Pigeon
coo coo
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User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
2d ago
If you really want to jumpstart science in East Asia you could potentially do so via reference to Taoism instead.
Pigeon
coo coo
3d ago
Re: the Duluth model, I had to look this up and by the Wikipedia article it's been much criticised. I'd be a tiny bit more sympathetic about your complalnt there, save that I read this story in the news very recently. Ex-partner attacks woman with axe, sets fire to house, drowns himself. "Why this foolish notion that women are at risk from men?" you ask, and I point to this. Except for some guys who really are walking around with "I'm trouble" labelled on their face, how do you know that if you take up with Joe and then break up with Joe, Joe is not going to try and axe-murder you? It's a gamble!
I have to say that while I'm sympathetic to part of this, things like this model likely contribute to a zeitgeist that overinflates the danger that women face and underestimate the danger than men do.
I recall trying to find statistics about intimate partner homicides years ago (using US data), and found that while women do get killed significantly more than men do in these situations, it was more on the order of male victimisation rate at ~60% of the female level (which seems to be already down from 75% in 1992, at least according to this), rather than orders of magnitude more. Looking at other developed countries doesn't help either, since while it isn't as close as the US, IIRC it's still "only" on the magnitude of, like, 20-50%. The statistical data doesn't fit with the far higher subjective concerns that women have with getting murdered by their spouses. (I found this in a brief search, which suggests a skew of 2:1 in female:male victimisation globally on page 14, but doesn't seem to distinguish between intimate partner homicide and other family-related homicide.)
I could be convinced that generally, murders aside, women are orders of magnitude more at risk of severe bodily harm than men do without dying, simply due to biology, but I'm not sure the data supports that women are astronomically more at risk than men are from intimate partner homicide than men are, and I think men barely think about their partners murdering them (at least compared to women thinking about the same).
Pigeon
coo coo
3d ago
For instance, this was probably my favourite painting in the exhibition, and I would have purchased it instantly if it was for sale. But it looks like shit, honestly, on the website, because the screen loses the illusion of depth that makes the painting so compelling.
I am far less versed in visual arts than my partner is, but even then I recall seeing a few art pieces like this when I last went to an exhibit in Nagasaki; a painting of some cascades that really looked like like the water was jumping off the canvas, and a piece of a mortuary that I could practically feel the gritty texture of the dirt.
I can believe that the skill for working these small miracles is something that is slowly lost in the age of digitisation and mass consumerism.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
The hard part, though, is that if that is true, if you know for certain that they are eating their seed corn, then my friend you have tremendous alpha and should put all your money betting on Microsoft going belly up.
Surely even if this is true, predicting when this will happen is still incredibly difficult?
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
Many of China's once-ghost cities and trains-to-nowhere are a good example.
This is, at best, a mixed example.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
Oh, that looks like obvious malicious clown garbage. He has a broken leg. Why is he in the hospital for over a month with a broken leg? Unless that is understating his injuty to a hilarious extent, a broken leg is a couple hours of outpatient care and then getting released.
What? I admit to being possibly out of date regarding orthopaedics best practice, but my impression is that most tibial +/- fibular fractures require operative management. Isolated fibular shaft fractures maybe? Even for conservative management it's going to be a cast and crutches and no weight-bearing on that leg for weeks, with at least a couple clinic visits. Certainly not to the extent that you can be so blasé as to say "couple hours of outpatient care then getting released"!
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
euthanasia trucks
Why is this something that "no one seriously thinks happened"?
I mean, this happens to this day.
math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed)
I think it would be quite mean to ask a high school student to figure out/invent how to derive the Taylor series of a function ab initio.
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
This is often not the case and is counterintuitive for many.
I recall when I was a student, an ICU consultant asked us to guess whether most people who go to ICU die from the initial resuscitation or escalation of intensive treatment; the time during of intensive treatment; or the time when we try to step down patients from intensive care; he was impressed at the few of us who guessed the last. Turns out we’re quite good at maintaining signs of life with technology, even as we are helpless to fix an otherwise nonviable body — at least if you’re stable enough to get into ICU and didn’t have your chest caved in by a bus.
This probably makes more sense once you try to guess about how often ICU doctors have to have difficult family meetings with patients’ families about withdrawing life support, versus patients dying while on life support.
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
I don’t know how to interpret chasing off famine relief with gunboats… it far exceeds any of the evidence for the intentionality of the Maoist famines.
Not sure about this one as IIRC starving people were killed when trying to access grain in warehouses during the Great Leap Forward, and one of the reasons why the famine was so horrific was because Mao and co. continued to export food for political gain and refused foreign aid for at least a year or two.
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
It should obvious to anyone that the US in 2025 is not China ca. 1930.
China circa 1946, more like. The Nanjing decade was relatively stable for most Chinese people; the KMT lost an enormous amount of credibility from the general population during WW2. Mao has explicitly referenced this when speaking to Japanese officials.
TENS is mostly commonly associated with skin (it's in the name, after all) and maybe the lungs but in cases with intestinal involvement the intestinal epithelium sloughs off as well. So if you're willing to stretch the claim...
It's also not an infection but a hypersensitivity reaction (potentially from an infection), but losing the epidermis does pretty heavily predispose to (further) infection.
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
Maybe it makes your skin fall off and your guts come out while leaving you in crippling agony (I'm like 50% certain there's an actual disease like this, but it's probably something that happens to premature infants. That, or acute radiation poisoning I suppose).
TENS might be close enough?
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
*Reading it is making me even more contemptuous of Luddites than I was before. If, as Ted Kacsynski would have us believe, the industrial revolution was a disaster for the human race, why stop at 1750?
Didn’t kaczynsci think that we should return to pre-civilisation?
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo ago
I think I'd be more wary about calling Confucianism a religion or religion-like without bounding what is meant by religion and Confucianism respectively.
Speaking of language, the Chinese term for Confucianism is 儒教 (rújiào) - the former character means 'scholar', and the latter means 'teaching', 'school', or sometimes 'religion'. Confucianism is the teaching of the scholars. I bring this up because it's similar to the names of schools that are uncontestedly considered 'religions' in the West.
It is true that Confucius has a temple, and he was himself strict about the preservation of the rites of Zhou and other traditional religious institutions, and many aspects of Confucian thought has seeped into Chinese folk religion; the Classic of Changes literally originates from treatises on divination...
But when I read most works in the Confucian school I get a different sense -- that it is "religious" to the extent that all political systems and philosophies in classical antiquity are religious, and it is less overtly religious than many of its contemporaries!
樊遲問知。子曰。務民之義、敬鬼神而遠之、可謂知矣。
Analects 6:22. Fan Chi asked what constituted wisdom. The Master said, "To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom."
子不語怪，力，亂，神。
Analects 7:21. The subjects on which the Master did not talk, were: extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings.
On the other hand, many of the Socratic dialogues reference gods and the divine much more directly than the Confucian classics do, but I think we would still consider Euthyphro more of a philosophical work than a religious one, right?
Regardless the ancients would have drawn less stark a divide than we would regarding the secular and the religious, if they did so at all.
And Confucianism is also -- I think more commonly -- referred to as 儒家 rujia (家 jia, lit. family/home, in this case meaning "school of thought"). Other contemporary examples of this usage include 法家 fajia (the Legalists) and 墨家 mojia (the Mohists), part of the Hundred Schools of Thought which we identify nowadays as primarily political or philosophical schools rather than religious ones, even if these philosophical schools were bound at the time to various superstitions and religions as well.
This is not to obfuscate the mystical parts of Confucianism, of course. The Classics referencing rites implies a certain belief in the validity of those rites, and we have further developments (e.g. 理學 lixue, often translated as neo-Confucianism) that have a more explicit focus on the metaphysical. But I would still put it as that Confucian thought is a largely humanistic school of moral philosophy that was nevertheless grounded in a superstitious and religious society, and thus utilises the assumptions and language of that society.
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo ago
Have you seen pictures of any large Chinese city in 1990 and compared it to the same city in 2020?
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo ago
I’m guessing this is a reference to the early Ming treasure fleets, in which case this is inaccurate as the treasure fleets were not exploring as much as they were re-establishing relations, and the ships were built for such.
Or this could be a reference to a brief period of theoretical Chinese naval superiority in technology between the Song and the Ming, before the Ming went all sea-ban and lost a lot of knowledge about building seaworthy ships.
Pigeon
coo coo
6mo ago
You're right in geological terms, which I definitely missed in the original comment, but I think it's more circumstantial than "high demand for coal". Imperial China, for example, had similar issues with deforestation as Britain did, and had widespread adoption of coal both as a daily fuel and as a metallurgical resource in response to this especially in the Song dynasty; Marco Polo notes the predominance of coal as a fuel, for a European source that's a couple hundred years down the line.
I'm not completely sure why Britain had the need to artificially drain its waterlogged mines while China didn't, despite widespread use of coal. I do recall that the Chinese generally didn't employ shaft mining until quite late, that shaft mines would just be abandoned rather than drained even in the late Qing, and that some Chinese mines had relatively efficient natural drainage that made them less flood-prone; perhaps the geological details of the mines themselves, and the mining techniques necessary for them, were significant factors. I'm also of the impression that viable mines in Britain were able to be operated very close to waterways in a way that e.g. China's (or perhaps other European countries, as well) didn't, which may have lead to different financial bottlenecks.
Speculatively, I also wouldn't be surprised if coal and firewood consumption fell significantly, at least at a per capita level, after the Yuan (14th century or so), which would at least partially explain why there was lower demand for further improvements in mining.
Pigeon
coo coo
6mo ago
men claim to be straight, but constantly joke about fucking femboys, twinks, and trannies
What really?
Pigeon
coo coo
6mo ago
The worst thing was that I was on vacation at the time and couldn't just get someone to prescribe some pred for me on the sly!
Pigeon
coo coo
6mo ago
No, I agree with this; but I think that some European states in the early modern period — France under Louis XIV? — had enough pure state capacity to develop the ability to support free trade, and it still took a little while for ideas about free trade to get expressed. Conversely in China, early Ming China most likely had the state capacity to support free trade, but pointedly decided not to. (Chinese state capacity withered away dramatically over the Ming-Qing period anyway; I am happy to be corrected about the European record.)
I suppose what I mean is that a modern state is necessary but insufficient.
I don't think we disagree, as from what I found men do kill women in relationships anywhere from 2 to 5 times as much, and in fact Wilson and Daly is one of the sources I cited; but given such a low base rate...
Which leads me to think that it might be one (or more) of men under-responding to the danger they're in, women over-estimating the danger they're in, or the self-defence clause is largely true and men really are astronomically less likely to be killed as long as they aren't violent.
For what it's worth, I think the third is almost definitely true to some extent, but I can't imagine it being the entire story, given that intimate partner violence in general also follows a similar trend, at least going by mainstream org press releases (something like 1:3 to 1:4 with likely significant male under-reporting); though there is an interesting part of the literature that contends that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and cases with unilateral domestic violence usually have the woman as the perpetrator, but still finding that violence causing injury (esp. severe injury) is still generally male-dominated, though again not to the extent that we usually assume it is. That aligns with my perception that murders and homicides aside, women are still more likely to be injured purely from biology.
(The review by Straus seems to suggest that actual cases of violence in self-defence are actually quite low:
so I wonder how the >50% self-defence stat for women comes from. Maybe self-reporting?)
Someone could probably do a systematic review on this. I can't imagine that the studies are generally high quality, though.
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