7 ms·

I think bottom quintile refers to the worst people not necessarily the poor or whatever.

nailer 2mo ago
> > I'm actually in the UK > 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. https://www.bmj.com/content/391/bmj.r2061 https://www.bmj.com/content/391/bmj.r2061
- miningape 2mo ago
  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.
- gjm11 2mo ago
  Here is the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press): https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genomicseducation.hee.nhs.uk/blog/should-the-uk-government-ban-first-cousin-marriage/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genom... 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.
  - modo_mario 2mo ago
    Regarding point 1 I refer to point 3 and regarding point 3 i refer to point 1.
    - gjm11 2mo ago
      I don't think I understand; would you care to be more explicit?
      - nailer 2mo ago
        Not the person you're asking but it's fairly obvious: > 1. things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources > 3. The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". Increasing pressure on communities' resources is that community paying for people that engage in incest.
        gjm11 2mo ago
        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".
gjm11 2mo ago
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.)
- marknutter 2mo ago
  > 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.
  - gjm11 2mo ago
    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?

> > I'm actually in the UK > 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. https://www.bmj.com/content/391/bmj.r2061 https://www.bmj.com/content/391/bmj.r2061

miningape 2mo ago
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.
gjm11 2mo ago
Here is the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press): https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genomicseducation.hee.nhs.uk/blog/should-the-uk-government-ban-first-cousin-marriage/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genom... 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.
- modo_mario 2mo ago
  Regarding point 1 I refer to point 3 and regarding point 3 i refer to point 1.
  - gjm11 2mo ago
    I don't think I understand; would you care to be more explicit?
    - nailer 2mo ago
      Not the person you're asking but it's fairly obvious: > 1. things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources > 3. The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". Increasing pressure on communities' resources is that community paying for people that engage in incest.
      - gjm11 2mo ago
        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".

gjm11 2mo ago

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.)

marknutter 2mo ago
> 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.
- gjm11 2mo ago
  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?