BahRamYou
10hr ago
There's a great quote from a Tom Wolfe book along these lines...
“Like more than one Englishman in New York, he looked upon Americans as hopeless children whom Providence had perversely provided with this great swollen fat fowl of a continent. Any way one chose to relieve them of their riches, short of violence, was sporting, if not morally justifiable, since they would only squander it in some tasteless and useless fashion, in any event.”
As an American, I'm a little defensive but... there is some truth in that. I admit that we were very, very lucky with our geographically- some might say supernaturally blessed. And our foreign policy has often been naive to the point of stupidity (sending factory equipment to the USSR, or granting China trade advantages come to mind). Our intelligence operations often result in embarassing failures, and Hollywood routinely portrays ourselves as evil.
Nonetheless, we do have some strengths that aren't just luck. I won't bother to list them here, I think anyone can think of a few. The 21st century will be interesting though...
BahRamYou
10hr ago
There seems to be such a huge split between the left and right on this!
From the left, I hear that Americans are broke. Living with their parents, no healthcare, no job (or a really crappy job), struggling to survive. The official statistics are either made up, or highly misleading (like, a handful of billionares have all the money while the rest of us have nothing).
From the right, I hear that America is the wealthiest country that has ever existed. Way more money than China or Europe. The economy has boomed thanks to Reagonomics, the Bush tax cuts, and Trumps... tweets. We can easily spend a trillion for Greenland, or missile defense, or battleships, or whatever, because we have essentially infinite money.
I think the libertarians are the most correct on this. Whichever party is currently in power will say we have plenty of money to pursue their goals. Whichever party is out of power will say that we're broke, we can't afford it, we need to pay down the debt, etc...
BahRamYou
16hr ago
Is that a problem? It seems to work quite well for them, especially with the help of modern tools like smartphones to look up obscure characters. English speakers can also recognize words without knowing how to spell them, that's the whole point of spelling bees.
BahRamYou
1d ago
ha! I've never seen the movie, I'll have to check that out sometime. It's been a very long time since I've read them so i hardly remember the plot at all.
Yeah... there's that. (world-weary sigh)
I've used ad-blockers for as long as they've been commonly available- maybe 15 years now? I moved around from one to another, in a never-ending "Red Queen's Race" between advertisers and ad-blockers. uBlock Origin really seemed like "the one" and I happily enjoyed it for about 5 years. But then they abruptly removed it from Chrome. And at this point I'm so tied into Chrome (gmail, Android, other extensions) that it would be a huge pain to switch. Sure, I could switch, but I feel like it's only a matter of time before they clamp down again on uBlock Origin in some other way. Because, let's face it, it's basically piracy- it's a way to hack websites to get their content without paying for it by seeing ads. It feels like when people told me "dont' worry that Napster is getting banned, you can just switch to Kazaa...Limewire... Bittorrent... PirateBay... etc...". When I just give in and pay their premium fee, our interests are aligned and the ads go away perfectly.
(also I disagree that it's 95%. My experience was more like 50%, varying wildly depending on the website.)
BahRamYou
1d ago
I was really into both that and The Dark is Rising as a kid. Apparently Welsh mythology really appealed to me for some reason.
BahRamYou
1d ago
I don't think there's any good way to make this work, but I do sympathize with the idea. Especially on the internet, so many ads just seem malicious. They're not there because anyone would actually see them and think "ooh, good product, I want to buy that!" They're there to trick you into accidentally clicking on them by completely covering the scream, or to screach at you with obnoxious sounds until you get so fed up that you buy a premium subscription to make them go away. If there was a way to buy a "premium internet pass" that would get rid of all internet ads I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately I have to do that individiually for every single website, which is its own sort of pain. My personal pet peave is trying to read a news article from some small local news site, which is technically open and not paywalled, it's just crammed full of so many ads that it's basically impossible to read for anyone not subscribed to "the Daily Times of Gary, Indiana" or whatever. I wouldn't mind subscribing to one or two newspapers, maybe even more if I was a professional journalist or something, but it seems unreasonable to expect me to subscribe to every single newspaper on Earth just so I can read one random article.
There... is a place that has managed to remove advertising completely: North Korea. It's kind of bleak and dystopian but... oddly calming? (Other than the state propaganda posters of course) Well, I've never been there so I can't say what it's like, but it's interesting that such a place can even exists, and gives us a glimpse of a different sort of life with a very different aesthetic.
I think the game was actually trying to be decently sympathetic to its main character. Showing how a guy who starts off basically good can sucked into bad ideas by going along with funny memes, cool friends, or in this case a pretty young woman.
But it gets the ending wrong. So the character gets sucked into this world, he meets some new "based" friends to do some protesting and... we're supposed to automatically just "know" that this is wrong. It doesn't give any reason, or even really show a bad outcome for Charlie. it's just taken for granted that this is wrong. I suppose the target audience is liberal moms worried about their children, not the actual children themselves.
(also, he acts more like a 12 yr old, but they portray him as a college student? It would have made more sense if he started off young and gradually grew up, but I suppose that would take a lot more time and budget to make a game like that)
If you actually want to make fun of the online right, it's pretty easy. Ironically 4chan does the best job of it, because they make fun of everything so of course make fun of themselves. Mostly by pointing out how most of them are not exactly Aryan supermen but nerdy boys stuck at home with no money, no power, and no women, and how endlessly spamming "based" or "the Jews" isn't much of an argument. They don't try to make the women look ugly, they just point out the complete lack of women. If you watch the part of Nick Fuentes's show where he responds to superchats from his fans, he's absolutely savage with this, endlessly calling them out as retards and larpers who will never accomplish anything in real life.
BahRamYou
2d ago
It's not exactly new or surprising that a head-of-state would have a big ego and ambition to leave a legacy. One might even say that's the norm. The constitution was explicitly designed with this in mind, with the hope that each separate branch of government would, by trying to seize more power for itself, keep the others in check.
What is new is how... useless Congress has become. In theory they have immense power. They could remove the president from office, fully control government spending, and even rewrite the constitution as they please. But in practice they just can't seem to agree on anything. They can barely even pass routine budgets to keep federal services running.
At the same time, social media has given the President more power than ever with his "bully pulpit." We can now directly watch all of Trump's speeches at the click of a button, or read his thoughts in short tweet form. And Trump is very effective at that kind of short-form communication. The rest of government is too fractured and, frankly, boring, to grab people's attention the way Trump can. It'll be interesting to see if this continues- somehow I can't imagine people tuning in to watch Vance or Shapiro with the same sort of horrified excitement they give to Trump. But we'll see- I suppose any speech becomes more interesting when it's backed up by immense power.
Regarding NATO, it's sort of a similar argument. Europe has, in theory, a lot of military power, but it's difficult to really use it when it's fractured between 31 different non-US members. What I would like to see is for continental Europe to form a new "Core NATO" with a centralized European Army, focused entirely on defending Europe. The US could either leave NATO or minimize its involvement there, and instead focus on AUKUS, potentially expanding it to include Canada, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan. This would be a smaller, but more tightly knit alliance, aimed at being able to project force all over the world, but especially at sea and even more especially in East Asia. Since this alliance is smaller and more closely aligned, it would have a lot more cohesion and flexibility to forcefully defend its (narrowly defined) strategic interests- peace in the middle east, counter-terrorism, and containing China and Russia.
Some of those are because of the more advanced rules/exceptions that I mentioned, and @bonsaii listed some above:
- The ㅆ from 있 slides onto the start of the next syllable
- 요 at the end of a sentence usually sounds more like 여
- the ㅁ from 좀 combines with the ㅂ from 바 to be... sort halfway in between ㅂ andㅍ
- the ㅃ from 빠 slides back onto the end of 바 tomake it more of a ㅍ sound
The others... I don't know, there might be rules I don't know, but I think you just need more listening practice. It's hard. But you're not going insane, they just don't follow the simple pronounciation guides in the intro hangul guides quite as neatly as they make it seem.
this is a good list of rules. But you certainly don't need to know all of these when you're a beginner, or even any of them at all. Just.... be aware that they exist.
BahRamYou
3d ago
Ah, interesting, thanks for the context! Yeah i've never formally studied that history, so I probably got a lot of details wrong. Probably when I heard that "Mao mangled it" I was thinking of what you said "a few abominations that are created entirely after the Communists took power and makes no sense," but it still works quite well as an international language/alphabet.
BahRamYou
3d ago
That's what most people say, but i've found it's a bit more nuanced than that.
Chinese characters are certainly hard for foreigners to learn, but they work quite well for Chinese or any language based on it. So anyone from any sort of Chinese dialect can look at those written charaters and know exactly what they mean, even if they dont know the pronounciation. Or at least, they could until Mao messed it up with his stupid "simplified Chinese" that randomly removes strokes. They will also instantly know the meaning of most Japanese Kanji too, without any extra effort. The hiragana in Japanese mostly just fills in the grammar words like verb conjugations, so it's easy to separate.
This used to be the case in Korean too, but then they abruptly removed all the Chinese characters. So now there's no clear boundaries between words, verbs have like 1000 particle endings with no direct translation in English, and everything has 10 different homonyms since the characters and tones got lost. You pretty much have to know the entire sentence and context to know what any specific word means. At least you know the pronounciation... sort of... assuming you know all the little details and exceptions they don't teach you at the start.
this is maybe more ranty than i intended. Korean really is a difficult language though.
BahRamYou
3d ago
Heh, yeah. I found learning Korean a very frustrating experience. They love to talk about how their hangul system is so scientific and simple, but native speakers don't understand how all the similar sounds and homonyms make it difficult for foreign learners. The pronounciation is tough, no way around that, and it's not always consistent. I've had some people tell me that 애 and 에 sound exactly the same, while others tell me that there's a subtle difference or that it's a regional dialect. I can't be sure.
(also, in case you haven't learned this yet, a lot of them change their sound depending on what comes before or after them. Nobody told me that in my intro Korean class)
Probably the best advice is not sweat the details too much, just push through until you know a lot more and then you'll get it from context. Nobody expects you as a beginner to be able to transcribe it perfectly. But realize that you're trying to do something difficult and it will take a lot of time and effort.
BahRamYou
3d ago
I thought RLM's recent video on the future of the Star Wars brand made some good points. They'll probably never again be a big tentpole brand that's universally loved by almost everyone, but... maybe that's OK. Maybe even for the best. They can create lots of different content that doesn't even pretend to fit into the same universe, and each can find its own niche with a different group. So the people who like Westerns can go watch the Mandalorian, the people who like spy movies can watch Andor, the people who like Feminist Wicca stuff can watch the Acolyte, and the people who just like cuta things can buy baby Yoda plushies. Also: the box office gross of the movies hardly matters, the profits all come from things like toys, video games, and amusement park rides.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Isn't "bless your heart" kind of an open insult in the South? I was thinking more of, like, the east Asian "face saving" culture" where, even if you say something stupid, other people will let it slide because they don't want to cause embarassment. And also, dictatorships where saying the wrong thing might cause you to get executed by the government.
BahRamYou
7d ago
Most of the time we just do nothing. Let them rant, they'll eventually get tired and go home. Trying to "talk them down" usualy just makes them madder, and if they're angry enough to do violence then it's kinda too late for talking. If it's a big mob then the police will show up, and maybe start arresting people if it really gets out of hand. But I think we've seen this week how that can easily go wrong.
BahRamYou
7d ago
I'm not him, and culture is of course very slippery to define. But I'd like to try. (I'm also American, but I've lived abroad enough to see clear differences)
Language: Most of us speak English, but with a sizable minority who speak Spanish. There are isolated areas where people speak other languages, but there's usually strong pressure for the kids there to learn English, and most of us never make much effort to learn a second language other than English.
Geography: the US is a very large country, with people spread out all over it, and our cities are also fairly low density. This leads to a lot of detached single-family homes, car ownership, and driving. I'd say it also contributes to a culture that's fairly closed off, with most people only sharing their real feelings and thoughts with the people physically in their home.
Religion: Used to be overwhelmingly Christian, but that's changing rapidly. Still lots of cultural traditions inherited from Christianity though, like the Christmas holiday season and most businesses closed on Sundays. Most people are fairly accepting of others' religious beliefs, as long as it doesn't require us to actually do anything.
Fashion: Very casual. Most people wear something like jeans and t-shirts, or sportswear, almost everywhere. Exception: politicians, lawyers, and fancy offices still wear the traditional suit-and-tie. It's rare for people to dress in formalwear or any sort of traditional ethnic clothes. People also speak in a casual manner to almost everyone.
Food: Large portions of meat, cheese, salt, and sugar, with fairly simple presentations. Lots of soda and coffee, moderate alcohol. Smoking is increasingly rare. Not a lot of vegetables, and they're most often served raw in a side salad. Tap water is safe to drink, although many people buy a filter or bottled water anyway. Most people have a kitchen with a large oven that can bake pretty large sizes, so it's easy to prepare, say, an entire turkey at Thanksgiving. Not common to eat routinely eat street food or at communial dining places. Drive through fast food very common though. Obesity is quite common.
Politics: People tend to be pretty blunt and outspoken, and are happy to tell you their thoughts on whatever is in the news lately without much filter. They have a strong sense of "law and order", and are shocked when people don't follow the law. But also a lot of cynicism about governmeng in general, especially Congress, so they don't expect to be able to have much personal interaction with government. Liberals often like to do public protests, but this is mostly performative, not a serious attempt to topple the government.
Economy: Highly capitalistic culture. People trust the currency, and don't worry too much about things like counterfeiting or fraud in their normal life. "High inflation" means like 5%. There's a lot of talk about things like side hustles, startups, and the stock market. Almost everything is bought through market transactions. It's considered quite unusual for someone to go hitchhiking, couchsurfing, home farming, homemade clothes, etc- much easier to just get a job and then pay for all that stuff with money. People expect that infrastucture like water, power, sewage, etc will generally work but occasionally have issues.
Recreation: Traditionally centered around watching TV at home, now more often digital. Children do a lot of sports and hobby clubs, but those are increasingly rare for adults. Lots of time spent watching and talking about the "big 3" sports of American football, basketball, and baseball, plus smaller amounts for other sports, but not many people do them in real life. Media shows a lot of violence, some swearing, but sexuality makes people uncomfortable. Lots of self-deprecating humor about the faults of America.
What do you think of this list? Obviously a lot of generalities and exceptions here, but I think it works pretty well overall.
BahRamYou
9d ago
If they did that, would it actually help the protestors? Ayatollah Khamenei is 86 years old, so presumably not as sharp or energetic as he once was. He stays in power by inertia, and probably also because there's a certain amount of hardline islamists in Iran who like having a theocracy. It's very possible that taking him out would just end up replacing him with a younger, sharper ayatollah. Possibly his son.
BahRamYou
9d ago
What happens to the kids when someone who's a single parent gets arrested and put in jail? I agree, they shouldn't be let off scot-free just because they have kids. But in the meantime, they haven't actually been convicted of anything yet, and it would take a while to arrange foster care or even find a friend to watch the kids. Can you arrange a faster/easier bail hearing for someone with young kids?
Just shows how myopic Americans are, I guess. We really, truly, do not give a shit about other countries. One white woman getting shot in Minneapolis is more important than conquering a foreign country in South America and potentially taking over another one from Europe.
edit- and I forgot all about Iran! I don't claim to know much about the situation there, but it seems important. It seems very important. Thousands of protesters there have been killed. I wish the news media would do more to inform us about what's happening there, instead of endlessly analyzing low-quality cell phone videos of this one stupid event.
BahRamYou
10d ago
It does feel a little weird to me that this case is getting so much attention. Like, sure, I get that it's a contraversial situation. But is it really so important that it pushes everything else out of the news? I feel like there's been a lot of big news this week- Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, the Somali daycare fraud leading to Tim Walz cancelling his plans to run for re-election... This situation, while tragic, is hardly unprecedented. There have been heated protests against ICE going on for years now. Frankly, I've stopped caring. Whether the officer shot her in cold-blooded murder, or whether it was completely justified self-defense, or somewhere ambiguously in-between... I just don't even care anymore. ICE will continue, protests will continue, illegal immigration will continue, small numbers of deportations will continue, small numbers of people get shot every day, and nothing big ever changes.
BahRamYou
12d ago
It's not for launching the satellites, that still happens from more equitorial latitudes. The issue is having a control/monitoring/intelligence facility. I'm sure they could do that from Danish territory, just like they're currently doing in Svalbard. But they're they have to share with a lot of other countries, and the number of satellites and control facilities is only going to keep growing, so at some point it just becomes nice to directly control the land. It makes generals... uncomfortable... when their most critical satellite control facilities are on someone else's land, and it raises the awkward question of what they would do if Denmark actually tried to make them leave.
Rubio is the one with a real job and specific powers. It just happens that his job is particularly in focus right now.
Vance has a very vaguely defined job and nothing much to do right now. It doesn't change the fact that he's still a very important person and the most likely next Republican candidate for president.
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