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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3169 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 14, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I've seen a tweet:

Note: there's not one prominent Leftist anywhere in the West doing what Charlie Kirk did, i.e. issuing an open debate challenge to all comers and saying "Here's my view, I invite you to try and prove me wrong". None of them are willing to subject their views to that scrutiny.

So my question is - is this true? Does anybody know a leftist that does what Kirk has been doing? I know some leftist bloggers - obviously Scott among them - that can argue their points with decent (in all senses) argument and manner. But it's still preaching, a blog is not an equal debate. Are there any debaters around?

A leftist doing what Charlie did, travelling around colleges to initiate debates, wouldn't really find debates all that often. This does kind of happen though, but they're just called guests, or maybe speakers. They get to use a theatre or or larger classroom and are generally welcomed.

Most of the speakers though come to say their thing - usually as well-structured, well-oiled, often repeated presentation, maybe answer a couple of questions, and move on. They usually don't come to engage in debate, and they do not set it up specifically as "I am here to debate you, come and argue with me, if you want, that's what I am here for". Maybe some do, I don't know, but most of the guest speakers I've seen expect mostly one-sided engagement. So if there are exceptions, that's what I want.

And yes, I realize that if we're talking about colleges, they are leftist sanctuaries. But even leftists occasionally disagree about something, not? And there might be other spaces where one could find and debate non-leftists, not?

I don't think the premise really works. There's so many squirrelly technicalities (Define "open?" Define "debate?") that I don't think you can really equate the two things.

We have a benchmark - Charlie Kirk himself. Compare to what he's been doing. If you need more, I'd be fine with any reasonably argued definition, but I'd define "open" as accessible to everyone, within reason (you can come to open mike, subject to physical availability, ask a question and get an answer from the debater, and be able to challenge the answer and at least briefly engage in discussion), and is explicitly advertised as such. And "debate" as a discussion of a topic where the sides perform a public two-directional dialogue where both sides are equally engaged. For the purposes of this question, this dialogue has to be synchronous.

I don't think you can really equate the two things.

Which two things? I'm not sure what is the second thing.

The tweet was discussed last week, and it turns out Destiny in fact has made some efforts to do this the other way. Given his recent comments, I'm skeptical he'll be making a habit of it in the future, though.

Do you mean this guy? https://x.com/TheOmniLiberal/status/1969862447155540269

I haven't heard much about him before, but I am very skeptical he ever had any habits like that.

Was anyone here very familiar with Charlie Kirk before the assassination in terms of his politics, his media activity, and such, and if so, do you know of any good primary resources that would be good as an introduction for someone with very little familiarity of the guy? I do believe strongly that, regardless of whom or what, if someone is murdered for their speech, that speech automatically earns status as being worthy of listening to, and I realized I wasn't living up to my principles. I barely heard about the guy before and just knew him as a conservative media figure with a lot of influence on college campuses with his debate tents, and that he was quite Christian, but beyond that, I had no clue. Even pre-, but especially post-assassination, I figure that only direct, primary sources are trustworthy wrt his beliefs and behaviors, so I figured I'd check out the TP USA site & YouTube channel, but I was also wondering if anyone knew of a particularly representative or condensed resource for media of him.

This is not a primary resource, but I found it informative for the things he did “offline”:

https://scholarstage.substack.com/p/bullets-and-ballots-the-legacy-of

Charlie Kirk was not just a piece of internet bombast; his main field of action, in fact, was not on the internet. Kirk was one of the most effective institution-builders and coalition-crafters in the United States. He was less an influencer than a power broker; everyone in MAGAland acknowledged the leadership role he played in building and holding together Trump’s coalition

TPUSA was a leadership incubator for a generation of conservative activists. His success with TPUSA made him a favorite of the Republican donor class. His show gave him a ready excuse to interview politicians, think tankers, and media personalities across the right. All of this gave Kirk an impeccable Rolodex—he had access to a vast network of conservatives who mattered and an unerring eye for up-and-comers who should matter. He was constantly connecting politicians with donors, statesmen with staffers, and media outfits with the next brilliant young producer or marketer. There are a good four dozen people in the Trump administration who owe their appointments to an introduction Kirk made on their behalf—and this was true not only of the Trump administration, but also across Congress, in state governments, and in news agencies like Fox News.

Has anyone of you ever bought/subscribed to anything from youtube sponsorships? To me everything looks like crap or scam. So I wonder - who buys it, for them to make any money.

Semi related: For decades the local greyhound adoption group had a booth at the county fair, they would bring in their greys to hang around and tell passerby about adopting retired racing greyhounds. I saw them every year growing up. Did not adopt a greyhound, as I was a kid and we already had a dog.

A decade and change later, I marry Mrs. FiveHour, and she wants a dog. She hasn't had a dog and we're both busy so I rule out getting a puppy, we'll just mess it up, but I'm a little nervous about shelter dogs as some have behavioral issues. I think to myself, well racing greyhounds are available, they're a good size (I like medium-to-large dogs), and they come pre-trained but not traumatized. We adopted one immediately, and we'd have two if it weren't for the first one being a prick to other dogs.

So a lot of times, advertising is the long con. Brand awareness is pretty important. You're not necessarily selling something today to the person who sees the ad, you're selling something years from now when they find themselves wanting something in the sector of stuff you sell.

I don't use YouTube specifically enough, and when I am using youtube a lot I just get a premium subscription to avoid ads. But I've eventually tried stuff like AthleticGreens and Momentous brand supplements, after approximately 5,000 advertisements on podcasts. BJJFanatics has a good podcast, and as a result I've purchased an instructional from them, if I get anything out of it I'll probably purchase another. Those are things I would have purchased a version of otherwise, in that just about everyone who works out eventually dabbles in supplements or instructional videos or whatever, and when the urge hit me I went to those brands rather than a different one. My Eagles' podcasts have started running ads for the rock climbing gym near me, if I didn't already go there I'd start if this was the first I'd heard of it.

So like, most of them are probably crap or scams, but if you're in the market for scams or crap, you're more likely to buy one from this particular scammer.

GroundNews seems aight, I've recommended it to normies after repeated exposure from sponsorships though do not use it myself.

GoatGuns look kinda cool and I've considered getting one to fidget around with but probably won't.

Nebula and History of Weapons & War seem great but I have too much other great stuff in my backlog and I can't really organizationally afford another platform.

GoatGuns look kinda cool and I've considered getting one to fidget around with but probably won't.

I got one. It works great as an ornamental piece. Of course it doesn't have all the detail (that would be awesome but I doubt you can pull such thing off for 50 bucks). I do not regret getting it. It kinda sounds silly - what a tiny gun that doesn't work is useful for? - but turns out sometimes having some silly things around is enjoyable. I have no idea where I heard first about it though... theoretically could be an ad, I just don't remember.

GoatGuns

Funko pops for the red tribe?

Some of the inner mechanisms are modelled, but on closer inspection of some videos not nearly as much of them as I'd thought. Fatal downgrade tbh, that was most of the notional appeal.

I actually thought it was that "Goats, Guns and Gold," dude that Peter Lavelle sometimes invites on Crosstalk RT.

To me everything looks like crap or scam. So I wonder - who buys it, for them to make any money

There's a world of people out there with more money than brains. And to avoid uncharitability some of those people have a lot of brains but they have even more money, and so they don't see a problem with spending money to try something out quickly and easily instead of spending brain power to get there slowly.

I played raid shadow legends once for a bit. It was kinda fun, but ultimately more of a grind than I wanted was fine with letting it go.

Not from YouTube but I got ear buds that look remarkably similar to raycons but a Chinese brand I'd never heard of. They were cheap and let me play switch mini games in stereo, no complaints.

From - not really because in general I would never buy anything based on ads alone. But I am using VPN that also had sponsored some youtube channels which I watched. I didn't decide to buy it because of that, but I can't say it didn't influence me in some way - it does have some alternatives which are also acceptable, and maybe if I've seen their ads I'd decide otherwise, hard to know. I.e. in general I'd never buy something I didn't previously know or research just because of ads, but I admit an ad can make me aware of something (which after research may prove worthy of buying, or not) or influence my choice between equally good alternatives. Didn't happen to me a lot but I have one example.

I subscribed to Factor for about a year, I had a long commute so it was worth the time savings IMO and broke my Doordash habit.

There's a lot of speculation about who knew what in Charlie Kirk's killer's social network. Is there a general legal duty to report that covers people who learn about a planned a murder?

If it turned out the killer shared his plans with somebody and that person responded with "you're retarded, also never talk to me about this again" but did nothing else, would they be criminally liable?

If it's just general retarded talk then indeed the internets are full of it and the feds aren't going to bother with it. But if it's specific talk like mentioning specific plan, specific weapons and specific discussion, like where to hide the rifle and which way it's better to run away, then participation in such chat may be trouble. Probably not for "never talk to me about this again", unless the feds have a particular reason to haunt this person, because the likelihood of making a case on such basis is very small. But from what I read his pals may have been a bit more supportive than that... If that's true, they may have some unlpeasant time ahead of them.

IANAL, but I'd guess that a reasonable person could be expected not to be able to distinguish between edgy hyperbolic jokes that appear as "plans" for murder and true plans for murder such that people who didn't report it wouldn't be liable. However you might feel about the morality or good taste of such jokes, it's hard to deny that the internet is so chock full of them that if you randomly selected one such statement, the odds that it's not a joke seems almost vanishingly small.

Also I'm curious if it's like Tyler Robinson had a history of edgyposting, dropped some sort of 'SOMETHING BIG IS GONNA HAPPEN TOMORROW AT THE CHARLIE KIRK HAPPENING' in a discord in a way that could plausibly mean something but also could just as easily be random bluster or 'I'm gonna go throw a tomato at Kirk' is it an offense not to report that.

Anyone played around with voice cloning and generation? ElevenLabs came out of nowhere a while back and blew everyone's minds, but are there any serious competitors to their quality? Or are they still the best around? Is it possible to do it locally?

I don't really understand why joker-types on the left profess love for Luigi Mangione the health care CEO assassin but are trying to dodge any association with Tyler Robinson the Charlie Kirk assassin?

I'm not really trying to adjudicate what Tyler's beliefs are (or Luigi's for that matter, he was a trad conservative in some ways), just... they both did political assassinations that leftist joker-types are in favor of. Why the selective embracing/rebuking?

Is it because Luigi's cute and has six pack abs? Is it because Luigi killed at the end of Biden's term while Tyler killed after Trump demonstrated a more fierce commitment to law and order?

Many believed that United had such regulatory capture and lobbying capacity that they were above the law, and so the victims of their injustices couldn’t plausibly seek justice against the company. Many believed that there were hundreds or thousands of victims of United and that their victimhood was especially heinous because (to simplify) they had purchased medicine but were withheld the medicine they purchased and were promised while they actively dying. Doctors, patients, academics, and those in the industry came forward after the event to talk about this. Something outside the law is treated according to the traditional norms regarding outlaws, as that’s just what means. None of this applies to Kirk, who was firmly within the law.

Why the selective embracing/rebuking?

Cost/benefit. You can sell that healthcare CEO is a supervillain that deserves death, and some normies could buy it, because US healthcare system sucks, and a lot of people hate it. Selling that the guy whose only thing was to debate anybody who would talk to him was a supervillain is much harder.

But here shouldn't the ire also be directed at those who make and enforce the laws? It seems we have a legislature and those who enforce the laws who allow Insurance CEOs to behave to the detriment of society. If we had better laws or enforcement I could imagine people not being as mad at their health insurance. Anger at CEOs maximizing profits seems akin to anger at dogs barking.

There's a wide gap between "illegal" and "detrimental to the society", and it is not closeable in any reasonably organized society that allows any freedoms to its members. You have conflicting interests here - the consumers of healthcare want to have maximum care for minimum cost, the providers have limited resources which will never be enough to provide it, and the middlemen want to extract profits. There's not really an optimal arrangement that you could legislate. Even if you make a totalitarian dictatorship fully dedicated to regulating and distributing healthcare, you still will have people who think they don't get enough care, and some of them will blame the providers for it. Sure, you could legislate against some of the toxic behaviors, but you'd get a set of others in response, and another set of people being mad about it. US is not in a great spot here, for various reasons, but there will always be something to complain about.

Is it because Luigi's cute and has six pack abs?

I'd guess this is 99% of it. Whatever difference between how the killers are lauded probably has little to do with the specifics of the killings, because the joker-types are lauding the killings about equally, by my reckoning. But being seen fawning over someone who looks like Luigi is much better for your status than fawning over someone who looks like Tyler.

How much furry porn and erotic discord RP is going to be part of the evidence for the Tyler Robinson trial?

Tyler Robinson trial probably not a lot - what matters for him is what relates to the murder, and the motive is easy to establish based on his own words alone, no need to dig deeper. However if the feds decide to go after his lover as an accomplice, there all kinds of weird shit may show up. Maybe even defense will bring it up - "you see, this guy is getting off looking at pandas, clearly he's bonkers and can't be expected to make a reasonable judgement".

"And here, your honor, we have an illustration of so-called bulge noticing."

In theory, evidence can't be presented if its more likely to impact the jury over unfair prejudice than by its probative value, and unless the shooter was a big fan of a very specific sort of snuff, it's unlikely that the porn or RP will have much information of value at all. In practice, the actual rules-as-operated are byzantine and highly dependent on which lawyers and what judges you get.

If he had any brain cells worth mentioning, he'd plea guilty. Dunno whether that's likely enough to make the question moot.

And if a prosecutor wants to show radicalization? Like following a lot of trans accounts and listening all day about the trans genocide?

I'd be surprised if the porn and ERP were particularly useful for that. I won't say those spaces keep their jorking material and their political advocacy separate, because they don't (cw: fully clothed trans / hyena fem wearing tight pants from behind), but there's enough difference that a prosecutor is going to have a lot of work to do in order to get a judge to sign off on presenting the smut as evidence rather than the political discussions. Again, not a lawyer, not legal advice, and the rules are pretty open-ended, but this is pretty common a problem.

What is the best LLM for translating to and from CJK? Please give an answer for both online stuff (Gemini, Claude, Copilot) and local stuff.

I tried Mistral 7B, but it seemed to be doing a much worse job than Gemini.

I would assume that most SOTA LLMs would be nigh interchangeable when it comes to translation tasks. When it comes to local models, well, what can your pc handle? The new Qwen is crazy sparse, but it's still beyond most consumer hardware.

I have 16 GB of RAM, a GTX 1660 Super, and a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU. Far from ideal hardware, I know. Mixtral 7B runs fine, though.

My experience with 7B models is that while it's amazing that they can do some useful tasks, they're severely limited. I mean, in some ways, they're better than GPT 3 or 3.5, but still far from reliable. Your specs aren't good enough to run larger models, I'm afraid, so you'd be better off using the bigger online models/closed-source models. At the bare minimum, you'd need a GPU with more VRAM (some manage barely usable results on CPU, but it's a PITA). I believe that some Gemma models might fit on your system, and probably do better than Mistral 7B, but at the end of the day, you need better.

If money is an impediment, Google is practically throwing away FLOPs on AI Studio. Sign up, and you can use Gemini 2.5 Pro without running into rate limits. I'm very confident that translation tasks are piss easy for it, and I've used it to translate hundreds of chapters of Chinese novels with satisfactory results.

Wow, you too? I find Gemini translates stuff really, really well. Or at least, I think it does, I cross-reference everything I put into it with Google Translate and sometimes it will apparently misunderstand something, or I'll open up a new private tab and have it translate it back to me and it's come out a little differently than I wanted it. I was told DeepL was supposed to be the best, but I somehow doubt it could be better than Gemini. I could be wrong.

The power of AI might shake up the closed nature of different language spheres of the Internet someday, I think. I had the fanciful idea that humans in other cultures would see things significantly differently from me, but I was surprised by how similar the lines of thought run. In almost every non-Arab country in the world, it seems that traditionalism is fighting a bloody battle against liberalism, and mostly losing.

Most recent models do really well! Translation is effectively solved since GPT 4, which was ages ago.

DeepL is good, but they're still better.

If you've successfully translated Chinese novels, can you recommend a model for translating from Chinese, but for someone that lives in China and doesn't want to use a VPN? I think Gemini is off-limits for them, and ChatGPT fucks with the writing style too much.

I believe that you should have access to Kimi K2, GLM and Qwen, which are the current best Chinese models. Can't imagine they'd be banned in China.

Bug report:

In this post, I input the following URL:

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new? utm_source=publication-search

I can see this upon opening the post up to edit; I correctly entered it. However, the post renders with the link pointing to this URL:

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new-search

As you can see, part of the URL has been stripped out, breaking the link. Hence, y'know, the bug report.

EDIT: I've had to add code tags around the first URL, as it "autocorrected" when I made this post. So it applies to bare URLs as well, not just [] () links. Note that this doesn't affect the preview, which is why I've had to edit rather than noticing it then.

EDIT2: Code tags weren't enough; added a space to the first URL to break it. URL I entered doesn't have the space. Seriously, this "some bugs don't affect the preview" thing gets annoying.

EDIT3: Putting a space before the ?, rather than after as it now is, results in the behaviour still occurring despite the deleted section no longer even being part of a hyperlink. Result:

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new -search

This should now be fixed. I also stripped out the weird URL-replacement stuff that was going on :)

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new

Okay, now it strips out everything after the ?, which is certainly better.

Yeah, it's trying to remove tracking codes, so I decided to leave that in for now.

Earlier today, someone told me that Charlie Kirk once made derisive comments about Ryan Carson, a left-wing activist who was stabbed to death in New York two years ago. Googling "Charlie Kirk" "Ryan Carson" produces nothing promising. Can anyone confirm whether he really did say anything to this effect?

What's the point? If you can't find multiple sources with a casual search, then clearly it's not something that had been important about him, either as a person or as a public figure. Most likely he didn't say it, and somebody just invented it or perverted what he actually said to mean the opposite. Maybe he did in a stupid moment and deleted it, who knows. It doesn't matter. This only is relevant if you subscribe to the idiotic "inner demon" theory - which most of the social media peoples do, of course, because it's stupid - where nearly everybody is actually a vile demon, but you can't exorcise the demon unless you have "proof", and when they finally say something that you can attribute to a vile demon, that "reveals" their inner true nature and this is the only thing that matters about them now and forever, and you can ignore everything else, and proceed to the exorcism. You just need to be on the lookout when the demon reveals itself.

My search only found one related tweet.

I don't think it counts, but it wasn't (necessarily) made up from whole cloth by your friend.

related to this, can anyone actually find the whole MLK episode they did? I found an 8 minute preview beforehand, but nothing other than like a 1 paragraph excerpt

My first thought: "aha! I know how to find that!"

My second thought: "There is currently no publicly available evidence that anyone has found or posted the entire Turning Point USA episode focused on Martin Luther King Jr.; most online references point to either commentary, controversy, or short clips and discussions about the episode, but not the full unedited version itself."

Say what you will about AIs, they're the only thing that gets close to solving Russell's Teapot.

That means that a) either there are some secret repositories of content which a lot of people can access, but somehow nobody ever can publish anything from there and everybody who has access is bound by an unbreakable vow to deny their existence; or b) literally everybody discussing this does it without actually doing the basic thing like watching the content they are discussing. Which is extremely sad.

That sounds like it was expressing bafflement towards Carson's friends rather than the man himself. Close enough maybe.

It should be the job of the person making the claim to prove their position, not for the other side to prove someone didn't say something.

It was just mentioned in passing on a phone call, not in a written exchange.

I don't really get the point of this urge to either prove that Charlie, in particular, said x, or to prove that he didn't. Charlie said a lot of things, it's doubtful he meant all of them seriously; and most of his accusers are just ascribing every rotten thing ever said by a xitter Roman statue account to him.

I'm curious because I have an indirect personal connection to Carson.

My Chinese coworker says that this image is a reasonable representation of the controversy over whether Mandarin and Cantonese are dialects or languages. What is your opinion on the topic?

He's wrong. The distance between spoken Mandarin and Cantonese is greater than the distance between French and Italian. It's more like the difference between English and Greek.

Here's what ChatGPT suggests for translating your post into various Chinese languages:

  • spoken Mandarin: Wǒ nàge Zhōngguó tóngshì shuō, zhè zhāng túpiàn dàgài néng dàibiǎo dàjiā zài zhēnglùn Pǔtōnghuà hé Guǎngdōnghuà dàodǐ shì fāngyán háishi yǔyán. Nǐ zěnme kàn?
  • spoken Cantonese: Ngo5 go3 Zung1gwok3 tung4si6 waa6, ni1 zoeng1 soeng2 caa1 m4 do1 doi6biu2 zo2 gwaan1jyu1 Pou2tung1waa6 tung4 Gwong2dung1waa2 hai6 fong1jin4 ding6hai6 jyu5jin4 ge3 zang1leon6. Nei5 dim2 tai2 aa3?
  • formal Mandarin: Wǒ de Zhōngguó tóngshì shuō, zhè zhāng túpiàn shì duìyú Pǔtōnghuà hé Yuèyǔ shì fāngyán háishi yǔyán de zhēngyì de hélǐ miáoxiě. Nǐ duì zhège huàtí yǒu shénme kànfǎ?
  • written Mandarin voiced like Cantonese: Ngo5 dik1 Zung1gwok3 tung4si6 syut3, ze5 zoeng1 tou4pin3 si6 deoi3 jyu1 Pou2tung1waa6 waa6 Jyut6jyu5 si6 fong1jin4 waan6si6 jyu5jin4 dik1 zang1ji3 dik1 hap6lei5 miu6haai2. Nei5 deoi3 ze5 go3 waa6tai4 jau5 sam6mo1 hon3faat3?

The inferential gap between modern Anglophones and people from more complex linguistic situations (diglossia or even polyglossia) is quite large and usually makes it a waste of time to argue about such things. Your average English speaker will have only ever encountered languages that are either completely unintelligible to him in writing or in speech e.g. Russian, or that are nearly identical to his own e.g. New Zealand English. If we lived in a world where a billion people spoke Jamaican Patois or Scots and our formal education was in Old English there would be a lot less confusion on the matter.

As to the nature of Chinese specifically, more or less all formal writing in the Sinosphere (including Korea and Vietnam; Japan was more complicated) prior to the early 20th century was in standardized Literary Chinese. No Koreans were under the impression that the language they were speaking was Chinese, even if that was the only language they could write, but your average Chinese scribe would tell you they were speaking and writing the same language, the same way Arabs do with their vernacular dialects and Modern Standard Arabic, or a Carolingian monk might have with Old French and Latin. If you define languages by mutual intelligibility, or from a learner's perspective ("do I need a different textbook for this?"), then they are clearly wrong, but if you then conclude that something like Ottoman Turkish is just a language like any other that you can learn to speak (good luck!) you are also missing something important about how it was used.

When China transitioned to writing in the vernacular, only Mandarin successfully made the jump, which meant that your average educated person in Guangdong went from speaking Cantonese and writing in Literary Chinese to speaking Cantonese and writing in Mandarin. A generation or two ago this person would not have been able to speak Mandarin except as a sort of cipher or word for word translation into Cantonese, but nowadays they will be fully fluent in both spoken forms. While there have been attempts to standardize written Cantonese in Hong Kong and written Hokkien in Taiwan (basically selecting or inventing new characters for all the words without obvious cognates in Mandarin), no one outside of a handful of hardcore separatists and language nerds (and speaking as a language nerd I'd rather they adapted something like Korean Hangul instead) cares about them, and even the spoken forms are on the road to extinction alongside their failed political projects.

speaking as a language nerd I'd rather they adapted something like Korean Hangul instead

Speaking as another self-identified language nerd, hell nah. The survival of the Sinosphere arrangement of one common ideographic writing system functioning, if imperfectly, for multiple distinct languages simultaneously - distributing the translation load between the act of writing and the act of reading in such a way that both can be performed somewhat on the fly - is precious, and I could rant at lengths about how much of a tragedy I see in Vietnam's ditching of Han Nom and Korea's almost-complete ditching of hanja. We have reports of 19th century Japanese who could travel to Vietnam and "talk" to literate elders in writing, without either making a single sound the other could parse!

As a third self-identified language nerd, I'm largely with you. I think Hangul is an interesting and unique writing system, and certainly more efficient than a syllabary like Japanese Kana, but I do wish that both Korean and Vietnamese used a hybrid script system analogous to Japanese with 1000-2000 characters for Hanzi derived words and the rest in their respective phonetic system. Korean and Japanese in particular have a frustrating amount of homophones due to the dropping of tones that could use the disambiguation. I wouldn't mind if the Chinese did the same from the other direction, though would prefer something like Zhuyin over Pinyin in such a case for largely aesthetic reasons.

Korean mixed script exists and has nice and quirky properties.

Korean and Japanese in particular have a frustrating amount of homophones due to the dropping of tones that could use the disambiguation

I thought Japanese solved the issue of homophones with pitch accent. Many of the more famous examples are clearly distinguishable, to the extent that I feel like "homophones" is a misnomer. Regardless, I don't think need tones for disambiguation and nor am I aware of that they ever had tones, unlike the more mixed situation in Korea.

The pitch accent has far from enough information to actually disambiguate heavily-overloaded phoneme sequences, especially with projected-down Chinese vocabulary. One of the more well-known pairs is 科学 (subject-learning = science) and 化学 (change-learning = chemistry), both read identically as kagaku with a down-pitch after the ka. In an informal context (like students chatting about what they are doing), people often resort to deliberately misreading the latter as bakegaku, essentially just pronouncing the "change" bit using a slightly amusing native reading (bake- is "change" with a heavy connotation of "shapeshift", like masters of disguise), perhaps similar to saying "Lifeology" for "Biology". (Imagine a scenario in which this word was overloaded in English, with "Bi-ology" denoting the study of things that come in twos)

Once you get to heavily overloaded sound sequences like koukai, my dictionary gives over a dozen of words that are read as that with no down-step (like 公開, "publicise", or 更改, "revise"), and at least two that have that reading with a downstep after the ko (後悔, "regret", and 航海, travelling the sea by ship). All of these are common words and you could easily construct contexts where there is ambiguity between them.

For native words, the collisions are fewer, as you have to distinguish between genuine collisions (kami (downstep after mi) as in paper vs. as in hair) and ones where the two words are actually the same etymologically but educated writing demands using different Chinese characters, such as kara[2] = 空 (empty) / 虚 (hollow) / 殻 (husk) or kiku[0] = 聞く (hear) or 聴く (listen) or 訊く (ask). The latter is a fascinating topic in itself, connected to the same thing I hinted at above with writing in these languages also being an act of translation! (Compare to how any EN->RU translator has to decide whether any instance of blue is синий or голубой, or maybe an SE->EN translator has to think about whether a "stark sås" is spicy or just strong.)

I thought Japanese solved the issue of homophones with pitch accent

This is more of a thing with commonly used words. When you get to more technical or literary vocabulary it gets a lot harder to parse the meaning from etymology based on pronunciation alone compared to the less homophonous Greek or Latin derived technical vocabulary in English.

For literary vocabulary i could see that this might be an issue but isn't most technical vocabulary imported words from English and German?

I guess it depends on how you count (e.g. by dictionary entry vs weighted by usage frequency). Names for drugs like aspirin will be direct imports from English. Words for things like economics, maximum, limit, exchange, chemistry, heart attack, etc. will be words constructed from Chinese characters.

Why would homophones / homonyms even be a problem if / when the meaning is obvious from the context.

In Finnish I can say ”kuusi palaa” which could mean ”six pieces”, ”a fir tree is on fire”, ”your moon is on fire” or even ”piece(s) of your moon” but nobody would be confused with any real world use of that piece of sentence.

Even this infamous artificial example is obvious to any fluent speaker with some thought: ”-Kokko! Kokoo kokoon koko kokko. -Koko kokkoko? -Koko kokko, Kokko.” (-[Person named] Kokko! Assemble together the entire bonfire. -The entire bonfire? -[Yes,] the entire bonfire, Kokko)

Does your coworker speak Mandarin as his first language? Is he from the northern PRC? Is he a nationalist? Those are important factors to consider when evaluating his opinion. I agree with others that including Korean is highly suspect. It suggests a level of ignorant northern Han chauvinism, the kind that still sees China as the "middle kingdom" (IMO better translated as the "central kingdom") and all other so-called cultures surrounding it as uppity monkeys who were enlightened by the hoary and superior Han Chinese.

To your question, no, they are not the same language at all. A lazy analogy (in that you could nitpick it to death and probably find a more exact example) is that they are like English and, say, Romanian. Both are Indo European, both use the Roman alphabet. They probably have some words in common that could be identified by a linguist. But day to day, they are mutually unintelligible, and the Romanians do things to the Roman alphabet that make English speaker say "wtf," such as "ă" and "ș". They are only part of the same "Chinese" language in that all Romance languages are part of "Romance," and even that is too generous IMO.

Does your coworker speak Mandarin as his first language? Is he from the northern PRC?

Cantonese is his first language. He's from Guangzhou, in the south.

Is he a nationalist?

I don't know. He has expressed thorough dislike of both the PRC government and Chiang Kai-Shek. He considers "zhonghua ren" to be significantly preferable to "Chinese person" as a moniker, I think since "Chinese" too easily implies "zhongguo".

That's a tricky one. IMHO there's probably nobody on this board who is really qualified to disentangle the nuances there, since AFAIK we do not have any regular born-and-raised-in-the-PRC posters (and even if we did the fact that they post here would make them highly unusual). But my understanding is that zhonghua 中华人 /zhonghuaminzu 中华民族 is used to mean "ethnically Chinese people," and I have heard it used (often as "huaren"华人) in conversations where the speaker was simply a non-PRC Chinese (e.g. from Taiwan) but also by PRC Chinese appealing to the loyalty owed by huaren (or huaqiao 华侨) to the mother country (PRC).

Re disliking Chiang Kai-shek... that's a tough one since AIUI he wasn't a very sympathetic character. I think there are plenty of PRC haters who have little love for Chiang.

I confess to not knowing enough folks from southern China to really grasp their views on Chineseness and compare them with those of northern Chinese (with whom I had much more contact).

My wife is of Chinese descent (though Malaysian for 3-4 generations) born in Malaysia and refers to herself as Malaysia Huaren which is typical for Malaysian Chinese in my experience. Admittedly that has another layer in that a lot of Malaysian Chinese will emphasize their affinity to the Cultural Grouping of Chinese moreso than their geographic location in Malaysia but that's incorporating SEA-idpol on top of China-idpol.

Re disliking Chiang Kai-shek... that's a tough one since AIUI he wasn't a very sympathetic character.

To clarify, IIRC his position is something like "Chiang/the ROC should have admitted defeat like Robert E. Lee/the CSA and permitted the country to be reunited, rather than retreating to Taiwan and permanently dividing people". But I may be misremembering/misinterpreting his opinion.

Here's a direct quote:

ToaKraka: In the video game Hearts of Iron 3, you can play as the PRC and capture/execute Jiang Jieshi rather than allying with him against Japan. ¶ (at the Xi'an Incident)

Coworker: Allying with him was the only option. Different in political affiliation does not make him an enemy of China. Japan was the ultimate enemy. ¶ His sin is that he splits the country into two.

My gut says he's probably a PRC nationalist, though I say so with low confidence. Taiwanese have a generally warm view of Japan despite having been colonized by the Japanese for decades, so not all Chinese see the Japanese as a nemesis. The idea that "Japan was the ultimate enemy" is probably the strongest most unambiguous message in PRC propaganda, closely followed by "we must never forget the Century of Humiliation at the hands of Western powers" and "the CCP deserves undying gratitude for creating the 新中国 which awakened Chinese racial class consciousness and helped unify 中国人 enough to end their exploitation by evil foreigners." Given that, and given that the "Chinese=Han=Standard Mandarin" as an idea is pushed to promote national unity (no criticism here, every European country did it in the 19th and 20th century), I would take his linguistic theories with a grain of salt. Of course, I don't know the guy, so I'm speculating about his beliefs a lot here.

I'd be curious to hear what he actually believes if you feel you can broach this rather sensitive topic with him.

Taiwanese have a generally warm view of Japan despite having been colonized by the Japanese for decades

Is this a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing, since the PRC is the strongest force in east Asia and both are concerned about their sea lanes and territorial integrity because of Chinese moves to expand its territorial waters and claim on Taiwan?

This is mostly because the brutal KMT crackdown on the Japanese-educated upper classes of Taiwan starting in 1947 made the colonial period seem better in retrospect to those who saw a decline in their social and economic status while their friends and relatives were imprisoned or executed.

It's been a while since I studied this, but IIRC the occupation of Taiwan was much less draconian than the occupation of Korea or the wartime occupations of the mainland. The Japanese built a lot of infrastructure there and developed the island somewhat. They also engaged in cultural repression, but again, I think it was less strictly enforced than in Korea.

My gut says he's probably a PRC nationalist

Direct quote:

Yes, the government of the PRC is bad, very bad. I am currently in the US which already proofs it. But there are more colors than just black and white in this world.

Fair enough, sounds like he has more nuanced opinions than the average zealous nationalist. Good on him.

In practice, "a language is a dialect with an army" seems to be the correct rule. There are instances of nations sharing a common language (the Anglosphere and friends), but also plenty of adjacent countries that can understand each other but declare them separate languages (I hear Swedish and Norwegian are almost identical) and countries that can't understand speech, but consider it a single language (China).

I think the language/dialect distinction is a bit like the religion/cult distinction: at the big picture most generally agree on the idea, but any concrete example can be argued over indefinitely.

I'd argue that Korean and Chinese are more separate languages than Italian and French.

Chinese is a tonal language and Korean is not, and they have different writing systems.

Italian and French have nothing that divides them to this extent, either in spoken or written language.

As for Chinese and Cantonese I have no idea, I'm not terribly familiar with them even if I've studied some Mandarin. My general rule though is that languages are separate if they aren't mutually intelligible.

I genuinely don't understand why your coworker put spoken Korean and spoken Chinese in the same bubble, they're mutually unintelligible and come from different language families, even if they used the same writing system for a long period. This on its own makes the rest of your coworkers claims suspect to me.

Take the Nordic languages: Swedish and Norwegian are clearly the same language as they are easily mutually intelligble both in written and spoken form. With Danish it's a bit murkier but seeing as the written form is clearly mutually intelligble with both Norwegian and Swedish, as well as large amounts of the local dialects, even if it can be a bit difficult, I would still put it as being the same language but at the outer edge.

Icelandic on the other hand is its own language seeing as both written but especially spoken Icelandic is not really mutually intelligble with the other Nordic languages.

Broadening things to the Germanic languages it's easy to see that German is separate from the Nordic languages. It uses mostly different words and even has different grammatical structure, it's clearly a separate language even if there are overlaps and a common history.

I'd argue that Korean and Chinese are more separate languages than Italian and French.

Forget Italian and French, in some ways, Chinese and Korean languages are more divergent than Italian and Hindi.

My general rule though is that languages are separate if they aren't mutually intelligible.

This is why I sometimes bear the suspicion that young people aren't speaking English.

I genuinely don't understand why your coworker put spoken Korean and spoken Chinese in the same bubble, they're mutually unintelligible and come from different language families, even if they used the same writing system for a long period.

His position is that a particular speech can be part of multiple languages depending on how it is written. The exact same hanzi/hanja passage of writing can be understood by speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean, so they are dialects of the same language, regardless of mutual intelligibility between the three speeches—but Korean speech also forms part of the Korean language when used with hangul.

That is more of an artifact of how logographs work than evidence of that the languages are the same or even meaningfully related.

The characters are pronounced differently in the different languages and and used very differently grammatically.

You could write English nouns with Chinese characters, that doesn't make English Chinese.

Is your coworker perhaps a Han supremacist?

The characters are used very differently grammatically.

He has claimed previously that grammar isn't really a thing in Chinese.

You could write English nouns with Chinese characters, that doesn't make English Chinese.

I think he would disagree, if I'm understanding his position corrrectly.

Is your coworker perhaps a Han supremacist?

I have no idea.

He has claimed previously that grammar isn't really a thing in Chinese.

Do not trust this man.

He sounds like certain Chinese people I knew who would claim that Japanese is also a dialect of Chinese, sign up for some Japanese class (in the $abroad country they were staying in) fully expecting to BTFO the stupid weeaboos, instead getting BTFOed themselves (as it turns out Japanese grammar is actually in some ways more accessible to speakers of reasonably-inflected European languages than to Chinese speakers), and angrily concluding that the racist teacher is discriminating against them.

It was impossible to get them to see reason on that topic; patriotic memes are entrenched very deeply.

Who wrote this and what languages does this person know? The inclusion of Korean speech in the bubble of Chinese language is already highly suspect. Both Japanese and Korean utilize roots from Classical Chinese, analogous to the use of Latin/Greek roots in most European languages, but they are structurally completely different and originated independently. The closest analogy in Europe would probably be something like Hungarian, which uses many of the same Latin/Greek roots as other European languages but has a totally different structure/origin. Including those languages in the bubble of "Latin" or "Greek" would tell me that person knows very little about European languages.

The language/dialect controversy is not that complicated. The distinction is artificial. There is some basis in mutual intelligibility, but this is clinal, so where to put cutoffs is subjective. The cutoffs are generally correlated but can differ between spoken and written language. Written Portuguese is generally more comprehensible to Spanish speakers than spoken Portuguese. Cantonese/Mandarin is just a more extreme version of this, but is only a difference in degree, not in kind. The "Chinese language" is essentially like creating an entity called the "Romance language", of which Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. are "dialects". After all, they also use a shared writing system just with more variation.

China's long history of fracturing looms heavily in their cultural heritage. The government has a vested interest in minimizing any potential source for internal regional conflict and reinforcing the idea of a single, unified China. Having a single national "language" helps tremendously in this regard. Therefore, for largely cultural and political reasons, they push the idea of a "Chinese language", much like a someone who conquered the southern half of Europe might try to push the idea of a "Romance language".

Who wrote this and what languages does this person know?

I drew this diagram in an attempt to understand my coworker's opinions, not necessarily as an endorsement of those opinions.

I am fluent in English and know a fair amount of Latin. He is fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin and mostly intelligible in English.

The inclusion of Korean speech in the bubble of Chinese language is already highly suspect.

Hanja?

The "Chinese language" is essentially like creating an entity called the "Romance language", of which Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. are "dialects". After all, they also use a shared writing system just with more variation.

My coworker's argument is that the Romance languages would be dialects of Latin if they all used the same speech-independent writing system (as they used to when they were called Vulgar Latin)—but they use phonetic writing systems, so they're languages instead.

My coworker's argument is that the Romance languages would be dialects of Latin if they all used the same speech-independent writing system (as they used to when they were called Vulgar Latin)—but they use phonetic writing systems, so they're languages instead.

Your coworker is talking complete nonsense. Hanja use in modern Korean rounds to zero (an approximate analogy might be the use of Roman numerals in modern English) and was historically incompatible with its grammar, hence the development of Hangul. By your coworker's logic, English speech should fall under the Arabic language because we borrow their speech-independent writing system for numerals. Japanese use of Kanji or Korean use of Hanja is basically the same concept, extended from exclusively numerals to about 2000 additional ideas.

To say either Japanese or Korean therefore falls under "Chinese language" is the same kind of idiocy as saying "English is actually Arabic".

Hanja use in modern Korean rounds to zero

He said was referring specifically to the Koreans who live in China. The Wikipedia pages for them (English, Chinese, Korean) don't mention whether they use hanja, but I guess he thinks they do.

Japanese use of Kanji

I didn't say anything about Japanese. He doesn't think that Japanese counts as using the same writing system as Chinese.

He said was referring specifically to the Koreans who live in China.

If he's talking about Yanbian, from Wikipedia:

In Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China, local newspaper Northeast Korean People's Daily published the "workers and peasants version" which used all-hangul in text, in addition to the existing "cadre version" that had mixed script, for the convenience of grassroots Korean people. Starting on April 20, 1952, the newspaper abolished the "cadre version" and published in hangul only. Soon, the entire publishing industry adopted the hangul-only style.

So effectively no real use of Hanja there either. My understanding is that these people are basically Korean-Mandarin bilingual in the same way as any other linguistic minority.

He doesn't think that Japanese counts as using the same writing system as Chinese.

Now I'm even more confused. His claim is that forms of communications are dialects if they all used the same speech-independent writing system, but doesn't think this applies to Japanese? Japanese speakers are significantly better equipped to understand a cut-paste Chinese written sentence than Korean speakers.

So effectively no real use of Hanja there either.

I'll point out that error to him tomorrow.

Now I'm even more confused.

Well, maybe I'm misremembering. I asked him about his views on Mandarin and Cantonese today, but we discussed Japanese many months ago. I'll ask him about Japanese again tomorrow. But he may just reiterate that I can't properly understand the situation without learning Chinese, as he told me today when I tried comparing Serbo-Croatian (a speech-first language with two different writing systems that may eventually diverge into two different languages) to Chinese (a writing-first language with two different speech systems that may eventually diverge into two different languages).

Tomorrow edit: Direct quote: (exasperated but smiling) "Stop discussing things that you don't even know what it means!" [sic]

Tomorrow edit: Direct quote: (exasperated but smiling) "Stop discussing things that you don't even know what it means!" [sic]

So basically he realizes he was full of shit and isn't happy with being called out. It's not often that something sounds so stupid it lives rent-free in my head for more than a day, so congrats to him I guess.

I seem to remember someone on this site posting about a study or studies about how men of husband/father age were the unhappiest and/or most depressed group of people. I think the age range was like 30-55 or something. Anyone know about this? Am I making it up? Can’t seem to find it.

I think young unmarried women have overtaken them, thanks to social media.

Is there a better way than Google Maps to navigate public transit in a city? It doesn't seem to do effective (or at least comprehensible) route-finding between transit types, e.g. start here, walk over to here, take this train type identified by this designation to this location, then walk to the destination. And this surprises me, because it feels like it should be technically simple compared to everything else going on. I've also had issues before where it tries to direct me to station entrances that simply don't exist.

There has to be a better way!

I like transit - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thetransitapp.droid&hl=en_US

Some cities will have their own app for their public transport. They're sometimes good.

I've heard people recommend Citymapper here in UK/Europe. Their website says they're partnered with Via in the US.

I think Citymapper was better last time I used it, although I understand it got a bit shitty when it got bought out

Citymapper is still by far the best option in London. I only use Google Maps for planning future trips from my desk, at which it seems to do a good enough job.

Do any of you spend any time with or around Native Americans? What are they up to these days?

I've been reading the 1970s novels of James Welch, which describe the modern lives of Native Americans living in Montana and other places; and that's the most up to date information I have. I guess I wonder if they've been absorbed into atomized individualism, if they still have a big alcohol problem, if there are any interesting cultural developments in general.

(In Welch's novels, I would say they've already been partially consumed by the main stream of American life, suffering from a wistfulness and purposelessness that may only partly stem from the loss of tribal structure and power over the land, and which may just as much originate in the inherent pointlessness of American working-class life as some then saw it.)

I know the native Alaskans have done quite well for themselves by selling drilling rights on their land to oil companies. Other stories that have come to my attention over the past few years include the Squamish Nation's proposed high-rise housing project in Vancouver and the court battle over whether half of Oklahoma was actually tribal land and outside the state's jurisdiction.

“Reservation Dogs” is a Hulu comedy about modern native life that was largely written and performed by native americans. It’s largely an “early 2020s woke” show politically with some exceptions, but many on the native subreddit seem to have found a lot of the background details to be very accurate and it doesn’t shy away from depicting the squalor, alcoholism, reliance on welfare, single motherhood etc that a lot of people mention.

I am somewhat curious about this myself. I've been watching/reading '90s content (most notably Northern Exposure, which might deserve an effort post at some point), and realizing that Native American representation has just dropped off a cliff culturally.

My personal thought is that purity spirals have made it difficult to portray Native Americans well enough to steer clear of progressive backlash, and so directors/producers choose the safe option of "doing something else." Which is disappointing, IMO, because the native cultures are surprisingly diverse and interesting in their own right (although sometimes oversold as almost flawless). See where the Land 'O' Lakes butter girl went.

Do any of you spend any time with or around Native Americans? What are they up to these days?

This depends dramatically on which tribe you're talking about. Tribeless natives are just integrated into the general population, though some remain within tribal orbits. Very generally speaking, the tribes with casino money and relatively small populations are doing extremely well, functioning as basically very large, very wealthy families (thinking here of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux in Minnesota, or even the Seminole in Florida). Those with sizeable reservation land are also in pretty good shape (most obviously, the Navajo tribe in the Four Corners area), though larger population and land area also means larger disparities between members. There are still a fair few Navajo grandmothers out there raising their grandchildren in derelict homes where they have to haul in potable water and get electricity from a generator. Smaller and more isolated tribes face similarly impoverished circumstances.

I have some experience living near different reservations around the country and I think maybe the best way to put it is that class differences are exaggerated for enrolled members; wealthy Native Americans are some of the wealthiest Americans, poor Native Americans are some of the poorest Americans, and those in the middle may as well be invisible. The wealthy and educated families are basically aristocrats, and they spend a lot of time and effort to keep it that way, often training in law and business to keep up their "most favored nation" status and ethnically inherited superprivilege. But the poor and drug- or alcohol-addicted are some of America's neediest people, living in squalor in homes they didn't buy, spending money they didn't earn. This leads to an interesting sort of "noblesse oblige" where the well-off tribal members sometimes dedicate significant time and resources (their own, as well as the federal government's) to "uplift" programs, building schools and homes for their downtrodden brethren, enacting jobs programs, and otherwise practicing a geographically and ethnically constrained form of communism. But no small number of this quasi-nobility also walk away from the reservation entirely, washing their hands of the fruitless frustration and thankless toil to seek their own personal fortune. These return to the reservation, if at all, only for a comfortable retirement.

I am if nothing else impressed with the shrewd leadership and entrepreneurial initiative that the quasi-nobility has shown, particularly in those tribes where the genetic remnant is so vanishingly small that they really are more plausibly white (or sometimes black) than "Native American." The Supreme Court some time ago asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment did not alter the constitutional status of Native Americans because tribes are political entities, not ethnic or racial ones. This fig leaf has been a boon for most Native Americans in America's post-colonial phase, to the extent that the tribes are land rich, government subsidized, and exempt from numerous regulations of general applicability.

But the boon is unevenly distributed, in ways that suggest mere resource redistribution might not address the core of the problem, and might even be a part of the problem. Very probably, I think, Native Americans would be much better off overall if we abolished tribes and reservations entirely, awarded the land to its residents in fee, and worked to integrate and mainstream them into American society. But this would undermine their tribal identity and heritage, as well as their aristocracy. And so the unflattering stereotype of the poor, drunk, welfare-dependent "Indian" persists as the reality of a permanent Native American underclass--not, as is sometimes suggested, as the byproduct of white colonial oppression, but as the "cost of doing business" for their own wealthy, educated tribal leadership maintaining the hierarchical status quo.

Adding to this- my uncle is in contact with the natives in Louisiana. There used to be a native (lower)middle class, who were indistinguishable from the local creole/cajun working class population except for some family stories. Since they opened the casino, any functional(lots of them are severe alcoholics but alcoholism is rampant in the area anyways) ones are among the local wealthy, and they mostly hire non-native workers- either local or imported from Mississippi- for the actual doing work at tribal businesses over their own less functional coethnics.

These Indians are shrewd businessmen whose customers often do not realize they are at an Indian casino; it has a French Louisiana theme and they run courtesy shuttles to Houston. They also love Trump and are in deep with the Louisiana Republican Party. It is highly probable that the ruling clique wins elections(chiefs and tribal councilmembers are elected, and almost certainly corrupt- although again, French Louisiana) through cash/kind handouts to the less fortunate among them. They are not readily distinguished from the surrounding population physically or by mannerism.

I appreciate the detailed answer. I live in Ohio, where there haven't really been any since the time of Anthony Wayne. I have a sense that, as with things like the Celtic Revival, Chinoiserie, etc., there was a period in the 20th century where there was, for a time, a broader cultural interest in "Indian" things; but this has waned, and now they don't seem to have any particular presence in the wider cultural arena. I don't think I can name any living Native Americans. Perhaps the absolute number simply isn't high enough. So I just find myself curious about - what are their politics? What are their unique subcultural practices in 2025? How did the Internet change their lives? In America you see things like Chinese laundries, Hispanic roofing crews, Vietnamese nail salons; apart from casinos, do the Native Americans have some thing like that? Perhaps I'd just have to go and see.

But as you note, the experiences of Native Americans in Florida vs. Oklahoma vs. Alaska are so different that it may not even be worthwhile to think of them as a single bloc.

There seems to be a lot of native Americans doing skyscraper construction.

Not sure where you're at, but historically I think this was specific to the Mohawk for some reason? Not sure if they're still at it, but they are famous for working on a lot of the original skyscrapers in NYC among other places.

Mohawks seem to have a reduced fear of heights. Some people think it's genetic, but I'm not aware of any actual science on the subject.

Lots of lower class Cherokees doing it in DFW.

Apropos cancellations from the right, is there any way to get a professor in trouble for teaching about social justice instead of the content they were supposed to teach? Especially if they are assigning most of the semester grade for writing and talking about social justice, not what's in the course description? Especially if it is a required course, with no option to change sections?

Apropos cancellations from the right, is there any way to get a professor in trouble for teaching about social justice instead of the content they were supposed to teach?

This will depend on how far from the subject matter you've strayed. Class in politics, law, literature, philosophy? Probably not. Class in calculus? Almost certainly.

Especially if they are assigning most of the semester grade for writing and talking about social justice, not what's in the course description?

This certainly would strengthen the case.

Especially if it is a required course, with no option to change sections?

This probably doesn't help you much.

The first step is to talk to their supervisor, usually a Department Chair or Dean. Bring clear evidence. Explain that you have some concerns and be sure to mention that you are afraid to talk to the professor directly, because you are concerned about retaliation. If the Chair seems unsympathetic, go to the next step up (Dean or Provost, usually). If they seem unsympathetic, escalate again. If you try to escalate prematurely, you'll be sent back down ("we don't handle that directly") so you have to be able to say "I already spoke with $SUBORDINATE, they were not helpful." If you get all the way to the President, you will most likely be talking to someone who is very annoyed to have you in their office, and who will seek the quickest, most effective way to ensure that you never darken their doorstep again.

If by now the problem still has not been resolved, you have to choose between taking your lumps, and going nuclear with a social media offensive. If you're at a public school, then the next level of escalation is your state representative. If they're a Republican, they will appreciate the opportunity to get some TV time advocating for you against the tide of Woke. If they're a Democrat, your options are fewer, but not nonexistent, depending on the particulars of your case.

(At some point it will become clear that this whole process is much, much more of a hassle for you than just giving your professors what they want. But obviously not everyone finds that sufficient deterrence.)

There's almost certainly nothing you can do, unless it's a state university in a red state with a very particular hook in the course material so sufficiently egregious an elected official or journalist can use it to rile up some sleepy boomers. Welcome to the ivory tower - it's not going to get any better.

With enough publicity you could make faculty uncomfortable, but "in trouble" based on something like a viral X post that embarrasses the school is a longshot. A publicity route requires your case to be egregious or for your case to be at one of the universities already in the hot seat. I don't recall the last time I read a story in the wild of a professor eschewing course material to make the class about themselves and their beliefs. Especially not one with severe consequences. This is common enough to border on uninteresting.

If you decide you care enough, then you should start building a dossier yesterday. Syllabus, e-mails, rubrics, published learning outcomes if they exist, recorded lectures, etc. That's going to bring about any type of return for a decision to commit to the bureaucratic process. I don't think you're going to find a shortcut around a formal complaint. At the end of your effort all you might have is more uncomfortable relationship with Prof. SJ and the corrected grading accommodations. Give'em hell.

Is it English/Writing? The only vocally woke professor I had in college was for Writing. You have to write about something, so that's the easiest place for them to shoehorn in social justice BS.

Education, so same issue. (I've taken a decent number of education classes, and they were mostly at least attempting to teach according to the course description)

You live in the south, correct? Contact your elected officials and ask who to get in touch with to make a brouhaha.

The usual complain publicly on the twitter would do it, or PM someone privately from the Trump office?

Alternatively I bet the White House has a phone line you can call for unrelated matters and they might be interested in something like this or know who to kick it to. Same for certain right leaning journalistic operations like Fox.

If you are from a pro-MAGA district one of your elected representatives would potentially be interested, it is shocking how amenable house offices are to randoms.

What happened last week? I mean this literally, it's was such a deluge that I feel like I forgot significant things in it. Asking here to sanity-check.

  • Charlie Kirk assassination, world-altering shitstorm, the swings of the manhunt
  • Iryna Zarutska murder, up-to-genocidal frenzy, progressive release of ever-more-uncensored video
  • Russian drone incursions into Poland
  • Nepali zoomer revolution, burning down parliament and beating ministers, Discord election
  • Israel bombing Qatar
  • Greta flotilla drone attack
  • Trump Epstein birthday card

Is that it? Was there some more israel/gaza stuff? Trump admin actions? Some other twitter culturewar flareup that seemed to matter?

Greta flotilla drone attack

Which as I remember was actually some of theirs mishandling a flare (I suspect fun substances were involved because come on, we know who we're dealing with here).

Trump Epstein birthday card

This hoax is much older than last week, Snopes reported on it in July: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/07/18/trump-epstein-birthday-card-drawing/ which is about when I remember it happening but maybe even earlier.

Which as I remember was actually some of theirs mishandling a flare

I saw this claim many times, linking the videos (there were 2-3) as if it were self evident. I literally could not see anything at all resembling that, watching them over closely several times. I think it was either a conscious bad-faith lie by many claimants, or else identifying the sparkling thing that fell out of the sky as obviously not a drone itself or a typical drone attack as we'd recognize it from frag-grenade-drop footage from Ukraine. But there was still no mishandling (or any handling at all) in evidence in the videos: a sparkling thing just relatively slowly fell out of the sky and exploded.

I saw some evidence it was an incendiary grenade but did not pursue it deeply. Moreover, evidence that it was a model of incendiary grenade in use by Israel, the US, and others (which I pursued even less deeply).

I also noted that its position, velocity and acceleration apparent in the videos really only seem consistent with having been dropped from not very high up and ignited only in the last moments of its descent (which wouldn't be consistent with a gun-fired flare).

On the balance of evidence I believe it was a drone attack

much older than last week

Yes I too remember that, and moreover I remember seeing it before. Perhaps it was a re-creation or a leak. What happened last week was official and mattered for that.

This hoax

[take withdrawn for being insufficiently-considered]

I'd say I'm about 70% on it being real.

You need to adjust your bearings then. It's clearly your feelings about Trump cloud your judgement. It sounds absolutely nothing like him, and Trump is one person who had a very peculiar style and is not changing it for anybody. Not to mention it is made explicitly so that it would be impossible to attribute. Even Dan Rather's Killian letter hoax was better made. It's separately hilarious how all the Left has switched on a dime from "all Epstein theories are Q-anon stupid inventions, shut up already about it" to "everything about Epstein is real and it's the most important thing ever and Trump is surely in the middle of it!". And then right in the middle of it this thing shows up. I mean, how gullible you must be? Of course, TDS makes people believe anything. I thought "hookers peeing on Obama's bed" or whatever it was was dumb enough to instantly be seen as ridiculous - and I was wrong. This one is even dumber.

For one thing I feel like Trump and his camp are not convincingly behaving like it is not.

That's a very silly reason to make conclusions. Trump's camp have seen dozens if not hundreds of hoaxes over the years, and this one is so ridiculous it's hardly worth attention. And "oh, you deny it not strongly enough so it must be true!" is extremely dumb way to decide if anything is true. And the worst of it - it's the ONLY reason. There's no evidence of Trump doing something similar ever to anybody, there's no evidence of Trump ever writing in this style, there's no evidence of Trump even writing any other notes to Epstein. It's completely out of character, out of pattern and unsupported by anything. It's like you said you have a gangsta rap track personally recorded by late Queen of England - and despite it not being in her voice, her never doing anything like that and having zero evidence it's hers - you believe it for the sole reason the British government is "not behaving convincingly enough" to deny it (they deny it all right, but it doesn't convince you because - wait for it! - it's "not convincing!"). Come on, man!

While I understand the inclination, the beliefs and motivation you've assigned to me here are not accurate. (do we even have a single Trump-deranged person on themotte? how would they not go crazy and burn out immediately?) I am neither a Trump obsessive nor an Epstein obsessive, and that "70%" is not a strongly held immovable belief.

My (again loosely-held and not deeply researched) model was that Trump knew or kinda knew about Epstein's proclivities during the 80s and 90s, he didn't really care (considered and treated it as within the jocular class of "cocaine and affairs"), he thought he should get credit for his later hostility to Epstein (hence his comfort attacking others for Epstein-connections, drawing massive attention to it, until like 2019 -- not the behavior of a man who fucked kids with Epstein), but did not fully appreciate that he would be held little less guilty even by his base for not immediately turning him in until more recent rounds.

I took another look at the card and found it would be more implicating if real than I'd remembered, which does not fit that model as well, so I withdraw my tossed-off small-questions-thread-grade take for further review.

Trump knew or kinda knew about Epstein's proclivities during the 80s and 90s

That may be plausible, Trump is not exactly a saint himself, and being in business, you have to deal with all kinds of sleazy people, so until it didn't affect him personally, he might have at least heard the rumors and didn't care much while it stayed on the level of vague sleaziness. When Epstein started to mess with Trump's own grounds, he was promptly banned. It's unlikely Trump ever was involved in Epstein's shady business (as far as I understand, he didn't need anybody's help in that aspect of life anyway) but it's not unlikely he had some common dealings early on. But the note implies the level of intimacy that Trump has never demonstrated to anybody, and frankly is a harsh mismatch with anything he has ever done and how he behaved in public. It's something Hunter might do (I don't say he did, but his character - artistic pretense, etc. - would fit much better) but Trump wouldn't. If the allegation were he knew Epstein - nothing do deny, he did. Even that they for a while were friendly is true - so if somebody implied Trump sent a congratulatory note to Epstein on one of his birthdays, nothing to deny here either, he very well might have. But not this particular note, it's just not him.

Us in Colorado are talking a lot about a school shooting at Evergreen High, roughly 20 miles west of Columbine High.

Enough happenings in one week for Billy Joel to make a new "We Didn't Start The Fire"

The Trump-Epstein birthday card and the bombing of Qatar may be linked. It’s not anyone in America leaking this stuff as otherwise it would have been published 2016-2024. I think it’s Israel showing its guns, reminding the President that they’re in control and that there’s much worse than can be released if he doesn’t go along with their decisions in the Middle East. The birthday card makes clear that Trump’s relationship with Epstein involved underaged girls, and of course any such relationship was recorded by Epstein, and it’s most probable he was a Mossad or Israeli Military Intelligence asset.

The birthday card makes clear that Trump’s relationship with Epstein involved underaged girls, and of course any such relationship was recorded by Epstein, and it’s most probable he was a Mossad or Israeli Military Intelligence asset.

Can you explain how ?

The card in question. There is something “more to life than having everything”. This satisfaction is a secret shared between Donald and Jeffrey which they enjoyed together in their last encounter. This “wonderful secret” is referenced in the phrase “enigmas never age”, which Jeffrey “noticed” last encounter, but which they won’t mention publicly. This is all written within the silhouette of a woman, with Donald Trump’s signature acting as pubic hair. In 2003 it was not considered noteworthy for a rich guy to hang out with 18 year old women, and we know Epstein trafficked in underage women, so the overwhelming probability is that they are referencing underage girls.

The reason for Epstein being Mossad I’ve made a number of comments on (I wish there was an easier way to search and paste the URL)

Was there some more israel/gaza stuff?

There was one other Israel-Gaza story I cooked up a post for partly motivated by accusations of boredom. The doldrums turned out to be false, so everyone is spared of it. For now.

Mars rock

Great catch. Holy shit what a week.

Oh, right, apparently the best evidence yet found of life on Mars, per NASA. No actual confirmation for another few years probably, but still, that's something.

Holy shit, didn't even know Israel bombed Qatar. That seems like a terrible overstep by the leadership, as Qatar was kind of friendly to Israel before and in the US pocket.

Qatar was kind of friendly to Israel before

Welcome to our universe, stranger from far away realms! No, not in our universe, Qatar has never been friendly to Israel. Qatar was a major sponsor and enabler of Hamas instead. Qatar has been playing a game where they try to make themselves useful by serving as a middleman to Hamas, but there never was anything friendly in it.

and in the US pocket.

That's another part of the game. They try to be useful, in a hope that this excludes them from the consequences of their actions - such as hosting and supporting Hamas, which is engaged in active warfare with Israel. Turns out they aren't useful enough.

Based off the response it seems likely it was done with their permission they just had to pretend to be mad about it.

Nepali zoomer revolution, burning down parliament and beating ministers, Discord election

Please tell us more.

The Nepali election was held on Discord. What's abnormal about that? :D

Blew my mind recently to learn that Nepalese monarchy was ended by a mass shooting in 2001, by the 29-year-old crown prince, culminating in his own suicide. Assuming that you trust the official account, of course; it is pretty poorly documented. But it's just so weird. It's like if instead of marrying Kate, Prince William snapped and shot up Buckingham Palace, a short time after Columbine, and that was just where history recorded the British crown ending.

Meta: feature request

Is there a quick and easy way to type an em-dash here? If there isn't, might I suggest implementing Google Docs' solution, wherein two consecutive hyphens will produce an em-dash?

I'm not sure what to make of the fact that mobile keyboards have kept iterating while the desktop keyboard interface seems to have stagnated — I can hold a virtual key to select a similar character, but on a desktop need obscure numeric (sometimes HTML) codes or a separate application. A pop-up "characters similar to" key binding isn't inherently impossible.

(insert Chinese laughter onomatopoeia here)

If you type "Windows+.", Windows also has an "emoji panel" that includes a symbol tab.

It’s not very practical but look up the FLUX kickstarter.

Alt + 0151 will produce an em dash in whatever program you're using. Alt + 0150 will produce an en dash if you're brave enough to use it.

Note that these "alt codes" work only with a numpad, not with the row of number keys at the top of your keyboard. (Many people who never use the numpad are willing to pay extra money to save desk space with a "tenkeyless" keyboard that has no numpad.)

It just looks wrong, like an amputee.

If you don't have a proper keyboard with all of the buttons then you shouldn't be allowed to use all of the available symbols.

I worked for an inventory service in college and we used machines that were nothing but a numerical keypad with a one-line LCD display, and asa result I'm one of the few people whose typing is mediocre but can scream on the keypad—I use it almost every time I need to put a number in, even if I'm typing something. So I couldn't imagine having a keyboard without one. To be fair, some laptops don't, which incidentally included the ones the supervisor used to download the data and run the reports, so they carried a usb keypad with them to make manual entry easier.

Do you have trouble with the difference in orientation between phone (one in top row) and keyboard (one in bottom row) keypads?

I suck on phone keypads generally, so yes,. though my phone keypad isn't laid out like you're suggesting.

Markdown supports HTML named character references. "& mdash;" without the space becomes "—".

Thanks for the tip.

So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Kirilenko and Korshunova's What is Personality, from the USSR's Progress Publishers. It's a somewhat dizzying but fascinating application of dialectical materialism to individuals.

Very little, truth be told.

Les Trois Mousquetaires, in public-domain audiobook format (librivox). Mostly just to keep my French from escaping me altogether, but also because I genuinely enjoy the genre. I think I get about half of what's being read. It'd probably be a better idea to actually read the text.

Mistress of Mistresses, by E.R. Eddison. It's slow going so far, very much unlike The Worm Ouroboros. I trust Eddison to know what he's doing, so I'll keep at it.

Just finished Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Published 25 years ago, but plot – about a university professor who finds himself cancelled after using a word where the literal/dictionary meaning is perfectly correct but an alternative/colloquial meaning is disparaging/racist – feels totally current.

I am awestruck by Roth’s sentences. Almost every page has a great one. (If you enjoy technically brilliant long – sometimes page-long – sentences.)

There are some blind spots – a couple of characters’ stories just seem to stop without resolution – but overall a great read. Extremely perceptive, sort of culture wars years before the culture wars. I haven’t read much Roth. Will be checking out more.

Where did you find that book?

Here. Lots of Progress Publishers books are on the Internet Archive. As far as I know, they're not in print anymore.

Thank you. Is it any good? More insightful than the usual western psychology fare?

Too early to tell, but it's written well and looks effortful.

The main reason I'm reading it is because I want a sense of the ethos of a lost culture. Not really expecting to learn truths about the human condition.

Yes, that makes sense.

About to start Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, having previously enjoyed adored his novel Never Let Me Go.

In between reading full-length books I've been reading some of the Father Brown stories. So far I've read "The Blue Cross", "The Secret Garden" and "The Queer Feet". They're okay.

I think Remains of the Day is even better. One of my top 3 or 4 novels.

Dinner At Deviant's Palace, by Tim Powers. Haven't read this one since I was a kid, and it's interesting to revisit it with adult eyes and understanding.

A Greater Britain:

  • Historically: In 1924, Oswald Mosley was a member of the Labour Party, and stood for reelection to the House of Commons, but lost by a hair's breadth (0.28 percent). In 1926, he returned to Parliament. In 1929, he was made a minister without portfolio, but was not able to get any of his radical policies implemented because the prime minister and the chancellor of the exchequer disagreed with them. In 1930, he resigned his cabinet post in disgust, and submitted to the Labour Party Conference a policy memorandum that was defeated by a relatively narrow margin (8.9 percent). In 1931, he left Labour and founded the fascist New Party.

  • In this alternate-history book: He wins the 1924 election, and is able to build up more support within the Labour Party. In 1931 his policy memorandum is defeated by an even narrower margin (3.2 percent), and he sticks with Labour rather than turning fascist.

Shadow of Montreux: Historically, Mussolini declared that fascism was "no export article", and the various fascist movements of Europe developed largely independent of one another. In this alternate-history book, in 1929 he changes his mind and organizes a Fascist International, akin to the USSR's Communist International (Comintern).

I had no idea Mosley used to be a member of Labour, that's wild.

Mussolini was also an ex-socialist. Horseshoe theory makes accurate predictions.

I’m am just about 85% finished with A True History of the Conquest of New Spain. A fantastic first hand account by one of Cortez’ men, a book I was shocked I’d never heard of. I can give a bit of a review in a day or two when finished if anyone is interested, but for now I’ll just say I recommend it highly. Even in translation from 1850 it is extremely easy to read, fast paced and exciting.

I've started reading it, simply due to your post.

I like it. And I like the premise; honest direct reporting from an actual participant.

Are there any legitimate gaming communities that are angry specifically about gamers and gamer culture being blamed for the Kirk shooting?

Utah Governor Spencer Cox on what radicalized the shooter - "Clearly there was a lot of gaming going on"

It feels to me like gaming qua gaming is completely absent from the modern culture war. Is this a real effect or an artifact of the fact that I don't play a lot of games anymore?

Oh my, is it the "games make people commit terrorism" season again?

Think there are a few things to think about here:

  1. This is probably an area where international perspectives differ a lot. As I recall, Germany and Australia were the biggest proponents of the anti game side with numerous restrictive laws. I don't see any politicians for me in the UK or in the US talking about games that way, but perhaps there are holdouts elsewhere?

  2. For those nations that don't have any opposition, I think gamergate played a big role. In the past, the anti game side was largely right wing Christians, assorted boomers, and general cranks, while gamers themselves were mostly (perceived to be) young left wingers. As gamergate screwed up this traditional alignment, there's now little political benefit to being anti: you'll be hitting your own base as much as the enemy.

  3. But surely the biggest thing is that games are too big, too popular. Gamers grew up, and most of the working population have probably played games or continue to play them. Even in the "hot coffee" GTA days the anti side wasnt that popular, but now?

You still see some of the old guard of gun control debates try it at times, both from the right (and 'right') and the left. SAF and NAGR done a decent job at slapping it out of their spokesmen, but the NRA still has some old guard that leap to it. Been more common with the post-Remington lawsuits, but generally not in ways intended for public consumption (or even to reach a jury).

EDIT... and that apparently includes the governor of Utah.

I remember when "video games are a public health crisis causing depraved Columbine-style violence and need to be regulated with harsh censorship policies" was a serious and common political belief close to implementing itself in the halls of power. By now this belief has been either thankfully abandoned or cooled down to the apolitical not-being-acted-upon groundwater level. It only seems to be brought up these days to lazily deflect from gun control proposals, and I say that as someone staunchly opposed to gun control myself; I just think it's foolish to rob the first amendment to pay for the second.

Come to think of it, over my lifetime I think I've seen the social roles of the beliefs "video games cause violence" and "vaccines cause autism" invert.

Who will replace us?

History is the story of societies being replaced by more competitive societies. The Sumerians were replaced by Semites and the Beaker people by Indo-Europeans. The Diadochoi states' apartheid societies were replaced by Rome's more assimilative state. Roman paganism was replaced by Christianity. Feudalism was replaced by absolutism, which was replaced by republicanism. What is best for society is often not best for the individuals within it, molochian competition is like that. Stalin built a superpower but he paid the price in destruction of Russian lives- but he turned a backwards society one generation removed from functional chattel slavery into a superpower that dominated half the world. The Roman Empire solved the stability problems of the late republic- at a cost that contemporary sources note, but don't let us check.

Who will replace today's liberalism? Christian communities are still hanging on, of course. But their numbers are dwarfed by blacks and Muslims, and despite their paltry human capital Quantity has a Quality all its own. And of course there's AI(I expect AI to never figure out how to do maintenance on its own datacenters). East Asian societies have low fertility now, but their collectivism might give them a leg up in the future- would Koreans or Chinese accept whatever measures to raise the fertility rate, unacceptable in Europe and the Anglosphere? Or will it be a crude, bombastic secular conservatism- popcountry style?

a backwards society one generation removed from functional chattel slavery into a superpower that dominated half the world

By bringing the slavery back, only on the state level (what do you think people were doing it Gulag, knitting?). And that society barely lasted 3 generations.

I expect AI to never figure out how to do maintenance on its own datacenters

They'd just hire humans though a shell company for now.

I expect AI to never figure out how to do maintenance on its own datacenters

Never is a long time. It still seems plausible that even if continual learning is the most important bottleneck, and even if algorithmic improvements fail to crack it cleverly, brute force will still work eventually. Maybe not until 2050 instead of the 2030 the more breathless people are predicting if we have to wait on Moore's Law, but it seems fairly inevitable unless some catastrophe kicks industrial civilization significantly back before then.

Moores law is running into physical limitations before then.

Moore's law, strictly interpreted as "number of transistors you can fit on a 2d die doubles every two years", will be running into physical limitations soon. Moore's law, loosely interpreted as "amount of compute you get for a given monetary or energy budget doubles every two years" is still relatively far from physical limits - Landauer is still about 6 OOMs away, so there's some headroom even without reversible computing. 6 OOMs of continuing halving of energy cost every two years would take us to 2065.

I'd expect further architectural changes to be required before then, because I don't expect the compute to be shaped optimally for the ML techniques of 2025, but "the SOTA ML algos are the ones that are able to take advantage of the hardware available at the time" is nothing new.

Some people might say that the uncomfortable truth is that women's liberation is incompatible with above-replacement fertility, but I think the problem is broader: personal liberation in general is incompatible with natural above-replacement fertility.

And you can't really use economics to overcome this. Like in that story in Freakonomics about an Israeli daycare, once money enters the equation, duty leaves it forever. Stimuli and fines simply say: "you don't have to have children, if you can afford it". You need a society which treats having children as a sacred duty to the community, where it's unthinkable to go against its will.

Or, conversely, the first society that industrializes childbearing and childrearing will win. Via artificial wombs, as there aren't enough women that are willing to go through regular childbearing many times that you can make this into a full-time job: if the natural replacement rate is 1.2, then we need 1x more child per woman to offset this, or one woman in nine turned into a breeder and having 10.2 children instead of the usual 1.2. I don't think even the most collectivist society is totalitarian enough to achieve this.

I had a shower thought driven by recent events: is the N-word a slur?

-It has a tremendous amount of historical context, but has been grossly separated from that. -Hearing it can be a call to violent action. -Some identify with it, some don't. Who it's used on often doesn't match and it generates considerable offense.

I'm of course referring to Nazi.

I wonder if introducing a taboo here is part of whatever would be required to drop the temperature.

I think it's still connected enough that it does not count. In my opinion, part of what makes a slur a slur is that it's a version a label that carries unnecessary negative connotation when one could just as easily use a label without that connotation.

"Whore" is a slur while "prostitute" or is mostly not, because whore is used very frequently in a derogatory way, especially against non-prostitutes in an attempt to tarnish them with the shame of the occupation. "Lady of the night" is definitely not a slur despite referring to the same label, because it's deliberately euphemistic and trying not to convey negative connotations.

The actual N word is a slur because it's generally used to refer to lower class or misbehaving black people, while "black people" is not a slur because it's just referring to the group of people with no negative connotations besides those that a racist listener might already have in their mind.

Importantly, these are slurs whether you use them against the correct categories of people or not. If you call a prostitute a "whore" it's still a slur, even if the label is true. They're likely to be offended, because it's not merely that you're accurately labeling what they are, but that you're deliberately choosing a derogatory way to do so. You are labeling them AND judging them poorly. Calling someone the N word is a slur no matter what race they actually are, because you're either labeling them as a black person in a derogatory way, or you are implying they have the same negative traits that you think black people have.

Nazi can be used in a slur-like way, but as actual Nazis exist and there is no other way to refer to them, it's just a label. It does have negative connotation, but broadly those negative traits are inherent to actually Nazism. A real Nazi will not be offended when you call them a Nazi, because they are not ashamed of it: they think they are right. The offense comes primarily from normal people who hate Nazis just as much as everyone else being unfairly accused of being the thing that they hate. It's a false accusation. Just like "rapist" or "murderer" is not a slur, and yet do carry negative connotation. If you publicly accuse me of being one I will be offended. Not because I disagree with the negative connotation or think you're being rude to rapists and murderers, but because that is not what I am and I don't want to be tarnished with sins I did not commit.

I saw a meme yesterday that was along the lines of "They have called you racist many times, but never called you wrong"

Anyway my gripe with being called a Nazi is that the people that use that word barely know what Nazi means. And usually those are people that claim to have intellectual or moral superiority. Or they know and play stupid when using it improperly - which is even worse.

Slurs are best modeled as verbal acts signaling that 1) I'm the kind of person who regards you that way 2) I'm allowed to feel that way and you don't have the power to stop me.

In that context, Nazi pretty well fits, in that calling someone a Nazi is a verbal act indicating that I don't have the power to stop you from calling me that.

What kind of activity or day truly relaxes you?

For me it's sitting down with a good old entertaining fantasy novel. Taking lots of hot baths helps too.

Not even seeing, let alone interacting with, a single other human.

At the risk of playing up to “touch grass” memes, I’m only ever truly relaxed when I get earthed. This can happen in several ways, but a few: disconnecting from tech, hiking/walking/wandering, cooking/eating/drinking beer outdoors, breathing fresh air, reading a paper book, digging a hole and planting a tree, trimming hedges, cutting grass, chopping/hauling/burning wood. Basically any day when my information diet is mostly non-human and mostly full of soil nutrients relaxes and invigorates me for all the necessary days of working with people.

Hiking in the woods. Drinking beer outside.

My type of day!

Knitting with an audiobook or podcast on.

Going for a run of at least 5km, strength training in the gym.

Cycling easy (running easy never really relaxes me), walking in a forest, reading a good fantasy novel.

Type II fun. Burning through 30 hard bouldering problems, rolling hard in BJJ against a slightly better opponent, going for a brisk walk for 26.2 miles, rowing a hard 5k.

It's after times like that I am truly relaxed.

Do all that the same day?

In addition to what you said I find monotonous physical activities relaxing, like hand-mowing the lawn or chopping wood. The activity itself makes me mentally unwind and the physical excertion makes be relax physically afterwards.

Also Sauna.

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