@Cerberus: Do you get Netflix?

I was flipping through their catalog and found this series called Barbarians ... the trailer showed some Roman soldiers speaking what I thought was Latin (subtitles in English), and I wanted to get your opinion. The show is a German production. If it's actual Latin it might be worth watching. Seems like the action was going to take place in the Teutoburger forest, so the Roman commander might have been General Varus.

@Justin enjoy your shit ban sandwich democrats!

I have unlocked an achievement. Bleeding from both nostrils

Damn prednisone

@Robusto I don't, but I watch it occasionally with boyfriend.

I have heard of this series; I think it is praised by many.

I'm not sure what I heard people say, but I think the Latin is probably good.

Ah, I have watched a trailer as well.

The Latin seemed reasonable.

@Cerberus Sweet. Thank you. Now let's hope the story and the acting are good.

@Cerberus TBH I think that's true about us as well. I think most of what I 'learned' about writing comes from elementary school, and a little from my ESL books

I feel like, but I may not be right, that, for example, high school was pretty useless in that regard.

I mean, one day I went the extra mile and wrote what I thought was a masterpiece, and the teacher was all like "eh, mmmmeh". The other day, I wasn't feeling like it and just hurled words at the paper, and the teacher was still like "eh, mmmmeh"

So even if we write a lot in school, there's no real guidance or feedback, it just feels pointless

Thanks to grade inflation, a 20 and an 18 (our scores are traditionally out of 20) mean something else, they mostly mean teachers on good days and teachers on off days.

So what if they say Penrose was pretty mediocre at school. If he had the same teachers I did, high grades would have meant little

What's with this online attitude of hating on children? I notice it on other social media way more often, but still, you'd think kids should be an uncontroversial subject

@M.A.R. Very sorry to hear that!

@Cerberus Are you female?

Slavic people in US and Canada

@CowperKettle without Mexico, North America looks like it's floating

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Repeating characters in answer (80): What is the idiom "...and roses" by Elsie on english.SE

@Robusto Netflix also has The Last Kingdom. Vikings rather than Barbarians. But no Latin.

I watched some of Season 3 of The Sinner and finally just quit.

@Xanne IMDB ratings for TV series are pretty weird. You can be fairly confident that anything below 8.2 is trash. Now, movie reviews can be pretty weird too, but at least they make some sense

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Pattern-matching website in answer (78): What is the English idiom for Russian "режет глаз" which literally translated as "hurts the eye"? by a deleted user on english.SE

Man in Omsk was fined 150 thousand rubles for standing in a single-person picket with this sign supporting Alexey Navalny.

That's two monthly salaries in Moscow, three monthly salaries in Yekaterinburg, and probably five monthly salaries in Omsk

If a man stands in a single person picket in Iran, supporting a jailed politician, he will probably go to jail too?

Officially, single-person protests in Russia are permitted without prior coordination with the authorities, but the police always finds some pretexts to detain, arrest and fine persons who protest against Putin's regime.

I was jogging in the center last year and came across a single-person picket. I asked if I could hold the sing for several minutes, but the woman said that the police might capture an image of us just at the moment when we are passing the sign to each other, and detain us both for "mass protest".

When the USSR fell and there was finally democracy in Russia, I never thought I would live to see such suppression of liberties again.

@CowperKettle I've never seen anyone do it. I dunno if that's a yes or no.

Thing is, my subjective opinion is we suck at activism (which is why it deters people like me)

The government cannot silence and suppress as harsh as Russia or China, but I'm pretty sure they'd like to. It's just that they don't have a very cemented position

There's been lots of mass protests, few of them peaceful, a lot of them involving a bunch of chumps vandalizing property, discrediting their own protest (It became so easy for the government to call them 'looters', as Trump did with BLM protesters)

But while a great many people, both conservative and liberal-leaning, are very dissatisfied, there's no opposition leader.

@M.A.R. In Russia, even the slightest damage of anything will get you jailed for months, and years if that concerns any part of a policeman (uniform, or God Forbid, a blackeye)

There was Mousavi, but he was just a power-hungry POS like the rest of them. He didn't stand for anything but himself.

Last year a man threw an empty garbage bin at the policemen, and was jailed for a couple of years. He did not even manage to hit anybody.

@M.A.R. I wonder how in Eastern Europe there were respectable opposition leaders even under the Soviet oppression, in 1980.

In Russia there are almost nobody with that level of respect.

Honestly I'm pretty much in the dark because the media is so heavily controlled, I don't even know

And I don't watch US propaganda channels aimed at Iranians because they don't stand for anything either, it's just a sham

The media is so heavily controlled I'm not sure even China can match up to us in that.

In Poland, there was Lech Wałęsa, a respected trade union leader. In Russia, we only have Navalny, who would be a rather weak populist politician if not for all the oppression.

If we had an outlet that had some people with some conscience and integrity, I might have gotten some real news about Iran. Right now it's just a tug-of-war

Some American channels aimed at Russia also have a propagandist lean that makes them offputting. They provide a mixture of very good research articles with some weak propaganda articles.

And US propaganda is winning, because state media can be guilty of being seen as part of the state, but people for some reason don't really consider the fact that the US sanctions are also ruining their lives

Putting it all in context, Iran's revolution was pretty popular

No random arsehole came along with some foreign support and some military generals to overthrow the government

Iran's revolution was a shock for the Soviet leaders. They did not know what to think about it. Carl Marx promised the movement towards communism, not towards islamism.

So it's very hard for people to accept that what they did was a mistake. Not saying that it was, but I think for most people the revolution was an end, not a beginning, so they didn't care much who was elected as long as they were elected

@CowperKettle TBH foreign policy-wise, we're pretty much communist

And that's where it matters, right? The US didn't give a damn how the economy was run, they only called independent nations communist and attacked them

@M.A.R. But there is private property on companies, and you can start a firm, that's pretty non-communist. In USSR, you could not even own your own apartment.

What we needed instead was a fascist (That's the economical term I think) economy like that of Korea, so we could build an economy independent of the US

@M.A.R. The US were afraid that the USSR will instigate a creeping revolution and capture more and more countries.

@CowperKettle And does the world care about that? I don't think so.

"Communism" doesn't mean anything much to people in power, it's just another term used in an ideological warfare

@CowperKettle = Fewer countries would listen to the US

The farthest the USSR went was Afghanistan. Not much of a threat.

I think the USA were afraid that they would have to meddle into a great war, like WWII, again, if the USSR captured more and more countries.

Cuba turned communist because the US was so pissed as Castro, who by then hadn't chosen sides

The Soviet ideology provided for a gradual sovietization of the whole planet.

@CowperKettle What sense of "capture" is this?

@M.A.R. Ideological capture, installation of Soviet-based regimes, single-party, with abolition of private property on businesses.

By the people

So the US opposed democracies, then.

No, a single-party regime is not a democracy.

I mean, sure, just throw a racist tantrum and 40 percent of the US population would follow you . . .

In 99.999% cases there was only a single person to choose from in any Soviet election.

Or any population

So it's only called demorcacy. It's a very curious regime. It makes children out of grownup people. People lose the ability to have any independent opinions and fight for them.

@CowperKettle I'm not saying the Soviets were the good guys. I'm saying America didn't oppose the USSR because they communists, but because they were independent

@M.A.R. I don't think so. They helped the USSR by building hundreds of factories in 1929-1939.

@CowperKettle I think it just has more extensive propaganda programs than people in power elsewhere thought necessary

People are brainwashed into thinking a fat billionaire with an 80s tan is empathetic towards the "middle class"

Why wasn't USA seeing the UK as its greatest rival? It was controlling half the globe by 1930.

It was

At the very least here

They replaced the UK eventually with the 1953 coup

I think that ideology does matter. For instance, there was a huge war over religion in 1618-1648 that left Germany without 30% of population. Probably the same with communism/fascism/multiparty democracy. It's a clash of cultures. Not just because one country was bigger or smaller.

@CowperKettle I mean, it's pretty difficult to think they were just being good samaritans then. You should look at the history and see how it served the businesses in the US to actually help the USSR. It sorta reinforces my point, that the ideology didn't matter

I mean, Churchill was pretty chill with Stalin back during WWII

Because there is no strict centralist rule in the USA, there are many interests inside the USA that compete with each other. The military want more subsidies, thus they present RUssia as a bigger threat that it is. The businesses want money, thus they just get along with anybody who might help make money.

The US invaded Russia after World War I, suddenly they were sorry 10 years later?

@CowperKettle Doesn't this contradict your earlier statement? "I think ideology does matter"

I mean, historically, the US has hated a lot of capitalist countries too.

@M.A.R. No, they did not invade Russia. There was the legitimate Russian government, the Constituent Assembly, that was dispelled by the Bolsheviks, and the USA tried in a very laid-back way to help it regain power. Basically they only held a couple of port cities, because venturing further would be unpopular with the US public.

The Constituent Assembly was dominated by Socialist Revolutionaries, so in a funny was the USA supported socialists in Russia.

LOL

Okay, back to work! ))

@M.A.R. @CowperKettle You might want to read Gaddis, top u.S. historian on the Cold War. At least get the full story from a Western point of view. The Cold War: A New History, John Lewis Gaddis, the leading American Cold War historian, traces relations between the Soviet Union and the United States from World War II until the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Note that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were allies, or co-belligerants, in WWIi. Of course you know that. Only proxy wars. But read Gaddis.

@CowperKettle Eh, that's an invasion, but okay. I mean, calling it anything else would again be part of that ideological warfare doublespeak

@Xanne There's so so much to read :/

If getting more knowledgeable wasn't so enjoyable it would have been such a hopeless task.

@M.A.R. Not an invasion. Russia and the USA were allies, the legitimate Parliament, the Constitutive Assembly, was dispelled after a coup conducted by the Bolshevisk. Some of the Bolsheviks opposed the planned coup and even published their protest, which led to quite a stir inside the party, by the way.

An invasion is not conducted under agreement with a legitimate government.

@Xanne Thank you!

Spring is in the air

Minus 5°C

@Xanne Yeah, I started that one but got bored with it. It's based on a series of novels by Bernard Cornwell, who seems determined to write historical novels about everything that ever happened. Pretty formulaic, IMHO.

This is what invasion is, @M.A.R. When the Soviet Union invaded Poland, it turned Poland into a puppet state and hunted down and killed anybody who was against the occupation.

It invaded to enslave.

Similarly, it tried to grab a piece, or the whole of, Iran, just after WWII, and only when the West signaled that it would intervene, the Soviet Union loosened its jaws.

I agree, but you have already shown a bias in favor of language(s) for quite some time.

The question that is rolling around in my mind is: What beside language can define a country?

There are two more, beside common language:

1. Common bloodline

2. Common memory.

Both of these depend, to a great measure, on a common language.

@Conrado I think you have it backwards there. In my view, language is primarily a cultural artifact. That's why it's so hard to speak like a native: you're always trying to jam your own culture into a foreign one, to use translated thoughts from one culture into another culture's words.

@Conrado I find that very unsatisfying. When you think of the word 'culture' what comes to mind is stories/myths/history, paintings and music and dancing, food and meals and how you live day to day, relatives and who you live with and how you behave with them and friends and strangers. But...

But what do we actually do all day? That list of culture is actually quite sparse.

What really happens consistently and constantly throughout all of those is language.

The part that is unsatisfying that I'm having a hard time getting past is what about language is cultural.

@Mitch I think culture may be hiding from you in plain sight.

Language is so much more than words.

I mean "You look hurt you should go to hospital" just sounds like a scratch in a record - to me. it should be "You look hurt you should go to the hospital"

@Robusto Yes, that's what I'm trying to get at... what about language is 'so much more than words" or all that other academic stuff like syntax and tense/aspect.

It feel like saying vision is the most important sense but the only justification is talking about color models.

OK, let me give you a simple example. We translate はい (hai ) as "yes" in English. And so when in a business meeting an English-speaking person hears that, they think it signals agreement. But what it really signals is comprehension: "Yes, I hear you," not "Yes, I agree with you" or "Yes, we will do as you ask."

Also, culture ending up being something like 'national character'... that seems like it's going to end up poorly for some characters.

@Robusto One could counter that then it's not a good choice of translation.

@Mitch Yes, but that is not a counter. You have to ask why it's not a good choice, and the reason is cultural.

Also, more importantly, daylight saving time can go to hell.

And the fact is, hai does mean "yes"—but not in the way we think. In polite situations, Japanese just don't like to tell anybody "no" (it's seen as rude). So when a Japanese is telling you no it's probably in the form of something like 難しいですね ("It's difficult, isn't it?"). That is a linguistic expression of a culture.

So culture = socio linguistics?

I remember a friend in college saying that the center was architecture.

(yes, of course, he was an architecture student)

Small locomotive of the Children's Railway in Yekaterinburg

And the narrow-gage road

good training for future railway engineers

Children run the whole thing

Yes, good training.

They have a lot of new locomotives now, bought in recent years.

keeps them off the streets

And a big depot.

away from gambling and drugs

and comic books

LOL

those will ruin you

I'm not sure that they are popular in Russia

I always wondered in childhood why in US movies children are so captivated by comic books.

I don't think they are a big deal in the US any more

I think the 40s and 50s were the most popular times.

On the other hand, I had several thousand books available in childhood. My father accumulated books constantly.

@CowperKettle American movies are not the most accurate portrayal of day to day American culture

@CowperKettle different from family to family

Yes, in some families there were just a couple of dozen books.

if that many

It was hard to get good sci fi books back then, and Tolkien specifically.

We had "The Hobbit" in a sovietized version. And it was worn due to being constantly borrowed by others.

Sovietized?

There was a preface invented by Soviet authors telling some sci-fi story of how this whole Hobbit book was discovered by Soviet prospectors

Something like that.

To make it past the censor's eyes.

mirf.ru/book/vlastelin-kolec-v-sssr-pereskaz-bobyr

It was hard to convince the censorship office to publish the translation. So a lot was just deleted and remodeled, and something added.

The first Soviet version was very badly mangled.

With scientists thrown in to make it look less like "magic", and thus not to spoil Soviet kids with stories about "mysticism".

Because Soviet children should believe in science.

It was the same with the Wizard of Oz. It was reworked into a different book, rewritten in Russian. But a talented book. And even with follow-up books nonexistent in the West, but very interesting.

@CowperKettle They pretty much run the whole thing everywhere, all the time.

Something only a parent really understands.

As someone once said, "A chicken is an egg's strategy for making another egg."

@CowperKettle Not mutually exclusive. That's an invasion, and the US invading Russia was an invasion, even if they call it "defense" or whatever doublespeak lingo they have for stuff like this.

@M.A.R. No, it was not an "invasion". Helping a country's government to withstand a coup is never an invasion. I always felt very sorry when I read the whole Civil War history that the US and UK did not go further and did not crush the Bolsheviks.

Russia lost millions of its best soldiers in the WWI and the UK really let it down by not sending a large contingent to liberate Moscow and St. Petersburg of Lenin and his Taliban.

@CowperKettle Well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that. You're pretty okay with the US being the boss of the world, but I'm pretty hesitant because of their human rights record. They've always been the bad guys when they needed to. They didn't need to starve a couple of million of their own people to be bad people.

@M.A.R. The US went on to help Russia in the early 1920 by literally saving millions of peasants from dying of starvation. Lenin's grain confiscation policies lead to fields lying barren. The worst man-made hunger in Russia's history. And the US brought in food and helped us survive.

I'm very okay with that.

I'm incidentally not okay with any government being the boss of the world, and I'm worried about the near future where China is another superpower. I just think no government has any right to be the boss of the world, because they hardly even have the interests of their own people in mind.

@CowperKettle Yes, I was referring to Lenin by 'starving own people'

China is not a democracy.

The USA is a democracy.

Historically, whoever the US has helped was because they couldn't function the way the US wanted.

Pfff. The US helped Soviet Russia to survive because the US wanted Soviet Russia to exist? No, just the US has an entrenched civil society in which people can freely come together and launch a campaign to help a starving people.

@CowperKettle Eh, that's an oversimplification. Sure, the US doesn't have local 'ministries of the communist party for people discipline', but it's not very close to the 'democratic' extreme of the spectrum

500 thousand Republicans are represented as much as several million mostly democrats

@M.A.R. China has the largest network of concentration camps on the planet since 1945.

The USA only has had Guantanamo, a very small camp. And even that was very much criticized inside the US

So what? Did I say I like China?

Give my message a second read

This "everyone criticizing the US is a commie sympathizer" mentality is part of the brainwashing, and it's in plain sight

Maybe there is no escape from one country dominating the globe.

Not when people are accepting of it

I mean, Russia might fare better. But countries like mine, the US has decided they should remain third world poor countries that should provide cheap workforce and cheap resources for the industrial countries

There must be some global law for regime change. People of North Korea do not deserve to live under oppression.

Sure, and neither do mine. That's also a problem to be solved. But the US coming to my door, saying I'm gonna strangle you economically and militarily unless you open it and let me in, that's no solution

Iran has a huge territory, a lot of resources, and access to the wold ocean. Is the US really that oppressive?

I mean somehow even despite the sanctions there must be enough to live well.

A lot of sun, great climate.

No snow almost.

I mean, don't underestimate where people can make a difference. Ultimately, power structures want a docile population, whether by coercion or brainwashing, or both.

You can probably harvest several harvests a year in Iran.

The US could bomb Vietnam and kill thousands when people were okay with it there

The US wanted South Vietnam not to be captured by communists.

I wish it kept South Vietnam under military protection.

Communism is like cancer.

@CowperKettle well, I've said it all the time, we have incompetent flathoofs running the country. They're openly admitting to selling oil and seem proud of it, so it wouldn't have been much different under a US-supported government, except maybe I would have had an iPhone instead of Samsung device

Maybe because there is free emigration from Iran, and all the best people just flee abroad?

@CowperKettle And it bombed and massacred civilians in South and North Vietnam and Cambodia to achieve that

@M.A.R. It should have acted better.

Well, free, just like any other communist country, it's a bureaucratic hell to get out, and it's bound to get worse

I'm not an expert on Vietnam War. I don't know who massacred more there.

@CowperKettle And so should have Lenin, and Shah, and Mussolini, and Bush

Again, back to square one: Ideology doesn't matter

Maybe because emigration was completely closed to Soviet citizens, the regime gradually became better in the 1970s and 1980s.

Good people percolated upwards, to the higher tiers of power.

Vietnam was threatening to be a prosperous economy under the influence of the commies. That was unacceptable, because there's always the danger that the population is other third world countries would think "wow, let's do that here too"

@CowperKettle Dunno, never thought much about it. But yeah, I think that's the price to pay if we want to progress without the US help.

A prosperous economy under Communist rule?

Right now we're pretending to have closed our borders, but really, only the bad stuff stays in and all the good stuff flows out

In China the economy became prosperous when the Party transformed to capitalism.

@CowperKettle Yes, in fact, Soviet Russia was threatening to do that too, before the sudden steep fall in the 60s or so

@CowperKettle well, no system has really been communist, that would suck. Russia wasn't really communist too, it was just a huge state capitalist, or so I'm told

@M.A.R. According to Russian economists, the growth was due to the village population flowing into cities and becoming very, very cheap industrial force. By the end of the 1960s, "the village died out". The city workers no longer were content to work for food.

Thousands of villages became ghost villages in the USSR.

And after the great migration stopped, the economy stopped booming.

Or the US found out and was scared shitless that an independent country would prosper, so they trumped up the Cold War?

In the 1960s there were debates in the USSR on introducing some features of capitalism.

Maybe both. I can't possibly be very knowledgeable here, but the timeline coincides

Sadly, at the same point, great reserves of oil and gas were discovered, and capitalism was not introduced. The USSR started to feed itself by producing oil and gas.

That's what we were taught in the university. Oil and Gas University of Tyumen, a city in Siberia.

@CowperKettle And that's when it fell?

@M.A.R. Yes, it started to fall when the prices of oil and gas suddenly dropped in the 1980s

The USSR ran out of oil and gas money.

At least that's the current view.

I'm not an economist.

It must be very complex, more complex.

Maybe some specialists know better.

Well if you do the west's bidding for them, you're kinda falling for a trap. If you just sell oil, and they wanted you to just sell oil, you will fall economically, except this time they won't lend a hand because they hate your guts

Essentially the same thing is happening here, has been for a couple of decades.

But

Gorbachev tried to introduce Perestroika to introduce some features of capitalism, but today's economists say it was about 20 years too late - these should have been introduced in the 1960s, when Soviet chief Kosygin called to introduce them.

I used to hear all this chant about diversification of products

Recently, they're not even pretending

There is the adage, "Oil Curse". Oil makes other kinds of manufacture unprofitable. And maybe that helps corruption.

Just proudly announcing on TV that "We WILL sell oil! The US won't stop us from selling oil!"

Same here. Putin constantly says that "We will build the Power of Siberia pipeline and show those Yankees".

@CowperKettle The resource curse or something like that, yeah. It's not just oil. It can be rare metals and stuff, like in Africa's case

Generally my favorite period of the Soviet Rule is late 1950s and early 1960s, before great reserves of oil were found, but after Stalin. Books and movies made during those years are full of enthusiasm. Starting from 1968, the invasion of Chekhoslovakia, there was gradual degradation.

But, say, look at Brazil. It's a pretty resource-rich country, and it wasn't devastated in any world wars. It did the US's bidding, and except for a small part of the population, everyone is suffering

How did it do the US's bidding?

It must be a huge strong country.

@CowperKettle It became a source of labor and resources

Labor migration?

So by this light, Uzbekistan is doing Russia's bidding. There are many Uzbeks everywhere, cleaning staircases in buildings. Working in construction.

Yeah I think that's essentially modern colonialism

Anyway I have some assignments whose deadlines are today, so I gotta get back to doing that

TTYL

CYA! ))

Oh yeah, got the vaccine today. I am street legal.

@Mitch :) And the moral of that is, perhaps, that we should all dance more and talk less. I think that many years ago, many peoples did just that. And, in some way, we try to re-synthesize in a sterilized environment the raw power of their expression by looking back through a dim lense.

But an environment without any sort of common spoken language doesn't usually foster dancing for any long period of time. And, of course, once it passes the sustainability threshold, dancing leads to other things, and pretty soon you have a family of some sort--a common blood line.

@Robusto I usually do (have it backwards). Still, what can I say? Language is an essential artifact, if such a paradoxical thing can exist.

@Robusto Conratulations! You mean you are street legal immediately?

@Conrado I have a CDC card saying I am fully immunized. Actual results will vary, of course, but I am counting on some travel in a few weeks and this means I am gtg.

@M.A.R. M.A.R. You are in a difficult situation of continual propaganda and doublespeak, and it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s a reasonable interpretation of events. If you’re in a bubble, how do you know, and if you want to get out, how do you do it? (Note whether one nation is the boss of the world is not something you can change by disliking it.)

@Robusto OMG I just looked at the little card they gave me when I got my shots. It's a CDC card! That and a passport . . .

@Xanne Yes I am, but I assure you this line of thought is not me babbling back the propaganda I was fed by the media. The media don't give a damn about other countries in the world. They only portray the US and Americans as these inherently eeevil people because the xenophobia they spread has to be very simply to be easily ingested by that infamous 40 percent who listen and do what they're told without much thought.

I am, however, just because I'm such a noob at this, reiterating what I've heard various activists (say, Chomsky) say, without much of my own research to add to it

I listened to what they said, and it made much sense most of the time.

About what?

My bar is comparing it with the little history that I know. That rarely fails. I mean, take the US invading Russia back at 1919 as an example. I know for a fact that foreign soldiers in a sovereign soil have very rarely, if ever, meant anything good for the country. My own history has repeatedly demonstrated that, because the Russians and the English treated Iran like a birthday cake for years.

@Cerberus About how altruistic the US has been in history, I think

@M.A.R. * simply put

So would I want that done to me and my people? Definitely not.

@Xanne And yes, I can't change many things about the world. It's probably much more useful to see what I can change. There are many evil things being done to this nation by the people that govern it, without the US ever having much to do with it. I can't stop that either, and I can't even elect someone I trust

For example, we're following, very slowly, because we're so poor, in India's footsteps in corporatizing everything. Now, since the dynamic here is unlike developed countries, that comes pretty close to what "wage labor" connotes. A movement towards making the very few very rich but the many piss poor

Back to the assignments . . . stop dragging me back to fun stuff, dammit!

@M.A.R. Sometimes the interests of the invader are aligned with those of (some of) the people in the invaded country.

I think the American invasions of Western Europe have definitely been beneficial.

Those may be the exceptions.

I don't know about their Russian invasion, if it deserves the name.

@Conrado By other things, I think you are saying...

@Conrado Yay! We can light up all the @Robusto we want. All you cops can go suck it... rolls window down letting plume of smoke out

@M.A.R. By the time Chomsky was 1/2 my age, he had 1) solved linguistics 2) classified formal language models, 3) solved politics.

Who is going to follow after Chomsky? (ie public intellectual)

@M.A.R. Well, you've got one Russian and one American telling you that your facts are wrong. Maybe the first step in handling the maelstrom of misinformation in your world is checking your facts. Then you have a chance at getting to the point where you can try to analyze the goals and objectives of nation states and make some judgment about what works and what doesn't.

@Xanne Yup!

Don't lose that little beauty.

I haven't been this excited about a card since I first got my driver's license.

@Xanne I didn't get that impression, and anyways I really thought these exchanges can rarely be that conclusive. "It's an only an invasion when no one likes us being there" sounds like the line of thought the conquerors would have. And you didn't say I was wrong, that would have involved giving me the facts themselves, you said I'm brainwashed by the propaganda, but in nicer words, and frankly that's bordering on ad hominem

Criticism of the US foreign policy should be impossible then, because it's a position often held by corrupt hypocrites in Russia, China and Iran

@Cerberus sure, I think those are just two different things. The US policymakers aren't being evil for the heck of it, it's always about what's good for business, and many people acknowledge this already.

But I mean, all this analysis is only useful when it can predict the future actions of the US. It's great when the-powers-that-be happen to want the same things as people. I would want to live in that world. But it's when we forget that simple fact that I think sometimes people just unreasonably expect TPTB to be humanitarian

The default is, when you brush your hands through a bookshelf, you drop many books and help reorder few. That's not what the US has been doing, but I'm saying it's reasonable to expect the US policies to have hurt many more people around the world than they have helped

Say, some nonviolent activists (TBF, if I ever was one, I would have been that, I think I'm pretty cowardly anyway) put up meetings with important people about how things are bad and how we need healthcare or that some people are dying in some country, and what I'm saying is it's naive to assume TPTB don't know what they're doing

Well, the US did "invade" Russia, but they did so in, umm, Siberia, and it was everything you might expect from a poorly motivated, disastrously planned expedition—in common parlance, a clusterfuck.

We punched the Bolshevik Bear in the paw with our face.

Say, let's go find some official and explain how social spending can be pretty good for the community instead of military expanding and new jets no one has.

It just seems naive to expect the spending to be accidental

Yet, it does bear mentioning that at least you have all these discussions and you rally people around because you're hoping for a reform, which is more than you can say for other places

@Robusto It's kinda fuzzy for me, but anyway, if the Russia example seems so contentious, thankfully there are enough examples of the US ruining countries and people, even in Europe, that defending the US as an interventionist boss of the world is indefensible

It seems to me that it's often said about most of these interventions, that if the US didn't intervene, definitely the communist party would have grown strong and dictatorial and ruled like a true communist nation with suppression of thought and freedom, and, do we really know that, about all of these cases?

Say, it does sound like that about North Korea. It's lucid because we can see NK today (but in all fairness, killing 20 percent of the population gives a pretty strong reason for dictators to exist, but speculation is shaky ground to stand on)

But Greece? Italy?

@M.A.R. I'm not an apologist for my country's adventures in making other countries safe for our corporations. I myself abhor those parts of our history, including the 1953 coup in Iran, the backing of Pinochet in Chile, the whole fucking Vietnam experience (see the chapter "The Impossible Victory: Vietnam" in Zinn's instructive criticism of the US) , et al.

Yeah, you always seem rather liberal, even among liberals

> In the course of that war, there developed in the United States the greatest antiwar movement the nation had ever experienced, a movement that played a critical part in bringing the war to an end.

I was part of that movement.

In many ways, I still am.

I mean, it's never about the people. It's not even about what people think or believe. If the US hated Islamic fundamentalism, they wouldn't have supported Saddam until they decided he's disposable or dangerous, and they wouldn't have been supporting the Saudis

@Robusto Chomsky says that's where the power for real change resides

I hope so.

It's admittedly much much harder for the US to do evil stuff, because of its people. They now use proxies and mercenaries and run extensive PR campaigns

Back in the 60s, what I read gives me the impression that people were pretty much of the "burn the commie witch!" attitude

The 20th century was all about a youngish US coming into its own as a world power. The tragedy of that was that our leaders thought to themselves, "So, now that we're a power, what should we do? Got it! We'll throw our weight around because we can!"

But post WWII was not the only time we intervened in the sovereignty of other nations. What the post-war era did was leave us with An Enemy That Must Be Defeated (Communism), and so we set about destroying ourselves in that pursuit.