POTF 44 - Vote

[Lord Thesaurian]

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Cyclops - What makes a villain?

Post 1

Lost a huge post earlier, here goes. @Himster very good point. In a classic sense a hero defends but Classically they seek fame, most prominently in the case of Achilles and Alexander. Less well known is Achilles shade's pointed retraction in the Odyssey where he laments to Odysseus in Hades that he regrets his early death and misses the sun and wind, and envys the peasant enjoying a humble life. Bill Burr concurs, he notes the Duck Dynasty man and the owner of the Clippers, like Harvey Dent, lived long enough to find themselves the villain. The same goes for a hero's reputation and we see time and again the changing moral position heroes of Siegfried (a rapist a thief and and a deceiver) Achilles (berserk sook), Arthur (spineless cuck) Lancelot (bangs his best friend's wife) all taking their turn on the wheel to the peak of heroism and, through changing social norms, down into scorn and sometimes villainy. Loki the trickster villain may one have been the wise wanderer before Odin stole that role. Asteroth, Moloch and Chemosh all had altars in the temple at Jerusalem before their idols were smashed and they were unpersoned by later editors. David and Solomon are goodmouthed and badmouthed up and down the scripture. The dismal possibility heroism is an illusion founded on whim and chance tinges me with Upanishadic pessimism, and there are heroes who feel the same. The Mahabharata has many variant endings, but one common scene is the victorious Yudhistira retiring from rule and climbing a mountain with his four brothers and their shared wife. On the way each of them dies, and at the peak Yudhistira enters heaven where he finds his enemies, and sees his siblings and wife in hell. Its a fricking downer man, but this dismal denouement is glossed and spun several ways. In most Yudhistira accepts the judgement that although they were in the right and their cause was sustained by arms, nevertheless their conduct merited punishment, and their enemy's, reward. In one version all serve their time in hell and finally all of them are reunited in paradise, even the little doggy (and it was Yudhistira's beloved god-father in disguise!) which is quite a tear-jerker. The question of heroic conduct and moral relativism is dwelt on in the Bhagavad Gita also. Arjuna, about to engage in kinstrife, pauses before the big battle and consults Krsna. He has doubts, how can this be right? Some of his enemies are morally perfect, righteous beings, and most are his relatives. Krsna expounds the doctrine of Dharma, in the this case right conduct as considered for each. This sounds a bit like blind obedience, but also has echoes of Tao, the way, from Chinese philosophy. The many are a cacophony but remain part of the whole, although none see the formless block, all follow their way as part of it. The act of participating changes thge whole, just as the whole changes you. This to me is deeply motivating. Am I a butterfly's wing, tipping the scales? Locked in an invincible phalanx advancing? A clod in an overwhelmed dam, transmuted by the spate from a defensive wall to a rolling tide of destruction? To me the act of conversation is key here. I suspect the doctrine of the Bhagavad Gita was written for caste-system advocates to overthrow enervating Buddhist/sceptic nihilism plaguing Indian philosophy, but the act of describing ones own doubts and shapes the mind of the listener, and in turn responses sculpt further the doubter's understanding. These moments and acts are local but the effects can be profound, as shared human experience travels across cultures and down centuries. Most people have felt the ripples emanating the upstairs room in Jerusalem on Passover Eve, the night journey to Medina, the heated words in the palace of Kemet, the wistful teachings of the failed police minister in Lu, the playboy-turned-penitent-turned-zero-****s given agnostic gnawing a pork chop and dropping truth bombs, whether they happened or not. The Indian Epics even more than the Hellenic Epics recognise the moral complexity of their heroes: there are very few villains, and most heroes have complex characters that include wrongdoing. Few bland Galahads here ticking boxes to inevitable paradise, more Parsifals evolving to face challenges, and falling into sin traps and dilemmas with unclear outcomes. Of course villains and heroes don't need to be complex, we are complex and we make them that way. If we us them to convey our morality they do so with all the uncertainty our morality entails. In turn if our heroes and villains interact they begin to reflect one another, and even resemble one another, inevitably. Put simply, Heroes are big guys...for you. Villains are their opponents. Thanos is a villain, he clicks his fingers and people die. Why is he a villain? Is it his mental health? His colour? His army? His motives? Tony Stark is a hero, he clicks his fingers and people die. Douchebag death merchants both, but he's our douche. I'd say talk to your villains, you'll change them. They will change you too. If villainy is also inevitable then be the villain you want to see.

Kritias - National Regeneration vs Resurrection: The ideological framework of the Greek War of Independence

Post 2

Moral or national regeneration and its antithesis, moral/national degradation, is an oft-used talking point from the centre of the political spectrum and right-wards. It is definitely not an unknown theme for us Greeks. And the question is: does the idea of national regeneration hold any water? In honor of two hundred years of Independence (sort of), this thread will trace the origins of one of the least remembered but more systematic efforts to implement these ideals of national regeneration in an often-unwilling populace: the Greek War of Independence, or as we know it, the Greek Revolution of 1821. This thread comes two years after an effort by Abdulmecid I, to trace the origins and causes of the Greek Revolution. You can read his thread here. Since this is a rather extensive issue, I've broken my thoughts down into chapters which I then hidden into spoilers for the reader's convenience. Chapter I: National Regeneration Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  In order for someone to understand modern Greek history, it is imperative to understand this basic dichotomy: Grecian idealism coming from Western Europe on the one side, and the ties to a Byzantine heritage which seems to have been more grounded in reality. Of the two, the former would prevail until the formation of the Greek nation state but not without significant fusion to the latter. The Grand Idee, or Megali Idea, the foreign policy of the Greek government for a hundred and one years (1821-1922) stands as testament of how difficult unlearning one reality in favor of another proved to be for the Greek people. Most records of European travelers to Greece in the late 1700s talk of a populace entirely disinterested of the ruins they lived next to. Local Greeks, Turks and Albanians looked on to travelers with a mix of curiosity and derision, and later with suspicion: when Europeans grecophiles, aghast at the locals not being able to parrot the classics back to them, launched programs to educate the local population of Plato and Aristotle, they were met with a feeble interest at best. William St Clair notes the efforts of Western tutors to force the local populace in the Ionian isles to renounce their Christian names in favor of names such as Xenophon, Pericles, and Demosthenes, which was met with great resistance, and of an antiquation of dress where traditional oriental clothing was systematically swapped for robes and sandals. For local Greeks, divisions between them and their Turkish overlords were based in religion, not some ethnic understanding waiting to be awakened. The language they spoke, a continuation of medieval Greek spoken throughout the Byzantine empire was simply known as Romeika, and their national identity was summed up in the term Rum. A Roman citizen. Ancient Greek history was almost alien to them, showing clear preference to their Byzantine heritage. Ancient myths and gods were just the produce of pagan people who used to live where the modern Greek people resided. The link of ancient to modern Greek people was naturally a point of great interest, even before the Greek War of Independence begun. According to Umberto Eco, western medieval travelers painted Byzantine Greeks as degenerate, lazy, cunning, and cheats. This view of medieval Europe seems to have come to extreme conflict with the view held with the Classicist period of Europe in the 18th century, where Romans and Greeks were basically seen as supermen: the heroes were the most heroic, the philosophers the wisest; a truly sublime and equally lost golden age of humanity. Contemporary reports coming from the Greek mainland painted a people who, according to most scholars of the period, had been bastardized and degenerated. However, and most tragically, scholars maintained that freedom would swiftly restore Greeks to their former glory. Lord Byron’s poems, but most importantly their popularity, is a testament of that European understanding. Here’s an example from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great! Who now shall lead thy scatter’d children forth, And long accustom’d bondage uncreate? Not such thy sons who whilome did await, The hopeless warriors of a willing doom, In bleak Thermopylae’s sepulchral strait— Oh! who that gallant spirit shall resume, Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb? ∗ ∗ ∗ When riseth Lacedemon’s hardihood, When Thebes Epaminondas rears again, When Athens’ children are with arts endued, When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men, Then mayst thou be restor’d; but not till then. A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; An hour may lay it in the dust: and when Can man its shatter’d splendour renovate, Recal its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate? This European longing for classical antiquity seems to have been deeply understood by the Greek diaspora who, on the onset of the revolution, did not direct their attentions towards the peasantry asked to shoulder the fight but to the Europeans abroad. William St Clair shares one of the first Greek revolutionary manifestos circulating European governments: Reduced to a condition so pitiable, deprived of every right, we have, with unanimous voice, resolved to take up arms, and struggle against the tyrants. . . . In one word, we are unanimously resolved on Liberty or Death. Thus determined, we earnestly invite the united aid of all civilized nations to promote the attainment of our holy and legitimate purpose, the recovery of our rights, and the revival of our unhappy nation. With every right does Hellas, our mother, whence ye also, O Nations, have become enlightened, anxiously request your friendly assistance with money, arms, and counsel, and we entertain the highest hope that our appeal will be listened to; promising to show ourselves deserving of your interest, and at the proper time to prove our gratitude by deeds. Given from the Spartan Head Quarters Calamata 23 March 1821 (O.S.) Signed Pietro Mauromichali, Commander-inChief of the Spartan and Messenian Forces There is a story of how little the locals understood the nuances of referring to antiquity for contemporary political capital: one of the captains in Morea sent a letter to Mavromichalis welcoming the Messenian and Spartan forces to the revolution, asking him how many men he should expect and by when. The Europeans, however, seem to have eaten up the propaganda; St Clair includes a contemporary piece from the newspapers in London, where fantastical battles both in sea and land (which in reality were mere skirmishes) were described with the grandest terms. For Europeans of the time, the Greek revolution became a major issue with racial and epistemological connotations. Simply put, the fake reporting of the action in mainland Greece seems to have reinforced the European idea about the possibility of regenerating a nation to greatness by sheer force of will. It is hardly possible to name a spot in the scene of action, without starting some beautiful spirit of antiquity. Here are victories at Samos, the birthplace of Pythagoras; at Rhodes, famous for its roses and accomplishments; at Cos, the birthplace of Apelles, Hippocrates, and Simonides. But to behave as the Greeks have done at Malvasia is to dispute the glory even with those older names. According to St Clair, the newspapers in Europe seem to have been taken by a fake news flurry, where the whole country was reported to be in open revolt, a Turkish army of 30,000 men to be destroyed, Athens was reported liberated with not a single man dead etc etc. Nothing of the sort was really happening in mainland Greece; but since the reporting spurred a wave of philhellenism translated in volunteers, money and guns the local intelligentsia took it upon themselves to embellish the stories as much as possible by conducting a PR campaign. The proclamation of Alexandros Ypsilantis just at the outbreak of the revolution is telling: Let us recollect, brave and generous Greeks, the liberty of the classic land of Greece; the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae, let us combat upon the tombs of our ancestors who, to leave us free, fought and died. The blood of our tyrants is dear to the shades of the Theban Epaminondas, and of the Athenian Thasybulus who conquered and destroyed the thirty tyrants—to those of Harmodius and Aristogeiton who broke the yoke of Pisistratus—to that of Timoleon who restored liberty to Corinth and to Syracuse—above all, to those of Miltiades, Themistocles, Leonidas, and the three hundred who massacred so many times their number of the innumerable army of the barbarous Persians—the hour is come to destroy their successors, more barbarous and still more detestable. Let us do this or perish. To arms then, my friends, your country calls you. The similarities between the addresses of the Greek intelligentsia to the newspapers published in London during the first year of the revolution is telling as to who the intended audience was supposed to be. Writings from the local captains of the revolution on the other side, mostly written after the revolution since the captains were by large illiterate (some in Greek, others completely), include sparse references to ancient Greece in subsequent editions, are surprisingly frugal of any nationalistic sentiment and appear to have understood the struggle against the Turks on a religious basis of Christiandom versus Islam. Records of the time show that the local parishes and the clergy also understood the struggle in this way, which at the onset of the revolution led to mass scale slaughter of Turkish populations in the Greek mainland. Chapter II: The Greek Resurrection Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  During the twilight years of the Byzantine Empire Greek literature takes an apocalyptic turn which, following the Ottoman Empire, reached prophetic dimensions. For local Greeks, myths and fantasies of a Roman renovation walked hand in hand with the idea of Christ’s resurrection. Just as Jesus had risen from the dead, so the Roman Empire was meant to be resurrected from the ashes, when a holy war would deliver Constantinople to the Romans. This deliverance was expected to occur at the instigation of fellow Orthodox Christians which caused the local populace to look for assistance eastwards to Russia instead of westwards. Any mention of Greeks, Greece or Plato was not even considered worth including in the mass production of literary output of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. The term Romans is not just the main one used; it is the only one. By 1774, when another Russo-Turkish war had passed without the Russians capturing Constantinople and reviving the fallen Roman empire, the writings of the Ottoman Greeks show their general disappointment. An example: since it has turned out that the time for resurrection appointed by the oracles was not the true one and [thus] the empire was not resurrected. The time appointed by the oracles for resurrection was 320 years after the Conquest (Sathas 1872, 119). And another: If, therefore, in the time appointed by the prophecies […] the Romans have not been liberated, then it will be very difficult for the resurrection of the Roman empire to take place (Komninos-Ypsilantis 1870, 534) The situation seems to reverse with the introduction of the Amicable Association (Filiki Eteria), Greek merchantmen, educated in Europe, bringing European ideas about the nation-state in the Ottoman Empire. As one of the three founders writes: If we are true sons of venerable Greece, as we boast that we are […] what are we waiting for? What excuse, however reasonable, could make us postpone this golden time which, as it appears, Providence has brilliantly ordained so that all the predictions, all the oracles about the liberation of the Genos, about the resurgence of Orthodoxy, may come true? (Xanthos 1845, 238). Up to the point the Filiki Eteria emerges in Odessa, the “Greeks” have been more focused on calling themselves what they had for a thousand years – as Roman citizens. In just a hundred years any mention of “Rome” and “empire” is dropped by the intelligentsia, possibly taking wind of the European movement towards classicism and its practical benefit for the revolution. However, and most importantly, the aspects of the former Romano-centric narrative, that of resurrection from the dead, becomes fussed to the modern Greek narrative. Albeit meant without its religious connotations, the Filiki Eteria seems to have understood the best way to propagandize their ideas of a nation-state clashed with the ideas of the local population about their Imperial heritage, and their manifest destiny to resurrect the Roman empire by recapturing Constantinople. The illiterate Makriyiannis, a general during the revolution, is a perfect example of this fusion: Thou, O Lord, shalt raise the dead Greeks, the descendants of those famous men, who gave mankind the fair raiment of virtue. And by Thy power and Thy righteousness Thou shalt bring the dead back to life, and it is Thy just will that the name of Hellas shall be spoken once more, that she shall shine forth, and the worship of Christ too, and that the honest and the good, those who are the defenders of justice, shall live on (Makriyannis, Apomnimonevmata). Chapter III: Conclusions Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  The Greek War of Independence is a prime example of the power of regeneration and the force of will in modern Greek political thought. Nationalism, a European concept that allowed the unification of fragmented city-states into empires during the 19th century, came to Greece through the western-educated Greek diaspora but clashed with the religious preconceptions of the local Greeks. The narrative of national regeneration is scattered in declarations and manifestos of the period but the real effect it had on the common peasantry tasked with winning the war remains questionable. It is more probable that this narrative was aimed outwards to the West, where such sentiments were appreciated at that point in time. On the contrary, it seems that the local Greek populace was motivated by an ideal of manifest destiny to recapture Constantinople which was expressed by the religious idea of resurrection. It’s interesting to note that similarly to other nations, like France, the US and even Russia, modernization went hand in hand with a rejection of religious authority. In Greece, this trend seems to have been the case for the early period of the revolution, where the excommunication issued by the Patriarchate on the rebels favored a break from traditional religious authorities. This break can be seen in the art of the time, where priests are depicted in darker tones and distrustful expressions. This break however seems to revert by the end of the revolution, where subsequent depictions of the fighting include and at point exaggerate the role of the church. In a previous post I have written about the stance of the Ottoman Greek middle class and their reservations in taking part in the revolution. For brevity I will include this segment here. However, the role of the Greek diaspora in the West was the exact opposite of what I describe in that thread. Where local Greeks were cautious and rejecting of the war of independence, western Greeks seem to have pushed for and abetted rebellion for their own interests. The sporadic landing of men and resources, setting up their own private fiefdoms (in the case of Mavromichalis in Mani and Sparta, or Ypsilantis in Morea with the Baleste Regiment) created a split in how the war was fought and why. Even the army presented this duality: on the one hand, Greeks coming from the west, having served in European armies, wanted to create a standing army of line infantry to take the Ottoman forces head on; on the other, local Greeks understood the lay of the land and preferred guerrilla tactics and ambushes which lead to the first major successes in the revolution. The duality between westernized and local Greeks was so profound that a civil war broke out in 1825 between the factions; the final blow of western Greece would be given right after the end of the revolution, where local captains were persecuted and imprisoned or executed, and the majority of the fighting forces were left out from the first Greek army to starve and beg in the streets. The power of the fief lords like Mavromichalis stood against any serious reform of the state into a centralized power. Kapodistrias, the first and last man to try to create a modern Greek nation met his end, shot by agents of the fief lords shortly after he had been appointed Governor of Greece. In addition to that, tying the country into debt slavery right from its formation shaped subsequent Greek history. Just for reference, Eric Toussaint has written an article about the odious terms of the revolutionary loans of 1823-24, the restructuring of these debts in 1878 and 1898 and the International Financial Control committee period leading to WWII. You can find this here. The first hundred years of the modern Greek nation is divided between trying to Hellenize an unwilling population that was habituated in a Byzantine heritage and oriental value systems, as well as keeping the population in check by feeding their preconceptions of manifest destiny to resurrect the Roman Empire – albeit under the guise of the Greek Kingdom. During that time, despite the economy being captive in financial centers like the City of London and later the International Financial Control committee, the Greek kingdom doubled in size with the incorporation of Macedonia, Thessaly, the Aegean islands, Crete and the Ionian islands. Following the Asia Minor campaign and defeat the Greek kingdom seems as if in free fall, having lost its main objective; during that time, and after seven subsequent dictatorships and coups, Metaxas imposes yet another dictatorship in 1936 and a new rhetoric of national regeneration – the Third Greek Civilization. But that’s an issue for another thread.

Himster - What makes a villain?

Post 3

It's an unpopularity contest. For example: To the Greeks and Persians, Alexander the Great was their Hitler, the ultimate villain, the Daemon King. To the Romans he was a hero, the ultimate figure to emulate. In Revolutionary France, he became a villain again. To the British Empire he became a hero again. Now he's a mixed bag, a great man with amazing talents and accomplishments who also committed genocide for no reason other than his personal glory. Now, having metabolized this figure through generations of thoughts, we have the most objective/nuanced picture of him in history and we still can't determine, objectively, whether he was a hero or a villain. Genghis Khan is an even better example. He is still the national hero and founding father of Mongolia. But the things he did, the things he explicitly intended to do, Hitler wouldn't have dared to dream of them even in his most vicious of moods. Above all other criteria and rubrics, it is unpopularity that determines who is a villain and who is not.

Iskar - Anyone here know anything about timelines?

Post 4

I've been going through my somewhat rusty understanding of relativity again given the occasion and started to draw Minkowski diagrams to get my thoughts in order. Since I think they are actually quite helpful in understanding what "time travel" in the context of relativity actually means, I jotted them down digitally and added a bit of an introduction for those unfamiliar with them: Minkowski diagrams are a standard way of depicting what happens in special relativity. "Special" meaning we're not dealing with the crazy of curved space yet, just the speed of light as a finite upper limit (including for the transmission of information). This is a basic Minkowski diagram, as of yet unpopulated: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  In order to make things representable we restrict ourselves to one space dimension, so what you see before you is not a spatial plane, but a one dimensional space (a line) and a time axis forming a flat 2D spacetime. Usually one chooses the units on the two axes such that the speed of light corresponds to one space unit per time unit, i.e. light emitted from the origin of this diagram moves on the yellow dotted lines towards the future. Since the yellow dotted lines represent the speed of light (remember, this is a space-by-time diagram), they form two cones with respect to the origin. The upper one is called the future cone, containing all events (points in spacetime) that you could causally influence from the origin. The lower one is called the past cone, containing all events that could causally influence the observer sitting in the origin. The past and future cones together only make up half of the diagram. Why? The rest is called the elsewhere (incidentally also the place where Khajiit live), and consists of those space-time coordinates that you can never reach and that can not influence you currently: You might be able to reach the space-coordinate at some time, but not at the time corresponding to these specific points in spacetime. Now, we populate this flat 1Dx1D world. Here is an unmoving observer sitting in the origin: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  The arrow does not indicate movement in space in this case (the space coordinate does not change), but simply the passage of time. These curves showing which point in space is passed by an observer at which point in time are called worldlines. If you start moving around, they will look like this: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  The observer in our example is moving at half the speed of light, they are making one unit of space in two units of time. This example also allows us to demonstrate the concept of time dilation: Say you left a clock sitting at rest at the origin and then take off at half the speed of light. After you have travelled one space unit (taking two units of your Eigenzeit) you take a look back at the clock sitting in the origin. Naively (or newtonially) one would depict "looking back at the origin" by the black dotted line. However, since "looking" means you have to receive light rays reflected of the clock in your eyes, we may not draw a horizontal line from you to the vertical line representing the origin in the passage of time, we have to draw a 45° angled light ray back to the origin. Now this light ray meets the origin at the event (0 space units, 1 time unit), which means the time you are seeing on that clock in the origin is 1, not 2 as on your own watch. That means that from your perspective time at the origin is advancing more slowly than with you. This is the first effect on the passage of time one has to consider: Since measurement of time at different spacetime points involves the transmission of information, which happens at most at the speed of light, movement changes what time coordinates we measure for distant points in space. Now a common talking point is that going faster than light means going back in time. Let us make that precise, as it will turn out that what you get from superluminal speeds is pretty far from a naive "turning up in your own past" DeLorean-style. Here is the worldline of a hypothetical observer that somehow managed to go at double the speed of light: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  If we apply the same principle as above for reading off the time at the origin (we left a clock there again), we see that the time at the origin seems to be -1, so indeed it seems like we travelled back in time with respect to the origin. However, your Eigenzeit ("own-time") still progressed by one unit to 1. Furthermore, since we left the origin, we cannot influence its past in any way anyhow (our own future light cone still only contains future points of the origin). The only thing we have achieved so far is that while looking back at the origing it looks like time at the origin is going backwards (i.e. we receive earlier and earlier light signals emitted by the resting clock). Frustrated by this ineffective method of "time travel" we decide to turn around and travel back to the origin at double the speed of light, which looks like this: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  Now something funny happens: Suppose we left a farewell/welcoming party committee at the origin and they are looking at us to see when we turn around, so they can prepare the party. They are in for a surprise: We arrive back at the origin way before they even see us turning around. Why? The event of us turning around (a) emits a ray of light travelling towards the origin at the speed of light. But since we travel at double that speed the events of us passing Alpha Centauri (b) and the Kuyper Belt (c) emit rays of light that arrive even earlier at the origin. In toto, seen from the origin our journey back seems to be entirely backwards: First we arrive completely unforeseen (literally) at time 2, then they see us moving backwards via c, b, a to the point of turning around on our superluminal voyage - all the while we're standing next to them on earth! The only "causal" stunt you could pull here is shooting a laser cannon at one of your friends from (a), then travel back to earth, and comfortably wait until it arrives one time unit later to either heroically save your friend or murder them with the perfect alibi - but that's just (slightly psychopathic) cosmic one-man-runaround ping pong, not actual time travel. So, superluminal speeds make the succession of time measured between observers moving relative to each other somewhat awkward, but doesn't really create time travel opportunities. There is one interesting effect of superluminal speed though: It changes what events are contained in your past and future cones in a weird way. Here's ordinary, sublight travel: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  You move at half the speed of light from the origin along the arrow representing your worldline. When you arrive, the green dotted lines represent your new future and past cones. Notice that the new future cones is always contained in any older future cone (e.g. the yellow one from sitting in the origin earlier), and that the new past cone containes all older past cones. In other words, the passage of time narrows down what you can potentially influence in the future, while it adds new events that can potentially influence you. Now this only holds for sublight speeds. Here's the same diagram for travelling at twice the speed of light: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  Notice how the green future cone is no longer contained in the yellow one, and the green past cone no longer contains the entirety of its yellow counterpart. In particular the blue area used to be part of your past, but is no longer, while the orange area used to be in your "elsewhere" and has now become part of your future. Caution, though: "Past" and "Future" do not mean sections of your worldline here, but the cones of events that can potentially influence you/that you can potentially influence. So far for special relativity in a flat spacetime. Of course things are more complicated in general relativity (of which special relativity is a linear approximation for small areas of low energy/mass if you will), and spacetime itself being curved could, at least, theoretically create settings where you can actually have loops in your worldline (vulgo: arrive in your own, actual, past, and say hello to yourself like Spock). This can only happen, though, if spacetime is topologically non-trivial, i.e. if it "has holes" like a donut: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  In the example above our 2D spacetime is curved and sports a kind of handle-like structure in addition to the mostly flat part. If you ignore the "entrance" or "exit" of the handle you can just move around ordinarily in spacetime (1), but if you "travel" through the handle (remember, one of the dimensions is time!) you could end up with a loop in your worldline (2). However, this kind of topological structure is highly unlikely and/or requires immense amounts of mass/energy to maintain. Some used to posit that black holes could create the ruptures in spacetime that are the "entrance" and "exit" in the image above (and then only need to "link up" to create such a "wormhole"), but Hawking and Penrose have shown that Quantum effects prohibit black holes from actually reaching infinite curvature at the centre, so it is unlikely spacetime actually "rips". In toto, this is crazy, but doesn't really provide us with means for time travelling in the more common sense. For anyone interested in further reading I can recommend Richard Gott, "Time travel in Einstein' universe".

sumskilz - Changes in the phenotype of Swedish and Europid individuals and implications thereof.

Post 5

And when we're talking genetics, even nationalities and cultural identities are only of coincidental relevance - there being no genetic basis for culture. But then we're talking changes occurring over 1 or 2 generations, so I don't think we're seeing selective breeding here. If anything, we're seeing nutrition and standard of living allowing for potential to be realised. In the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, I'm inclined to agree that the measured changes are (at least primarily) environmental. That said, what you've written here are to some degree widely held misconceptions. The reality is more complicated. The predominate genetic predispositions of a population will influence its culture. Likewise culture itself is a significant selection pressure. One example, is the fact that pastoralist cultures created selection pressure for adult lactase persistence. A higher percentage of adult lactase persistence within their constituent populations subsequently created greater cultural dependence on dairy products, which in turn increased the degree of positive selection for adult lactase persistence. Depending on h and S in the breeder’s equation, culturally influenced changes to population genetics can potentially occur quite rapidly. An example is currently taking place in Israel where religiosity is correlated with having about 3 times as many children. Adult religiosity is ~44% heritable. Therefore, we can safely assume that there is a currently a ~39% per generation increase in the population’s relative genetic predisposition toward religiosity, because R = (.44 x .44)(3 – 1). Which in turn, will increasingly influence the country's culture. Of course, the genetic propensity for religiosity can only be a vague inclination toward certain types of thought and behaviors. The specifics are filled in by culture, of which religion is an aspect, from an anthropological perspective. In this case, most relevant is the mitzvah "be fruitful and multiply". Third point, due to assortative mating, nationalities and cultural identities aren’t simply of coincidental relevance for population genetics. To varying degrees, culturally derived identities determine who people are more or less likely to have offspring with. In some cases, where there is traditionally mandated endogamy for example, this can be significant. In other cases, where borders shift and there is little cultural resistance to intermarriage, the result is usually more like a genetic continuum that roughly correlates with geography. For example, there is a lot of genetic overlap between French and Germans (who are already very similar populations), to the extent that people with roots close to the borders may have more ancestry in common with people immediately across the border than those at the far end of their own nation.

Lord Thesaurian - Coronavirus outbreak - From China to the World.

Post 6

Countries that followed strict lock down procedures properly like New Zealand certainly benefited the most. Those that did a half-assed job merely mitigated the outcome while also lengthening the process. On the other hand, those that had less lock down procedures enacted ended up creating a lock down environment as well as the extra deaths. This assertion has been reduced to an unfalsifiable appeal to purity built on an anecdote. It’s worth repeating that the pandemic was declared before NZ went into lockdown, and at that stage, WHO recommendations indicate mass quarantines will no longer be effective and should therefore not be used as the costs of implementation likely exceed potential benefits. Parsing demographic and geographic factors from the lockdown impact in a single country will require the full perspective of hindsight, but the odds of a potential counter factual being significant enough to countervail the trend we’re seeing in the current as well as previous pandemics regarding the (in)efficacy of lockdowns are inherently low. This would make NZ an outlier, best case, given its geography and low population density isolated it from international spread since the beginning of the outbreak by default. It would have been in a completely different place relative to more interconnected regions that were sitting on hundreds or thousands of undetected cases by the time major NPIs were adopted. It’s also untrue overall that less restrictive interventions led to increased case growth relative to more restrictive measures. As cited earlier: Implementing any NPIs was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries, including South Korea and Sweden that implemented only lrNPIs (Spain had a nonsignificant effect). After subtracting the epidemic and lrNPI effects, we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of mrNPIs on case growth in any country. In France, for example, the effect of mrNPIs was +7% (95% CI: -5%-19%) when compared with Sweden and + 13% (-12%-38%) when compared with South Korea (positive means pro-contagion). The 95% confidence intervals excluded 30% declines in all 16 comparisons and 15% declines in 11/16 comparisons. Conclusions: While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less-restrictive interventions. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33400268/ The studies that look at lock down measures, however, always try to simplify it which is a really bad way to look at it. There are many factors in play: How widespread lock down measures were applied? How strict were each lock down measure applied? How well did the public follow them? How well was it enforced? How much does the public try to circumvent the measures? Simply saying restaurants are closed while people are getting together in their houses more doesn't really tell us the full picture if the latter is not accounted for. This is pretty much what most, if not all, studies, even those that show positive effects for lock downs, fail to satisfy. They're too simplistic. The “ more restrictive vs less restrictive” study looked at ~50 different NPIs from 11 major countries including Sweden, South Korea, the UK and Germany. Omitted variable bias is a major reason why the efficacy of lockdowns observed in some studies is statistically overstated. A good example of that is the Flaxman paper referenced earlier and probably in every lockdown discussion since its publication. Professionally or otherwise, it’s been cited hundreds of times as evidence lockdowns work. Our results show that major non-pharmaceutical interventions—and lockdowns in particular—have had a large effect on reducing transmission. Continued intervention should be considered to keep transmission of SARS-CoV-2 under control. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7 The way the result was determined suggests the conclusion relies on a causation fallacy, which could be why it doesn’t hold when comparing more vs less restrictive NPIs across countries. The reason for this, in the context of the Flaxman study, is their model retroactively uses the number of deaths to predict future deaths under NPIs vs no NPIs and determined that NPIs reduce transmission. That’s a fairly obvious conclusion, but to stretch this into a claim that “lockdowns in particular” caused it is mostly conjecture. As I said earlier, it’s unsurprising a study, looking at countries in the same region and adopting the broadly similar strategies, found lockdowns were correlated with reduced transmission. What’s odd is that Flaxman et al, determining the efficacy of lockdowns vs a few other categories of NPIs, don’t appear to address the fact that their own model predicts Sweden’s NPIs reduce Rt as much as other lockdown countries, including significant overlap with Denmark and Norway. Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  Also significant, I think, is that the predicted range of NPI impact is arguably more precise for Sweden than other countries in the model, and yet not much less than the most generous predictions for lockdowns’ impact on Rt. Flaxman and colleagues determine 3-3.5 million lives were saved by NPIs, but don’t mention the caveat in their conclusion this is due to “lockdowns in particular.” The model does not necessarily show this, even under its a priori assumption that all NPIs have the same multiplicative effect on Rt. The latter assumption is significant given it means the effect of any NPI on the model predictions will be equally strong in the first place, and even then, lockdowns don’t appear to have been especially impactful relative to other NPIs. The reason the authors deduced a particularly strong effect of lockdowns is because most countries in the sample, all except Sweden, employed lockdowns in similar time periods, producing an outsized effect on the model by virtue of being a common factor relative to other kinds of interventions. Because the model attributes 100% of the reduction in Rt to government interventions at the outset, the commonality of lockdowns is predisposed to have a dominant effect, which seems to have led the authors to a correlation/causation fallacy. The results of the model actually suggest less restrictive NPIs did most of the heavy lifting across all countries in the sample, relative to lockdowns. This matches the conclusions of the comparison between mrNPIs and lrNPIs The flaw in Flaxman’s argument is observed in other research, due in part to the difficulty of accurately weighting the probable effects of individual variables in a Bayesian model. The peculiar aspect of the claim that lockdown accounts for 81% of the reduction in R 0, is that Sweden did not implement any lockdown, but still see a similar decrease in R 0 as the other countries, even though the other NPIs were reported to have no substantial effect on R 0. To solve this problem, as compared with the authors’ earlier work9, which showed a significantly higher R 0 for Sweden, they invoke a country-specific last intervention parameter, which is only implemented for Sweden10 (see equation i). The “last intervention” parameter is multiplied with R 0, and can therefore be seen as a parameter adjusting the model for Sweden independently. As can be seen, when analysing the posterior distributions of the intervention parameters, the “last intervention” parameter for Sweden results in 73.5 % of Sweden’s reduction in R 0 (Figure 1). The last intervention impact on R 0 is not reported or discussed in the Nature publication, possibly misleading decision-makers on the importance of lockdowns. In conclusion, it is peculiar that the model displays an almost identical change in R 0 in all countries, dropping sharply below one at the final NPI, independently on the nature of that NPI. In reality, all countries had different NPIs implemented at different time points, likely with varying strength and efficiency, and it is quite likely that NPIs such as enforcing social distancing at least had some effects, not seen in the models. Given the importance the initial report had on government policies and the fact that we show here that the conclusions made about the significance of the lockdown are not entirely correct, we do think that we should pinpoint this to readers and policymakers. Correct assumptions on the effects of NPIs are becoming even more urgent as many nations still are imposing different NPIs, and that these might go on for an extended period https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...40v1.full-text Because modeling attributes virtually all reduction in Rt to whatever NPI is used last, this indicates not only the existence of confounders but also that the common use of lockdowns is predetermined to have an oversized effect on any estimates. Our finding in Fact 1 that early declines in the transmission rate of COVID-19 were nearly universal worldwide suggest that the role of region-specific NPI’s imple- mented in this early phase of the pandemic is likely overstated. This finding instead suggests that some other factor(s) common across regions drove the early and rapid transmission rate declines. While all three factors mentioned in the introduction, voluntary social distancing, the network structure of human interactions, and the nature of the disease itself, are natural contenders, disentangling their relative roles is dicult. Our findings in Fact 2 and Fact 3 further raise doubt about the importance in NPI’s (lockdown policies in particular) in accounting for the evolution of COVID-19 transmission rates over time and across locations. Many of the regions in our sample that instated lockdown policies early on in their local epidemic, removed them later on in our estimation period, or have have not relied on mandated NPI’s much at all. Yet, e↵ective reproduction numbers in all regions have continued to remain low relative to initial levels indicating that the removal of lockdown policies has had little e↵ect on transmission rates. The existing literature has concluded that NPI policy and social distancing have been essential to reducing the spread of COVID-19 and the number of deaths due to this deadly pandemic. The stylized facts established in this paper challenge this conclusion. We argue that research going forward should account for these facts when assessing how important NPI policy is in shaping the progression of COVID-19. https://www.nber.org/system/files/wo...719/w27719.pdf Taiwan is a good case of early strong response that made it possible that they don't even need to consider a full lock down. Taiwan certainly did respond earlier than most other countries, thanks in part to its network of contacts on the mainland that passed information on the outbreak during the time Beijing was still trying to cover it up. Subsequent miscommunication from the WHO, probably in deference to China, about human transmission also delayed appropriate response by other countries, to the extent Taiwan’s NPIs came a month earlier than most. It would be a misnomer to say acting “early enough” makes lockdowns unnecessary, because lockdowns are ineffective beyond the earliest phases of an outbreak in the first place, which had likely passed by the time China publicly acknowledged the outbreak in Wuhan and announced countermeasures. This fits the findings from earlier research, which found the spread of Covid could have been confined to a regional outbreak had Chinese authorities put in place NPIs that were delayed 3-4 weeks by the coverup effort. https://www.axios.com/timeline-the-e...l&stream=world

numerosdecimus - The Myth of Reverse Racism

Post 7

This sort of sophistry (which is always applied selectively) is designed to facilitate a liberal/leftist monopoly over the discourse on discrimination (language control/manipulation being a central objective of the intersectional left). The intention is to preemptively shield liberals/leftists from accusations of racism and to excuse, minimize or justify racism directed toward certain communities (in this case white communities), particularly when it comes from powerful liberal institutions (e.g. academia, mainstream liberal press, corporate America, the Democratic Party etc.). In other words: framing racism in the way outlined in the OP is itself a consequence of systematized racism. This is a typical definition of racism: Spoiler Alert, click show to read:  Indeed. Sophistry and intellectual inconsistency has always been the recourse of supremacist ideologies that aim to enslave others. With the case of our modern western society, there is no greater example of the practice of a supremacist ideology than that of the far-left/sjw/woke crowd. I don't know if the principles which traditionally have defined western societies will survive, but if we lose, at least we can die resting assured that these lunatics, who are driven by ill instincts, will be promptly and summarily executed by the tyrannical regime they will have helped to create. Once such a regime is well established, the supremacist lunatics will have fulfilled their purpose and are now disposable, since the regime never wants raving lunatics set loose. The social and political instability created by these lunatics had its purpose in the society that preceded the tyrannical regime. Now that it is established, it serves no purpose and is an active threat to it. (edited)

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