listening to Dan Carlin's Supernova in the East and super irritated that he focused on Hiro Onoda instead of the 10-million-times-more-interested Teruo Nakamura.
The last Japanese holdout to ever surrender was not Japanese imperial fanatic from the home islands but...
.... a Taiwanese aborigene who decided not to surrender with his unit but just build himself a hut on a deserted island and lived quietly until accidentally discovered
Also I guess I shouldn't call him Teruo Nakamura since he did not actually speak Japanese (or Chinese!). His name in his own language was Attun Palalin.
That is a thing I did not know until I just googled it; I'm not super up on my Taiwanese aboriginal name structures just offhand.
But the point is: Attun Palalin wasn't fighting a 30 year war in the woods.
He made friends with locals, planted crops for himself, and lived a fairly quiet and unassuming life from all accounts. A local included him in their will.
The most amazing holdouts tho aren't even the longest lasting ones.
The ones I find most impressive are the guys who held out of years ***in populated areas***. Two guys held out in Iwo Jima for ***5 years****. wanpela.com/holdouts/profi…
Y'all Iwo Jima is *little*. 8 square miles. My home county is 172 square miles. Manhattan is 22 square miles.
ANd Iwo Jima ain't Manhattan. Few buildings. Few trees. Not too much cover to hide behind. Mostly flat.
They lived in a cave and stole stuff.
Guam is even more populated than Iwo Jima. It's bigger too, but in the 1950s it has 60,000 people living on it.
Two guys held out there until 1960.
Sorry, more than 2.
*Five* guys, a pair and a trio, made it to 1960. Two gave up in 1960. Two died in a flood in 1964. The last one made it to 1972.
They did this ***in a populated area***!
The *actual* last Japanese to surrender, however, did so in....
.... 1989!
But they don't get counted, because they did "move on" from the war. They accepted that Japan lost.... and joined a communist insurgency in Malaysia! wayback.archive-it.org/all/2008011921…
Those guys weren't quite "holdouts" though more like "got-left-behinds."
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First, you take CDC's reported deaths. Then you make an adjustment for underreporting of recent deaths. Various ways to do that I won't get into here, but all methods yield similar results.
Then you compare deaths in each week to deaths in each week in prior years.
Various ways to set a baseline. But one uncontroversial way to set a *maximum* expectation for "normal deaths" is to take: 1) maximum deaths in a given week 2014-2019 2) multiply by pop growth
When people think of "extremely functional microstates that just work for hard-to-explain reasons" they always leave out Mongolia and it's infuriating.
Mongolia has had *negative* excess deaths in 2020 y'all.
When we give examples of successful introduction of participatory demcoracy, rapid economic development, etc, we should really be giving Mongolia as a textbook example.
I am partly pro-Mongolian because they have anomalously high TFR for their income level, because Mongolians love the babies.
Also, lowkey, this is, um, a thing that is happening:
I get the desire to punish everybody associated with Trump but "a bunch of people who've been running the country for 4 years and have a bunch of political supporters and cash being angry and bored" is perhaps not actually the ideal outcome.
One of the issues to reckon with is that Reconstruction didn't go far enough, but attempts at strict Denazifiction were widely regarded as mistakes. De-Baathification has been seen as a catastrophe for IRaq.
I'm not sure what defines the differences. But study of authoritarian regimes most definitely does *not* support the idea that you should always purge as much as possible!
Saw @mattyglesias tweet about a poll of QAnon support (linked). I think it's a *bit* mistaken tho: the table he shared was QAnon support *among those who had heard of it*. But TONS more liberals have heard of QAnon than conservatives!
Here's the net favorability of QAnon (double-weighting the "very" folks) accounting for differences in who's even heard of QAnon.
Key to understand is Democrats and liberals are EXTREMELY anti QAnon not only because they are very unfavorable to it but because large shares of Rep/Con folks ***have never heard of QAnon***.
I think it's fair to criticize US support of the Saudis in this war.
I also think it's unreasonable to argue that we should be providing even humanitarian aid in a region where we know both sides will steal it and use it to enhance their exploitation of the local people.
reading the self-important and vaguely-cultish textbooks by bayesians makes me want to go out and kill a sufficiently large number of bayesians that i can estimate the mean pitch of their screams
"when we have multiple models, we should choose one using Bayesian statistics"
no
you should do both and publish an appendix showing robustness tests, you cultist
"but my bayesian model takes 4 weeks to process i can't run 1,397 robustness tests"