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Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

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Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#91

Post by ImHereToVote »

saagarjha wrote: post #71
p-e-w wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy is a scale, not a binary state. The actually relevant question is "could the average American have prevented Abu Ghraib?" And I believe the answer to be No, so 'Americans' cannot possibly be responsible under any reasonable definition of responsibility.

Well you can also have average Americans who think they have no business taking responsibility after it happens, since it wasn't something that concerned them, and nothing ends up done in response to it happening. Or you can note that some people did horrible things under the banner of your country and accept it as such, vowing to never let it happen again and holding those directly involved in the decision to accoun…

> those directly involved in the decision to account for what they did

We don't do that here.

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#93

Post by EGreg »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30
EGreg wrote: post #6

It’s one thing to have a bad crop. It’s another to have your government enforce some heartless economic system at the expense of people’s lives, and utterly fail at helping them by accepting foreign aid from other countries. Just as the Holodomor[1] and Great Chinese Famine[2] were the result of misguided or malicious “socialist” collectivization efforts by Stalin and Mao, the Irish Potato Famine[3] and the much late…

> the much later famines in the Bengal regions...entire British Raj came about through state capitalism There is an interesting thread of history in the earlier 1770 famine in Bengal. The EIC over-taxed during the famine, leading to "a large proportion of the dead [being] spinners and weavers who had no reserves of food" [1]. Dead spinners produce no textiles, which caused the Company losses. That crashed the stock a…

Thanks for sharing this! I didn’t realizs the connections… just like I didn’t realize that the Bay of Pigs invasion was a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis because Cuba wanted to defend itself against the US “special military operations”, and made an alliance with USSR. Not at all dissimilar to what’s happening in Ukraine at the moment. Anyway, I like making these connections across disciplines — at the time the people reacted exactly to these things.

DOES ANYONE KNOW OF A BOOK THAT COVERS SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES IN THIS WAY?

The vast majority of ways science is taught, we just learn the shrinkwrapped version. I want to know how they finally figured out the mind was in the brain vs heart, how they got past spontaneous generation, humors, phlogiston, who was a proponent of luminiferous ether after the michelson moey experiment, and more importantly… how did they discover molecules and the atom, what did they know before they had electron microscopes… how did they use the older, worse theories and how did they eventually discover these new concepts like tectonic plates etc

did Popov and Marconi and Tesla know each other… in short how did science develop? Any books like that?

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#94

Post by EGreg »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #57
d3vmax wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very interesting chain of events. All European exploitation was cruel and history was written by victors. With China and India rising, a lot of the shenanigans are going to come out and made common knowledge. Right now, history is heavily tilted towards the western story.

> with China and India rising, a lot of the shenanigans are going to come out and made common knowledge None of this was hidden. American political, British financial and Indian geopolitical history are just rarely taught together. India and China have no paucity of cruel and exploitative histories. Both contain periods of empire building, ethnic cleansing and wrenching inequality. A better takeaway is recognizing th…

From what I understand, the Spanish conquistadores were far more brutal than the British, who were in turn more brutal than the French, who actually befriended the natives and gave them horses.

Having said that, most people die from “mundane” things like influenza and famines, and not necessarily cruelty. Those are the things we all have to try to prevent the most.

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#95

Post by EGreg »

bregma wrote: post #77
EGreg wrote: post #6

It’s one thing to have a bad crop. It’s another to have your government enforce some heartless economic system at the expense of people’s lives, and utterly fail at helping them by accepting foreign aid from other countries. Just as the Holodomor[1] and Great Chinese Famine[2] were the result of misguided or malicious “socialist” collectivization efforts by Stalin and Mao, the Irish Potato Famine[3] and the much late…

It was more mercantilism than capitalism. The same ism that resulted in the American Revolution in which one set of mercantilists overthrew another set. Capitalism was arising at the time but was not yet ascendant.

Well, I am talking about the enforcement of private property of the landowning class, landlords and middlemen extracting rents for them — quintessential parts of Capitalism. And the Whigs explicitly going for laissez faire and attributing the famine to laziness — are not unlike the Republicans today, though today we have far more safety nets for everybody!

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#98

Post by mistrial9 »

projektfu wrote: post #87
Mistletoe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how they ate the potatoes? Cooked in what way and with what additions like butter etc.?

It depends a lot on how poor one was. Some had extreme diets of potatoes and milk or buttermilk with rare variations. Others incorporated oats and other vegetables and meat when they could afford it. But the best stuff was taken for sale in Britain. Imagine 6-12 lbs potatoes and a cup or two of milk, day in, day out! https://www.dochara.com/the-irish/food-history/food-in-irela... Colonialism is miserable.

did you omit meat products for a reason?

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#99

Post by Eisenstein »

EGreg wrote: post #93
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the much later famines in the Bengal regions...entire British Raj came about through state capitalism There is an interesting thread of history in the earlier 1770 famine in Bengal. The EIC over-taxed during the famine, leading to "a large proportion of the dead [being] spinners and weavers who had no reserves of food" [1]. Dead spinners produce no textiles, which caused the Company losses. That crashed the stock a…

Thanks for sharing this! I didn’t realizs the connections… just like I didn’t realize that the Bay of Pigs invasion was a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis because Cuba wanted to defend itself against the US “special military operations”, and made an alliance with USSR. Not at all dissimilar to what’s happening in Ukraine at the moment. Anyway, I like making these connections across disciplines — at the time the p…

I think 'Cosmos' the TV series (old and new ones) is the best 'popular' version of such a history.

The thing that I think you are overlooking though is that Tesla and Marconi and Popov were not required to invent radio and modern electronics. There is a reason why a lot of groundbreaking inventions get invented by different people in different places at around the same time. Look into 'multiple discovery theory'[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

Re: Scientists have identified the potato pathogen that devastated Ireland (2013)

#100

Post by JumpCrisscross »

EGreg wrote: post #94
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with China and India rising, a lot of the shenanigans are going to come out and made common knowledge None of this was hidden. American political, British financial and Indian geopolitical history are just rarely taught together. India and China have no paucity of cruel and exploitative histories. Both contain periods of empire building, ethnic cleansing and wrenching inequality. A better takeaway is recognizing th…

From what I understand, the Spanish conquistadores were far more brutal than the British, who were in turn more brutal than the French, who actually befriended the natives and gave them horses. Having said that, most people die from “mundane” things like influenza and famines, and not necessarily cruelty. Those are the things we all have to try to prevent the most.

There isn't a moral arc to history, but perhaps a moral regression. We tend towards goodness, simply because we each know more throughout time.
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