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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • Learning a second language AND professionally teaching English to speakers of said language. English is not broken. English is actually much better than many alternatives. We don’t need to worry about noun gender. We don’t have to worry about tones. We have precise ways to indicate number and time. Formality levels are not baked into word construction. The pronunciation of words can generally be inferred from the spelling, despite learning this skill being a little complicated— but that complicated nature even has its usefulness.

    We rag on English, but it is by far not the worse out there, not even close. It’s just contempt for the familiar.



  • I would bet on it being a little bit (well, a lot) of ablism mixed with people wanting only answers that they personally can use. Which circles back on the ableism… people don’t want to believe that they could suddenly join this minority group at any time.

    I had to be in a wheelchair for a year. The internalized shame from pervasive background ableism is horrible.






  • A 1-800 number is immune to long distance charges, free to call by anyone in the US— the owner of the 800 number pays any fees associated with the call. Traditionally, 800 numbers are owned by companies in order to sell stuff. (The 1- portion of a 1-800 number means that it’s a long distance call… which was a thing when I was growing up in the 80s/90s, but basically isn’t a thing anymore in the age of cellphones)

    The opposite of an 800 number is a 900 number. The person calling a 900 number has to pay, usually by minute, and most of that money goes to the owner of the 900 number. Famously used for phone sex lines.




  • PTSD is awful. Really really awful, and I speak from personal experience. Now, I know every case of PTSD is different in terms of triggers and what happens when triggered… but from what I know of the mental disorder that I have, I find it hard to imagine being forced by the mental illness to drink and drive drunk. I can imagine drinking to avoid the results of triggers, but from my perspective, that still doesn’t absolve the choice of drunk driving.

    Resisting arrest I can kinda see, depending on the exact form of how he manifests PTSD. My own version is more panic and pass out than get violent, but I know training can make you go the other way. But that still brings us back to drunk driving. I don’t think someone with PTSD is any different than any other normal person when it comes to not getting into the driver’s seat after imbibing.

    That’s just not how ptsd works, please correct me if my limited perspective is flawed here.



  • It’s a failure of properly understanding intersectionality. Intersectionality says that the combination of societal status does not equal the sum of each individual status, but may in fact be its own unique thing. A black woman has unique challenges and experiences even compared with “women” in general, or “black people” in general, even though black women are black, and are women. This is a weird idea and hard for most people to wrap their heads around, so it’s not surprising that this comes up.

    Jews (of which I am one) have a particularly troublesome social status intersection that creates a unique combination that leads to some troubling conclusions for modern left leaning Americans.

    Consider the following two premises: oppressors, that is, the strong, should be fought against to prevent the weak from harm. And white people have historically been the oppressors.

    Hopefully, these two statements are non-controversial and make sense.

    Then come Jews, who, apart from their Jewishness, are basically considered white in the modern day. So jews are oppressors and must be fought against to protect the weak, right?

    Ah… but there’s a nasty historical coincidence— the oppression against the jews has always been that they are secretly powerful and oppressing others. The elder protocols of Zion and other nonsense permeates the culture. Hundreds of years of jews being the evil bankers (because we were forbidden from having any other job). Constantly given garbage and unfavorable positions, and any success we reap from that is then used as ammo against us.

    So the intersection of whiteness and Jewishness creates a self-reinforcing messy cycle of increasing hatred that is really hard to untangle.



  • Hey, I’m pretty darn leftist (democratic socialist, not tankie) and pretty opposed to the current state of affairs regarding CEOs, so I feel this is targeted at me… and yet totally misrepresents the position.

    CEOs are not useless. CEOs absolutely set the “tone at the top” and create the entire culture for a company. At the same time, CEOs do not work 400 times harder than the average worker, yet that is what they are paid. CEOs are also capable of doing great abuse to those beneath them, and have next to zero accountability for it. CEOs are kings in their little fiefdoms, and I say down with all monarchy. Note that “down with kings” does not mean “down with leaders”, nor does it say or even imply that kings aren’t leaders, or that leadership is useless to have.