English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2022-09-26 (page 1 of 3)

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12:05 AM

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Do you think that would be too curt a response to our new Meta question? :)

12:54 AM

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A: What do you think about enabeling the MathJax web-plug in for underlining, striken text, and changing text color?

If we could agree on how we, as a site, would use the various markup flavors, this might be an interesting idea. But I doubt that we would or could do that. With the minimal markup we have now, people do different things in different ways, with little consensus. Multiply the possibilities and I t...

@tchrist Ah ! non ! C'est un peu curt, jeune homme !

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59-year-old dentist mobilized in the Urals, and relatives are now trying to get him back

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..and a 59-year old surgeon

I'm sure they will get back home, especially after being mentioned in the media.

1:09 AM

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Imagine the possibilities.

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@jlliagre Upon your suggestion, I have enlengthenized it.

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A: What do you think about enabeling the MathJax web-plug in for underlining, striken text, and changing text color?

Here are a few choice reasons against this proposal: The main problem with this idea would be its potential for looking 𝕘𝕒𝕦𝕕𝕪 and 𝒸𝓇𝒶𝓈𝓈 compared with our existing page setup. We’ve gone for a quiet look here, in keeping with our theme. It’s supposed to bring to mind a book, not a nois...

@CowperKettle Is this for real?

It surprises me.

Yes

But it's just small fires, quickly extinguished. Single Molotov cocktails thrown in the night by random people.

@tchrist Someone didn't like the effort. Did you get my joke?

1:26 AM

@jlliagre I hope so!

This is quite good: practicaltypography.com/color.html

@jlliagre Usually English speakers who use curt instead of short or even brief have been reading too much French lately. :)

La tirade du nez ou tirade des nez est le nom couramment donné à une célèbre tirade située dans le premier acte (scène IV) de la pièce Cyrano de Bergerac du dramaturge français Edmond Rostand. Provoqué par le vicomte de Valvert qui se moque de son nez proéminent, Cyrano se lance d'abord dans cette tirade : il montre à Valvert par vingt exemples successifs que l'affront qui lui a été fait manquait d'esprit et qu'on aurait pu le formuler de bien d'autres manières, et avec davantage de talent : « Ah ! non ! c’est un peu court, jeune homme ! On pouvait dire… Oh ! Dieu !… bien des choses en somme…...

@jlliagre Oh haha!

@CowperKettle It still shows more courage than I imagine I could muster. More the sort of thing a nineteen-year-old would try than someone two score years their senior. Then again, you just mentioned several 59-year-old draftees.

There have been some reports that the actual number of new draftees is not really 300k, but closer to a full million.

Apparently the exact text of the order Putin signed with the exact number to be called up is being kept secret.

Again, or so I've read.

2:18 AM

@tchrist Nobody really knows, but I guess there's no upper limit

Even to gather and train 300k will take some time.

3:06 AM

My neighbor told me that if anybody comes and asks for him, I should say I don't know such a person.

We were walking with a friend on Saturday, and he noticed some policemen near the mall, they were waiting to detain protesters. He said we should make a wide detour, lest he be detained by chance and get a call-up notice.

4:01 AM

I understand.

4:13 AM

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Hah.

Pretty round face.

4:52 AM

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I'm following this paramedic woman on Twitter. She just wrote that a call-up notice arrived for her man at 7 am.

Luckily, it arrived at his official address, and he wasn't there.

They both work at an ambulance station

Not great.

And what good will it do the Russian army anyway?

By Friday, the four regions will probably become part of Russia, and on Saturday or Sunday, I guess, Putin will declare war and introduce full-blown martial law.

Novaya Gazeta wrote that since the start of mobilization, 261 thousand men left Russia. Thus, in the next couple days foreign travel might be banned for all conscriptable men.

I was a timekeeper at the ParkRun on Saturday, and a man there said "haha, my friend runs a pub and one of his bartenders has already fled to Kazakhstan"

5:08 AM

@CowperKettle Hmm just curious, why didn't he skip the partial mobilisation, then?

@CowperKettle That is a very large number.

Are you afraid that you might be called up?

With corneal transplants, they would not take me if I gave them money. I cannot lift heavy things and can lose eyesight from a hit to the eye.

OK a silver lining...

That's why I'm not doing push-ups and pull-ups. I get aching, red eyes the next day

With push-ups, I haven't even tried.

Yeah, that's not good.

Otherwise, I would try to hide somewhere.

I think I would ditch my phone SIM card, and buy someone's card instead, to be non-trackable.

5:15 AM

Yeah.

Not an easy life.

And print out a fake call-up notice, to carry with me and show in case I'm stopped in the street. "Look, I'm already due to appear at the call-up station tomorrow".

Ah, smart.

Do you know anyone who has deliberately broken an arm or a leg?

No

They don't enroll criminals, so another handy way it to break a shop window and steal some trinkets in full view of security cams

5:31 AM

Oh, interesting.

What would be the punishment for that?

5:53 AM

In Ust-Ilimsk, Irkutsk region, a man just shot the head of the recruitment committee

@Cerberus Maybe several months in jail

6:19 AM

The draft committee head was instructing the newly-mobilized men, when one of them stood up, said "Nobody will be fighting, we shall all go home now", approached him, and shoot him.

He is now in the ICU in critical condition

7:09 AM

@CowperKettle I suppose the draft committee head is a local position?

@FaheemMitha Yes

Another army recruitment center was torched today, in the early hours: twitter.com/Segozavr/status/1574292274841722880

The guy burned his own car together with the building.

But the car is an old model.

Or maybe he hijacked a car

7:45 AM

Wordle 464 4/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

7:56 AM

#Worldle #248 4/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜↖️
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜↙️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨↘️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

2 hours later…

9:41 AM

Wordle 464 3/6

⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩⬜🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

#Worldle #248 2/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨↘️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

Wordle (ES) #263 X/6

⬜⬜🟨⬜🟨
🟨🟨⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩

https://wordle.danielfrg.com/

10:46 AM

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Current weather in Yekaterinburg

11:41 AM

Congratulations! You solved Redactle Unlimited in 46 guesses with 45.65% accuracy and a time of 00:14:26! #172

In the city of Ryazan, a mobilized man publicly burned himself, is now in the ICU with a 90% body burn, which means a certain death.

He screamed that he did not want to fight.

A horrible beginning of the week.

12:02 PM

Meanwhile, in Italy:

A party with neo-fascist roots, the Brothers of Italy, won the most votes in Italy’s national elections, looking set to deliver the country’s first far-right-led government since World War II and make its leader, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first woman premier, near-final results showed Monday.

Italy’s lurch to the far right immediately shifted Europe’s geopolitical reality, placing a euroskeptic party in position to lead a founding member of the European Union and its third-largest economy. Right-wing leaders across Europe immediately hailed Meloni’s victory and her party’s meteoric rise as s…

apnews.com/article/…

12:47 PM

@CowperKettle I don't know that they are going to be trained at all. There are reports of them being sent directly to the battle lines.

1:13 PM

@tchrist I think they will be trained, but only shortly, maybe 15 to 30 days.

I've seen a report of one man being sent to Ukraine after just a couple days, but this report was not very certain

I think that there's a high probability of a tactical nuclear stricke, maybe in the atmosphere, to destroy electronic equipment and demostrate the ability.

1:42 PM

#Worldle #248 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

🌎 Sept 26, 2022 🌍
🔥 26 | Avg. Guesses: 6.26
🟨⬜🟨🟥🟥🟩 = 6

#globle

@jlliagre Are we looking at an Italexit?

There are clashes with the police in Khasavyurt, Dagestan, with people protesting against mobilization.

Wordle 464 3/6

⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

@CowperKettle If it's this bad already, I can't guess what will happen if and when Putin formally declares war and Russia goes on a "war footing" domestically, including diversion of manufacturing and further suspension of civil (and civilian) law in favor of martial law with direct rulership by a wartime military.

1:58 PM

Not that bad, because Dagestan is a national republic, and people there have been more active than in other parts of Russia.

Back in 1916, there were huge revolts against mobilization in Tsarist Russia, but they were much more bloody

Central Asian revolt of 1916

The Central Asian revolt of 1916, also known as the Semirechye Revolt and as Urkun (Kyrgyz: Үркүн, romanized: Ürkün, lit. 'Exodus', , IPA: [yrˈkyn]) in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, was an anti-Russian uprising by the indigenous inhabitants of Russian Turkestan sparked by the conscription of Muslims into the Russian military for service on the Eastern Front during World War I. The rampant corruption of the Russian colonial regime and Tsarist colonialism in all its economic, political, religious, and national dimensions are all seen as the contributing causes. The revolt led to the exodus of hundreds...

Also not in Russia per se, but in recently-conqured colonies.

Are "national republics" certain pieces of Greater Russia which are given a higher degree of autonomy in certain regards than are other certain pieces?

I think you just said "yes"?

Yes, national republics have been given more leeway

You can see how uncertain I am by my urge to thrice use the word certain there. :)

In order to keep them inside the Russian Federation.

Tatarstan could retain a large portion of taxes, until the last couple years.

Basmachi movement

The Basmachi movement (Russian: Басмачество, Basmachestvo, derived from Uzbek: "Basmachi" meaning "bandits") was an uprising against Russian Imperial and Soviet rule by the Muslim peoples of Central Asia. The movement's roots lay in the anti-conscription violence of 1916 that erupted when the Russian Empire began to draft Muslims for army service in World War I. In the months following the October 1917 Revolution the Bolsheviks seized power in many parts of the Russian Empire and the Russian Civil War began. Turkestani Muslim political movements attempted to form an autonomous government in the...

Independence revolts continued well into the 1930s.

While in the rest of Russia, there was already tight control over population.

I hope Putin doesn't start saying anywhere with a -stan is also part of Russia.

2:03 PM

>
The Indian poor are accessible, conversational, often congenial and friendly, and generally unthreatening. No one can travel among the American poor the way I could travel among the Indian poor, asking intrusive questions. What’s your name? How long have you lived here? Where do you work? How much money do you make?—the usual visitor’s questions. I got answers, and even hospitality. In the same sort of area in the United States—the decaying sections of Jackson, Mississippi, the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, the Anacostia district in Washington, D.C., and many other places—I would be thr…

Like Moldovastan. :)

@Robusto Is that also from that travel book you were reading?

Yes.

I'm going back over it now and compiling some of my favorites of his observations.

Which are many.

IMO, fairly accurate, for what it's worth. Actually, except for rich people, most Indians are at least superficially friendly. Particularly towards foreigners. Expect when they are trying to defraud them, I suppose.

Rich Indians typically lock themselves away in their castles and will only associate with other rich people.

I have reached the point in which I cannot read the Indian poor as meaning the poor of India instead of meaning poor Indians like Custer's crocodile tears. It's like how we have to say people of color not colored people now. My own language has to say people of India never Indians or Indian peoples or whatnot.

2:08 PM

Red Army intervention in Afghanistan (1929)

The Red Army intervention in Afghanistan in 1929 was a special operation aimed at supporting the ousted king of Afghanistan, Amanullah Khan, against the Saqqawists and Basmachi. == The situation in Afghanistan == In 1919, diplomatic ties were established between the Soviet regime and the Kingdom of Afghanistan – a development that was perceived by the British Foreign Service as contrary to UK interests. In April 1923, Amanullah Khan promulgated a new constitution in Afghanistan, heralding a program of secularisation that included prohibition of both polygamy and the marriage of minors, and lifting...

For example, if you talk to Indians in a railway carriage, they will generally talk to you. By way of contrast, if you are ina railway carriage in England and try to talk to people, it's likely not to go so well.

> All the Red Army men were dressed in Afghan uniforms. The commanders received Asian names, which were to be called in the presence of the Afghans. The command was entrusted to V. M. Primakov (under the pseudonym Ragib Bey).

Weird noms de guerre.

@tchrist I'm not sure I understood that.

> “If Russia stops fighting, the war ends,” he said. “If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends.” —Anthony Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State

2:10 PM

> The infantry, rushing into the city, forgot that it had to play the role of the Afghans and went on the attack with the traditional Russian “Hurray”.

In my experience, English people, if you try to talk to them in public places like railway carriages, are prone to look at you like you're something they scraped off the bottom of their shoe.

@tchrist The First Chechen War started when Russia buttressed Chechen opposition forces with Russian soldiers without uniforms, and these were defeated, and captive Russian soldiers paraded on TV, showing Chechens that there was Moscow's hand in this.

@tchrist If you are referring to that weird thing about referring to Native Americans as Indians, well, I wish it would stop.

@FaheemMitha I've always had people talk to me everywhere in England. Even in bookstores, which is where one would suppose people contemplate their most private reveries.

@Robusto Ah. Well, my experience has generally been different.

2:12 PM

Perhaps because your skin is not the same color as the Brits'?

@FaheemMitha You consistently use the shorter term because of your local context, but here our local context is that of the United States government's Bureau of Indian Affairs. So simple Huffman encoding says that the more frequently used local context is the shorter encoding, and the less frequently used version takes a longer encoding, hence of India to mean anything Asian. I know that makes no sense in your local context.

@Robusto Very likely, yes.

Well, there is that.

In Majorka, the Spanish owner of a small bookstore repeated some weird word to me, over and over, until I understood that she was trying to pronounce Solzhenitsyn.

I suspect that racism was at the heart of the Brexit movement.

2:14 PM

@CowperKettle That's a very difficult word under the phonotactic rules of Spanish phonology. They just don't have those sounds, or cannot use them in those positions.

@tchrist The name India derives from the river Indus, which isn't anywhere near North America. It makes no etymological sense.

Apart from being pointlessly confusing.

@FaheemMitha As I have explained before, etymology doesn't matter. Believing it does matter leads to the folly known as the etymological fallacy. Words only mean what they mean now.

Etymological fallacy

An etymological fallacy is committed when an argument makes a claim about the present meaning of a word based exclusively on that word's etymology. It is a genetic fallacy that holds a word's historical meaning to be its sole valid meaning and that its present-day meaning is invalid. This is a linguistic misconception, and is sometimes used as a basis for linguistic prescription. An etymological fallacy may involve looking for the true meaning of words by delving into their etymologies, or claiming that a word should be used in a particular way because it has a particular etymology. == O...

@tchrist My small sister noticed a small bug crawling on a table in the caffee, and pointed and said "bukashka!" (small bug). The waiter crackep up laughing, and kept repeating "Bukashka! Bukashka!" He remembered it, and when we returned the next day, smiled and said "Bukashka!"

@tchrist Well, this particular usage makes no sense.

@tchrist More precisely, words only mean what they do in a historical context, including that of the present.

2:17 PM

It's a usage with more than 500 years of textual history. You cannot undo it. It's what it is now.

It makes as much sense as if I was to go around randomly calling people here Turkish or something. Or Samoan.

@tchrist Fine. Well, it's still nuts.

Also, about those turkeys.

They are not from Turkey.

Which one is wrong?

And what are we supposed to do about Indiana and Indianapolis and Indianans? Are we really going to keep going around telling them that they're wrong?

And Cumans called themselves Kipchaki, while Russians called them Polovtsy. Go figure.

@FaheemMitha Or when we speak of the young Turks, we are not talking about those of the last years of the Ottoman Empire.

@Robusto Well, at least that's an idiom. Not an actual name.

2:19 PM

Sorry, there is no such place as Indiana. You're all too stupid.

That is not going to go over very well.

@tchrist At least the word Indiana has an extra a. Reduces the possibility of confusion. Practically eliminates it, really.

Did you know that the Australian magpies are not magpies, the Australian robins are not robins, the American buffalo are not buffalo? What are we going to do about all these wrong words?

We call Germany Germany. The French call it Allemagne. The Germans call it Deutschland.

What's in a name?

From Wikipedia

> Indiana's name means "Land of the Indians", or simply "Indian Land".

Irony much?

Well, it was the Indians' land until the genocide.

2:22 PM

@Robusto At least they don't call Germany Patagonia. That might cause some confusion.

@Robusto Something something nekkid: stat rosa pristina nomine / nomina nuda tenemus.

Ooh, Latin.

Telling one set of Galicians that they are not Galician because only the other place counts as Galicia is just as stupid as all these other examples.

@FaheemMitha There is always going to be some confusion when people speak different languages and have different cultural references.

@Robusto IMO that's just a particularly awful name collision.

Despite what some people might think, I'm not that much of a word pedant.

2:24 PM

Your opinion in this derives from your self-identification, which is always a matter of faith not reason.

Or maybe just pedant.

There are different cultural frames of reference. None of them make universal sense.

Question for anyone who went to a US school and who cares to answer - do you feel you got a good education in your American school? Specifically, high school.

By what yardstick would one measure that?

@tchrist A personal one. I'm asking for a subjective opinion.

2:28 PM

Compared to having no education at all in one's teenage years as was originally normal? Certainly.

@FaheemMitha I went to a Catholic prep school. My education there was both very good (the quality and level of the education from a knowledge standpoint) and very bad (the means by which that education was inculcated).

Because so much of the American public education system is really about childcare=babysitting, and because so much of the rest of it is about prepping people for the dull existential doldrums of white-color office drones, little of it maps well to the requirements needed before advanced university studies.

We had many more languages available than were available in public schools, including Latin, German, French, Spanish, even Russian. We were expected to take at least three years of a language, three of science, and three of math (I took four of each), and a number of other advantages.

There do exist European education systems where during what we call their high school years, they do get more of what in America is taught after high school if at all. Against that measure the American high school education seems a poor one.

@tchrist As always, it depends on what you can afford.

2:35 PM

But this ignores the many opportunities that are available to those with talent, including university credits in high school via the A.P. program, amongst others.

It's more of a do-it-yourself education system. If you put in the extra work, you reap the rewards of a richer education. But nobody makes you do that, and most people do not.

It's unclear what benefit there would be, for example, in requiring all students to learn calculus.

Why do I wake up to see this room full of interesting conversation as far as the finger can scroll? So frustrating!

I hate this room.

I took AP calculus (the only kind of calculus offered), AP physics, AP English.

@Cerberus Sounds like a love/hate relationship.

Mebbeh.

We didn't have AP physics, just AP biology and AP zoology. And of course AP English, which people think I took at age 10. :)

We had no AP classes in history / civilization / humanities. I don't know why. Probably because of how small Lake Geneva is.

Or maybe because there wasn't as much demand for those as there was for what today are called STEM classes.

And we only had four possible language choices: Latin, German, French, and Spanish.

I hated secondary school, but it did prep me for higher learning. I tested out of every basic requirement so I could get onto the interesting stuff right away.

2:43 PM

It was much too much geared towards high academic life, if you did the entire AP track. There was much less available for tracking students into the crafts or trades. There was a tiny bit for agriculture but it wasn't held in high enough esteem.

And not everyone needs a post-graduate degree. That's the problem.

Very topical Language Log article:

Russian Newspeak

where they also mention an ELU Q about 'liquidate':

I don't think we are yet at the Russian Noose Peak.

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Q: "liquidate" in metaphorical sense

Merriam-Webster reads: Main Entry: liq·ui·date Pronunciation: \ˈli-kwə-ˌdāt\ Function: verb Inflected Form(s): liq·ui·dat·ed; liq·ui·dat·ing Etymology: Late Latin liquidatus, past participle of liquidare to melt, from Latin liquidus Date: circa 1575 transitive verb 1 a (1) : to determine by agre...

liquefy, without looking

Which is a very bad look for us because it is closed.

2:56 PM

Bayesian Surprise Predicts Human Event Segmentation in Story Listening

Decimo-annihilate.

Vote to reopen the liquidate question.

@Cerberus It's pretty annoying... too many things to say and be misunderstood.

@FaheemMitha It's not even currently in India.

@FaheemMitha I don't think the English have a monopoly on 1) not talking to strangers or 2) being racist.

The English (and other northern European types) don't like even talking amongst -themselves- in public.

But also everyone is racist.

Vote to reopne the 'liquidate' question

3:14 PM

@Mitch It's open already.

@Mitch In this case I just meant too much interesting stuff going on that I would need time to read back on.

Peter Shor wins prize.

@Mitch Liquidating leads to beer goggles.

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Russians have been allowed to cross the car border checkpoint into Georgia on foot, in expectation of the possible upcoming Russian decision to close off borders for males fit for the army.

@Robusto thanks!

@Cerberus Reading is overrated.

Don't let facts get in the way of your opinions

@CowperKettle Nice mountains.

3:25 PM

I'm happy for them, they will manage to escape.

Those poor people.

The damage to Russia from this war will be enormous.

@CowperKettle Every election in the US has associated with it a large number of people saying 'If the other candidate wins, I'm going to Canada'. But it never really happens.

At least not like this

A runner woman said on Saturday, after the run, "the conscriptable guys in our company got drunk on the day Putin announced mobilization"

In usual circumstances (those not now), joining the Russian army has never seemed like a choice people like to have.

Yekaterinburg airport today started barring conscriptable reservists from boarding foreign flights e1.ru/text/gorod/2022/09/26/71685851

3:29 PM

In the US, joining the army (for the past 30 years) has either been a fallback to not being able to get some other job, or a commonly invoked patriotic duty (like after 9/11)

It has been this way ever since the Marian reforms.

I remember hearing stories of people who were fleeing Nazi Germany (before hostilities started) by traveling east across Soviet Russia to get to the US.

@Cerberus The damage to Russia and its people has already been enormous.

That's a long trip

Stanislav Kurilov

Stanislav Vasilyevich "Slava" Kurilov (Russian: Станислав Васильевич Курилов; July 17, 1936 – January 29, 1998) was a Soviet, Canadian, and Israeli oceanographer. He escaped from the Soviet Union by jumping overboard from a cruise liner in the open ocean, and swimming to the Philippines. == Biography == === Early life === Stanislav Kurilov was born in 1936 in Vladikavkaz (then known as Ordzhonikidze). He grew up in Semipalatinsk, in Soviet Kazakhstan. As a young child, he learned to swim in secret from his own parents (who forbade him to enter open water), and at the age of 10, on a dare, he swam...

> He escaped from the Soviet Union by jumping overboard from a cruise liner in the open ocean, and swimming to the Philippines.

3:32 PM

> Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it only by reputation, and its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems to agree that if it could only get its act together and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the onrushing invaders, it could stomp them (and all other opposition) flat.

@CowperKettle Is that how most in Russia thought of joining the Army (before this latest)?

@Mitch There are still people who like serving in the army.

My point was that it always seemed to me that joining the Russian army was not desirable as an alternative to being unemployed.

@tchrist Yes, but the tally of everything, including all consequences.

It has gotten better, probably. And RosGvardia, the internal anti-riot police, became a desirable alternative to a poor job.

3:35 PM

I did not intend to imply that it won't worsen.

@CowperKettle You go back a long way.

Moscow, the Third Rome?

Moscow, third Rome

Moscow, third Rome (Russian: Москва — Третий Рим, romanized: Moskva — Tretiy Rim) is a theological and political concept asserting that Moscow is the successor of the Roman Empire, representing a "third Rome" in succession to the first Rome (Rome itself, capital of Ancient Rome) and the second Rome (Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire). == Concept == "Moscow, Third Rome" is a theological and a political concept which was formulated in the 15th–16th centuries in the Tsardom of Rus.In this concept, three interrelated and interpenetrating fields of ideas can be found:...

Haha

@tchrist I wonder if he's related to Paulie Shor.

It's a unix system

Yeah. And she apparently knew zero Unix commands, instead relying on a primitive GUI.

3:39 PM

@Mitch Ohhh so that's how Unix works.

With porn on the computer, too.

Yeah it's kind of a big deal

I wonder whether the image of that woman was in the film, or edited in by whoever posted the video...

wait...which image?

How could you have missed that?

do I have to watch it again?

3:41 PM

It's a unix system

This time stamp.

That boy later starred in a great movie The Cure en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cure_(1995_film)

@Cerberus I musta blinked. But I think similar 'cheesecake' images were in previous scenes, to show how juvenile the computer nerd who set it all up was.

@CowperKettle That's excellent info for movie trivia. He was also in the 'Social Network' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody' (in small roles)

(discovered after looking on wikipedia)

@Mitch Oh, so those are in the original film?

I wonder whether the American censors would still allow that nowadays.

Children seeing sexual images?

4:02 PM

@Cerberus Trends are interesting... I've seen on Youtube shorts some images of women who are showing some cleavage with a blurring out of the chest area.

It could be international pressure...ie like Disney films getting pressure from large Chinese or Arabic markets to modify things.

@Cerberus But, note, that the image was only someone in a bikini, which I think is currently allowed in front of children in the US.

@Mitch Hilarious.

The US only seems puritanical in comparison to Europe. It is still considered pretty ... um... -un- puritanical to the rest of the world.

To me, the American censors have always seemed to be the greatest source of censorship and prudeness in Western imagery/video.

@Mitch Allowed, but "OMG the legal risk": American lawyers are super risk averse, because of the way the justice system works, and because of how sensitive the public is.

@Mitch I would not say the rest of the world.

It depends.

Oh?

But, yes, I meant those places whose imagery we normally see.

South America, for example, is generally less Puritanical than the United States, I should say?

4:09 PM

@Cerberus hm... not actually knowing anything but by association, the large majority of Spanish speakers in the US come from Central/South America... and they tend to be much more conservative in social things than the average US.

However, you might counter with Brazil which, yes, does seem quite the other direction from puritanical.

Emotive conjugation

In rhetoric, emotive or emotional conjugation (also known as Russell's conjugation) mimics the form of a grammatical conjugation of an irregular verb to illustrate humans' tendency to describe their own behavior more charitably than the behavior of others.Used seriously, such loaded language can lend false support to an argument by obscuring a fallacy of meaning. == Examples == It is often called Russell's conjugation in honour of philosopher Bertrand Russell, who expounded the concept in 1948 on the BBC Radio programme The Brains Trust, citing the examples: I am firm, you are obstinate, he is...

@Mitch About some social things, to be sure.

But those are the poorest people from the poorest, most backward countries.

apropos of nothing at all, TIL that there is a name for that.

The Hunduran countryside is nothing like São Paulo, in which city live more people than in several countries like Honduras combined.

@Cerberus It's complicated surely, and the selection process of who immigrates makes a difference.

> Edward Snowden received Russian citizenship from Putin, Russian media report.

Now he can be mobilized, too.

4:11 PM

Haha ouch.

@Cerberus Maybe Brazil is weighting this considerably? I don't really know other countries.

Brazil is half of South America.

But if we're going by population, look at India/China/Muslim countries for puritanism.

But countries like Argentina, Chile, Mexico are not exactly prudish either.

7 mins ago, by Mitch

The US only seems puritanical in comparison to Europe. It is still considered pretty ... um... -un- puritanical to the rest of the world.

You said "the rest of the world".

In addition, I think China is less prudish in some respects, as are Japan and Korea.

And India as well. It depends.

Again it's complicated.

There are very unprudish things in Japan/Korea (mixed nude bathing).

But otherwise I would think both countries are much more prudish than the US.

@Cerberus India is very conservative. You can barely have people kissing in movies there.

4:15 PM

user image

Indian brides.

They show cleavage.

And bellies.

No more prudish than American brides, I should think?

@Mitch It will depend on the issue, but I think, with respect to cleavage, they are not that prudish.

user image

Nigerian bride.

Just the biggest country on either continent.

user image

Brazilian brides.

user image

American brides.

(I also tried "Dutch brides", but then I get "Dutch mail-order brides" in the image results...)

user image

Chinese bride. But also:

user image

Western wedding dresses seem to be popular in China.

user image

Japanese bride.

user image

And another one.

4:35 PM

user image

Nanopore DNA sequencer, attached to a smartphone.

@Mitch ah what? That's not at all the impression I get

Of course, "India" both includes Bombay and some nondescript village in central India.

@CowperKettle hehe

Exactly.

So Kazakhstan is now resisting the Russian annexation of parts of Ukraine.

What does that suggest: Chinese pressure?

No I think it's like that part of a Scorsese movie when there's a wedge between different mafia members and their mistrust is their downfall

More seriously, I think Cowp mentioned something along the lines of this unquestioning obedience and approval of Russian policies eventually costing Kazakhstan dearly

There are multiple gunshot sounds outside, I think it's one of those military exercises

I hope :S

Our company can be your one-stop shop for decentralization.

@M.A.R. Oh, dear, the army actually shoots bullets near your house??

The Bride Wore Black

The Bride Wore Black (French: La Mariée était en noir) is a 1968 French film directed by François Truffaut and based on the novel of the same name by William Irish, a pseudonym for Cornell Woolrich. It stars Jeanne Moreau, Charles Denner, Alexandra Stewart, Michel Bouquet, Michael Lonsdale, Claude Rich and Jean-Claude Brialy. Costumes by Pierre Cardin. It is a revenge film in which a deranged widow murders the man who accidentally shot her husband on her wedding day, as well as his four friends. She wears only white, black or a combination of the two. == Plot == As the film opens, Julie Kohler...

4:47 PM

@M.A.R. I'm very sorry to hear that. Keep safe! Don't peek out the windows

Nice plot.

@M.A.R. Be safe, if you can!

I hope your outer walls are masonry, not wood.

@M.A.R. Now called Mumbai, after their patron goddess Mumbai-Devi.

> While I was in Mumbai the municipal council launched “a drive to clear hutments and shanties from the roads and footpaths.” On the first day one thousand such shelters were pulled down and the occupants scattered. In one morning, more than six thousand people were made homeless.

Oh, please.

It's insane to change the names of places every so many years under a new régime.

It's just Bombay.

Here we go again.

Or we don't.

We do not say London in Dutch, nor Paris.

4:55 PM

Once upon a time it was Lunden, according to the Royal Ordinance Survey.

Nor do you say 's Gravenhage.

And way back when it was Londinium.

Personally, I like the name Bombay. It sounds exotic. Mumbai sounds steamy and putrescent, a miasma.

You may call it whatever you like.

But changing names for artificial reasons in, in my, oh, so humble opinion, a bad idea.

What is one to do? Burma was such a handy name, serviceable for so much of my life, that I find it difficult to pronounce it now as Myanmar.

@Robusto Was that a Jesuit school? And what were the means by which that education was inculcated?

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