English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

And because they care only about their own seat, not about the nation or its good governance, they drink whatever slurry comes out of his ass.

@Cerberus Specifically, he tells his minions to destroy them. And they do.

@tchrist And it's a huge ass.

Lotta slurry.

How can senators be destroyed?

1:14 AM

By voting them out.

Primary challenge

A primary challenge occurs in U.S. politics when an incumbent elected official is challenged in an upcoming primary election by a member of their own political party. Such events, known informally as "being primaried," are noteworthy and not frequent in the United States, as tradition dictates that members of a political party support officeholders of the same party, both for party unity and to minimize the possibility of loss of the seat to an opposing party. In addition, officeholders are frequently seen as de facto leaders of their political party, eligible to establish policy and administer...

The problem is that the thing that most stirs people up is fire and brimstone, extremist hate.

I'm not sure I understand.

And so the reasonable people cannot stand before the hordes.

The crazies.

One would expect a senator have his own supporters.

Nope.

It is not that.

1:16 AM

Or the party structure, then.

But why should it all depend on the president?

It is that you can be outfuckingrageous and incite the morons who live in the Fox World. This kills the senators.

Primary challenge

A primary challenge occurs in U.S. politics when an incumbent elected official is challenged in an upcoming primary election by a member of their own political party. Such events, known informally as "being primaried," are noteworthy and not frequent in the United States, as tradition dictates that members of a political party support officeholders of the same party, both for party unity and to minimize the possibility of loss of the seat to an opposing party. In addition, officeholders are frequently seen as de facto leaders of their political party, eligible to establish policy and administer...

Nobody cares about the center. They want as far out as possible. That gets the pitchforks pitched and the torches lit like nothing else.

And it's far more effecting to make people take up arms because they are AGAINST something.

So Trump has enough power to blast both the senator's own supporters and the entire party organisation?

Completely.

How did that ever happen?

Really, Fox News does. He is but their angelos.

1:19 AM

Was it the same with other presidents?

No.

We started to see it under Bushlet.

But nothing like this. Nothing.

How did he take over Fox?

Murdoch?

And how come Fox is so powerful?

@Cerberus Because they cater to the hateful idiots.

They tell 'em what they want to hear.

You're poor, you're powerless, and it's someone else's fault.

Is that enough?

Rupert Murdoch can tell you how to direct your hate.

Aug 4 at 18:40, by Robusto

1:21 AM

I mean, is that enough to become so powerful?

This is the same strategy that brought Hitler to power.

"It's the Jews! Get rid of the Jews and take your rightful place as masters of the world!"

I wish I could Godwin you, but you're right.

Godwin me?

Godwin's Law.

OIC.

1:24 AM

Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals. There was no dissent. When Bill Clinton appoint her to the U.S. Supreme Court, the vote was 94-3. Then Newt happened.

So the way it works now is that the Senate will never confirm anybody "from the wrong team". Ever again.

We no longer govern. We rule.

@Cerberus I know it doesn't seem to make sense. It never did to me either. And then it was too late.

Let's hope it is a phase.

This is what so incensed John McCain. Because he knew it was wrong.

@Cerberus Dying is a phase.

Perhaps many Republican politicians are waiting, then, for Trump to fall; then some return to normalcy could be achieved.

You cannot govern this way. You can only rule like a brutal despot, destroying everything that the other side brings up in your path to power.

1:27 AM

I read that almost none of the ones up for election mentioned Trump at all in their campaigns.

@Cerberus He is the outcome and the symptom. The sickness remains after him. And we will not be after him while yet he lives.

If both sides of the patient realise he is sick...

And all because the rich want all the wealth. All of it. And they want it right now.

There will be more monsters to come. That's what Murdoch's purpose is. And of course, Putin's. How 'bout that Brexit eh?

One wonders how much influence Murdoch has really had on the content produced by Fox.

1:32 AM

This is how civil wars are groomed, how dictatorships arise, how the people are brutalized and their country lost. We see it happening again and again throughout history.

I still have a little bit more faith in humanity.

Franklin's "a democracy, if you can keep it" has come to the unkept phase.

All those people who work at the White House and try to keep Trump in check?

They've been banished.

They used to work there.

I'm sure many still do.

Also in the many other offices of the state.

1:34 AM

It is impossible to understand the complete lock that Fox has on their minds from without.

They seem utterly crazy to us. Because we do not live in that world. It's all their media consumption. We have passed beyond the outer limits of our democracy's reach. "Do not adjust your set. We control the vertical. We control the horizontal."

They have been conditioned to make them resistant to reason.

And science.

They are just rabid warrior lemmings ready to be turned upon whoever meets with Trumpian displeasure.

I have to believe there will be an end to this. That most of the people really want a return to normalcy.

I'm sure most do.

But it keeps me up nights.

> 今月の文芸春秋の記事、「現代最長政権コロナに敗れる」の中で、立憲民主党の石垣参議院議員が「大事な時に体を壊す癖がある危機管理能力のない人物」とツイートして炎上、謝罪に追い込まれた、という下りを読んで、日本人の知性も品性もここまで堕落し荒廃したかと、暗澹、絶望した。日本人は駄目だね

From Yoichi on Sept 9th. twitter.com/yoioishijcomhom?lang=en

You left a sentence fragment at the end.

Wow, in the part you left out he says, roughly speaking, Japanese people really suck, don't they?

1:44 AM

eek

That was all there was.

> 今月の文芸春秋の記事、「現代最長政権コロナに敗れる」の中で、立憲民主党の石垣参議院議員が「大事な時に体を壊す癖がある危機管理能力のない人物」とツイートして炎上、謝罪に追い込まれた、という下りを読んで、日本人の知性も品性もここまで堕落し荒廃したかと、暗澹、絶望した。日本人は駄目だね

"日本人は駄目だね" must be the disparagement of his own people then?

That last bit says "Nihonjin wa dame da ne."

Which means, literally, Japanese are bad, right? And I translated more idiomatically into English.

The rest of it is about the politics of the post-Abe government, which I am out of touch with.

But yeah, I thought there was a sentence fragment at the end because no sentence-final period. I expected more. But that is enough.

Have you ever corresponded with him outside the public ELU stuff?

Trying to reach him. Having trouble.

No. Never tried.

Searching for him does turn up false positives. But the Twitter account for sure his him. I just don't do social media so can't get to him there.

> Currently, Yoichi Oishi is Chairman for Chubu-Nippon Broadcasting Co., Ltd. and Chairman for CBC Radio Co., Ltd. and Chairman at CBC Television Co. Ltd. .

Like how that one's a false positive.

Twitter profile has: "Worked 40 years in both local & international ad agencies. Love reading and travel. Currently I'm in StockExchange English language enthusiasts' online circle."

So that's really him.

So is this obit a false positive.

Well, it's not an uncommon name.

Our Yoichi has to be 90 by now, right?

That's not all that old in Japan, though, I guess. My mother-in-law is 101 and still going.

A bit wandered, perhaps. But still a sweet old lady.

Eigenartig doch wahr.

2:00 AM

82?

Something like that. Or was that 6 years ago?

@tchrist Back in 2011 he was saying he was 80.

IIRC.

Yes, perhaps so.

We need to find some social media junky to try to reach him. It's unlike him to be away from ELU this long. But the proof-of-life of the Twitter post from him is encouraging.

Yeah, I have no FB, no Instagram, no Twitter ... no interest in any of that.

Exactly. Who the fuck would?

Haha, I just notice he says he's in "StockExchange" ...

2:07 AM

yep :)

Very posh of him.

2:30 AM

BTW, fun fact: Yoichi's surname (Oishi) can mean either "little stone" or "big stone" (impossible to tell without seeing the kanji, and the Hepburn romanization leaves subtleties like that by the wayside).

Japanese given names are often unfathomable.

The famous Admiral Yamamoto who planned the Pearl Harbor attack? His given name, Isoroku, means "fifty-six."

That's weird. The Chinese seem to have given names that "mean" things.

Unlike ours. It surprises them.

I've been taking my dad from the train station on a taxi to home just now. The taxi driver started grumbling at us for wearing masks. He said that covid does not exist, it's all just common flu. He had a pack of cigarettes in his glove compartment and coughed quite a bit during the ride.

Yuck.

I have heard of taxi drivers believing in conspiracy theories here as well.

Taxi drivers are usually among the lowest of the low here.

2:46 AM

The running taxi joke here is "I'm only taxiing as a hobby, in reality I'm a [businessman, banker etc.]"

When the driverless cars started appearing in the news, the joke was refashioned to ""I'm only a taxi driver as a hobby, in reality I'm a quantum supercomputer etc."

@CowperKettle In LA and NYC the joke is about waiters who are really actors.

Another one is "Russia's economic crisis could be solved in a week, but sadly all taxi drivers are busy"

3:08 AM

@Cerberus Imagine when you first learned that Athens lost to Sparta in what we've come to call the Peloponnesian War. Or when you learned that the Orcs won the Battle of Unnumbered Tears in the Silmarillion. This is what it feels like here.

It's more like the Sack of Rome. Barbarians well past the gates.

The bombing of Rotterdam, perhaps?

Which happened simultaneously with the surrender to the Nazis.

It's a tragedy that sows salt in the fields of generations yet unborn.

I understand the feeling.

I feel the national health insurance isn't good at all.

You mean your own there?

3:13 AM

All I can say is that it seems somewhat less Earth shattering from the outside.

I have seen you say words to that effect.

Remember also that demography is strongly against the Republicans.

They'll have to steer left soon in order to survive, I should think?

What do you mean? Right now geography is strongly in their favor. The tyranny of the minority. It's minority rule.

A decreasing minority.

because to have the national health insurance one has to pay premium noninterruptedly for 5 years back to the past from now whether they have noninterrupted income interim.

3:17 AM

@Cerberus California has two senators. So does Wyoming. That isn't changing.

Texas will flip fairly soon.

Immigration + youth.

The Senate is ruled by people very few people voted for.

And they control everything but the purse.

I believe various smaller states are not so far off from flipping, too?

And isn't the presidency the most dangerous post?

I suspect the national health insurance help doctors to make more money.

3:21 AM

@CaptainBohemian That sounds bad.

I'm tired of minority rule. It is not the way it is supposed to work. And they're trying to lock that in for generations. That's what this is about.

because some doctors are reluctant to take patients not having national health insurance.

yesterday I went to a hospital, and an assistant forwards to me a doctor said it's not convenient to report the medical expense to the health bureau if you don't have national health insurance.

Hey guys

random question

I'm trying to type in christine clean in a word document

but i can't seem to get the spelling right

What is the correct spelling?! Your help would be greatly appreciated.

@CowperKettle Trump's slurry.

3:27 AM

Surely I'm not dyslexic

that seems to mean doctors can get more money when reporting the medical expense to the health insurance bureau than directly charging from the patient.

Please!

> For Republicans, future success is tied to mobilizing their strength among whites without college educations—a still-substantial but shrinking portion of the electorate—while attaining gains among at least some growing demographic groups. A narrow Republican reliance on noncollege-educated whites would lead, at best, to continued popular vote losses and ever smaller Electoral College wins, which would eventually peter out.

They could pull this off for a while, but not indefinitely, without making a left turn.

:(

but national health insurance is only convenient for people having continuous substantial income.

3:30 AM

is it qruistine clean?

@Cerberus No, future Republican success is tied to locking in a Supreme Court that does things like invalidate the Voting Rights Act and allows infinite anonymous money into elections. Which they've done. Nobody would have ever voted for that bullshit.

That is of course a problem.

@Turbo You mean pristine?

if you have long income gaps, you may be heavily burdened by the premium of the national health insurance.

@CaptainBohemian Same problem here, for a long time now. But it's employment, and without it you don't have a clean long history and can't get health insurance.

@Cerberus Thank youu

Mental block :/

3:32 AM

Heh.

You might even want to leave out clean.

@Cerberus You may not recall but we actually chatted several years ago

As pristine includes clean.

@Cerberus so pristine kitchen would be fine in a sentence?

@Turbo I vaguely recall your name, but I think you must have changed your icon?

Probably haha it's been so long

3:33 AM

@Turbo Yes. But, more literally, that means a kitchen that has never been touched.

@Cerberus stat rosa pristina nomine; nomina nuda tenemus

Suffice it to say, I wholeheartedly agree with your political analysis of the situation in the USA

Or maybe Roma for rosa. Stupid scribes.

I have lived in the UK for the last 18 years and am Canadian and French, but for some odd reason I follow US politics more closely than any other political system

@tchrist I remember you too!

@tchrist here you can't have the national health insurance suddenly, like from today on. You have to pay the premium for whatever gaps of the lack of the national health insurance in precedent 5 years.

3:36 AM

@tchrist I remember that quotation, even though I only 'read' the book in a hurry when I was 18, for my finals.

the premium of the national health insurance for 5 years is a big burden.

So I must have heard it again later.

Possibly from you.

and that's irrational because you can't go back to the precedent 5 years to see a doctor with the identity of the national health insurance.

> Whites made up 69 percent of Eligible Voters in 2016—a figure expected to drop to 67 percent by 2020 and 59 percent by 2036. During this time period, the Hispanic population is expected to grow by 6 points—going from 12 percent in 2016 to 18 percent in 2036—while Asians and other racial groups grow by 3 points, or 7 percent to 10 percent. The share of EVs who are black will be mostly stable—rising less than 1 percent between 2016 and 2032.

Second, the population is aging. Those 65 years old and older will make up a larger share of EVs—going from 21 percent in 2016 to 22 percent in 2020 a…

americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2018/04/14/449461/…

> La frêś la tulìva el paròli da n'ètra parèinta, Stat Roma pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus ch'la stèva scrìta in dal "De contemptu mundi" ed Bernêrd ed Cluny dal XII sécol, in dùa però a s descòr dal disfacimèint dla Ròma 'd cal tèimp là.

I have no idea what language that is, but it reads clearly enough. :)

3:39 AM

Yeah, I don't recognise it.

Who knows, it could be Old Venetian.

But I must sleep.

> È interessante notare che le edizioni moderne del poema di Bernardo stampano, sulla base di alcuni manoscritti, un testo significativamente diverso: stat Roma pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.[2] La traduzione del verso sarebbe allora: "Roma antica esiste solo nel nome...". Pertanto la traduzione del verso di Eco sarebbe analoga, ma nel tentativo di dargli maggior senso e significato ne sono state date diverse interpretazioni

That one's Italian.

Much easier to read for me.

in May I heard that buying face masks needs to show health insurance cards.

Yeah, agree. But you don't get totally lost with that weird one.

Carpśàn

...

Dialetto carpigiano

Il dialetto carpigiano è una varietà della lingua emiliana e, più specificamente, del dialetto modenese. È parlato, con qualche sotto-variante, nelle località della bassa pianura a ovest del fiume Panaro, ossia nel circondario di Carpi. È ancora molto diffuso nelle campagne novesi, dove assume un'importanza significativa. == Caratteristiche == Il carpigiano è più simile al modenese rispetto al mirandolese, in particolar modo per quanto riguarda il vocalismo, decisamente evoluto rispetto a quello originario del Latino Volgare: la A lunga palatalizza: mèr, sèl, andèr (mare, sale, andare); ...

I don't know if that's still the case.

3:41 AM

Not totally lost. But partly.

> Al dialèt carpśàn 'l è na varietê dialetèla dla lèngva emigliàna e, piò preciśamèint, dal dialèt mudnés. Al carpśàn al vìn parlê in dal sitê dla bàsa śvèini a Chèrp, dimòndi de piò dal persòuni piò ansiàni, ch'i 'l dróven c'ma lengva mèdra, e difàt cun l'italianiśasiòun in del scóli e ch'a deśvìn dai média, i ragasō e i śōven i 'l descòren poc; al cuntràri al carpśàn 'l è dimòndi parlê in dal campàgni 'd Nōṿ, in dû i al descòren normalmèint.

Modena, I see.

Yep. I just don't know Italian dialects at all, not like I know Iberian ones.

Nor I.

then people having no national health insurance cards can't buy masks, then they can't take a bus and go to places needing to wear masks.

3:42 AM

I have heard some Napolitan.

How was it?

Renato Carosone - Tu Vuò Fa' L'Americano

►

I think this is Napolitan?

Yeah, the Italian reads much more easily for me too. It's like reading some weirdo Extremaduran dialect and then coming back to Galician and being able to move along at speed again.

I'm sure.

I wish you a good night.

G'night.

3:45 AM

Ciao.

Yeah, that's kind of a different language, kind of, but not.

4:08 AM

I don't get it

SmokeDetector

6:38 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at beginning of body, potentially bad keyword in body (46): Business Resources by brianwong on english.SE

8:02 AM

> For my part I deem those blessed to whom, by favour of the gods, it has been granted either to do what is worth writing of, or to write what is worth reading (Pliny the Younger)

Word of the say: sourdough (old-timer in Alaska)

10:34 AM

I was translating a news report about psychiatric consequences of child sexual abuse to Russian, and went to the Russian Wikipedia's page "Child sexual abuse". I found there a big graphic picture of a naked child being raped by a soldier. Seems not quite well-placed. The artist was famous for pornographic sexplotiation pictures, it seems from his portfolio.

11:00 AM

@CowperKettle Not all that funny. Probably another technophobe who claims technology is ruining grammar and spelling and claiming nobody listens to them in the same picture

12:02 PM

@CowperKettle I've seen this somewhere before, maybe it's not just Alaskan

TRiG

12:15 PM

@CowperKettle Yikes.

12:51 PM

@M.A.R. Sourdough is a type of bread that is leavened by a type of bacteria, which imparts a sour taste to the bread. A culture is kept always in fermentation, so a bit of the leavening bread is always left when new loaves are made, upon which more dough is added to keep it alive. That's where the word for old-timer Alaskans comes from, because that is how they made bread back in the gold rush days.

1:01 PM

Interesting, but only a weathered statistician might say if this is bullshit or not.

1:19 PM

@FaheemMitha same

@CowperKettle I remain sceptical about the role of herd immunity.

Unless they can show that most young people in Sweden have immunity.

But the restrictions in Sweden were not that different from the ones in Holland.

TRiG

@FaheemMitha Bormir isn't shady, just easily swayed.

And desirous of glory.

@M.A.R. there are some real zingers in there.

> That such writers also depend upon recycling the plots of their literary superiors and are rewarded for this bland repetition isn't surprising in a world of sensation movies and manufactured pop bands. That they are rewarded with the lavish lifestyles of the most successful whores is also unsurprising...

> To pretend that this addictive cabbage is anything more than the worst sort of pulp historical romance or western is, however, a depressing sign of our intellectual decline and our free-falling academic standards.

To Morrow The Kingston Trio with Lyrics

►

A song I've heard today on a jog.

Great lyrics.

Мы все ежики = We are all hedgehogs

A sign I snapped on a jog today

A memorial to the Beatles at the embankment in the center

The old library building, if I remember right

Mitchell van Zuylen

2:41 PM

Quick question that I can't find an answer to (because I don't know the proper terms, i'd wager)

When using "rely on", can I have words in between 'rely' and 'on'? A colleague wrote the following " [...] to determine on which system he relied to [..] " and this seems a little odd to me, but I'm not sure if it's actually wrong or not. Would "..to determine which system he relied on to.. " be better?

@MitchellvanZuylen Hoi!

Both are correct.

Matt E. Эллен

"on which you can rely" is acceptable English, but seems a but stiff.

or maybe literary?

now I've said it, I think it's a lyric in a song or jingle

Perhaps slightly.

@MitchellvanZuylen To explain what's happening here: in a normal main clause, we have a pattern he relied on me. The object me comes after the preposition on. However, relative pronouns must come very near the beginning of a clause, so which must come before he relied. And which is the object of on. So now on is dangling a bit, all alone: which he relied on.

It is possible in English to place such a preposition before its object: on which he relied.

But it's not compulsory.

So both options are correct.

Notably, the COVID-19 infection rarely seems to cause a runny nose, sneezing, or sore throat (these symptoms have been observed in only about 5% of patients). Sore throat, sneezing, and stuffy nose are most often signs of a cold.

Mitchell van Zuylen

2:56 PM

Thanks guys! Especially @Cerberus, that's super useful :)

In early August, I had these symptoms and recovered very soon.

I had these symptoms 10 days ago and recovered very soon. I don't think it was covid.

Covid usually causes a rise in temperature and coughing.

@MitchellvanZuylen Succes ermee!

3:27 PM

Some people like to say a treatment is covered by the national health insurance, like it's a free treatment.

But the real problem with the national health insurance is it isn't free and needs to pay premium monthly.

If you have an affiliation paying the premium by extracting from your salary continuously, the national health insurance should not be a problem for you.

But once you have gaps without affiliation paying you, you wouldn't want to pay the premium by disbursement for the months you don't have income, then to have the national health insurance is a problem for you.

This is especially a problem if you have long periods in which you don't have affiliation paying for you.

Some people have affiliations but may still have problems with having the national health insurance because their affiliations don't pay them adequately, like students.

Insurance is very superficial a measure because it works only if you pay money to the insurer;

The insurer doesn't care what speciality you have how talented you are; they only care if you pay them money.

@M.A.R. This makes me wonder if you have something specific in mind. And I also wonder what you are expecting to find. Something of relevance to our current predicaments, or something that speaks to the human condition? While on the topic, perhaps you've heard of this work called the "Bhagavad Gita"? It's a few thousand years old, so not exactly new.

3:42 PM

That is why I have bad impression in insurance promoters.

@TRiG I think the obvious interpretation of the text is that he succumbs to the influence of the Ring, but later sacrifices himself (and is redeemed, perhaps), for the hobbits. Though from memory I can't remember which hobbits those are. Since there are 4 to choose from.

@FaheemMitha That is also my interpretation.

I think Mery and Pippin?

@Cerberus Yes, I think so. Because Frodo and Sam ran for it when Boromir tried to get the ring from Frodo. But I think it's Merry. As in joyful. Short for Meriadoc?

Oh, yes.

Haven't cared about the national health insurance for over a decade and am not sure if there is any change in its regulations.l have wanted to checked but keep lacking time.

3:58 PM

@M.A.R. Breaking news out of the Indian Parliament suggests things are going south fairly quickly. The BJP (i.e. RSS) wanted to pass two bills related to farmers, so they pushed it through the Rajya Sabha, totally ignoring parliamentary procedure. The Speaker (or Assistant Speaker) of the Rajya Sabha is BJP, so he decided that the bills had been passed based on a voice vote, and ignored objections.

So 50 MPs raised a motion of no confidence in the Speaker (or Assistant Speaker), which is apparently historically unprecedented. Apparently Modi now thinks he can do anything he wants. Interesting times.

Things are already fairly tense. This is clearly going to make things worse.

I don't like seeing doctors that much because I never have sufficient good impression in doctors and never have so much money to see doctors without caring about the registration fee and don't have redundant time in which I feel nothing to do.

@Mitch I don't see a clear overarching point, though.

I reminds me a little of the Dwight MacDonald essay, "Masscult and Midcult", which I originally read in a book entitled "Against the American Grain".

MacDonald had a lot of that same "my literary preferences are superior to yours, and here are some obscure rules to prove my good taste" sort of tone.

Which is not to say that I disagree, necessarily. But trying to produce a theory about something as subjective as fiction doesn't seem very useful.

The MacDonald essay is actually quite interesting if one can get hold of it.

4:26 PM

@FaheemMitha Good point. But then all criticism is from -some- kind of "this is my opinion which is better than yours' point of view, and this guy just didn't hide it well enough. Also, it wasn't particularly ... coherent? I couldn't tell what was common about the things he said were bad...and then I think he said Pratchett wasn't bad but then seemed to lump him in with the others. Also...how could he have included Rowling in all that I thought this was written in the 80's?

@Mitch Yes, I thought similarly. He seemed to have some criterion for what he considered "good", but I didn't understand what it was. And his arguments, as you say, weren't coherent.

> "The number of covid dead in the U.S. is equivalent to a 9/11 attack every day for 67 days.”

I suppose all criticism is subjective but some of it is more convincing than others.

Knight

Is anyone here whose first language was not German but learnt it?

@Mitch The MacDonald essay does a better, more detailed job. It's quite an ambitious essay. I was quite impressed by it when I read it as a child, and went around for a while trying to apply MacDonald's rules (which really seem to reduce to squinting at a book sideways and asking oneself "but is this Art?"), but eventually realised how ridiculous it was.

Most of anything is rubbish, and mostly you don't really need to analyze it to see that anyway.

He did have some interesting things to say about the American fascination with procedurals, which was already very much visible in the 1960s, or whenever he wrote that essay. Though CSI and NCIS and their ilk had not yet made an appearance.

5:04 PM

@Knight You might try out the chatroom of german.stackexchange.com

5:46 PM

> The patient lives in the basement of a building vacated through resettlement.

In Russian we call this just resettled building. Or rather outsettled (расселенный)

It's when a large multi-aparment building gets resettled to different other buildings when it gets too old, via a municipal program.

@Knight "Learnt": depends on how well!

6:06 PM

@Mitch So uh, was Tolkien rewarded with 'the lavish lifestyle of the most successful whores'?

@FaheemMitha What I expect to find is rather simple: Alternative findings in an alternative scientific framework. It's not expected to find novelties in, say, medicine or astronomy. (And lots of Renaissance era science was picking up where we left off) Humanities might be different.

But I'm just spitballing here. There's always so much to learn in so many places, I don't know if I would be able to pursue this idea seriously.

@FaheemMitha hmm. Generally fascists or ultra-nationalists gain power every couple of generations and this doesn't seem unique to anywhere. Often they cause misery and chaos and people become eventually disillusioned for a time. Rinse and repeat

@Robusto Oh I meant calling a person "sourdough"

6:26 PM

@M.A.R. It's not happened in India before. As you know, independent India has a rather short history. So it's hard to be casual about it, because nobody knows what is going to happen.

@M.A.R. Also, every couple of generations seems to be overstating it, at least for the meager morsels of history I'm aware of.

For example, the UK has a long and somewhat ugly history, but the closest thing to facism I can think of was Cromwell. And he wasn't even that close. Those were pre-industrial times.

Don't get me wrong, the UK's government's are often terrible, but not usually fascist. The same could be said of other countries. For example, Germany has that rather unfortunate 12 year period, but other than that? Though Germany doesn't have that long a history as a country either.

@M.A.R. Yeah, and I'm telling you where they got that name.

8:07 PM

@FaheemMitha well, for a loose definition of "couple". Nazis were three generations ago, not much before

@M.A.R. Yeah...that guy was bitter, like -he- wanted the lavish lifestyle he thought they were all getting.

I'm pretty sure though that as a billionairess, Rowling isn't uncomfortable.

@Mitch well I never said I support his stance, mostly because I had heard of it but not given it a thorough read or much thought. But from afar it seemed he's saying Tolkien conjured a fairy tale so the worker class would shut up and be content and not question authority, which seemed like a reasonable warning whether or not Tolkien intended it that way

Xanne

8:23 PM

@FaheemMitha I would imagine you could argue with an American fascination to just about anything, given the size of the market and the average income of the population.

8:45 PM

theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/22/…

Uh, you don't wanna know how the story ends