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It seems like we get these kinds of "men are sexual degenerates" posts semi-regularly, I've never found them particularly convincing, and this one's no exception. The major problem with your analysis is that it is, ultimately, an example of the Chinese robber fallacy, in spite of the atypical circumstances of this case. It is always possible to find examples of regional cabals of people who have helped to perpetrate or cover up a crime, but that does not make it an illustration or indication of larger society (I would also note that 50km around Mazan is a massive radius that features the city of Avignon, home to 487,000 people in its larger metropolitan area, and the arrondissement of Carpentras is itself home to 220,000 people; it is not particularly surprising to me that someone could find 72 criminals there over a period of nine years if they really tried). But here is an example of what one can write that follows the broad strokes of your comment, if so motivated:
This Valentine's Day, I am thinking about why the Thai penile-amputation epidemic has received so little attention, sparked so little discussion. This is the curious case of a rather hyperspecific form of crime that became oddly common in Thailand in the decade after 1970, where angry wives severed the penises of philandering husbands. I could not find a single mention of it on this site. You could claim this was an isolated incident that has no implications for society in general, that this is cherrypicking isolated cases and not reflective of an attitude that women have towards men generally. But series of interviews carried out with prominent Thai women revealed that they almost unanimously endorsed this method of retribution. It was to the extent that expertise in managing penile amputations has developed in Thailand, and that “I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat,” is a common joke and immediately understood at all levels of society.
This article notes about it: "In 2008, the Journal of Urology carried a retrospective by Drs Genoa Ferguson and Steven Brandes of the Washington University in St Louis, called The Epidemic of Penile Amputation in Thailand in the 1970s. Ferguson and Brandes conclude that: "Women publicly encouraging and inciting other scorned women to commit this act worsened the epidemic. The vast majority of worldwide reports of penile replantation, to this day, are a result of what became a trendy form of retribution in a country in which fidelity is a strongly appreciated value."" It was endorsed by female society at large, publicly, occasionally in a televised way (which suggests they expected no blowback for these viewpoints), and thus resulted in a rise in prevalence in Thailand.
In the West, such light-hearted endorsements have occasionally become apparent as well, and for far less than infidelities. The Catherine Kieu Becker case is only one example of that. On July 15, 2011, a popular CBS daytime television show titled The Talk discussed the news story of Becker who was charged with drugging her husband, tying him to the bed, and waiting until he awoke to sever the man's penis off with a knife. She then proceeded to throw the appendage into the garbage disposal before calling 911 and reporting the crime herself. The audience members along with the other hosts immediately after hearing the details and the supposed reasoning for the mutilation (the husband had asked for a divorce) responded surprisingly by laughing. One woman in the audience was heard saying, "That'll teach him" and the host found it amusing enough to repeat it so it could be broadcast. Sharon Osbourne, one of the hosts of the show, offered her opinion that she felt the crime was "quite fabulous" only after making a gesture with her hands mimicking what the severed body part would have looked like while being destroyed in the garbage disposal. In spite of the talk of how men find it hard to relate to women, men do not collectively laugh on TV about women being raped; I find it quite interesting that women are capable of making light and even excusing when this kind of mutilation occurs to men.
I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of women do not view sexually violent retribution against men as particularly heinous, and are very capable of endorsing these acts, committing it while justifying it to themselves as a method of revenge for perceived slights. This is the nature of women. The vast majority of women know just how vengeful women can be, and I have the sense that while women can empathise with other women, most of them simply struggle to empathise with harms to men. The women in question here had issues with their husbands, their husbands weren't satisfying their needs in one way or another, and as such they're capable of viewing it as a trivial matter when they do the deed.
Is this sentiment unhinged? Maybe it is, but it's where this kind of reasoning is capable of getting you. When looking at 8 billion people interacting over the course of decades, it will always be possible to find case studies that sound like prima facie convincing evidence for most any position. But that never stops people pointing at them as soldiers for whatever viewpoint they want to support and going "See? This proves [sweeping statement] about [significant proportion of the population]".
It's not irrelevant to the discussion, I just thought the vibe of the comment was funny and is the kind of unnecessarily-detailed comment about relatively mundane matters I like finding in TheMotte.
I don't cut my apples either, FWIW, since apples oxidise stupidly quickly (even just leaving them for 2-5 minutes causes light browning) and biting into a full apple is just satisfying in the way the slices aren't.
I virtually always prefer oranges. If I can cast my net wide here and include mandarin oranges in that definition, the best ones I've had were the tangerine cultivars in Jeju Island (hallabongs, cheonhyehyangs, etc), which were just sinfully sweet and almost honey-like, I haven't ever eaten an apple that can compare with that.
Also I have never seen someone talk about eating an apple in such an autistic way as this comment of yours.
Oh, jesus. Speaking of unasked questions, don’t even get me started about the very concept of the hive. We first see it being cultivated in rats, who seem to exhibit the same kind of behaviours that humans do once infected (convulsing, a subsequent desire to spread itself) and then it jumps to patient zero. This opens up a whole can of worms that somehow never gets explored in spite of its implications.
Does this mean there are rats in the hivemind now? Does the hive know everything the rats know as well and partially see the world through their perspective? Since there are estimated to be as many rats as humans in the world doesn’t that mean the hive mind’s perspective is half rat? Or do different species have their own hives? Why aren’t the coyotes and dogs featured in the show ever affected if the virus can effortlessly jump species? Surely at least close relatives such as chimpanzees and bonobos could be affected, etc.
The show has a million things like this that it doesn’t even seem the writers considered, and it makes it feel very sloppy. Also, is there a fuck pile featuring the most genetically fit individuals so the hive can continue to live on? I want to know these things way more than I want to see Carol crashing out for the three millionth time.
1: The Amazing Digital Circus (ongoing). I watched it all from episode 1-7 after hearing a lot about it, expecting to find nothing but mediocrity at best and brainrot at worst. But... I'm ashamed to say I like it. It's a weird mix between a Pixar movie and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
There are some parts that feel unnecessarily fan-servicey (e.g. putting a character in a maid outfit temporarily), and the characters have one too many Ted Lasso-esque heart-to-hearts, but there are good character moments and in general it toes the line between absurd zoomer humour and existential dread quite well. Despite the fact that it's clearly not meant to be overly highbrow (and it isn't), there's also some surprising references hidden in all of the bullshit, such as a brief reference to Searle's Chinese Room which just gets played off as a gag. Overall, it's a pretty decent and fun watch, I see why it achieved internet fame. 7.5/10 enjoyment.
2: Pluribus (2025). Against my better judgement, I watched the season all the way through, and it was somehow more disappointing than the first 3 episodes made it out to be. Oh, this rant is going to be long and angry.
Firstly, the pacing and themes: The series is hilariously slow-paced and spends a large amount of its runtime on expository scenes that primarily serve to illustrate the same handful of themes over and over again, you can see all of the plot developments from a mile away, and it covers all the bog standard fare for a sci-fi hive mind show (asking questions about the value of individualism vs collectivism, about if it's worth it if the cost of peace is one's selfhood and the loss of these valuable human things that arise from our attempts to reach out to each other, about if a person is ever really "independent", etc). I can't see it as treading much new ground in that regard, aside from the fact that it does so in a far more ponderous and soap-operatic manner than other science fiction. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but I also can't help but think that the people who actually think that the show adventurously breaks new ground are the pseudo-literary kind, the kind who would stay away from anything that they consider as pulp, and who genuinely believe that this concept is a new vehicle through which to tackle these philosophical themes because they would never be seen dead consuming genre fiction.
Secondly, the characterisation: Considering its fans tout it as a character study, there's noticeably little character development. Carol starts the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, and... she ends the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, after a brief period of wilfully deluding herself into believing that Zosia loves her. Pretty much the only dynamic that ends up changing is the newfound presence of Manousos at the end of the season. And most of Carol's (circular) character arc, far from redeeming her, seems to paint her as a worse character than you initially thought she was; initially it's possible to think of her as steadfastly principled in spite of her abrasive, aggressive nature, but the second she finds out that the hive can't convert her without her consent she immediately embraces pure hedonism, and goes so far as to have sex with a member of the hive (something she hypocritically criticises Koumba for doing earlier on in the show). The second she finds out again she can be converted by means of her frozen eggs, a plot point that makes zero sense for various reasons (including the fact that induced pluripotent stem cells can be made from virtually any bodily cell and germ cells are actually some of the worst candidates for stem cell creation due to the fact they only contain half the genome), she reverts to her original stance on the hive. It reveals that her opposition to the hive was not out of any kind of principle or selflessness, but out of her own self-interest. By the end of the season, I genuinely could not think of a single thing to like about her - she started out as a miserable Karen who you might have been able to argue had principles, and that argument gets eroded so heavily throughout the course of the season such that there isn't anything to like by the time the season is done. And she's so stuck in a holding pattern that the season leaves no room for her character growth.
Thirdly and finally, the visuals. In spite of an insane per episode budget of $15 million, many of the shots just look bad. There are multiple scenes that are clearly and obviously greenscreened: the rooftop scene in Episode 5 (which is so ugly it looks like a certain shot from The Room), as well as Kusimayu's conversion scene, Manousos and Carol's fight scene, and the scene with Carol and Zosia in "Thailand" in Episode 9 just look awful. And apparently the rooftop scene was by far the most costly scene in the show! Some other scenes were shot on location and look fine, but some scenes require such terrible VFX, are so expensive and yet are so irrelevant to the plot that it boggles my mind why they even attempted such a shot in the first place. Frankly, it's so obsessed with its cool visual concepts that it almost feels like the point of the story: Karolina Wydra flying a plane, the hive emptying out an entire supermarket and coordinating a large cast of extras to "fill it out" again, Carol's rooftop scene, etc; the show often feels like it's visuals-first and plot-second. There is so much pointless VFX and so much shooting across multiple continents with many extras, and that's a stark difference compared with Breaking Bad, which had little VFX, a small budget, minimal sets, etc, and managed a 10-13 month turnover between seasons. Meanwhile Pluribus is going to take a long time apparently despite being greenlit for a second season from the get-go. What does any of this actually ever get you?
In other words, I'm disappointed. I liked Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and had high hopes for this, but this isn't it. 5/10 enjoyment, basically the show equivalent of drinking water.
There are country- and culture-specific ones all over the internet.
For South Korea, there's Dale's blog; he's a Korean temple-obsessed autist who provides extremely exhaustive coverage of temples in South Korea, there are hundreds upon hundreds of posts where he talks about their history, provides photographs and rates them on a one to ten scale. He has also put together lists where he details the ones most worth visiting, such as this post and this post.
For China, Nick in China's youtube channel is a good resource. There are also twitter accounts devoted solely to cataloguing Chinese architecture, such as this one. Though researching China is not easy at all and I ended up having to go down Chinese sources sometimes - the Chinese government puts together rather exhaustive lists of culturally and historically important sites called the "Major Sites Protected for their Historical and Cultural Value at the National Level", and they're quite good. Here is the list for Shanxi province.
If you're interested in Greek and Roman sites, Scenic Routes To The Past is a good youtube channel for that. It's a travel channel run by Garret Ryan, who also runs the history channel toldinstone, and it's quite extensive in covering Greco-Roman historical buildings and remains while providing historical context.
Also, this isn't for any specific destination, but Antiokhos in the West's twitter is generally a gold mine for fascinating historical sites. And if researching for a country you’re unfamiliar with, starting with the UNESCO world heritage list is never a bad idea.
So I'm making this with the disclaimer that the countries I have travelled to at this point include the following: Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Northern Italy (so, no Rome and Sicily), Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, South Korea, and Northern China. Note I cannot comment on other areas like Egypt, the UK, Spain, Greece, Southern China, Japan, India, or Cambodia.
With all that out of the way here's my list of favourite historical things I've seen (that are not in China, if you include the China ones the list becomes a good bit longer). It's a small list of favourites because I'm picky.
1: Sainte-Chapelle, France. I need to provide the disclaimer that I was not generally very impressed by Paris - it was rather chaotic and seedy, far from the romantic vibe it attempts to cultivate in tourist adverts, and I hear things have only gotten worse since I visited. But Sainte-Chapelle is the one thing in the city I really think justifies travelling there, and it does so stunningly; it's a 1238 Gothic cathedral with a lower and upper chapel, the latter of which is covered from top to toe in stained glass depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ, Ezekiel and Job, Genesis and so on. When the light hits the chapel at the right angle the interior looks positively kaleidoscopic. It's a small chapel, it's not large at all compared to many of the others in Europe, but it's so good I would say that if you travel to any historic site in Europe you should make it this one.
2: Changdeokgung Palace, South Korea. This is a rather out-of-left-field one, I don't think most people would put the Seoul palaces on the top of their list, but I would. I even prefer it to the Forbidden City, to be honest, which I don't think is a popular opinion. I went here in winter and had the palace grounds almost entirely to myself. It's an elegant, mazelike early 17th century palace painted in bright red and teal, with a throne hall that's adorned with paintings of uniquely Korean iconography such as pear blossoms and the Irworobongdo five peaks. But what really sold this one for me was the hidden garden at the back of the palace that I don't think most people ever find their way to; you have to pay an extra fee to go there, but it adds a lot of depth to the experience. It's so big it represents 60% of the palace, it's full of very naturalistic garden design and gorgeously framed pavilions and ponds, it contains what used to be the Korean royal library, and it's also full of cats (supposedly they have been there ever since a Joseon Dynasty king became an inverterate cat lover, I'm not joking). It's worth it if you can see this one off peak season, it needs to be serene.
3: Mausoleum of Emperor Khai Dinh, Vietnam. Vietnam is one of the most overstimulating and chaotic places I've been to, it is not for the faint-hearted, but it's also got some incredible things. This mausoleum is by far the youngest historical site on the list, hailing from the early 20th century during the final tumultuous years of the Nguyen Dynasty, and it was built as the tomb of an emperor who was largely a puppet of the French. But it's on here largely because its architectural style is one of the most unique things I've seen, and you will never find it anywhere else in the world. It's an eclectic East-meets-West hybrid of French and Vietnamese architecture, and it doesn't do so by mixing in French and Vietnamese-styled structures into the same complex, rather the whole mausoleum looks like a perfect midpoint between the two disparate architectural styles. It also features more modern construction techniques such as the usage of concrete and steel, and somehow makes all of it work seamlessly. Elements like neoclassical pilasters, pillars and arches sit comfortably alongside reliefs and paintings of dragons, Asian tomb statues, carved Confucian sayings and porcelain mosaics. The dragon-and-cloud mural on the ceiling of the mausoleum is a particular highlight, it's quite incredible.
If including China, include the Great Wall, Yungang Grottoes, Shuanglin Temple, and Terracotta Army. There are a few others that nearly make it but don't. For example Venice might have made it on here, but ultimately I thought it was too touristy and shoulder-to-shoulder crowded for me to be able to truthfully say that it was experientially special for me. It was very beautiful but it also felt like being in an ant farm, which degraded the experience. I would still say to visit because it's Venice, you have to, but it still won't be on the list.
I'll end this with another disclaimer - other people probably won't agree with my list and this kind of thing is obviously rather subjective. Ultimately the best way to refine your travel list is to just research a lot.
China is definitely one of the best places in the world for ancient history, I’ve only made one trip there and yet it already contains more than half of my favourite historical sites. And this is coming from someone who’s travelled quite abundantly. Shanxi province, in particular, is probably the part of East Asia with the most preserved history.
Though I will say if you ever go, brush up on that Mandarin Chinese, that will be an obstacle. Barely anybody speaks anything but Sinitic languages and it's likely you'll have to use a translate app at many points. Also, be flexible, be tolerant and don’t take shit too seriously. This is good advice for travelling anywhere, but China in particular has a tendency to induce culture shock.
Thank you, that's very flattering. The Great Wall picture is one of my favourites of the entire trip, I devoted about an entire day to getting all the colours right.
There's another photo I really want to work on involving a vendor perched on a plank on the side of the wall, far above the valley below, but I've been holding off because it'll probably involve yet another marathon editing session.
It was exceptional. Not always an easy travel, but the immense sense of age and scale you get in China is just unparalleled anywhere else in East Asia. There's also a whole lot of culture and it's not difficult at all to find active religious and ritual practice (Yonghe Temple in particular had so many chanting monks inside its halls).
I keep meaning to write a longform post about it but just get busy and sidetracked. Someday soon, maybe.
Been trying my hand at proper photo editing this week. Over Christmas I took thousands of shots in RAW format, whittled them down to a chosen hundred, and am now only starting to edit them properly. I've been taking it quite seriously, checking the histogram as I go along for dynamic range, trying to do proper colour balancing, and so on. It's quite surprising how long it takes; it's not uncommon for me to spend hours on a photo before I'm satisfied.
Here is an album of my completed photos thus far. There's not much there yet due to how time-consuming the process is; currently I have seven photos down, with ninety-three more to go.
Agreed on the high quality of the fruit (and poor quality of the meat). Didn't try any mangoes in Vietnam, but the pineapples and coconuts I had there were so very fresh. Fresher than anywhere else I've been. I had at least one coconut every day with my meal and it didn't matter where I went - regardless of if it was a sit-down restaurant or some tattered stall on the side of the street they were delicious.
I very consistently had a good time with Vietnamese desserts, which was unexpected. I was a big fan of the che when I was there, and there's a gigantic variety of these sweet soups; there's even one featuring a savoury pork dumpling (che bot loc heo quay) that actually kind of works in spite of the flavour contrast.
Never been to Cambodia, though Siem Reap is a destination I've had on the backburner for a while now.
It's funny, you just listed the main Vietnamese dishes/drinks I would really consider a must-try. Vietnamese coffee is truly incredible albeit a bit sweet (though understandably so given the use of Robusta), and southern-style banh mi is the only food I tried that I would call great. I only had a short layover in HCMC when I went, and I'm very glad I ventured into the city just for that one banh mi stall.
I suspect I would have liked Vietnamese food more had I spent more time in southern Vietnam; the more south I went, the more flavourful the food became. I'm typically more accustomed to heavily-spiced food, and much of northern Vietnam seems to enjoy food that's perhaps even blander than Cantonese cuisine.
The answer to this hugely depends on what "Chinese food" we're talking about here.
China has a ridiculous number of regional cuisines, so many in fact that one attempt to categorise them all identifies 63 cuisines. Throughout the trip I was only able to scratch the surface of only 3 cuisines in that list - Beijing, Shanxi and Central Shaanxi food, and they're quite different from the mostly Cantonese-inspired (and increasingly Sichuan-inspired) Chinese food in the West. It's different enough that all of these cuisines barely feature rice as a staple grain since it doesn't grow well at all in the desolate and harsh climate of the north.
Shanxi food is by far my favourite - the dishes there are very vinegar-heavy, and it's something the province specialises in. The vinegars there are made from sorghum, barley, and peas, and they're ridiculously varied and malty and deep in flavour (I actually got to see some being actively fermented the traditional way in an old Ming/Qing dynasty building). Every restaurant in the region will provide a variety of vinegars to pour onto each dish, as well as a large pot of chilli oil. The food in this province is flavourful and hearty, and many of these dishes aren't well represented outside of China, I highly recommend it. Though there are dishes that some laowai should maybe avoid unless particularly adventurous - I saw dishes featuring rabbit head being served in places like Datong, which I imagine would turn off a large number of Westerners.
On the other end of the spectrum, Beijing food is not all that fantastic. I find that their dishes tend to lack depth and flavour, and while I wasn't hugely excited for the cuisine there in the first place I was still surprised at how little I cared for it. It's not bad at all, but their flavour preferences don't excite me. Peking duck is still good though, and another thing that I really enjoyed there was their jianbing, a sort of savoury stuffed crepe popular in that part of China.
Something that really unexpectedly blew me away when I was in China was their yoghurts. Nai pizi and suannai are less sour than Western yoghurts and way more texturally satisfying, and in Shanxi province they come in weird flavours such as sea buckthorn and vinegar (I am not joking when I say it works; some vinegars in Shanxi are downright caramelly in flavour and actually complement the taste of yoghurt really well). They run circles around Western yoghurts all day, and being back in Australia now I can no longer find them anywhere, something which I am extremely disappointed by. In addition, China also has the most comforting drinks - their coffee is good, their tea is super fragrant, and their soy milk is downright delectable. I don't even like soy milk usually, but the Chinese really know how to do it right.
All this is to say that overall I really liked Chinese food (it was certainly way better than Vietnamese, come at me), and I don't just think it's as good as western MSG slop, I think it's often better. But food in China is far from a singular cuisine, the dishes in different parts of the country are nothing alike, and it's not really possible to say whether real Chinese food is "good" or "bad" without specifying which Chinese food we're talking about.
Not really, for a few other reasons - for example there's a pretty distinct lack of homelessness and drug addiction in Chinese cities, and the country is extremely safe, which actually makes it feel rather non-dystopic compared to many Western cities I've been to (which are often very visibly riddled with these problems). The country also doesn't feel very totalitarian compared to many other one-party states of its ilk, it is surveilled but police presence isn't heavy and you can generally travel quite freely. I would not call China third-world as a whole, I'm unsure where I would slot it within that definition because it's not really easy to categorise along that axis.
There are elements that you can pattern-match to a Hollywood dystopia (like having to scan your bags when you enter the subway), but as a whole China doesn't feel "low-life" or dystopic as much as it feels contradictory. People love trotting out extremely polarised and sensationalised views of China - people will either say it's "living in the future" or that it is a CCP hellhole that's about to collapse, but I don't think what I saw actually matches either view particularly well. I think people can come to these conclusions because they focus in on aspects that already confirm a preexisting view - there are things that it's extremely good at, and there are areas where it lags. In general it seems the Chinese government and people have a very different view of what their country should look like, as opposed to the West.
I just got back from a December trip to northern China. It's a country that's modernised in a very non-Western way, such that it appears like a weird cyberpunky juxtaposition of hypermodernity coexisting with third-world elements - the streets are very clean, robots in hotels deliver stuff to your door, face recognition for check-in and boarding is a thing in some airports, the whole country uses pretty much only payment apps, etc, but the AQI can be bad, the public toilets are dirty, taxis and some train stations smell like cigarette smoke, nobody speaks anything but Mandarin (or some other Sinitic language), there are touts who will try to sell you shit, and so on.
Personally, I think it's an amazing destination. I would go back in a heartbeat if I could. I have so many superlatives for it, and I won't forget being almost completely alone on the Great Wall with mist rising over the surrounding mountains like some Chinese ink painting, or stepping into an ancient grotto cave the size of a cathedral with thousands of religious carvings covering every square inch of its walls, or suddenly encountering a colourful festival in the streets of a Qing dynasty walled town. There is an astounding amount of history and culture there, I think it boasts by far the greatest density of genuinely historical stuff in Asia.
I have a travel report lined up and pictures to upload, but I'm suffering from severe jet lag and am too lazy to do that right now.
I don't really disagree with that, rigidly planning out every moment of your vacation is an absolute and utter slog. But I never really have an exceptionally clear idea of what I would want to do on a day by day basis; I don't plan things out for the purposes of prescriptively defining what my vacation should look like. My kind of planning looks more like keeping a register of what's there so I can make an informed decision of where to go in the moment (which doesn't exclude exploratively walking around and seeing what's there, either).
It's also particularly important to understand what's in your vicinity when you're vacationing in a more rural area, since unlike a city it's harder to just walk around and stumble across things spontaneously.
That being said, I do get the sense I like to travel in a significantly more hectic way than most people. I get bored very easily just kind of lazing around for a significant portion of the time; beach and cruise vacations are exceptionally unappealing to me.
Personally I find planning for a holiday pretty entertaining. I'm travelling on the 15th too; going to China, and the number of places I have written down is ridiculous and I will probably will not be able to visit them all. If I were in Madrid I would at least visit the following:
- Royal Palace of Madrid (official residence of the Spanish royal family; reserve a ticket in advance for this one)
- Church of Saint Anthony of the Germans (17th century baroque church with some spectacular floor-to-ceiling frescoes, you can't really miss this one in my opinion)
- Royal Basilica of Saint Francis the Great (18th century church, baroque style, possesses the fourth largest dome in Europe. Here are some of the paintings you can find on the interior).
There's also the Temple of Debod, an Egyptian temple moved straight from Aswan to Madrid, the Cerralbo Museum, a private mansion containing the private art collection of the Marquis of Cerralbo, alongside a bunch of other museums and palaces that are worth visiting if you have time.
If you're willing, a trip to Toledo is just a 30 minute train ride away. It's a historic town that's on the UNESCO register; its centrepiece is the Primate Cathedral of Saint Mary of Toledo, a High Gothic church (one of the only three in Spain) featuring a gigantic carved altarpiece. I'd say it may be worth your time; there are many other historic sites, synagogues and even former mosques in the city from the Moorish period. Just walking around the old town and checking out whatever you can would probably be rather fun.
So which will it be? Do you want $100,000 in 1959 or $100,000 today?
$100,000 in 1959, please and thank you.
This probably comes off as unnecessarily cantankerous, but I fervently refuse to use DoorDash, UberEats, Hungry Panda or any other kind of food courier service since 1: I am annoyed by their """bikes""" on the footpaths all the time speeding by pedestrians at rates that may hurt someone if a collision occurred, and 2: I am steadfastly convinced that this refusal to actually go outside, touch grass and do things for the sake of pure "convenience" is part of what is wrong with people today. In similar fashion, I don't order anything online and don't drive either. I take the train and walk everywhere in the city. I do this even when working late and when it would be inconvenient to get food later in an early-morning city like Sydney.
When other people go out, they barely seem like they're even there. I'm not immune to this myself since the superstimulus is strong, but every single person on the subways and sidewalks is stuck on their phones, moving at the speed of a Roomba, and possessing almost zero awareness of the people around them. I walk an order of magnitude faster than them and want to slap them on the back of their heads sometimes. Everyone's caught up in their own world, they're so utterly atomised, it's increasingly rare to have any kind of spontaneous pleasant interaction with people when you're going out aside from what's strictly necessary; mostly I'm only capable of finding the kind of scripted, perfunctory interactions with a cashier or service industry worker that nobody wants. When there are spontaneous interactions, it's people asking me for help finding directions or carrying their bags for them (or other self-serving reasons for pursuing interaction), or some insane belligerent person who I don't want around me, it's always something inconvenient or abrasive and barely ever something that improves my day. The world around me feels empty even when it's not, most of the people I come across may as well be zombies, and it decreases my own motivation to actually engage with it. Nobody is actually interested in talking to other people. The sci-fi authors of yesteryear writing about themes like loss of humanity were right; their only problem was failing to make their stories sufficiently boring and insipid to mirror reality.
Things were not like this just a generation or two ago (depending on where you live, in many parts of Asia and particularly rural parts of the West you can still find the last remnants of a more social dynamic). While there are benefits to technological convenience and the current-day Industrial Society which I happily make use of myself and take for granted, such as TheMotte, with the exception of medical science I'm not convinced it has made people happier or more fulfilled on the whole - if anything, I lean the opposite. And I am definitely certain that for any average, reasonably healthy person it doesn't outweigh the benefits of owning all that excess wealth.
Hmm, I think it's definitely true the average (as in the mean) man does more dangerous and arduous work than the average woman. The workplace fatality rate for men in 2023 (that was the year I could find consistent numbers for) was ~7-8x the maternal death rate that year.
Not only that, but the workplace fatality rate for men exceeds the maternal death rate + the female workplace fatality rate by a huge amount. For example, I looked into the BLS numbers surrounding this a while back and the number of men killed during 2018 by occupational injuries caused by transportation incidents, contact with objects and equipment, falls, slips and trips, exposure to harmful substances or environment, and fires and explosions is 4,119 men killed. This excludes injuries caused by "Violence and other injuries by persons or animal" as that category includes deaths by self-inflicted injuries on the job. Even excluding that, the number of male deaths exceeds the number of women killed in ALL occupational deaths (413 women) AND maternal deaths (658 women) added together (1,071 women).
Just to give you a sense of how large that margin is, in 2018, the number of men killed in occupational-related transportation incidents alone (1,929 men) exceeds the number of women killed in all occupational deaths and maternal deaths added together.
However, I'm less convinced that the average (as in the median) man does as much dangerous work. About 65% of men work some kind of management/service industry/sales job, and I don't think these jobs cause as much pain as birthing a baby. Even if the do, there's just as many women working them as men.
Define "dangerous". Work is something you do for most of your life, whereas childbirth is a very transient condition (especially today). Management/service industry/sales jobs are highly disparate types of work with highly differing demands, the stressors encountered there definitely impact health, and just because women are as likely to participate in that large category of work does not mean they are subject to all the same stressors. It's been brought up fairly often in the context of the wage gap, but even within the same occupational categories your median man is likely to work more, take more strenuous and demanding jobs, and prioritise flexibility less, which results in women having higher satisfaction with their jobs (a consistent finding within the literature).
Occupational deaths do happen in these jobs; proper numbers are hard to come by but have a gander at this BLS list of fatalities by occupation. Deaths in private sector jobs under categories like "professional services" (585 deaths), "financial activities" (108 deaths), "information" (31 deaths), "administrative and waste services" (497 deaths), "educational and health services" (168 deaths), "leisure and hospitality" (253 deaths) etc collectively exceeded maternal deaths in 2018. No breakdown by sex is provided, but as mentioned in the previous section, women can only make up 413 of these deaths at maximum, suggesting a large sex disparity in mortality within these occupations. But even discarding that, the indirect health effects of constant stress results in elevated levels of cortisol over a long period of time, poor sleep, and so on, increasing risks of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, infections, strokes, etc. These kinds of pressures are endemic in many kinds of professional and service industries and is not a trivial source of health issues; for example WHO made an attempt at estimating the number of ischemic heart disease and stroke-related deaths linked to long working hours for the year 2016, finding that the worldwide number of deaths from long working hours was 745,000 from only these two causes of mortality. Men made up 72% of the deaths, and if you do the maths that means men represented 536,400 of these deaths and women represented 208,600. In contrast, worldwide general maternal mortality for the year 2016 accounted for an estimated 309,000 deaths. And there are undoubtedly more sources of death from long working hours than just those, and there are other job-related stressors which don't just amount to things like "death by lobotomy via a falling metal pipe". It is likely not the case that job-related mortality in even these kinds of management/service jobs is less of an issue than maternal mortality is for your average American woman of the same social stratum, and it is not the case that the prevalence of this mortality is the same between the sexes.
The costs of obligation manifest in many ways which aren't immediately obvious. In general I tend to think people overweight things that are obviously unpleasant but transient compared to stressors that cumulatively accrete over one's lifespan - and in general I think the latter tends to have a greater overall impact on health and wellbeing in spite of the fact that they're often overlooked as sources of mortality. Attrition is important; it's the difference between feeling intense temporary grief vs. clinical depression. Unexpectedly getting kidney stones, while more painful in the moment, would not impact my overall life as much as being stuck in a job I dislike. I have a sedentary job which sometimes requires me to work a lot of overtime and weekends during crunch time (in fact I did so earlier this month), if asked to make a tradeoff between spending large swaths of my life slogging away at an inflexible, stressful job and giving birth to 1.5 kids at any given point in my life I'm inclined to say that at least personally, I think the latter may be a superior value proposition. That's not to trivialise any of it, but I don't think this conception of unpleasantness actually aligns with how people experience it for the most part.
EDIT: added more
So, has anyone else watched Vince Gilligan's new series Pluribus yet, and if so, what do you think of it?
Personally, I'm currently a bit lukewarm on it so far. It's still early days so I won't pass premature judgement on it, but a common complaint is that the show past episode 1 doesn't seem to have enough compelling material per episode to justify its runtime, and frankly I agree. Episodes are long and drawn-out, with much of the second and third episode being focused around a core repeated cycle of "Zosia (or some other stand-in for the hive) tries to do things for Carol" - "Carol gets aggressively angry at Zosia" - "[insert bad thing] happens" - "Carol feels bad" - repeat. The story beats are so repetitive.
I understand that this show is in part meant to be a tone piece and that the long extended shots are meant to build atmosphere, but the vibe isn't good enough to carry the show on its back alone (sometimes the show is so sterile and clean-looking that it comes off almost like stock footage to me), and there are plenty of shows which achieve a thoughtful pace while also moving the plot along in interesting and compelling ways. Severance, season 1 in particular, comes to mind as an example. The problem's not so much that it's slow and more that it's not intriguing, that the extended scenes don't achieve much for how long they are, and that there's a lack of economy in the writing. So many scenes exist to achieve only one goal; e.g. the extended scene where Carol tests the thiopental sodium on herself and watches the footage from it just accomplishes one very simple aim, and yet it takes so long.
My barometer for whether I like a show or not is whether I'm interested to see the next episode, and frankly I could drop this at any point and not really have much of an urge to see what happens next. There's a serious lack of compelling mysteries within the show to drive viewer interest, with the only question I can think of amounting to "How are they going to progress this?" which is a question that moves the focus from something within the story to something outside of it, namely the writers' intentions. In addition, there's so much philosophical ground you could explore (Does disconnecting a member from the hive amount to lobotomy or even murder? Is "de-integrating" the hive, like Carol wants to do, tantamount to killing a hyperconscious, hyperintelligent organism that might have more moral worth, strictly speaking, than any human in existence? And it does claim to be happy), but the show just doesn't engage with much of that. At least, not at the moment.
Carol as a protagonist is quite unagentic, which means that much of the series consists of long sections of her engaging in pointless filler like sleeping on the couch, getting impotently mad at the hivemind, wanting her Sprouts back, etc, while not probing the hive or asking questions that a more interesting protagonist would when placed in such a situation (Episode 4 features more of this, to be fair). A common defence is that her behaviour is realistic given the situation she's put in, but a more important question IMO is if she's a compelling protagonist to watch, and I don't think that's the case - her characterisation and behaviour is paper thin, and she doesn't particularly get up to anything that makes you hugely like her or root for her either. She is demonstrated to be an absolutely miserable person even before the soft apocalypse occurs, and it doesn't make her a particularly enjoyable or interesting character to follow when you're in her shoes all the time.
Yet another element that makes it worse is that she only has a bunch of eternally jovial yes-men to interact with the whole time, and this makes the premise wear thin very quickly. All the interactions feel as deep as a puddle, and this may be the point, but it also makes for a very shallow viewing experience. Most of the other human characters aren't much better either. I was fucking flabbergasted by how easy it was for them to accept life with the hivemind looming over them without thinking too much about what it implied, and in fact outright aggressively attacked anyone who suggested doing anything about it. They seemed almost like ridiculous caricatures, completely in denial, who had been set up just so the writers could knock them down.
I don't think it's a bad show, not yet at least. But the unending positivity towards this show makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills, and I often see such criticisms of the writing being addressed with thin, condescending dismissals along the lines of "You only think the show is uninteresting because you have TikTok brain", or worse, "People don't like Carol because she's a woman" (which is the way the entire Gilligan fandom has been dismissing criticism of the writing of female characters ever since people had the temerity to dislike Skylar White). I'm not saying it's impossible to like the show for valid reasons, but any and all criticism has not been not treated well.
Off the top of my head I have one from East Asia: Mongols > Chinese, Chinese > Vietnamese, Vietnamese > Mongols.
The last of these three is the most tenuous due to persistent ambiguities about the success of the Mongol Empire's first invasion of Vietnam, as well as about whether the Yuan dynasty's later campaigns into Vietnam should be considered Mongol expeditions due to how sinified and multi-ethnic the dynasty and its armies were (though if "Roman armies" are admissible as a coherent ethnic group really anything goes). But it's the best I can do at the moment.
Today I read The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History. I think it makes a very good case in favour of the idea that premodern China was not a stagnant, conservative, pacifistic Confucian state indifferent to warfare as it is usually imagined in popular conceptions, but was actually an exceptionally dynamic place that was receptive to new technologies and ideas both before and after the Renaissance hit Europe. In fact, even after the development of the musket and the Renaissance-style star fort, East Asia was no paper tiger; it adopted and modified European-style firearms quickly, and managed to maintain its military might against Europe until as late as the seventeenth century.
It's well known that while the Chinese developed gunpowder during the Tang and used it in increasingly creative ways during the Song Dynasty (with Europe having come across it relatively late), Europe was the first to refine it into the classical cannon style. What's less known is that guns in China were actually developing concurrently in a similar fashion to those in Europe, growing longer relative to muzzle bore, until the existential wars that rocked the Ming Dynasty ended around 1449 and the Ming enjoyed a long period of peace - meanwhile, warfare in Europe grew progressively more intense. What seems to have been a decisive early Chinese advantage was quickly eroded, and to a large amount of historians on the topic, this is viewed as the beginning of European hegemony.
In reality it's not nearly that simple. Once the Portuguese introduced their cannons to China in the 1510s, the Chinese learned rather quickly from it. During the first Sino-Portuguese war, Chinese artillery was inferior to that of the Portuguese, but the following year the Portuguese suffered a serious loss to the Chinese, with every account of the war suggesting that Chinese artillery had improved to the point that it was a decisive factor in their victory. As the Portuguese attempted to collect water, they were pinned down for an hour by heavy firepower, and after they made it back to their ships Chinese gunners blasted them so fiercely that Portuguese guns were incapable of answering. This marks the beginning of a rapid military modernisation in East Asia that brought them well into parity with Europeans during 1522 through the early 1700s.
The Chinese seem to have innovated not only in the design of artillery, but they also innovated in many serious aspects of how firearms were used, the most notable being their usage of drilling and coordination. Most historians seem to think that volley fire for firearms was developed twice; the first being in Japan during the 1570s, and the second being in the Netherlands in the 1590s. But Japan was in fact not the progenitor; volley formations have a long history in China, being described in texts as early as 801 (it initially used crossbows). After the introduction of muskets this strategy was applied very quickly - in 1560 there are already military texts that demonstrate the Ming Dynasty were firing arquebuses in volleys; it is likely this was a common strategy before then.
Possibly the East Asian state most affected by the musket, though, was none other than Korea, who developed advanced musket strategies after the Imjin War and ended up with one of the most effective musket armies during the seventeenth century. Their musketeers were exceptionally lethal in battle with extremely high levels of accuracy, and were feared by pretty much everyone participating in the East Asian sphere at the time. Two of the most expansionary European forces in this period took on East Asians on the battlefield - the Dutch against the Ming and the Russians against the Qing and Korea - and they both lost. When the Dutch actually ended up facing off against the Ming loyalists, of an initial army of 240 European soldiers only 80 escaped, with the remainder either hacked to death, drowned, or captured. European military advantage over East Asia was actually a very recent development in history.
While Europeans had big advantages in defensive fortifications and shipbuilding which the East couldn't quite emulate, Qing China in particular had far superior logistics, with the Kangxi Emperor's careful planning being instrumental in defeating the Russians during the 17th century. This advantage allowed the Qing to consolidate their power and establish an unprecedented period of dominance in East Asia during the high Qing period - which ended up being a double-edged sword. Without external threats, the Qing developed a gay and retarded bureaucracy incapable of responding in an effective centralised manner. Britain came back newly industrialised and pretty much wiped the floor with Chinese forces during the Opium War, and while Japan centralised and threw out their ancien regime (and, as an aside, destroyed a ton of traditional Japanese culture as a side effect of this culture shift, involving the iconoclastic destruction of many feudal castles and historical Buddhist temples), China was still funding armies that had been established in the seventeenth century which had metastasised into powerful interest groups in spite of their effective uselessness. Their shipbuilding and artillery after the Self-Strengthening Movement was actually superior to Japan's, but their internal politics were so dysfunctional they were unable to mount a capable response during the Sino-Japanese war. The rotting corpse of the late Qing held on until 1911, and at that point China was a source of global entertainment and derision: an article from the NYT in 1895 claimed "China is an anachronism, and a filthy one on the face of the earth". Well, it certainly didn't remain that way for long.
As an aside I'm quite stunned by how ridiculously advanced the Song Dynasty was for its time, to the point that I think it represents one of the most dizzying heights achieved by a premodern civilisation. More people lived in urban centres during the Song period than at any other time until the late eighteenth century, and 10% of the country was urbanised, a metric that Europe would not reach until 1800. Their production of iron around 1100 was equivalent to the output generated by the entire continent of Europe in 1700, using refined techniques that would only occur in Europe centuries later. The Song utilised automation in textile production to an extent that exceeded medieval and even early modern Europe, in fact it wasn't even until the eighteenth century that Europe achieved such devices.
There were significant advances in gunpowder, printing, anatomy, the discovery of tree dating, rain and snow gauges, rotary cutting discs, the knowledge of magnetic declination, thermoremanent magnetisation, magnetism in medicine, relief maps, all kinds of mathematical innovations and discoveries (including effective algebraic notation and the Pascal triangle of binomial coefficients), steam sterilisation, pasteurisation (of wine), artificial induction of pearls in oysters, effective underwater salvage techniques, all kinds of silk processing devices, including reeling machines, multiple-spindle twisting frames, and others, smallpox inoculation, the discovery of urinary steroids, the use of the toothbrush and toothpaste, a method for the precipitation of copper from iron, the chain drive, the understanding of the camera obscura phenomenon, and new types of clock mechanisms.
They may even have been the first people to become anatomically modern, developing the "modern overbite"; for context, throughout most of history people's top and bottom incisors met tooth to tooth instead of overlapping each other, once food started being cut into small pieces this changed. In Europe this shift only started occuring during the eighteenth century when the fork and knife came into common usage, during the Song Dynasty it was already common at least among the upper class.
Anyway, it's a rather interesting book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in a comparative history of warfare.
problem_redditor
5mo ago
I don't think the chemical plant was disused, rather it was emitting waste into the water and it's not implausible that it emitted fumes as well. Apparently the crew were getting allergic reactions on their faces as well during production.
Admittedly this is based on a statement by the sound designer Vladimir Sharun, and it's not quite clear how supported his claim is. But it's a thing that's been weaved into the mythology of the movie.
That study is awful, please read this article explaining its bad methodology. They used a 5 point scale that indicated likelihood to engage in any given activity. The question that's usually focused in on as the source of this claim was like question 35 on a long quiz asking if you would force a woman to do something sexual, where a question about whether you would rape a woman had just been asked in the same quiz, creating the implication that this question was something different that wasn't rape and obviously making people want to give rape the lowest likelihood.
As to how that five-point measure got made into the 1-in-3 statistic? Anything that wasn't recorded as a 1 was taken as a "yes". This is frankly a ridiculous method of coding that data and inflates the percentage by a crazy amount. The answers provided on that scale were basically "No, Yes, Yes, Yes, or Yes." Also "the men in Edwards et al (2014) were in between two to seven times less likely to say they would rape a woman than kill someone if they could, depending on how one interprets their answers. That's a tremendous difference; one that might even suggest that rape is viewed as a less desirable activity than murder." I suppose we live in a murder culture too, then.
In other words, it's an incredibly sketchy study with such awful methodology that I can't help but regard it as being intentionally bad just to inflate the percentage.
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