English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2020-08-01

« first day (3551 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (1378 days later) »

12:04 AM

So the idea is that 'extraterrestrials' were very much unlike humans, because they lived in a place that was completely different (the heavens).

@Færd So you could call God and demons 'aliens', but then the word is used in a different way.

12:17 AM

@Cerberus Fair enough.

Unless you can think of a culture in which a belief is held that organic beings like us live in different worlds outside the Earth.

Many cultures do believe in 'aliens' who live on Earth, strange creatures living in terra incognita, such as high up in the mountains or beyond the ocean.

Where did Adam and Eve reside? I suppose there's some disputes but they weren't as heavenly and ethereal as angels and stuff.

But that's not a good example. I'm going to look into this later.

@Færd Good point: maybe Paradise was in the heavens.

But its inhabitants are either actual humans (like Adam and Eve) or supernatural beings (like angels).

12:45 AM

@Cerberus It sure as hell isn't here on Earth.

1:02 AM

@Robusto But we do have snakes.

@Cerberus You have snakes in Amsterdam?

We have rattlesnakes out here and I almost ran over one on my bike. It looked like an old dusty piece of rope that had fallen from a truck or something, and as I was going by and my pedal was coming down near it I saw that it was definitely a rattler. Sheesh!

@Robusto We, mankind.

@Cerberus I know. I segued into a joke.

You almost segued over a rattlesnake.

At least you weren't Segwaying.

True.

Although Segway scooters are really quite cool.

15 years ago I took my son to California and one of the things we did was take an organized Segway tour of San Francisco. It's amazing how well those things handle.

1:13 AM

Oh, my.

Lotta water under the bridge since then.

1 hour later…

2:43 AM

Word of the day: sheeple

Captain Bohemian

3:35 AM

How do you read well on such a small screen of phone?

4:17 AM

@Færd Most of these so-called modern religions are a branch of philosophical beliefs of older people taken to an extreme and given constitution. I don't know of any that built things from scratch

Here I think the whole alien contact thing is not sensationalized and does not polarize people much, and when people utter things that sound similar to scientology or something else it's lumped into spiritual meanderings never done purposefully or with much organization of thought, and often considered harmless. It's probably the modern Iranian's vague and half-hearted attempt at reconciling modern-day science with childhood teachings.

But philosophical dilemmas are only challenging when you feel an immediate need to resolve them, and these don't. Not to mention sometimes anything coming from the west passes as science, in a fallacious association with modernity, so you might even have the occasional Bill Gates microchips anti-vaxxer believe their stance is firmly science-based

2 hours later…

6:15 AM

@M.A.R. I'd heard that there's a visible trace of scientology among this or that segment of the society but you're probably right.

Anti-vaccination advocacy/propaganda is gaining more popularity tho.

For the time being, I suspect most of the superstitious beliefs that can do actual harm to our society come from our own religious figures and leaders.

From Islamic medicine to end time theories etc

And basic human rights being contravened based on Sharia law on a daily basis, of course.

We live under a theocracy / clerical dictatorship, after all.

6:51 AM

@Færd Those beliefs are so common you don't know if the normal Christian end-time alarmism is influenced by the Islamic version or vice versa.

I think what hurts us most is this state of uncertainty, between adhering to the traditional virtues and adapting the new ones from mostly foreign cultures. So it occurs to me people adhere to neither, really. This is what I meant when I said long ago that we're probably doing very low on morale

Or was it that we're depressed? I guess FWIW the whole world is at the moment.

But there's this probably Whorfian thing about betterment in a language that allows you not just to express your ideas better, but to better shape them in your mind

Or it's not Whorfian. I dunno.

I think a while ago I looked around a little about the so-called Islamic medicine but IIRC the modern crooks have been heavily influenced by global crooks; their treatments resemble homeopathy or your typical snake oil more than before. Their attacks on established medicinal practice is almost entirely borrowed from the Western crooks.

To be skeptical of authority (in this case the science of medicine), at least to this degree, seems like a rather modern invention, or am I being too chronocentric?

Captain Bohemian

so hot

1 hour later…

8:15 AM

@M.A.R. Islamic medicine and traditional medicine go back hundreds/thousands of years. There's been a lot of give and take between various folk medicines around the world, west and east.

A bigoted traditional doctor/healer/guru/whatever doesn't need influence from abroad to act defensively against a newish authority that threatens his status.

Nor do his followers.

So I think most of the resistance and opposition is original.

It's not that bad tho. Overall I'm not too pessimistic about the acceptance of established medicine in our society. Not yet.

Captain Bohemian

8:40 AM

user image

9:08 AM

user image

9:47 AM

> Anti-Kremlin protests in Russia’s eastern city of Khabarovsk entered a fourth week on Saturday as thousands of people rallied against the arrest, dismissal and replacement of the local governor by president Vladimir Putin.

ft.com/content/…

The funniest thing is, there has not been a single report on the TV.

Four weeks of protests, tens of thousands marching each day.

Not a single TV report on any governmental TV channel.

@Færd yes, but it hasn't been the same. You could argue that before a certain point, any medical knowledge we had would now be considered traditional, the empirical knowledge that gave Europe a huge headstart.

@Færd that's too . . . jaded. Almost everyone trusts established medicine, some people don't throw away traditional slash nonscientific medicine simply because they're told it's their heritage. Again, I think the issue is not very polarizing here, and that we've imported most of the polarizability.

That's just my impression though. Of course, before any sort of medicine was established, I can easily imagine this healer calling that healer a fraud, but for the whole thing to become the two fronts of "foriegn medicine" and "cultural heritage" sounds very new to me.

@CowperKettle same here, except they have some evidence of looting or vandalism, then they double down on the whole coverage thing and demonize them as much as possible

10:03 AM

@M.A.R. In Russia, the official TV channels usually do tell about a demonstration if it was a massive one.

This case reminds me my childhood. Prior to 1990 it was customary for the state TV to just avoid any mention at all.

Of course that was in the USSR, and it fell in 1991.

But this is a bad tactic, because people now have access to the Internet.

So people basically see with their eyes that the state is lying, whereas in the USSR they could not double-check using the Internet.

Interesting development. There is an ongoing effort to set up 'walled-off Internet' in Russia, but the system will be ready only by December 2021.

There are too many links to the global Internet yet, so it's not possible to shut down unwanted information yet.

10:23 AM

user image

A map of Belarus I've just stumbled across in the VK social network, explaining how a large portion of Belarus was really "gifted" by Russia. Similar maps appeared in Russian social networks prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014, only they showed how a large portion of Ukraine was really "gifted" by Russia.

My grandmover lived in Homel Region, the lower right corner

Brahin, Belarus

Brahin (Belarusian: Брагін), Bragin (Russian: Брагин), or Brohin (Yiddish: בּראָהי‬ן‬‎) is a town in Belarus and an administrative center of Brahin Rajon. It stands on the banks of Braginka river, 28 km from the nearest railway (Chojniki station), and has a population of 3,700. == History == The settlement is first mentioned in the Hypatian Codex in 1147 as the important town of the Kyiv princedom. A significant part of Brahin's population traditionally was of Jewish descent. By the end of 19th century, 2,254 of 4,311 inhabitants were Jewish. During World War II, Brahin was under German occupation...

11:04 AM

@CowperKettle Media often simply eliminates what it considers undesirable, it doesn't cover it. Not telling anything is not lying yadda yadda. I've found that this is also the most common way for American news companies to manipulate the public, not covering undesirable news, so as to make distorting the rest (for some "news" channels like Fox News) easier to believe

@CowperKettle That's also similar to the arguments overt Indian or Pankistani nationalists use.

11:35 AM

@M.A.R. I don't see any evidence for that. A defensive reaction against "foreign medicine" seems more plausible. Invaders unite.

2 hours later…

1:46 PM

51

Dravidian and Sanskritic Languages

Proposed Q&A site for linguists, teachers and students of the Dravidian and Sanskritic languages.

Currently in definition.

2:20 PM

@CowperKettle So that's the canary in the coalmine presaging an invasion?

@Robusto I am not sure, because you need some pretext for an invasion, you cannot just enter and say "Hi"

It's kind of propaganda 'just in case a good pretext turns up'

The Belarussian army must be quite strong, because it's a half-dictatorship.

The Ukrainian army was all in shambles prior to the invasion of 2014.

So it must be quite hard to invade Belarus.

Belarus was not fully conquered even by Hitler in the 1941-43, although he killed off about 30% of its population.

There are too many deep forests and bogs.

There was a widespread guerrilla movement

Belarusian resistance during World War II

The Belarusian Resistance during World War II opposed Nazi Germany from 1941 until 1944. Belarus was one of the Soviet republics occupied during Operation Barbarossa. Belarusian partisans may refer to Soviet-formed irregular military groups participating in the Belarusian resistance during World War II against Nazi Germany as well as the pro-German collaborationist structures behind the Soviet front. == Pro-Soviet resistance == After the victories of the Wehrmacht against the Red Army in 1941, Belarus was one of the Soviet republics that came under control of Nazi Germany (Operation Barbarossa...

Interesting.

Belarus means "White Russia"?

Captain Bohemian

2:52 PM

so hot

Captain Bohemian

3:10 PM

a favor others give you is you are entitled to get,

but an offense others incur on you is not you should bear.

1 hour later…

Captain Bohemian

4:36 PM

user image

@tchrist: I'm thinking this woman must be a native Spaniard, and the language seems to inhabit different parts of her mouth than it does in Central and South American speakers. Her lower jaw is much more mobile more of the time, moving in and out like a cash drawer almost.

@Robusto Yes ))

> A recent sampling of microbes collected from the seafloor near Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California, uncovered a surprising variety of microbes that consume or shed electrons by eating or breathing minerals or metals.

quantamagazine.org/…

5:17 PM

@CowperKettle This is not as profound as it sounds. They've been known long enough to be in high school curricula

Every organism needs a source of energy, and a source of electrons

Some organisms' choice is rather different because they're too ancient or they're living at the bottom of the ocean.

Don't get me wrong, these organisms whose basic principles of metabolism differs from animals and plants and most ubiquitous and well-studied species we know make for an exciting topic of research, but phrasing it like it's some novel discovery is . . . well, what articles on internet do shrug

Captain Bohemian

6:16 PM

it's so easy to finish a bottle of blueberry juice but it;s so hard to resolve hunger.

Captain Bohemian

6:32 PM

When hunger haunts, you don't feel eplomb.

After solving hunger, hunger will haunt you again soon.

The weather was quite strange - with both sun and rain.

It was cloudy and even rained not long ago, but now the rain had stopped.

2 hours later…

Captain Bohemian

8:13 PM

Hungry and hot

Are you hungry?

Hot still hot albeit rain

Hungry still hungry albeit eaten

Because there is no cooked food

8:42 PM

BLT is a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. Add guacamole and it becomes an LGBT.

9:18 PM

user image

10! Oh the humanity

@M.A.R. sadly they probably need it that badly

It's August 1. My cry is "Oh, the humidity!"

The weather has been surprisingly pleasant here

@Robusto and if you add queso, it's an LGBTQ

@Mitch That's over the top.

9:29 PM

My only problem is the noise pollution.

@Mitch if it's plus sized

I'm sitting here trying to figure out a condiment that starts with I

@M.A.R. City dweller are you?

Interfaith?

That's not food

Ipecac?

Ipecac makes me want to puke.

That's an acquired taste

9:32 PM

@Robusto It's supposed to be really quiet otherwise, but there are two neighboring construction sites and our neighbor upstairs that's always redecorating or something, I swear we would have sued them thrice if this was the US

Imidazole?

@M.A.R. No lawsuits in Iran?

Not a common ingredient

We just walk down the street and if someone blinks funny we sue them

@M.A.R. Imodium?

@Robusto I guess we just back away from our rights more easily here

So yeah, I don't like sprinkles (Boston: jimmies) on my ice cream cones because they're over the top.

@M.A.R. Maybe.

9:34 PM

Ice cream is best consumed pure

That was a Dad joke. I guess it wasn't obvious enough. sighs

@Robusto actually, I think we sued one of the construction sites, and were close to breaking a fight with the neighbor

@Robusto nothing like ruining dad jokes

See what you've done?

Now it's mostly that we call each other assholes behind the other's back

ICING! It's ICING!

Yes I looked it up

It was the only one.

I feel like iceberg lettuce is cheating

9:37 PM

While you were otherwise occupied you missed a lot of drama in here.

@Mitch That's a great talent

Moooooooo

@Robusto sigh

@Robusto ugh, as I always do, unless you were talking to Mitch

What happened?

@M.A.R. You were part of the drama. And yes, that was directed at Mitch, who should have been standing up for Dad jokes in chat.

scratches head

Maybe it's a sleepchat thing, or maybe you're referring to something that happened long ago?

9:40 PM

Oh I got your joke the first time. But I was too preoccupied with I foods to give it credit.

As a reminder, the feral youth have a much faster internal clock

On to +

I consider myself slightly feral

You don't look it.

Good for you!

9:41 PM

Now I'm just anxious to remember the drama that happened, I assume here or?

@Cerberus I'm trying, OK! It's easy for a three headed hell guard to look down on the ferocity of a civilized cat musician

user image

crosses from the white areas

@M.A.R. I suppose so.

But you chose to dress like that.

@Robusto Oh! I got it! The one with Gigili?

@M.A.R. No.

It was because of your remark.

9:51 PM

rubs temple

9 mins ago, by M.A.R.

Now I'm just anxious to remember the drama that happened, I assume here or?

Oh I meant the drama you were referencing

Wrong reply

But sure, remembering it serves no purpose. Your best chance is witnessing a hopeless flat Earther or something get nuked by rational arguments or something. That, or read GoT

This was good drama: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/352519/…

2 hours later…

11:45 PM

Honest Government Ad | A message from the White House

« first day (3551 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (1378 days later) »

Transcript for

Aug '201

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…

Not for the faint of heart or those easily triggered by Englis...

phrase-requests pronunciation single-word-requests synonyms

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile