Pigeon
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User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
2d ago
As you might expect, really. Isn't Li Ka-Shing rather on the outs with the Party at the moment?
Pigeon
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3d ago
It’s far enough from trump’s actual style that I believe this is the real deal.
Pigeon
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11d ago
I thought this was the med reg's job in the UK?
Is this scope creep?!?!
Pigeon
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28d ago
I think it was reasonably easy to infer that given the text in the original argument --
5/5! I had a similar fear of "this seems too easy I must be missing something" for some of these.
I do think for #3,
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
Guerilla warfare is a defensive strategy against symmetrically matched opponents.
Surely you mean "asymmetrically"?
That said, I agree. I was more quibbling with this part of an above comment.
That last one is the most important. No "guerrilla" or "terrorist" insurgency has ever won a civil war against a domestic enemy.
If we take "no guerrilla or terrorist insurgency has ever won a civil war" as "no group has won a civil war while still being guerrillas" rather than "no group starting out as guerrillas has won a civil war", the number of eligible groups you could apply this to changes.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
For what it is worth, the diction and grammar makes this seem less likely to be AI to me.
Pigeon
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1mo ago
As an aside, see this r/askhistorians comment about a Song dynasty literati who got domesticated by his cat.
Pigeon
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1mo 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
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1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo ago
Scott Alexander's posts often veer into "holy shit, get to the point, dude!" territory
They do?
Pigeon
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8mo ago
Pigeon
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8mo ago
I assume the meeting happened first and the lawyering happened later?
Pigeon
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10mo 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
10mo 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.
I don't play RPGs much anymore, do explain?
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