Whyvert
@whyvert
Inquisitive and harmless wyvern. Interested in human nature and patterns of history. Otherwise known as Paul Cossins.
Highlighted threads from last month (June). The Philistine spread of Iron smelting technology.
The Bible reports that early on, the Philistines had somewhat of a monopoly on iron production technology, and indeed, the distribution of 12th-century iron objects in the Levant is concentrated in Philistine regions. "Now there was no blacksmith to be found throughout all the…
since ppl keep asking me about mesolithic european foragers, ima do a tweet thread on it...i've followed this lit pretty closely, and also the pigmentation literature since the mid-2000s when it was pretty clear that it was gonna be one of the first successes of human genomics
Population of Europe in 1848. Most countries have gone 2X to 3X since In contrast Egypt goes from 9 to 114M in the same period of time!
A sensitive girl is a FEELMAIDEN. A tall girl is an ENTMAIDEN. A short girl is a DWARFMAIDEN. A girl who talks a lot is a SPELLMAIDEN. A pale girl is an ELFMAIDEN or ELVEN. An artsy girl is a CRAFTMAIDEN. A girl who makes bread is a LOAFMAIDEN. Etc.
"academics in the humanities display more toxic language than those in other fields, suggesting that toxicity is more prevalent in the humanities... our findings echo concerns about ideological bias in social media, where progressive voices tend to dominate"
This indeed is motivation for our new paper in @NatureHumBehav
Why are British X users being blocked from seeing anti-government protests? The Online Safety Act takes some of the most draconian speech offences in UK law and forces the website to enforce them on pain of crippling fines. A couple of examples of these 'Priority Offenses': 🧵
Footage of the protests taking place this evening against illegal immigration is being censored under the Online Safety Act
"Internet writing is eating the world, and as the medium’s breakout mainstream-famous figure, Curtis Yarvin is the object of disproportionate attention. And this attention will presumably only intensify as Vance becomes more salient in the run-up to 2028." — My new article
The Thai-Cambodia war. Boils down to (a) nations that despise each other and (b) crappy elite factions who're using war for their own internal advantage. These things are common elsewhere, which is why I see only a part of the world as a zone of lower war risk.
Hugely useful timeline of the Thai-Cambodia border crisis. Makes pretty clear that the whole thing has been instigated by, and most often escalated by, Cambodia, notwithstanding tit-for-tat on the Thai side. Why is this crisis happening, and why now? 🧵 1/14