Stats for nerds
0recommend
2mentions
2people
2021–2023years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I've read about this several times, and I'm not surprised the story is popular. Many people see China as a foe, so they like to smear it. That's alright, but anyone should be extra cautious when a story is just what most people want. Stories tend to inflate and bend to please their auditory.
For instance, consider the claim that China had to import 250,000 sparrows from the USSR. Where does it come from? This article seems to be a mash-up of a few sources, mainly Wikipedia. Indeed Wikipedia has the same claim, which is sourced from the book "Mao: The Real Story", by Alexander Pantsov. The said book has just a single sentence about this: "As a result, the Chinese even had to import sparrows from the Soviet Union." A vague assertion: no source, no date, no number of birds. Searching the web only showed many deformations of this (imported from Russia (sic), or USSR and Canada, or imported a million sparrows...). I couldn't find more about this in JSTOR and SciHub.
Overall, I haven't see anything compelling about this detail (importing sparrows) and not much about the main claim (killing sparrows is the main cause of the famine).
One last thought: pesticides have killed scores of birds and insects, especially in the USA. Probably much more than the Four Pests Campaign did. And ecological imbalances have obviously suffered during the last decades: among others, bees are waning in many countries. It seems a bit hypocritical to blame Mao in the past and forget Monsanto-Bayer and Co in the present.
- Regular exercise makes it worse because of PEM [1], and graduated exercise therapy is contra indicated [4] because their ATP energy system doesn’t fully work [2]. You could cripple them by forcing progressive exercise dogmatically. Talk therapy is no longer recommended [2] and many antidepressants are not effective [3].
If you read the book Why Zebras Get Ulcers by Sapolski there’s this story about the African farmer who has his cow die, and can no longer farm or support his family after. Sapolski says in America you’d give antidepressants, in Africa you’d just chip in and buy a new cow.
No offense, and as respectfully as possible while getting the point across, but you’re being a dick to your friend. These people bounce between doctors for years [5] because there’s no FDA approved diagnostic test, with a hyper complex disease that’s literally debilitating to them do you really think you can drive by diagnose and they just missed completely obvious and first pass treatment options? Your comment is the “I could build it in a weekend” response to ShowHN.
Edit: note, I believe in somatic experiencing of symptoms, as described in the link to this threads article. For example there’s quite a few stories in the biography of Chairman Mao [6]of high status officials suffering “neurotic crises” and requiring bed bound recuperation, arguably because of the repressive environment they lived in. But ME/CF is completely different.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/healthcare-providers/clinical-car...
2. https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(21)...
3. See dots in bottom left quadrant for Paxil/Zoloft/etc etc. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/CureTogethers-page-on-ch...
4. https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Graded_exercise_therapy quote: “ Graded exercise therapy (GET) is a form of physical therapy for the treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) where physical activity is gradually increased over time. It is a treatment that was offered to ME/CFS patients in the UK by the National Health Service (NHS) as specified in the NICE guidelines from 2007-2021, but the recommendation was removed by the 2021 NICE guidelines because of high rates of harm.”
5. https://www.omf.ngo/what-is-mecfs/ quote “ People with ME/CFS often go years before diagnosis, and 90% of sufferers have never been properly diagnosed.”
6. https://www.amazon.de/Mao-Biographie-Alexander-V-Pantsov/dp/...
