ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
1d ago
Is it really so simple that the conspiracy theories of a revolutionary pack of morons in 1979 drove them to fight their only geopolitical friends in the region?
In a word, yes. The Iranian revolutionary program is a descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood ideology of Sayyid Qutb (though this is embarassing for them to admit, as he was a Sunni and spawned other groups that have been or are enemies of Iran), which was itself a repackaging of early 20th century leftist ideas in an anticolonial context where poor Muslims are the oppressed class and Western powers are the oppressors. Israel, being for most intents and purposes a Western settler-colonialist state founded by Europeans, is a natural enemy for people with such beliefs. As you pointed out, the timing of the revolution in Iran allowed the new regime to step in as the champions of the Palestinian cause at the precise moment the Arab governments were giving up the struggle and signing peace accords, and the ability to channel the free-floating anger of millions of young Muslim men was a handy thing for them until Hamas finally broke their leash and set off the geopolitical chain reaction we are still living through.
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
Have users on this forum struggled with mixed identities? How did you resolve the frictions? Do you have a stable identity that you're now at peace with?
I grew up as a mixed race State Department kid living in a series of third world countries. I was not particularly introspective about my ethnic or cultural identity until some point in high school, when I put some thought into which aspects of my parents' cultures I valued and consciously took those parts for my own. I do not fit in perfectly with any larger cultural community and that is fine. If I have children, they will most likely assimilate fully into broader American culture regardless of what efforts I make to preserve our ancestral traditions, language, etc., and that is also simply the way of things.
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
ResoluteRaven
6d ago
Black culture is more warm in the sense that people are gregarious, speak louder, touch each other more, and have more large raucous social gatherings than certain types of borderline autistic northern Europeans or WASPs who stand six feet apart, never talk over each other, and eat meals of boiled potatoes and beef in respectful silence. Of course, not all western cultures are like the latter, and southern whites in the US are noticeably more similar to their black neighbors in behavior, food, accent, etc. compared to northeners.
ResoluteRaven
6d ago
So if they said "I politically believe that people like me are benefited from seeing people with views like you as demonic monsters and that killing you would be a net positive to my group's quality of life" is that really gonna be ok?
Yes, those are the rules. Anyone is free to express their desire to commit torture, rape, and genocide as long as they are polite about it. That may seem ridiculous, but it has worked out for us so far, while other comparable fora have died from lack of engagement or collapsed into (greater) ideological conformity.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
Some empty tankers that were unable to enter the Strait of Hormuz have chosen to go to the US or Brazil to fill up on oil there instead.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Beggars can't be choosers. In the face of extinction, it seems to me that any part of the population reproducing, whether that's teenagers, religious fanatics, or perimenopausal women with frozen eggs, is preferable. Being able to carry a pregnancy to term at an advanced age is also a pretty good indicator of maternal health, which may be attenuating the negative effects somewhat. From what I've seen, the children of older parents almost always strike me as kind of autistic (though people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones), but the parents have tended to be odd or socially maldajusted too, so it's hard to disentangle correlation from causation here.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
First of all, China must be realizing around now that they have no meaningful way of communicating their military capability to the world, but especially to US and regional allies, in a way they will respect and find authentic. Simply because China's military basically doesn't get used for anything and hasn't for decades (and no, building artificial reefs in the SCS doesn't count). So no proof of concept demonstrations.
If China wanted to demonstrate their military prowess, they could simply march over their border with Burma and put an end to the civil war there. No one would care enough to stop them and they have a reasonable enough humanitarian justification for intervening. For whatever reason, they seem content to operate through proxies and occasional arms sales for now.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Sinosphere in common parlance includes Korea, Japan, and Vietnam i.e. anywhere that Literary Chinese was at one time the language of high culture.
Restricting it to areas that speak Chinese today would indeed only leave Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, and parts of Malaysia and Burma.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
We could openly embrace our identity as an Empire in the mold of the Roman Empire. End birthright citizenship, and make citizenship by blood only.
That doesn't sound particularly Roman. More Roman would be offering citizenship to any migrants who joined the army to conquer Cuba or Greenland, on the condition that they remain there afterwards and helped develop the new territories.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
This video gives a good overview of your options as far as Three Kingdoms adaptations go.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Golden Gate Park is good for a walk (free) or to visit one of the museums (free if you're a Bay Area resident on certain days, but I've never been asked for proof), Land's End and the Presidio are good for ocean and bridge views, and for food besides the obvious Chinatown (bring cash) and the Mission (I'm not a big fan, but if you want to eat the best burrito on a street that smells like piss while strangers offer you magic mushrooms that's where to go) you could get a bento box from Nijiya Market (the Japantown Mall next door is pretty unique as well) or something on Irving St near UCSF. The Musee Mecanique has a a nice collection of antique coin operated arcade games and music boxes (it's free to go in and look around, if I recall). You could also take the ferry to Angel Island or Sausalito (among other places) if you want a change in scenery.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
One Chinese deficit—which is arguably not even a deficit except from a Western, Christianity-inflected moral standpoint—is that they just don't seem to have an interest in much of the rest of the world. The downside of this (and to be honest, I'm a little disturbed by it) is how generally indifferent they seem to suffering that exists beyond their borders. I hope this might change as they become wealthier, but the social science research I've looked at does not show this happening, at least so far. Of course, this disinterest also has an upside: to me it seems obvious the Chinese don't want to conquer the world.
The Western mode of directly or indirectly conquering the world because you experience moral outrage at the suffering of the poor and oppressed masses is not the only way to relate to other nations, and taking a different approach isn't by itself evidence of disinterest in global affairs. At this very moment, Chinese laborers are building ports, railroads, and highways across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America; Chinese immigrants are cooking meals in restaurants in nearly every country on Earth, from the frozen sub-arctic to the humid tropics; and Chinese astronauts are orbiting the Earth in their own space station. These are not the behaviors of an isolationist state or people. That this network exists primarily to further international trade, rather than as a tool in some great moral crusade, seems to me eminently reasonable and not a weakness.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Don't even bother with trying to get the true ㄹ sound unless you learned Korean or Japanese from a young age. I'm convinced it's one of the most unintuitive sounds in the world for an English speaker. It's like halfway between an American "R" and "L" but leans more "R" at the beginning of a syllable and more "L" at the end of a syllable. Just using American "R" and "L" in that way is probably as close as most can get.
It seems unintuitive because it's two different sounds: at the start of a syllable it's a tapped r like in Spanish and at the end of a syllable it's more or less the same as the English l. Native speakers consider it one sound because there's only one letter for it, the same way English speakers think of the voiceless th at the start of "think" and the voiced th at the start of "then" as the same sound because they're written the same.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
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.
Now this one I do know about. 애 and 에 merged in the speech of hip youngsters in Seoul in the 80s and it has spread to the rest of the country in proportion to how much one interacts with that crowd, similar to how the cot-caught merger is spreading among young Americans due to the cultural influence of California.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
No, but I know in certain cuisines (e.g. Northeast Chinese) one might be offered a plate of raw garlic to take bites of as a palate cleanser between courses, similar to the pickled ginger served alongside sushi in Japan.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
I've come across similar complaints from Korean learners on various language forums in the past, but I don't know it well enough to directly address your issue. What I would suggest generally is identifying a set of minimal pairs in Korean containing whichever consonants you find troublesome, pulling audio files of native speakers reading those words from Forvo, and then attaching those mp3 files to an Anki deck so you can do spaced repetition exercises and train your ear on those particular sounds.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
I've spent most of my life surrounded by cosmopolitan liberals and I've literally never heard an IRL person say this. The only time I've heard it was 4chan shitposting on /pol/ as clear bait.
Europeans are more likely to say "America has no culture," while American liberals will specify "white people have no culture," but I've heard both IRL many times, though it was more common in the late 2010s.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
In my experience second generation immigrants don't pick up certain regional accents because they have strong negative connotations among elite circles e.g. Southern or Boston, but they are more likely to when people don't feel as strongly about them e.g. Chicago. New York is also full of people with strange half-regional and half-foreign accents.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
The normalization of "partner" also extends to heterosexual couples now, at least among my peers, which I find rather irritating.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Minneapolis really had no reputation in my mind, I wouldn’t have imagined it was any woker than any other semi-large American city, and probably comparable to Oklahoma City or St. Louis or something.
Minnesota was settled by Scandinavians who brought along their particular political tendencies, which included a strong labor movement and a certain brand of pathological altruism (cf. Swedish immigration policies). I'd say Minneapolis is about as distant culturally from Oklahoma City as any two cities in America could possibly be, nor is St. Louis much like either of them.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
The Iranian population is much more secular and pro-western than their neighbors, even those that are American allies on paper, and has the human capital needed to support a first world economy, so the fact that they have been languishing under an Islamist theocracy for decades instead of achieving their full potential is a tragedy of similar proportions to Eastern Europe being stuck behind the iron curtain during the Cold War.
This latest round of protests was also sparked by economic problems such as rampant inflation and Tehran running out of water, and not the sorts of purely cultural issues that some here would pattern-match to foreign interference, such as the 2022 protests over the hijab law. Democracy is not what most are asking for; many of the protest chants I've heard are some variation of "Bring back the Shah."
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
That would require a level of industrialization in Latin America that seems unlikely, barring direct American conquest and economic administration (and good luck with that).
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
And I think with a truly "worthy foe", most Americans would set aside political tribalism pretty quickly, and band together against that foe. The problem is, we haven't had anything close to a worthy foe since the Cold War.
Economically, the Chinese are far ahead of where the Soviets were relative to the US during the Cold War, and the last time there was a hot war they chased the Eighth Army halfway down the Korean peninsula while at a severe technological disadvantage, so they seem plenty worthy to me.
If I am preparing a meal and one of the ingredients is salty then I add less salt. If all of my ingredients are salty then I go to the grocery store to restock on fresh produce. Easy enough.
I sweat so much on hot summer days, even just standing outside, that I will get dizzy without some source of electrolytes, whether gatorade, jerky, or something else. Other people don't seem to have this problem and I envy them.
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