Zompist Bboard Again

Anyone interested in reading about Irish/British history in German? Perhaps your first language is something else, and you want to brush up on your German, or specifically on a pseudo-scholarly register of German? Earlier this year, for no good reason, I wrote this it-was-meant-to-be-brief-but-ende...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat May 11, 2024 10:44 am I was linked to this wonderfully refreshing view of the whole situation: 50 Completely True Things (by a Palestinian American).

Very good indeed!

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...

ChatGPT can, when pushed quite hard, speak really really bad Verdurian straight out of the box. I got it to tell me about Verdurian, which it could do quite well, and then insisted that for the rest of the conversation, it would exclusively use that language to communicate with me. It’s quite ‘lazy...

many jewish kids apparently come to patagonia after their period of exterminating palestininans on vacation, and plenty buy land there, and a lot of locals are starting to wonder are we going to start getting genocided in our own country too? EDIT: my apologies. I completely missed the bit about la...

Anti-semitism is specifically hatred of Jews. Which is why, incidentally, I always write it without a hyphen. It’s really not a great term: in fact its early use was mostly by antisemites themselves, who were looking for a more ‘scientific’ word than ‘Jew-hate’. The orthography of antisemitism is o...

Flavor conlang idea for my novel: Standard Intramural (Let me know if this conlang idea already exists. I know it's terrible, but I think it's cool for an exotic SF setting. I have many pages of notes on this "language" that I didn't consult for this post. Last year, I had hopes of workin...

malloc wrote: ↑Sun May 05, 2024 7:52 pm So last week I tripped while running and scraped my shoulder on pavement. Now an enormous scar is forming on my shoulder, the size of a playing card and stiff enough to make moving my left arm uncomfortable.

Yeah, that must hurt. Hope you get better soon!

What I I'm trying to understand is why the Quran having a code would be significant. Assuming minor letter combinations in the Quran does have a code in it, why do some people find that so deeply meaningful? I mean, having any kind of secret, purposely encoded meaning in a sacred book would be huge...

....you can't make this up. I hadn't even read this part when i wrote the above. right. everything you say is antisemitism, else i'm antisemitic. in addition, opposing the genocide of certain semites is antisemitic. well, if that's all correct guess i'm antisemitic. it's not tho. The 'Arabs are sem...

I'm surprised there is enough stuff about conlanging out there that ChatGPT actually knows about it :) I've said it before in the AI thread... but beyond the 'cool toy' aspect (which I mean, it is) I don't think generative AI is terribly useful. I'm very skeptical about claims that it's going to wri...

I've said so before, but why not say so again? "Zionism" is, also, an antisemitic dog-whistle. So is, by the way, 'from the river to the sea.' It's hard to hear 'death to all Zionists' without hearing something else. I know people here don't mean either the word or the slogan that way... B...

I won't comment on the protests specifically; I don't know how it is on American campus so can't possibly comment. I have views on what's going on on French campus, but they're so tied to arcane parts of French politics they'll be insanely boring. That being said, a few general comments... Antisemit...

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 ...

The points made in the back-and-forth between bradrn and Linguoboy illustrate fairly well why, while I absolutely don't support Israel, I'm not really interested in supporting the pro-Palestinian movement, either. No, I don't care if people think that that's the worst kind of bothsidism. When one s...

One can insist but its better to have reasons for it. can't fathom how its not colonialism for an ethnic group to take over some land and make the natives second class citizens, but yeah, that's my intuition. I have my reasons, which I already explained -- many of the Jews were persecuted and/or re...

I think causality is still a show-stopper... it means either no time travel or somehow the past can never be changed. Leaving that aside and assuming it's handwaved away or something... Maybe time travel is worked out several millenia in the future, at a time when the Nazis have lost all relevance. ...

IIRC the idea is to have people invest money before they retire, and then live of those investments once they're retired. One of the many problems with that proposal - and that is what many people who are your or my age or younger seem to have trouble understanding - is that the new system would ha...

Thirded!

Social security takes from the young, who mostly don't believe it'll be solvent when they're old, to give to the old, many of whom are members of the AARP, which is a lobbying organization that is good at its job. We hear that a lot from young or young-ish conservatives here over pensions. The beli...