TranscendentalEmpire

joined 1 year ago
[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago

My dude, nothing in that blog supports your claim.

First of all, it's talking about the metallurgy of the 16th century and after, which is after Japan had imported blast furnaces. Secondly, it ignores the amount of labour needed to actually produce refined steel from iron sands, which ultimately dictates the quality of the finished product.

This isnt a debatable topic, any steel made from iron sands before modern electromagnetic sorting contains a large amount of impurities when compared to steel made from rock ore.

Even during WW2 the Japanese had a hard time producing high quality steel even with the use of blast furnaces, because the iron sands contains a large amount of titanium.

This blog which falls over itself trying to engage in revisionist history, can only claim that the quality was "perfectly fine"....not good.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

That's not true, no matter how many times you make that unsupported claim.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 3 points 1 month ago (5 children)

You are conflating the elemental molecule of iron with the finished product of an alloy of carbonized iron aka as steel.

Yes, there isn't a molecular difference between the iron found in sand vs the iron found in rock ore. However, the medium in which you harvest your iron and how you're able to heat that iron, dictates the quality not your final product.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 7 points 1 month ago (7 children)

Lol, my dude. No one is claiming that modern japanese steel is of poor quality.

Im speaking of the time period contemporary with the accusation. You know, how arguments typically work......

Do you think the guns Japanese Samurai used were made from steel refined from sand?

Just pointing out this one because it's funny. Yes, a lot of the early firearms made in Japan were still made from iron sand (Satetsu). Which was the main source of iron in Japan until the 16th century.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 14 points 1 month ago (10 children)

According to whom?

The reason why Japanese iron is inferior is because of the source of the iron itself, they utilized iron sand instead of rock ore. Rock ore can be made up to 90% ferrous material while the iron sand contains as little as 2%.

This means when you smelt your source material into blooms of iron and slag, the blooms made from sand iron were much smaller. Instead of utilizing a single bloom to make a sword, the Japanese had to work several blooms together. Which is much more labour intensive, and can lead to a lot of imperfections in the final product.

This is why katanas were made out of so little material, and had to be handled with care. They were much more fragile pieces than similar swords made in Korea and China at the time.

Plus, the Japanese developed their iron working much later than their mainland contemporaries, as they never independently invented furnace technology. The technology for furnaces was imported, most likely from the Korean peninsula.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 21 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I think the first sentence is probably enough to make anyone not afflicted with a eurocentric brain want to palm some face.

I think excusing it as a "not serious" statement is dangerous, as a lot of people even on Lemmy won't second guess it.

The belief that the west is the origin of all science and culture is surprisingly pervasive, especially in the tech industry.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 1 points 2 months ago

But Spartan women weren't that bad off, compared to other places in antiquity

We also white wash Spartan history pretty dramatically. Yes, Spartan women who were citizens were better off than their Athenian counterparts. However, that's not saying much when you consider spartan citizens were a fraction of the population of Sparta.

The vast majority of women in Sparta were helots, and were subject to chattel slavery. I don't think you can claim that Spartans cared about gender equality when they had an entire social class made up of the bastards produced by raping their slaves.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This isn't going to be accurate, it's ignoring a key aspect of the heat that will be generated, friction. When designing materials for prosthetics we have to be aware of how much friction occurs between the material and skin. If the amount of friction is too great, the material can create enough heat to damage tissue.

The formula for the skin friction coefficient is cf=τw12ρeue2, where ρe and ue are the density and longitudinal velocity at the boundary layer's edge.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 42 points 2 months ago (9 children)

Command Senior Chief

The person who came up with the scheme is also the most senior NCO on the ship. All the enlisted people in charge of monitoring that activity knew, they just knew not to ask questions.You would be surprised how much pull an E-8 or E-9 has in the military.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 7 points 2 months ago

Yeah..... This is a bit sketchy. Pharmaceuticals aren't just something that an amateur can make by following step by step instructions. Even something as simple as baking a cake requires some basic experience to know when things are going right or wrong.

Even maintaining the calibration on a CLR requires some background experience, let alone building and programming one all on your own. With your actual reactor being as small as a mason jar, it means the margin for error is going to be small as well.

This is neat for people with a background in chemistry, but I don't really see it as anything but dangerous for the general public. They also are fudging their math a bit to make things seem a lot cheaper. Reagents can be really cheap at bulk prices, but you have to spend the time looking for them, and they aren't equating the cost of a trained chemist making these medications.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 3 points 2 months ago

You are using the people claiming there is a genocide as the source for the claim.

That's typically how investigations work.... There's an accusation, and then an investigation to find evidence that supports the claim. They aren't using people as a source for the claim, they're using the evidence the people gathered.

You on the other hand seem to be focused on who gathered the information instead of what they gathered.

Welcomes** the outcomes of the visit conducted by the General Secretariat's delegation upon invitation from the People's Republic of China; commends the efforts of the People's Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People's Republic of China.

This is anecdotal evidence from a political organization that has a well established history of ignoring the plight of specific Islamic ethnic minorities, including the Kurds in Syria and Turkey, the Ahwaz in Iran, the Hazaras in Afghanistan, the 'Al-Akhdam' in Yemen, and the Berbers in Algeria.

Over 50+ UN member states (mostly Muslim-majority nations)

Again, anecdotal evidence which does not detail the accusations, nor how their experience contradicts that accusation.

The World Bank sent a team to investigate in 2019 and found that, "The review did not substantiate the allegations."

Using this as "evidence" is just academically dishonest. The "team" was a single bank manager, and the "investigation's" scope was solely to insure that a 50m dollar loan for 3 different schools were not being used to commit crimes against humanity.

The bank claimed that the specific schools they investigated did not substantiate the allegations, however they found enough to decide they wanted to minimize the project.

"In light of the risks associated with the partner schools, which are widely dispersed and difficult to monitor, the scope and footprint of the project is being reduced. Specifically, the project component that involves the partner schools in Xinjiang is being closed."

China’s mass imprisonment and forced labor of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity—but there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide

I think you are forgetting the accusations of the population control of an ethnic minority. "The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which lists birth prevention targeting an ethnic group as one act that could qualify as genocide."

Comparative Analysis: The War on Terror

Again, a logical fallacy. Just because America has participated in genocide does not mean that China cannot also participate in genocide or crimes against humanity.

Who is driving the Uyghur genocide narrative

Another logical fallacy.... You are attacking the man, not the evidence or argument.

He relies heavily on limited and questionable data sources, particularly from anonymous and unverified Uyghur sources, coming up with estimates based on assumptions which are not supported by concrete evidence.

The vast majority of the evidence he's gathered for his peer reviewed study are gathered directly from public data released by the Chinese government. There have also been some data from a leaked cable, which have been validated by multiple investigative bodies of journalists across the world.

As materialists, we should always look first to the economic base for insight into issues occurring in the superstructure. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive Chinese infrastructure development project that aims to build economic corridors, ports, highways, railways, and other infrastructure projects across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Xinjiang is a key region for this project.

This is a biased interpretation of materialism. A similarly biased claim based on materialism would be that the Belt and Roads initiative motivated china to ethnically cleanse a region vital to the initiative.

On a personal note, I don't think the lable of genocide is really important. What is important is that an ethnic minority is being abused by a State. And while there is a lot of misinformation and politicing surrounding the topic, there's still an alarming amount of data that suggest China is forcibly assimilating an ethnic minority group.

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