Zompist Bboard Again

Why do we have to give up on fixing injustice within communities? Do we still need rights of communities if we can have that? I dunno, ask the person who has the weird opinion you are criticizing. If we can fix injustice within each community, do we still need rights of communities? Yeah, because o...

The Daoists were into alchemy, yes, but someone was inventing clockwork, printing, the compass, paper money, gunpower, the spinning machine, improved plows, and more. I doubt it was the Daoists that were doing it. This was a natural advance. Daoists weren't really into using crafts for social good,...

what the British gov't did in Bengal (horrible mismanagement just like their horrible mismanagement in years past led to other famines in British India; while from what I have read there were issues with shipping food in due to the Japanese occupation of Burma resulting in the Bay of Bengal effecti...

Ignoring the rights of communities means that majorities can simply win an election, then oppress minorities. Why do we have to give up on fixing injustice within communities? Do we still need rights of communities if we can have that? I dunno, ask the person who has the weird opinion you are criti...

Mohists dealt with crafting things to improve society. Daoists were more into concocting potions to achieve immortality. Like Western alchemists, they inadvertently helped develop chemistry. But I don't think Daoists would have dealt with lowly mechanical crafts. Everyone likes the Mohists these da...

Why? What did the Greeks have that the Chinese didn't have? The Chinese invented more things, even invented printing to spread ideas faster, and still didn't quite take off. The Confucians retarded progress every chance they got. The Ming were taking off until the Confucians turned back to the elev...

Christianity would not be the same religion today if it had not become official in Rome--not just because, as zompist noted, Constantine called the council of Nicea which established definitive Orthodoxy, but because of who it was adopted by (i.e. Mediterraneans and then more distant Europeans). Ju...

logical thinking, empirical observation and rational explanations for phenomena. I'm pretty sure Aristotle thought he was doing this. There's hardly a more charged word in Greek philosophy than logos (reason). What inventions/achievements would the Milesians make had they survived for several centu...

I like to play with alternate history now and then... That's not quite the main focus of the board... then again I always appreciated the sound advice I got here. Some recent talk about religion got me thinking. Would a scenario where 'paganism' in whatever form would survive to the present day mak...

imagine a situation where israel ceases to be as a country, succeeded by the Republic of the Holy Land: the RHL has totally different laws, is not an ethnostate, all the checkpoints and legal ethnic barriers are gone, everyone in the territory in question has immediately the same legal rights, incl...

I don't think these differences are essential or hardwired, tho: the brits are perfectly able to conquer a territory and incorporate the inhabitants into the lower class of a new regime, ask the scots, irish and hongkongese, but things went how they went. an interesting piece of evidence for this d...

I'm not like a super expert on the history of colonialism but it seems to me exceedingly similar, especially anglosaxon colonialism, we're talking a) invading non-white peoples land and b) giving it to white people c) with military backing and d) justifying it as bringing civilization, punishing ba...

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 4:53 am 'Plant based' feels a little annoying too - why not market it as vegetarian or vegan?

Technically petroleum is plant-based...

So, it looks like this person has a true diphthong [ɪ͡ə], going smoothly from [ɪ] to [ə]. Still, that yields a more distinct [ə] than the last person had. Thanks for looking! My impression is that he has [jɪn] while ausg has [jn]. It's pretty clear that he has a longer and more gradual vowel and a ...

As I write this, the forum claims that there are more than six million views for my Could this work as a collaborative project? -thread in Ephemera. That thread is less than a month old, and has 30 replies. What on Earth is going on there? Wow, that's extremely weird. That makes me think the bots a...

I had a listen to this, and couldn’t quite decide what’s happening in it, so I made a spectrogram. Here’s what I eventually came up with (sorry for the large image): Very interesting! I wonder if you could do the same for one of the others, especially the ones I said didn't come close to mine? (E.g...

We both have always known US currency but never understood US coinage. Ooh, don't get me started on your old system... pounds, guineas, farthings, half-farthings, groats, shillings, ha'pennies, mites, coppers, pence, tuppence, thruppence, fuppence, bobs, nobs, florins, crowns, fivers, pieces of eig...

Your news is sadly out-of-date: they’ve now read the whole scroll , with more to come. Not quite, they say they can read 5% of the scroll. But the achievement is amazing. They did CT scans of the carbonized scroll, then went digitally slice by slice, tracing where the papyrus sheets lay; then assem...

Just to broaden things a bit, here's a list of German and French TV shows that most Americans would know: Movies and books would be a longer list, especially for France. Though I'm not sure if any French novelist is known here past Camus. Houellebecq, I guess, though I think he's obscure. Very rarel...

Hey zompist, sorry for keeping nagging you, but which one of these is close enough to your idiolect? Maybe e.g. the one by ausg? And is it just me, or does ynarakit pronounce onion as [ɐnjɛ]? I think ausg is closest to what I'm talking about. bananaman, Matt3799, and Neptunium all come close. The A...