BahRamYou
10hr ago
I actually agree with this pretty strongly. I wrote the other day that I think part of why people object so strongly to ICE is just the aesthetics of their uniforms. I also heard (anecdotally) a lawyer say that he would never, ever wear a black suit to a jury trial- it has a huge biasing effect on people.
I thought that police traditionally used blue for this very reason? It's a color that conveys the right mix of authority and calm. I have no idea why they insist on wearing black- are they trying to sneak around in the dark like ninjas? But even ninjas wore blue!
BahRamYou
20hr ago
This guy has been showing up in my feed a lot lately, and I think he has a good perspective on the situation. Notably there's some history I didn't know: Xi Jinping's father was once "purged," but he wasn't executed, just removed from power for a while. He was eventually allowed to come back. So being "purged" is maybe not as severe a punishment as westerners might think.
The other thing is that there's always a certain amount of petty corruption going on there. For the most part they allow it and tolerate it. It's only used as an excuse to purge someone when they want to remove someone for other reasons. (That said... giving away nuclear secrets seems a lot more severe than petty corruption? but who knows)
So his conclusion is that this is essentially a move by Xi Jinping to consolidate power for himself and the CCP, taking power away from the top military leaders. You might ask why he'd want to do that, since he's already got plenty of power and you'd think he has enough on his plate trying to run a country of 1.4 billion people. But this would give him more power to do something dangerous and unpopular... like, say, start an invasion of Taiwan.
I really, really, really hope that doesn't happen. I've been to Taiwan and it's a nice place. I also think the US and its allies are in a bad state right now, not ready for this kind of major full-scale war.
BahRamYou
21hr ago
See, for me, it was playing the strategy game "Romance of the 3 Kingdoms" series on NES. Which tells you absolutely nothing about these characters except their stats. You can recruit all of them, but there's a hidden loyalty stat for how the story is supposed to go. So I kept trying to recruit Lu Bu because he had the best combat stat, and he kept on betraying me XD. I suppose that's a very authentic experience to the story!
BahRamYou
1d ago
I have bent over backwards to try and host spaces for people to hang out casually and meet without much expectations but also clearance to flirt, and somehow I virtually NEVER (like, once or twice in the past year?) get invited to spaces hosted by other people.
Just want to say, you're doing god's work and you'll get your reward in heaven (but probably not in this life).
BahRamYou
1d ago
I mean... it's really long, and really old, and really Chinese. It's not something you can just read casually. It's practically a whole field of study in itself.
I grew up playing Koei games like the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" series. If you're... a certain sort of nerd, you'll appreciate them. The downside is, they sort of assume you already know the story, so they can be confusing. But they'll still give you part of the story, and a good appreciation for the overall strategic situation and map.
"Dynasty Warriors" is more story based. It's pretty much nonsense, but it gives a good sense for the myths and legends, which is what most people remember it for anyway.
For a slightly more academic approach, I really enjoyed this blog series: Chinese history for white people. Still very limited and oversimplified, but it's a good read.
Beyond that, I think you just have to read Wikipedia articles about the specific people and battles involved. Or commit yourself to learning Chinese lol. I think it's still lacking in proper English-language material.
BahRamYou
1d ago
Seems like there's roughly 4 types of Democrats on this issue:
- is the relatively moderate, centrist opinion. They're happy to accept legal immigrants, especially to fill job vacancies or reunite families, but they still want to enforce immigration law. Obama would be the most prominent example of this.
- is the more pragmatic, squishy, vague position. They're still in principle against illegal immigration, but they don't really want to do anything to enforce it either. There seems to be a strong sense of "but how else would we get the work done without them?" here, especially in certain industries like meat processing that are pretty nasty work for low pay. I think this is how Biden thought about it.
- is the more emotional position. They just hate seeing anyone get hurt, so pictures of people who are not visibly committing a crime getting arrested really triggers them. The actual issue isn't really important, especially when it's a smaller, weaker, more photogenic person getting arrested by an armed federal agent in a black uniform. Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and most of the street protestors seem to have this position.
- is the more academic position. They see the US as being a vast chunk of unused territory, stolen from the native americans, which has no right to be nationalistic. They want to help the overall world GDP by moving as many immigrants as possible into the US, and also create a huge voting advantage for leftists. To that end, they really don't care whether immigrants are legal or illegal, and would prefer open borders. You don't see this view a lot from elected officials (at least not openly), but plenty of people express it online, especially from college students and their lefty professors.
BahRamYou
4d ago
Well, there's different reasons to not trust a country. Denmark seems like a nice country, and we've historically had good relations. But they just don't have the capability to do anything in the Arctic or in space. If they decide they dont trust the US and want to kick them out from Thule military base in Greenland... what exactly is Denmark going to do about it? Send some dogsleds?
BahRamYou
4d ago
Probably not. Even 1 year was enough for me to develop some bad habits. 20 years of that lifestyle would be insane.
BahRamYou
5d ago
$1k per month is roughly what I got when I lost my job in 2020 because of Covid. It wasn't exactly riches, but it certainly wasn't "nothing." It was... an interesting experience, getting checks in the mail from the government for doing absolutely nothing, while public figures told me to stay inside for public health. I was glad that it helped me keep my life going and not become homeless, but it also encouraged me to be lazy so... I don't know. It's a hard question.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Rubio is the one with a real job and specific powers. It just happens that his job is particularly in focus right now.
Vance has a very vaguely defined job and nothing much to do right now. It doesn't change the fact that he's still a very important person and the most likely next Republican candidate for president.
BahRamYou
6d ago
There's a great quote from a Tom Wolfe book along these lines...
“Like more than one Englishman in New York, he looked upon Americans as hopeless children whom Providence had perversely provided with this great swollen fat fowl of a continent. Any way one chose to relieve them of their riches, short of violence, was sporting, if not morally justifiable, since they would only squander it in some tasteless and useless fashion, in any event.”
As an American, I'm a little defensive but... there is some truth in that. I admit that we were very, very lucky with our geographically- some might say supernaturally blessed. And our foreign policy has often been naive to the point of stupidity (sending factory equipment to the USSR, or granting China trade advantages come to mind). Our intelligence operations often result in embarassing failures, and Hollywood routinely portrays ourselves as evil.
Nonetheless, we do have some strengths that aren't just luck. I won't bother to list them here, I think anyone can think of a few. The 21st century will be interesting though...
BahRamYou
6d ago
There seems to be such a huge split between the left and right on this!
From the left, I hear that Americans are broke. Living with their parents, no healthcare, no job (or a really crappy job), struggling to survive. The official statistics are either made up, or highly misleading (like, a handful of billionares have all the money while the rest of us have nothing).
From the right, I hear that America is the wealthiest country that has ever existed. Way more money than China or Europe. The economy has boomed thanks to Reagonomics, the Bush tax cuts, and Trumps... tweets. We can easily spend a trillion for Greenland, or missile defense, or battleships, or whatever, because we have essentially infinite money.
I think the libertarians are the most correct on this. Whichever party is currently in power will say we have plenty of money to pursue their goals. Whichever party is out of power will say that we're broke, we can't afford it, we need to pay down the debt, etc...
BahRamYou
6d ago
Is that a problem? It seems to work quite well for them, especially with the help of modern tools like smartphones to look up obscure characters. English speakers can also recognize words without knowing how to spell them, that's the whole point of spelling bees.
BahRamYou
7d ago
ha! I've never seen the movie, I'll have to check that out sometime. It's been a very long time since I've read them so i hardly remember the plot at all.
Yeah... there's that. (world-weary sigh)
I've used ad-blockers for as long as they've been commonly available- maybe 15 years now? I moved around from one to another, in a never-ending "Red Queen's Race" between advertisers and ad-blockers. uBlock Origin really seemed like "the one" and I happily enjoyed it for about 5 years. But then they abruptly removed it from Chrome. And at this point I'm so tied into Chrome (gmail, Android, other extensions) that it would be a huge pain to switch. Sure, I could switch, but I feel like it's only a matter of time before they clamp down again on uBlock Origin in some other way. Because, let's face it, it's basically piracy- it's a way to hack websites to get their content without paying for it by seeing ads. It feels like when people told me "dont' worry that Napster is getting banned, you can just switch to Kazaa...Limewire... Bittorrent... PirateBay... etc...". When I just give in and pay their premium fee, our interests are aligned and the ads go away perfectly.
(also I disagree that it's 95%. My experience was more like 50%, varying wildly depending on the website.)
BahRamYou
7d ago
I was really into both that and The Dark is Rising as a kid. Apparently Welsh mythology really appealed to me for some reason.
BahRamYou
7d ago
I don't think there's any good way to make this work, but I do sympathize with the idea. Especially on the internet, so many ads just seem malicious. They're not there because anyone would actually see them and think "ooh, good product, I want to buy that!" They're there to trick you into accidentally clicking on them by completely covering the scream, or to screach at you with obnoxious sounds until you get so fed up that you buy a premium subscription to make them go away. If there was a way to buy a "premium internet pass" that would get rid of all internet ads I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately I have to do that individiually for every single website, which is its own sort of pain. My personal pet peave is trying to read a news article from some small local news site, which is technically open and not paywalled, it's just crammed full of so many ads that it's basically impossible to read for anyone not subscribed to "the Daily Times of Gary, Indiana" or whatever. I wouldn't mind subscribing to one or two newspapers, maybe even more if I was a professional journalist or something, but it seems unreasonable to expect me to subscribe to every single newspaper on Earth just so I can read one random article.
There... is a place that has managed to remove advertising completely: North Korea. It's kind of bleak and dystopian but... oddly calming? (Other than the state propaganda posters of course) Well, I've never been there so I can't say what it's like, but it's interesting that such a place can even exists, and gives us a glimpse of a different sort of life with a very different aesthetic.
I think the game was actually trying to be decently sympathetic to its main character. Showing how a guy who starts off basically good can sucked into bad ideas by going along with funny memes, cool friends, or in this case a pretty young woman.
But it gets the ending wrong. So the character gets sucked into this world, he meets some new "based" friends to do some protesting and... we're supposed to automatically just "know" that this is wrong. It doesn't give any reason, or even really show a bad outcome for Charlie. it's just taken for granted that this is wrong. I suppose the target audience is liberal moms worried about their children, not the actual children themselves.
(also, he acts more like a 12 yr old, but they portray him as a college student? It would have made more sense if he started off young and gradually grew up, but I suppose that would take a lot more time and budget to make a game like that)
If you actually want to make fun of the online right, it's pretty easy. Ironically 4chan does the best job of it, because they make fun of everything so of course make fun of themselves. Mostly by pointing out how most of them are not exactly Aryan supermen but nerdy boys stuck at home with no money, no power, and no women, and how endlessly spamming "based" or "the Jews" isn't much of an argument. They don't try to make the women look ugly, they just point out the complete lack of women. If you watch the part of Nick Fuentes's show where he responds to superchats from his fans, he's absolutely savage with this, endlessly calling them out as retards and larpers who will never accomplish anything in real life.
BahRamYou
8d ago
It's not exactly new or surprising that a head-of-state would have a big ego and ambition to leave a legacy. One might even say that's the norm. The constitution was explicitly designed with this in mind, with the hope that each separate branch of government would, by trying to seize more power for itself, keep the others in check.
What is new is how... useless Congress has become. In theory they have immense power. They could remove the president from office, fully control government spending, and even rewrite the constitution as they please. But in practice they just can't seem to agree on anything. They can barely even pass routine budgets to keep federal services running.
At the same time, social media has given the President more power than ever with his "bully pulpit." We can now directly watch all of Trump's speeches at the click of a button, or read his thoughts in short tweet form. And Trump is very effective at that kind of short-form communication. The rest of government is too fractured and, frankly, boring, to grab people's attention the way Trump can. It'll be interesting to see if this continues- somehow I can't imagine people tuning in to watch Vance or Shapiro with the same sort of horrified excitement they give to Trump. But we'll see- I suppose any speech becomes more interesting when it's backed up by immense power.
Regarding NATO, it's sort of a similar argument. Europe has, in theory, a lot of military power, but it's difficult to really use it when it's fractured between 31 different non-US members. What I would like to see is for continental Europe to form a new "Core NATO" with a centralized European Army, focused entirely on defending Europe. The US could either leave NATO or minimize its involvement there, and instead focus on AUKUS, potentially expanding it to include Canada, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan. This would be a smaller, but more tightly knit alliance, aimed at being able to project force all over the world, but especially at sea and even more especially in East Asia. Since this alliance is smaller and more closely aligned, it would have a lot more cohesion and flexibility to forcefully defend its (narrowly defined) strategic interests- peace in the middle east, counter-terrorism, and containing China and Russia.
Some of those are because of the more advanced rules/exceptions that I mentioned, and @bonsaii listed some above:
- The ㅆ from 있 slides onto the start of the next syllable
- 요 at the end of a sentence usually sounds more like 여
- the ㅁ from 좀 combines with the ㅂ from 바 to be... sort halfway in between ㅂ andㅍ
- the ㅃ from 빠 slides back onto the end of 바 tomake it more of a ㅍ sound
The others... I don't know, there might be rules I don't know, but I think you just need more listening practice. It's hard. But you're not going insane, they just don't follow the simple pronounciation guides in the intro hangul guides quite as neatly as they make it seem.
this is a good list of rules. But you certainly don't need to know all of these when you're a beginner, or even any of them at all. Just.... be aware that they exist.
BahRamYou
9d ago
Ah, interesting, thanks for the context! Yeah i've never formally studied that history, so I probably got a lot of details wrong. Probably when I heard that "Mao mangled it" I was thinking of what you said "a few abominations that are created entirely after the Communists took power and makes no sense," but it still works quite well as an international language/alphabet.
BahRamYou
9d ago
That's what most people say, but i've found it's a bit more nuanced than that.
Chinese characters are certainly hard for foreigners to learn, but they work quite well for Chinese or any language based on it. So anyone from any sort of Chinese dialect can look at those written charaters and know exactly what they mean, even if they dont know the pronounciation. Or at least, they could until Mao messed it up with his stupid "simplified Chinese" that randomly removes strokes. They will also instantly know the meaning of most Japanese Kanji too, without any extra effort. The hiragana in Japanese mostly just fills in the grammar words like verb conjugations, so it's easy to separate.
This used to be the case in Korean too, but then they abruptly removed all the Chinese characters. So now there's no clear boundaries between words, verbs have like 1000 particle endings with no direct translation in English, and everything has 10 different homonyms since the characters and tones got lost. You pretty much have to know the entire sentence and context to know what any specific word means. At least you know the pronounciation... sort of... assuming you know all the little details and exceptions they don't teach you at the start.
this is maybe more ranty than i intended. Korean really is a difficult language though.
BahRamYou
9d ago
Heh, yeah. I found learning Korean a very frustrating experience. They love to talk about how their hangul system is so scientific and simple, but native speakers don't understand how all the similar sounds and homonyms make it difficult for foreign learners. The pronounciation is tough, no way around that, and it's not always consistent. 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.
(also, in case you haven't learned this yet, a lot of them change their sound depending on what comes before or after them. Nobody told me that in my intro Korean class)
Probably the best advice is not sweat the details too much, just push through until you know a lot more and then you'll get it from context. Nobody expects you as a beginner to be able to transcribe it perfectly. But realize that you're trying to do something difficult and it will take a lot of time and effort.
Yeah, and the red uniforms were (alledgedly?) to distinguish them from the clouds of gunpowder smoke. Makes sense at that time but... there's a good reason soldiers don't wear bright red uniforms anymore. Colors matter!
More options
Context Copy link