Just like a toddler stuck in the “no!” phase.
Remember: The world is still a big, mysterious place to your toddler, and he feels pretty powerless in it. Saying no is a normal, healthy way for him to feel as if he has some control.
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[quote=“generic_name, post:30, topic:92742, full:true”]
So what is “The Culture War”?[/quote]
It’s a conflict generated by TPTB, in response to the New Deal and other such expressions of democracy which served to reduce wealth disparity in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Powerful think tanks like Rand formed or evolved to best serve the interests of the wealthiest entities, who for some reason can’t abide the idea of maximising human potential, preferring instead to minimise it. These parasitic scum seem happy to be a bloated tic on a corpse.
Anyway, I digress… these filthy fucks obviously control a shocking amount of resources, some portion of which they invest in retaining and increasing that power. The hearts and minds of the authoritarian subset of the populace is low-hanging fruit, and they’ve been coddled and caressed lovingly for decades now by cable news and talkback radio stooges. It’s not hard to see an agenda behind depriving countless communities of access to quality education and healthcare in order to create a criminal underclass that can be completely disenfranchised, and easily demonised by further swathes of uneducated masses who’ll buy this shit because they’re white. Or attacking the basis of higher education from the inside, gutting the infrastrucutre that creates young radicals to create vocational sausage factories. A privately-run movie rating body that’s a defacto bit of government. Etc. Every important institution is tainted by these scum.
I mean, if conservatives just want to always be at war with liberals then there is no solution here.
You can’t smell the coffee because the writing’s been on the wall your whole life. Yes, a thousand times yes, that’s what’s happening here. ‘Culture war’ as uttered by those on the right is never in reference to the decades-long onslaught that’s been waged by the scum; it’s always in reference to what amounts to rearguard guerilla tactics, exercised mainly by lonely heroes. The authoritarian contingent of the populace is just like these guys:
Fuck them, and in particular, fuck their evil masters. It’s past time to stop turning the other cheek to let these mindless fucking zombies make us ‘butthurt’ yet again. If you ask me, we should give no quarter. They’re fucking un-people.
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“Everyone who will actually be taking to people should take French or Spanish, how are the Russian and German teachers going to get students?”
“I’ve got an idea, but it involves engineers, we just need a logical reason…”
“Nope, just clear instructions!”
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I don’t speak a word of French, and never needed to. On the other hand, German has served me well, but not nearly as much as Spanish.
Haven’t yet tried to escape to Montreal?
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I’m in the middle of nowhere in the US.
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Have you never consumed a glass of champagne?
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I have, but I’m not much of a wine snob. I don’t pronounce the names of wines in their actual French (or Italian, or whatever) pronunciations. I pronounce “champagne” like the college town in Illinois.
Technically, there are individual French words that I know, but I’m far from conversant in French. I understand close to zero French.
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We’re just giving you a little bit of a hard time because of this:
There’s a boatload of appropriated French words in English.
Incidentally, if you speak one Romance language, picking up any of the others shouldn’t be too difficult. They follow the same grammar and gender rules, and are all based in Latin. When I’m a bit more practiced with French (you don’t really lose it all if you don’t use it, but it certainly goes dormant), I can understand about half of Portuguese and 1/3 of Italian or Spanish.
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Des Moines?
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Detroit?
[edt] Krike, we’re gettin’ off topic.
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The same thing can be said for practically every other language.
I do pretty well with Spanish, and a little bit in Italian, but I can’t understand Portuguese unless it’s written down. I don’t understand French either way, although there might be a word here or there that I can recognize just from similarity to Spanish. If I tried to speak French, my accent would be incomprehensible.
I should see how I do with Romanian. Probably the same as French. I can probably recognize a word here or there, but it would be largely incomprehensible to me.
Also pointing out the obvious that English is a Germanic language and not a Romance language.
I tend to agree, from personal experience. Some people say that it is use-it-or-lose-it, and that one can’t learn a language after age 18 or after age 12 or age 4 or whatever, but I think people can learn languages a lot easier than that. I know many people who speak fluent English despite having learned it as adults. Practice does improve fluency, but I think lack of practice just makes the fluency go dormant, just from past experience.
Then there are languages like Polish. I haven’t spoken Polish in years, and can still understand it, but it’s so grammatically complex that if I were to speak it, I’d just have to wing it and hope I’m making sense. There are too many rules for me to consciously think about, so I have to go by feel.
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A friend of mine is trying to give up smoking, and in some book he read they posit that since smoking elevates endorphins you can try to mitigate the withdrawal by “getting angry” since that will also boost endorphins (it sounded like they recommend getting angry at cigarettes, which is pretty funny.)
I’m not sure I completely buy that, but when he said it the first thing I thought of was people I know who listen to talk radio all day. And I’ve seen some rants on youtube that are pretty unhinged, I can definitely see these guys getting a rush from it.
There probably isnt any way to reason with people like this.
My own landlord said something the other day about how “liberals need to get over it, after all, conservatives shut up and got over it after Obama was elected!” – it’s as if the Tea Party never existed, facts and logic don’t apply, reality is whatever you feel like.
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Wouldn’t
DA TWA
be closer?
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If Carlisle United appointed Paulo Di Canio (Mussolini loving fascist, sometimes played and coached football) as manager, I would refuse to support them until he left.
I suppose that means that I have more integrity than anyone who voted for Trump just because he had an (R) next to his name.
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[quote=“IronEdithKidd, post:69, topic:92742, full:true”]Incidentally, if you speak one Romance language, picking up any of the others shouldn’t be too difficult. They follow the same grammar and gender rules, and are all based in Latin. When I’m a bit more practiced with French (you don’t really lose it all if you don’t use it, but it certainly goes dormant), I can understand about half of Portuguese and 1/3 of Italian or Spanish.
[/quote]
I’ve noticed this too. While my Spanish is over 30 years rusty, I can still read it well, and, if written, I can usually puzzle out Portuguese, Italian, or French (in best-to-worst order of comprehensibility). I’d be able to cope with Québec highway signs, should I ever take a road trip that way.
On the other hand, tuning into a Spanish-language TV broadcast is a different story. I’ve very, very recently started following Mexican football, and (aside from just now starting to learn Spanish soccer terminology) can’t follow the announcers all that well (and when I can follow it, I wouldn’t be able to translate it into English at all). I still haven’t picked a team.
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Yes. I speak a small amount of French tolerably well. I was listening to CBC radio news one day, when they played a clip–most of which I understood–of someone speaking French with an extremely odd accent.
Once the clip was over the newsreader pointed out that the clip was in Spanish…
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My landlord today was yelling about how “Obama awarded himself a medal!”
So I had to do the google, apparently this originates from Breitbart and is spreading among conservatives, I’m not sure it’s got any traction outside those circles. And, of course, it’s bogus. But hey, “let’s get ANGRY today!”
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