Could it be that this morphine blocker is blocking endorphins?
197 karma · joined January 3, 2017
Such as?
Wrong. The Arab slave trade [1] exceeded the Western one both in scale [2] and in cruelty [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade [2] https://www.quora.com/Who-did-most-of-the-slave-trade-Europe... [3] https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Arabic-slave-trade-more-humane...
My point was limited in scope to the 9/11 attack itself. I think terrorism on that scale can be classified as assymetric warfare.
Warfare predates nation states. Today, most of the world is parceled into nation states. But violent non-state actors never ceased to exist. And therefore we shouldn't limit our definition of warfare only to war between nation states.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Clarke#9/11_Commiss...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/opinion/bob-graham-releas...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Matters-Arabia-Failure-A...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare
Sure, there will always be people who think this not "real" war. But that's an irrelevant classification detail to the belligerents or the people caught up in the collateral damage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_jackal
[2] https://phys.org/news/2015-07-expansion-golden-jackal-europe...
[3] https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/ANNA_109B_0073-0076.pdf
[4] https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/First-golden-jackal-spotte...
Yes. Check out the smooth movement of a vehicle with properly oriented wheels:
The wheels should have been oriented either like this:
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[\]|___|[\]He wasn't under oath so the stakes for lying aren't too bad.
A unit of "Moors". Again, Mediterranean looking North Africans. Despite the misleading title.
> It does no such thing. Can you point to any reputable scholar who is prepared to state such an "upper bound"?
Of course not. The evidence is so thin it wasn't even up for useful scholarly debate.
Her academic credentials are the very reason why she got criticized for what she said. Saying that the BBC school video is accurate is an extraordinary claim. And as a historian you might want to back that up with some evidence.
> She wrote a good article about it here: > https://www.the-tls.co.uk/roman-britain-black-white/
In which she dwells on twitter bullying and provides zero evidence for her claims.
That "evidence" consist of one fleeting mention in a biography about Septimius Severus.
> For 101 reasons, the genetic evidence is not very informative, and certainly can't be used to justify that claim that Africans were a "statistically insignificant subgroup"
The lack of evidence (genetic or historical) puts an upper bound on the proportion of subsaharan Africans in Roman Britain that is several orders of magnitude lower than the BBC animated cartoon suggests.
> As Beard points out, even Norman DNA is not very well represented in the modern population, and we know for sure that plenty of Normans came over as a result of the Norman invasion.
For the presence of the Normans there is plenty of historical evidence. For the presence of subsaharan Africans there is just about nothing. So we should stick to the null hypothesis.
This is his default style as a polemicist and it distracts indeed from the points he is trying to make.
> And I can't tell what his actual point is!
The first 3 bullet points are his actual message. The rest is a reaction to some preceding drama on twitter.
His point is basically that Africans were a statistically insignificant subgroup among Romans in Brittain, and by adding them so prominently in a short animated cartoon for school children (who hardly know anything about antiquity) the BBC is performing historical revisionism.
He also casts doubt on the assumption that these Africans were black, pointing out that Northern Africa was inhabited by Berbers and Phoenicians.
> He furiously complains that the BBC and Mary Beard are "bullshitters" but I can't figure out exactly what corrections he wants made.
He wants scientific rigor to prevail over political correctness.
True.
> And yet, his book was still published.
Because the subject of his book wasn't covered by these laws.
> And in any case, he didn't say it to be threatening or abusive, so that's moot.
Neither did Damore. He still got fired.
> The HR policies of an American company (a country where in a lot of states you can be fired for any/no reason at all) is neither here nor there in a discussion about the UK's definition of hate crime, where that definition needs to be proven in a court of law to a jury of your peers at a trial.
These HR policies are a sign of the times. The fashion of suppressing rational speech & thought in a misguided attempt to "protect" the minority-du-jour will eventually creep upwards into the laws of countries, as has already happened in Canada:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Act_to_amend_the_Canadian_H...
Prohibitions like this one are overly broad and smother a lot of legitimate discussion. Exceptions to free speech used to be limited to things like:
* Don't yell "fire" in a crowded theater.
* Don't call for violence.
If we broaden the scope to any speech someone, somewhere might take offense to, then we can no longer have much diversity of thought in public debates.
If these kind of "hate speech" laws existed in England in the 19th century, Charles Darwin would possibly never have published the book "Descent of Man", because saying "You and I both descend from animals" was a very demeaning thing to say to most people at the time, and therefore could have landed him in court. The very idea of biological evolution is still offensive to a lot of people today, BTW.
A stark warning that this concern is not a sterile theoretical exercise came in August this year, when James Damore was fired from Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...
So a company that champions and celebrates science to the outside world (like in their many doodles about scientists) and that has control over much of today's human communication, believes at the same time that it is a thoughtcrime to cite the scientific consensus about something as basic as biological differences between men and women.
With the latter arrangement you have lots of minable resources at hand, only a small delta-v away from you. Ik you are ok with long delivery times, transporting them around doesn't cost you much energy.
Whereas on Mars, everything is much more energy-intensive, both mining raw materials and moving them through your industrial processing chain.
Space-based manufacturing is still an alien concept to us and while it comes with its own challenges, the vacuum and zero-gravity of space offers a lot of advantages too:
Infinity is not a number. It's a limit.
Treating it as a number only confuses real understanding of it.
> Presumably also because there wasn't much there at the time that would've allowed them to collect taxes. The Romans liked to portray Germania as poor and inhospitable. Part of the reason for that could be cognitive dissonance for never having conquered it.
I think what turned off a lot of people is the transition made by opinion makers from the straight and falsifiable hypothesis "Global Warming" towards the weaselly worded "Climate Change".
Wording matters when it comes to mass communication. Words that were bold and scientific have been replaced by words that are indistinguishable from politics.
This is sometimes called "cultural marxism". It is in my opinion the dominant ideology that permeates our thinking, our language and our behavior nowadays. That's why it is so hard to put our finger on it. We are like a group of goldfish discussing the concept of "water". Dr. Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto does a great job at explaining how emancipation movements that were born with the best of intentions can transition gradually into tyranny. Though he uses just the word "marxism".
http://www.c2cjournal.ca/2016/12/were-teaching-university-st...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04wyGK6k6HE
Of course there's also the fable "Animal Farm" by George Orwell which masterfully describes the cycle of emancipation from tyranny to a new form of tyranny.
Just one example:
A few weeks before the launch, the Navigator Command Module Pilot, Jim Lovell, spent a few hours practicing on the earth-horizon sextant simulator at MIT. He consistently identified the “horizon” about 20 miles above the real horizon. Great! Jim Lovell could be calibrated and his bias number loaded in the flight computer.
In the same vein as this article, I am always deeply moved watching Dr. William Widnall's lecture on Apollo's guidance, navigation, and control: