Yeah, yeah.

The few points I’d bring up are:

1. If you want to reach a high level of proficiency you should basically be in love with the language. If you’re forcing yourself to do something, learning it won’t come as easily.
2. You should use a diversity of tactics, experiment, and find what works best for you.
3. Comprehensible input is a very good idea. There are different standards for what makes for the best comprehensible input, but I would say you should focus on finding songs, books, comics, shows and movies etc where you can still get something out of them even if you don’t understand everything, and beyond that learn not to expect to understand everything. Being around L1s can also be very helpful, but it depends on how you make use of their input.
4. Define what you actually want to get out of your language learning by setting realistic goals. If you want to learn a new language because you hear it makes you less likely to get dementia later in life, then you might prefer a more game-y or puzzle-y approach. If you’re interested in translating into your first language, then focus on understanding input more than generating output. And so forth.

Sometimes you see a headline like this and you just have to stop for a moment and reflect on how mindboggling it is that genocidality could become so popular in a society. The fact is of course that this is the character of every genocide in history: genocides only happen if most people in a society passively or actively accept them. But when oneself is so far removed from that cultural context that enables this most horrible of crimes to happen, it becomes difficult to even fathom how a society could end up in a situation where one could meet ten people in the dominant group and find that nine of them want the marginalized group — largely children no less! — reduced to bags of nondescript red mush. Even the tenth person is probably still incredibly racist and a tacit supporter of genocide, just not an active supporter of it.

It feels cliché to mention how Zionist settlers are themselves to a pretty large extent descended from the survivors of pogroms and one of the worst genocides in human history, because the apparent irony of that is just not what makes the genocidality of so-called “Jewish” “Israelis” so horrifying, revolting, and tragic. People are not their great-grandparents, and Zionists, although they use Jewish aesthetics, are still a product of the cultural climate of Anglo settlerism and German volkism more than they are a product of anything Jewish. The Zionist settlers are, in a word, “not Jews”.

No, this is a human matter, not an ethnoreligious one. It’s a matter of me expecting to be able to look a member of my own species in the eyes and see a soul capable of empathy; all human beings are after all cousins if you go back far enough, and I would gladly welcome anyone as my own family. So even if people’s actions hurt others, I like to believe that people are largely just misguided and could be set on a better path, that people simply mean well but don’t always know how to do well.

But Zionists, in the way they talk, in the way they act, in the lack of any brightness in their eyes, there is just… no humanity left. Whatever humanity the Zionist settlers had was “left at the door” like shoes and coats when they decided to become settlers, and they’ll put their shoes and coats back on when the wretched, moribund system they benefit from finally collapses on them, which will be soon, God willing. And perhaps then, and only then, to paraphrase my own favorite ex-Zionist, ĉiu vidos en sia proksimulo nur homon kaj fraton.everyone will see in their neighbor only a man and a brother.

Yeah, I was having a hard time coming up with a name for the animation studio, so I just decided to make it an Extremely Subtle Shirobako Reference — it would after all be a pretty vintage reference to make by 2060 (although the studio was founded earlier than that), and we live in a world where, say, the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company was “defictionalized” way sooner after the source material than that.

I’ve used empty links in my own previous posts here, but I haven’t seen others do the same. I’ve got a whole .txt file on my computer with draft “wiki from the future” posts, including one about the “Fina Venko”, i.e. how Esperanto ended up displacing English as a lingua franca pretty quickly and suddenly starting in the 2060s.

Edit: Incidentally, slubbing is already a word, “to draw and twist fibers in order to prepare them for spinning.” — but I figured that word was already obscure, specific and technical enough that it wouldn’t be a problem.

Yes, the app Xiaohongshu, also known as Rednote. Although originally aimed at people in China, the app saw a brief flash of popularity in Seppoland/USA after TikTok was banned.

It seems highly unlikely.

Trump is speedrunning his Tokugawa Shogunate arc, many people are saying this

This is perhaps a bit apropos, but when I was a kid, when I visited beautiful Anishinaabewaki in the summers, there was a game arcade my cousins and I would often visit. This arcade had the 1991 cabinet Road Riot 4WD, and I remember there was a character in that game called “Idi A Mean Dada” who was basically just a grotesque generic caricature of a stereotypical “African dictator”. Naturally this “Idi A Mean Dada” character was the host of the track “Timbuktu, Africa” – which looked nothing like Timbuktu – despite Timbuktu being some 6,500 km away from Kampala.

I said to my cousin, “This is… pretty racist…” and my cousin concurred. I believe my mom was, what, impressed that I could recognize and point out that it was racist? And I was just thinking, “Well, yeah, obviously.” – but I guess that just speaks to how normalized that kind of junk was back then.

I don’t really know much about the real Idi Amin, but yeah, he sure had A Place in popular culture didn’t he.

I don’t think replacing the current two arbitrary hard borders cutting ~70 Indigenous homelands in half, thereby preventing the Native citizens in these border regions from fully exercising their rights and traditional ways of life… With >100 arbitrary hard borders cutting I don’t even know how many Indigenous homelands into halfs or thirds or quarters… Would improve the quality of life of most Natives. Nor would it improve the quality of life of, really, anyone else in the region.

On the other hand, if you instead say that the Balkanized Seppoland just doesn’t have hard borders, then, well, how different is that really from the current arrangement? There would still be some sort of central organization managing the affairs between the states — at least when it comes to their borders — but the states themselves would be beholden to significantly fewer laws from above. This is a “small government” Republican’s wet dream.

The main thing is just that replacing a settler state with smaller settler states doesn’t actually resolve the contradiction. The states will still act in settler interests, in fact they’ll probably find some way to just more or less return to the current status quo. The way you help Native nations is to return land and respect treaty rights.

You might as well. If it goes poorly then surely you can just get rid of it later, right?

Wanna form a neolithic comedy duo with me?

The first thing to come to mind is “The Virus” by The Halluci Nation. I can’t guarantee that I’m not misunderstanding the question or whether this will be to your liking, but yeah. It’s got some heavy themes around Indigenous history and current issues, but shining through the whole song is a message of hope, pride and resilience, which only enhances the bass drop.

Don’t eat the chili. They put something in it ta make you forget. I don’t even remember how I got here.

Hahahhahahahahahha, yeah marge as in margarine. It’s not necessarily a standard term for it in my GenAm ass dialect but it is used in e.g. Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Irish, and most notably British English, and I liked the sound of it, so I just decided to start calling margarine marge. Both Marge as in Marjorie Bouvier Simpson and marge as in margarine ultimately trace to an Ancient Greek word meaning “pearl”, as do the names of pizza Margherita and the margarita removedtail.

A bowl of rice with marge and shoyu

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.

In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

One section of the French Legitimists and “Young England” exhibited this spectacle.

In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society.

For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this, that under the bourgeois régime a class is being developed which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.

What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.

In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits. […]

— Manifesto of the Communist Party chapter 3 (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848)

With articles like these berating “Chinese state propaganda” at the same time as Sinclair Broadcast Group with its conservative “must-run” segments holds a monopoly on local news broadcasting in Seppoland, or this article accusing the Chinese state of “constraining and delaying” information on the COVID-19 pandemic when the Western press’ systemic and semi-deliberate fumbling of the pandemic leads most people in this part of the world to not even believe that the pandemic is ongoing, well… It rings of throwing stones in glass houses, doesn’t it? Of pots calling kettles black, of taking a mote out of a brother’s eye without first taking the beam out of one’s own; how many phrases exist to convey the idea of that good word hypocrisy.

Articles like these are the projection of a moribund system’s beneficiaries — in the old days it was feudalism turning into capitalism, and at present it’s capitalism turning into socialism.

Why’s he even taking a Chinese class if he can’t act like a normal human being around Asians? Is he a wannabe sexpat or something? Does he just like the characters, and doesn’t care for the people who actually invented them? Sheesh.

The difference between Belgium and Seppoland literally is striking in this case…