Italy is a fascinating region to study language, it was broken up into city states well into the 1800s, with some of those city states serving as the center of culture and intellectualism for all of Europe, at various times. So there was like these very advanced areas of Italy, and these very backwards parts, and the 1800s was all about getting people all speaking the same language, the Florentine dialect.

I bet if someone took on such a study it would be a very uninteresting read. Also Italians are friendly and speak good English I bet you could connect with someone who could help explore the topic more!

I guess I’m drawing a line between the late medieval period when there was accelerated social development of the EU, but not enough scribes and scholars, and so their work suddenly became very sought after in a new world made of contracts and written agreements. So I’m probably talking about arguably two different things. First when writing in a very formal manner was a literal sign of intelligence, because that kind of intellectual work became a necessary component of late pre-modern statecraft, and hence highly valued by the ruling classes of the time and place. The second connection is to cursive, which is a formalized writing that had real legal and business value just a few generations ago.

So I’m sure I am butchering the history of any actual scripts that were mentioned in this effort post. But as someone who has a pretty lively fascination with handwriting, font and text in general, I’d love any questions, clarifications, resources, criticisms and reprimands that are due!

Oh shit, reverse the flow to the warp coils! Dump all energy from life support into forward shields and laser missiles, our only chance to defeat the psychic alien is to reverse and restart time for .00001 second, creating a terminal in the psychic time loop. Once free, we can concentrate our dark matter on the psychic alien, stunning him for just long enough to get him to buy a sketchy timeshare on Mars.

Thank you science word rearranger celebrity with NGL pretty good hair

So, not trying to step on any mines here, and I get this is literally only a 2D representation of a phenomenon.

But what jumps out to me, is how “neurodivergence” is being defined kind of ahistorically. It supposes that neuro divergence is an essential, natural quality in humanity. That has real problems when we try to describe objective reality, especially the parts of us that aren’t tangible.

Did ancient people mostly have 2 arms and legs, 10 fingers and toes at birth? Yeah, by all accounts. Were ancient people as intelligent as modern people? That question gets a little funky, because who and what gets defined as intelligent, is really historically and geographically dependent. European kings sent away to the most far flung monasteries to bring in trusted advisors who spoke multiple languages and could write awesome cursive; at the same time Fibonacci was bringing algebra and the foundations of calculus home from Turkiye and publishing them in Italy as brain teasers. Now cursive is worthless except as a craft, maybe some marketing, and calculus became the intellectual basis for the industrial revolution.

So if “neuro divergence” can be defined historically like intelligence, which in some ways the graph itself supports this claim, then we can’t rely on an idea of human nature to make a point, especially since we are talking about scientific medical detection of a concrete divergence or disorder.

So like, what is divergence? What is being diverged from? The baseline has always been a vibe.

I’ve read studies that show better outcomes, increased happiness, better social integration measured among children and students with autism who spent time working on farms around animals. Structured, satisfying, hands on work, that used to make up most of the population. Now farmers is a micro minority, either owning land and charging people to work it, or working land for not enough money – hard, degrading, difficult, exceedingly dangerous work.

Other factors like screen time, social media, increase in dietary simple sugars, all show measurable changes in behaviors of people with ADHD, social anxiety, autism, bipolar, borderline disorders. Academics like Michel Foucault have studied how mental health treatment and psychiatry (additionally schools, and hospitals) are directly descended from the development of mass imprisonment and incarceration during the industrial revolutions in England, France, Germany, etc.,

Foucault also reviews sources that show more kind and forgiving attitudes in society toward people with severe social dysfunctions and intellectual disabilities. I wouldn’t go nearly as far as saying that people with disorders and divergences were better off – I believe that the medieval monastery was a “safe” place for a lot of people with what might now be described as neuro divergent, but also acknowledge the medieval church exploited poverty and mental illness for official and unofficial purposes.

But it does raise the question of how people, who may be intellectually “equal,” when raised under different conditions develop quite differently. And the way our current system functions, it uses value judgments and certifications, etc., to slot me into a specific place. But once in that place, i have to almost be a certain kind of person in order to succeed. The role isn’t suited to the person filling it, but to the needs of the organization. And usually the org needs to make money.

If there is greater social stigma towards disorder and divergence than there once was, that plays a major factor in whether people even want to be diagnosed. Lots of people have commented on self identification with neuro divergence as being a “tik tok trend” or some such. But a friend of mine, in an unofficial obit she wrote for someone older, made a point to say that previous generations looked at MH like it meant you were off to meet the business end of an ice pick.

For myself, learning I have ADHD and treating it has been holistically helpful. I’m open about it with people, we will see if it bites me in the ass.

I just worry a bit about the framing of “people have always been this way.” While I agree it is true in a way; I think our society is extremely stressful and toxic.

And then to say that the baseline of neuro divergence is unchanged throughout time buys cover for people who are responsible for the environmental changes making people unwell, and getting richer because of it.

Did I agree or disagree with you that the USSR and China were not capitalist? I’m open to different interpretations. I can see ways that USSR and China were capitalistic in some ways, socialistic in some ways, and had their own unique character in other ways. China and USSR weren’t even allies after Stalin, and China’s economy changed dramatically after Deng Xiaoping took charge of organizing the Chinese economy after the cultural revolution. I’m actually quite critical of the USSR after 1921.

I think you should try to be a little more specific. The creation of the military of the USSR was a carry over of the armies of WW1 who were being sent to die senselessly by the Tsar. Afterward, Russia was invaded by like 6 separate countries, including the USA, and had to deal with a counter revolution by the Tsarists. I think those are two specific circumstances where the maintenance of a military was verifiably not imperialist but necessary for preservation of the worker state. Afterward, the military was used for repression by the Stalinist bureaucracy, but industrialization was necessary after the destruction of the early 1920s, if not how it was carried out.

The carving up of Eastern Europe by Molotov Ribbentrop might be considered imperialistic, I think there’s a lot of different ways to look at the only thing that Stalin and Trotsky agreed on: that the Germans and Italians were going to be the opponents in another world war. I’m actually very critical of Stalin, and think he made many mistakes. But other than being a bastard and a motherfucker, I think the historic circumstances, that were the motivators for a the mistakes that were made by the Stalinist bureaucracy, were objective, often defensive. And while imperialists always claim national defense when claiming some foreign prize, there is much more basis for a defensive posture against the Nazis, who actually invaded the USSR and killed 20 million Russians, mostly civilians; than there is when, for example, the USA invaded Vietnam.

Vietnam might be a good example of an imperialist agenda on behalf of the Chinese. The USA and China both supported the villainous Khmer Rouge. But other than soft power, what evidence has China demonstrated of imperialism? Genuinely curious about what your answer might be.

Don’t make me out to be something I’m not. Yes I’m a socialist and an anti capitalist but I’m not a sucker, at least not a willing one.

That’s an interesting observation, whether or not USSR and/or China is/was capitalist, and in what ways, is a rich topic of discussion. There are a ton of different theories about them, and I’m familiar with a few.

Why do you think USSR and China still had militaries? Was it to make imperialist war, or to defend against it? There’s an abundance of different views on the topic that are much more scientifically and historically honest than “its just human nature.”

And many didn’t, and none produced the kind of mass industrialized war capable of dozens of millions of casualties. But yes their ruling classes still waged war for the same reason as our ruling classes do. So it isn’t a problem of human nature, but a problem with having a ruling class.

But never before have the underclass actually held the tools and means of production, and been as directly opposed in every rational interest, as the exploiting and exploiter classes produced by capitalist social and economic relations. Furthermore, the working classes are broadly opposed to war, broadly in support of rational, secular government, human rights, and freedom of association. But because the education and dissemination of info to the masses is overseen by the ruling minority, people lack the ability to name the problems which we face.

So our social forces that produce war, are imperialism, which is a historic stage of capitalism. So we can concretely identify specific tendencies in a society built by people, name them, and subsequently resist them; rather blaming all problems of society on “human nature”. We can be much more accurate and specific than that. And the moment we are, we have an imperative to do something. Which is why fatalism is so convenient for people who fear freedom.

That’s how people who consider themselves rational and scientific end up falling for apocalypse myths; with facts underwriting eschatology. I think there would be less conflict and difficulty in the world if people were 50% less gullible.

“Humans” can be violent, short sighted and ignorant when people stop thinking critically and start applying dumb, impractical abstractions to complex and ever-changing objective reality – and then stubbornly pretend like the dumb abstraction is objective truth.

On a thread about being more intelligent to prevent human suffering, don’t be on the side of stupidity and suffering by pretending that a deeply contradictory social order that directs all human activity toward the production of war and human suffering, is the only social order humans have ever been capable of producing, let alone, will ever produce.

You’re entitled to be a misanthrope and hate humanity, but entitlements granted by capitalism on one side, are paid for with victimization on the other side. Being on the side of the victims, but receiving entitlements (often unintentionally) means that the victimized class both hates them self for their even involuntary role in in the victimize/entitlement social relation, but also unable to imagine anything different.

Ultimately, it is a fear of freedom that prevents humanity from advancing beyond capitalist social relations. But fear in some inspires courage in others. And in that courage, is hope.

For the ten millionth time, its capitalism

points at everything humans have built look at everything humans have destroyed

Its amazing for a guy who has never read a book, the Trump admin consistently has hit most of the story points of Infinite Jest. I don’t know what’s worse, living inside the Trump admin, or living inside that awful fucking book

This isn’t about anarchism as an abstract ideology. This is about Mikhail Bakunin and the anarchist faction developing within the IWMA.

If you’re an anarchist reading this as “Marx doesn’t like anarchism,” then consider these facts:

1. Marx was a materialist. He wasn’t concerned with ideas, he was concerned with action.

2. The church was still an immensely powerful social force. An anarchist who resisted the old order, would believe in negating the morality of the church. Marx however, wanted the negation of Capitalism. To Marx, the bourgeois and the workers are completely opposed, not the workers and morality. Marx really hated how people in his era talked about morality, he believed that morals were a social relation, not a code handed down by a higher power. He thought morals were a response to particular set of historic conditions, and overthrowing religion meant reversing the material social relations that made religion a necessity among the masses.

3. Morals could be thought of as guardrails on the bourgeois. They want to always be seen as moral by the nobles, peasants and workers, especially in that era, since the bourgeois weren’t really the ruling class of the time. They were like a rapidly ascendant middle class. The bourgeois were still under the influence of feudal ties, which had been bound up in church morality for thousands of years. And the conflict between the bourgeois and the proles hadn’t been decided yet, not in most parts of the world.

4. So attacking “morality” as an oppressive force, when the actual oppressive force was economic/bourgeois just gives the bourgeois freer reign to do whatever they want. Its like setting a bomb in a church or factory. You’re just giving the bourgeois justification to violently oppress the working class, who it is always in the interest of the bourgeois oppress.

5. Marx is going after “amorphism” more than he is going after anarchism. Marx believed in taking action based on verifiable material fact, not on abstractions, moralizing, false equivocating, etc., the truth of the brutal exploiting nature of the bourgeois against the workers was a verifiable material fact, and the job of the revolutionary was to help people see, consider, and act upon (praxis) the truth of their conditions, not tell them what they need to hear to make them plant bombs.

Marx opposed Bakunin’s faction, the AOSD, part of the IMWA, on the basis of what they were doing, and why they were doing it. He isn’t attacking an abstract “idea” of Anarchism.

Marx is talking about Bakunin, not you

He is talking about Mikail Bakunin

I think I got caught up in the explaining it, I like to write

It isn’t just a single linear measurement, it would be multiple measurements. Also they weren’t using meter circumference wheels, the wheels would be, to us, some arbitrary standard that would be revealed when dividing the two lengths by pi.

I think the point of the post re: the tired paleontologist is that the pi-related ratio just isn’t that interesting, Ancient Aliens uses math to mystify the subject, not make it simpler to understand. So I think the thing youre hung up on is the point of the post. It just isn’t that interesting of an insight if you understand the math, but of you present it a certain way, youre like selling the idea that ancient civilization had access to abstractions (like pi) that maybe didn’t “exist” for ancient civilizations. But when you think if it in terms of practical applications, you realize that the tools and the work that people were doing didn’t require exactness of abstraction, just exactness of practical function.

Ancient Egyptians did have a concept of pi, but to them it was 22/7, which is more than close enough for any practical application. Pi is 3.1415… and 22/7 is 3.142. They didn’t need that exact of a figure to build a pyramid, their calculations were as good or better than our engineers use in practical application. Civilizations that are around for thousands of years end up figuring shit out when they try to do stuff. We use mathematics to plan, and so did they; but to build something you don’t need someone who has memorized pi, you just need engineers with practical experience building things. Ancient civilizations had that, their tools contained their methods of abstraction, even in rare cases their books did not.

But Ancient Aliens never imagines real people with real experiences, it assumes stupidity and brutishness in its subject, when actually they are objectively stupid and brutal. You’re confusing rationality for sensationalism, which I appreciate imagining the world as being more rational than it is.

You’re doing a measurement, and using a wheel to measure. There’s a mark on the wheel, so that one turn = one unit of measure. So if all of your measurements are x turns of the wheel, then all of your measurements will be x/pi.

So mathematicians studying it will discover the measurements are all some multiple of pi. Journalists unlucky enough to have to write about this stuff know like 1 thing about archeology but like 2 things about math and 10000000 things about sensationalism, so they write articles about the one thing they know about archaology, the two things they know about math, and the 10000000 things they know about writing a sensationalist article, rinse repeat.

The left wants children driving flying cars, this is why women would be happier if they don’t vote

/s

It feels good to be starving, knowing that someone else is starving more

dark /s

When they counted, they counted hundreds of thousands! We didn’t count therefore the number is zero, well done! The good and simple people of Starvation Land can sleep easy knowing that no one ever starves in Starvation Land