Lol what? You are delusional. I’m not sure Orthodox Slavs would agree that WW1 and the subsequent Russian Civil War were “secular” wars considering most propoganda from that time was highly religious and they were seen as “holy wars” by both Slavs and Germans. The Ottomans literally were a Sharia state and the Sultan framed the war as a Jihad against the enemies of Islam. There was deep religious subtext in WW1 from nearly all the major European powers.

Both world wars were caused mostly by nationalism/ethnic conflict and recent history/economic problems. Secularism had literally not a single thing to do with it. Where exactly do you get this “WW1 and WW2 were caused by secularism” delusion from?

For real. I wish it were these people killing themselves with their stupidity, not others…

Considering China’s literacy rate grew from 20 percent in 1956 to 65 percent in 1982 (and now 97% in 2020 which is insane for such a highly rural country – 43% of the population, to give an idea) due to them focusing on Simplified Chinese, you’re just wrong in stating it “didn’t do anything”. In fact, Mao got the idea from seeing Japan’s success in improving literacy by simplifying Kanji into Shinjitai, so you’re wrong twice…

Of course, it went hand-and-hand with the government’s education reforms, it doesn’t deserve all the credit. But it helped a LOT. It can be argued that it’s no longer a factor because of the access to education Chinese have now, and I’d agree, but it helped when literacy was in need of improvement.

Obviously though, different characters is a small change compared to completely rewriting the sentences to simplify it, like this does here.

People have been complaining about laziness in language and “dumbing down” language since language has existed. It’s nothing new and it’s not happening at a different rate than before. The perceived degredation of language is not, and has never been, a real thing. It’s natural and unstoppable language change. It’s the reason you can’t understand Old English, and why Hindi, German, Spanish, and Russian are different languages from English now.

That being said, things like this theoretically could help to increase literacy rates significantly in populations with low literacy (in a similar way Simplified Chinese script along with Chinese education reforms drastically improved China’s literacy rates) – and most of the US has surprisingly low literacy (about 54% of adults have low English literacy and 21% are illiterate) – or for people who aren’t proficient enough readers to gain anything from reading something of such a high level. Reading should be accessible to as many people as possible, not gatekeeped. It would be far better as some sort of “annotation creator” though probably, if your goal is more literacy.

Of course, you shouldn’t rely on something like this by any means. But it’s not bad for a lot of purposes, we shouldn’t beat uneducated people while they’re down. And either way your literacy really doesn’t affect your “stupidity”, although a lot of resources with knowledge you might want will require a certain level of literacy.

Having on-hand knowledge of a lot of dated, obscure, or specialized language does not, in fact, make you smarter

Sincerily, someone who knows a lot of obscure, dated, and specialized language ((i am a linguist))

““Occasionally she’d cook meals(?) of fish for him and place on his heartsfoot [hearth’s foot? heart’s foot, figurative language for joy?] her meddery [???] eggs, sausages, and stainish [burnt/crispy] bacon on toast, and a wishy-washy cup of Greenland tea or soup-can(?) of coffee, milk and sugar, or Si-Kiang sugary [some sort of sweet tea?], or ale of ferns [herbal ale?] in trueart [skillfully crafted] pewter, and a bit of bread “??? ???” to please him and keep his stomach porky, until her (???)knees shrunk to nutmeg graters while her joints shucked [peeled] with gout; and as rash as she’d rush with her peak-load of provisions up on her sieve [???] “(???) rage, it swells and rises”, my hardy Hek [Hector?], he’d cast them from him, with a stour [force] of scorn, as much as to say you sow and you sorrow, and if he didn’t peg it flat on her (tail/head/heel?), believe you me, she was safe enough.””

I don’t know what kind of rural Irish hell this comes out of, but some of the words don’t even look English. I hated trying to decipher that and I’m sure I wasn’t accurate for half of it.

Maybe access to connected devices (e.g. your computer components or the phone you have plugged in to your computer)

on y office maybe? that could be interpreted as “we work there” with very poor grammar

Uh, yeah they would. Republicans and their general… hatred of mankind are already a pretty good motivator. It’s not like there’s any leftists to compete with them either, Americans are scared of those.

That’s painful to look at, I can’t agree that it’s easily readable

I feel as though the “human trafficking” part is more important than the bourgeois dog, why isn’t that in the headline? Or specifying the work hours or exact pay (under $8/day)?

Chomsky’s work undeniably transformed (cognitive) linguistics, but a large portion of Chomskyan linguistics is heavily debated/controversial.

His universal grammar, although debated, at least contributed a lot to Sapir-Whorf linguistics generally being recognized as wrong, which is nice. Unfortunately, a lot of laymen and even a tiny minority of linguists still believe linguistic determinism because it’s more interesting than reality. But that goes with all fringe, usually nationalism-driven, beliefs; like “Hungarian isn’t Finno-Urgic, it’s Turkic/isolate!” or “Tamil is oldest language and all other languages came from it!” or other crazy shit. Or Altaic, but that one isn’t crazy depending on which variation of it you pick, even if it’s likely wrong or unprovable.

The anime fandom is extraordinarily sexual. It makes sense when you see that in general, anime is one of the most casually extremely objectifying/sexualizing/tokenizing things you can find… specifically towards women and queer people. Even yuri (lesbian) animes tend to be shounen (aimed at young men) and often are very fetishistic, and anything that resembles queerness is usually used in shounen animes specifically as fan service to their male audience.

There are MANY animes that I guarantee you only exist for the purpose of porn (more specifically, designed to get popular from people making & spreading porn of them). Rampant and unavoidable horny fan service is a plague

In Italy, you have to travel to whatever city you have residence in to vote. A lot of (mostly progressive) people have to fly across the country to cast their vote, apparently it sucks for them

A clean room re-write of the books probably wouldn’t cost too much if the company that owns the copyrights to these textbooks don’t want to sell the rights for a reasonable price.

That’s a long way to say that you’re completely maliciously ignorant on endangered languages & language preservation, fascist bootlicker. Move to some other site to spread your corporatist-compliant “enlightened centrist” propoganda, it’s disgusting to see your comments littered everywhere like trash on a beach. Or at the very least, don’t shill on the behalf of greedy fucks who are abusing a group’s vulnerability and the law to exploit a nearly-dead culture for money. It’s a language with like 2000 fluent speakers, mostly old people who will be dust not long from now. You are, quite plainly, deflecting responsibility for them taking the work of a vulnerable group and claiming ownership of it to make money, against the knowledge and wishes of the group whose labor they practically stole.

And now you’re making a point of gaslighting the victims and the people who are rightfully against the exploitation, by comparing the work of the victims to basic facts of the universe that are observed in nature, while also using it as an attempt to defend your favorite shitty economic system/ideology. Like seriously, do you think languages are just something that exist in the wild outside of the confines of living beings? Do you think these people just observed some feral Lakota words and grammar the same way that Newton observed the laws of the universe? No, they obtained everything almost exclusively via the work of the speakers of the damn language, and despite being a “nonprofit” used it to profit a ton while depriving the native speakers of the records of their own language and oral history.

I am a linguist, and I can say with confidence that a strong majority of linguistics researchers and language preservationists find this, and practices like this, despicable – linguistics is a field where the overwhelming attitude is that knowledge needs to be open (even when facing the challenges of science journals being exploitative as fuck and not open at all, researches still put considerable effort into getting around that), especially in the context of an endangered or dying language/culture. You don’t just exploit a population for profit and refuse to leave, and still talk about how you’re doing a good thing. What these people do – and continue to do – is a disgrace.

Legally, using someone else’s non-recorded spoken language to make a profit without their consent is a gray area assuming you can prove that they got it from you (obviously these people can), but considering written language and recorded spoken language are both protected by the same copyright laws as any other tangible medium (and indeed, it would be a very clear-cut case if what these people provided to the consortium was plainly recorded), it’s obvious that what the LLC did was wrong and it’s very reasonable to say that they infringed on the Lakota peoples’ IP, considering that this was a collaborative work where the actual content came nearly entirely directly from the tribespeople themselves. This is fundamental ethical linguistics 101, even dictionaries of more widely spoken languages (like English) involve a bunch of explicit consent, consent forms, contracts, etc. from the speakers & contributors they use the labor of (or from the whole community that they use the labor of when it’s an endangered language), for both legal and ethical reasons.

I hate to come off as this aggressive, but this capitalist apologia & acting like this is acceptable behaviour in modern society is really crossing a line for me, considering how close the topic of dialectology and language preservation is to me – it’s the whole reason I began to do linguistics.

Hellfire trigger manipulator demonstration

On an unrelated note, here are clips of people bump firing pistols and M1 Garands

M1 Garand #1

M1 Garand #2

M1 Garand #3

M1 Garand #4

Mini14

Pistol #1

Pistol #2

Pistol #3

Pistol #4

Pistol #5

Pistol #6

ok but we have evidence right in front of our face that the US was doing it

Looks like someone wasn’t taught about separation of powers…

Executive orders only control the executive branch/manage the federal government, and certain other things the president has control over (like elaborating on an already-in-place law), they can’t make or pass laws. Executive orders that overreach can be found invalid and blocked. The president can’t just use laws as a suggestion.

Melatonin gummies? Those count as “drugs”? I thought they were considered supplements like vitamins and stuff.

Would property taxes actually do much? They’re so little even in high property-tax states that I think you’d need to do a lot more than that to FORCE rich people to utilize their other properties. High taxes would potentially push more costs on renters. Maybe we should just outlaw having more than 1 or 2 homes… including for real estate companies and banks :)