Pigeon
coo coo
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User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Now, someone might say "but Stalin and Mao...". Yes, they are popular with tankies but very few wokists go around trying to defend Stalin and Mao. When it comes to the far right and Hitler, on the other hand...
I’m not sure that’s true. Barely anyone even on the far-right defends Hitler.
On the other hand, it’s fairly common to find who excuse, or are apologetics for, the USSR and pre-Deng China — more often for Mao and Lenin, perhaps less often for Stalin, but surely still more than for Hitler!
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Every WWII casualty is his fault on top of the holocaust
Well, there is the Pacific theatre…
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Don't manga readers skew female?
Is this true? I would have thought it was more male-skewed.
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
＞You take that back!
I can understand pixie cuts, but I will admit to finding the haphazardly-shaven or buzz-cut-esque haircuts common in queer circles to be bizarre and unattractive.
Also the…jewelry. Why nose rings?
I‘d say it’s extremely easy to argue, given that Japan started the second Sino-Japanese war (and started committing atrocities, like the Nanjing massacre) two years before Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and Germany had pretty warm relations with the Chinese at the time; while the Anti-Comintern Pact predates the start of war in Asia, it took until 1938 for Hitler to end the alliance with China (and align Germany with Japan) and recognise Japanese holdings, and 1940 for the Tripartite Pact.
My understanding of the historical consensus on this is that the Pacific theatre and the European theatre largely didn’t affect each other that much; neither Germany nor Japan were exactly dependents on the other, and if one fell, the other would still struggle as per history. In fact, if anything, Hitler was rather hoping for a Japanese invasion of the USSR that didn‘t materialise in the end (but also never told the Japanese that he would invade the USSR - Axis coordination was pretty shit, and trust was pretty low).
(It is true that Japan benefitted from technology transfers during the war, but it‘s difficult to argue that Japan couldn’t have done what she did without German backing when, in history, she was literally doing that without German backing for years.)
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
Or we could posit that there is an infinite, even if we cannot know it; or even that causality and time make no sense outside of our contingent environment, and that speaking of “what caused the universe” or “what came before the universe” is a category error in and of itself.
Even if we accept that there needs to be an explanation for existence — and any argument for this has been terribly, terribly far from convincing — it doesn’t explain why it needs a god; nor does it explain why a “changeless, fully actual thing” would be able to cause the universe to exist beyond “trust me bro”.
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
Great show.
In terms of the writer’s political views, the show seems rather unusual. While seeking more women and less Oxford classicists in the bureaucracy, the writers also seem fairly keen on conscription and the build-up of Britain’s conventional forces, vaguely Euroskeptic. Meanwhile they seem to favour school choice, joke about the excesses of political correctness. The abiding theme is a distrust in the competence of politicians and the alignment of the bureaucracy with British interests.
That the show’s politics are a bit eclectic and ultimately converge on some vague anti-establishmentarianism shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given that it was co-written by a right-winger and a left-winger.
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
somebody could suggest them to look into the history of Japan? I think there are a lot of similarities there, with regard to being colonized
Japan was colonized? That’s news to me. Perry’s gunboats didn’t lead to concessions or annexations. Unless you count being forced to open ports and restrict tariffs as colonization…? That’s markedly different from South Africa.
Pigeon
coo coo
10mo ago
I'm not a big believer in changing minds via debate anyway. It's more effective to change them via friendship and familiarity and positive experiences.
Well, as long as you know that’s what you’re doing, and what everyone else sees you’re doing.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
That’s fair.
Conversely, my anecdotal experience is that something like a quarter to a third of the actual far-leftists I know will be like “Lenin/Stalin/Mao had the right idea, just went too far/did some things wrong”, “Great Leap Forward is capitalist propaganda”, “Communists would have succeeded and created utopia on Earth if it was not for evil capitalists sabotaging them”, etc. Usually not “everything they did was right”, but absolutely bending over backwards to excuse any “mistake” they made. I’ve heard someone claim that the Great Leap Forward was actually the US’s fault!
I have never seen anyone in real life defend Hitler, like, ever. Not even outside of the West where it’s less of a taboo.
I am not sure I would call it complete indifference, but isn't it well known enough that there is a marked difference between the empathy we give men vs women? IIRC it's common for FTM transgender people to comment on how much more hostile the world is. To writ:
A couple of years after my transition, I had a grad student I’d been mentoring. She started coming on to me, stalking me, sending me emails and texts. My adviser and the dean — both women — laughed it off...I had experienced harassment as a female person at another university and they had reacted immediately, sending a police escort with me to and from campus. I felt like if I had still been in my old body I would have gotten a lot more support.
What continues to strike me is the significant reduction in friendliness and kindness now extended to me in public spaces. It now feels as though I am on my own: No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being.
(And isn't the quote below revealing?)
My ability to empathize has grown exponentially [after transitioning], because I now factor men into my thinking and feeling about situations. Prior to my transition, I rarely considered how men experienced life or what they thought, wanted or liked about their lives.
(There were other anecdotes I recall, e.g. a trans man quipping about how he learned that people were much more lenient to women talking shit than men, and that he quickly got called aside to talk about how he was acting inappropriately once he started passing - even though nothing had actually changed in behaviour; but the WaPo article was the first one I found and it seems good enough to illustrate my point.)
Not to mention the actual litany of things that we do privilege women over men for, from prison sentencing to divorce and custody to education, the complete etc etc. Even most of the examples used in the trans rights fight is one group trying to gatekeep womanhood vs another group of self-described women wanting privileges available for women.
My personal experience is that when I try to destress with people (e.g. venting about an 80 hour workweek, or a crappy boss) off work is that - yes, there will be friends and family to empathise, but you get a much higher incidence of "dude not our problem" and "stop whining", as well as a general presumption that I'll be fine and it's not serious, compared to women - who people feel more obliged to reassure and to take action on behalf of.
On the more absurd side, there are things like that youtube video "experiment" (yes, n=1, but you get the point) on public violence where the male-on-female violence got bystanders to stop the altercation/call the police immediately, but reversing the roles lead to people cheering for the woman beating the man and sometimes joining in!
It's an effect strong enough that we call it the "women-are-wonderful effect" (or part of it) and discuss how it's benevolent sexism; but we don't call the perception of competence or increased expectations (e.g. with regards to life success) put on men "benevolent sexism", do we? And isn't that itself a bit suggestive of how we're more receptive towards Women's Issues? (I don't claim to be immune from this either!)
If I started crying on a park bench I suspect no one would stop to ask me what was wrong, and maybe they would for a woman (not a sure thing though, I wouldn't stop for a stranger crying in public, regardless of sex). But that's a marginal kind of scenario and I don't think that's what most people are getting at when they say no one cares about you if you're a man.
Is that really a "marginal scenario" (with the implication that it's not part of a larger trend of scenarios that would impact men)?
(wow didn't realise I didn't actually post the link)
Pigeon
coo coo
10mo ago
Not very differently. Which is to say, both back then and today the jury would have been quite fair and just, unlike the ridiculous civil rights fantasy the movie portrays.
Like, this isn’t Alabama, and this is just one case, but I dunno, man.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
As a further piece of evidence:
…
[the white people in my life don’t realize I am, if not white, then about as close to it as one can get.]
(It is telling that the author of that piece reveals to being of mixed East Asian/white heritage but is still handwringing about all this.)
The entire issue was ostensibly about “Asian-Americans”, but my East Asian girlfriend got was not very happy about the coverage (she said outright that she thinks it is discriminatory from the progressive writers, that if it were South Asians or black or any other race/ethnicity, they wouldn’t have done such a dreadful job and had such awful art). While I am agnostic to those particular claims, I am inclined to agree that it represents ; most of the pieces don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Nevertheless it is evidence of attempting to equate “Asian” (esp. East Asian) with being white-adjacent, whatever that means.
I recall at my job hearing a Sri Lankan colleague remark casually about how “we three ethnic people” (in a group) have culture and whatnot, while white people didn’t; I remarked that the rest of the group there were not white, but East Asian; she replied kind of dismissively that “you know what I mean, you know, brown people”. I think that is as clear a sort of equivocation of East Asian with white as I can find, and that it can be said casually to other people in a work environment tells me much.
Or take this piece of ridiculousness, such that it is.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Is there a good AI substitute for clinical examinations at present, or are we going to rely on patients self-examining?
I can honestly buy that in the short-medium term AI would take a better history and get differentials and suggest treatment plans better than the modal doctor. I could even buy that within that timeframe you could train AI to do the inspection parts/things like asterixis, but I don’t know how you’d get an AI to…palpate. Movement and sensation etc. are quite difficult for computers, I am to understand.
Alternatively maybe they’d just get so fucking good at the rest of it that professional examinations aren’t needed anymore, or that some examination findings can be deduced through other visual/etc means…
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Also curious what's the point of including the subject and object forms (e.g. he and him), seems redundant to me, unless someone is combining he/her or she/him?
I’ve seen he/her twice. But I think the more common case is she/their. Makes it rather a pain.
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo ago
Pending a detailed read of Nufher et al. and Gignac & Zajenkowski, this appears as one of three -- either the blogpost is simply wrong; or I have a misundertanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect; or the author has done a really shit job at explaining himself. Either way, I'm not convinced so far.
It means that we can throw random numbers into x and y — numbers which could not possibly contain the Dunning-Kruger effect — and yet out the other end, the effect will still emerge.
My understanding of the DKE is that self-assessment is poorly correlated with objective ability in such a way that poor performers overrate their performance and good performers underate theirs. In this case, the lack of correlation in Fig. 7 from y being a variable with a uniform distribution uncorrelated with x already shows the effect! I'm not sure how the author is so sure that plotting uncorrelated variables and "showing" the DKE disproves it, as the entire point is that they're poorly-to-uncorrelated!
If my understanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect is right, I suspect the author may be right to some degree (just based on personal experience, I think DKE is extremely oversold, and even if true is unlikely to be very important), but his working is definitely wrong.
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
The skill of individuals on the Japanese side was high, but they absolutely failed to fight as well as they could have. Many of the decisions made during that battle make no sense even by the standards of what the Japanese should have known at the time.
I only have a passing knowledge of this part of history (the Pacific war), but did Japan not get quite unlucky as well with scouting and with loading times of bombs/torpedoes?
At a glance I couldn't find anything in particular for the COVID vaccines, but the delivery system used for the mRNA vaccines are lipid nanoparticles, which have been in use for a short while, and can be targeted towards certain cells. (Some newfangled cancer vaccines, for example, use targeted lipid nanoparticles.)
So I'm not sure about whether they would be as widespread as COVID-susceptible cells, but based on the mechanism of uptake - which has nothing to do with the mRNA - it seems to be a technology that can be used for targeted cell uptake of drug/vaccine/etc.
They would probably be different cells, though, yes, though because the vaccines wouldn't replicate like viruses do, I would expect the distribution of uptake to be more local than with a COVID infection.
Not sure what you're getting at with adenoviruses, but it would probably depend on which? Most human adenoviruses would attach to CAR, which I'm pretty sure is widespread but not exactly everywhere, or CD46, which actually is everywhere.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I think your definition of identity is coherent within your worldview, I just don’t think that’s the definition of identity that most people use.
Moreover, it does still break at some stages (at least regarding social ideas of when identities are “wrong”), for example with transracial people who strongly identify as another race, or with otherkin as discussed elsewhere in this thread.
Do people merely not accept that an otherkin believes that they are a porcupine, and why do people not accept it? Or is there some degree of “wrongness” in a human being believing that they are in fact a porcupine?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Sheer weight of numbers. At that time western european powers were already far ahead, capable of fighting and winning wars on multiple continents with superior technology, while the mughals sat satisfied counting their starving peasants.
Although I cautioned BurdensomeCount on using GDP reconstructions too liberally, I would also push back against something like this, since the technology disparity between Europe and the rest of the world wasn’t that pronounced, and states with some degree of organization outside of Europe often were able to maintain some level of parity with European arms (e.g. 16-18C was the era of gunpowder empires in the Near East and South Asia, and neither China nor Japan had issues in adopting western improvements to guns during the Ming and early Qing and the Warring States period respectively). Many of these wars (at this stage) were limited, and many were pretty embarrassing, too, like the Anglo-Mughal war.
This is not to mention things like patterns of trade; the global silver trade in this period had not Europe as its most important agent, but China. (I am to understand that the most, uh, ?industrialised? and mercantile regions of China and (maybe) South Asia, for example, were also not really that far behind in per-capita terms vis a vis e.g. Britain.)
All of this doesn’t really tell a story of Europeans pwning everyone effortlessly. Conclusive departure from the norm such that the rest of the world was unable to easily catch up probably only started sometime in the 18th century (and only really solidified in the 19th with the industrial revolution), even if per capita conditions in Europe were already favourable leading up to that, and even though many of the preexisting institutions and intellectual currents that led (?) to these changes were being built centuries before (though not with growth and industrialisation in mind).
(All I mean to say is that to presuppose obvious European dominance of the world pre-sometime-in-the-18/19C is pants-on-head historically silly, even if the conditions that would lead to their future dominance were planted early; there is also a separate argument that you are discounting advances made elsewhere in the world with the sole focus on European domination, but that is for another time.)
I can't name sources in a hurry, and this might be a faulty explanation, but I think a partial reason of this is due to Korea turning super-neo-Confucian during the Joseon dynasty/period. This is most evident after the Qing conquest of the Ming, which the Koreans responded to by considering Qing China as not having political legitimacy*, and doubling down on their interpretations of neo-Confucianism; but strands of this are evident even earlier, when Korean scholars rejected Ming-dynasty innovations (e.g. the Lu-Wang school) in favour of elaborating on older models, most prominently from Zhu Xi. Even today you can see a much, much more obviously hierarchical system regarding personal relations present in Korea than in Japan or China, even counting pre-PRC China (edit: at least contemporaneously).
China, on the other hand, did have such reevaluations, and the Manchu conquest prompted significant soul-searching, resulting in things like the kaozheng school of thought. Japan's kangaku, likewise, did not hunker down in the same way Korea did.
I could easily see how a more hyper-Confucian society that's had a crash course in modern liberal democracy and capitalist markets would create sex-based resentment, especially if you introduce a dose of feminism into it.
*For further reading you could go look at how many Koreans at the time considered themselves to be sojonghwa and the real inheritors of Chinese political culture and civilisation, now that actual China was overrun by "barbarians". This was to the extent that, IIRC, Joseon Korea refused to use Qing dynasty regnal years as part of its calendar, and continued counting as if the last Ming emperor (?) was still in power. Also note that this was not entirely unique to Korea; there were politicians and thinkers in Japan and Vietnam who shared this opinion.
Some element of this after the "loss of China" in the 17th century likely contributes to Korean culture today. I've been told by native Koreans about how the older generations still sometimes say outright that "since the fall of the Ming there has been no worthy Chinese (persons)"; and there's always some loony Korean nationalist scholar, never taken very seriously, insisting on how this or that aspect of Sinosphere civilisation (from festivals to Chinese characters, so on and so forth) actually originates from Korea.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Firstly, the claim was this:
I see a lot more rightists defending Hitler than I do leftists defending Stalin and Mao.
Secondly, that doesn’t hold nearly as well when I hear people say that Mao was “misunderstood”, mm? I think that goes beyond “harmless pastime”.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Has retard really hit this level of the euphemism treadmill that it is included on this list?
It might have. I’ve had people confront me over saying it in casual conversation a few times, years ago (granted in a very progressive environment), and I’ve seen a lot of “r-word” referring to retard in the last few years.
I was curious about the Wonderlic test after seeing it referenced in a comment sometime this week, so I took a look. Is this practice website actually accurate to the content of the test? I found it really quite easy, some trouble with not being familiar with Imperial units and American coinage aside.
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