Zompist Bboard Again

I'm not so sure about that. I don't know exactly how effective the troll farms and propaganda are, but given the popularity of regressive authoritarianism they're evidently accomplishing something. yes! though they're by no means the only source thereof. I think zomp's model here is too simple as i...

at least here, pool halls are either expensive and in a posh neighbourhood or cheap and in street you wouldn't like to park your fancy wheels, so it's likely the two groups won't notice each other.

yeah, the rightwards turn in my own country motivated me to finally go and get my burgundy one so i get the feeling. it's pretty and has a bunch of pictures of vehicles inside.

this feels like that fps game where north korea invaded the us (fun game, silly premise)... they may want to supplant the us as sole superpower, but they're so just fantastically far from being able to get there it's like a minimum wage millenial wanting to buy a house in a good neighbourhood. the u...

I'm not confident that Trump's bad policies will significantly weaken the empire. The empire can keep chugging along indefinitely with unboundedly bad policies. total agree on the rest of it, but on this not so much. sure, the cultural hegemony is pretty airtight right now but look at, say, de-dola...

do we need to defend the institution of the protest itself no? man, that's dystopian. Okay: it has been the case throughout history that international pressure sometimes works in dissuading states from particular lines of policy: it is, after all, a Bad Thing for any state to have a very bad interna...

well yeah... if one saw the us as some benevolent hegemon instead of the evil empire i see it as then sure, we see the world differently enough that we're not likely to agree on any of the details: for example, the notion that the us empire wants other countries (with the likely exception of its cor...

China does seem to be less interested in imperialism than the states: it does not have a military base in every corner of the planet, nor does it seem interested in it, but even if China was exactly as interested in a globespanning empire as the US, it simply cannot have one: it's not that storng. s...

well, yeah, but without the international and public pressure would there have been a solution at all? the "solution" might have been "south africa has a right to exist as an afrikaaner white ethnostate" without it.

The solution to the Middle East conflict will not be found on Threads, or TikTok, or in the streets of any city that isn’t within a 2-hour car ride from downtown Jerusalem. street protests and popular disapproval of the whole thing were important in the dissolution of the south african apartheid re...

Those are mostly neoliberal traits from the 80s after ww2 and before the collapse of the USSR so not necessarily relevant. notice how i said "since the start of the decline of the soviet union, say andropov on" instead of "since the official dissolution of the soviet union". The...

oh, shit you know the guy's gonna sign up for the elon musks's upcoming "upload your mind" business. it's gonna be called "eternity" or whatever.

so called AI is excellent for some things, I routinely use GPT to code, but I can't think of a use for it in conlanging: maybe something like asking it what is triconsonantal roots or sth?

I'd say so, yeah: much of those difference I know through youtube videos that make it as a joke (haha americans say elevator or sth) as opposed to reading a british source and going "lolwut?", which is what happens if you're, say, a spanish and read some mexican guy.

possibly it has bought zero allies, but according to the IMF it is the largest trading partner and also the largest lender for african countries, which is different from getting nowhere. its conceivable china's power has peaked, though, time will tell.

we don't have any different orthographies than our spanish cousins that i can think of: it's mostly a matter of lexicon: they say judías where we say porotos or frijoles, they say guindillas for our ajies or our chiles, they say ordenador for our computadores/as, that kind of thing. oh, and of cours...

agreed on the more peaceful front: I don't know about "freer", but because I probably have a thicker concept of freedom here: since the start of the decline of the soviet union (let's say from andropov on) wages are stagnant vis a vis, inflation, productivity, and housing prices meaning a ...

it's common for people to think they're rulers are good: a lot of being a ruler is convincing the ruled that you're good, after all. A multipolar world would be one with an increased amount of violence as the various poles jockey for position with one another. I really hope I don't have to convince ...

on this I am with rammstein. or, well, the song, I actually don't know, lindemann might be fash himself for all i know? you get the point, though, we're all living in america.... yeah, we live in the us empire, the most powerful empire in the history of the planet, and the only one to ever be the s...

One key thing is that global telecommunications has allowed speakers of the English standard varieties to be familiar with one another's speech, which over time likely would reduce the impact of the drifting apart of the English standard varieties more than it would actually put a damper on said dr...