veqq
1yr ago
20% of the total wealth in the Western world
Where does this number come from?
veqq
1yr ago
Could you explain the distinction between Tutsi and Hutu?
Previously I vaguely remembered colonial authorities basically made them up. So I looked into it a bit. Wiki e.g.:
They defined "Tutsi" as anyone owning more than ten cows (a sign of wealth) or with the physical features of a longer thin nose, high cheekbones, and being over six feet tall, all of which are common descriptions associated with the Tutsi.
which would add any successful people into this, as if making "kulak" an ethnicity.
Both the Tutsi and Hutu had been the traditional governing elite, but both colonial powers allowed only the Tutsi to be educated and to participate in the colonial government.
🤷♀️
Is it the case where a few disparate groups were sublimated into either Tutsi or Hutu? Or that the Tutsi were a coherent group? Are "official" takes as distorted as e.g. HBD? I'm more familiar with Central Asia, where Kazakhs, Uzbeks and such were basically invented in the 1920s, almost whole cloth.
veqq
1yr ago
We all know the statistics associated with dating apps.
Going outside and talking to people has great statistics.
veqq
1yr ago
The word "Russophile" means pro-Russian (dependent on definitions of Russia(n)). Calling Galeev a Russophile is incorrect. That is the only scope of my comment.
veqq
1yr ago
This is a telegram channel doing the same thing, but less doomsdayish: https://t.me/axisofordinary
veqq
1yr ago
I know 3 guys who studied theater and acted professionally before becoming right wing political consultants.
veqq
1yr ago
Thanks, that led me down a 2 hour rabbit hole. https://old.reddit.com/user/zaruka
veqq
1yr ago
More North Korea stuff. Zaruka has many pics and impressions from visits a decade ago. I finished the rabbit hole after Zaruka and figured someone might be interested, but it's a bit hard to choose any comment and even "top" isn't helpful. But I'll try this: https://old.reddit.com/r/northkorea/comments/n8ysx/i_travel_to_north_korea_annually_ama/
veqq
1yr ago
Well I don't buy the whole 'Russia inflicting genocide' line
Russia's stated goal is to reunify the Ukrainian people with the Russian people, destroying an independent Ukrainian identity. That matches the definition of genocide.
By "genocide" we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. ... The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups
Forced assimilation qua taking Ukrainian children is one of the 5 prohibited acts, amounting to genocide in context.
veqq
1yr ago
The Chinese Taoists, – he said, – had a similar notion, I will retell it in my own words. Struggling for hearts and minds, discourse workers constantly demand that people answer 'yes' or 'no'. All human thinking must flow, like an electric current, between these two poles. But in reality there are always three possible answers: "yes", "no" and "fuck you". When too many people begin to understand this, it means there is some wiggle in the skulls. In our culture, it has reached a critical point. It needs to be reduced drastically.
This reminds me of older discourse around powertalk(?), wherein enough people "leave" the game of producing to extort producers, that society begins to collapse. (I only briefly leafed through a decade ago and current perusal leaves me uncertain whether that was the source.)
veqq
1yr ago
In Slovenia, they have university labs full of only researchers who will do experiments for private companies, for a fee. They will invest in newer equipment to do more interesting experiments etc. They do nothing but research. On their off time (not researching on contract), they pursue their own topics with the equipment.
In Germany, there are many research labs, both state and non-governmental like the Plank society (though funded by the state!)
The society has a total staff of approximately 17,000 permanent employees, including 5,470 scientists, plus around 4,600 non-tenured scientists and guests.[2] The society's budget for 2018 was about €1.8 billion.[2] As of 31 December 2018, the Max Planck Society employed a total of 23,767 staff, of whom 15,650 were scientists.
and
In 2020, the Nature Index placed the Max Planck Institutes third worldwide in terms of research published in Nature journals (after the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Harvard University).[5] In terms of total research volume (unweighted by citations or impact), the Max Planck Society is only outranked by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences and Harvard University in the Times Higher Education institutional rankings
veqq
1yr ago
think that English heritage and tradition means the US still has a very large component of English descent today
I've never heard anyone assert this as those posing as Germans and Irish are clearly far more numerous. How often does it come up for you?
Everyone is discussing race related issues- but car culture led to freeways, which the federal government built through the centers of beautiful dense cities knocking down beautiful stone buildings etc. Here is a video covering this transformation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=n94-_yE4IeU&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa&index=8
It is from a great series on the wild economic incinerator of suburbia, how poor downtowns produce more economically (well, income for cities) than upperclass areas or newer malls etc.: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa It also explains a lot of American cost disease re infrastructure.
If you look at pictures from 1930s downtown anywhere in the US, it looks very similar to a European equivalent. Massive beautiful stone structures erected in the late 19th century etc. 9:16 on the first video has some good pictures.
veqq
1yr ago
That is provided you can choose where you work and it's in a place near grocery store which carries all the things you need.
No, that's an Ameirca/Canadian/Australian thing. Explore, "walk" with google street view, clicking forward around in Istanbul, Chelyabinsk, Kyoto, random places in Africa whose names I don't know... There are grocery stores with better, cheaper and more variety of food than US supermarkets everywhere. It's mindboggling.
Ljubljana: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@46.0395398,14.4861671,15z search "spar", "mercator", "hoffer". You're rarely 2000 ft from multiple markets at any point. And those are just the chains. There are then plenty of independent butchers, some farmers markets etc.
This is how most of the world is.
Here's Szeged, a city in Hungary: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@46.2584053,20.1461581,14z searching grocery will give you different locations - near the same.
Now Guadalajara, Mexico https://www.google.com/maps/search/grocery/@20.6755284,-103.3554495,15z
try mercado and tanguis, but a lot of stuff isn't actually there. Almost every corner will have a shop selling meat, dairy and fruit - often on a corner.
veqq
1yr ago
I don't understand this comment. Today is now, not 30 years ago. But you doubt things have changed while you give the historical background of what it was 30 years ago, then say it changed?!
The situation has changed a bit in post-Soviet times
Yes...?
veqq
1yr ago
At this point what to the German bishops represent? 4 million active church goers? (10% of 80mm - protestant half)
3 parts:
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A difficult quality to articulate, like: At least one passion/interest which she develops/works on/improves (can be chemistry "i love cute chemicals", dog training, old philology, horses...) / having agency / a serious about life, making active long term decisions (this leads to many things, like a good role model for kids, understanding cause and effect, to give kids a good mindset, so she isn't boring herself, so I don't feel guilty concentrating on something for hours because she has things to do too...)
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in context of the above, the desire to also build a family, execute on some sort of plan etc. ...forever! So linking my own agency with another, whereas most seem to either not have any agency/selfstarterness or
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also boobs, because I'm shallow
From 20-24 I wasn't mature enough to take basic steps and missed out on a few jewels, who then got married etc. shortly there after. Then I ran into some trainwrecks who failed on the 2nd point / misrepresented their goals or own position (went so far as to stay with a girl's family for a month, planned many things out... then she ghosted me for her wedding with the neighbor guy, her parents wanted her to marry since they were 12, who she quickly divorced...) But I've definitely met hundreds of perfect people, and some dozens who were actually in a position to be in a relationship etc. I just dropped the ball a lot. To some extent, at 30 I'm now scared that "everyone" is now TikTok addled and unable to truly make such a commitment. At least, it's much harder to find lovely people than 10 years ago. (Central Europe) In Latin America, I've met 2-3 people ever who would fit - all taken already or such.
The first point can often perhaps go too far, where it turns into anti-familiness etc.
veqq
1yr ago
It's likely that pre-conquest Mesoamerican religions failed to go through the Axial Revolution that happened primarily in Greece, Israel, Japan, and China between the 8th and 3rd centuries BCE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_monarchy#Vision_of_history discusses this too, with history starting when the monarchy emerges - and then all you need to do is maintain that forever
veqq
1yr ago
Due to "bilingual" education, which in practice means doing HS in Spanish, their children never learn college level English.
This is not accurate: High school is not and has not been all in Spanish. Perhaps in the future, but... California for example only removed the (English for Children) 1996 ban in 2016. (PLIC was offered for a few years in the early 90s.)
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currently few teachers credentialed for another language
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core subjects are in English (math, science) - there's no current model to do those in another language in highschool
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higher income monolingual parents are using this to teach their kids Mandarin
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these programs concentrate on elementary school immersion
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these programs leverage non-public heritage classes (like Saturday Chinese schools) established to keep kids from losing their home culture (it's not hard to just speak to your kids in your language and teach them, but immigrants aren't generally aware of how language acquisition works.) You end up with 2, 3, 4th etc. generation kids with no connection to the local language, a terrible command of Spanish but perfectly fine English. (Honestly, growing up in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood and going back, I believe complaints about closed off immigrant neighborhoods self perpetuating are solely based on ignorance and memories of them having just arrived in the 80s or 90s. Even the gangbangers primarily use English.)
Going to school myself, only 3 of us spoke English in 1st grade (across all 1st grade classes, and the Vietnamese twins learned Spanish by exposure) - but by 3rd grade everyone had learned. Unlike 20 years ago, only 40% are ESL now. Nowadays they have more kids in the Vietnamese programs than Spanish.
Anyway, education in Spanish or English would be better than what we actually got. I literally had 2-3 actual classes. In all others (including APs), teachers would put movies kids brought in all day and we'd talk or such. I got a lot out of this - reading almost the whole time, eventually going through language learning and programming textbooks.
So to clarify: This is not accurate. These (lower class) Hispanics aren't doing high school in Spanish, because they aren't really getting an education at all. That said, I'm also in Mexico at the moment and quite a lot of Hispanics (and American whites) are studying here (due to the cost) in Spanish. A few girls doing computer science, veterinary medicine, geology...
Hispanics are primarily conservative. Cf. latinx adoption, Catholicism and booming protestantism, that nearly all Hispanics are descended from Spaniards (so more colonial and slave owning heritage than American whites!)... Even in the universities, adoptions of the core woke tenets don't penetrate very far. (N.b. I am more familiar with the upperclasses in Latin America itself, though growing up in a poor Hispanic US barrio.) But certainly when your parents are encouraging you to have kids at 18, throwing a celebratory party etc. and telling you not to waste your time with college... Isn't that what conservative intellectuals espouse today?
That said, educational attainment's not so bad either. My grandfather was an electrical engineer with patents for computer memory, after picking fruit as a kid. I have an uncle building rockets at Blue Origin (which don't work!) A cousin with a PhD, another doing networking for Starlink etc. besides myself. Two uncles and some cousins voted for Trump etc. my mom voted straight Republican until Romney. This is quite average.
Remember, the lower class and indigenous (not the same!) Hispanics built pyramids and did cool math (besides the flower wars and sacrifices...) The middle and upperclasses are mostly European (the Lebanese made tacos al pastor, Germans brought beer and banda (polka, corridos) music etc.). The non-lowest majority are very mixed. There's a lot of potential here. There are serious problems with the culture/mindset overall - but the non-Hispanic West isn't different there, unfortunately.
veqq
1yr ago
What's required is a personal commitment to the idea of a long-term relationship before you even meet the other person. And a recognition that the relationship will drastically change multiple times and require constant work. If that is the starting point, you've got a shot and then you can sort of grocery list for all of the matching attributes. If that is not your starting point, I think you can still have a decent enough romantic life, but you shouldn't think you're going to make it long term.
I strongly agree with this.
If you ever find it, I'd love to read it. Also: @daseindustriesltd
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