do i think buddha was a real person, though?

no.

so, we can talk about the empire if we want, but we need to understand that it includes most of the world, and always has.

it's not this thing centered in london - it has been centered in baghdad and constantinople, too.

and, it's all one great big empire....so big it fractures and reforms, but never does it secede...

i've posted about this previously, but i should clarify that it's clear at this point that the hypothesis that buddhism derived from the indo-greek synthesis in northern india has been largely proven, at this point. 

buddhism was invented by greek settlers in northern india.

the parallels to christianity come from the shared hellenic origins.

what that means is that you should not support movements in other parts of the world that you would not support in your own backyard - because we all have the same rights, and we're all fighting for the same things.

the panhellenic world created by alexander was never destroyed - it merely expanded in every direction, fractured, recombined and fractured again.

we remain panhellenes, today.

there are two counter-examples in the old world - the strong counter-example (subsaharan africa) and the weak counterexample (china, which flirted with panhellenism when it embraced offshoots of buddhism). and, there is the new world, which is built strictly on panhellenic values - despite the indigenous substratum.

so, there is no orient.

we are (almost) all greeks.

deathtokoalas

but, maybe what you're saying about said's imperialistic relativism, so to say, is actually an insight, rather than a defect. i would certainly agree that anybody arguing that western imperialism is somehow unique in history is wrong - turks, arabs, mongols, etc had imperialism at the centre of their existence, as well, and should be analyzed in the same way, in their historical turn.

the idea that everything every empire ever did is caused by the same forces is of course silly, but i want to point to two historical examples to back up his argument, which i'd argue is partially useful, although not the reason i tend to cite said, myself - i find him useful in deconstructing this tendency to masquerade racism as agency, which leads to pseudo-leftists aligning with conservative and reactionary forces under the misguided argument that they're supporting "liberation movements". in truth, they're just aligning with the far right and can't figure it out, or don't care or have conservative sympathies that get exposed that way.

you can and should oppose imperialism by aligning with the left, not the right - and arguing that you're upholding cultural differences is....well, that's what the book is for.

but, the two examples i want to try draw attention to are the french invasion of algeria and the existence of christianity.

if you look at the historical justifications for the french invasion of algeria, they fit the description said laid out fairly clearly. the reason the french went into algeria was to stop slave raids and piracy in southern france. it really wasn't economic or material, it was practically self-defense. and, over time, the french ended up integrating algeria in a way that's somewhat unusual, and maybe only has the british relationship to india as a parallel. that is one example where said's description is correct, even if you can find a dozen more where it's really not.

i would argue that tracing the issue back to the greeks actually demonstrates the opposite point, because islam is a fundamentally greek religion, like buddhism and christianity are. i've tended to make the opposite argument - there is no such thing as the east at all. we're all greeks! we're still living in panhellenism, from the tip of ireland to the depths of malaysia. a careful historical analysis indicates there is no such thing as the east, at all, and othering them doesn't actually make any sense. but, the western fascination with eastern mystery cults in the roman period is widespread. you had mithraism, for example. and, the most obvious outcome was christianity - an eastern mystery cult that found widespread adoption amongst westerners, partly voluntarily and partly not.

this isn't to say that said's models are universally applicable. but, this topic doesn't lend itself to broad statements, anyways; there simply aren't universal models to describe colonialism, it's complicated and doesn't generalize well. i would agree that he sometimes made statements that were too broad, but if you wind them back and apply them more carefully, they can be quite powerful.

"only the west engages in empire"

i mean, that's a ridiculous, empirically wrong statement.

==

i should also point out that chomsky himself is enormously critical of marx & lenin - because he's an anarchist. as were bakunin & kropotkin & ....

i wouldn't place said in that category, certainly. but, criticism of marx is nothing new on the left.

but, what chibber is doing here is fundamentally bad thinking, in defining sides and good and bad people, rather than looking at arguments and separating them from the people making them. i don't need to agree with everything said says, or even most of the things he says, to realize the value of his contribution in pointing out a certain strain of blurry thinking that needs to be corrected. citing said in one context doesn't mean citing him or even endorsing him in another. and, it would be a ridiculous strawman to suggest otherwise.

==

deathtokoalas

at the end of the talk, all i got from this is that these guys largely missed the point that there isn't a difference between east and west and it's racist to insist there is - a position that would align them with post-structuralism, rather than it's negation.

Red Authority

Of course there is a difference between East and west. There is a difference between all nations. What are you talking about?

deathtokoalas

i'm talking about basic egalitarianism; no there is not a difference between east and west and is not a difference between any "nations", the latter of which is an artificial construct of capitalism. if you get anything at all from said, it has to be that the "orient" doesn't actually exist, and neither of these guys got that.

===

deathtokoalas

specifically, said is useful and powerful in deconstructing the phenomenon of leftists supporting far right groups like isis, or even  groups like the khmer rouge, even if he's only weakly applied to many other scenarios. that's where said is useful and how he will continue to be cited, not in a broader post-structuralist framework.

ViolentHexameter

Not really. You just happen to have read Said and now see everywhere where you can apply your mediocre education. Like most people with a university education who are not, well, over 40 at least.

deathtokoalas

well, i can tell you that i'm going to keep citing said in this context, and that i'm going to keep thinking it's useful and powerful, whether you want to keep throwing non-arguments about it at me or not.

nothing these guys said here is convincing in undoing said at all.

from the previous posts,

- the minimum amount of methionine seems to be about 10.1 mg/kg

- an upper limit on an amount of cysteine that is probably insufficient for taurine & glutathione production is 10.9 mg/kg

- i previously deduced 100 mg/day of taurine as necessary

- i don't yet have good numbers for glutathione

that provides the following rdis:

methionine: 10.1*70 = 707 mg

cysteine: 10.9*70 + 100 + g = (863 + g) mg

that's not final, but it's the right idea, which i'm settling on.

yeah. so, i've decided that this is going to look something like:

cysteine 15-20 mg/kg

methionine: ~10 mg/kg

....which is the reversal of the existing recommendations. the reasons for this are as follows:

1) vegetarians need more taurine production than meat eaters.

2) cysteine is easier to find than methionine in a meatless diet

3) excess methionine consumption leads to excess homocysteine which leads to death

so, the current recommendations - based on the idea that methionine is essential and cysteine isn't - seem to have the basic health prerogatives backwards. it's just based on a conservative accounting mechanism, which is frankly kind of stupid, in context - and something i've reacted to before. whether something is essential or not shouldn't determine whether it's given priority over things that aren't. in context, excess methionine is actually even potentially deadly, which is perhaps even why we evolved to prevent ourselves from converting cysteine back to methionine - our body is maybe dropping a bit of a hint, with that.

but i need better data on a high cysteine, low methionine diet and i can't currently find it.

the truth is that this doesn't seem to be something with a clear answer, at this time - and the consensus seems to be "it's too complicated to get totally right".

but, let's see how close i can get by asking this very different question.

i think a part of the reason this is confusing - and the survey states as much up front - is that the language they're using is often inexact, to say the least. the ideas are not being presented clearly. so, let me work through this and try to get the ideas clarified, first.

their argument is that cysteine can "substitute" for methionine if it's present in sufficient quantities that you can prevent the conversion of methionine to cysteine. but, this isn't actually a substitution process at all. it's more like a blocking process. they should by talking about transsulfuration-blocking, not cysteine-sparing.

they then erect this idea of "total sulfur requirement", which is the amount of methionine you need without any cysteine, and subtract out the minimum obligatory amount of methionine, which they decide is the amount of methionine you need to do methionine things. the argument is that what's left should be the amount converted to cysteine, but, as i've said before, that doesn't actually make any sense, and i'd advise against citing that deduction. i guess you could use that number as a crude upper bound, but you don't actually know how much non-essential methionine gets converted, so you can't actually say anything besides that. the amount of cysteine you need to block conversion could very well be half of that. worse, if you go back to the first study, it mentions that they don't know that the amount of methionine cited is truly sufficient for what i'm measuring - they explicitly poi\int out that that number may be insufficient to produce enough taurine and glutathione. so, you can only deduce that you need some amount that is less than 10.9 mg/kg of cysteine to block transsulfuration from occurring at levels that may or may not be sufficient to meet cysteine needs.

so, what's the right experiment, then, even if i can't find it?

what you should do if you want the answer i'm looking for is measure the maximum amount of methionine that gets converted to cysteine, and base your cysteine requirements on how much you observe your body transsulfurate. so, what you want to do is give the subject massive levels of methionine & serine with zero cysteine and zero cysteine derivatives and see where the breakpoint occurs. that will determine total dietary cysteine requirements, independent of methionine. i'd want to take that number and build an rdi for cysteine on it. then, i could subtract that out from the total sulfur requirements to get a methionine rdi.

the confusion is likely stemming from methionine being seen as essential and cysteine being seen as inessential. that may be technically true, in terms of the chemistry, but cysteine seems to be the more valuable chemical, so it should really be what the requirements are built around. methionine may be indispensable, but only at much lower levels, and only as an after thought, in the presence of sufficient cysteine.

so, i'm taking a giant step back and asking a different question - has anybody tried to measure how much total cysteine your body requires, independent of methionine? let me figure that out first...

this is the government-subsidized row house that i spent the first 15 years of my life in:

my dad built that fence to stop the kids from trampling the flowers that were once there.

the area was ridden with crime, drugs and violence, in general. i didn't go outside much, when i lived there, for that reason. getting home often seemed like a race against time, in terms of getting hurt.

it's beyond specious to make deductions about people and their backgrounds based on what they look like. that used to be called racism, before the deeply orwellian redefinition of the term to something that is inherently meaningless.

i point this out only to ask you to be less stupid.

i'm only going to say this once: wasting time impeaching trump is exactly that, and it's exactly the point. so, they're going to drag it out until at least 2022, when they lose at least the house because everybody's fed up with them for wasting their majority on impeaching trump.

so, yell all you want for them to do something substantive - it's pointless.

they'd rather lose their majority than use it.

and, if it wasn't trump, it would be something else...

there's a thorough survey of the issue up to 2006 here:

https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/136/6/1682S/4664458

this brings in a third study by the same group:

https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/133/3/733/4688035

unfortunately, this remains all about sulfur, when i want to be looking at cysteine conversion. but, the conclusion is clear enough:

- if you get sufficient methionine and insufficient cysteine, your body will convert the methionine to cysteine.

- you get sufficient cysteine and insufficient methionine, your body will recover methinione from homocysteine.

- if you get sufficient levels of both, your body won't convert the methionine to cysteine and won't recover methionine from homocysteine

i'm aiming for #3, because i don't want the conversion - i want the methionine to do it's thing as a methyl donor and dna precursor and i want the cysteine to exist in sufficient amounts to convert to taurine & glutathione.

this third study seems to verify that i'm doing it right, but the number they present is unconvincing. so, can i find better data?

so, i mean, i know it often seems like i'm just aping him, but that's because he's been the goto voice of sanity regarding pseudoscience for almost all of anybody who is alive's life.

what i side with is the forces of science against the forces of ignorance, and chomsky is the face of that, and has been for.....70 years.

when you get past that, the disagreements start to pile up.