English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Robusto

00:00

@jlliagre Well, for France, sure, but there are countries which pretty much do have common ethnicities, if not much else.

jlliagre

@Robusto Ethnicities are often even more affected by stereotypes than nationalities.

Robusto

@jlliagre True.

CowperKettle

00:29

Gearless Magnet Bike

►

M.A.R.

00:53

@alphabet I know, I was working on the technicality that it wasn't called America then

@Greateful @Alph SE and Github are accessible to me. SE didn't use to be evil so they never did something like that. I dunno if GitHub would introduce some measure of blockade in actually using some of their services. But no, I don't need a VPN to access either.

Cloudfare and Google block me from visiting certain websites, and yes, the reasoning given is my access to those websites could violate sanctions imposed by the American government. It also tends to correlate with a certain degree of assholery from those websites, i.e. websites that I hear are dicks to their American users tend to impose such blanket bans

OTOH Cloudfare doesn't ban me from visiting other websites. So it's not a unilateral decision on their part, at least.

alphabet

@M.A.R. Huh, apparently GitHub reversed its ban a few years back: github.blog/news-insights/policy-news-and-insights/…

M.A.R.

When Russia invaded Ukraine some misguided folks were petitioning SO to ban Russian IPs. Thankfully the majority of people here are adults.

@alphabet just like censorship from the Iranian side, these things come and go according to the political climate. With Grump in power some of those bans will come back.

Heh

I'm leaving in that typo

Dannyu NDos

Wait, so Iran restricts the internet like China does??

alphabet

As you may know, our government may be banning TikTok--not with a firewall, but removing it from app stores. And you'll never guess why Mitt Romney supports this.

M.A.R.

@DannyuNDos not as successful at it but much worse because they give it a moral decay angle.

Dannyu NDos

01:07

Dunno what a "moral decay angle" is, but that sounds awful.

Though South Korea also has some degree of internet restriction, that's for preventing crimes, so

M.A.R.

@DannyuNDos they ban the entirety of YouTube, Facebook, X, WhatsApp, Telegram etc.

Because someone could post a video on YouTube criticizing the mullahs

The official angle is they're preventing us from consuming porn, of course.

Dannyu NDos

What about Tumblr?

Robusto

@alphabet That is unfortunately all too believable.

alphabet

@M.A.R. Is that the only official reason they cite?

M.A.R.

@DannyuNDos take a guess

Dannyu NDos

01:14

I hope no.

Robusto

@M.A.R. If Allah didn't want you consuming porn, why'd he (I presume we're talking about a male deity here) why'd he give us a sex drive?

M.A.R.

@alphabet no, "anti-revolution sentiment" is also mentioned. Because the Farsi word for "anti-revolution", zedd-e-enghelab, was a huge success with the masses in the beginning. They pictured some puppy-kicking eldritch horror when hearing that.

Dannyu NDos

@Robusto I guess you can just call him "God"? That's the English word anyway.

M.A.R.

@Robusto I kid you not, "to resist the urge as he is testing us"

tchrist

Robusto

01:17

@DannyuNDos Every "god" is different.

tchrist

Decaying morels are sad.

M.A.R.

@tchrist that's what porn will do to ya

tchrist

@M.A.R. mycoporn?

Dannyu NDos

@Robusto Yeah, but they refer to the same God, the Abrahamic one.

Robusto

@M.A.R. Yeah, the same thing infected Christianity as well.

M.A.R.

01:18

The others have dutifully said their daily prayers

Robusto

@tchrist Morels is good mushrooms.

M.A.R.

@tchrist the Basidiomycota are the kinkiest ones

tchrist

popcorn

Robusto

@DannyuNDos Spiders and scorpions have a common ancestor, but they ain't the same thing.

alphabet

@Robusto I assume that the official answer--the one you hear from conservative Christians here also--is that people need to get married as young as possible to avoid the risk of illicit sexual activity.

M.A.R.

01:21

Of course Pezeshkian has sorta vowed to loosen the leash a bit. Not making much progress on that front since the puritans exert so much control over it. But you hear a bright mind talk on TV about having "legal, state-approved VPNs" and outlawing the others.

Dannyu NDos

@Robusto God doesn't have ancestors.

M.A.R.

At least they're admitting VPNs exist and people use them, which is a small step for mankind

@alphabet which is how they explain away minor marriage, the crazier ones

Robusto

@DannyuNDos Now you're talking about [deity] as if that's a real thing, not something made by man in his own image.

tchrist

@M.A.R. It's the Ustilaginomycetes who are most known for being so terribly smutty, especially Tilletiales and Ustilaginales themselves.

Corn smut

Corn smut is a plant disease caused by the pathogenic fungus Mycosarcoma maydis. One of several cereal crop pathogens called smut, the fungus forms galls on all above-ground parts of corn species such as maize and teosinte. The infected corn is edible; in Mexico, it is considered a delicacy, called huitlacoche, often eaten as a filling in quesadillas and other tortilla-based dishes, as well as in soups. == Etymology == In Mexico, corn smut is known as huitlacoche (Spanish pronunciation: [(ɡ)witlaˈkotʃe], sometimes spelled cuitlacoche). This word entered Spanish in Mexico from Classical Nahuatl...

Robusto

@alphabet A. God made me a homosexual. B. If I give him some yarn, will he make me one too?

Dannyu NDos

01:24

@Robusto Well, I don't think it matters here whether the conditional statement is counterfactual.

Robusto

Old joke.

@DannyuNDos I'm just saying your "Abrahamic" is just interpreted differently by the countless offshoots of religious nuttiness.

Dannyu NDos

*cough*

alphabet

@M.A.R. They might as well have just called it "Things we dislike"

Dannyu NDos

Reminder: I'm a polytheist, and I believe in gods whom I've found. You can judge them as idols, but this is how my faith has become anyway.

alphabet

@M.A.R. Now their official line is that you should wait until you're 18. Fortunately, as we all know, nobody under that age has ever wanted to have sex.

M.A.R.

01:30

@alphabet no, they never mention a specific age because then the next question would be about the marriage lives of Imams and the Prophet

It's easy to avoid questions when you're controlling all the national media

alphabet

@Robusto He gave me homosexual temptations, which thankfully can easily be overcome through the power of prayer and/or electroshock therapy.

Dannyu NDos

@Robusto Though, yeah, I admit that's true because I've seen some people claiming that 하느님 Hanınim and 하나님 Hananim are different deities.

Robusto

@DannyuNDos Yes, but not to be rude or disrespectful, I think religious is a lot of pernicious nonsense. I think we can end the conversation now.

alphabet

@M.A.R. I was talking about the conservative Christians here.

Dannyu NDos

Yeah

alphabet

01:34

Feb 2 at 17:41, by alphabet

@Laurel I think the part where the hero sleeps with a 9-year-old might be hard to adapt onscreen.

tchrist

Bad plane crash in Korea.

alphabet

I used to be one of those dogmatic overly-online atheist types. I'm glad I moved past that phase.

Dannyu NDos

@tchrist Oh no...

tchrist

This one wasn't shot down by the Russians, though.

@DannyuNDos nytimes.com/2024/12/28/world/asia/south-korea-plane-crash.html

> suppositio materialis: The physical form of a word, word element, or series of words independent of semantic content or grammatical function; reference to a word, etc., in this aspect as an example or model.

That's the use–mention distinction!

> 2009 A term has material supposition (suppositio materialis) when it stands for itself. It must be kept in mind that people in the Middle Ages did not use quotation marks. —T. Aho & M. Yrjο̈nsuuri in L. Haaparanta, Devel. Modern Logic ii. 34

> Any part of speech, or the inflected cases of nouns substantive, may be used categorematically by a suppositio materialis, that is, by speaking of the mere word itself as a thing; for example, ‘John's is a possessive case’, ‘Rich is an adjective’.

"categorematically"?

Guess they also didn't have italic hands in the Middle Ages. :)

Robusto

@alphabet I hear castration works as well.

@tchrist Always with the bad news. Aren't there any good plane crashes into talk about?

Dannyu NDos

01:48

No

tchrist

@Robusto Miracle on the Hudson?

Robusto

That's old news.

tchrist

Olds, news, what's the diffs?

I bet there aren't any kinds of crashes that are considered good.

Robusto

My uncle (former B-24 bombardier in WWII) used to say that "any landing you can walk away from is a good landing."

Mitch

02:19

@Vikas haha no, I think he slept the opposite direction from his wife, head at the foot of the bed. Unless they both did and then the bed was just placed wrong in the room

@CowperKettle I'd never heard of that book.

Huck Finn is pretty good. There was more than one short story of his we were supposed to read around middle school...the Joan of Arc one may have been one of them

alphabet

02:45

@Robusto Like ones where those on board deserved it?

CowperKettle

Why are people from Norway so good at editing files in Linux?
Their ancestors are vi-kings.

@GratefulDisciple What good book on/of Buddhism would you recommend? I will look for audio versions

In the winter, I'm a Buddhist, in the summer, I'm a nudist

Vikas