Capital_Room

rather dementor-like

0 followers follows 0 users joined 2023 September 18 03:13:26 UTC

Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer

User ID: 2666

‎

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025

Capital_Room rather dementor-like 1d ago

Well, for my own history, getting assigned Strunk and White when I first got to Caltech was a good start, though I agree with the critics as to its tendency to being out of date, some clear hypercorrection in its linguistic prescriptivism, and the more style-oriented parts being not great outside of the formal academic context. From there, it's mostly just been reading lots and lots of linguistics papers.

I also know that several of my peers in high school learned several important bits of English grammar — including, for a few of them, the basic parts of speech — from taking Spanish class.

So the key, really, is to find things that, for one or another element of grammar, lay out something like 'this is how English does this versus how other languages do it.' Like that we use attributive nouns like every other Germanic language (and unlike the Romance languages), but are rather unique in mostly keeping spaces between the nouns: like "motor vehicle liability insurance" versus German * Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung*. Or else, those that cover historical evolution of the language: 'this is how Modern English does this versus how Middle English did it.'

Actually, some of the more introductory articles on Wikipedia for various grammatical categories aren't too terrible as a starting place, particularly for things like tense-aspect-mood and phrasal verbs (which is why you sometimes can end a sentence with a preposition, and "This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put" is an incorrect hypercorrection).

As for the rule of dialogue, there's any number of places to find it pointed out that the actual rule is against having two or more different people speaking in the same paragraph, not that there must be a paragraph break at the start of each sentence where a different person speaks — or worse, at the start of each quotation even mid-sentence. (This last is why I mostly avoid reading webfiction.)

(And the vocative comma shouldn't go away, because it's the difference between "let's eat, Grandma," and "let's eat Grandma.")

Context

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025

Capital_Room rather dementor-like 1d ago

Does anyone else get annoyed when they see someone complain about "grammar mistakes" that aren't actually mistakes, where this is mostly a product of the complainer's overly-simplified understanding of language rules (usually due to poor education)? Whether it's the incredibly-frequent egregious misunderstandings of the rule of paragraph breaks in dialogue, total failure to recognize the (admittedly dying) subjunctive mood, or mistaking an imperfective-aspect dependent clause in a past-tense sentence for a "mistaken" switch to present tense (because English grammarians refer to the active participle as the "present participle"), I keep finding myself getting quite irritated.

Context

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

Capital_Room rather dementor-like 1d ago

On the one hand, replacing every American with a higher-IQ Chinese or Indian person might raise the GDP by 15%, but it's weird to say to say it would be good for "America."

I've seen people who would argue this, in two different types. First, there's the open borders set; the sort who, when someone talks about how current trends will, say, destroy France, respond with "What, is it going to sink into the ocean? Iberia will be turned into an island somehow?" To them, "America", or any other country, is just a chunk of land, an arbitrary geographic division marked by "imaginary lines," utterly independent of the people living on it. That the job of a country's government is to provide administration for the Universal Human Rights, both "negative" and "positive", of all people within its particular arbitrary domain, without discrimination — they have a duty to treat equally everyone who happens to be living there in any given moment, regardless of how long they've been there, or any arbitrary fiction like "citizenship." Further, their view generally sees the existence of separate countries as a historical mistake, a remnant of the xenophobia of our ancestors, who failed to see past superficial cultural differences to our universal humanity, and thus drew borders instead of politically unifying into a larger and larger multicultural polity that would come to embrace all humanity; and thus that existing nations should at the very least, in practice, be reduced to mere administrative subdivisions of a de facto or de jure one-world government.

(There's also a slightly more libertarian-leaning technocratic subset, who see the duty of the state's administration as less about the welfare state, and more about maximizing their territory's GDP. A corporation's leadership has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, thus, if a CEO thinks firing the entire workforce of the company and replacing them with new hires will make it more profitable, he isn't just allowed to do so, he's required. Analogously, if a government thinks replacing the "legacy" population of the country with immigrants will increase total GDP, well then, 'line goes up equals world more gooder.')

Then there's the people who would reject the idea for other countries, but would make the case for America specifically, because the USA is not like other countries — "America" is an idea. America is a system of government, laid down by the Founders (some argue via divine inspiration), and enshrined in the (sacred) Constitution. Wherever those ideals exist, there is "America." So, yes, you can replace every American with a higher-IQ Chinese or Indian person, but so long as the structures of the federal government remain, so long as the Constitution is still there, then it's still "America."

Context

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

Capital_Room rather dementor-like 1d ago

Western democracies are designed to make it difficult for politicians to directly control the judiciary.

Which is yet another reason "Western democracy" needs to go. Bring in an Augustus who will solve this swiftly and decisively.

Context

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

Capital_Room rather dementor-like 1d ago

Has there been a non-Baltic Western state

Did you mean non-Balkan — meaning to hold the breakup of Yugoslavia as an exception — or did you really mean non-Baltic? Because I'm not familiar with any of the Baltic states having "dissolved."

Because you really shouldn't confuse those two.

Context

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

Capital_Room rather dementor-like 3d ago

I think I found this on themotte but forgot the poster

I know I, for one, referenced it (indirectly) here eight months ago, but other people have probably mentioned it on the Motte as well.

Context

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

Capital_Room rather dementor-like 4d ago

It seems like there are still pockets of competence to be found and an increasing motivation to overcome short term political obstacles and create some robust institutions

Increasing motivation does not imply increasing ability. It doesn't matter how much people want to overcome the political obstacles if those obstacles are totally insurmountable. And it looks to me like they are just that.

I think that even in the worst case scenarios of the U.S. FedGov starting to collapse, state governments are capable of acting as a backstop.

I disagree. First, because as FedGov starts to collapse, one of the highest priorities for uses of its fading power will be to crush any and all rivals, particularly state governments. And even without that, well, it might just be me looking at the government of my state, but I don't see this capacity.

If Starship is successful and we get some orbital infrastructure, its JUST possible we can get some self-sufficient or semi-self sufficient off-world communities.

I attended talks by the Mars Society back at Caltech in the early aughts, so I'm far from unfamiliar with the topic of space settlement — and the barriers involved. Barring some miracle, I don't see us getting any kind of long-term off-world presence of biological humans, let alone "semi-self sufficient communities" in the next hundred years.

Context

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

Capital_Room rather dementor-like 5d ago

I can understand why most republican policy is in the best interest of republicans, but I'm honestly stumped on this. Is it legitimately just ideological consistency? A willingness to suffer to Do The Right Thing?

I'd say it's that, despite all the talk of MAGA having wholly taken over the Republican party, much of the institutional core of the party is still the "what's good for Wall Street is good for Main Street" crowd. As someone in a several-hour-long Youtube video (on the county-level political map for Congressional elections, every two years, from the end of WWII to the turn of the century, with a focus on how, once you set aside the highly-granular and variable presidential elections — particularly the Reagan landslide — the South didn't really stop voting (D) until the 90s, as all the old "Dixiecrats" finally died, and the new generation of Dems were abandoning the working class for the professional managerial class and minorities) I once watched said, "the Republican Party was founded as the party of New England banking interests… and that's what it always will be."

I also recall, but can't find again, an interview with a GOP campaign strategist who got a bit too candid with the interviewer and ended up saying something to the effect that Republican candidates already know that their job is to make empty promises to working class rubes to get elected, then deliver for the "donor class" instead once in office, so his job, as strategist, is to help the politicians lie to those flyover rubes more effectively.

Both party elites are elites — while only Hilary may have said it openly, plenty of the top people in both parties consider blue-collar rural whites "deplorables" — R's are just the ones more reliant on winning their votes, and thus given more incentive to hold their noses and pander.

Context

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025