Steven Johnson

If we are the best versions of ourselves, which that balloon just proved...

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@controlthezone Does this team try to make a big splash (e.g., Elly), or basically stick with the core they have and do smaller moves?

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@LO_Mariners Should they put Ward on waivers and bring up Arroyo?

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@dannyoneil Weird it's a hard court tournament, because that's a lot of grass.

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@meowiners The experiment participants, known as "fans," have described following the team to researchers in horrific terms, such as akin to being imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, being caught in the cycle of domestic violence, or living in Cleveland, Ohio.

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@meowiners Inspired by the Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 and Milgram electric shock experiment of 1961-62, "Seattle Mariners baseball" is generally regarded as one of the most ethically dubious academic projects of the last 50 years.

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@MikeDugar

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@Hoopss

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@jacobinfante24

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@LO_Mariners Dodgers receive Logan Gilbert, Cole Young.
DBacks receive Emmet Sheehan, Zyhir Hope, Logan Evans.
Mariners receive Ketel Marte, Justin Wrobleski, Ben Casparius.

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

It’s fairly well known that Mao Zedong’s so-called Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) ended in the greatest man-made famine in human history—some 45 million dead, fields littered with corpses, villages emptied by hunger, and the sound of chewing bark mistaken for the crackle of grain. What’s less well known is that Mao’s revolution didn’t just declare war on landlords, capitalists, and reason—it declared war on nature itself.

In 1958, the Chairman launched what he called the Four Pests Campaign, a crusade against rats, flies, mosquitoes—and, inexplicably, sparrows. The tiny birds, Mao decreed, were “enemies of the people” for daring to eat the people’s grain. And so, as one historian put it, an entire civilization mobilized against the feathered menace. Schoolchildren banged pots and pans in the streets, peasants drummed on washbasins, and factory sirens screamed for hours to keep the birds in flight until they fell dead from exhaustion. Nests were torn down, eggs smashed, and chicks stomped into the earth.

The results were biblical. In Beijing alone, more than a million sparrows were killed in a matter of weeks. Rural communes competed to see who could pile the highest mountain of avian corpses, a kind of grotesque festival of progress. But victory, when it came, was short-lived. The sparrows, it turned out, had been eating more insects than grain. Within a year, the skies were empty, and the earth was crawling. Locusts rose like living clouds, devouring fields from horizon to horizon. Peasants watched in horror as the crops disappeared into the mandibles of an unstoppable plague of their own making.

Rather than admit his mistake, Mao doubled down on absurdities. He replaced the sparrows with imported Soviet “science”—the theories of Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist who believed that crops could be re-educated through hard labor. Genetics was bourgeois nonsense, Lysenko said; what mattered was enthusiasm. If you plowed deeper, planted closer, and shouted revolutionary slogans loudly enough, the harvest would multiply. Yes, they actually believed that. So fields were churned to depths that strangled their roots, seedlings planted shoulder to shoulder until none could breathe, and bureaucrats inflated yields to impossible heights. Mountains of fake grain were reported; much of the real grain exported to show socialist success.

By 1960, China was starving. Whole provinces were dying in silence. Peasants boiled leather belts for soup, mothers abandoned their infants by the roadside, and in some villages, desperate men turned cannibal. Still, the propaganda blared: “The people’s communes are good!” Mao’s war on sparrows was part of a nationwide war on reality itself.

Years later, a survivor put it simply: “We killed the birds, and then the insects ate everything else.” It was the perfect epitaph for Mao’s age—a revolution so blinded by ideology that it devoured not only its people, but the very balance of life that sustained them.

#archaeohistories

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@danpfeiffer

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@LO_Mariners Luis Castillo and Luke Raley for Jeff McNeil and Kodai Senga

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@Jomboy_ Why is Kiner-Falefa sliding???

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@LO_Mariners Willson Contreras for Cole Young. Maybe pick up Contreras's club option to get him to waive the no-trade clause.

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@rogercfr @OptaSTATS San Diego

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@ChrisDaniels_TV @Mariners Or Bob Wolcott

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@awfulannouncing Same ref! Same team!

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@TheNeedling You never know. Cal Raleigh could have been using a forged birth certificate.

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@LO_Mariners Who are you rooting for? Houston or Texas? Cleveland or Detroit?

[Steven Johnson @stevie_j13]

@DustinNickerson If you did, you wouldn't be true M's fan