Pigeon
coo coo
No bio...
User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
1d ago
As an aside, see this r/askhistorians comment about a Song dynasty literati who got domesticated by his cat.
Pigeon
coo coo
2d ago
Yeah, no disagreement — it’s as benign as it can get, really. I actually thought this sort of habit came from the West though!
Pigeon
coo coo
3d ago
The close analogue to that might be med students who are tempted to take them to cope with the enormous amounts of coursework, but I have not heard of abuse at rates >> than any other class of students.
I think the most unique and widespread-enough example I can think of with medics “misusing” a drug more than other professions would be beta-blockers prior to interviews and exams.
Pigeon
coo coo
4d ago
Mao probably counts. The Houthis count. The Syrian rebels probably count.
I think it depends heavily on what it sounds as "guerrilla or terrorist insurgency" -- do they have to stay guerrilla the whole time?
Pigeon
coo coo
4d ago
Whatever the reputation of their leaders today, clearly many rank-and-file Soviets and Nazis of the time also weren't averse to harming civilians, punishing prisoners and acting in a non-chivalrous manner...
For example, if the distinction between wheat- and rice-growing parts of China really exists, that's fascinating.
My guess is that the specific statement -- that rice-farmers are more interdependent, holistic, less prone to creativity, etc., while wheat-farmers are the reverse -- is from some highly cited papers from Thomas Talheim. You might find similar speculation in previous decades about how rice-farming promotes a culture of hard work and incremental progress (etc etc.) compared to wheat farming which is less rewarding per joule of human effort spent, invoked in a similar manner as how the Protestant ethic used as a rationale for differences in development in European/Euro-descended countries.
Outside of that, there are definite stereotypes -- both premodern and modern -- about the differences between northern and southern Chinese, but usually seem to be of the vein that northerners are more honest and hardy and brash (and uncultured etc.), while southerners are more savvy and shrewd (and more effete and cowardly etc.)
(I make no comment on the validity of either.)
Likewise, I never thought of the fact that Europe suffered the Black Plague while China remained saturated, and what effect that might have had on their respective trajectories.
This is a partial hypothesis for the Great Divergence: The Black Death, + other 14th century wars and calamities, wiped out >33% of Europe's population, which lead to a significant increase (almost double?) in wages and the decline of feudalism. During this time, higher wages, lower rents, higher costs to trade e.g. compared to intra-China trade, and other factors produced large-scale supply/demand disequilibria after the Black Death that increased the demand for labour-saving technology as well as the incentives for innovation from each class of society e.g. from people no longer being serfs.
On the other hand, it would be negative EV for a Chinese merchant or industrialist -- who had lower labour costs to deal with and more efficient internal markets -- to spend a lot on innovation, when you could just spend more money on hiring more people. And this is before we add in things like the shift to neo-Confucianism in the Ming period, awful early-Ming economic policy, Qing paranoia etc.
For what it's worth, I don't find this to be anywhere near a complete explanation. There is a corresponding divergence within Europe of countries that maintained that level of growth in per capita income and those who didn't. China also has had its share of upheavals and famines without a corresponding shift in this sense (although arguably none were as seismic population-wise as the Black Death was for Europe), and more recent reconstruction of historical Chinese wages does see them near their peak at the start of each dynasty and dropping off gradually as the dynasty goes on, which both kinda confirms the supply/demand effect of reduced population on wages after social turbulence but also doesn't seem to really map neatly onto any bursts of innovation. Additionally, the period of time associated with rapid innovation in imperial China, the Tang-Song period, is associated with a population increase.
But even if it doesn't explain China, I think it at least explains the European story partially, about how potential preconditions for industrialisation and scientific development were met.
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo ago
Communism has some atrocities with higher death counts (e.g. perhaps Mao's Cultural Revolution)
You are thinking of the Great Leap Forward, not the Cultural Revolution (which was devastating to China and cost 1-2 million lives, but is a separate incident).
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo ago
I was just giving another example of a military decision made explicitly for international optics rather than for strategy or propaganda, etc. Doubtless there are many examples of militarily ineffective overcommitments throughout history.
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo ago
The only comparable situation I can imagine from history is Republican Spain throwing an excess of resources to holding Madrid, of planning offensives for newspapers and prestige.
The Battle of Shanghai would be another partial example, where Chiang Kai-Shek intentionally spent his best men and disproportionate amounts of armor to defend Shanghai both to buy time to move industry and to try to provoke an international reaction.
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo ago
Scott Alexander's posts often veer into "holy shit, get to the point, dude!" territory
They do?
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
I assume the meeting happened first and the lawyering happened later?
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
I admit to having never played Atelier Totori and have only played about 10 minutes of Atelier Sophie, but I'd be very surprised if any Atelier game had "high impact sexual violence"...
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
If you mean that Koreans have nutters who claim Chinese things — and other things too, for that matter — are actually Korean, no, that's real. The Chinese do grossly exaggerate the extent of belief, of course.
The festivals thing I was thinking of was related to Lunar New Year. I'm going off this by memory, so couldn't find a source in time.
The Chinese character thing was something found originally here, where some Korean novelist and former(?)-professor expounds on the idea that actually proto-Koreans created Chinese civilisation before migrating to Korea (by equating proto-Koreans simultaneously with the Shang and the Dongyi). (Apparently the same person was also featured in a video here earlier this year where he more explicitly claims that Chinese characters are Korean. That video has been private'd, but some vengeful Chinese netizen has re-uploaded it)
(I also somehow found this looney tunes Korean guy claiming that English is descended from Korean?)
Again, these things aren't taken seriously by the (vast?) majority of Koreans, but they do exist (as do more mainstream but still silly nationalistic punchups). This is also not to elide that you see loony shit from the Chinese (and Japanese, and every ethnicity really) as well -- sometimes even from the state organs!
My conjecture is that some part of this historical revisionism has to do not only with modern nationalism and geopolitcal rivalry, but also a longer-rooted hostility that has fomented since the Qing conquest.
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
I'll stress that that part is my own conjecture, and doubtless modern nationalism and fear/mistrust of the PRC plays into this phenomenon as well. But it seems unlikely to me that the historical background didn't contribute to this. And that the Chinese usually overhype whatever minor Korean nutter has to say for their own purposes as well, to the extent that the average Chinese is probably more misinformed about the actual state of understanding in Korea (where Koreans rightfully mostly relegate such hyper-nationalism as mostly batshit insane).
Then there are things that are just kinda...dumb, like the Chinese getting irate at the Korean dragon boat festival getting recognised internationally (honestly who gives a shit? It's like Italians getting upset about modern British celebrating a derivative of a Roman festival). That stupid thing about kimchi and paocai thing still confuses me to this day (not the background facts, but the sheer idiocy of it, as well as the initial irresponsibility of the Chinese press).
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
9mo ago
Hong Kong is lower by a little, but the others are higher. Macau actually has a TFR of above 1...!
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
Especially with the male oversupply (see: one-child policy and preference for sons), at least up till quite recently, owning a residence is considered the minimum requirement for getting a decent match in China, at least in the urban areas. It gets to the point where multiple generations might be investing in a property for a son so he can get ahead (admittedly not just in romance; also stuff like residency status and rights, but I am very far from an expert on this)
More anecdotally, I know of Chinese women who openly discuss/brag about what sort of make of car/house/whatever accessory they require before giving a man the light of day.
Not sure how the owning a house thing is doing with the property market still in freefall.
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
I'm pretty sure this is referencing moral foundations theory.
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
I'm sure you could find more, but even just a brief perusal gives me examples of this from the Atlantic in an otherwise unsympathetic piece. I feel like it's pretty well known even with only a relatively passing interest in Korea.
Two examples inside that article are that of an engagement getting broken off because a downturn in a business owned to-be-groom's parents spooked the to-be-bride and her family, and a late-50s university lecturer finding out that he wouldn't meet the salary demands outlined by Korean women now.
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
The preference for sons in China goes deeper, as in older tradition the sons of a family perform the sacrificial rites due for ancestor worship. But it is true that the pragmatic aspect of this was of significant concern as well, enough for (no longer extant) jokes to exist about families being "robbed" by having many daughters but no sons.
Then again, go back that far and often enough the newlyweds would just live in the (husband's) family compound...
For what it is worth, the diction and grammar makes this seem less likely to be AI to me.
More options
Context Copy link