There’s the one about a fan, but that’s also kind of about a girl

Right, which is why it’s good that they’re not trusting meta. They’re hunted and it would be very easy to find them if they were organizing over Facebook.

Right, that was my point. There are leftists in Israel who aren’t Zionist (because Zionist leftist is an oxymoron), they’re just young/dependent enough to not be able to leave yet.

Exactly, it’s good they’re not trying to rely on meta to do any planning

I was teaching my native English speaking students German and explained that woher and wohin are like whence and whither, and the looks of utter unrecognition made me realize I was doing this. I tried for a moment with “thence and thither? Hence and hither?” And 4/7 knew “hence,” but that was it, and it’s not really used in the same sense as the others, anyway (I mean, it is, but it’s metaphoric and most people saying it probably aren’t thinking of it in that sense).

True, but there are leftist youths who can’t escape yet.

Same for projectile vomiting. Side note: don’t use iron dissolving tablets as a mixer for spiced rum, even in a hurricane.

Listen, I too like the concept of a cruise- but we clearly can’t have them. They’re too bad for the environment and our immune systems, plus they exploit the hell out of their staff. It would be cool to have a resort that travels to different landmarks or brings you down to Antarctica, but we obviously aren’t responsible enough for them.

Let’s just stop.

My dad used to work at a gun counter near the state border (he’s definitely not representative of the country as a whole, this is just an anecdote I like) and two uniformed cops from the neighboring state came in wanting to buy a gun. He asked if they had gun permits for our state, and when they looked at him incredulously, he said he’d never forgive himself if he fell for so obvious a sting. He said it was somewhat tense, but they left without too much of a fuss

It’s wild that you’re just allowed to destroy evidence that a relative committed a crime

Nobody asked for you to do that, they asked for your advice, which you provided.

Why does your belief matter here?

Russia has an infamously capable propaganda sector and Peruvians have seen the bad side of US-American and European empires. It doesn’t strike me as too unreasonable that a desperate person could be convinced that news sources from those countries can’t be trusted and the Russian media can.

calling on citizens to steer clear of the area and follow the instructions of the emergency services on the scene.

“Citizens” twigged for me, but the original says “residents and pedestrians,” weird. DW should have perfectly capable translators for English, but they also treat police as a singular later in the article. I wonder if that’s a result of AI translation or if they’re just under extreme deadline pressure.

That chancellor is in Central Europe.

it just makes me look bitter and angry … which, as a person, I try not to be.

Just as an aside- I don’t pay a lot of attention to usernames, but I have strong associations with yours and thoughtfulness. You seem like you try to understand your emotions, and those of others, which doesn’t really line up well with bitter and angry.

Sorry if that’s too much, but there are a few usernames that stick out as notably reasonable to me and yours is one of them.

Thank you for a normal answer that has a point.

Thank you for saying that. It’s basically impossible to discuss China normally on here with anyone. I don’t think China is inherently a greater evil than any other huge world power. They’re more reasonable and considered than most of the others imo (edit: this originally said “any of the others,” and while I do think China thinks slightly longer term than the EU, I don’t think the EU is especially unreasonable or unconsidered, so I changed it to most), but they don’t have the same goals that I would have, and I think they’re more oppressive than I would like, but I think they also get a lot more shit from the world than other countries do (for example, the USA has been operating camps where immigrant women are occasionally sterilized without their consent or knowledge since Obama- that’s genocide, but nobody cared about it until trump).

I haven’t encountered many other people who are somewhat neutral about China, so I seem to get alternately painted as a Sinophobe and as a shill for Xi.

Do you feel these people that speak a different German dialect are being genocided by the German government?

Not exactly. Genocide is a really serious accusation, and I don’t think it can happen without intent (same for ethnic cleansing). I do think that as a result of the actions of the German government, the German people (and the world as a whole) have lost aspects of their culture that they can’t get back.

There’s always going to be a trade off between cultural diversity and efficiency, and I think Germany then and China now are both focused on efficiency. I can’t even blame them, but I do think there are ways to ensure everyone can achieve competence in a common language without losing their native languages.

Actually, I think that the universality of written Chinese was a probably enough for general national communication, but it does leave people less able to frictionlessly move around (and of course, the implementation of a unified writing system erased other aspects of culture, but that’s a sunk cost).

If I were designing the system, I’d have students attend bilingual schools, so that some classes would be held in Mandarin/Standard German, and I’d have some classes held in the local dialect. That’s more work, but it’s also a really good way to celebrate the culture associated with the dialect. Nowadays in Germany, speaking with a strong dialect is strongly associated with a lack of education, but if people literally learned about and regularly discussed academic subjects in those dialects, people would form new associations.

I think people don’t romanticize enough. Yes, the world is full of horrors, and they seem to be impossible for people to fix, but there is a lot of wonder that surrounds us.

Things in my life that are “normal” and in my opinion underromanticized: 1) How the hell do I live with a creature that doesn’t speak and we are able to not only coexist without problems, but we comfort each other and enjoy spending time together? 2) My husband and I were born 6k km apart, and yet we are pretty perfectly matched for each other. 3) I have survived for as long as I have because of a network of humans who would never know me, and who tried to build systems and devices to improve the world beyond their direct benefit.

Sometimes I like to imagine a monologue from David Attenborough describing human societies the way he would a termite colony- we’re so specialized and cooperative! In response to an earthquake in Venezuela, dozens of other countries sent teams of rescuers- as kind as that is, it’s not exactly a surprise. When I about how awed I would be to hear that termites do that for neighboring conspecific colonies though, it puts it in perspective.

I don’t think the US would provide a counterpart for MAD with Russia right now, but the UK or France could. Obviously the other nuclear powers might get involved as well, but a nuke in Ukraine is going to directly impact the UK and France, whereas it might only have an indirect effect on the others.

I think the French government is more likely to, but I don’t know how their population would react to that. I live in but am not from the west of Germany, and people here have a surprisingly long memory about Russia (they also have a long memory about their own history and are grateful to Russia for ending Nazism, it’s just tempered by the several hundred years of history before the twentieth century and by the perceived brutality of the Soviet military, possibly due to propaganda,). Most Germans I talk to generally don’t want to go to war, but if they were going to, they’d want to fight Russia.

My guess would be that France would likely be similar, but I don’t know.

There are older Germans who have been living here for generations and don’t speak standard German. Germans learn it in school now, but not every school insisted on Hochdeutsch in the post-war period, especially in more rural areas.

Generally they all understand standard German, but not all of them can produce it. Their children can often understand and produce both their dialect and standard German, but their grandchildren have mostly lost the ability to produce the dialect.

It’s really sad to lose the diversity of dialects, and it’s a direct result of enforcing a standardized German dialect in schools and government institutions.

China is geographically massive in comparison to Germany and has that much more to lose.