ZanarkandAbesFan
No bio...
User ID: 2935
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
My biggest problem by far with OOTP was having Harry teach a school subject (including to students older than him). That just felt monumentally implausible. I'd have liked it much more if DA had just been a generic club where the students taught each other and/or practiced spells they'd read about in books from the library etc. Maybe Harry leads a single class on the topic of patronuses.
ZanarkandAbesFan
4d ago
Hogwarts to Poudlard is a truly bizarre change.
ZanarkandAbesFan
4d ago
The BBC is a state propaganda organ
It's a propaganda arm of the progressive cultural and social elite in the UK rather than of the state itself. It has such influence on state policy that it's easy to conflate the two, but that's getting cause and effect mixed up.
ZanarkandAbesFan
6d ago
Albus Dumbledore became Albus Silenti, Slytherin became Serpeverde and Professor Snape became Professor Piton
lolwut
ZanarkandAbesFan
6d ago
And to all the cool aunt, "AKshually language evolves" descriptivists, this change entails a loss of possible meanings and is bad. I know "deer" used to mean "any animal" and "corn" used to mean "any grain," etc but when those words changed usage it became possible to express MORE thoughts because the language became more specific. My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought (both as cause and then again as consequence). Do you feel like we have an excess of clear thought out there nowadays? Of course not! Do your part- join the prescriptivists. Make language specific again!
Well aksHually,
I'm someone who tries to get "less" and "fewer" right, and gets frustrated by people using "got" rather than "gotten". But I don't get alarmed about the "we're losing clarity in our language" argument, for two reasons:
1/ Most supposed examples of this happening (such as the ones you gave i.e. "I knew" vs "I had known" and "less" vs "fewer") don't actually involve any extra ambiguity or loss of meaning.
2/ English has lost a tremendous amount of complexity during the time it evolved from Old English (and before that, from Proto-Germanic). If we're worried that further simplifications are bringing about loss in communicative power, then we should logically seek to undo all the other changes that have taken place over the last several thousand years, but no one seriously suggests that.
My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought
I'm really skeptical. Do English speakers, who only have "they" as a third-person plural subject pronoun, have blurrier conceptions of mixed-gender groups of people than i.e. French speakers, with their "ils/elles" distinction? I doubt it.
ZanarkandAbesFan
6d ago
ride motorcycles
Any evidence for this?
ZanarkandAbesFan
6d ago
“Most men in bio are short because they can’t get women, but because you’re tall I know you’re genuinely interested in bio”
I'm struggling to parse this somewhat. Does he mean short men go into biology because they think they'll have an easier time dating in a female-heavy field? (Incidentally, clicking the link for this statement statement directs the user to a "this page doesn’t exist" page on X)
ZanarkandAbesFan
22d ago
I'm going to say that if this guy killed himself because of cheating accusations then he was probably cheating.
Professional chess and the people who follow it is a pretty small world. Being publicly accused like this and having your reputation continuously dragged through the mud with no real way to outright refute the claims (it's impossible to prove that you didn't cheat) is absolutely something that could destroy someone emotionally.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
Fair enough, that's pretty bad. He was arrested and sentenced though. I'll amend my original post to specify republicans that went unpunished for making these comments.
Be honest and admit that these kind of "just joking" comments come from all sides.
I think we usually expect more from people running to be elected officials? Do you have evidence of republican politicians going unpunished for saying they'd like to murder their opponents' children?
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
I didn't really appreciate it at the time, but I think Trump's general style in 2016 was a big part of this, penis size jokes in the primary,
IIRC, his only dick-related joke went something along the lines of "There was also a comment about if my hands are small, something else must be; I assure you, there's no problem" which I actually think was a pretty witty and non-offensive way of addressing that insinuation.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
And yet we manage!
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
Australia and Canada have made it for Centuries without civil warring.
Low population density probably plays a role there as well.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
AFAIK it's a pretty minority position among American Jews to consider themselves non-white, and in practice, has largely the same impact as badly-passing trans women: the world continues to view them as men, regardless of how they self-identify.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
I've got no idea, I'll take your word for it.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
It's basically only on places like the Motte that anyone considers American Jews non-white.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
She's married to a white man. I could believe she's indifferent to prejudice suffered by white men, but outright hatred seems a bit extreme.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2mo ago
Jan 6 will continue to be the premier example.
Jan 6th is fair to bring up, although I'm not sure it was any more violent in nature than many of the BLM riots or things like setting up CHAZ.
It will come up relatively frequently on gun/hunting forums or other conservative-dominated space where they feel they are 'in private'. I mean, shit, it comes up here from time to time.
Such forums have far smaller cultural reach than places like Reddit or even Bluesky. They also have essentially no representation among university departments and college campuses, which play a critical role in shaping the attitudes of young, politically-involved people. The point is that if you're a mentally-unstable, violently inclined individual, you know you're going to get far more widespread adulation and praise for killing a right-wing figure than a left-wing one.
When Tom Cotton calls for people to beat up pro-Palestinian protestors,
I googled "Tom Cotton Palestine protests" and what I found was him saying this:
"I’m saying that if people are trying to get to work or pick up their kids from school or take a sick kid to the doctor and you have pro-Hamas vigilantes blocking the streets, they should get out and move those people off the streets," Cotton said. “The police will get there eventually. But a lot of damage will be done in the meantime."
That seems pretty distant for saying they should be beaten up for the positions they hold.
or they laugh about a guy nearly beating Paul Pelosi to death, or they cheer for police brutality,
Do you have examples of prominent right-wingers doing either of this (for cases of unambiguous police brutality)?
When someone plows a truck into a crowd of protestors, they shrug and say "shouldn't have been standing there" (while laughing behind their hands).
Evidence? I'm not trying to be obtuse btw. I don't live in America and I don't particularly follow American news (90% of what I know about it I pick up from this website).
You mention not disassociating from the 20%, but for American* right-wingers the 20% includes much of their senior leadership.
I have the opposite impression. That 20% on the left includes celebrities, writers, academics, politicians and platforms like reddit. I don't see an equivalent on the right.
They probably intuitively think of gun control as something that prevents only right-wingers from having guns.
The article is paywalled. Nevertheless, I may be misinformed on this.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2mo ago
Well that's tough for the Qataris then. If you're going to fund proxies to try to militarily destroy another nation, that nation might decide they don't want to play by your particular rules of engagement.
I don't know what the situation was like for you growing up, but my sense is that there's currently a clear asymmetry. I believe you if you say that individual right-wingers said those sorts of things around you, but the difference as far as I see is that you have close to entire mainstream platforms like reddit and branches of academia that openly celebrate things like this in a way there's no real right-wing equivalent for.
IME the biggest difference is that when there's left-wing political violence, normie liberals will usually say "that's terrible"
It's meaningless for 80% of liberals to say "that's terrible" when they refuse to disassociate from the 20% who say "that's awesome" and when that latter group has outsize influence in left-wing politics.
and when there's right-wing political violence, normie conservatives will split into thirds along the lines of "it's good, actually", blaming the left, and just pretending it didn't happen.
Do you have evidence of this? I don't live in the US so my exposure to American media is limited, but I can't think of any non-fringe right-wing group that celebrates political violence on the right. You'd have to go to really marginal groups with tiny numbers like white supremacist or incel forums. There are multiple often-violent groups often have the tacit if not explicit support of much of the American left: Antifa, the Punch A Terf crowd, the pro-Hamas people, the Defund the police contingent, BLM etc.
One difference is that it seems to be acceptable among much broader swathes of the left to celebrate violence against the outgroup it is on the right. Look at how many people expressed admiration for Luigi Mangione, for example. It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that the left has far more of a problem with tacitly supporting violence than the right.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2mo ago
It's usually pretty similar regardless of the country, although the minor variations are interesting (three of the suggestions for "Do French women" are questions about what they wear, while three of them for "Do German women" are about where they shave). The exception was trying the above with Welsh women, where autocomplete comes up with somewhat less expected results (the two that caught my eye were "can welsh women's teams play in england" and "where do welsh women go to prison").
Maybe, but IIRC it was mostly focussed on specific spells and academic magic. I think I'd have bought it more if it had been more presented in the way you described.
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