Zompist Bboard Again

These conspiracy theories about the student encampments are really getting bonkers. First, a relatively sane friend shared a headline about how 80% of the protesters arrested at ASU you were not university affiliates with the question "Wondering what percentage of the participants of these prot...

Yeah, Linguoboy, I get it, I'm a bad person because I'm not interested in supporting the cause of a movement that is calling for my murder. I would certainly be a much better person if I would look at a movement that wants to murder me, and also a lot of other people, and tell them that I'm fully o...

On the other hand , you get students chanting ‘burn Tel Aviv to the ground’, or the protest organiser who said ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’. (And we all know who they mean by ‘Zionists’: the linked article makes it quite clear that they mean ‘anyone who is identifiably Jewish’.) Even in my own ...

All there really is is an obligation to pay that's funded out of current revenues. The thing with the proposed alternatives is that they mainly just go to greater lengths to hide the same kind of thing. In the US or more generally? Here pensions and our equivalent of Social Security have dedicated ...

Yes, exactly! If there is a problem with demographics, no matter how the pensions work, we're still going to run into the same kind of problems. There is a potential shortage of labour. That's only equivalent to a "problem with demographics" if we don't continue to improve productivity th...

On the other hand , you get students chanting ‘burn Tel Aviv to the ground’, or the protest organiser who said ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’. (And we all know who they mean by ‘Zionists’: the linked article makes it quite clear that they mean ‘anyone who is identifiably Jewish’.) Even in my own ...

I just toured the perimeter of the encampment. There's an iron fence on the west side of it which is covered with signage. There are tables with craft materials and folks are being invited to make their own signs. A lot are just generic messages of solidarity (e.g. "Jewish Alumni for Palestine&...

I think we should be quite clear that this isn’t whataboutism. I fully respect people’s right to criticise Israel, as long as they in turn respect my right to argue back. But I could take protesters a lot more seriously, if they showed any sign of being as upset about the other problems in the worl...

I think you don't get it because Zionism does not mean what you think it means. Zionism is the belief that there should be a Jewish homeland at about the current location of Israel, nothing more, nothing less. C'mon, we'r all linguists here, we all know it's never this simple. This is like saying &...

Went to the memorial for my stepmother, and it was pretty much what I expected: The twenty-five years she spent with my father were hardly touched on. He (and his children and grandchildren) were mentioned only in passing and only by a couple of folks and there were only a two photos of him included...

Well, illegitimacy comes down to whether you approve of it, it's often just a "hurray/boo" word (man, do those have a name?) I've seen them called "yum/yuck" words but I can't remember where (perhaps Hayakawa?). however, it doesn't stop being colonial if you think the colonialis...

(The exception to this, very depressingly, is ‘pogroms against palestinians’… it’s become abundantly clear in recent days that this is precisely what’s happened. But even here, you shouldn’t confuse ‘the Israeli state’ with ‘the current Israeli government’.) This strikes me as special pleading. May...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Apr 16, 2024 12:18 pm

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Apr 16, 2024 11:03 am (I myself have /ah/ for the second vowel, but I'm not a native, just a longtime resident.)

But by /ah/ do you mean [a] or [ɑ]?

Yes.

We mean the second syllable, even though apparently there is also variation in the third syllable (i.e. whether /oʊ/ is reduced to a schwa or not). The reduced vowel is very old school; I can't recall the last time I heard someone use it. (I myself have /ah/ for the second vowel, but I'm not a nati...

All that changed when the sexual abuse scandals began to break. When would you (or your late partner) say that the scandals peaked?, and that the suspicion started to appear? When I was a child/teenager in the church, I wasn't aware about the sexual abuse scandals until the Boston Globe report in 2...

This reminds me of the clear delineation between left-libertarians (e.g. anarchists and council communists) and right-"libertarians" (e.g. so-called "anarchocapitalists" and many big-L Libertarians), which really have very little in common with one another. There are plenty of f...

(Speaking of which, saw a news report today with the headline that Cook County is "temporarily" unable to give out paper copies of vital records, like birth, death, and marriage certificates. I didn't even read it; I was just like, "Of course, why expect local government to fulfill i...

From the Nietzsche thread: Well ok. I have never actually watched Southpark so I didn't get the reference. Pretty much everyone I know considers the show intensely bigoted and reactionary, for what it's worth. They were libertarians, but they do oppose Trump. Penn Jillette was libertarian too until ...

We drove down to Southernillinois a.k.a. Little Egypt where a couple guys I know were hosting a viewing party. They had a huge backyard located on the top of a hill so we had great views of the "360° sunset". We also had a striking red flare from the bottom of the sun (which y'all probably...

Sounds horrible. We have bureaucratic headaches with healthcare, though they're not typically life-threatening. This isn't life=-threatening, just terribly inconvenient. I've been using up a lot of mental energy on this that I could really use for other things. I tried calling the insurance and the...