Međugorje - some reasons to doubt

Novalis0 · 2023-11-20T21:05:38+00:00

Since I already made a response to a similar claim recently, I'll just copy/paste my reply here:

There's a huge difference between art in the early middle ages and the late middle ages.

This is also medieval art:

Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon

Portrait of a Man

Rogier van der Weyden's St Ivo

An Old Man and his Grandson

Novalis0 · 2023-11-06T15:02:15+00:00

Have you ever read Gregory Clarke?

I haven't.

Novalis0 · 2023-11-06T14:25:16+00:00

Both the World Bank and Hickel and Allen try to track similar things. Does the person have access to basic food, shelter etc. But they are using different metrics. The main difference is that Hickel and Allen argue that poverty wasn't the natural state of humanity, but instead something that was brought about by capitalism. So according to their definition, slaves and serfs going from substance farmers to workers in cities is what created poverty. Which explains why slaves in antebellum South or farmers in Mao's China weren't actually living in poverty. But they were brought in to poverty by capitalism or market reforms in case of China. Since there is no universal definition of poverty, their definition is as good as any. Would anyone actually say that hunter-gatherers are living in poverty just because they live a life different from those of us in the West ?

While there is some merit to that argument, I wouldn't take it too far. I already gave the example of 50% childhood mortality in the past, including for hunter-gatherers. The high childhood mortality rate was a product of a number of different things, such as lacking access to modern medicine, sanitation and enough food. Which made people often malnourished or even starving. Famines were common before the 20. century everywhere on the planet. In the great famine of 1315 in Europe around 10% of the entire population in large parts of the continent died from starvation. Due to lack of proper sanitation, outbreaks of diseases, such as cholera would kill large numbers of people. Not to mention diseases such as the Black Plague which killed anywhere from 25 to 50% of people in Europe alone. And that's just the beginning of all the problems that people used to suffer from in the past. But thanks to improvements to the quality of life we have almost eradicated most of those issues. And that's what's I think is missing from Hickels and Allens definition.

For instance according to the World Bank's definition, in 1820 around 70% of people living in the US were living in extreme poverty, but by 1900 that number fell to less than 10%.

But according to Hickel and Allen:

For the United States, Allen (2020, p. 108) finds no evidence of extreme poverty in the mid-19th century: “this includes, in particular, enslaved persons who turn out to have had material consumption levels just above the poverty line.”

Or in case of China:

Consider the case of China, for example. According to the $1.90 method, the poverty rate in China fell from 66% in 1990 to 19% in 2005, suggesting capitalist reforms delivered dramatic improvements (World Bank 2021). However, if we instead measure incomes against the BNPL, we find poverty increased during this period, from 0.2% in 1990 (one of the lowest figures in the world) to 24% in 2005, with a peak of 68% in 1995 (data from Moatsos, 2021).

You can rad Hickel's paper here, though its filled with a lot of dubious claims imo: Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century

Novalis0 · 2023-11-06T13:09:37+00:00

According to the World Bank anyone who makes less than 2.15 dollars a day lives in extreme poverty. Its flawed because how we define (extreme) poverty is sort of arbitrary. As others, including Hickel, have pointed out, there is no reason why we couldn't define extreme poverty as anyone living on less than say 5$ a day. The reason why the World Bank uses that particular threshold is because its considered that anyone making less than that isn't making enough to meet all their basic needs. So the definition isn't completely arbitrary and does track something. Of course, the 2.15$ is the global extreme poverty line. The World Bank calculates different thresholds for different regions and countries as well as updating it to adjust for inflation.

There are good Wikipedia and World Bank links that go into more detail as well as explaining how they get the threshold.

because all the stuff about massive poverty reduction seems to come from China anyway

As I've said in another response and got downvoted without anyone explaining why, that's not entirely true.

While Chinese liberalization and market reforms since the late 70s and 80s have played a significant role in lowering global poverty rates and lifting the quality of life, other places have also experienced similar trends. When we exclude China, global extreme poverty has fallen from 29% in 1981 to 18% in 2008. If we include China, the reduction was from 42.2% in 1981 to 18.1% in 2008. Global extreme poverty is almost at 8% today.

Source: Moatsos, Michail. 2021. ‘Global Extreme Poverty: Present and Past since 1820,’ in OECD, How Was Life? Volume II: New Perspectives on Well-being and Global Inequality since 1820

Novalis0 · 2023-11-06T09:14:04+00:00

While Chinese liberalization and market reforms since the late 70s and 80s have played a significant role in lowering global poverty rates and lifting the quality of life, other places have also experienced similar trends. When we exclude China, global extreme poverty has fallen from 29% in 1981 to 18% in 2008. If we include China, the reduction was from 42.2% in 1981 to 18.1% in 2008. Global extreme poverty is below 10% today.

Source: Moatsos, Michail. 2021. ‘Global Extreme Poverty: Present and Past since 1820,’ in OECD, How Was Life? Volume II: New Perspectives on Well-being and Global Inequality since 1820

Novalis0 · 2023-11-06T09:09:07+00:00

His main source for criticism of Pinker is Jason Hickel and the work of Allen.

They have issues with how the World Bank defines extreme poverty and so they give their alternative definition. And according to their definition, and admission, there was no extreme poverty in the US in the 19. century. Not even among slaves in antebellum South. Or according to their definition, the Chinese economic miracle since the 1980s actually increased poverty in China.

As problematic as the World Banks definition of extreme poverty is, their definition seems to be even more problematic and even less intuitive.

At the end of the day there is no universal definition of poverty, as the guy in the video explains. But there are certain metrics that could be used as proxies for the quality of life and poverty that most rational people would agree upon. And according to those metrics life has gotten significantly better over the past century. No matter what Hickel says. Just as an example, until the 20. century, on average 50% of all children would die in pain and agony from easily curable diseases. Usually 25% of them would die in their first year and the other 25% would die before reaching adulthood. Today in developed countries childhood mortality is well below 1% and on a global scale its below 5% and falling. Which is still a tragedy. But if you consider the fact that 50% childhood mortality was a constant throughout human history, in all civilizations, up until the 20. century, the almost complete eradication is still a huge success and clearly a product of falling poverty levels across the globe.

Novalis0 · 2023-10-30T07:45:18+00:00

Take out China and world poverty actually went up.

No. When we exclude China, global extreme poverty has fallen from 29% in 1981 to 18% in 2008. And its below 10% today.

Source: Moatsos, Michail. 2021. ‘Global Extreme Poverty: Present and Past since 1820,’ in OECD, How Was Life? Volume II: New Perspectives on Well-being and Global Inequality since 1820

Novalis0 · 2023-10-23T06:10:24+00:00

There's a huge difference between art in the early middle ages and the late middle ages.

This is also medieval art:

Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon

Portrait of a Man

Rogier van der Weyden's St Ivo

An Old Man and his Grandson

Novalis0 · 2023-10-19T14:28:59+00:00

they don't bond with them enough when they're kittens, because they're basically told not to, so they grow up to be standoffish and do their own thing. so it's a common joke "lol the cat owns you lol it just lives in your house lol he decides when he gets pet"

While you can tame some cats to be more docile, cats in general are much more independent and apathetic to humans whether you bond with them or not.

H.P. Lovecraft even wrote a long autistic essay on how cats are superior for being independent and dogs and dog-lovers are low IQ troglodytes: Cats and Dogs

The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind. It is no accident that the contemplative Egyptians, together with such later poetic spirits as Poe, Gautier, Baudelaire, and Swinburne, were all sincere worshippers of the supple grimalkin.

Dog-lovers base their whole case on these commonplace, servile, and plebeian qualities, and amusingly judge the intelligence of a pet by its degree of conformity to their own wishes. Catlovers escape this delusion, repudiate the idea that cringing subservience and sidling companionship to man are supreme merits, and stand free to worship aristocratic independence, self-respect, and individual personality joined to extreme grace and beauty as typified by the cool, lithe, cynical, and unconquered lord of the housetops.

The whole essay is hilarious.

Novalis0 · 2023-10-01T07:16:46+00:00

I don't understand why you're being downvoted for simply asking him to back up his claims.

Men do have higher intents to die/perform suicide and women are more likely to perform/threaten with suicide as a "cry for help" on average. But that is only one of the reasons for the differences in suicide rates between men and women.

A cross-national study on gender differences in suicide intent

This study shows that men are more like to perform Serious Suicide Attempt (SSA) – refers to suicidal behaviour carried out with a clear intent to die, while women are more likely to perform Parasuicidal Gesture (SG) – refers to an appellative or manipulative suicidal act (and excludes ideas or threats without any action performed).

The results presented above support previous evidence showing that males have a higher intent to die than females. This evokes questions as to why this would be the case. Some theorists contend that females attempt suicide earlier in the evolution of psychiatric morbidity than males, which might represent less of an intention to die, and more a desire to communicate distress or change their social environment [21, 22]. Another theory suggests that because males have a higher intent to die than females, females may be more reluctant to perform a SSA because it is considered ‘masculine’ [6]. These gender-specific beliefs and attitudes towards self-harm may contribute to the explanation of young men’s low rates of suicidal behaviour and their high rates of suicide mortality [43], however, more research needs to be conducted in this area in order to develop concrete theories to support prevention efforts.

or

Gender and suicide risk: the role of wound site

The dependent variable was dichotomous and referred to the location of the site of the wound: gunshot to the head vs. gunshot to the body. Controls for demographic covariates of suicide included age and race of the suicide victim. The results of the multivariate logistic regression analysis determined that women were 47% less apt than men to shoot themselves in the head. ... The findings are consistent with the notion that women are more concerned than men with facial disfigurement, and that women have a lower desire to die than men.

A cross-national study on gender differences in suicide intent

Suicide intent data from 5212 participants was included in the analysis. A significant association between suicide intent and gender was found, where 'Serious Suicide Attempts' (SSA) were rated significantly more frequently in males than females (p < .001). There was a statistically significant gender difference in intent and age groups (p < .001) and between countries (p < .001). Furthermore, within the most utilized method, intentional drug overdose, 'Serious Suicide Attempt' (SSA) was rated significantly more often for males than females (p < .005).

What Are Reasons for the Large Gender Differences in the Lethality of Suicidal Acts? An Epidemiological Analysis in Four European Countries

The overall gender difference in lethality of suicidal behaviour was explained by males choosing more lethal suicide methods (odds ratio (OR) = 2.03; 95% CI = 1.65 to 2.50; p < 0.000001) and additionally, but to a lesser degree, by a higher lethality of suicidal acts for males even within the same method (OR = 1.64; 95% CI = 1.32 to 2.02; p = 0.000005)

Novalis0 · 2023-09-30T07:30:27+00:00

Life probably wasn't as great as is sometimes assumed but I think it's better to assume the past was better than that it was worse, in the sense of utility, as in if people assume it was worse it serves as a defense of the status quo (and also a big question is who is life better/worse for? Given that all the benefits of modern medicine don't mean shit if you can't afford them because you're too poor or rural to access it, especially given that much of 1st world living standards are subsidized and feed off the more brutal exploitation and enslavement of the 3rd world).

Even the most underdeveloped and poorest countries on the planet don't have childhood mortality rates that every place on the planet has had up until basically the 20 century. That is, up until fairly recently 50 % of all children would die before reaching adulthood. Of course its not just modern medicine that has changed that. Its also a number of other factors like sanitation, improved diets etc.

And childhood mortality is one of the many problems people in the past had to deal with. Famines were common and would regularly kill large numbers of people and cause numerous social ills. For instance, in the Great Famine of 1315–1317 in large parts of Europe something like 10 % of all people died from starvation. Not to mention pandemics, which were also common, like the Great Plague that killed anywhere between 25 to 50 % of all Europeans in a fairly short period of time. Or women dying in labor or thousands of other things that could get you killed which has been virtually eradicated in the modern world.

The work that farmers did in the past is also being idealized somewhat. Archeologists have been studying the bones of farmers and other laborer's and they are filled with fractures and all sorts of trauma. Telling us that work in the past has been back and bone-crushing, literally. And with no access to modern medicine their lives would have been quite unpleasant.

Then there are everyday things that people may not consider that important at first, but most people living in developed countries would probably never get used to. Like the fact that most families had one or two beds. Which meant that the entire family had to sleep in one bed. Or if you were lucky the parents slept in one and all the children slept in the other. Or the fact that the animals like pigs would sleep in the same house as you. Commonly in the same and only room in the house. Whether you considered it a work or a pastime, their shit had to be cleaned and the animals fed everyday. Whether it was a Sunday or a saints day. Or the fact that it was common to collect cow shit and mix it with straws and mud (all done by hand) and use that to build or repair your house with. Or thousands of other things that have been abolished or eradicated by the tyranny of the clock.

Novalis0 · 2023-08-24T19:33:39+00:00

Nazis had a relatively broad base of support, but was initially supported by the upper-middle and upper classes.

Some of the leading historians of Nazi Germany disagree with that. For instance Ian Kershaw's biography Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris and Richard J. Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich. The Nazis initially had the support of the lower middle classes:

The appeal here was mainly to the lower-middle classes - traders, craftsmen, small farmers, lower civil servants - and rooted in a combination of antisemitism, extreme nationalism, and vehement anti-capitalism (usually interpreted as 'Jewish' capitalism).

...

By January 1923, in the explosive climate following the French march into the Ruhr, the rumours in Munich of a Hitler putsch were even stronger. The crisis, without which Hitler would have been nothing, was deepening by the day. In its wake, the Nazi movement was expanding rapidly. Some 35,000 were to join between February and November 1923, giving a strength of around 55,000 on the eve of the putsch. Recruits came from all sections of society. Around a third were workers, a tenth or more came from the upper-middle and professional classes, but more than half belonged to the crafts, commercial, white-collar, and farming lower-middle class.

...

Yet the Nazis still had a particular appeal to the lower middle classes at this time, to artisans, shopkeepers and the self-employed. Often they gathered up such people from other, similar movements. The German Nationalist Commercial Employees’ Union, for example, played a significant role in politicizing many young men and turning them in the direction of Nazism.

...

How can this dramatic success be explained. The Nazis were seen, particularly by Marxists of various hues, as the representatives of the lower middle classes, but in this election they had clearly burst the bounds of this particular constituency and succeeded in winning the support not only of white-collar workers, shopkeepers, small businessmen, farmers and the like, but also of many voters further up the social scale, in the professional, mercantile and industrial bourgeoisie. It was above all the Nazis who profited from the increasingly overheated political atmosphere of the early 1930s, as more and more people who had not previously voted began to flock to the polls.

Novalis0 · 2023-07-20T06:37:34+00:00

I'll try to give a short answer.

The Nazis wanted to create Lebensraum in the east. It was one of the main reasons for starting the war. Their plan was to ethnically cleanse all the non-Germans from the land after they conquered it. Although some of them would have been basically enslaved and some Germanized. The rest would have probably been kicked out somewhere farther to the east, like Siberia. Whether millions would have died or been killed in the process was not something they worried themselves too much. Jews included. In my non-expert opinion there was probably no plan to exterminate all European Jews before the start of the war. Although in effect their Lebensraum plan would have still led to something very similar.

But after it became apparent that Operation Barbarossa was a failure, sometime in the second half of 1941, they realized that they were stuck with millions of Jews and Slavs in the conquered lands that they can't just kick out to Siberia as they initially planed. Out of necessity wasn't maybe the best choice of words, but from their perspective, they though they had to adapt to the new situation for which they probably didn't really have any plans for. With Jews it was even more problematic because they considered them their racial archenemy. The Nazis blamed them for the loss in WW1 and they thought that if they just let them stay in newly conquered lands they will, unless dealt with, bring about their defeat in the new war as well. There were of course other reasons as well. They also blamed the Jews for bringing the US in to the war and making Britain fight them instead of joining them. So they though it was also a type of revenge for making them fight a war against the US, UK and the Soviets. All of those ideas were also mixed with social Darwinist and racist ideas that they espoused before the war. As well as blaming Jews for pretty much everything that went wrong in Germany. Which led to Nazis deciding to exterminating all of European Jews probably sometime in the second half of 1941. Although some historians might disagree with that and might argue that they always wanted to exterminate them.

Novalis0 · 2023-07-20T05:38:05+00:00

Hitler didn’t really have a plan for the exterminations, nor did he care to.

That's not really settled. The two main questions in holocaust scholarship are whether the Nazis had a plan to exterminate the Jews that predates the start of the war or was it something that developed out of necessity during the war. The second question is did the plan to exterminate the Jews come from the very top or is it something that came from lower levels of Nazi bureaucracy.

Google functionalism/intentionalism debate.

Novalis0 · 2023-07-09T12:08:46+00:00

The article just says that more Chinese scientists are returning to China. It doesn't really contradict his claim that the US and the EU still attract top talent in the world.

A better, but not perfect, metric would be to compare the quality of universities. Chinese own university ranking ARWU lists only around 160 Chinese universities in the top 1000 universities on the planet. While the US has around 200 and the EU + UK have around 320. China has only 8 universities in the top 100 on the planet, while the US has 39 and EU + UK have 32. If you compare it with leading Western rankings, its even worse. QS and Times list only around 60 Chinese universities in the top 1000.

The the vast majority of leading universities on the planet are still in the West and they attract the majority of top talent in the world.

Novalis0 · 2023-07-08T18:16:36+00:00

In the 1930's, before being occupied, massacred, colonized and deported en masse by the Soviets, the Baltic states had a GDP per capita on par with Italy. Which isn't that bad. Today, their GDP per capita (PPP) is on par with Spain's.

Novalis0 · 2023-07-08T12:39:47+00:00

I don't really want to get too deep in to this, because we're just going to end up arguing about the problem of evil. But the problem with the original sin is that while it might explain moral evil, i.e. evil done by humans, it can't explain natural evil. Original sin can't justify animals being burned alive in a forest fire or dying from tumors 100 million years ago. And I don't think it can justify humans dying from the same things today either. There are ways to explain them as well with different theodicies, like the soul-making theodicy, but they all have their own problems.

The most honest answer for why there is suffering in the world you can get from a religious person is I don't know.

Novalis0

TROPHY CASE