In Finkelstein's "Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom", he notes that have been investigations into the use of human shields by Hamas by orgs such as Amnesty. They found no evidence that Hamas used human shields. However, they did find evidence that the IDF used human shields.
Also, why would Hamas possibly use human "shields" when Israel have absolutely no qualms with killing civilians?
That's fine, I don't think you're being an ass at all. Brette is saying that just because there is a correspondence between the measured spike signals and the presented stimuli, that does not qualify the measured signals to be a representation. In order for it to be a representation, it also needs a feature of abstraction. The relation between an image and neural firing depends on auditory context, visual context, behavioural context, it changes over time, and imperceptible pixel changes to the image also substantially alters neural firing. According to Brette, there is little left of the concept of neural representation once you take into account all of this and you're better off calling it a neural correlate.
I work in neuroscience and I don't agree that it is on much firmer ground that psychology. In fact, as some people in the community have noted, the neuroscience mainstream is probably still in the pre-paradigmitic stage (using Kuhn). And believe it or not, a lot of neuroscientists naively do believe that the brain is like a computer (maybe not exactly one, but very close).
As someone who also works in the neuroscience field and is somewhat sympathetic to the Gibsonian perspective that Chemero (mentioned in the essay) subscribes to, being able to decode cortical activity doesn't necessarily mean that the activity serves as a representation in the brain. Firstly, the decoder must be trained and secondly, there is a thing called representational drift. If you haven't, I highly recommend reading Romain Brette's paper "Is coding a relevant metaphor for the brain?"
He asks a crucial question, who/what is this representation for? It certainly is a representation for the neuroscientist, since they are the one who presented the stimuli and are then recording the spiking activity immediately after, but that doesn't imply that it is a representation for the brain. Does it make sense for the brain to encode the outside world, into its own activity (spikes), then to decode it into its own activity again? Are we to assume that another part of this brain then reads this activity to translate into the outside world? This is a form a dualism.
Huh, that's so strange lol. I guess AliPay will probably be all you need. Since you're going to Shanghai, I actually really enjoyed the propaganda museum.
I live in China (Hangzhou, actually). Just to add to what people have already said. WeChat now accepts international credit/debit cards and it works fairly reliably now (my girlfriend recently visited and she was able to use both WeChat and AliPay), but I think AliPay is probably more reliable. I'm fairly confident they both would work in Guilin/Changsha, but bring cash just in case.
To be honest, I don't know much about thought disorder. I only know of it as a symptom of schizophrenia (though it also exists in other forms), and there is no way to treat schizophrenia. Not sure what happened to the previous comments, I can't see them either.
Yes exactly, people who ask why they didn't try to manage the opening rather than let-it-rip don't realise how quickly it spread even with lockdowns. Where I was living in Hangzhou, in the weeks leading up to the opening up, I could hear about a new place being locked down nearly daily, and cases were still continuously rising during this period.
It's pretty much impossible to provide an overall 6 month transition plan in China given how different the provinces are in terms of resources etc. Anyhow, people who are talking about a transition period don't realise how infectious the current strain was. The only way to manage the spread was to continue to use lockdowns (and this was already failing). But the only way to have lockdowns be localised and not use it as a blunt weapon is to also continue to pour resources into testing etc. Cities were already running out of money to do testing and some were requiring citizens to pay for their own (mandatory) tests.
If you're interested, David Fishman (who lives in China and writes very interesting articles about the energy sector) has written about China's New Countryside program, which OP's article reminded me of. The New Countryside program is also based on rural revitalisation programs developed in Vietnam, I've read elsewhere.
They already have a pretty high vaccination rate. Many older people did not get the covid vaccine simply because they didn't want to get it or because they felt no urgency to get it in the first place. Ironically, the vaccination rate has been quite high recently (though unfortunately, it'll be too late for many people). You could say that were suffering from their success of zero-covid during the first couple of years. Fact is that with how infectious Omicron is, dynamic-zero was never going to be sustainable. It was also economically unsustainable, several cities could no longer afford their containment measures and people had to pay for their own PCR tests.
Yea, I was looking for a spot to do a test just now and I accidentally found a single-vial spot. Had to pay for it though. Hope the other single-vial tests aren't like that.
Yea, I've seen that table. I work at a university and they're still fairly strict about testing atm. Not sure what they'll do they once people start being positive just by virtue of being part the batch sampling.
Reading the comments here is such a crazy experience for me. I'm in Hangzhou, and I still see people out and about without wearing masks because it's not particularly severe here yet. I'd say there's a week or two before we go through what the other major cities are going through.
Zizek was recently banned from speaking in the "Conference on Zizek's Philosophy and Thought" hosted in Nanjing University. The linked article is supposedly the speech that he submitted for that event.
In Finkelstein's "Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom", he notes that have been investigations into the use of human shields by Hamas by orgs such as Amnesty. They found no evidence that Hamas used human shields. However, they did find evidence that the IDF used human shields.
Also, why would Hamas possibly use human "shields" when Israel have absolutely no qualms with killing civilians?