It’s always hilarious introducing stories (in general, not just SF) from another culture to people outside that culture. You hardly ever get someone who pauses to think about how weird their own stories may seem to outsiders. And nobody ever seems to grok that other nations’ people might have pride in their own nation. So to American eyes, American patriotism is natural and normal but Chinese patriotism is obviously the product of propaganda, or as in the story mentioned at the beginning of this article, that a North Korean writer may actually want to write good things about their own country, even if the patriotism is aspirational, say, instead of saying what it is now.
You are the exception, however, not the norm. Look at the huge kerfuffle that brewed up over The Battle at Lake Changjin, for example. It’s been derided as pure propaganda (unlike, say, almost any American war film!) that is full of historical inaccuracies (unlike, say, almost any American war film!) and that shows Chinese soldiers as unequivocally good (unlike what, say, almost any American war film does for American soldiers!) and that shows American soldiers as incompetent and/or evil (unlike what, say, almost any American war film does for whoever the enemy is!).
Basically it’s the same old “othering” that dominates all public discourse anywhere. And it amuses the everloving fuck out of me.
You mean like how the US military has a stated policy of wanting final approval on any film that uses their equipment? And of later blacklisting film-makers who make movies critical of the US military?
Or like how very few films (like ‘zero’) called out, say, the abuses of Harvey Weinstein before he got jailed, despite them being open knowledge for decades? (Yeah, I guess it’s completely different when a government does it instead of a single very wealthy individual…)
I was fortunate enough to be brought up on stories from all over. LOADS of people have folk stories that are “grotesque” to those not brought up with them, and once you get over that, you begin to look at your own folk tales and seeing how foolish and/or grotesque and/or problematical they are. I mean talking snakes with legs? Daughters getting their own father to impregnate them? Fathers offering their own daughters for rape to protect guests? Yeah, Christian-sphere mythology has a lot of grotesque bits as well and there it’s considered holy writ!
Again, the US government leaves censorship to the industry, which censors both inconsistently and stupidly because it’s so paranoid about possible government censorship. You probably should look a little bit deeper into film (and music) censorship in the USA sometime. It’s actually kind of amazing what people are getting away with imposing on others in the “Land of the Free”.
It is not possible to read all the Sci-Fi books out there. So you must have a process for selecting what you do read. Reading a book is an investment in your time. Your time is valuable. No one wants to waste that time reading unworthy books....
First off the concept, as introduced on the back of the book, or in book-yakking circles (like this) or such must be something that interests me in some way. This means that if the books seems too political in focus (“left” or “right”), for example, I don’t engage. That’s not what I read SF books for.
Second, if the concept intrigues, I have to get a hint that it isn’t just a rehashing of something I’ve already read. I need to read a new take on a concept, not Yet Another Evil Empire Cut Down By Rebels space opera, complete with laser swords, say…
Third, if it gets to this stage, I’ll find a free ecopy somewhere and I’ll read the first 50 pages in a “try before you buy” thing. The author has to grab my interest in 50 pages, no more. If by page 50 I’m not sufficiently intrigued that I’m willing to shell out money, I don’t shell out money. The ebook is deleted and the book is put into my mental “do not enage” bin alongside books whose very concepts don’t interest me.
If, however, by page 50 the book intrigues me, I’ll start the difficult task of hunting down hardcopy and buy it when I find it.
There, I said it. Had some Wagyu A5, genuine certified import from Japan prepared by an actual chef on a handful of occasions. The last one was on Saturday as part of a business conference in the exec suite of some fancy hotel, talking to potential investors....
This is a common error: people import food from other cultures and don’t import with it the way it is prepared in that other culture. Then they say “this sucks”.
Similar thing happens with even something as basic and trivial as tofu: it’s not a meat substitute, and if you try to use it as that it’s going to suck. Make it the way it’s made in the culture that invented it.
The main deaths weren’t even students. They were protesting WORKERS over a kilometre away. And, in fact, the overall upheaval of 1989 was worker protests that were nationwide. There’s a reason why the authorities were so antsy and why they even, at the end, did the dangerous thing of using the PLA against the people: they viewed the events of 1989 leading up to June 4th as an existential threat.
I have been beating this drum for years in various platforms (including Lemmy). The absolute inability of (chiefly) Americans to admit even the slightest possibility of error is truly astonishing, it turns out.
At least I get block fodder out of it when I see people unwilling to address anything and just do childish responses.
I thought about this already for a while and with Lemmy and Mastodon the opensource community has a place to really try itself out and coordinate. Then even things like open-source planning-systems (like at Amazon) and AIs are possible....
Generally you can assume anybody who uses terms like “sheeple” unironically, or equates human beings with livestock, is a cunt whose opinions can safely be ignored and whose existence can be excised from your digital life with blocks and other such tools.
Use of those tools is also good for your mental health.
Jesus Christ, Edge is an ACTUALLY GOOD WEB BROWSER. It’s based on Chromium, so there’s no usable difference, plus you can access passwords.google.com in Edge with no issue. Most of the sites are tested on Google Chrome first, so they’ll be just as well-optimised for Microsoft Edge with no fuss whatsoever, 'sides from...
Edge would be fine if it weren’t spyware and nagware. In functionality it’s … a web browser. In privacy it’s a horror. In its proclivity to nag you to perdition its UX is splatterpunk.
Ads should be explicitly opt-in. Not even “implicit” opting-in or opt-out. You should specifically say you want to see ads before seeing them. And if that means no more billboards, ads in bus shelters, ads on radio, etc. then I’m all for it.
How can there be a hatred of something that doesn’t exist? 😲
What’s called Artificial “Intelligence” right now is nothing of the sort. At the absolute best they’re a bunch of hallucinating digital parrots. They show no comprehension of any kind of the whatever it is they churn out and it takes about 30 seconds to prove it with any of them (yes, even the much-vaunted ChatGPT).
So I don’t “hate AI” because it doesn’t exist. I hate LLM generative text, though, or its pictorial and audio counterparts.
I know a lot of languages have some aspects that probably seem a bit strange to non-native speakers…in the case of gendered words is there a point other than “just the way its always been” that explains it a bit better?...
Speaking one language that is mildly gendered (English), two that are strongly (and in the case of the second bizarrely!) gendered (French, German) and one that is almost entirely ungendered (Mandarin), I have not found any utility whatsoever in grammatical gender.
I suspect that grammatical gender is just an ur-form of grammatical classifiers that has stuck around for non-useful amounts of time. I suspect this because one of the grammatical “gender” divisions that’s in use in many languages isn’t masculine/feminine(/neuter) but rather animate/inanimate. So I suspect that grammatical gender was a classification mechanism whose system and utility was distorted into uselessness over the thousands of years of spread and development.
So why do we have classification mechanisms? Well, in Mandarin there’s classifier words. (In English too: “a sheet of paper”, not “a paper”, but it’s waaaaaaaaaaaaay stricter in Mandarin.) The classifiers in Mandarin, given the sheer amount of punning potential in oral language, are likely a redundant piece of information to help nail down which specific word you mean in contexts where it might be unclear. For example in a noisy environment, or if someone is speaking unclearly, “paper” (纸张[zhǐ zhāng]) might be confused with “spider” (蜘蛛 [zhī zhū]). But if I say 一只蜘蛛 [yī zhī zhī zhū]—a spider—it’s harder to confuse that with 一张纸张 [yī zhāng zhǐ zhāng]—a piece of paper.
So I’m positing that perhaps at some point grammatical gender was used as a primitive form of classification for disambiguation that some languages just never grew out of. Which is why in German men are masculine, women are feminine, boys are masculine, and girls are neuter. It has nothing to do with actual physical gender and is just a weird, atrophied, and somewhat useless remnant of language.
English has gendered pronouns, for example. There’s also some gender divides in nouns: actor/actress, for example. (These are slowly being replaced, however.)
Languages like Farsi and Mandarin and such don’t. The only difference in pronouns, in fact, with Farsi is “courteous” vs. “common”. And even that isn’t happening as much as it used to. And the only time nouns are gendered is if the item they’re talking about has an actual physical gender. Like “man” or “woman”. There are no gendered declensions of any kind, in fact.
It’s more complicated in Chinese. In oral Chinese there’s no gendered pronouns. It’s pronounced [tā] whether you mean man, woman, or other.^1^ As with Farsi, however, there are no gendered nouns outside of those describing literal physically-gendered things. And unlike Farsi, not only are there no gendered declensions of any kind, there are hardly any declensions of any kind^2^.
^1^ In written Chinese, for complicated reasons, there are three different pronouns in common usage: 他 for masculine (he), 她 for feminine (she), and 它 for everything else (it). This “modernization” was first proposed in the very late 19th century and came into its final form sometime in the 1920s. It was a deliberate attempt to make Chinese easier to translate into western languages (and since at the time the Chinese had somewhat of an inferiority complex it was also couched as making Chinese a “modern” language). (There were a couple of others added, including one for deities and one for animals, but those never caught on and are hardly ever seen in modern Chinese.)
But they’re all pronounced the same: [tā].
And now, full circle, Chinese is “modernizing” again. While official laws, forms, scholarly papers, regulations, etc. use that three-way split in pronouns, increasingly in commercial settings (like the world’s largest digital souq: Taobao) all pronouns are being replaced with “TA”. Yes. Latin letters. Uppercased.
This I find completely hilarious: Chinese developed gendered pronouns (in writing only!) to soothe western tastes … only to pick up an ungendered pronoun again … to match western tastes. And before westerners have solved the problem themselves in their own languages!
^2^ Chinese does not decline for number except for a tiny handful of cases you can learn completely in 30 minutes. (And even here it’s not quite ‘declension’ like that word applies in the Indo-European family of languages.) There’s no “car” vs. “cars”. They’re both 汽车. If you want to specify that you mean more than one car, you would modify it by saying “some” or “three” or whatever in front of it: 一些汽车 [yī xiē qì chē], literally “one (small number) car” or “some cars”.
I love German’s case structure! Except that the gender system slices through what could be an elegant way of piecing sentences together in any order without ambiguity and turns it into a muddled mess that requires you to memorize the silly gender of every damned noun in the language. ☹
I’m sorry that the Chinese classify things differently from you. I’ll get right on asking them to change it to suit your thoughts. (As it so happens, the classifier 张 is, in fact, “flat objects”. Fancy that! Perhaps reading what I actually wrote instead of what you wanted me to write so you could “well akshually” me might be an advantage.)
Feeds are littered with repost bots recycling mindlessly internet trash. Not rare is to see series of exactly same posts from different communities with no comments....
I do not know whether anybody else has already said this, but Lemmy could really use a feature that would allow individual users to block instances. I think it could have spared some of the defederation word wars that have been going on lately, since that would be an individual choice rather than a collective one....
Even amid a provincial state of emergency that has seen tens of thousands forced to flee their homes due to wildfires, people in B.C. are defying a ban on campfires....
Service in airlines was at its absolute worst when competition was at its tightest. It’s shit now, yes, but during the height of deregulation and “innovations” like the cattle car airlines it was far, far, far worse.
I like Arby’s. The roast beef sandwich with their Arby’s sauce, their beef and cheddar, even their chicken sandwiches. They are delicious. Their curly fries have no equal, and the potato cakes are great too.
It seems anytime I try to check out Mastodon it is always some negative political view or affiliation of why X, Y & Z is bad. Is this just what most people like boosting or is it a sign of botting to push negativity over the more positive headlines?...
Lemmy used to be very tech savvy, but not repulsive. Cryptobros are repulsive (and not just because of the cryptocurrency shilling!). What’s my incentive to stick around?
People are stupid. All people. No exceptions. Yes, this includes you, the person reading. Yes, this includes me, the person writing^1^.
Every person on the face of Planet Earth (and the tiny handful currently in orbit around her) exhibits maladaptive^2^ belief, reasoning, and/or behaviour. Again, no exceptions.
And we can’t help it. The world is too large, too complicated, for our poor little brains to cope with. We can actively cope with ±7 “things” at any given moment on average. Much of our cognitive processing is spent juggling around the currently active number of “things” we’re thinking about. Honestly it’s kind of amazing that we’ve accomplished as much as we have given that 7 is a shockingly small number compared to the number of “things” in our worlds at any given instant.
So here we are, thinking pieces of meat, with a woefully inadequate stack of “things” we can think about at any given time living in a world that overwhelms that capacity by hundreds of orders of magnitude. To cope with it we group “things” into bigger “things”, losing detail in the process, and thus begins one of the bigger pieces of stupidity: stereotyping. Again, note, this is inevitable. You are doing it right this very instant as you form some picture of who is typing these words, what this person is like, and likely even assigning moral characteristics to the person. You can’t help it. (And I can’t help forming a stereotyped mental picture of the person reading this.) But this goes far beyond just stereotyping. This is at the foundation of why we cling to outdated and objectively incorrect beliefs which are maladaptive in the modern world. And no, I don’t mean (just) religion here.
So all of this is to say that people are, in fact, quite stupid. Including you. Including me. We should treat them as if they were. Including ourselves. (That last point being the key one.) Because we are stupid we should be far more humble about what we think we “know” and more open to listening to the stupidity of others. Because here’s the trick that has allowed us to survive for as long as we have: everybody, stupid as we are, also has something we’re not quite as stupid in. And on those humble bits of less-stupidity are edifices of intelligence built. And if you have the humility to listen to the stupidity of others, you’ll stumble across the occasional gem of true intelligence … and you’ll learn.
^1^ I mean here I am trying to convince you you’re an idiot. That’s about the dumbest thing I can imagine wasting my morning doing!
^2^ Here meaning ‘contrary to the accomplishment of desirable outcomes up to and including continued existence’.
Drunks here get loud and maudlin, but not aggressive; nowhere near the extent of, say, British drunkards or Canadian ones, or American ones. Same in Japan, incidentally, and Korea.
Alcohol reduces your inhibitions. What’s being inhibited is purely on the person being exposed and the culture they’re from.
Man, all the comments in here about the “boring” songs and poetry … do yourself a favour and don’t ever even consider reading works like, oh, I don’t know, practically anything by Goethe, Schiller, or Shakespeare. Or from the other side of the world, the novel A Dream of Red Mansions. Or that Indian epic Mahabharata.
The strange, secretive world of North Korean science fiction (arstechnica.com)
Lemmyshitpost community closed until further notice
Hello everyone,...
What criteria do you use to determine whether a book is worth your time?
It is not possible to read all the Sci-Fi books out there. So you must have a process for selecting what you do read. Reading a book is an investment in your time. Your time is valuable. No one wants to waste that time reading unworthy books....
I don't like Wagyu beef
There, I said it. Had some Wagyu A5, genuine certified import from Japan prepared by an actual chef on a handful of occasions. The last one was on Saturday as part of a business conference in the exec suite of some fancy hotel, talking to potential investors....
Nisga’a memorial pole about to start journey home to B.C. from Scottish museum (www.winnipegfreepress.com)
Non-Paywall Article
The June 4th Incident may be a lot more nuanced than you think
Please hear me out....
Do you think opensource + Fediverse will develop into some kind of political force/movement in the next years?
I thought about this already for a while and with Lemmy and Mastodon the opensource community has a place to really try itself out and coordinate. Then even things like open-source planning-systems (like at Amazon) and AIs are possible....
KRITH NAZGUL live at BleakFest, Chengdu, China 2021 Chinese Black Metal （中國黑金屬【九戒靈樂隊】"純陰粹慘"成都泛黑暗音樂節） (www.youtube.com)
Microsoft Edge is worthwhile in 2023
Jesus Christ, Edge is an ACTUALLY GOOD WEB BROWSER. It’s based on Chromium, so there’s no usable difference, plus you can access passwords.google.com in Edge with no issue. Most of the sites are tested on Google Chrome first, so they’ll be just as well-optimised for Microsoft Edge with no fuss whatsoever, 'sides from...
AI generated political ads should be illegal.
Until AI is allowed to vote perhaps they sit the fuck down.
What's the point of gendered words in certain languages?
I know a lot of languages have some aspects that probably seem a bit strange to non-native speakers…in the case of gendered words is there a point other than “just the way its always been” that explains it a bit better?...
Lemmy is plagued by bots worse than reddit
Feeds are littered with repost bots recycling mindlessly internet trash. Not rare is to see series of exactly same posts from different communities with no comments....
[Feature Request] Instance Blocking Feature
I do not know whether anybody else has already said this, but Lemmy could really use a feature that would allow individual users to block instances. I think it could have spared some of the defederation word wars that have been going on lately, since that would be an individual choice rather than a collective one....
Police say 'many' taken to hospital after explosion, fire in downtown Prince George (www.cbc.ca)
Police say “many” people have been taken to hospital after an explosion and fire in downtown Prince George, B.C., early Tuesday....
Campers fined for defying fire ban even after B.C. declared state of emergency (bc.ctvnews.ca)
Even amid a provincial state of emergency that has seen tens of thousands forced to flee their homes due to wildfires, people in B.C. are defying a ban on campfires....
AirTag again exposes lies told by airlines about lost luggage (appleinsider.com)
Man disparages Pride flag, then kills shopkeeper in California (www.bbc.com)
A US shop owner was shot dead after a dispute over a Pride flag displayed outside her business, police say.
Arbys food is good
I like Arby’s. The roast beef sandwich with their Arby’s sauce, their beef and cheddar, even their chicken sandwiches. They are delicious. Their curly fries have no equal, and the potato cakes are great too.
Why are trending posts on Mastodon mostly negatively politically oriented? (lemm.ee)
It seems anytime I try to check out Mastodon it is always some negative political view or affiliation of why X, Y & Z is bad. Is this just what most people like boosting or is it a sign of botting to push negativity over the more positive headlines?...
People aren't stupid.
cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/2313987...
Why aren’t health warnings on cigarettes expanded to alcohol? (rabble.ca)
Lord of the rings is shit
Its very boring, the films are too long and i have originally no idea how some people can have a yearly lotr marathon.