WandererintheWilderness
No bio...
User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
17hr ago
Actually, I was thinking of underwater swimming, the kind that fish evolved to do in the same way that humans evolve to speak natural language, and which elephants would struggle to match. But fair cop on the fact-check regardless, my fault for putting pithiness over precision.
Though I thank you for the breakdown, this doesn't really address my observation. I don't dispute that, based on the linked articles, some localization choices are motivated by political correctness. What bothers and bemuses me is that some of the linked articles seem to see no difference between clear instances of politically motivated rewrites - e.g. turning a crossdressing he/him character into a trans girl to win representation points - and perfectly anodyne use of clearly-non-political American slang where it might not literally correspond to the word-by-word Japanese dialogue - e.g. talking about a character "yeeting" another. Is it truly the case that only politically-biased translators make those kinds of alterations too, while more literal-minded translators are also the ones who don't try to warp the political overtones of the source material?
But even then, surely it shouldn't be a binary choice. Surely there are anime fans who would prefer naturalistic, idiomatic, non-maximally-literal localizations just so long as they weren't politically biased? Indeed, I'd have naively guessed it'd be a majority of dub consumers; after all, surely purists who want textual fidelity above all else and are sufficiently well-versed in Japanese culture that they don't need to gloss a cultural nuance like "gyaru" as something more familiar to Americans would, in any case, prefer subs to dubs? So what's going on?
Side note: your example is kind of baffling to me; I've got one of the most left-wing social circles here and I've never heard anyone in my online circles treat "That's my girl" as some kind of taboo, inherently misogynistic phrase. My guess would be that the localizer, in this case, simply picked a common American phrase that people actually say in this situation over a purely literal translation so that the dialogue would sound natural. I agree the localizer could equally well have chosen "That's [FMC] for you", but I would assume that they happened to pick "That's my girl" because they viewed it as an equally innocuous, unremarkable idiom. Which it is. But eh, for all I know woke anime localizers might indeed be plugged into specific echo chambers where everyone agrees that "That's my girl" is an eeeevil microaggression; I merely caution you not to assume this is some kind of mainstream consensus on the Left. I'd never heard of it before.
(Like, yes, sure, if you get a critical theorist talking, they'll explain that the fact that we casually call grown women "girls" is belittling and a sign of structural sexism in the English language blah blah blah. But get a critical theorist talking about anything and they'll explain how it's secretly a tool of systemic oppression. "That's my girl" is not uniquely regarded as some sort of dogwhistle where if you make a cartoon character say it, it's supposed to immediately scan as a boo light signaling that they're an evil sexist. That's not a thing. Hell, search for "that's my girl" on Tumblr or Bluesky and you'll get tons of hits showing casual usage by very woke users!)
Speaking as an outsider to this whole milieu, the discourse seems rather confused between complaining about motivated alterations specifically, and complaining about less-than-maximally-literal translation in general, which is to say, about the entire concept of localization. Several of the examples in the X thread seem to object about localizers using modern American slang even when it carries no culture-war salience at all.
For example, one of the linked articles take issue with changing a line about a girl being "a gyaru" to calling her "that gyaru bimbo". This is, to put it mildly, not what I would call a change oriented towards extra wokeness. Instead it seems obvious to me that the point is to convey a close-enough analogue to what a Japanese viewer would understand the term "gyaru" to mean to American viewers who might never have heard it before. Maybe it's a good translation, maybe not, but it's got nothing to do with tweaking dialogue to be more in line with western feminist norms - it's localization working as intended.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
I don't think this necessarily conflicts with badger's claim; it may be that Computerese is a sufficiently obtuse language that the default language centers of the human brain can't cope with it the way they can with Spanish or Chinese, requiring considerable cognitive processing power to learn it anyway, but that this is ultimately just a quirk of what language architectures our brains are optimized for. Swimming isn't inherently a harder problem than walking, natural-selection-wise - but it's very difficult if you're an elephant.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
And explicitly no expectation that they'll get to enjoy pensions of their own because it is demographically impossible.
I don't think that is "explicit". You might consider it obvious but I don't think it's something political messaging typically owns up to - at most they acknowledge the existence of a problem but gesture at immigration as a surefire fixer.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
I get where you're coming from, but to overextend the floor metaphor, I feel like over-focusing on uniquely disturbed individuals who are not simply unproductive, but will actively ruin anything that is given to them - the "bottomless pits of need" - is like saying that you can't raise the floor because there's this crazy bastard with a shovel who will dig his way down to the basement however high the floor is. Like. Okay. But we can still talk about how low a randomly-chosen individual can expect to get if they wind up penniless and friendless.
This is what I was trying to get at with the the "average unemployed pauper" stuff at the end of that same paragraph. If, while otherwise under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, you are told that you are going to be penniless and unemployable in a given society - i.e. on the lowest rung there is, if not personally the single lowest person - how bad should you expect your lot to be? Maybe there's a fixed probability (corresponding to a fixed percentage of the population) that you're going to turn out to be one of the irrecoverable wretches. But that's not the only term in that calculation, and I think it's fair to talk colloquially about improving your expected outcome in that situation in terms of "raising the floor".
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
some people are bottomless pits of need, and cannot be raised above that natural floor
Perhaps some, but not all of them. Even if you believe that no significant percentage of modern America's homeless could be meaningfully helped, it's surely undeniable that other places and eras have had much more prevalent homelessness than just that fringe of irrecoverables. The situation of the average unemployable pauper in 2026 America is vastly superior to that of the average unemployable pauper in Dickensian London, and I'm willing to call that raising the floor.
But I think even that is a stretch. Certainly a lot of modern homeless people are wretches who are not realistically going to live decently on their own again. But how did they get this way? Widespread access to hard drugs seems to be a massive slice of the pie. Succeed in massively curtailing access to such drugs (via whichever policy you think is most likely to succeed) and you've already "raised the floor" in a very significant way - however unemployable and disadvantaged you are, you'll be massively less likely to end up as a shambling brain-rotted junkie. It's not a natural inevitability that if you're homeless you'll become a debilitated addict. That's by no means the only way I can think of to help those extreme cases, but I wanted something stark and obvious and not redistributive in nature, or requiring any level of cooperation from the homeless themselves.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
I think Rov's point is that China has such a huge population to start with that even now that they're "controlling" it, they're best analogized to "what if we had a much bigger labor pool here in the US" than "what if we shrunk our labor pool too".
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
I don't think we're using "the floor" in the same sense - I mean "the floor" in the sense of how badly off the least fortunate members of society can get, and that can clearly be altered. The life of the man who has nothing could be improved considerably if we ended homelessness or gave everyone a UBI; it could be considerably worsened if we outlawed all charity or legalized selling oneself into slavery. You may think that raising the floor from its current position would have negative externalities, you may even think we should lower the floor from said current position, but it's trivially false that it "never changes".
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
There is no denying that growth raises the ceiling. The left-wing view is that raising the ceiling is morally worthless if you do not raise the floor first.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
One could consistently and defensibly desire a status quo of "anyone can physically go where they please, but getting citizenship is difficult and claiming benefits in a country you're not a citizen is impossible regardless of how long you've lawfully been there" (in such a way that one simultaneously opposes immigration as it currently exists, and wishes for the abolition of borders as they currently exist).
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
The debate is important because in the case of a lab leak then we're at a point where it's clear that modifying infectious human viruses has killed far more people than it's saved. It should probably be completely banned for the next 30 years or so.
As I have said before, this is exactly why the lab-leak-vs-zoonotic debate shouldn't matter. If after half a decade of feverish debate, there's no consensus - then for God's sake, stop it anyway. A 50/50 chance that it caused a global pandemic should, by any Bayesian reasoning, be plenty bad enough to rule upon. This isn't the trial of a human being, we don't need to convict beyond a reasonable doubt. The right question is not "did gain-of-function research, as a matter of fact, cause COVID?" (about which there will likely always be plausible deniability regardless of the truth of the matter) but "is it frightening plausible that gain-of-function research could have caused something exactly like COVID pretty easily?" (which is basically impossible to refute at this point).
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
Is the concept of an economic underclass having considerably more freedom from the law than their supposed betters really that novel? "Only proles and animals are free".
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
Sure, but I do think you might get fewer able-bodied young men volunteering to martyr themselves for the cause when the cause being sold to them by the terrorist recruiters is "I know things are fine around here, but there's all these disgusting enemies of the Prophet who hurt our ancestors over there, let's go attack them" as opposed to "you know how everything around here is shit? it's because of those hated infidels who are currently oppressing and bombing us, so let's kick them out of our rightful fatherland". Observably, stable, independent Muslim nations spend considerably less effort on trying to wipe Israel off the map than Hamas does, even if many of them still have that as one of their long-term goals.
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
Many groups want to simultaneously tear down culturally the notion of a shared community, while still asking the inhabitants to consider each other as part of a shared community and act accordingly.
Well, some wish to build a sentiment of worldwide community for the Human Race - the planet Earth as one big commonwealth, with countries and borders as an administrative tool not different from a country itself dividing itself up into Länder or counties or regions with varying degrees of local government.
You might think this is utopian, but it's not a contradiction - and I think this was genuinely the dream of many in the late 20th century, explicitly or implicitly, with the infrastructure of the EU and UN as steps towards implementing such a thing. The hope was that national identity would simply become irrelevant to fostering civic spirit as progress and globalization and the Internet built up a sentiment that we're all in this together. People would genuinely become citizens of the world in their hearts, and vote for the good of their countrymen as a special case of voting for the good of Homo sapiens in the same way that you vote for the good of your town as a special case of voting for the good of your country.
I think, then, that the current malaise results from resurgent (or simply stubbornly-not-fading-away-on-schedule) nationalist sentiment making itself known loudly enough in various parts of the world that what was once merely optimistic now looks genuinely unreachable in the short term.
Becoming left or right wing is downstream of other life experiences
I think being a CSA survivor is itself a pretty major reason someone might grow up as strongly leftist, though (and, separately but compoundingly, that someone identifying as "a CSA survivor" in a survey is more likely to be left-wing than right-wing even assuming equal rates of actual experience of CSA between blue and red respondents). The therapists are woke, the books about coping with trauma are woke - if dealing with trauma is a huge part of your life then you'll grow up marinating in a generally left-wing worldview. And if you don't absorb that worldview you're less likely to continue identifying as "a CSA survivor" in adulthood - as opposed to compartmentalizing it away as just some shit in the past you don't need to think about, unlike all those fragile left-wing snowflakes who bootstrap themselves into chronic anxiety by fixating on their bad experiences.
So that gets us "CSA survivors are more likely to be left-wing"; and surely I don't need to justify the "left-wingers are more likely to question their gender" part of the chain of reasoning?
WandererintheWilderness
17d ago
I would have thought that an obvious "common factor" in both identifying as a CSA survivor and identifying as non-cis would be "being left-wing".
it requires imposing criteria that aren't used anywhere else in the world.
In fairness, Gaza's situation is in itself pretty unique. I don't think classifying it as an apartheid state is especially helpful, but there isn't really any truly analogous situation elsewhere in the world that you can point to and say "aha, but by this definition, wouldn't [X] be an apartheid state too?". It's just a one-of-a-kind clusterfuck that people struggle to squeeze into a round hole.
WandererintheWilderness
18d ago
(1) the extreme anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiment among Palestinian Arabs; and (2) the widespread support for terrorism among the Palestinian Arabs
Optimistically, there's something of a chicken-and-egg problem here. Forty years down the line in the counterfactual where a two-state solution was implemented in the 90s, would young Palestinians grow up with such extreme hatred of Israel if they perceived it as simply a neighboring country, and not the oppressor controlling the land they themselves currently live on? I don't know that it would reduce Palestinians' anti-zionist sentiment by a wide enough margin but equally, it would be surprising if it didn't reduce it at all.
WandererintheWilderness
18d ago
The operation may have good consequences beyond oil whether or not Trump's sole motivation was oil.
WandererintheWilderness
18d ago
the process would be something ridiculous like learning Mandarin, applying for a visa, moving to China, courting local girls, and then paying for the car and apartment. To understand why this is absurd, imagine if each time I wanted to buy a Chinese trinket, I had to move to China and haggle with the local shopkeeper in Cantonese on an open air market
A wife is not a decorative item. Yes, you are in fact supposed to court a potential paramour if you want her to fall in love with you and commit to spending her life with you. Yes, making some effort to learn her language might be considered basic decency if you intend to make the same commitment to her (especially if her own English isn't that great). There is nothing "ridiculous" about any of this, and it's only a "market inefficiency" that you can't make a Chinese girl sign her life away to you sight unseen just by throwing money at her in the sense that it's a market inefficiency that slavery is currently illegal. If all you want is a sex slave who handles your housekeeping, then have the decency to say so without tarnishing the institution of marriage as modern western civilization understands it.
But I don't even think that is what you want, since you consider it important for your putative Chinese wife to be "intelligent", so I don't even know what you're talking about. If you actually want to marry a person and not just a pliable body, then yes, obviously you should court her and learn her language first! What's "ridiculous" about this?
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
There are major parties in Israel that are less liberal than Iran; shall we sanction them?
They haven't shot tens of thousands of protestors last January after being warned not to by the US.
They tried that. Their offer was rebuffed, perhaps because of the Israel Lobby
Far be it from me to accuse Israel of being reasonable either! Nor did I intend to claim that Iranians are strange evil mutants who have never considered the kinds of course of action I describe. Indeed, the fact that they did come to the table once is all the more reason to be disappointed that they don't seem willing to do so again. Bush was a long time ago. If they'd come forward with all those bullet points this year, would Trump have said no again, or would he have told the hawks in his cabinet where to stick it and leapt at the most obvious path to his Nobel Peace Prize that fate could hand to him on a gold-plated platter?
I should clarify as I did elsewhere in the thread that I don't actually support the current war. I just don't think Iran is remotely blameless for it, which is different from saying they bear sole moral responsibility for it, or that they left Israel and America no choice but to attack. I just cannot believe that there is nothing Iran could have done to deescalate once you open up the "willing to say on camera that uh, actually, maybe we're sorry we shot those protestors and maybe Jews and women and gays are alright and maybe America isn't the Great Satan and maybe it doesn't need to be destroyed" options in the decision tree.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
I never actually said I supported the current war, which I don't really. But you can simultaneously reject a vigilante lynch mob as barbaric and counter-productive, and point out that in point of fact its target was guilty of a pattern of gratuitously antagonistic and frequently evil behavior which they could have quit at any time and without which the violence would not have escalated to this point. It doesn't justify the attack, but justifying the attack wasn't the topic of the thread, it was Iranian leadership's decision-making ability.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
I don't dispute that; I dispute that this particular ethnos get to hog the word "American" all to themselves when at the very least black, slavery-descended Americans are equally distinctive, have been here for centuries too, and are equally laughable to imagine all sailing back to the shores of their forefathers one day.
Wait, is the claim that the localizers would have inserted ostensibly sexist dialogue into the material as some sort of false-flag operation allowing them to then decry the work itself as problematic? This seems, uh, yet another claim from the more straightforward (and contradictory) accusation that some localizers alter dialogue to make the work itself seem more woke than it really is.
More options
Context Copy link