, lethal force. Something doesn't ring right there
EDIT: Correction. Romanian I know supported Trump.
I did mine because it was a cheap way to get my DNA in a file. You can then run it against https://promethease.com/ or http://dna.land or whatever other tool you like.
Like, even if you don't ever do it a relative will still get a close enough match to put you in the picture.
https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/files/2017/02/MapMigration_c.j...