typhonbaalhammon

[typhonbaalhammon]

Russia is arguably at 3 (Georgia, Syria, Ukraine)

China is busy committing genocide in its conquered periphery but it has also consistently encroached on its neighbors, both at sea and in the Himalayan mountains (they're sneakily colonizing Bhutan and Sikkim). Arguably the only reason they are not more aggressive is that they are bad at war and have been traumatised because the last time they invaded and fought another country they had their asses handed to them by Viet Nam and 46 years haven't been enough to let them forget.

Anyway if the US gets into a war with Iran, which I hope it will not, that will make the tally:

Horrific and Completely Unnecessary Wars of Aggression by World Powers This Century

United States — 2 (and whatever 20 years in Afghanistan was)

Russia — 1 (and a few smaller adventures)

China — 0 (for now)

Anyway. Rules based international order.

[typhonbaalhammon]

Attal didn't remain prime minister for very long.

Openly LGBTQ+ heads of state and government

[typhonbaalhammon]

[typhonbaalhammon]

I have some news for members of the united states armed forces who feel like they are pawns in a political game and their assignments being unnecessary.

[typhonbaalhammon]

Culture is so obsessed with the idea of lone geniuses that it doesn't really appreciate that most of the progress of science (and likely every other discipline) occurs collaboratively, in babysteps, and usually through a lot very tedious, utterly unsexy, work.

[typhonbaalhammon]

The largest mass shooting in American history was a hate crime against gay people. Don’t ever forget that.

[typhonbaalhammon]

something that is very clear (ha) in historical screenshots is how the '90s consensus on UI design has eroded over the past twenty years, particularly once Steve Jobs was no longer there to hold the line on texture.

for some reason a clear distinction between controls and content is just unappealing to designers, user interface clarity and efficiency be damned, and it's progressively watered down at every turn.

the strange thing is touch screen interfaces if anything need even more clarity due to the lack of "touch" feedback like hover effects and highlighting that mouse interaction can provide, and without this we're left tapping at random bits of glass unsure of whether they're even interactive controls or not.

[typhonbaalhammon]

[typhonbaalhammon]

​Hiking can be an enjoyable way to achieve your exercise goals while spending quality time in nature. Here are The Onion’s tips for first-time hikers.

[typhonbaalhammon]

FREE THE FREEDOM FLOTILLA AND FREE PALESTINE.

[typhonbaalhammon]

My girlfriend is reading 'Decolonization is not a metaphor' by Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang, and in it, they excoriate Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans for its colonialist romanticism and appropriation of the native identity, and rightly so I suppose.

But they also take the bizarre step of claiming Mohicans are a fictional people. And their concluding paragraphs posits an alternative decolonial version that would somehow involve the Mohawk.

And now I don't doubt that Last of the Mohican's portrayal of native americans is horribly problematic and flawed (I haven't read it but supposedly it mixes up Mohicans and the related Mohegan people)... but the Mohicans are decidedly not fictitious !

There exist a Mohican nation to this day !

I cannot begin to imagine how two scholars from this field could make a mistake so egregious, I think they might have oversimplified something and not reread carefully. It's driving me insane.

[typhonbaalhammon]

I think psychic powers are about as plausible as time-travel, or even faster-than-light travel.

I love that psychic powers are still "allowed" in science fiction. They're an acceptable part of the aesthetic. Like you can't have magic, but you can have brain magic, because it's more Science.

[typhonbaalhammon]

(Yes, I went out and uprooted the Himalayan Balsam after filming this)

If you like this stuff, please consider becoming a patron!

[typhonbaalhammon]

[typhonbaalhammon]

When I am appointed to represent a child, my first action is to separate them from their parents and tell them the following things:

1. I am their attorney. I do not work for their parent or the judge or the cops. I don’t care what any of those people want.

2. My job is to listen to them and try and make what they want happen in court. (At this point I make a joke about how most people want me to get them out of trouble but if someone wanted to be in trouble I would do my best.)

3. What they tell me is confidential. It goes nowhere unless they agree to it. (If old enough, I talk to them about mandatory reporters, and how I’m a mandatory non reporter.)

4. I will give them lots of advice because I’ve been doing court for a while and I know a lot about it, and they don’t. It’s all really complicated, and if they don’t understand what’s happening it’s my job to help them figure it out.

5. They will make the decisions. (At this point I usually have to reassure them that I’ll help, I’ll speak for them in front of the judge, and I’ve got their back. It’s scary to have an adult say you’re in charge, most of the time.)

6. I tell them I know it’s absolutely wild to have some stranger come in here and say “hey, you can trust me!” and that I get if they don’t believe everything right away, because I plan to show them through my actions and my words that I’ll fight for them.

7. But nonetheless, I will treat them like a person who can make decisions, because they are living their life and I am not.

I do not:

Pretend to be cool.

Try to be their BFF.

Overwhelm them with detail.

Let their parents in the room until the kid asks for them. (I provide openings for this, and ask if the kid wants their parent to help them remember and understand.)

I want to emphasize I went into this job knowing nothing about how to interact with vulnerable populations, especially children. The training was minimal, and my role means that I can literally walk into a facility and get an unmonitored visit with a minor client one on one.

In my years of practice I have never felt threatened by a child, even one that was “violent” and “unstable.” It turns out just saying “hi, I think you’re a person with thoughts” is wildly successful? Now people treat me like I have special Child Whisperer powers. My powers are that I ask the child what’s up and I’m not scared to say things that are objectively awkward. I know nothing about anything.

[typhonbaalhammon]

Word-classes don't need to be defined solely by syntactic criteria, especially if you don't feel the need to have "universally valid" classes, you can and probably should include morphology. The fact that verbs inflect and not adpositions for example. Or all the kinds of agreement that can exist.

Before I go back to reading Creissels, I should point out for the interested readers that when we linguists say "there's no definition of" a concept, we do not mean that somehow linguists forgot to define what they're talking about, it's just that the attempts were deemed unsatisfactory (generally because they don't take typological diversity enough into account, hence the precision "cross-linguistic" in the OP).

(I'm making this precision because I dislike it when non-linguists get overly excited about e.g the impossibility of defining a concept like "word")

how do you prove a word is a noun

[typhonbaalhammon]

I know from multiple personal and recent experiences that the universality of grief is of no help to anyone who suffers from it, and that grief drives people crazy and makes them irrational but I do have to say the anonymous OP sounds like they think they're the first person to ever experience loss.

I guess being agressive is a (bad) way to deal with overwhelming emotional pain.

It's because being told that my dead baby sister is gone gone and rotting in the ground and there's no form of afterlife and i'll never see her again makes me wanna send atheists to the dead black void they're telling me my dead 16-year-old sister and my puppy are in.

no other religion is telling me that i'll never see her again and i hope anyone who does that gets hit by a crane.

I don't even have a firm religion, I don't think any specific religion is real or right or true, but if you tell me my baby sister's gone, I'm gonna go fucking feral.

I'm gonna see her again, bite my asshole off.

I mean this in the most neutral way possible: This sounds like a you problem.