Pigeon
coo coo
No bio...
User ID: 237
Isn't it usually along the Huai? That was the point of division for the Jin (晉) and the Sixteen Kingdoms, as well as the Southern Song and the Jin (金). This puts the entire Yangtze delta area unambiguously within the "South", rather than it being bisected by the Yangtze into North and South, at least if you follow the old course of the river before it became a Yangtze tributary.
(I realise I'm nitpicking and this comment is more being a pedant for the other commenters, as you clearly suggest that the Yangtze delta is "Southern" in another comment)
Pigeon
coo coo
4d ago
Pigeon
coo coo
4d ago
Nah, like, shitty photographs from banquets and such, reunion parties, the like. That and stuff like yearbook photographs. I don't stalk peoples' instagrams, not having one myself.
Half of them don't seem to curate their images at all anyway
Pigeon
coo coo
4d ago
Notably, true polyploidy is generally not compatible with life for humans, so the number of actual children with this with this should round to zero. Mixoploidy with a mosaic of diploid and polyploid cells -- usually diploid-triploid mosaics? -- can survive beyond infancy but usually have, uh, developmental challenges. I haven't heard of a viable mixoploidy with diploid and haploid cells.
For better or worse we're not grapes or fish.
Pigeon
coo coo
4d ago
TBH I kinda get it, liking tomboys isn't weird at all
Most of my experience with this is seeing people liking tomboys (or at least otherwise girly-girls acting tomboyish), but the idea of it is at least acceptable enough that トモちゃんは女の子！ was popular enough to get an anime.
Pigeon
coo coo
4d ago
I feel like if I just go through my female high school classmates' photographs (and how they aged) a good double digit number at the very least would be prettier than her. She's, like, second quartile at best?
Some of it might also be the makeup. An ex of mine who was extremely pretty when you used East Asian makeup techniques and products, or hell, didn't use any makeup at all, looked shockingly bad when she got her makeup done by a Western professional.
Pigeon
coo coo
5d ago
I think even in East Asian reckoning Christine Fang is not that good looking?
Pigeon
coo coo
5d ago
Ok, but before there were women, there were apes, and before there were apes there were mammals, and before...
And before humans (+ tree shrews) decided to torture themselves, chili peppers produced capsaicin to repel mammals, ergo eating modern kimchi is morally impermissible because it’s a profanation of its natural function?
Pigeon
coo coo
7d ago
wars CANNOT be a smashing success just by blowing things up. They have to achieve the political goal. War is politics!
I admit I had more confidence that people in this forum had at least heard of Clausewitz…
Pigeon
coo coo
14d ago
Maybe I'm expecting to much, but when you're hashing stuff out with an actual medical graduate on managing their college loan payouts and they're more than a little clueless while a friend of mine and I are just going 'No... this is easy', it kind of makes you re-think alot of things.
I’ve heard colleagues grouse about needing to do mathematics when “the reason [they] got into medicine was to get away from maths!” I’ve also seen frankly shocking levels of statistical ignorance in the doctor population.
One thing that stuck with me is an informal experiment a friend of mine did many years ago — he asked a few dozen consultants what a p-value indicates. I think he got a grand total of one correct answer. And these are people who are supposed to be regularly reading (and sometimes writing) academic papers!
Pigeon
coo coo
26d ago
My understanding is that something similar happened for railways, even without the significant differences in engines (?). Revolutionary technology that generated multiple bubbles along the way that bankrupted many people.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
There is a reason the Arab states never developed much in terms of civilization
This is a truly bizarre take without more elaboration.
So are you saying that you're in the outlier of outliers for having known multiple trans people IRL? This might be true, but "liars on the internet" is multiple orders of magnitude more common so you'll have to forgive me if I have doubt you're that special unicorn.
You'll have to take my word for it, but for various reasons including profession, social circle and upbringing I do know more trans people -- either professionally or otherwise -- than the modal person. I'm not even saying that it's impossible for a man to pass as a woman (and I in fact concede that women may well pass as men -- I can imagine at least one trans man who I've met who I think would've passed as a short and stubby guy if given androgens), but I think the rate of truly passing trans women is really very, very low, edge cases aside (e.g. vanishingly small number of truly passing trans women, small number of people who legitimately have a poor sense of sex differences, etc). I certainly don't know of one and I know upwards of five trans women (and a few more in passing both personally and professionally -- I once recommended Wandering Son to a trans person who hadn't heard of it and never met her again).
(edit: that said, now that I think about it, potentially the reason I'm able to recognise trans women is because I have seen more of them than normal. Perhaps I am not the modal observer either.)
Yeah, so you're even saying that there's overlap even when you aren't trying.
That isn't me "passing", though -- they recognised the error when they looked more closely. And I think for the majority of cases that is also what is happening to trans people getting clocked as women -- people don't look very closely when it's actually only in passing, +/- when they clock that something's not quite right they're too polite to say otherwise. I'm also honestly stumped by the idea that someone could have sex with a trans person and not realise, unless they've never had sex before. I doubt a trans man would be able to fool a natal woman either -- last I checked neopenises weren't very convincing at all.
I suppose this really depends on what it means to "pass". I would categorise someone as "passing" if under more-than-incidental observation someone still mistakes the trans person's natal sex. Under a looser definition of "pass" that might not apply. I imagine morbidly obese people might also have an easier time passing due to all the fat obscuring the frame. But there are still other non-visual tells...
I'm not even a conservative who's dead set on denying that trans people exist or something -- I have great sympathy for the transmedicalist sort of trans people, and if there was a button that magically transformed men into women (and women into men) I would be all for people to press that button if they really wanted to. I think that the greatest insult and harm that the tucutes and recent "trans activists" have done is to transmedicalist-trans people themselves. I can't speak for other people, but to my eyes it's not accurate that even a significant minority of natal men, even with great effort, can generally pass as natal women with current technology. It's a sad situation.
If you knew they were trans in person you were looking for features with confirmation bias
No, I clocked them as extremely obviously not natal women and then got confirmation in one way or another afterwards. What did you think I meant by “confirmed”?
Or hell just go look at some of the older Jerry Springer episodes about guys who didn't realize they fucked a trans woman and got upset after it was disclosed.
That seems absolutely nuts. How the hell does that happen? The texture of neovaginas is, like, not going to be anything close to a real one. Even just the lack of proper lubrication for one.
I’m sorry but your insistence that trans women are actually generally passing reads as massive cope to me. That some lizardman’s constant worth of interactions suggest otherwise is not relevant in this case -- I've been clocked offhand as a woman previously during a period of my life when I had long hair by people who weren't paying too much attention, and I was not trying to present as a woman and definitely wouldn't appear female to anyone actually looking.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
I’ve definitely met and confirmed multiple trans women in person, and they do look different. Of course I can’t say that I’ve definitely clocked all the trans women I’ve seen, but it does seem like there’s a bit of discontinuity between how trans women, at least, look and how natal women look; it doesn’t seem like there’s a spectrum from not obvious at all to very obvious, especially if you look at someone in daily life rather than someone in curated photographs.
(Of course there could actually be a spectrum and my brain just pattern matches to one or the other so readily that it only seems discontinuous, but that is my experience. I don’t see people who “barely” pass.)
Trans men I’ve definitely seen one or two “real” examples (eg excluding ones with “they/their”, neopronouns or ones that feel like a man one day and a woman the next, only counting the ones going from one binary to the other and making an effort to actually pass), but I’m less sure I’m clocking all of them due to the sheer effect of testosterone. That said in my milieu I don’t really see many of either trans men or gender lunatics to begin with.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
I admit to not following this at all, but surely as for all procedural changes like these there would be a grace period where people could get their licence changed?
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
I think this interpretation stretches credulity enormously. You don’t go out and picket over minor changes in procedure, even if it is annoying; you do so for perceived loss of privilege (the inability to use the Dr. prefix as a signifier).
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
I think this is really quite inaccurate, and frankly, quite disparaging and myopic.
For one, since I previously referenced 墨子 Mozi:
墨子卷十五號令
官府城下吏卒民家前後左右相傳保火火發自燔燔曼延燔人斷諸以眾彊凌弱少及彊姦人婦女以讙譁者皆斷
Mozi, Chapter 15, section on Orders and Commandments
Among the officials, officers, soldiers, and common people within the government offices and the city, those to the front, rear, left, and right are mutually responsible for reporting and preventing fires. If a fire breaks out due to one's own negligence, and it spreads to harm others, the responsible party shall be beheaded. For any who use their numbers to bully the few or the weak, who forcefully violate or rape women, or those who encourage such actions, all such offenders shall be beheaded.
We can see that rape is packaged as part of actions that harm others.
Aside from this, while rape (as 强姦/彊姦) is not often directly mentioned in Chinese annals except in legal settings, the euphemisms used are telling.
The most direct is 妻/妻略 - “to wickedly take [as if she was] a wife”; others include:
- 不敬 - “to show disrespect”
- 非禮 - “to fail to behave in accordance to ritual and manners”
- 弗賓 - “to fail to treat as a guest”
- 姦亂 - “anarchic/disorderly licentiousness”
- Etc.
Even in veiled form, these terms show disapproval of rape both as a personal affront to the woman as well as besmirching the honour of her husband or clan. Of course this is not quite the same idea as our liberal standards of rape, but it nevertheless is very far from the idea “that a woman is involved at all, let alone an unwilling one, is of no consequence”. And to this day, the term for molestation is 非禮.
Or you could go through eyewitness accounts of the Nanjing event for more details about how the Chinese reacted to the rape of their women. That works, too.
What makes your statement even more bizarre is that some Chinese cults that actually do have a strong proscription not just on rape, but on sex in general, sometimes were also the most sex-egalitarian; IIRC some millenarian cults (maybe some parts of the White Lotus societies?) worshipping Wusheng Laomu were like this, though I couldn’t find any sources in a hurry. Traditional Daoist thinking would both admit that 精 "essence" is lost in ejaculation, but that abstinence produced various maladies and infirmities, so caution and moderation would be most healthful.
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
An unconscious woman, however, is next level for "Are you done yet?"
With the caveat that this isn’t something I’ve actually experinced, I’m actually pretty sure this isn’t the case, because if the woman is unconscious there isn’t any pressure to finish.
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
As far as I can tell this is a uniquely Christian innovation.
I mean, the Chinese have evidence of this in writing even in pre-Imperial history; 墨子 discusses punishments for rape during the Warring States period, and various annals including 春秋左傳 and 詩經 describe rape in a decidedly disapproving manner. I'm sure other cultures would
This is, of course, in the background of a very different philosophical culture and climate than Christian Europe. For one, the Christian idea of sin is probably actually quite peculiar, which I suspect makes much of the difference in mental interpretation.
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
They can detect Russian ESL speakers in 6 words of a prompt
Shit really? Now I'm curious what the LLM thinks I speak as a first language.
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
1 - I've been lucky in that I decided a few years ago to start listening to the entire back catalog of EconTalk. It started in 2006, and I'm around 2011 now. There are plenty of episodes that aren't housing-related, but there is an incredible breadth and regular stream of folks grappling with and trying to understand the housing crisis, the crash, and the process of recovery. I guess I've been stewing in it enough that it's clear what people thought they were trying to do, how it sounded nice, how it all went wrong, and now we're basically repeating the same tune, just a different key.
This sounds fascinating. Any way you could distill what you observed from those 5 years of podcasts?
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
Much of the cultural relevance and memes (in the Dawkinsean sense) from the Three Kingdoms can be found from the Romance, so if getting a background on that is what you're after then the Romance is definitely a better fit, as the culmination of a thousand years of dramatised retellings of the period. You're not going to get things like Zhuge Liang borrowing ten thousand arrows from the actual history.
I'm not sure if there even is an English translation of the Records.
With a huge caveat that I'm not a historian, let alone a military historian of classical China, my understanding is that:
Riverine warfare becomes much more important starting with the Huai, at least in comparison to cavalry warfare, and northern states tended to have significantly weaker maritime capabilities due to the lack of necessity for this in conquering the North China Plain;
An inability to exert power along the Huai river and Huainan for a southern state means that a northern state is able to exert much more initiative in trying to attack the Yangtze proper;
Conversely, being able to hold the Huai river/Huainan gives a lot more slack for a southern defender before an invader can reach the Yangtze.
So it is perhaps less that the Huai is exceptionally defendable as much as that the Huai river and gatekeeps the Jiangnan area; a northern state able to dominate the Huai river and its surrounds is more likely to be a credible threat to the south both in terms of maritime capability as well as logistically. On the other hand, a southern Chinese state that was capable of exerting power over the Huai would not necessarily find itself being able to dominate the plains north of it.
This is of course only part of it. As you know, another way of conquering a southern state based on the Yangtze is from upstream, as with the eventual conquest of Wu, or the fall of southern Song after the fall of Xiangyang.
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