Alright, so a closer analogy would be saying Charles Lindbergh's non-stop transit of the Atlantic in a fixed-wing plane in 1927 was a sham, because he relied on the West to East jet stream --- Dieudonné Costes was the first to manage the more difficult Paris -> New York return flight in a heavier-than-air craft in 1930.
Self-reporting on surveys is, as you indicate, problematic, because a person might fudge their response because they think they aught to be feeling better, and that nice doctor has put so much work into helping them. Start with the Wikipedia article, however, for more modern research done with the help of direct fMRI brain scans: it's now possible to verify, e.g., that reported decreases in pain are actually correlated with pain-related chemical processes in the brain, rather than just I-don't-want-to-insult-the-hard-working-doctor parts of the brain. Placebos can't magically help with issues not closely tied to the brain, though even issues that aren't directly brain-related often come with a strong pain/stress component that might be better alleviated with improved placebo-like patient confidence in the (non-placebo) treatment regime.
Oh no, the Apollo missions launched from a southerly location in the US to increase the boost from the earth's rotation! The worthless cheaters! We haven't really put a man on the moon until we've launched from Maine, and picked up burgers at a drive-through in California on the flight out!
The $10,000 question, though, is whether the cell companies would simply hand over the full cryptographic keys to the government snoops, so the fake towers would be indistinguishable from the true. When your phone resolves 4 towers simultaneously with the same 1 identity, how does it choose the true one?
Even in "purely mechanical" pathologies like broken bones, scientifically studying and implementing "placebo" components of treatment can have beneficial effects. While the underlying cause of such pathologies is not amenable to placebo treatment, they carry along a lot of pain, stress, and anxiety, too. A good doctor should know both how to set the bone and apply the cast, and how to minimize the suffering of the recovering patient (so they don't spend the next few weeks intently focusing on their pain and how much they want to scratch itchy spots under the cast). Use of placebo doesn't necessarily mean giving the patient some additional magic-woo-woo tincture; it's things that can be built in to the bare technical process for slapping on a cast. What sort of "bedside manner" framing of the medical procedure can the doctor present, so the patient leaves subconsciously satisfied that they will have a relatively easy and painless recuperation (with better long-term results than hooking them on massive addictive painkiller drug doses)? Success in this aspect of care is amenable to scientific scrutiny, perhaps even by learning from and systematizing what successful quacks do to con their patients into feeling cured.
Unfortunately, here in the US, the drug lobby has made sure we can't import your cheaper and equally effective generic placebos from Canada (using baseless fear-mongering that they might be watered down to the wrong dose, or a placebo for some entirely different disease altogether).
Of course, knowing that what you're getting is a placebo destroys the effect, which makes it hard to study with informed patient consent...
I'm not certain this is true, as I responded to another post above. I think you can rationally know that a treatment is a placebo --- but, so long as you subconsciously trust that placebos are themselves effective treatments, you can still get the benefits. The conscious level of the brain that worries about distinguishing between the chemical formula for sucrose and $EXPENSIVE_DRUG, and their relative biochemical pathways, isn't the same as the subconscious part that needs treatment for pain/depression.
Dishonesty is troublesome. However, in many cases, I think *honest* forms of placebo can be developed. Placebos don't operate on the rational/analytical levels of the brain --- so, in theory, it should be possible to simultaneously directly inform a patient how placebo is being used in their treatment (when not being used in a blind trial), while triggering subconscious feelings of well-being and trust in the treatment. I think I've heard about trials (I can't dig up specific references) where patients are told they are being given a placebo (including explanation of what than means), and *still* get beneficial placebo benefits (from being, honestly, told that the placebo can provide such and such benefits to many patients).
You can start with the Wikepedia page on Placebo, which is loaded with reputable citations. Indeed, there's a big class of medical issues for which placebos aren't helpful. But there's also a range --- as one might expect, tied to issues closely connected to what goes on in the brain --- where placebo works out pretty well; not just measured by exit questionnaires, but according to fMRI studies of brain activity. See also the section on "Gastric and duodenal ulcers," indicating improved results from doctors who are "better" at administering placebos. And heck, if having people listen to you helps your painful condition, that's a perfectly valid variety of placebo (which don't have to come in the form of a sugar pill), and deserves to be studied and incorporated into treatment plans.
Right, which is why we use *science* to figure out what kind of things placebo is good for and what not, and use it where it's good. For health problems in the class of pain and nausea, studying how to maximize placebo effectiveness (combined with proper treatment for underlying non-placebo-amenable causes) is a worthy cause.
Re the placebo effect, it only makes you feel better momentarily. The question I ask: "do you want to actually BE better, or only FEEL better?"
This is the one place I disagree with Randi in this interview. The placebo effect has been repeatedly scientifically proven to be pretty amazingly effective at making people better, by objective measures of health/recovery. It's the gold standard against which "real" medicine is compared (and sometimes fails to do much better, while adding more side effects). Of course, when there is a real treatment that performs better than placebo in blind trials, people should be getting that. Using placebos dishonestly --- raking in tons of money while keeping people from known effective cures --- is the problem. But it's a worthwhile area of study to learn (possibly by observing the quacks) how *real* doctors can best harness the power of placebo effects in their patient care procedures, bolstering the effectiveness and reducing side effects of actual medications.
Key differences from a bank loan: (a) you may never be able to pay it back, since the more wealth and willingness you have to buy back outstanding shares and "go private," the more those shares are likely to cost, and (b) the bank doesn't make detailed decisions about how you live your life; only that you must pay back $XX every month (regardless of how you get it)
They aren't talking about just tossing ordinary working programmer geeks on a plane, who would simply think we need a technocracy. These are the leading minds of CEOs and Venture Capitalists --- they're certain to have a higher vision: a plutocratic technocracy.
I may need a therapist, but I'm doubtful of your ability to judge professional qualifications. I might end up with an Oil/Coal lobbyist posing as a shrink.
You like throwing around "big" numbers about the oceans as though (a) they are not warming at a similarly unprecedentedly fast rate (albeit somewhat behind the atmosphere), and (b) as though air temperatures (of a couple degrees over the coming century, not just a "fraction of a degree," though measuring those fractions is important to seeing the larger change) don't matter on their own.
Hint: even though the deep ocean stays about the same temperature, we up at the surface experience these things called "seasons" where weather patterns vary significantly due to changes in air and shallow-surface temperature, with the corresponding shifts in air current patterns, amount of moisture retained and released, etc. Messing with these variables impacts all the parts of the biosphere not deep under the ocean: including those systems that supply the bulk of food and drinking water to humans.
Your characterization of "without violence" is the whopping ridiculous caricature here. Though much of the violence occurred in waves somewhat preceding the immigrant settlers, immigrants were encourage by, e.g., the Homestead Act of 1869 to expand/settle into land "vacated" starting from the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and continuing during enclosure of land by settlers. Note that the earlier part of the settlement waves (correlated with Westward expansion) required specific historical happenstance --- the temporary availability of large tracts of arable land --- which we don't have lying around to hand out free to immigrants any more.
The later immigrant waves (late 19th - early 20th c.) relied on a different form of violence, but violence nonetheless: immigrants were welcomed to be shunted into the worst extremes of unregulated Capitalist labor --- short, miserable lives in deadly factory and mine conditions. Physical, mental, and sexual abuse was rampant. Dissent and worker organization was brutally suppressed, by private police forces like the Pinkertons. As before, this immigrant wave no longer provides a model for current refugee relocation: the immigrants were only "welcomed" because the industrialists needed a big disposable labor pool in this country. In today's globalized economy, industrialists are happy leaving laborers in whatever poorer-off country they started in; with neocolonial arrangements, you no longer need to move laborers to your own country of residence to exploit them.
Massive dislocated refugee groups need a country that will accept them in order to help them. History only shows countries accepting immigrants to help themselves; and, currently, no one is particularly running short on labor material (hence high unemployment across the globe). In a better world, governments would be controlled by people more willing to help their fellow humans. In the world we have, it's best to avoid dislocating people in the first place, because they won't be given anywhere to go. The problem is not that *theoretically* large populations of humans can't be peacefully relocated, but that the conditions under which such peaceful relocation could theoretically occur (including charitable and self-sacrificing nations with vast resources) exist virtually nowhere on earth.
So, over ~400,000 years of records, the most drastic climate changes were ~2C/ka.
Compare to the IPCC numbers of +1.1-2.9C over the 21st century, in the *best* low-emissions case (and considerably higher for the emissions trajectories we currently seem to be on). That's ~10x faster than the *fastest* changes in the "always swift" Vostok record. And those past dramatic climate changes correlate with pretty serious ecological upheavals; while "life" in general finds a way to go on, the picture isn't so rosy for particular species, populations, and ecosystems. If you happen to have a particular concern for Homo sapiens species populations (and, by extension, the complex ecosystems that support them), you might get pretty worried about 10x more abrupt ecological upheavals than the worst the planet has recently seen.
And yes, though atmospheric temperatures are cited/measured in many circumstances, climate scientists aren't so absolutely f*cking stupid that they ignore that the earth has an ocean. Climate models indeed include that ~90% of the excess global warming heat is being absorbed into the oceans, which lag the atmosphere somewhat in temperature because of their higher thermal mass but are on their way warming up too (with some potentially highly disruptive nonlinear changes from disintegration of the polar ice cap and re-routing of major currents). No, climate predictions don't have the air rising by 28C before the oceans rise 0.1C, which would only be possible in the completely unphysical ridiculous case where the solar heat pumped in gets 100% absorbed by the atmosphere before touching the oceans, instead of (as expected) being 90% absorbed in the (dark colored) oceans instead of the (mostly transparent) atmosphere, then being trapped from radiating back from the ocean to deep space by greenhouse gases. I don't see why you bring up ocean temperatures in this manner, unless you are intentionally trying to confuse and spread FUD with insinuations from misleading half-truths.
OK, let's look at immigration into the US from 1780 on.
For the first major chunk of your post-1780 period, immigration largely fueled continued Westward expansion --- with the associated continued internment and extermination of natives, squeezed into ever less hospitable reservations with endless promises of "this is the last time we'll break the treaty and make you move elsewhere".
Initial and later immigration waves were also welcomed to provide disposable labor for the mills and mines, under horrific conditions (which certainly count as violence against humanity). As with potential climate refugees, refugees arriving for a short, miserable life of hard labor might have been a bit better off than starving in various famines back home --- but they arrived to exploitation and contempt, rather than welcome as fellow human brothers and sisters (hardly a model for a nice way to treat people forced from their homes by our Hummers).
As the population stabilized to fill Capital's need for labor, the immigration influx was cut off. The Immigration Act of 1924 made sure that "undesirable" Eastern Europeans (including Jews fleeing shortly before and during the rise of fascism) would be under strict quotas. While nationality quotas were officially eliminated in 1965, the free flow of anyone-who-wants-to-come immigration remains severely curtailed through the present day. Entry through official or unofficial channels is difficult, expensive, and/or dangerous. Immigration policies set a steady, controlled rate of influx to serve the needs of corporate masters (whether tomato-pickers or high-tech H1-B workers), rather than to fulfill the desires of everyone who would rather be here.
So, does America provide a model for how to relocate huge swathes of refugees? Not at all --- we're already letting in only a small trickle of applicants, and will gun down people at the border for circumventing the quota. Past cases of more liberal immigration policy depended on historical specifics that no longer exist: land to grab from natives, or a deep shortage of the unemployed for bottom-rung manual labor. We sure won't be taking in whole populations from African countries, and nor will any of the other developed countries (if anyone was willing, they'd have immigrants pouring in already), beyond the usual trickle of just enough to maintain a cheap labor pool.
The online merriam-webster isn't exactly the "final word" on vocabulary usage. However, their "def'n 3" ("compel") fits pretty well. The combination of factors in the historical migration --- including European theories of divinely-granted dominion over "sub-human savages," martial superiority, and the natives' unwillingness to politely cede their hunting, agricultural, and cultural sites to European newcomers --- compelled the historical outcome of mass-genocide so the immigrants could get what they wanted. If the historical parties involved had been substantially different (e.g. more averse to calculated slaughter, or more willing to give away everything you have to pushy strangers), then perhaps genocide would not have been compelled/required --- but that's not what happened.
And again, what "peaceful" migrations into pre-inhabited New World areas are you talking about? They were only "peaceful" if you mean "successful for the victors, and who gives a damn about the indigenous populations who were easily crushed." Areas like Argentina were only "peacefully" populated to the extent that they were only very sparsely inhabited before, with no large opposing populations to generate large bloodshed. To the extent that the inhabited world is a lot more crowded place now than it was then, modern-day migrations are not likely to go as smoothly.
The historical population movement that occurred did "require" this (in the important sense that what happened, happened). Perhaps in an alternate history, everyone would have been nice to one another and just gotten along without bloody conflict --- in which case it would have been a different form of mass migration, which didn't "require" genocide. Since I see little historical evidence for common "everyone's nice to one another" mass migrations into otherwise inhabited areas, or signs that present societies are any less viciously violent towards masses of impoverished newcomers wanting to "nicely share" their resources, I think it's reasonable to extrapolate that climate-induced migrations won't display the unprecedented triumph of new-found human unity and neighborly love over fear and greed.
What part of the genocide of previous "New World" inhabitants is an "entertaining myth"? Do you think there was no-one here before, or they all just joined up with the jolly Pilgrims for a never-ending Thanksgiving feast? Did the terms "conquistador," "pox blanket," "trail of tears," or "reservation" never receive mention in your history class?
"We'd rent or sell land to newcomers" who arrive with truckloads of cash to rent/buy our land. You're utterly deluded if you think anyone "in the developed world" is going to say "aww, your life savings is $1.28 in devalued third-world currency. I'll be nice and sell your family a fertile acre for $0.50." When the vast majority of displaced immigrants, who sure as heck don't have the cash to buy land (or even a month's rent), arrive at "developed" borders, they'll be greeted by razor-wire and machine guns. Likewise, the fighting that "will happen anyway" in the "undeveloped world" definitely gets worse the more people there are with no subsistence to lose by swelling the ranks of warlord's armies.
So, were you asleep in history class, or do they just not teach real history these days?
You do realize that the colonization of the New World "empty frontier" required the largest mass-genocides in history, as European immigrants arrived to claim resources from the tens of millions of prior inhabitants? This is a perfect example of mass population movement resulting in *absolutely horrific* costs to human life (yes, folks not on "your side" count as human too) due to conflict over resources with prior inhabitants of newly-favorable land.
Slashdot Mirror
Alright, so a closer analogy would be saying Charles Lindbergh's non-stop transit of the Atlantic in a fixed-wing plane in 1927 was a sham, because he relied on the West to East jet stream --- Dieudonné Costes was the first to manage the more difficult Paris -> New York return flight in a heavier-than-air craft in 1930.
Self-reporting on surveys is, as you indicate, problematic, because a person might fudge their response because they think they aught to be feeling better, and that nice doctor has put so much work into helping them. Start with the Wikipedia article, however, for more modern research done with the help of direct fMRI brain scans: it's now possible to verify, e.g., that reported decreases in pain are actually correlated with pain-related chemical processes in the brain, rather than just I-don't-want-to-insult-the-hard-working-doctor parts of the brain. Placebos can't magically help with issues not closely tied to the brain, though even issues that aren't directly brain-related often come with a strong pain/stress component that might be better alleviated with improved placebo-like patient confidence in the (non-placebo) treatment regime.
Oh no, the Apollo missions launched from a southerly location in the US to increase the boost from the earth's rotation! The worthless cheaters! We haven't really put a man on the moon until we've launched from Maine, and picked up burgers at a drive-through in California on the flight out!
The $10,000 question, though, is whether the cell companies would simply hand over the full cryptographic keys to the government snoops, so the fake towers would be indistinguishable from the true. When your phone resolves 4 towers simultaneously with the same 1 identity, how does it choose the true one?
Even in "purely mechanical" pathologies like broken bones, scientifically studying and implementing "placebo" components of treatment can have beneficial effects. While the underlying cause of such pathologies is not amenable to placebo treatment, they carry along a lot of pain, stress, and anxiety, too. A good doctor should know both how to set the bone and apply the cast, and how to minimize the suffering of the recovering patient (so they don't spend the next few weeks intently focusing on their pain and how much they want to scratch itchy spots under the cast). Use of placebo doesn't necessarily mean giving the patient some additional magic-woo-woo tincture; it's things that can be built in to the bare technical process for slapping on a cast. What sort of "bedside manner" framing of the medical procedure can the doctor present, so the patient leaves subconsciously satisfied that they will have a relatively easy and painless recuperation (with better long-term results than hooking them on massive addictive painkiller drug doses)? Success in this aspect of care is amenable to scientific scrutiny, perhaps even by learning from and systematizing what successful quacks do to con their patients into feeling cured.
Unfortunately, here in the US, the drug lobby has made sure we can't import your cheaper and equally effective generic placebos from Canada (using baseless fear-mongering that they might be watered down to the wrong dose, or a placebo for some entirely different disease altogether).
Of course, knowing that what you're getting is a placebo destroys the effect, which makes it hard to study with informed patient consent...
I'm not certain this is true, as I responded to another post above. I think you can rationally know that a treatment is a placebo --- but, so long as you subconsciously trust that placebos are themselves effective treatments, you can still get the benefits. The conscious level of the brain that worries about distinguishing between the chemical formula for sucrose and $EXPENSIVE_DRUG, and their relative biochemical pathways, isn't the same as the subconscious part that needs treatment for pain/depression.
Dishonesty is troublesome. However, in many cases, I think *honest* forms of placebo can be developed. Placebos don't operate on the rational/analytical levels of the brain --- so, in theory, it should be possible to simultaneously directly inform a patient how placebo is being used in their treatment (when not being used in a blind trial), while triggering subconscious feelings of well-being and trust in the treatment. I think I've heard about trials (I can't dig up specific references) where patients are told they are being given a placebo (including explanation of what than means), and *still* get beneficial placebo benefits (from being, honestly, told that the placebo can provide such and such benefits to many patients).
You can start with the Wikepedia page on Placebo, which is loaded with reputable citations. Indeed, there's a big class of medical issues for which placebos aren't helpful. But there's also a range --- as one might expect, tied to issues closely connected to what goes on in the brain --- where placebo works out pretty well; not just measured by exit questionnaires, but according to fMRI studies of brain activity. See also the section on "Gastric and duodenal ulcers," indicating improved results from doctors who are "better" at administering placebos. And heck, if having people listen to you helps your painful condition, that's a perfectly valid variety of placebo (which don't have to come in the form of a sugar pill), and deserves to be studied and incorporated into treatment plans.
Right, which is why we use *science* to figure out what kind of things placebo is good for and what not, and use it where it's good. For health problems in the class of pain and nausea, studying how to maximize placebo effectiveness (combined with proper treatment for underlying non-placebo-amenable causes) is a worthy cause.
Re the placebo effect, it only makes you feel better momentarily. The question I ask: "do you want to actually BE better, or only FEEL better?"
This is the one place I disagree with Randi in this interview. The placebo effect has been repeatedly scientifically proven to be pretty amazingly effective at making people better, by objective measures of health/recovery. It's the gold standard against which "real" medicine is compared (and sometimes fails to do much better, while adding more side effects). Of course, when there is a real treatment that performs better than placebo in blind trials, people should be getting that. Using placebos dishonestly --- raking in tons of money while keeping people from known effective cures --- is the problem. But it's a worthwhile area of study to learn (possibly by observing the quacks) how *real* doctors can best harness the power of placebo effects in their patient care procedures, bolstering the effectiveness and reducing side effects of actual medications.
This is a great way to find out who your real friends are:
the folks who respect you enough as a free human being not to *buy control of your life* for their profit.
Key differences from a bank loan:
(a) you may never be able to pay it back, since the more wealth and willingness you have to buy back outstanding shares and "go private," the more those shares are likely to cost, and
(b) the bank doesn't make detailed decisions about how you live your life; only that you must pay back $XX every month (regardless of how you get it)
They aren't talking about just tossing ordinary working programmer geeks on a plane, who would simply think we need a technocracy.
These are the leading minds of CEOs and Venture Capitalists --- they're certain to have a higher vision: a plutocratic technocracy.
And from where, in that quote, do you leap to the conclusion that I want people to grow crops on glaciers and starve?
I may need a therapist, but I'm doubtful of your ability to judge professional qualifications. I might end up with an Oil/Coal lobbyist posing as a shrink.
You like throwing around "big" numbers about the oceans as though (a) they are not warming at a similarly unprecedentedly fast rate (albeit somewhat behind the atmosphere), and (b) as though air temperatures (of a couple degrees over the coming century, not just a "fraction of a degree," though measuring those fractions is important to seeing the larger change) don't matter on their own.
Hint: even though the deep ocean stays about the same temperature, we up at the surface experience these things called "seasons" where weather patterns vary significantly due to changes in air and shallow-surface temperature, with the corresponding shifts in air current patterns, amount of moisture retained and released, etc. Messing with these variables impacts all the parts of the biosphere not deep under the ocean: including those systems that supply the bulk of food and drinking water to humans.
Your characterization of "without violence" is the whopping ridiculous caricature here. Though much of the violence occurred in waves somewhat preceding the immigrant settlers, immigrants were encourage by, e.g., the Homestead Act of 1869 to expand/settle into land "vacated" starting from the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and continuing during enclosure of land by settlers. Note that the earlier part of the settlement waves (correlated with Westward expansion) required specific historical happenstance --- the temporary availability of large tracts of arable land --- which we don't have lying around to hand out free to immigrants any more.
The later immigrant waves (late 19th - early 20th c.) relied on a different form of violence, but violence nonetheless: immigrants were welcomed to be shunted into the worst extremes of unregulated Capitalist labor --- short, miserable lives in deadly factory and mine conditions. Physical, mental, and sexual abuse was rampant. Dissent and worker organization was brutally suppressed, by private police forces like the Pinkertons. As before, this immigrant wave no longer provides a model for current refugee relocation: the immigrants were only "welcomed" because the industrialists needed a big disposable labor pool in this country. In today's globalized economy, industrialists are happy leaving laborers in whatever poorer-off country they started in; with neocolonial arrangements, you no longer need to move laborers to your own country of residence to exploit them.
Massive dislocated refugee groups need a country that will accept them in order to help them. History only shows countries accepting immigrants to help themselves; and, currently, no one is particularly running short on labor material (hence high unemployment across the globe). In a better world, governments would be controlled by people more willing to help their fellow humans. In the world we have, it's best to avoid dislocating people in the first place, because they won't be given anywhere to go. The problem is not that *theoretically* large populations of humans can't be peacefully relocated, but that the conditions under which such peaceful relocation could theoretically occur (including charitable and self-sacrificing nations with vast resources) exist virtually nowhere on earth.
So, over ~400,000 years of records, the most drastic climate changes were ~2C/ka.
Compare to the IPCC numbers of +1.1-2.9C over the 21st century, in the *best* low-emissions case (and considerably higher for the emissions trajectories we currently seem to be on). That's ~10x faster than the *fastest* changes in the "always swift" Vostok record. And those past dramatic climate changes correlate with pretty serious ecological upheavals; while "life" in general finds a way to go on, the picture isn't so rosy for particular species, populations, and ecosystems. If you happen to have a particular concern for Homo sapiens species populations (and, by extension, the complex ecosystems that support them), you might get pretty worried about 10x more abrupt ecological upheavals than the worst the planet has recently seen.
And yes, though atmospheric temperatures are cited/measured in many circumstances, climate scientists aren't so absolutely f*cking stupid that they ignore that the earth has an ocean. Climate models indeed include that ~90% of the excess global warming heat is being absorbed into the oceans, which lag the atmosphere somewhat in temperature because of their higher thermal mass but are on their way warming up too (with some potentially highly disruptive nonlinear changes from disintegration of the polar ice cap and re-routing of major currents). No, climate predictions don't have the air rising by 28C before the oceans rise 0.1C, which would only be possible in the completely unphysical ridiculous case where the solar heat pumped in gets 100% absorbed by the atmosphere before touching the oceans, instead of (as expected) being 90% absorbed in the (dark colored) oceans instead of the (mostly transparent) atmosphere, then being trapped from radiating back from the ocean to deep space by greenhouse gases. I don't see why you bring up ocean temperatures in this manner, unless you are intentionally trying to confuse and spread FUD with insinuations from misleading half-truths.
When the taxpayers have already funded research, what's the justification for not having that research available to anybody and everybody?
Because money money money money mine mine mine mine.
If you have any other questions about justification for dubious acts under Capitalism, please refer to the above subtle and nuanced explanation.
OK, let's look at immigration into the US from 1780 on.
For the first major chunk of your post-1780 period, immigration largely fueled continued Westward expansion --- with the associated continued internment and extermination of natives, squeezed into ever less hospitable reservations with endless promises of "this is the last time we'll break the treaty and make you move elsewhere".
Initial and later immigration waves were also welcomed to provide disposable labor for the mills and mines, under horrific conditions (which certainly count as violence against humanity). As with potential climate refugees, refugees arriving for a short, miserable life of hard labor might have been a bit better off than starving in various famines back home --- but they arrived to exploitation and contempt, rather than welcome as fellow human brothers and sisters (hardly a model for a nice way to treat people forced from their homes by our Hummers).
As the population stabilized to fill Capital's need for labor, the immigration influx was cut off. The Immigration Act of 1924 made sure that "undesirable" Eastern Europeans (including Jews fleeing shortly before and during the rise of fascism) would be under strict quotas. While nationality quotas were officially eliminated in 1965, the free flow of anyone-who-wants-to-come immigration remains severely curtailed through the present day. Entry through official or unofficial channels is difficult, expensive, and/or dangerous. Immigration policies set a steady, controlled rate of influx to serve the needs of corporate masters (whether tomato-pickers or high-tech H1-B workers), rather than to fulfill the desires of everyone who would rather be here.
So, does America provide a model for how to relocate huge swathes of refugees? Not at all --- we're already letting in only a small trickle of applicants, and will gun down people at the border for circumventing the quota. Past cases of more liberal immigration policy depended on historical specifics that no longer exist: land to grab from natives, or a deep shortage of the unemployed for bottom-rung manual labor. We sure won't be taking in whole populations from African countries, and nor will any of the other developed countries (if anyone was willing, they'd have immigrants pouring in already), beyond the usual trickle of just enough to maintain a cheap labor pool.
The online merriam-webster isn't exactly the "final word" on vocabulary usage. However, their "def'n 3" ("compel") fits pretty well. The combination of factors in the historical migration --- including European theories of divinely-granted dominion over "sub-human savages," martial superiority, and the natives' unwillingness to politely cede their hunting, agricultural, and cultural sites to European newcomers --- compelled the historical outcome of mass-genocide so the immigrants could get what they wanted. If the historical parties involved had been substantially different (e.g. more averse to calculated slaughter, or more willing to give away everything you have to pushy strangers), then perhaps genocide would not have been compelled/required --- but that's not what happened.
And again, what "peaceful" migrations into pre-inhabited New World areas are you talking about? They were only "peaceful" if you mean "successful for the victors, and who gives a damn about the indigenous populations who were easily crushed." Areas like Argentina were only "peacefully" populated to the extent that they were only very sparsely inhabited before, with no large opposing populations to generate large bloodshed. To the extent that the inhabited world is a lot more crowded place now than it was then, modern-day migrations are not likely to go as smoothly.
The historical population movement that occurred did "require" this (in the important sense that what happened, happened). Perhaps in an alternate history, everyone would have been nice to one another and just gotten along without bloody conflict --- in which case it would have been a different form of mass migration, which didn't "require" genocide. Since I see little historical evidence for common "everyone's nice to one another" mass migrations into otherwise inhabited areas, or signs that present societies are any less viciously violent towards masses of impoverished newcomers wanting to "nicely share" their resources, I think it's reasonable to extrapolate that climate-induced migrations won't display the unprecedented triumph of new-found human unity and neighborly love over fear and greed.
What part of the genocide of previous "New World" inhabitants is an "entertaining myth"? Do you think there was no-one here before, or they all just joined up with the jolly Pilgrims for a never-ending Thanksgiving feast? Did the terms "conquistador," "pox blanket," "trail of tears," or "reservation" never receive mention in your history class?
"We'd rent or sell land to newcomers" who arrive with truckloads of cash to rent/buy our land. You're utterly deluded if you think anyone "in the developed world" is going to say "aww, your life savings is $1.28 in devalued third-world currency. I'll be nice and sell your family a fertile acre for $0.50." When the vast majority of displaced immigrants, who sure as heck don't have the cash to buy land (or even a month's rent), arrive at "developed" borders, they'll be greeted by razor-wire and machine guns. Likewise, the fighting that "will happen anyway" in the "undeveloped world" definitely gets worse the more people there are with no subsistence to lose by swelling the ranks of warlord's armies.
So, were you asleep in history class, or do they just not teach real history these days?
You do realize that the colonization of the New World "empty frontier" required the largest mass-genocides in history, as European immigrants arrived to claim resources from the tens of millions of prior inhabitants? This is a perfect example of mass population movement resulting in *absolutely horrific* costs to human life (yes, folks not on "your side" count as human too) due to conflict over resources with prior inhabitants of newly-favorable land.