ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
No bio...
User ID: 2935
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
3mo ago
The goal of gang warfare isn't to win, it's to show personal courage in the face of danger.
Don't gang members jump their victims pretty regularly? I'm not sure honor culture is the (whole) answer here.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
3mo ago
I take it from this that Peter Zeihan isn't particularly well thought of around here?
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
3mo ago
Is an idea radical if it's 2000 years old?
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
3mo ago
Well, I'll at least say your the first consistent prescriptivist I've come across!
Omg, I would love a way to distinguish between reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns.
If you ever find yourself in the unlikely position of having to pick up a Nordic language, you'll have that to look forward to.
I think these sorts of theories are much more plausible than those involving deliberate sabotage.
Israel created massive refugee camps of the native population of its lands and then tried to dump the problem onto the neighbouring Arab states. I can’t gather a lot of sympathy for them for failing at this and having to deal with the consequences of its actions.
I'd say it was the invading Arab armies in 1948 encouraging Arabs to leave their homes to make fighting the Israelis easier that are more responsible for the "massive refugee camps". But even if, for the sake of argument, we put all the blame on Israel, it's significantly less brutal than what the colonialists in Australia or the USA did. Maybe you wouldn't have much sympathy for them either if Native Americans started massacring thousands of American civilians. But I'm skeptical you'd be as energised about that as you are about Israel.
Also it lost Sinai in a war (incidentally: a war that displayed how extremely vulnerable the country is if its enemies can act with even a tiny bit coordination. Israel’s short sighted and frantic actions are pushing its enemies into such coordination right now)
AFAIK Sinai was given back in the 1979 Camp David accord, 6 years after the Yom Kippur war ended with the international community begging Israel not to march into Cairo and occupy it militarily. I guess you could look at that and reduce it to "Israel lost Sinai in the war" but that's a pretty motivated description of events. In any case, I wouldn't look at that as an example of how much danger the Arabs pose to Israel.
If the world started operating on pre-20th century assumptions of ethnic conflict again, Israel would have a free hand to exile or kill the Arab population of course. But then it could also not expect much sympathy or support from the West when the hundred fold more populous enemy surrounding it did the same to Israel. So be careful what you wish for.
Is your suggestion that Arabs are holding back from trying to destroy Israel due to respect for 20th century norms of handling ethnic conflict?
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
3mo ago
I'm skeptical the US ever provided nuclear deterrence for Israel. Even without the current hard pivot away from Israel that the Democrats are performing I can't imagine there's any world where the US would have nuked Iran in return if they try to nuke Israel.
Because it means the remaining Arabs will have to either be somehow deported, or live under a permanent apartheid/occupation regime.
The words occupied and apartheid don't mean what you seem to think they mean. Gaza wasn't occupied or under any form of apartheid under the standard definition of those terms between 2005 and 2023. And who was planning to deport them before recent hostilities?
No Iran doesn't want a 20% Jewish population I am sure. But then Iranians didn't settle in a land exclusively inhabited by Jews in the 20th century and then spent the last century in a struggle to take over the said land. So the comparison is really pointless and distracting.
Israel tried to give Gaza to Egypt, and the West Bank to Jordan. It unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. It gave the Sinai back to Egypt. That's not the behavior of a country consistently struggling to take over land. Again, these words don't mean what you seem to think they do.
In fact there are approximately zero comparable cases to Israel's ethnic problems in the last century which is the exact thing that makes it such a hot-button issue.
The only thing that makes Israel's case unique is how benevolently they treat the other ethnic groups they share the region with. I can't think of a single other nation in history that, were they in the same position as Israel is now, wouldn't have crushed the Palestinians decades ago. I can only assume you're aware of how the Romans or Ottomans handled hostile activity in the Holy Land. Do you honestly think the case of Israel is the first time in history one ethnic group has achieved dominance in a particular region at the expense of another? How do you think Australia and America became full of white people?
Modern IDF has not proven itself capable of fighting anything other than severely resource constrained urban insurgents. It failed badly the last time it tried to act against Hezbollah, which has much more in common with a proper army than an insurgent group. There is little indication that IDF’s ground forces have actually increased in quality since the last war.
This is cope. Hezbollah losses were twice as high as Israel ones during 2006 according to wikipedia, and that's with Hezbollah hiding behind civilian shields, having an extensive tunnel network to hide and move around in, and fighting on home territory. They also don't have an airforce.
Israeli military depends almost entirely on western supplies and cutting edge technology.
Israel has one of the most advanced defense sectors on the planet. Part of why the west sells Israel weapons is because they want to buy Israeli military hardware for themselves. The types of arms that Israel buys are often highly precision-based and used to minimize battlefield casualties. Cutting them off from that wouldn't handicap Israel war efforts, it would just make them a lot more indiscriminate.
The main problem with the Israeli political chaos is that Israel is making many suboptimal decisions, prioritising Netanyahu’s political survival and the populace’s thirst for vengeance over Hamas.
This is concern trolling. There's no country on earth where it would be viable for a government to do nothing in response to an Oct 7th style-attack, or to the thousands of rockets Hezbollah keeps firing at them. Complaining that Israel's response is "suboptimal" is just a way to launder the actual wish for Israel to simply not respond at all and accept being constantly under siege.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
3mo ago
That would be totally suicidal, nobody in the country supports such a thing and it’s simply a fake solution made up by westerners (just like the “2-state solution”) to avoid thinking too hard about the unpleasant implications of the Israeli state.
Why is it an "unpleasant implication of the Israeli state" that Israel wants to keep its Arab population from not growing much beyond 20%? Is it an unpleasant implication of the Iranian state that they probably don't want a 20% Jewish population?
I'm sure this argument applies in some cases but proves too much when applied to English IMO. If we accept that English's minimal conjugations for person and number (limited in almost all cases to the '-s' suffix for third-person singular) encode useful redundancy in any real sense, we'd have to accept that modern English is monumentally inferior to languages with fuller inflectional profiles like Old English or Proto-Germanic for reliable communication. And we should subsequently advocate for far more extensive language reforms, like a complete re-introduction of the case system, than e.g. telling people off for using double negatives or whatever.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
3mo ago
Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is still good, but you can already tell the series has lost the spark that went with Patrice Désilets.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
3mo ago
I assume "elites" here refers to journalists, democratic party workers etc.
English and its closest relatives have, as far as anyone can tell(and Old English is one of the few older Germanic languages well documented enough to tell how it worked- spoiler, a lot like modern German but without articles.
I'm not sure what I said that you're responding to with this paragraph.
If your argument is that English should go all the way in dropping inflections, just like Afrikaans did, it'll probably get there eventually.
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.
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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo ago
The west funds Hamas.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
3mo ago
I think you mean faceh's sign!
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
3mo 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.
I don't see this as having much to do with wokeness or identity politics (at least from Harris' end). I think this has common elements with the various Latinos/Blacks for Trump groups, with the main parallels being:
More options
Context Copy link