English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

6:52 AM

7:34 AM

I am a Telugu medium student. I am not able to understand English paragraphs. Can you suggest English books and online course

Xanne

8:04 AM

@Færd How beautiful. Where are they from? Is the pin your location, if I may ask?

Færd

8:15 AM

@subbu Try English coursebooks and simple stories for your level.

@Xanne I don't know about the source. I picked them up from Twitter and Google Image searches.

So the pin is not my location. I live in Tehran, Iran.

Where do you live?

@subbu Take a look at this, for example: easystoriesinenglish.com.

Xanne

@Færd California, near San Francisco

Were you born there?

@Færd Thanks sir

@subbu sure

@Færd No, in Oklahoma.

Færd

8:24 AM

@Xanne Ah cool. I don't know why I thought you were Asian. I must have mistaken you for another user.

Yeah I did

Xanne

@Færd Maybe Gigili

M.A.R.

8:44 AM

@subbu Read, then write. Rinse and repeat. For more detailed instructions, see @Færd

@RegDwigнt "You know, and you must know this, there is a thing called testing too much" "Who says that?"

It's just three bloody words. Why has no one said them before?

M.A.R.

8:56 AM

@Færd when I was four or five I made it my first ever personal mission to be able to draw a map of the world with all the countries in it. I still remember most, can even draw a vague liking to their borders

@Robusto my goodness. Half of the actually funny memes that exist are actually this guy's oneliners

CowperKettle

9:09 AM

CowperKettle

9:28 AM

CowperKettle

9:46 AM

Years lived with disability (YLD) due to depression, in thousand years per 100 thousand population, by country. 2010

CowperKettle

10:14 AM

@M.A.R. Quite cool

When I was four or five I .. I did nothing.

CowperKettle

10:26 AM

And this has continued.

CowperKettle

12:23 PM

Word of the day: morningness–eveningness questionnaire

Robusto

1:32 PM

@M.A.R. He was indeed prolific.

M.A.R.

2:06 PM

@CowperKettle Well I'm worse. When I was four or five, I was doing something, and now I've actually gone back and done nothing

SmokeDetector

4:07 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at beginning of answer, potentially bad ns for domain in answer (32): Synonym of Incendiary by 352522808qqcom on english.SE

CowperKettle

vladtime.ru/kriminalnie_novosti/…

A crime report from Perm Region of Russia, 2014

A 68 yo retiree was drinking vodka and his 14 yo granddaughter was chatting with him.

They started quarreling, and he knifed her to death. The next morning, he built a catapult and threw her body from the catapult into the neighboring forest. He was an engineer.

When asked by the police why he did that, he said that the granddaugher had always dreamed to travel to the stars.

Reads like total fake news.

Ah, turns out it is fake news.

Someone has a really great imagination.

Robusto

@CowperKettle What other kind of news do you get over there?

SmokeDetector

4:34 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at beginning of answer, potentially bad ns for domain in answer, potentially bad keyword in answer, blacklisted user (104): Synonym of Incendiary by 352522808qqcom on english.SE

CowperKettle

@Robusto e1.ru/news/spool/news_id-69410698.html

100 people went to the center of my city in support of the protesters in Khabarovsk, who have been protesting every day for 28 days now

The police have not appherended anybody.

Because there were too many people.

Sometimes the authorities use a different tactic. They only ask people for details and make photos, if there are too many people, and some days later they arrest a couple or fine a couple.

Robusto

Good going.

CowperKettle

Last spring a couple of local oligarchs bribed the local authorities and wanted to destroy the little park there and put a new huge church in its place.

This enraged the citizens, and for about a week the people were gathering from dusk to dawn, in order not to let the construction begin.

It grew out of control, and so President had to intervene and finally the park was saved.

Robusto

President Putin?

CowperKettle

Of course, after this a lot of people were fined and several people got short jail terms.

@Robusto Yes. Because in Russia, in cases of mass protests, the authorties get paralyzed. They seek answers from the Cremlin and dare not do anything on their own accord.

Robusto

4:49 PM

Figures.

CowperKettle

It's a usual thing for a half-authoritarian regime. It was so in the late Roman Empire.

Robusto

Do you still have Комсомо́л or anything like it there?

CowperKettle

Well, there is a tiny Komsomol movement but it's no longer enforced upon everybody. IT's on the outskirts of the political spectrum

The domineering party is Putin's United Russia (Yedinaya Rossiya)

Robusto

Who snoops on the people to ferret out dissidents?

CowperKettle

And there is the Young Guard of United Russia, but it's not compulsory.

@Robusto The FSB, the heir to KGB

Robusto

4:51 PM

Are they as diligent as the KGB?

CowperKettle

No. They only care for the money. They bust up rich companies to siphon money from them.

Robusto

So you truly have a "thugocracy" there.

CowperKettle

Yes.

Robusto

That sucks.

CowperKettle

There is no true ideology that would bind the state.

In the USSR, there was the idea that we are all buldiing a better future.

And you could appeal to this idea in order to promote this or that thought of yours.

Robusto

4:54 PM

George Will on Putin's Thugocracy.

CowperKettle

Ah, the paywall. But I know, even in Russia people use to say that the Mafia runs the state.

Robusto

Tyrants can be especially ominous when they are ludicrous. In 2011, Vladimir Putin, scuba diving in the Black Sea, emerged clutching two 6th-century Greek urns — remarkably without a trace of moss — which had lain undiscovered in six feet of water, even though Russian archaeologists had scoured the seabed while studying an ancient Greek city. Putin’s flaunted contempt for his audience, the Russian masses, is calculated to breed in them an enervating cynicism that will prevent restiveness and the necessity of assassinations, such as that of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow in 2006…

CowperKettle

Yes, the urn thing was a riotous fun.

Yes, his clique has control over the main parts of the economy.

I'm afraid that if Putin is toppled, it will for a long time be not very different. The people in Russia are very passive.

Robusto

Well, centuries of serfdom and peonage are to blame for that.

CowperKettle

Yes, the Constition amendment referendum was visibly fraudulent. This has decreased Putin's rating quite strongly.

Robusto

4:59 PM

Yeah, but he makes the ratings he wants to show.

CowperKettle

He has got to be careful, because people around him are keeping tabs on ratings. They may want to make a coup, like they did in 1801 in Russia and all through the 18th century.

Stalin used to kill off all possible pretenders to the throne

Robusto

> Joseph Stalin was reported to have said, at a Bolshevik party meeting in 1923, that voting is “completely unimportant” — “what is extraordinarily important is … who will count the votes, and how.” Except for a brief democratic interlude in the 1990s, this maxim has governed the Soviet and later the Russian government’s approach to elections ever since.

CowperKettle

The Bolshevik system was based on strong subordination and there was almost no democracy from the start.

The very theory stated that only "politically educated" people should have the rule.

The elections in the USSR were held in order to make people feel that they are part of the system.

And in order to pick the most "politically educated" and involve them into the ruling system.

Robusto

Only those who had "the correct line."

CowperKettle

Only those who could keep their tongues tied and follow the correct line and feel what could be said and what could not.

In Putin's Russia it much more relaxed, so it's a great progress compared to the USSR

Robusto

5:04 PM

I feel for you, man.

CowperKettle

History is very interesting.

I listened to an audiobook titled The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes, it's great and it explains a lot.

Richard Pipes

Richard Edgar Pipes (Polish: Ryszard Pipes; July 11, 1923 – May 17, 2018) was an American academic who specialized in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union, who espoused a strong anti-communist point of view throughout his career. In 1976, he headed Team B, a team of analysts organized by the Central Intelligence Agency who analyzed the strategic capacities and goals of the Soviet military and political leadership. Pipes was the father of American historian Daniel Pipes. Pipes was born to a Jewish family in Cieszyn, Poland, which fled the country as refugees after it was...

CowperKettle

5:52 PM

We have a joke in Russia that in reality the Periodic Table first appeared in a dream of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, but he knew nothing about chemistry, and did not understand what it was at all, so it had to reappear in Mendeleyev's dream.

CowperKettle

6:12 PM

Jim Fixx

James Fuller Fixx (April 23, 1932 – July 20, 1984), AKA Jim Fixx, was an American who wrote the 1977 best-selling book The Complete Book of Running. He is credited with helping start America's fitness revolution by popularizing the sport of running and demonstrating the health benefits of regular jogging. He died of a heart attack while jogging at 52 years of age; his genetic predisposition for heart problems and other previous lifestyle factors may have caused his heart attack. == Background == James Fuller Fixx was born on April 23, 1932, in New York City. He graduated from Trinity School in...

Interesting person.

Running probably expended his lifespan by a good 10 years.

And a smart one too.

Robusto

6:43 PM

@CowperKettle I think he was a smoker.

Yes, "other previous lifestyle factors."

CowperKettle