corsac

Your opium-smoking analogy is wonderfully apt.

It always piques my interest when I hear of something economically valuable that "cannot be cultivated", as in, I wonder how much "cannot" means "not enough tinkering has been put in to figure out how to cultivate it in a cost-effective manner" as opposed to "impossible". I remember talking to a wasabi farmer in Oregon who claimed to have been one of the first to grow a crop "that can't be cultivated outside Japan" outside Japan.

It seems doubly worthwhile to experiment with in this case since it would both keep a food tradition viable and protect the orchid species from disappearing. When I google Orchis mascula I do find info about cultivation (though cultivation on a commercial scale might be a different matter).

"Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - but will not say how - and the decision is final."

I agree. Companies like Microsoft never do this to ordinary people.

I took the time to borrow Schwartz's book from Libgen, skim through it, and read the parts that seem relevant to that claim (it didn't look worth reading in full--lots of fluff about "quantum theory rehabilitating the basic premise of moral philosophy" etc. etc.). I also took a glance at a few of the cited studies. Schwartz's main point has nothing to do with the brain "naturally resisting change"; the book argues rather that our brains remain malleable and are continually shaped by our behavior, and the studies he highlights are in support of those points. In his own words, he is arguing for "the brain’s astonishing power to learn and unlearn, to adapt and change"--so it looks like the article-writer drew a very different conclusion from the same undiscussed studies.

The article also mentions neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps's research to support an attendant claim that "When the prefrontal cortex is under stress, our capacity for learning, memory, and decision-making is compromised". But her research on stress's effects on cognition that I can find actually suggests stress is often beneficial to learning and performance, and her work on fear response conditioning focuses on timing of interventions, not energetic expense or discomfort.

What's so worth hating about this kind of vacant-eyed patronizing crap, this "neuroscience-based approach" and "blueprint for L&D professionals", is how it authoritatively name-drops experts and science-y words as an appetizer, without inviting any actual engagement or understanding, and proceeds to dish up warmed-over PD workshop slop for the next 9/10ths of the article. Those L&D professionals may have no substantive understanding of neuroscience, but they know that you need to feel "discomfort" and bear "energetic expense".

How disingenuous.

You know what is totally, totally irrelevant here? Your (incorrect) presumptions about my nationality and ancestry.

"Racism" in popular usage includes ethnic and religious hatreds ("racism against Muslims" etc.). I agree this usage is sloppy. Would "virulent bigotry" be more precise?

Suppose for argument's sake your claim that nomads "would gladly enslave your ancestors and congratulate it [sic]" were historically supportable -- let me lay out for you why your "malaria/tsetse fly" comparison is still plain old unilluminating bigotry. In short: a) you can generalize tsetse flies and malaria organisms but not human members a group; b) you can relate to the latter, but not the former, on human terms.

Were there periods of positive coexistence between nomads and settlers, and were there cases of successful peace agreements between the two during conflicts? Were there members of nomadic ruling elites who championed or protected sedentary subjects from their peers? Were some nomadic people themselves slaves, religious ascetics, children, etc. who would not "gladly enslave" anyone? Did some nomads even transition to sedentary life? Do they have human descendants alive now? The answer in each of these cases is a well-attested "yes". Do any of these cases apply to malaria or the tsetse fly? No.

By comparing a human group to parasites or vermin, you can generalize them and dismiss any possibility of relating to them on human terms. If some group would gladly enslave me, I'd have no problem condemning it or resorting to force. But unless I mainly wanted to enjoy treating them as inferiors I wouldn't liken them to diseases or insects like you are doing.

> notions of legitimate-or-not based on the standards of the time

> "Retaliation" is a huge stretch: if your trade and your trade representatives are consistently unwelcome in someone else's territory

To clarify, trade missions conducted according to established protocols of the time and in the context of precedents of mutual trade, and retaliation in keeping with loosely-shared notions of legitimate-or-not, so much so that chroniclers of sedentary urban peoples could invoke their own concepts of legitimacy in recording them. These details are well attested in the historical record.

> eventually the kings and tax collectors did evolve into systems of governance with accountability that could support ... all the ... things we enjoy.

Sedentary agrarian societies evolved. Nomadic societies evolved. (Seafaring societies evolved. Urban mercantile societies evolved.) They all interacted with each other and some branches of each adopted some ways of the others. Our modern world with its particular triumphs and failures, freedoms and limitations, emerged from that interaction and is radically different from all of these pre-modern societies. Certain enduring elements of governance with accountability (or at least the conditions for them) were, by many accounts, a major contribution of nomadic states. It's incredibly complex and there is room to disagree -- as we do -- ideally without dehumanizing human beings as diseases or insects.

Were anything like modern notions of political legitimacy and just war current across Silk Road era Eurasia, or not? And didn't you just say it was a Hobbesian war of all against all anyway?

More to the point, supposing C has a robust pattern of responding to a trade overtures from nomadic A by violence towards A's representatives, and of justifying the response using an intransigently chauvinist characterization of A (the ahistorical "good peasants vs. bad nomads" construct alive and well in certain comments in this thread) – without imposing anachronistic comparisons or standards, is there a better way to understand A's retaliation than essentializing them as "parasites"?

And if A and B voluntarily engage in mutually beneficial trade, and C who rules over B (and holds trade and aliens both in contempt for ideological reasons) obstructs B and A from trading in order to weaken A, what is that?

Well, I am not the former. And here's a lecture for you: comparing human beings to diseases and insects subject to eradication is plain old racism when the latter do it as much as when the former do.

Population density != human flourishing.

>> hence why they won the fight.

More likely, they won because there were always far more of them, and Eurasian trade shifted from the "silk road" to the oceans.

>> those are the only societies with formal, documented anything

You can't be serious.

"Xiongnu", the early Chinese ethnonym for their nomadic northern neighbors, literally contains a word meaning "slave".