ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
No bio...
User ID: 2935
Trump unironically probably would be better for everyone in the ME, including Palestinians (though not for the reasons that Democrats think). The worst outcome for Palestinians is that Hamas keeps using them as meat-shields in new conflicts they feel emboldened in starting because they're confident a Democrat administration will keep restraining Israel. That factor is lessened with Trump in power.
Of course, as I've said before, none of the people who claim to care about Palestinian lives really do. They're far more invested in killing Israelis.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
As someone who uses "y'all" and someone who believes in making language more effective, yes, I'd be in strong favor of people starting to say "thou" again.
Fair enough. How far would you take this? We could introduce distinctions between reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns, so that in the expression "John spoke to his brother and his wife", we would know whether the wife belongs to John or his brother. What about clusivity? Or reintroducing noun classes/genders for easier referent-tracking? There's no shortage of cool features we could add if we were really interested in making language "as effective as possible".
That wouldn't make English more effective, it'd just make it easier to learn.
Removing obvious redundancy in most cases would count as making something at the very least more efficient, if not more effective outright. It certainly wouldn't make it any less effective, but it would enrage those same prescriptivists who claim to care primarily about efficacy of language.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
I guess I'm glad there's no outcry of Cultural Appropriation, but I can't help imagine if a white guy with dreadlocks and calling himself Abdou Njie had jumped up and started rapping the heavens would have fallen.
The rules for this are simple: you can freely "appropriate" from people below you in the progressive stack.
The Japanese TV announcers even pointed out awkwardly "Her name is Aya Nakamura but she has no connection with Japan."
LMAO
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
The issue I have with linguistic prescriptivism is that it tends to arise from a pretty incorrect view of how language works. The processes it decries as degrading modern English are the same things that led to the emergence of the language from Middle/Old English, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-European etc. I'm sure there were plenty of people during the great vowel shift upset at the "incorrect" way people were using the language, but I've never heard anyone advocate that we go back to speaking like Shakespeare.
I suppose you could argue we should forcibly halt all further evolution of English so that things don't get any worse, but prescriptivists IME seem to want to maintain some supposed purity or elegance of the language as it stands, which is like believing it's necessary to maintain the chastity of the village whore.
They're people living in the world and using language as a tool, and they want that tool to be as effective as possible.
There are a plenty of things we could do to make English more effective that no one seriously suggests because the language works well enough as it is. Should we reintroduce "thou" so it's possible to unambiguously differentiate between singular and plural second-person pronouns? (Ironically enough, most hardcore prescriptivists would frown on people using "y'all" instead of "you" when referring to multiple people, even though it's strictly more effective at conveying meaning!) Maybe we should condense the inflections of "To be" so that instead of saying "I am", "You are" and so on we just say "I is" "You is" etc. English isn't a pro-drop language, so those extra conjugations are redundant. You might say that would sound ugly, and I agree, but I also think the Welsh accent sounds ugly, and I recognize that doesn't mean anything in terms of how effective or legitimate a way it is of using the language.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
Any suggestion for why it seems to be so technically poorly run? DEI seems unlikely to be the culprit for obvious lack of rehearsal.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
I'd be very interested in reading an impartial analysis of the decision to pull out of the nuclear deal. Most of the time it's brought up is in the context of left-wing journalism where any decision made by Trump is axiomatically bad.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
The west funds Hamas.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
I think you mean faceh's sign!
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
Although, it's a bit strange to send ships to patrol a place with missiles flying around, and not take sufficient efforts to deter missile shooters.
Is it that strange? They can claim they're taking bold action, without running the risks of actually taking bold action.
I really don't like violence. It's always a terrible option, but it does feel like for all our advanced weapons (see "Prosperity Guardian"), we -- or at least our current leadership -- are unwilling or unable to actually bring them to bear to serve The Greater Good (or at least Pax Americana, which I'd argue is a pretty great good) against various powers that largely sell themselves as fetishistic death cults, because someone might get hurt.
I'm generally quite skeptical that American leadership is actually that upset about civilian casualties (beyond those happening purely for cruelty's/gross negligences's own sake). I can't imagine you get to the top of the political system by being squeamish about what history has abundantly demonstrated is often necessary to protect your national interests, or those of your allies. My read is that the US judges the Houthis as too unimportant to really bother making an effort with, or to risk antagonising Iran over.
Muslims can certainly be antisemitic, but - and I could be wrong - I think most Muslims in the US don't really have an issue with Jews who aren't known to be supportive of Israel.
It depends on how religious/political the Muslims in question are. If we're talking about people who are basically entirely secular, then maybe they wouldn't care. But I doubt that's the case for those seem to care strongly about Israel, which seem to be those causing headaches for the Democrats in Michigan etc. I'd be stunned if the fervour of their anti-Israel sentiment doesn't strongly correlate with outright Jew-hatred. I can't imagine, for instance, a prayer in an American Mosque for Palestinian victory in their quest to murder all Jews in the Holy Land to end with a reminder to the congregation that American non-Zionist Jews are decent people, and it's important to be nice to them.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
Yeah, my sense (which is admittedly based off of about two people on twitter) is that democrat voters aren't so angry because they were treated dishonestly but because the cover-up of Biden's cognitive state put the party in a much worse situation vis-a-vis the election against Trump. I don't think there's gonna be any electoral fallout for retributive reasons.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
Would that gain him any new votes or make people who generally vote D but thought Biden was too old less likely to vote for Harris?
I firmly believe that Americans are narcissists and it's to their credit here; they'll mostly vote on domestic matters that truly impact them.
Does that make them narcissists? I'm not sure why anyone should be expected to vote more on the basis of issues affecting people overseas rather than domestic concerns.
I don't think many Michigan Muslims would care about the mere fact they're Jewish.
My sense at least is that politically active and religious Muslims are generally pretty abundantly anti-semitic. And we're not talking about a guy raised secular who doesn't identify at all with his background; wikipedia describes Shapiro as an observant Conservative Jew and quotes him as saying, among other things "Israel not only has a right, they have a responsibility to rid the region of Hamas and the terror that Hamas can perpetrate".
Even without the above statements, any image of him entering a Synagogue or near an Israel flag would likely spread around hardcore Muslim communities like wildfire as proof he's a bloodsucking Yahud Zionist who they have a duty to treat as an existential fundamental enemy in their Holy War.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
The republican case is actually more noteworthy IMO, given how much of a departure from typical Republican candidates Trump represented.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
The Muslims in Michigan absolutely are.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
The example Level 3 question is literally read a table and pick the smallest number in the appropriate row. Back in 2012 less than half of 15-16 year olds in the USA were able to answer a Level 3 question correctly.
I straight up don't believe the figures for the number of people correctly solving those PISA questions given by that Unz post. If half of US adults didn't agree on which numbers were bigger than others I think there'd be much bigger societal problems than the ones America currently has to deal with.
Agreed. I always found it weird that so many people's major criticism of him is that he once gave a probability of ~30% to something that did in fact happen.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
Not much of one. If you added up the top 10 people cancelled by the Right, do you think they would reach the prominence of James Damore?
Does Bud Light count?
I think you can explain a large part of the higher visibility of LW cancel culture because progressive thought dominates so many public-facing institutions. It's hard to cancel someone if you don't have a high profile patrons like major media outlets on your side.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
I read nomenym's comment as describing the POV of the typical antifa member; that there was an implicit "in the minds of people who advocate punching a nazi" attached to the end of their first sentence. Perhaps I'm wrong.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
That's fair, but I don't think it changes my argument that most women still probably over-estimate how thin the body types that men find most attractive are. What's probably more accurate to say when it comes to the appearance of fashion models is that they're one of the causes rather than an effect of these distorted perceptions.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
Thanks! It's kind of interesting that men are more attractive while women are less attractive.
Speaking as a straight guy, I don't agree that women in the US are more attractive than in the UK. I think straight people (which I assume 2rafa is) often have a slightly distorted view of what the opposite sex actually finds attractive, which is why e.g the female-dominated fashion industry keeps hiring super-thin models, and why so many men try and get as muscular as possible.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
2mo ago
Probably something to do with the Jews.
I'm not sure what I said that you're responding to with this paragraph.
I'm not arguing that English should drop inflections. My point was that if you're arguing that English should be as effective a tool for communication as possible, then there are hundreds of ways the language could be changed for that purpose (including removing obvious redundancies like some inflections) beyond simply insisting people use the word "literally" correctly. I don't think such measures are necessary, because languages are pretty adept at maintaining their ability to communicate all shades of human meaning effectively.
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