Oceans Yet to Burn

slartibartfastibast

I was trying to ask Google why Japanese prefectures are called prefectures and I accidentally a racism:

I think the hilarity comes partly from the fact that when I stop the question at “Why are ___nese…” before I get to a noun, there is still a broken English nounification of the adjective that can happen if your standards are lax enough. And anywhere that you can ask “Why are Chinese smart?” without getting corrected on your grammar is probably also a place where you won’t get corrected on your racism. You have to be extra smart and well educated and enlightened to realize that everyone is definitely exactly the same everywhere.

mitigatedchaos

Well, like, is it technically incorrect grammar?

In English, we put the plural status as part of the noun, but the Japanese language uses things like counters and the noun 日本人 does not actually specify whether you are referring to one or more Japanese people, as “neko” does not specify the number of cats, and so on. Japanese also doesn’t have an a/an/the attached to the noun.

So, if we adopt either a descriptivist mindset or some sort of cultural prescriptivist mindset, it could be argued that Japanese/Japanese is valid just as ninja/ninja and German/Germans. That also brings up that there is no simple plural form such as “Germans”, and I don’t think anyone anywhere will approve of “Japaneses”. (Wow, “Japaneses” sounds really racist.)

So I guess it’s down to whether the listeners/readers socially approve of it, much like “Brits” is okay, but “Japs” and “Nps” were both part of pretty damned racist WW2 propaganda and are thus permanently prohibited, even though all three are just shortenings of national names.

slartibartfastibast

“Paki” bad. “Bikey” good.

mitigatedchaos

Let’s just refer to every nationality as they refer to themselves in their own countries, for cultural respect. Sure, it will feel weird saying “nihonjin” without saying “wa”, and everyone else will look at you like you’re Steve Naruto Midnight Raven the Ultraweeb, final boss of the figurine and dakimakura dungeon,

Wait, where was I going with this?

Oh, right, to avoid further confusion, by decree of the International Society for Metrification, residents of the United States of America shall now be known as either United Statesians or Unionese,

shtpost

argumate

blackblocberniebros

I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.

ranma-official

Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.

Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.

what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable

we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them

argumate

If children vote the same as their parents that doesn’t exactly seem unfair, given that their parents are trusted rightly or wrongly with other aspects of their well-being. And if it’s a secret ballot, they can rebel as much as they like when they feel the inclination to do so.

Plus is it really that difficult to find a 14 year old that is more politically savvy than the average 30 year old?

mitigatedchaos

I was 14 once and I certainly wouldn’t give my 14 year old self the vote. 14yo Miti did not understand much about war. 18yo Miti had far sounder judgment on such matters.

Source: blackblocberniebros politics

slartibartfastibast

I was trying to ask Google why Japanese prefectures are called prefectures and I accidentally a racism:

I think the hilarity comes partly from the fact that when I stop the question at “Why are ___nese…” before I get to a noun, there is still a broken English nounification of the adjective that can happen if your standards are lax enough. And anywhere that you can ask “Why are Chinese smart?” without getting corrected on your grammar is probably also a place where you won’t get corrected on your racism. You have to be extra smart and well educated and enlightened to realize that everyone is definitely exactly the same everywhere.

mitigatedchaos

Well, like, is it technically incorrect grammar?

In English, we put the plural status as part of the noun, but the Japanese language uses things like counters and the noun 日本人 does not actually specify whether you are referring to one or more Japanese people, as “neko” does not specify the number of cats, and so on. Japanese also doesn’t have an a/an/the attached to the noun.

So, if we adopt either a descriptivist mindset or some sort of cultural prescriptivist mindset, it could be argued that Japanese/Japanese is valid just as ninja/ninja and German/Germans. That also brings up that there is no simple plural form such as “Germans”, and I don’t think anyone anywhere will approve of “Japaneses”. (Wow, “Japaneses” sounds really racist.)

So I guess it’s down to whether the listeners/readers socially approve of it, much like “Brits” is okay, but “Japs” and “Nps” were both part of pretty damned racist WW2 propaganda and are thus permanently prohibited, even though all three are just shortenings of national names.

race politics slurs cw

ranma-official

blackblocberniebros

What’s sealioning?

ranma-official

it’s when you’re discussing how much you hate all members of group A and a person from group A is like “hold up, what?”

mitigatedchaos

Okay, I laughed at that one.

To answer OP, the term is one of those SJ terms that is so easily prone to abuse that it’s poor epistemic or political hygeine or something to use it, because it can basically be used to dismiss the outgroup defending themselves.

Source: blackblocberniebros politics

funereal-disease

elucubrare

if you were a villain, what kind of villain would you be?

elucubrare

I’m definitely “I’m taking over the world because under my control it would be perfect”

earlgraytay

I’m the “mostly in it for the fashion and the Depraved Bisexuality” kind.

lizardtitties

I’m absolutely the “been pushed too far by you assholes” kind

funereal-disease

I’m the “taking logic to a horrifyingly inhuman extent” kind

mitigatedchaos

Joke’s on you. I’m already a villain and I’ve tricked you all into following my blog.

As soon as North America is under my control, I’ll rebuild the NAU and show the Chinese and the Russians the true meaning of the words “continent-spanning superstate”.

Source: elucubrare shtpost chronofelony

argumate

You don’t need to be female to enjoy Wonder Woman any more than you need to be male to enjoy Captain America or a robot to enjoy WALL-E, but it’s amusing to consider identity based advertising anyway.

“fellas, finally a superhero movie you can watch without your wife nagging you!”

“tired of buff male superhero homoeroticism? how about hot lady island!”

“a woman can be just as good as a man… at dealing out violence and mayhem!”

mitigatedchaos

I’ll ‘ave you know I only watch movies where the main character is my exact permutation of race, sex, internal gender identity and struggles thereof, neurotype, personal hobbies, height within 2cm and weight within +/- 2 grams.

Anything else is just too unrelatable.

shtpost

xhxhxhx

collapsedsquid reblogged your post: After that exchange with @raginrayguns over the…

Do you think that’s because it’s a smaller island with a lot fewer people on it maybe?

no, not really

collapsedsquid

I’m not sure what your point is there. You’re comparing different islands in a far off locations in a different state with different internal politics to tell me what exactly?

xhxhxhx

the idea that “a smaller island with a lot fewer people on it” would have some sort of mortality advantage doesn’t have any basis in fact, collapsedsquid, and I’m not sure where you got it from

Malta and Cyprus certainly didn’t get any sort of mortality boost just because they were small islands with few people on them

mitigatedchaos

You can make a lot of systems work if they’re small enough that might not scale otherwise. (Singapore is small. Mauritius is small. Hong Kong is small. Norway is small.)

Though in this case it isn’t really the causative factor, IMO.

He might otherwise be arguing about restoration of political unity in China or something along those lines.

politics

collapsedsquid

xhxhxhx

I was bored so I wanted to do a ballpark estimate for the excess deaths resulting from the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, assuming that a counterfactual Nationalist China would have the crude death rates of Taiwan rather than the crude death rates of China between 1953 and 1979.

It’s about 158 to 161 million.

Now, that isn’t appropriate or fair. It’s not appropriate because CDRs aren’t comparable across populations with different age structures – once you get to the 1980s It’s unfair because Taiwan had lower CDRs than Mainland China when the comparison started.

We can also ask the question of how rapidly the Nationalists and Communists reduced its mortality from the same starting point. Because the Nationalists had 18 deaths per 1,000 in 1947, we might as well start there; the Communists had the same death rate a decade later, in 1957. So what happens if we start the clock running in 1957? How does that look?

Not great for the Communists. The Communists still have about 80 million excess deaths between 1957 and 1979, of which about 39 million are from period between 1958 and 1961.

Well, I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

argumate

hey you can’t make an omelette without killing fifty million people

collapsedsquid

Like others, Ryan reasonably selects as Exhibit A of the criminal indictment the Chinese famines of 1958-61, with a death toll of 25-40 million, he reports, a sizeable chunk of the 100 million corpses the “recording angels” attribute to “Communism” (whatever that is, but let us use the conventional term). The terrible atrocity fully merits the harsh condemnation it has received for many years, renewed here. It is, furthermore, proper to attribute the famine to Communism. That conclusion was established most authoritatively in the work of economist Amartya Sen, whose comparison of the Chinese famine to the record of democratic India received particular attention when he won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.
Writing in the early 1980s, Sen observed that India had suffered no such famine. He attributed the India-China difference to India’s “political system of adversarial journalism and opposition,” while in contrast, China’s totalitarian regime suffered from “misinformation” that undercut a serious response, and there was “little political pressure” from opposition groups and an informed public (Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action, 1989; they estimate deaths at 16.5 to 29.5 million).
The example stands as a dramatic “criminal indictment” of totalitarian Communism, exactly as Ryan writes. But before closing the book on the indictment we might want to turn to the other half of Sen’s India-China comparison, which somehow never seems to surface despite the emphasis Sen placed on it. He observes that India and China had “similarities that were quite striking” when development planning began 50 years ago, including death rates. “But there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India” (in education and other social indicators as well). He estimates the excess of mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame,” 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).
In both cases, the outcomes have to do with the “ideological predispositions” of the political systems: for China, relatively equitable distribution of medical resources, including rural health services, and public distribution of food, all lacking in India. This was before 1979, when “the downward trend in mortality [in China] has been at least halted, and possibly reversed,” thanks to the market reforms instituted that year.
Overcoming amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally acceptable half. We therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist “experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the “colossal, wholly failed…experiment” of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone.

That’s Noam Chomsky’s point.

collapsedsquid

xhxhxhx: right, but Taiwan seems to have managed it without the surplus corpses

Do you think that’s because it’s a smaller island with a lot fewer people on it maybe?

mitigatedchaos

Or, just gonna put this out here,

The cultural starting conditions between China and India are not the same.

We’re supposed to consider that irrelevant because all cultures are equal and human beings are just economybots, but… have you observed the records for overseas Chinese as compared to other populations?

Source: xhxhxhx the invisible fist the red hammer

collapsedsquid

disexplications

“I just wanted to print out a copy of my resume. Now I have these soldiers in my house and they won’t leave”

collapsedsquid

In 3-d printing future, the government will hijack your printer and use it to print drone soldiers.

mitigatedchaos

No lie, I was planning to use a version of that as a plot element once upon a time.

Source: disexplications mitigated future mitigated fiction

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

ElectronConf Seattle 2017