One thing you'll hear people say sometimes -- I've said it myself -- is that this shows that in some sense go is a "deeper" game than chess; there's more to know and understand, more variety of possible human skill.

That might well be true. It certainly feels a more elegant game, and involves longer tactical sequences, and so forth. But this may be misleading.

Consider the game of treblechess. To play a game of treblechess, you play three games of ordinary chess and look at the overall result.

Suppose that when we play ordinary chess, I win with probability W, lose with probability L, and draw with probability D = 1-(W+L). And suppose separate games are independent of one another (which might not be true in reality, but never mind). What happens when we play treblechess?

I win 3/0 with probability W^3. I win 2.5/0.5 with probability 3W^2D, because that happens when I draw any one of our three games and win both of the other two. I win 2/1 with probability 3(W^2L+WD^2), because that happens when I win two and lose one or win one and draw two, and for each of those there are three choices for which game is which. So I win at treblechess with probability W^3 + 3(W^2(1-W)+WD^2).

I can draw by getting one each of WDL (probability 6WDL) or by drawing all three (probability D^3).

Suppose that when we play chess I win 40% of the time, draw 50% of the time, and lose 10% of the time. Then our Elo difference is about 107 points. In triplechess, I will win 65.2% of the time, draw 24.5% of the time, and lose 10.3% of the time. Our Elo difference is about 214 points.

If in ordinary chess I win 65% of the time, draw 25% of the time and lose 10% of the time -- about the same odds as for treblechess in the last example -- then our chess Elo difference is about 215 points. At treblechess I will win 84% of the time, draw 11% of the time, and lose 5% of the time, and our Elo difference will be about 375 points.

If in ordinary chess I win 15%, draw 75%, lose 10%, then our Elo difference is about 17 points; in treblechess I will win 31%, draw 49%, lose 20% and our Elo difference will be about 41 points.

Treblechess Elo differences are on the order of double ordinary chess Elo differences! Clearly treblechess is a game with twice the depth of ordinary chess!

But it isn't. It's just longer and gives more opportunities for the better player to come out ahead overall.

Go is also a longer game than chess, though of course not in the same way as treblechess is. Perhaps the larger Elo range of go is more because of that than it is because of actual deeper strategy and tactics?

[EDITED to add:] I actually don't know whether dyslexic people find it difficult to count letters in words, if they have them already written down by someone else. I suspect they find it harder than people who aren't dyslexic. But perhaps "blind people whose spelling is poor" would have been better; I would not want to deny them human-like intelligence either.

(But I agree that "land" is fine here, and the rest of TFA doesn't strike me as obviously AI-written. And I'm not a fan of the "look, they did one thing that AIs often do! Must be AI and therefore bad!" thing in any case.)

(I am inclined to think that most things major enough to need a referendum are also major enough that if there's a "change" and a "don't change" option the latter should need some kind of supermajority.)

> And if that went to a referendum should be 60-40? What happens if it were 59.9-40.1 ?

If it was set up with a 60-40 threshold then 59.9-40.1 means no change, just as if it was set up 50-50 then 49.9-50.1 means no change. I'm not sure what the problem's supposed to be here.

At any rate, someone noticed that he has a Youtube playlist (which has since been deleted, or maybe just made private) full of Curtis Yarvin (= Mencius Moldbug), Peter Thiel, and others known for such views.

If someone says "hey, you've got a quote from X who is a known Bad Person on your website; it would look better if you removed it" and you agree that X is a Bad Person then it's indeed pretty surprising and odd if you vigorously insist on leaving it there, and it looks like some sort of indifference to right and wrong.

But if in fact you think X is a Good Person who is being persecuted by a mob with Bad Opinions, it becomes much less surprising and looks (at least from your own perspective) like righteously standing up for your values against peer pressure and persecution.

(My own opinion, not that it's directly relevant, is that DHH is in the wrong morally and factually on this stuff. So I think Justin K. was standing up for bad values. But that isn't exactly the point; the point is that from this perspective his actions become much more comprehensible, even if not more encouraging for those of us who have been happy neovim users but object to anti-immigration politics.)

But that's exactly what I'm saying is importantly not symmetrical. Making major changes has extra costs beyond the advantages and disadvantages of being in one state or another.

There is a symmetry here, one you remarked on earlier, but it maps the Brexit referendum not to itself with roles reversed but to earlier EU-related decisions that were made without referenda. You could absolutely argue that, say, signing the Treaty of Maastricht was a major change that the individual states involved shouldn't have made without consulting their populations. I'm not sure I agree -- see below for why -- but it's definitely the same sort of issue as with Brexit.

The reason why I'm not sure I agree is that the entry of the UK into the EU was done gradually. The UK joined the EEC (without a referendum at the time, but there was one a few years later on whether to stay, which a large majority voted for, suggesting that joining without an explicit referendum was maybe a reasonable step), which was a substantially less major change than joining the EU would have been if it had existed then, and then the EU gradually increased its scope: Maastricht, Amsterdam, Lisbon. The combined effect of all those things was large, but each individual step was smaller, less risky, and (maybe) more undo-able.

(I do think, on balance, that probably each step should have been subject to referenda in the countries affected, with rejection triggering a rethink of how much European integration to aim for how quickly.)

If the proponents of Brexit had been able to divide Brexit into phases, each much smaller, less risky, and more undo-able than the whole, then that would have had many advantages and the downsides of a simple-majority referendum would have been less, though they'd still have been big changes and I think should still have needed more than a bare plurality of votes. I don't know whether any such thing could actually have been done, and kinda suspect not.

> If a majority vote isn't a majority vote [...]

Not every vote has to be a majority vote. Being a democracy doesn't mean that at every instant you do what The Majority wants at that instant, no matter how slimly it prefers that. Not because there's anything particularly wrong with The Majority, but because like an individual it may change how it feels too often for that to be a good idea.

(Likewise, having my own interests at heart doesn't mean that at every instant I do what I want to at that instant. That's why we have things like marriages and contracts and deliberately-established habits. My preferences are noisy and benefit from a bit of low-pass filtering, and I think the same is true of almost everyone. So we deliberately get ourselves into commitments it takes some effort to get out of. We can still get out of them -- you can get divorced, quit your job, explicitly break off a friendship, etc. -- but it's to our advantage that those things aren't so easy to do and we will only do them when we are really quite sure that they're a good idea. I think research suggests that most people are a bit too reluctant to make such changes, but the amount of friction we want getting in their way isn't zero.)

> What was the well-defined outcome of the UK joining the EEC in 1973? [...]

I am bemused by the question because I never so much as vaguely hinted that there was any such thing. I said that in 2016 the option of staying in the EU was a well-defined one with known advantages and disadvantages, unlike the "leave the EU somehow but no one's specifying any details at this time" option it was opposed to on the ballot papers.

I completely agree that joining the EEC in 1973 was not like that. That too was a major change, though a smaller one because the EEC was a smaller deal than the EU became over time, and holding a referendum on that (with something more than a mere plurality being required to proceed) would probably have been a good idea. As I said above, the result of the referendum held not long after suggests that joining would probably have won by a comfortable margin, in which case holding a referendum wouldn't have made much difference -- but as a matter of principle I'm in favour of explicitly running such things past The People unless it's already very clear what they want.

(I am not claiming that there is none. But I personally would define "reasoning" in terms of its structure and its results, and it looks to me as if the best LLMs' "illusion of reasoning" has enough similarities in structure and results to much human reasoning that I don't see why we shouldn't also call it reasoning; if your opinion differs then I'm curious about where the disagreements lie. E.g., do we have different beliefs about what sort of thing LLMs' schmeasoning is able to accomplish, or does your notion of "reasoning" specifically require that it be done by humans, or what?)

If a change would be large and far-reaching and painful to undo, then it should be more difficult to make. Not impossible, of course: sometimes you need to make large far-reaching hard-to-undo changes. But imagine the following situation: about half the population likes X and about half hates it, and every year we hold a referendum on whether to have X or not. Then about once every two years you flip between X and not-X and all the upheaval costs you more than the gain from whichever is the better choice would get you.

So before making a big upheaval-inducing change on the grounds that The People want it, you should have good evidence that The People really do, which means one referendum with a result much more decisive than 51:49, or maybe a series of 51:49 referenda all going the same way.

If I were setting up something like this and could choose the rules, they would be something like: we run a referendum every couple of years until we get a decisive result; a side that won the last N referenda needs a 20%/(N+1) margin to get its way. So, first time round you need to be 60-40 ahead to settle the question; if you won the first time then you only need 55-45 the second time; if you win again but still more narrowly than that then you only need about 53-47 next time; etc. If one position really does consistently have majority support it'll win eventually even if its advantage is narrow. If public opinion is very changeable then too bad, a decision will have to wait until The People have a strong enough opinion to measure with confidence.

(Obviously nothing like that will ever happen. Too geeky and complicated.)

Of course, that wasn't the only major problem with the Brexit referendum. The other catastrophic problem was that it was a choice between "stay in the EU", a well defined outcome with known good and bad points, and "leave the EU somehow", something that could mean dozens of different things. It should have been between "stay in" and "attempt to negotiate terms for leaving, and then hold another referendum on whether to go ahead". Or between "stay in" and "leave on such-and-such terms if we can get them, and otherwise ask again". Or the government should have held extensive negotiations first on what terms it could leave on, and then held a referendum on whether to leave on those terms. Or the referendum could have offered options "stay regardless of terms", "leave regardless of terms", and "leave if such-and-such terms can be achieved". Those possibilities are all pretty unsatisfactory, but they're all better than choosing between the status quo and An Undertaking Of Great Advantage But Nobody To Know What It Is.

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.

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.

> https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918

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.

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.

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.)

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".

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).