ResoluteRaven
No bio...
User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
11hr 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
23hr 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
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
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
6d 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
7d 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.
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
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
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
6d 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
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
9d ago
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
US intelligence concurs that ISIS was responsible, and this attack definitely fits the MO of Islamic terrorism in Russia and previous ISIS attacks more than anything Ukraine could or would want to pull off (so far mostly kamikaze drone strikes on military targets).
It appears that the Afghan branch of ISIS has been gaining in strength since the Taliban takeover and is now fighting the same kind of insurgency against them that they did against the American occupation. Say what you will about the Taliban, but at least they don't dream of world domination like many other jihadist groups. I suppose it's a pipe dream to wish for a foreign policy discerning enough to pick out and empower isolationist Islamic extremists at the expense of their interventionist brethren, but it sure would let the rest of the world sleep a little easier.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
I was similarly confused by the media coverage of this execution, but what seemed likely to me was that a couple of outlets whose reporters are already trained to see swastikas in every shadow pattern-matched "asphyxiation by nitrogen" with "gas chambers," told all their friends that "Alabama is doing a Nazi thing," and then they all ran with it.
Regarding humane forms of execution, seeing as two things the US has in excess are fentanyl and guns, I always figured we should dope them up and then shoot them in the head, but that would run afoul of the unwritten rule that execution must be as clean and sanitized as possible so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of the executioners. To which I say if we as a society can't stomach the sight of someone's brains splattered against a wall then we may as well abolish the death penalty because we clearly can't handle the weight of the responsibility.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I meant to respond to your driving post before getting distracted, so I'll do it here:
Yes, drivers from New Jersey are probably more competent technically than in the rest of the country, but since America's urban planning or lack thereof forces people like me who hate driving and suck at it onto the road every day to get anywhere I would really much rather everyone around me drive "like a grandma with Alzheimer's" rather than get myself killed trying to keep up with the pros.
Having been all over the world it also seems pretty apparent to me that driving cautiously is correlated with having a wealthy and high-trust society, the same way that the more haggling you need to do in a street market the worse the material conditions around you are likely to be.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
As I've said before, the party (and the Partisans) of Woodrow Wilson, never changed sides, just their branding. Whether it's white hoods in 1920 or black hoodies in 2020 it's the same fundamentally anti-american (and dare I say it anti-western) bullshit.
Looking at the election map of 1916, I see Wilson opposed by a coalition of New England Yankees and the places they settled in the upper Midwest. As best I can tell, these same Yankees and their intellectual descendants at the colleges they founded are the ones in charge of the Democratic Party today and peddling the latest racist "anti-racist" dogma.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Finding a place with a similar racial mix to America is challenging enough by itself, but your best bet is probably somewhere in Latin America like Brazil (which does now have affirmative action, but I believe it was implemented more recently than in the US) or simply a comparison of data from before/after the Civil Rights Act was passed. The presence of large nonwhite populations in Europe (gypsies aside) is so recent that I doubt you can infer anything meaningful from their situation and other possibilities like apartheid South Africa had laws that leaned way too far in the opposite direction.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
It's not clear to me that Taiwan and Ukraine require the same kinds of weapons. The former needs naval and air assets while the latter needs artillery shells and tanks. Any war between China and US allies in the Pacific (outside of Korea) would be a quick and deadly exchange of missiles and planes that ends with one navy still afloat and one at the bottom of the sea, Battle of Midway style, rather than the kind of unending slugfest that a war between two nations that share a land border can devolve into. By the time you find yourself fighting a ground battle on the island itself, a war for Taiwan would have already been lost.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Even places that lack the belief in the biological equality of different populations have mostly ended up with some form of racial spoils system à la affirmative action for Malays in Malaysia or on the basis of caste in India, or else simply tried to expel the higher achieving population as Uganda did with the Indians or most Medieval European states did with the Jews at one time or another. The stated explanation is usually some form of "disparate economic outcomes between ethnically or culturally distinct groups are an incitement to violence and the higher achieving group must either pay the rest of us a bribe for their own safety or get out."
Only in places where the different groups exist on a continuum, Latin America for example, do we see less conflict on these particular grounds (I suppose you could argue that the class-based violence that occasionally consumes these countries is a proxy for it, but poor black Brazilians hating their rich white overlords because they're rich and not because they're white seems like an improvement over our situation). It may be trivial to say that there would be no racism if we all interbred until there were no distinctions, but it seems like we might only need to go halfway or less to get that benefit.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Apart from official recognition of areas that are already de facto independent, like Somaliland, Kosovo, Taiwan, etc. there is a possibility of an East African Federation forming in the next few years as a political union of up to seven currently separate countries. There are a few Pacific islands that have a chance at formal independence as well, including Chuuk (from Micronesia) and Bougainville (from Papua New Guinea), and Yemen and Libya would also probably be better off each splitting into two countries to avoid prolonging their current civil wars indefinitely.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
One example of a society with more women than men is the black urban ghettos in the US, where a decent fraction of the male population is in prison at any given time, and they certainly don't do much to inspire confidence in this eugenics scheme. If we cast a wider net to look at matriarchal societies in general, which may or may not have arisen due to a temporary or chronic gender imbalance, we see that women do all the economically productive work and men spend their days gambling, drinking, and killing each other (my impression of Soviet Russia post-WWII is that it trended in this direction as well, but was kept more in check by heavy state intervention).
As far as feasibility goes, I'm also not sure that this is as easy a change to make as one might assume. We don't, to my knowledge, know the genes that regulate the frequency of boys or girls being born. We can infer that it involves control of X and Y chromosome segregation in male gametes, but that's about it. It's true that under famine conditions more girls are born than boys, but that's because male fetuses are more fragile and are preferentially miscarried when the mother is stressed, not because fewer of them are conceived. Of course, if everyone is doing IVF anyway you can select the sex of your child easily, but that's intervention at the level of individuals rather than populations.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Because to Asians raised in famine-stricken societies, it the responsibility of a host to ensure that their guests are well-fed. This explains the Asian obsession with food relative to westerners who are many generations removed from true poverty, a decent fraction of whom seem to eat almost entirely for sustenance and not pleasure. In many Asian languages the traditional greeting is "have you eaten yet?" and you can't walk ten feet in a rural area without someone offering you dinner.
I'm not sure what there really is to complain about here though. I love taking home enough leftovers from a Chinese restaurant to cook my next three meals; it's the customers who are leaving money sitting on the table if they let the restaurant throw it all away. The only things I don't usually take back with me are excess hotpot broth and dipping sauces. By contrast, whenever I go to a European restaurant and am presented with half a sandwich and a cup of soup I feel cheated because I could have gotten 3x as much of better-tasting food for the same price at an Asian or Middle Eastern place.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I don't have a good answer to your larger question, but in the case of Crimea the inhabitants never wanted to be part of Ukraine: they tried to become independent when the Soviet Union collapsed but the new Ukrainian government strong-armed them into amending their constitution to state that Crimea was sovereign "as a part of Ukraine."
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
After decades of ridiculous claims, I will believe that we have been visited by aliens the moment one of these whistleblowers tosses an extraterrestrial corpse onto a table in broad daylight and not a moment sooner. Maybe not even then, unless they released a chemical analysis report along with it.
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.
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