Lemmitors: You don’t understand! I’m not voting for Slightly More Rotting Corpse, I’m voting for the Slightly More Rotting Corpse administration. Yes it’s true that both of them support nuclear warfare along the Mexican border, but Rotting Corpse would be dropping more nukes with higher frequency on the climate refugees so we have to vote for the lesser evil.
When the American populace as a whole is brainwashed into believing the only choices are red and blue, you have to accept that whining about it and voting green (or not voting) is going to accomplish nothing.
So make your colorful allegory and feel good about yourself on the internet. In the end, you are accomplishing less than the people you look down on who recognize the shitty reality of our situation.
If choosing red or blue doesn’t work, and choosing another option also doesn’t work, then what good does feeling self righteous about your decision to pick one over the other do? Unless you’re suggesting that the shitty reality of our situation is that we’re fucked and nothing will work at all no matter what - which is a level of defeatism that I don’t think is very helpful either.
Voting for the slightly less shit option makes it easier for the things we do in parallel to have a positive impact: direct action doesn’t get slowed down much by voting once a year or so.
I don’t think it does much, but any tiny contribution to the fight against climate change is a good for the world, as is any slowing of the erosion of civil rights domestically, gutting of what remains of medicare/medicaid, etc.
I also know a GOP administration will be worse in terms of fighting against leftist movements in the streets, if only slightly. They’re definitely worse re: labor movements overall, again: even if only marginally.
So I’m not going to claim it’s a panacea, or even someone that will have notable effects, but I do think it matters at the margins, so the effort required is usually worth it, IMHO
Being self righteous about doing nothing is worse.
Despite your own brand of defeatism in insisting the outcome is the same no matter what, one side actually is better. Even if the metric of “better” pales on the grand scheme of what we deserve or should be doing.
I’m not trying to project self-righteousness by recognizing that there are only two real choices. I’m asserting that advocating non-action or pointless action is such a tired trope that what you’re doing is circlejerking for dopamine instead of applying what little influence you have as an individual to work toward the avoiding the actual worst outcome.
As I’ve said elsewhere, to fix it from within the system itself you would need a bloc of people willing to punish one of the parties for moving right by withholding their votes and their donations. To fix it from without the system is also possible, but would require some “authoritarianism” in the form of people with guns. Anything else is just people flailing around ineffectually and getting mad at others who aren’t flailing in the ineffectual way that they prefer.
Either way you’ve got the same problem: getting a large enough group of people together who are willing to do the thing. Socialists of all stripes have been trying to crack that egg for over a hundred years and the only ones who had any success were the ones that managed to get the peasants on their side because peasants have a certain amount of class consciousness that proles don’t.
If you had enough people to do the thing, then you would be able to protect members of the group at a local level while national orgs realign and/or get replaced.
But nobody has a large enough group of people to do the thing. In the absence of a large enough group of people to do the thing, voting is a purely personal decision that will not effect the outcome.
“If there were enough people who cared about trans lives to actually change the outcome of the election, you wouldn’t need the law to protect them – you could just make them do it.”
Please God tell me I’m misreading this. People in Texas can just get fucked I guess?
I don’t see all that happening before it’s time to vote, so isn’t what you’re saying now a bit of a distraction from the very real risk to the stability of the country?
We’re allowed to kill Abe Lincoln and JFK, why aren’t we allowed to kill these guys? Why does Reagan get plot armor out of all the presidents? Who wrote this shit?
To be fair JFK getting shot was pretty epic though. He almost caused nuclear holocaust (although a more rabidly anti-communist president may have definitely caused nuclear holocaust), war crimed the South Vietnamese a ton, and stabilized Israel. RFK getting assassinated was less epic because that gave us Nixon
You have a very twisted view of the world. No one was “allowed” to shoot Abe Lincoln or JFK. It was very much not allowed, but murderers don’t usually care about what’s allowed and do it anyway.
I would genuinely cry. He is older than both of them and could literally run circles around them, both mentally and physically. I would 100% vote for Bernie and be fine with it. The vote for Biden is because the armpit of hell that I live in doesn’t do ranked voting and Trump will wreck the planet. A rotting potato powering a computer core running ChatGPT left ignored on the resolute desk for 4 years would be a better alternative to these two fuckwits.
Seriously, why did they have to run Joe? If they had run someone in their 50’s or 60’s they would win on “well, he isn’t as old as Trump” alone. If they had run someone under the age of 40 I imagine every leftist voter under the age of 50 would have been voting for them. The only reason “he’s fucking old” doesn’t stick to Trump is because he behaves like a horny 15 year old jacked up on cocaine and Twitter.
Yeah, because we have more than two parties, so a simple majority isn’t automatically an absolute one. But if you group the far right with the increasingly far right “conservatives”, it looks much more bleak.
But if you group the far right with the increasingly far right “conservatives”, it looks much more bleak.
we’ve been in that situation since the 1980’s; our center-right and our far right are our only choices for president now.
i used to think europe’s democracies were ahead since they carried on with progressive initiatives the americans stopped doing in the 1970’s, but now i wonder if europe’s lurch rightwards is them catching up to the americans.
don’t listen to them; our systems beats theirs because you don’t even need a majority to win over here thanks to the electoral college and gerrymandering. lol
Then cry. And then go knock doors and tell people why it’s important to vote the way they should not because of one person, but for the future of the country and their own livelihood. Despair is only displaced by activism. All it takes for evil to succeed is for us to stand by and let it happen.
It is a pendulum, here in Sweden I know many people feeling disillusioned by the social democrats, combine that with ineffectual meassures against gang violence (often perpetuated by second generation migrant), where the perpetrators don’t care about punnishment as it is quite mild.
Add to that that we have seen gangs and clans infiltrating the government at different levels, a few months ago two big news broke, one was that an employee at a court had let her criminal boyfriend sit at her computer using her access to go through classified documents, the other was that a student at the police academy had very close ties to gangs, to the point that it is assumed that they were tasked by the gang to join the police force and be a man on the inside.
Then we recently had a soldier who left his Ak5 complete with all parts in his car, against all regulations, when he was eating lunch, the car just happened to be burgled and the Ak5 rifle as well as a set of body armor was stolen.
It is assumed by most people that this was organized ahead of time, military vehicles have special number plates and are easily recognized, so he probably got paid to do this by a gang.
Then we have the dad who got shot a killed after asking a group of what was gabg members to behave as he was taking his son to the public pool, snd an altercation started, the dad was shot in the head and his 12 year old son called the police.
We also have some less recent major issues that had contributed to the rise of the right.
Incidents where young men from migrant families have been harrasing and even feeling up women, commonly at public pools.
Combine that with severe religious differences and some public pools have experimented with women only bathing hours.
Most of if not all of the above points have been related to migrants.
So it isn’t that odd that when the left offer what is seen as weak policies and pushes for understanding of the perpetrator and the right just says “fuck them, we gave them food, a place to live, security, healthcare and what do we get back? Gang violence, disrespect and harrasment!”, that people choose the right.
In my mind we need heavier punnishment, we need containment punnishments, way longer punnishments for those who are not interested in rehab which our justice system focuses on, after two times caught they need to get an automatic 10x the time normally given. If people are not interested in being part of a working society, then I’d rather they stay locked up.
While I don’t agree with your conclusion/personal opinion of more repressive politics as the solution to this, I still want to thank and upvote you for explaining the situation and the resulting political climate in Sweden in a bit of detail.
IMHO, none of that justifies voting for far-right or even fascist parties (like the AfD over here in Germany), but I can absolutely understand the reasons why people do it.
Thank you, to be honest I have no idea if this would work, but it would keep these guy off the streets for far longer.
We give people a lot of chances here, but in the end, why keep doing it if they are not interested in rehabilitating themselves?
Sweden and Scandinavia as a whole put focus on rehab in prisons, so they get that, prison punnishment is meant to just be the incarseration, not the day to day life, that is supposed to be as normal as possible.
That is great! The problem happens when people just see it as a vacation, and refuse to learn.
Then I don’t know what more to do other than making them uncomfortable for longer.
In my mind we need heavier punnishment, we need containment punnishments, way longer punnishments for those who are not interested in rehab which our justice system focuses on, after two times caught they need to get an automatic 10x the time normally given. If people are not interested in being part of a working society, then I’d rather they stay locked up.
we do that here; not only does it both not work well and allows people to profit from exacerbating it; it fixes a lot less and costs a lot more than treating it like a societal issue; changing policy; and aggressive outreach.
we’ve also had recidivism rates drop when convicts were given alternatives viable to their situation instead of focusing on the punishment.
I get what you are saying, but we allready have a prison system focusing on rehabilitation, and it doesn’t phase the gangs.
you’ll never stop the gangs; but you can make it more difficult to operate if it becomes getting harder to find new gang members and less cost effective to retain the ones trapped in their sphere.
By increasing the length of prison sentences, we atleast keep them contained for longer.
that’s what i meant by viable alternatives to their situation; no matter how long you contain them they eventually have to return to their situation and all at great cost.
If you have any other suggestion, please go ahead and tell me.
aggressive outreach is a more effective tactic at combating gangs
American here, our gangs primarily exist because the police do not benefit (and actively harm) minority communities, and the gangs offer what is essentially an alternative police force* for crimes that otherwise go unenforced and unreported. Is that not the reason for gangs in Sweden?
(Gangs in these categories historically include the Italian mafia in the US, the Gangs of New York, the Triads, the Crips & Bloods, and I’m sure I’m missing others)
I have no exact knowledge about why the gabgs appeared in Sweden, best I can say is the extreme culture clash between migrants and Swedes making them feel like outsiders.
Sweden in an extreme country with an extreme culture, where as other countries are far, far more religious and family oriented, we are far more individual and have a deeper connection to the government.
This is quite foreign to mugrants who have trouble understanding us, which makes them push further back against it.
To be clear, the main issue is the culture clash between Sweden and migrants from the middle east, we have a VERY different culture and relationship with the government.
The main issue as I see it is that Swedish culture is quite passive agressive, and we have not enforced our culture norms hard enough that they integrated into our society as well as possible, now people have talked about how we Swedes need to integrate ourselves into the migrant population.
On Reddit I always assumed that so many people can’t be that stupid uneducated and make these obvious mistakes for engagement bait.
But now that we are on Lemmy, and engagement gets you nowhere, I’m losing faith in humanity at a faster pace.
In my experience, these mistakes are made primarily by native speakers. Because they learned it by hearing and can’t tell the difference. Those who learned English as a second language learn through books and are explicitly taught the difference.
You would HATE being a person who could read in the Middle English era. There was no standardized spelling, people used many different conventions/regional spellings, and it was mostly either phonetic spelling or random French bullshit. Also some earlier writers used really conservative spelling to emulate Old English. It was the wild west out there.
For example, here’s a (not comprensive) list of the variant spellings you may see for each second person pronoun:
You can find a lot more about Middle English spellings in LALME (A Linguistics Atlas of Late Mediæval English) (electronic version here)
Some of the more innovative spellings come from Northern Middle English/Northumbria (northern England and southern Scotland, though the dialects of the latter would largely split off and develop mostly on its own in the early stages of Middle English and become Scots) and to a lesser extent Midlands Middle English/Mercian, in large part due to significant past influence of North Germanic/Scandinavian languages; i.e., Old Norse, which was somewhat mutually intelligible with Old English and caused/progressed both the loss of inflections and the formation & solidification of Modern English syntax (in particular, Old English syntax shifted to become near-identical to Old Norse syntax; Old English also entirely lost inflection of grammatical gender, grammarical case, etc. and adopted many core vocabulary of Old Norse). Those changes happened primarily to facilitate communication with vikings in the Danelaw, since Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians were very eager to communicate with each other; things like declensions were very different in the two languages (the 12 different declensions of “the” probably weren’t fun to deal with for Scandinavians), so Old English speakers started omitting or simplifying them, and they mostly died off in (early) Middle English. English also completely lost dual pronouns (pronouns with exactly 2 referents). Word order was primarily SVO in Old Norse, so Old English’s relatively liberal word order (or lack of consistent word order) was simplified/regularized significantly to be more SVO.
Southern Middle English – the dialects of West Saxon and Kent – were significantly more conservative (partly due to having next to no influence from Norse). Those are where many more conservative spellings are from. The West Saxon dialects were the most influential/dominant (especially due to the Kingdom of Wessex’ great power) until the Norman Conquest, when East Midlands English (especially around London) took over that role.
Southern American English & Maritime Canadian English varieties were both primarily based on more southern English varieties – specifically, the time’s London English and West Country English. Appalachian English was also heavily influenced by Scottish English and the English of northern England. Canadian English in general was based on both Southern and Midlands English. Meanwhile, New England’s English was primarily derived from East Midlands dialects. Generally, dialects derived from the time’s West Country English are significantly more conservative and more similar to the general speech of ~15th century England, while more Midlands (of the time) influenced American and Canadian varieties are similar to standard ~17-18th century English. Dialects influenced by the time’s Scottish English and Northern English also generally contain a lot more conservative Anglic constructions – modern Appalachian/Southern American English varieties and modern Scottish/Northern varieties share a large amount of vocabulary and other features which were lost in other dialects.
Standard varieties of Modern British English are comparatively generally significantly more innovative and don’t share many features with Middle & Early Modern English varieties – general British English started diverging greatly from most other English dialects around the mid-to-late 18th century and early 19th century. This is also a reason why Australia and New Zealand English have a lot of features which seem to only partially agree with other English varieties. For example, the trap-bath vowel split, which was partially completed in Australia and is present in certain words, but not all words, and has variation in some words. When Australia was being colonized, Southern English varieties had recently begun undergoing the split, and it was considered a “Cockneyism” until Received Pronunciation was formed in the late 19th century and embraced it; it wasn’t fully progressed until around that time, which is why New Zealand English (which came from immigrants in the mid 19th century) mostly agrees with Southern English on those vowels.
Since you seem to be a good person to ask, and will probably give a better answer than Google, was the thorn somewhere in our current 26 letter alphabet at some point and got deleted, or was it already gone out of style by the time we settled in our current order?
Þorn was in use since Fuþark (Germanic runes) but wasn’t used to write Anglo-Saxon until around the 8th century. It died out after the printing press came into use, usually imported from France (or Germany or something occasionally) and not using some characters found in English at the time. Because of the lack of a Þ/þ key, typers started to use “Y” as a substitute (which is why you see e.g. “ye olde” instead of “the olde”). Eventually þorn just disappeared and people used the spellings using “th”. A similar thing happened to Yogh (Ȝ/ȝ), where it was substituted for by “Z” (With e.g. “MacKenȝie” yielding “MacKenzie” instead of “MacKenyie”) until it disappeared and spellings using “y”/“gh” (or “j”/“ch” when appropriate) replaced spellings using “ȝ”.
Ðæt (Ð/ð/đ) was mostly replaced by þorn by Middle English so it didn’t get to be slain by the printing press. Wynn (Ƿ/ƿ) was replaced by “uu”/“w”/“u” by Middle English too. Ash (Æ/æ) didn’t die off, in large part because it was available on many printing presses of the time due to its usage in French and Latin, but it became obsolete for English words and was mostly used to replace “ae” in loanwords (especially from Latin and Greek).
There were some other funny things in Old English & Middle English orthography; like omitting n/m and writing a macron over the preceding vowel to indicate the sound (like “cā” instead of “can”), in the same way that it occured in Latin/Latinate languages which lead to “ñ” and “ã”/“õ” in Spanish/Portuguese/Galician.
Haha yeah. Soon after becoming a linguist your first realization is how little everyone else knows about or cares to know about linguistics. Btw I edited to add a little more information if you’re interested.
Anime has a disgustingly right wing bent, which should be expected from a country that’s been run by the right since 1955 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_System.
For someone that hates the right you make a lot of generalizations. Every country with power is a mess politically, but that says nothing about their art.
I’m not going to go on a quest for iskeai Reaganomics and general nationalistic and racist themes, but I’m sure you won’t have a hard time with some self study on that front.
That’s funny because if you actually watched Overlord you’d know Ainz’ goal (besides getting back to the real world) is to create a utopia where all races are equal. But keep throwing buzzwords if it makes you feel good.
I was making a general statement about when anime has a political theme, not on that particular anime. Though I guess you could find a utopian vision in a nation that views all to be equally worthless and champions genocide and calling the dark young of shub niggurath to stomp on people.
I was making a general statement about when anime has a political theme, not on that particular anime.
Only anime I know of where this is actually a thing is Attack on Titan, but I haven’t watched the last season (apparently it deviates from the source material, maybe for this reason, which is why I haven’t).
Though I guess you could find a utopian vision in a nation that views all to be equally worthless and champions genocide and calling the dark young of shub niggurath to stomp on people.
Yeah, I do like multifaceted morally grey and villainous characters with interesting or even aspiring motives. I highly recommend Hunter X Hunter, The number of characters in that anime that aren’t majorly flawed in one way or another you can count on your fingers. One of the communities favorite characters is a murderous pedo clown that serves as the main characters mentor and drop-in father-figure for a large part of the story. If you watch any single anime and never watch anime again, let it be HxH.
I’ve only finished the anime up to season 4, but I don’t think the theme is that “Nazarick is evil and evil skeleton overlord is fun”, but rather “do the ends justify the means Nazarick takes”, given that Ainz wants to create a utopia where all races live in harmony. It’s very interesting writing given how much time and humanity is given to side characters that are eventually destroyed or imperialized by Nazarick.
They are somewhat nuanced and ideologically motivated bad guys, I’ll give you that. And it does make the anime interesting, especially compared to your standard isekai/VRMMO anime
Renewables are unreliable. That’s a fact. Yes you have moments, days even weeks where they can deliver what is currently required. In total output. Not yet in delivers when you actually need it output.
Sure you can have 100% renewable generation for a 24hr period, but if your generation is during the day and your usage is spread into the night, you’re not really covering your needs, no matter how good it looks on paper.
It is also your current usage. Now do the math and replace all fossil fuel usage with electric alternatives. Cars, buses, trucks, heating, cooking, etc. Now calculate just how much more renewables you need to cover all that in ideal circumstances.
Now do the same for windless winter days.
If we’re going to step away from fossil fuels entirely, you’re going to have to accept nuclear as an option. Thinking we’ll manage only with renewables is a dream. While you dream, we’re burning fossil fuels non-stop. Cuz that’s reality.
You can have renewables with nuclear, or renewables with fossil fuels. You’re actively choosing renewables with fossil fuels.
by insulating the roof of my house better i cut my useage of oil by more than 50%, next time i’ll insulate the outer walls, and after that i’ll switch to electric heating that would need just 20% of the original energy.
you forget that the energy consumption not neccesarily always rises. All appliances get better and better in efficiency, for example.
Yes, your total energy consumption drops, but your electricity consumption rises as a result. Electrification of stuff that relied on burning fossil fuels means that electricity consumption goes up even while total energy consumption stays the same or drops. I’m not necessarily saying that nuclear is the solution, but it’s a solution that can at least buy us a few decades for renewables and energy storage to catch up to demand.
An EV will double your electricity usage. Look into the requirements for EV cargo transport. Swapping out all the diesel trucks, just the heavy transport will come close to doubling the national electricity needs. Add to that small vans and buses.
I urge you to actually do the math. You’ll get a much much better understanding of the issue. Just pasting links to articles that look like they support your arguments adds to the dream.
The aim is to drop fossil fuels. Your goal should’ve been to embrace nuclear while increasing renewables. Atm you seem fine with just burning fossil fuels, killing the planet, cuz the alternative isn’t renewable. GG.
Take a look at Germany, Belgium, etc. ditching nuclear because the green parties fought so hard for it. What are they doing now? Back to healthy healthy coal and gas. Thanks for helping kill the planet even faster in your zeal for exclusively renewable energy.
What most people dont’ understand, i live in a part of germany, where eating of self collected mushrooms will radiate you, where boars in the forest are radioactive because of chernobyl 30 years ago…
There may be a point when we don’t need nuclear, maybe once we dramatically level up our battery technology, but that point is not now, and probably not for the next 50 years
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