> 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.
> 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.