English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Mitch

12:00 AM

@M.A.R. is 'parastar' right for Farsi?

M.A.R.

Yep

'parast' means 'to worship' now, it's possible it meant something else before

(Like a millennia ago)

@Mitch hospital sister, hmm

Hmm, we also have "sarparast", "sar" being head and "parast" being parast, which can both mean "leader" and more commonly "[legal] parent"

So this meaning of "parast", 'to look after' probably persists in a few places still.

Mitch

OK, in Farsi, what do you call the two sides in WWII?

M.A.R.

@Mitch "Allies" and "Allies". Mottahedin and mottafeghin

Mitch

Allies vs Axis

@M.A.R. They look the same in English

M.A.R.

Mottafeg is Arabic and it's honestly kinda weird here. We don't use it elsewhere. It's the Allies in English

@Mitch do they now

Mitch

12:07 AM

wait..so which is which? (and what is it in Farsi script)

M.A.R.

Mottahed is more commonly used in Persian, meaning "united", also often used when talking about nations and stuff

The Axis

So you could say the label for the Axis conveys more of the meaning of "Allies"

Which is kinda interesting. Iran was leaning towards Germany, right?

Even though we obviously weren't in a state to do jack shit

@Mitch متفقین = Allies, متحدین = The Axis

Out of the context of WWII, "allies" would be متحدین

Russia's allies = متحدین روسیه

RegDwigнt

12:26 AM

@Robusto yes, the key term being "another or others". Not with "oneself", as everyone on that page suggests, implies, or flat out states.

The Allies are still called the Allies in German, for both wars. Even though they really sucked at helping either Hitler or Wilhelm II.

Though for WWI the more common term in German is the Entente. But that only adds insult to injury, because it's just the French word for allies. As opposed to "allies", which is also a French word for allies.

And the French didn't help the German effort at all. Despite being called "allies" by the Germans, in French.

@Cerberus crazy dog, it's exactly the other way round. Generally, one tends to be a bit more familiar with things one is interested in.

Cerberus

12:47 AM

@Mitch Nice.

They seem to be ignoring the root "med"?

@Mitch Yes, but we know nothing about them.

And most states will not correlate with a single language.

@RegDwigнt Or...it is a self-reinforcing circle!

RegDwigнt

Why is Germany half green?

It's only sister here.

Cerberus

@Mitch They misspole the Dutch.

RegDwigнt

You can have sick sister, but the legend says green is "sick" + "caring", not "sick" + "sister".

Cerberus

It is verpleegster.

RegDwigнt

Oh I only just realized the words are printed on the map.

Duh.

Well, pfleger is a completely different thing.

Those are caring for the elderly.

They are not nurses. It does not require medical education.

Cerberus

12:51 AM

Yeah, Germany needs more stripes.

Oh.

RegDwigнt

If I wipe your ass, I'm a pfleger. That doesn't make me a nurse.

When military service went from mandatory to voluntary, you still had to do a civil service instead. For most teens, that meant being Altenpfleger for a year.

A teen fresh out of school doing community service is not a nurse.

Also I find it cute how those idiots couldn't even get Russian right. That disqualifies the map right there.

I have to assume they put the same amount of care, or maybe even less, into researching the languages nobody at all is familiar with, like Irish or Albanian.

Cerberus

So are you saying Krankenpfleger is incorrect?

RegDwigнt

I am saying more than that. I'm saying it's not only incorrect by my definition, but indeed by the map's own, "care for the sick".

Those people are not sick. They just require assistance for any reason at all. Including just plain loneliness.

Cerberus

OK you kept talking about pfleger, so that includes Krankenpfleger.

Could it be a matter of old-fashioned language?

If not, it means there are errors in at least three languages at least...

RegDwigнt

@Cerberus I don't think so. I think if anything it's the opposite. A very current and very technical distinction. Old-fashioned would be just Schwester.

Nobody on the fields of Verdun or Kursk would have called for a Pfleger.

Anyway. Why they spell Russian wrong. That bugs me more than anything else.

And what the fuck is Infirmièr-E and Infirmièr-A for French.

Those people are clueless about language.

Cerberus

1:07 AM

Noted.

Perhaps there is infirmièra in Occitan dialects?

RegDwigнt

No I mean the hyphen. The fuck is the hyphen for.

For Portuguese and Italian they use a slash.

They literally just copypasted whatever without proofreading or unifying it.

Cerberus

Yeah I don't know.

RegDwigнt

Haha.

Nice colors tho.

Especially for the 10% of us with red-green blindness.

Epic fail on all accounts.

Next please.

Cerberus

Now, now, I still think the map is nice.

RegDwigнt

Well. To the same extent that any map is nice.

Cerberus

1:13 AM

Isn't it?

RegDwigнt

Yes I especially like the flat maps because they show the world as it is.

All those curved thingies just to save space, meh.

Cerberus

Fake.

RegDwigнt

Give me a big flat map the size of the world. Now that is marvellous.

Cerberus

Yeah.

RegDwigнt

Would look at it all day.

Cerberus

1:14 AM

Globular maps are for socialists.

People who take care of the sick.

RegDwigнt

Yes. They are very shortsighted like that.

Look how beautiful.

So flat.

Oh, there's even a more detailed version!

Gorgeous.

Cerberus

@RegDwigнt I was watching a reality show the other day, in which there was a Dutch flat-Earther.

He believed Antarctica was a circular land mass around the Earth.

So your map is wrong.

RegDwigнt

Well, your whole country is literally named "flat earth".

@Cerberus he can use the second map, which as I said is more detailed. The Antarctis is represented by the black-and-white dashed line around the perimeter, as you will notice.

The white is for snow and the black for the penguins.

Cerberus

@RegDwigнt Touché.

@RegDwigнt That looks lovely.

And desirable.

No Trump.

Nor the other crap from there.

RegDwigнt

1:30 AM

@Cerberus I think he is represented by the word congo in the middle of the Sahara continent.

Cerberus

He is a river?

RegDwigнt

There's rivers in deserts?

I've never been.

Oh that thin line, that's just a continental cleft. He causes those wherever he stands.

He's about to divide Africa apart. We'll need a name for that. I suggest apartness.

What language do they use in Africa? Dutch maybe? I've never been. But let me look up Dutch for apartness just in case.

Cerberus

Separatie.

Or scheiding.

RegDwigнt

Hm. That's too sexual. Can't you build something from the English stem instead.

I think that'll sound much more neutral.

Cerberus

Aparthouding?

RegDwigнt

1:40 AM

Oh I like the sound of that. Just a bit of a mouthful. Maybe shorten it by, say, three letters?

Cerberus

Apartinge?

Or apartingh.

RegDwigнt

No, the English will pronounce those all wrong.

They don't know how to pronounce ge and gh.

Cerberus

-ing could be spelled like -ing(h)e in older Dutch.

Apartzijn?

RegDwigнt

Hm. I like the sound of the ij. But again nobody else knows what that sound is. Is there maybe an alternative way to spell that.

Maybe we can use some German suffix for that. Something like Gesundheit, maybe? That would have the additional bonus of sounding very healthy!

Cerberus

Well, we have lots of borrowed words from German, like dasein.

So apartsein?

tchrist

2:59 AM

@RegDwigнt The Nile, the Colorado, and the Río Grande/Bravo are all desert rivers.

user 6232128

3:13 AM

> Although most deserts are in basins with closed, or interior drainage, a few deserts are crossed by 'exotic' rivers that derive their water from outside the desert. Such rivers infiltrate soils and evaporate large amounts of water on their journeys through the deserts, but their volumes are such that they maintain their continuity. The Nile, the Colorado, and the Yellow are exotic rivers that flow through deserts to dellver thelr sediments to the sea.

tchrist

And then there's Lake Tahoe, with all its many rivers flowing into it from snowmelt in the high sierra. And just one leaving it, the Truckee River, to traverse the Black Rock Desert and dead-end into the great sink of Pyramid Lake.

user 6232128

How's the fire situation in your area?

tchrist

It snowed on it again. I believe they're in mop-up now.

user 6232128

That's literally very cool.

tchrist

outtherecolorado.com/news/…

The one close to me was 85% contained as of 3 days ago. It snowed hard yesterday.

That's the big one, that hit the park and killed people.

And sent Boulder's Air Quality Index to 600 briefly.

I think it ended up destroying some 250 homes, but many were secondary residences not primaries.

Hey look, North Dakota's doesn't violate spectral law like Colorado's does!

Colorado goes Red > Orange > Yellow > Blue > Green

North Dakota follows the rainbow. Don't tell them I said so though. :)

user 6232128

3:38 AM

:-)

I guess they're using the traffic light order.

tchrist

We don't have blue traffic lights.

Cerberus

Our traffic lights go red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

tchrist

Thus spake Sir Isaac Newton.

Cerberus

Did he?

user 6232128

yup

tchrist

3:43 AM

He invented indigo so that it could align with his mystical mumbo jumbo.

In Britain they go red, red-yellow, green, yellow, red.

user 6232128

he chose the mnemonic

tchrist

He wanted 7 stages.

Red-yellow is so you have a chance to put everything in the right gear and all.

Disengage the hand-brake. Get ready!

user 6232128

(7 plus or minus 2 ) is the "magic" number

tchrist

But since that Oct. 22 announcement, the daily infection total has more than doubled, and deaths have risen to more than 1,100 per day. If these trends go unfettered for more than 70 days, the United States’ official death tally could top 400,000 around Christmas, deaths might exceed 2,500 a day, and hospital wards across the country will be full.

Yeah, you know Trump will do nothing.

Cerberus

@tchrist Ah, that makes sense!

@tchrist Are any local hospitals full yet?

tchrist

3:54 AM

Where a co-worker of mine lives in Denver, the estimate is that 1 in 30 people there are walking around infected right now. He's my same age, and his wife has rheumatoid arthritis so immune issues. They just stay inside completely.

Faheem Mitha

That 90% effectiveness thing is based on quite small samples.

I don't understand why they are so confident.

38,955. Anyone know what the locations are?

tchrist

@Cerberus Depends where. Mostly not. Our governor gives them another 6–8 weeks. But in some states they're all already full, like in North Dakota. So the governor there is now allowing covid-positive nurses to keep working with covid patients provided the nurses are asymptomatic.

We've been taking their transfers.

Patients, not nurses.

Faheem Mitha

> For 90 percent of the volunteers who got the vaccine (as opposed to a placebo), SARS-CoV-2 infection did not occur for a study period of seven days.

tchrist

Seven days?

Faheem Mitha

@tchrist That's the article you linked to. The other articles I found were vaguer.

tchrist

3:57 AM

Oh I meant 4–6 weeks till we're full, including temporary field hositals.

Faheem Mitha

There doesn't seem to be much information available yet.

tchrist

@FaheemMitha What I meant is that I don't really know what that means in this context.

Faheem Mitha

@tchrist I think it means 7 days after the second dose.

> While the FDA and researchers worldwide await further details, the company’s numbers are encouraging. In an ongoing phase-three trial, 38,955 volunteers so far have received two doses of the vaccine. To date, 94 of them have become infected with SARS-CoV-2.

I'm not sure why this is considered statistically significant.

tchrist

I know they were first going to look at it when it hit 32 infections, as that was the lower bound for "statistical significance" for that group. But I don't have the math skills to know how they determined that.

I think the main significance they demonstrated this time is the proportion of placebo cases compared with vaccine cases, but I could be wrong.

Faheem Mitha

New cases in India appear to be dropping. My guess is that the offical numbers are grossly understated, to the point of being meaningless, and much of the population has been infected already. So the drop is probably real, in that some kind of herd immunity is taking hold. Plus Indians probably have better immunity than people in the West. At least in big cities.

Though that part is obviously a bit speculative. But viruses run rampant in Bombay all the time.

tchrist

4:03 AM

Why would they already have immunity to a novel virus?

That's not supposed to be possible.

BUT....

Faheem Mitha

@tchrist Not a very long time period, though. Statisticians like to model. Sometimes they take their models literally. As in, think that it reflects the truth.

@tchrist Better resistance, not immunity.

tchrist

There was a report today or yesterday (time zones) that showed that children who they know for sure never had SARS-CoV-2 exposure had some of the very same antibodies that that virus elicits.

Faheem Mitha

People here get hammered with a lot of different stuff. It's 25 million people in a small space, with a health care system that barely functions at the best of times.

tchrist

So that has to be from the common coronaviruses. What they don't understand is why they've only found this happening in young children, not teenagers or adults.

Faheem Mitha

I expect they have fairly well trained immune systems.

Cerberus

4:06 AM

@tchrist OK so the lax places are being saved by transfers to stricter places?

tchrist

@Cerberus "Saved".

Cerberus

Saved from having to deny access to hospitals to those who really need it?

tchrist

We've been accepting a LOT of transfers, apparently.

Yes, these people had to have a hospital bed, and there were none.

So they transferred them.

> The CBS4 report found that in recent weeks, COVID-19 patients from Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, Wyoming and Montana have been transferred to Colorado hospitals. Welch said about 25 COVID-19 patients have been moved from other states to Colorado hospitals which would amount to less than 3% of COVID -19 positive and suspected COVID-19 patients hospitalized in Colorado.

That's from November 5th.

Cerberus

I see.

I think Germany accepted a similar number from us during the first wave.

tchrist

Right, I remember that.

Cerberus

4:10 AM

Though in the end it was (barely) unnecessary.

We refused planned transfers from Belgium during the second wave (though emergency transfers are always accepted).

Which seems...harsh.

"Refused": we may still be refusing them.

tchrist

> “Hospital census levels and ability to accept transfers changes constantly”, said Welch, “sometimes even within the hour. So requests are evaluated continuously based on current capacity and capability to provide the care that an individual patient needs.”

Cerberus

Though I think the second wave is also past its peak in Belgium.

tchrist

Yes, it's entirely up to the hospital they'd go to whether they can accept them.

> One Colorado emergency room doctor, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue, suggested to CBS4 the capacity issues for hospitals may not be limited to ICU beds and ventilators but to manpower.

Cerberus

Yes, of course.

tchrist

Yes, we're starting to hear that happening in the worst-hit places. Just no medical staff left.

Cerberus

4:13 AM

A 'bed' really means a properly staffed and furnished bed.

An IC bed means one with ventilator, computer, specially trained IC nurse, etc.

tchrist

You need one ICU nurse per pair of ventilated beds, max.

yeah

Respiratory specialists.

Cerberus

I think it's normally one nurse per IC bed, one per two in an emergency.

tchrist

Yes, that's the emergency loading.

Cerberus

Anything over 2 means excess deaths.

On average.

tchrist

And it's not like they work 24-hour shifts, or at least, should.

I've seen them work 16-18.

Cerberus

4:16 AM

Yes, I think a hospital needs many more IC nurses than the number of IC patients they can house simultaneously for 24 hours?

tchrist

Absolutely.

Cerberus

Unless the "one nurse per bed" already accounts for that?

tchrist

Dunno.

Cerberus

It could be, one nurse available all the time, or one FTE.

That is a big difference.

200%.

No, more.

320%.

And that is assuming those nurses have no administrative tasks.

tchrist

Where'd the extra 20% come from?

Cerberus

4:19 AM

(7x24)/40 = 420%.

That's between working 24/7 and working 40 hours a week.

CowperKettle

Word of the day: soffit

tchrist

The entire country sent doctors and nurses to New York during their early surge. We aren't going to be able to do that this time. It's happening everywhere at once.

Cerberus

At least New York is still doing OK, or isn't it?

tchrist

@Cerberus I forgot about the weekend!

Cerberus

Heh.

tchrist

4:23 AM

@Cerberus Yes, but it's starting up there again.

Cerberus

OK.

Alas, the virus doesn't get the weekend off.

tchrist

> Coronavirus cases in New York are swiftly rising, and Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday that the city was “dangerously close” to a second wave that might mean more restrictions.

@Cerberus Also, the virus doesn't get tired of us the way we get tired of it.

Cerberus

@tchrist OK that still sounds moderate?

@tchrist Indeed not.

tchrist

> The number of new infections is swiftly rising, with more than 1,000 cases identified in the city for five days in a row, a level that last occurred in May, according to the state’s Department of Health. Just a month ago, daily cases were typically in the 500 to 700 range.

Hospitalizations and death rates are a small fraction of what they were at the height of the outbreak in the spring, and case count comparisons can be tricky, given that much more testing is occurring now. The test positivity rate in New York City is still well below that in neighboring states.

Remember that positivity-by-county map of Colorado I showed you maybe a week ago? Lots more red now today.

And those are two-week averages, too. Denver is at 10.9%, Boulder at 7.2%, but Summit County is at 17.2% positivity.

Boulder's hospitalizations are in somewhat better shape than Denver's.

Our two-week cumulative incidence rate is 504 cases per fortnight, theirs is 824.

Cerberus

Do you think new, stricter measures are needed?

I'm off to bed now, adeus.

tchrist

4:42 AM

@Cerberus Something has to change.

Nothing else has worked.

SmokeDetector

6:41 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Offensive body detected, potentially bad keyword in body (44): Meaning of "I never got to say that." by Yoon on english.SE

CowperKettle

9:27 AM

Word of the day: pilonidal cyst

user 6232128

Spelling of the day: Veterans day

> Veterans Day is largely intended to thank LIVING veterans for their service, to acknowledge that their contributions to our national security are appreciated, and to underscore the fact that all those who served

CowperKettle

Sinking of the Reuben James - Woody Guthrie

►

Guthrie was initially anti-war, because the followed the Communist party line. But when the USSR was attacked he quickly turned pro-war. At least if I recall it right. I read his biography 18 years ago.

He took part in the war by sailing in a liberty ship. Was torpedoed once or twice even.

CowperKettle

10:09 AM

Etymology of the day: pylorus (from Greek pyloros, literally "gatekeeper, porter," from pyle "gate" (see pylon) + ouros "watcher, guardian," from PIE root *wer- (3) "perceive, watch out for.")

CowperKettle

10:26 AM

"The efficiency of the Sputnik 5 vaccine is 92%" rg.ru/2020/11/11/…

My trust in this statement is 0%. It's based on only 20 cases of incident disease, and I distrust the process.

RegDwigнt

1:16 PM

@tchrist it bothers me a great deal that the gauge goes counterclock-wise.

Why would anybody do that.

Mitch

@M.A.R. nice...thanks for all that.

CowperKettle

Mitch

@M.A.R. Are those two fairly Arabic sounding? The endings sound Arabic to me.

@Cerberus At least that one we can figure out on our own though.

@RegDwigнt Most maps are made up.

On the other hand, they do get a lot correct. Like 'nurse'

CowperKettle

2:10 PM

A journalist from the city of Nizhny Novgorod has been fined 300 000 rubles for a joke about covid he made in April in his Telegram channel.

M.A.R.

2:48 PM

@Mitch Both have Arabic roots, Mottahed is also a common word in Persian. "-in" is a strictly Arabic plural marker, but many plurals with "-in" are also common in Persian too, so it's an undeniable part of Persian even though it's not analyzed to be part of Persian grammar. Plural markers in Persian are "-ha" and "-an" (/an/)

@CowperKettle Here's marvelous news from India

in The Screening Room, 2 hours ago, by A J

Censorship Of Netflix, Amazon, Hotstar & News Portal Starts; I&B Ministry Will Regulate Digital Content in India

The law of preservation of idiocy states that idiocy is not created or destroyed, but is only moving from one nation to another.

2

Overall, words that sound good with "-in" are often more common than their Persianized counterparts: Moslemin, Mas'oolin (responsible people / officials), Ma'asoomin (those without sin)

Robusto

3:06 PM

@M.A.R. I agree that it is not destroyed, but it's definitely spreading. Or perhaps it's always been there but we just haven't noticed all of it yet?

@Cerberus: I've encountered the word uitwaaien. The person who used it says it means "to spend some time in the wind" but Google Translate gives it as "get a breath of fresh air." My question: Is the word's usage mainly literal ("go outside") or figurative ("do something new/different")?

RegDwigнt

3:30 PM

@Mitch all maps are made up. No maps exist in the wild. Every map is a human invention.

Robusto

3:49 PM

@RegDwigнt NOU

Mitch

@RegDwigнt I'm thinking of a map whose scale is 1:1. Exact same scale as reality. But ... better.

Wait...I wasn't thinking of that.

I'm thinking of it now.

Robusto

> “I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.” —Steven Wright

CowperKettle

4:12 PM

It's such a pleasure to see the hysteria of Putinite propagandists:

They post such stuff in the interwebz

Robusto

@CowperKettle They should have a Trump one showing Putin doing the propping.

tchrist

@RegDwigнt Yeah, I was wondering if anybody would notice that. It's like how it's weird when the number-line is inverted so that the numbers increase as you move left and decrease as you move right; seems wrong.

I just have never gotten used to that ordering that swaps emerald and cyan.

tchrist

4:44 PM

> By the same token, if the public typically associates hard statutes with binding obligations, then using the hortatory statute with only precatory language creates confusion and ambiguity. If the public associates soft statutes with nonbinding obligations, then the soft statute will be superior to the hard hortatory statute because it will accomplish the same communicative ends, but avoid the confusion produced by using a hard statute.

I always initially read hortatory as being related to horticultural instead of to exhortation. Which is wrong, of course. No gardens involved.

And precatory sounds like it's related to sermons.

2

Specifically to prayers.

CowperKettle

Georgia is going to do a full manual recount, Twitter says

tchrist

@CowperKettle I saw that. Hope nobody's ends up getting caught red-handed.

> Etymology: < post-classical Latin precatorius relating to or expressing an entreaty (4th cent. in a grammatical text), expressing a wish (6th cent. in epistola precatoria, in legal context), either < classical Latin precātor suppliant, intercessor (< precāt-, past participial stem of precārī to pray (see precation n.) + -or -or suffix) + -ius, suffix forming adjectives, or < classical Latin precāt-, past participial stem of precārī to pray + -ōrius -ory suffix².

Funny how Italian came to use prego as they do.

CowperKettle

I's still highly against any use of voting by mail. I think it should be prohibited, even though I believe in generally good transparency of elections in the USA, due to the presence of a lot of activists.

Matt E. Эллен

5:01 PM

If you deny voting by mail you have to make allowances for people overseas (e.g. military) and people who can't move so well. You'll have to open polls for longer and possibly make polling day a national holiday

IMO voting by mail is less easy to subvert than voting online

CowperKettle

@MattE.Эллен Yes, there should be polling stations abroad. Voting by mail is highly corruptogenic. My sister worked as a volunteer observer at a voting station in New Delhi during the Russian presidential election of 2018, for instance. Not a big deal.

Matt E. Эллен

So, with voting abroad, do the voters get separated into their states, or how is that handled?

tchrist

@CowperKettle I do believe you misunderstand how it works.

CowperKettle

@MattE.Эллен I dunno. In Russia voting is conducted for the whole of Russia ))

Matt E. Эллен

@CowperKettle ah :D

tchrist

5:14 PM

@CowperKettle Really? I thought it was only conducted for the whole of Putin.

@CowperKettle Mail Ballot Security Features Primer: How Do Mail Ballot Systems Protect Against Vulnerabilities?

Mitch

5:37 PM

@tchrist I was going to make a quip about deprecatory being the opposite of precatory, but it turns out that is actually the case.

@tchrist left to right by increasing -frequency-

CowperKettle

@tchrist I have read it, and there is no description of how the main and the most apparent vulnerability is handled, namely the voting in presence of a person paying you money or having an authority over you.

Mitch

wavelength messes me up.

CowperKettle

The article says that mail voting is widespread in the US, and it's horrible.

Mitch

How about voting by shooting your gun into the air?

the loudest set wins

@CowperKettle I've heard that it sounds bad but in practice it has worked out really well.

user 6232128

Is there anyway to vote online, like by email?

Cerberus

6:12 PM

I doubt whether any country would allow Internet voting.

That would seem very, very, risky.

Computers can never be trusted.

@Robusto I would say it is only literal (though of course any expression can be used metaphorically in the right context).

@CowperKettle There is nothing which can prevent that if you vote outside the voting-booth.

But you'll need a mass effort involving a hundred thousand people in order to substantially influence election results that way; it's not easy.

And it will be discovered.

It's nothing like electronic voting, which could be mass-rigged by a single person.

And nobody might ever find out.

Robusto

@Cerberus Yes. But what I'm getting at is that you seem to be saying it's not a fixed trope, such as "get a breath of fresh air" is in English.

Cerberus

It is a fixed expression, but its meaning is literal.

Where literal is of course always relative.

When describing a person, it always means going outside to be exposed to wind.

Praesumably with beneficial effects.

Robusto

I see. Thanks.

Cerberus

You could use it for laundry, perhaps. Then it is even more literal.

Or at least simpler and with fewer implications.

CowperKettle

6:28 PM

@Cerberus In Russia, it works.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle It is discovered, so I would say it doesn't work.

CowperKettle

Yes, it is being discovered, but the persons who discover it have no power to do anything, because the court system in Russia is not independent.

Court litigations drag on for years and rarely result in correction of irregularities.

user 6232128

If enough people know, it can be stopped.

CowperKettle

All people know, but it is not stopped because people do nothing.

user 6232128

That's their choice

Cerberus

6:30 PM

@CowperKettle Yes: the problem is not the fraud itself, but the fact that the government commits it.

Using a different voting method would make little difference in such a situation, would it?

user 6232128

Freedom of choosing to do nothing

Xanne

@Mitch To me “in the wind” means having escaped captivity—not getting some air. Also in the wild.

CowperKettle

Try speaking about election fraud in a company of people in Russia. People just say "I'm not interested in politics". If you press them, they will act as if you are a nuisance and say "So what! Nothing can be changed! Go and make a revolution, and I will live a life".

Cerberus

Yes, of course.

Robusto

@user6232128 It's not exactly "freedom" when the alternative to doing nothing may threaten severe consequences, up to and including death.

Fuck with the bull you get the horns.

user 6232128

6:36 PM

Passive resistance was used successfully in the second largest country in the world to get "freedom."

Robusto

Yeah, and a lot of people died.

You're making my point for me. Are you brave enough to face death for a principle?

Xanne

@CowperKettle Citizen action—pollwatching—and appropriate legal and police support—is essential to fair elections. Although I don’t think there’s Internet voting, there are computer systems of coyrse that aggregate votes. A paper trail may be important.

user 6232128

"Freedom" is a principle.

Give it to me or give me death.

Xanne

Freedom is a relationship between people and governments, politically.

That was liberty.

Honest elections are a process, one continually changing.

user 6232128

The point is, are you willing to die for what you believe in?

Robusto

6:42 PM

Call me a coward, but I'd rather not have to make that choice.

Xanne

People have certainly done so.

@Robusto Thus, war as the failure of diplomacy. Or civility.

user 6232128

They kept Mandela in prison for 27 years.

Robusto

And death is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Look at North Korea, where people's entire families can be rounded up and put in concentration camps (a death sentence) for even minor infractions.

Where you might be brave enough to risk your own life, who would willingly risk the deaths of their children?

user 6232128

> "So what! Nothing can be changed! Go and make a revolution, and I will live a life".

A life not worth living.

Unexamined.

Robusto

@user6232128 You are conflating two different concepts.

user 6232128

6:54 PM

Are they really that different?

Live and let live; but, don't tell me how to live.

Robusto

@user6232128 You're the one who used them that way. It's up to you to explain to me how they are the same thing.

@user6232128 Now you're just heaping platitudes onto the table.

Robusto

7:10 PM

Whatever happened to Jason Bassford? Did he get pissed off and leave?

Hey! Don't stop answering posts because of a minor mishap and a disagreement with a mod. Come back, EL&U needs you. — Mari-Lou A Sep 24 at 10:48

I don't see why this answer is downvoted so severely, or, frankly, at all. While I've had differences with @JasonBassford in the past, here he has phrased his argument carefully and explained the circumstances sufficiently in my view. If you limit the scope of "author" to the things this answer encompasses, I think it holds up. +1 — Robusto 1 min ago

@tchrist: ^

user 6232128

Did he ever come to the chatroom?

Robusto

Nope. Not that I'm aware.

user 6232128

7:36 PM

> Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

Bertrand Russell

I'm not so sure if this would hold for every possible "language."