ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
11hr ago
Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons: Cattle farmers and the meat industry want to kneecap their economic competition, conservatives dread a future where steak is banned and scientists in white coats force feed them pink slime, hardcore vegans think that true commitment to their cause should require sacrifices and this sort of moral shortcut would undermine the whole puritan thing they have going on, economists hate it because it's currently expensive as hell, non-Westerners laugh at the whole enterprise, and environmentalists who can do math insist on switching to insect, soy, or mushroom protein instead.
Really the only groups rooting for its success at the moment are biotech investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, biologists who are overconfident in their ability to pull it off, and the aforementioned liberals and environmentalists who haven't crunched the numbers.
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
Myanmar
The Burmese Civil War rumbles on, with rebel forces pulling back from Myawaddy on the Thai border, because apparently the Karen National Army and the Karen National Liberation Army don't get along. All the same, the map still isn't looking good for the central government, with attacks on all fronts, fighting on the outskirts of Mandalay, and the Arakan Army closing in on the regional capital of Sittwe. At this point the partition of the country into 5 or more states seems inevitable, which seems like it will be mostly a victory for traffickers of drugs, arms, and people, who can thrive in the chaos of a half dozen failed states. But hey, maybe one of these ethnic groups will thrive without the Bamar boot on their neck and end up building a successful and prosperous society. Here's hoping.
ResoluteRaven
1d ago
Here are some suggestions depending on what your exact interest in linguistics is:
- If you're interested in learning languages for travel, reading literature, impressing foreigners, etc. then you might want to check out Ecolinguist, Benny Lewis, Moses McCormick, Xiaomannyc, or Alexander Arguelles on YouTube and in terms of podcasts anything with slow in the title e.g. Slow German Podcast, News in Slow French, etc. for learning purposes.
- If you're interested in linguistics because you want to channel your inner Tolkien and invent conlangs for a fantasy novel, then jan Misali or the conlang and neography subreddits are your friends (and so is a historical linguistics textbook like this one).
- If you just think languages are cool for intellectual or aesthetic reasons, then ILoveLanguages, NativLang, Langfocus, Watch your Language, and the Lexicon Valley podcast may be of interest to you.
Also if you want to learn Latin or Ancient Greek check out ScorpioMartianus and if you want song covers in obscure dead languages then check out the_miracle_aligner.
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
Every time I've gone online since I was 10 years old I've seen some braindead take or fallacious reasoning or contradictory position being expressed. The world is full of people who are ignorant, immature, incoherent, insane, and intransigent and no amount of arguing on my part is going to make a dent in their number. If I tried anyway and blew up at every instance of what appeared to me to be deranged hysteria, I would in fact become one of those deranged hysterics myself (I believe we call them Twitter People). Since that still wouldn't accomplish anything and is, as the kids say, a bad look, I choose to channel my time and energy towards more productive tasks instead. That's all there is to it.
ResoluteRaven
8d ago
That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.
I am confused by the belief many here express that Ukrainians are being hoodwinked into fighting against their own interests and better judgement, considering the number of examples we have of the West trying to convince a people to fight with the full force of economic and political propaganda and failing spectacularly e.g. Bay of Pigs, South Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela. There's simply no way you can sustain a high-intensity war for over two years on smoke and mirrors if the population is ambivalent, and the moment they become so the front lines will collapse like those of Tsarist Russia or Imperial Germany in 1917-18.
As to your point about the draft, it seems to me like it would only be dystopian if you see the entire concept of nation-states as such. You don't stop being a citizen of your country when you go overseas; they can still make you pay taxes, have you extradited to stand trial for crimes, and compel you in any number of ways. The suspension of consular services for a month is a relatively mild measure as far as these things go, and will probably just create a small undocumented population in several countries. If the Polish or Estonian governments ever start grabbing Ukrainian refugees off the streets and deporting them to the front lines in unmarked vans at Zelensky's request (and if I were a refugee who didn't want to fight, I would definitely want to stay out of countries that hate Russia so much that this is even conceivable), I'll agree that they've gone too far.
ResoluteRaven
22hr ago
I mean, some people's language learning goals really are "achieve a phrasebook level in 20 languages to receive social validation" rather than mastering any given language, and aside from that I think it's worth seeing how even quite a low level can get you through some basic interactions and make people much friendlier to you.
ResoluteRaven
1d ago
I think it's simply a fact that any given person's idiolect contains a mixture of metaphors they understand from experience and archaic ones that they have absorbed from the broader culture without fully comprehending. Learning how language was used in the past is one way to help sharpen your own thinking and ability to artfully express yourself, but communication is a two way street, so however much I like using e.g. metaphors from chemical kinetics to describe social and political processes, I have to adjust my vocabulary based on context.
To answer your last two questions, linguistic evolution is a natural process that you or I have little power to influence, but I certainly think it adds something to a child's understanding of the world to know that for instance the word "broadcast" is a term borrowed from farming, at least insofar as it drives home the point that early 1900's America was an agrarian society where everyone would understand such terminology. Learning a foreign language is helpful in a similar way, particularly one that uses a completely alien set of metaphors and historical references.
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
I think a generalized concept of a network state makes some sense, in that it recognizes that increasing numbers of people in the future will be more loyal to an online community of likeminded individuals than to their physical neighbors or the nation state that governs the land they live on. Such a group will naturally seek to build a parallel set of institutions and leverage their combined resources to achieve shared goals. Not having read much of Balaji's actual writings on the subject, I can't speak to any concrete proposals of his, but I can presume that he has a misguided sense of who, if anyone, will be directing this phenomenon and what the results will ultimately be.
ResoluteRaven
6d ago
The point is that those are the same people. They say the same things in person that they do online because below a certain age there isn't a difference in their minds and you have to treat it as such.
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
Under a worst-case scenario I would expect Chinese economic and political support and perhaps a limited military intervention to stabilize the Kachin and Shan statelets on their border as a buffer zone. There isn't any other country that would want to get involved, so they might even be able to get the UN to foot the bill for such an operation if they play their cards right.
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
It appears that humans have between 350 and 400 olfactory receptors, so I suppose once we fully describe them we'll have as good a model for smell as we can get. Taste seems to be a lot simpler, and yet people are still finding new receptors there as well (though having tasted salt licorice I would say that's one better left unstimulated).
ResoluteRaven
10d ago
This line of argument goes at least as far back as Gibbon's claim that Christianity fatally weakened the Roman Empire and the modern online form includes a heavy dose of Nietzschean master-slave morality in the way they contrast supposedly Pagan and Christian ethics. In a sense they are correct, in that if one is committed to permanent racial separatism and inequality then any universalist and egalitarian ideology, be it Christianity, Communism, etc. represents a beachhead from which future moral attacks may be launched on your position. What they don't have is any sort of workable replacement, retreating instead into memes and BAP-type shitposting rather than doing the hard work of building a philosophy to replace the one they continue to hack away at even as it holds up the ground beneath their feet.
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