All sources I could find point to 15% to 20% of the population being neurodiverse with only a small fraction of this being people in the autism spectrum (around 1% of the total population). So even accounting for under diagnosing there’s no way that’s true.
Categories only make sense if they are useful, and if you make them so imprecise that they include everyone then they are useless.
By expanding the criteria for the autism spectrum to include everyone that displays even a single trait associated with autism we would be doing a disservice to the people that display a larger amount of those traits (i.e. the ones that are on the spectrum with the current consensus), since they would be invisible in the midst of everyone else.
China is such an excellent test for how gullible someone is. So many people will believe any bad thing they read on the internet about it, no matter how absurd, and no matter how easy it is to disprove.
So there’s a whole fucking Hundred Acre Wood exhibit, Pooh and all, but I guess if you text someone about it Xi appears from under your bed and black bags you? xibe-check
Are you really trying to deny reality here? I understand you hate China and am even willing to belive it’s ideological and not entirely racist but pretending they’re not a global manufacturing powerhouse is next level nuts.
Not really. Global Scale Wars were a unique thing back then. The Great War, the war to end all wars, was thought (hoped!) to be the only one of its kind. They had a lot of conflicts between major powers, but at least for the west, 17 million deaths excluding the spanish flu epidemic was a massive outlier.
Even the Mexican Revolution, listed on Wikipedia with an upper estimate of 3.5 million, wasn’t a quarter of that, and it wasn’t global. The last thing in the west that came (somewhat) close was the Napoleonic Wars with an upper estimate of 7 million, a hundred years earlier. China has had several massive death counts in various wars and rebellions, but that won’t have been very present to the average western civilian.
WW1 brought with it a slew of new developments in military technology and capability for destruction. For the world to have not just one, but potentially two conflicts considered at least on par with The Great War would be very concerning.
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. World War V will be fought with crossbows, World War VI will be lasers, and World War VII will be blowguns. I don’t know about World Wars VIII through XI. World War XII will use the same weapons as III, but will be fought entirely within underground tunnels. World War XIV will—Hey, come back! I have a whole list!
Yeah, like in that Doctor Who special where they tell the WW1 soldier “Now let’s get you back to your first world war” and he goes “FIRST world war?!”.
Climate change, same sex marriage (though, perhaps not as shocking as some might expect, ditto anything trans related), potential mars colonization, coming off the heels of the Spanish flu, COVID news would probably freak em out. Ooh, the USSR being gone, and China being a world super power. The USSR would have been new to them, and it collapsing less than a century later would probably feel quite odd, especially if you could make them understand just how incredibly advanced the USSR got in such a short amount of time. Tons of stuff.
In the 1920s a state fresh off a recent regime change disappearing would have been extremely par for the course. You telling that to someone from the 1960s would probably have more of an effect.
I mean, if you showed them a map it'd look nothing like their current political divide. I'm not sure they'd be more shocked by the state of what then was Soviet Russia than by Czechoslovakia being broken up or the other half a dozen changes in Europe alone.
I’m Czech, and exactly 105 years ago (October 30, 1918) the approximately dozen nationally aware Slovaks met in an inn and wrote a letter to Prague that they agree to be part of Czechoslovakia as the “Czechoslovak nation” because they knew they couldn’t form a state on their own, and split off the hated Hungary. The 4 people who signed our “Declaration of Independence” 2 days prior needed someone to represent Slovakia so they went in the streets searching for a Slovak. Vavro Šrobár, a nationally Slovak lawyer who incidentally just arrived to Prague, came forth and signes the document, and became Minister of Slovakia a few weeks later.
The Republic helped Slovakia reach its industrial potential and gave its people democratic values (except for WWII, we don’t talk about Slovakia in WWII). Eventually, Slovak politicians wanted power so they broke off after true democracy was restored in 1989. The Velvet Divorce was so uneventful compared to the end of Communism that people did not really care at all.
So I agree that to informed people in 1923, Slovakia being separate a century later would be no surprise. However, the formation of USSR (which I know much less about) was pretty controversial and involved a civil war so they might be actually be surprised it did last 80 years.
On the other hand, the other changes you glossed over are quite significant, especially with Germany and Poland.
Show them a time lapse animation of the countries borders as they changed in real time such that a second equals one month. Two minutes of “what the fuck just happened‽‽”
In fact, German medical science was on the forefront of chemical and surgical gender therapies, riiight up until Hitler. Quite a lot of seminal research was burned by the doctors responsible - to protect the identities of anyone involved.
1923, virtually every capitalist country in the world had just invaded the USSR 5 years ago, Japan only pulled out in 1922.
The USSR being gone only becomes shocking post WWII when they went from an agrarian nation wracked by civil war and famine, with zero tractor factories to sending 100,000 tanks into Germany 20 years later to putting a man in space 20 years after that.
Helicopters exist, and there are some octocopter drones that can lift a person. We also got a working jetpack recently, and we’ve had water-jetpacks for ages.
How pervasive surveillance and tracking of people (and their data) is in todays society. We've become accustomed to it but I'd bet people a century ago would be shocked at the idea of stuff like regular people being filmed from multiple angles when just going to the shops, having a device in their pocket constantly recording their location, receiving targeted advertising based on what information they've looked at previously, etc.
It wasn’t really that strange, people got tailed all the time during the nuclear weapons program and after, to make sure that they weren’t gay. Shit was wild in the early 50s. A senator committed suicide because his son was outed as gay, getting dirt on people was hardcore. People got fired on the flimsiest of claims.
Physical surveillance was pretty bad, even then. Digital surveillance has gotten worse today, but it’s much more fragmented and not so…eerily similar to the CCP. Also, fuck McCarthy. The book on this timeframe is a wild read, highly recommend it as it explains the postwar era and cold War paranoia.
At risk of being a broken record, a reminder that OG fascism was cool and on the rise at that point. The surprise would be that you can opt out of all that stuff, people will just think you’re weird.
I have family in the US (who are not trumpets afaik) and they wouldn’t know that he actually got proven guilty for doing it. They‘d probably assume he made a deal.
Isn’t it a civil trial tho and not a criminal trial? Meaning that the bar for evidence is just “more than likely” and not “beyond a reasonable doubt” right? I mean it’s still very damning but he has not (yet) been found guilty of the crime, just liable.
There is an important distinction of being “convicted” and “proven guilty” though. You can get off a conviction through multiple means, one being a mistrial and so on. I think there is no two ways about this after reading:
A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.
I'm not an expert on the nuance of the US legal system, but "convicted" probably applies to the criminal system, right? What would it be in this scenario? A confirmed rapist? Just "a rapist"?
Still, the guy raped some lady and he's actively running for president. That one would be shocking any time before the mid 2010s, honestly.
Yeah they’d be shocked that someone rich enough to run for president could be accused of rape ‘why didn’t he just have the girl committed to an asylum to keep her quiet?’
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