like “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
-
Recent Posts
Archives
- December 2023
- December 2022
- September 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- October 2019
- September 2019
- August 2019
- July 2019
- June 2019
- May 2019
- April 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- August 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
Categories
- Aging
- Altitude adaptations
- Amerindians
- Archaic humans
- Ashkenazi Jews
- assortative mating
- Australian Aboriginals
- Book Reviews
- Bushmen
- Cold War
- Denisovans
- Dietary adaptations
- dysgenics
- Economics
- Education
- Eskimo
- European Prehistory
- Evolutionary Medicine
- Genetics
- Genghis -Khan effect
- GGS
- homo erectus
- Homosexuality
- Indo-European
- Linguistics
- Low-hanging Fruit
- Mangani
- Neanderthals
- Pygmies
- Skin color
- Speaking ill of the dead
- sub-Saharan Africans
- Uncategorized
- World War Two
Meta
West Hunter 
As my grandmother used to say “It was all a dream”.
Can’t wait to see where this discussion goes …
I thought Walter Duranty was dead.
BTW, there’s no need to read it, if one is familiar with the NYT but here’s the NYT link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/women-china-communist-revolution.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur&mtrref=t.co&assetType=opinion
Here’s the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/women-china-communist-revolution.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur&_r=0
Without Communism and its killing, women were emancipated in the West.
I wonder how many female babies have been aborted or abandoned after birth since the communists took over.
I can give you the numbers for Eastern European bloc right away (except Poland). Abandoned babies – 0%. (It was a totalitarian state, nothing would stay hidden for long – Big Brother is everywhere, so why breaking the law when getting caught is inevitable?And big brother says thou shall not abandon a baby but marry the father. The father does not want to marry? No problem, I will soften his heart. You do not want to marry the father? How about I pay you a visit instead? No?)
Abortions – 50% of all conceptions, no prob, we do not like babies anyhow… (official data from 1987..)
Of course, it could have been different in China…but I doubt it.
It was much higher than 50% for most of post-Stalin USSR. Availability of contraception was low.
Comment from the article
Yeah but it sounds like this chump spent all his time traipsing around with a bunch of wogs and speaking gibberish instead of getting himself a proper gentleman’s education at a respectable school so who cares what he thinks?
The Communist Revolution had flaws?
No comrade! Do not be deceived by the capitalist roaders!
Heh.
Can’t beat your wife if you don’t have one.
“The more you beat your wife the tastier the soup.”
A quote from the good old days in a nation of serfs in dear old Russia. Life in China was far worse. Funny you don’t read many articles about why asian women choose to not marry or have kids. Not truthful ones anyway. Men are predictably assholes to their wives. They expect them to work full time and raise the kids without their help. Men get to hang out together after work and get drunk. Women ain’t having it.
Not sure if you’ve ever spent much time there, but if you’ve ever spent much time in the typical Chinese multi-unit building (in which virtually all Chinese live), you’ve heard (through poorly insulated walls) Chinese wives screaming bloody murder at their husbands (and child). Whether they had it coming is anyone’s guess. I doubt there are many Chinese, of either sex, who ‘choose’ not to marry.
That’s nonsense. For the traditionalists, the women’s sphere is the home. This means that while they save face for their husbands outside, they have rule the domestic sphere. Often this means control of the money as well.
Its amazing the kind of ridiculous bullshit that gets peddled.
I talked very simply about a very complex subject and I will except critisism for that.
What isn’t ridiculous bullshit is the folowing. I am quoting from an Economist article titled Asian Demography: The flight from marriage. “What is unusual about Asia is women seem to bear an unusually large share of the burden of marriage, reducing the attractiveness of married life as compared with work.”
The Economist is as reliable as Salon for its grasp on reality, which is not at all.
I’m not defending The Economist, but I think they’re talking about moderns not traditionals.
Likely working women, who have to do all the housework too. Note: I have zero personal information on the subject.
I think I might have even read that article: they were trying to determine the low birth rate in the Far East. It’s even lower than for Euros and their descendants, which is pretty low itself.
But I don’t see how they could judge by China, with the one child policy. In fact, I think they were talking about Japan. They’re not even getting married (or living together). Presumably they had some stats. But my knowledge of the subject is so slight I can’t say much else.
Despite his flaws, Hitler really liked dogs.
aww gosh…and a vegetarian.
And he had such wonderful blue eyes!
Despite his flaws, Mao surrounded himself with nubile teenage girls and regarded himself as a traditional Chinese Emperor….
NYT closed comments after only 23. The comments weren’t going the way NYT wanted. They always do that. If even their leftist readers think they’re going too far, they close the comments, as soon as they see the pattern.
Also, this article is one in a series, The Red Century.
You wouldn’t want to miss What Punk Rock Meant to Communist Yugoslavia.
Typical NYT’s. At least the communists didn’t make the women bind their feet.
But aborting female babies seems to be (or was) quite common in China.
Abortion of females is quite common today, and for the past 30 years or so. You need to be able to afford ultrasound machines for that.
In maoist times, it was just infaticide.
Footbinding was going away even with the KMT though.
I don’t get it. Explain?
In other news, Testosterone Rex is the Royal Society science book of the year. Is all lost?
The guy in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” had a wonderful dream of escape, but it was just a hallucination that occurred moments before his death by hanging.
Similarly women in China must have “dreamed big” after the Communist revolution, but afterwards due to the one-child policy they were subjected to forced abortions or sterilizations; baby girls subjected to infanticide or abandonment, etc. It seems rather gauche of the NYT to not even mention this when discussing all of Communism’s benefits for Chinese women.
I’m well familiar with ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ having first seen it on Twilight Zone in the 60’s, but when I clicked on the link in Greg’s tweet yesterday on my phone I didn’t get it either. Then just when now when I saw it on my desktop I immediately cracked up – something about the mobile presentation just didn’t flow right.
I’m not well read on the American Civil War since I’m not an American. I looked it up.
Oh, so now women need to be “taught” how to have dreams? They weren’t capable of dreaming before the communists came along to impart that knowledge?
This is what misogyny looks like!
It’s almost like big-c Communism and whatever we are allowed to call the NYT’s ideology differ more by the means of implementation at their disposal than actual belief.
The WSJ has an article on this NYT piece. The author quotes another NYT article from 2010.
I knew there was reason I never read a full book length history of Communist. I had read about the Russian case in detail. It was pretty depressing. But China seemed even worse. I bought a book but couldn’t finish it.
Keep in mind that 45 million would have been about 6~7% of China’s population at the time. A greater percentage of Ireland’s population died during the Irish Potato Famine.
Your point is? Chinese Communism was OK?
The Black Death also killed more people. Is that relevant?
Cause of the Irish Famine: Potato Blight
Cause of the Great Leap “Forward”: Brain Blight
Funny how no one ever brings up the Potato Famine when the Holocaust is mentioned. All part of the attempt of the Left to minimize the crimes of Communism when they can’t actually deny them, along with the pathological attempt of the Irish to portray themselves as the Most Oppressed People Ever.
Don’t get me wrong, the Irish are a great people who have accomplished some great things. But if self-pity were rocket fuel, the Irish would have made it to Mars by now (followed closely by the Koreans…)
Ireland was exporting food to England and elsewhere during the famine. Just as China was exporting food to its capitals as well as to places like Cuba and Africa during the Great Leap Forward. The cause in both cases was bad political economy, with some important similarities despite the obvious ideological difference. Both economies were highly centralized, with most of the land in Ireland owned by Anglo-Irish lords who were often absentee landlords residing in England, and the land in China owned by the State and run by functionaries in the capital. This highly centralized distribution of ownership meant that all the agricultural production was appropriated as rent by the lords and by the State. The Irish peasants were governed by oppressive laws that prevented them from accumulating property and capital.
Or maybe Pluto…
Lenin actually allowed the Americans to help with the food shortages caused by upheaval of the revolution and fighting. The American effort was led by Herbert Hoover.
http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2011/pr-famine-040411.html
I haven’t studied the potato famine but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the big property owners ignored the peasants. Those were bad times. A more humanitarian outlook was slow in arriving.
But the land owners didn’t actually cause the famine. In China, the famine was allowed to continue to protect ideology. In Russia, an incipient famine was stopped by Lenin temporarily backtracking on Communist economics. This wasn’t necessarily humanitarian. He may have been worried that the Communists wouldn’t hang on to power.
In the Ukraine, it seems Stalin made an already bad thing much worse by refusing to ship food in.
The Irish famine was exacerbated by old fashioned greed. A very old human trait.
The famines under Communism were worse in the sense that Communism was supposed to counteract that greed factor and no longer ignore the starving if food was available. It failed to do this.
In Ukraine, Stalin shipped out food.
To the Ukraine? Or out of the country? I haven’t read up on it for several years. There are also seems to be disagreements among authors about the fine details.
But everyone agreed Stalin didn’t help the Ukraine. Whether this was punishment for some infraction (Ukrainian nationalism) or if he needed cash from exports I’m not sure. Likely both. I do remember that he was completely unmoved by stories of the famine.
He was a really cruel man.
Out of Ukraine. Then didn’t allow any in as people starved.
The Irish famine was also allowed to continue to protect ideology, an ideology of English and Protestant ascendancy. This ideology demanded that English and Anglo-Irish lords in remote estates and in England appropriate most of the agricultural product as rent, while the producers, the Irish peasants, were deprived of rights and in a insecure tenant position. This arrangement was responsible for the Irish dependency on the potato.
Maybe so. It’s odd that England’s relationship with Ireland was so much worse than with Scotland. (Where three of my grandparents came from, with no apparent hatred of England). Yet they should have been similar: both places became English-speaking through what must have a coercive policy. Was religion the big difference?
England and Scotland had interrelated royal and aristocratic families. Ireland was just overrun.
@ursiform Cromwell annexed Scotland and Ireland. There was fighting in both places. But in Scotland it was just your standard battle. Apparently in Ireland, the English soldiers were allowed to go on a rape/pillage spree. Why the difference? The Scottish were Presbyterians, not too different from Cromwell’s religious views.
Antonia Fraser’s history of Cromwell blames the bad behaviour in Ireland on the different religion. It’s the only account I’ve read.
@ursiform It’s true the royal families were related. Plus they were on the same island so there was already mixing along the border. People likely went back and forth.
The Holodomor killed ~10% of Ukraine’s population.
Yes, I’ve had the same reaction when trying to read about these times in history. I couldn’t stomach it. I had the same reaction when trying to read the Iliad. I stopped because I didn’t want to read any more gory stuff.
I’d like to think this the Times’ idea of clickbait.
The German people were dreaming pretty damn big, too until sometime in late 1942..
The thing that spooked me was how quickly and easily they went cannibal. There was one guy on a documentary who said he accused somebody because he hasn’t had barbeque in a while.
Trivia: IIRC two of Bierce’s short stories were made into Twilight Zone episodes. Can anyone remember the other (besides Owl Creek Bridge)?
‘To Serve Man”?
Oh never mind obviously couldn’t be Bierce !
Maybe I’m thinking of “The Damned Thing.” It was adapted, but not for Twilight Zone.
For anyone interested, Solzhenitsyns MARCH 1917 will be published in English translation this November (finally!). I mention it as seems to be telegraphing the Tambov rebellion in NOVEMBER 1916, the previous knot.