𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

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 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍 
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 26th, 2022

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  • The word has negative connotations, but I stand by it. I an not saying there result isn’t stronger, but if you extend cultural mixing out to the maximum - say humans and the planet survives another thousand years, and global travel is no harder than traveling to the next town over - what you end up with is homogeneity, and this would be sad, I think. Imagine it: the entire world speaking some pidgin derivative mashup of Mandarin, English, and Hindi, with essentially the same culture everywhere on the planet. Just as has already happened, languages are lost, because nobody speaks them natively anymore. All that’s left of the original cultures are some UNESCO sites and preserved old movies. I can’t say the world wouldn’t be stronger for it, but in the process, something irrecoverable is lost.


  • I don’t know about this meme, but you know memes come in waves. It’s just the nature of memes.

    That said, Germans - at least the Bavarians - have a special relationship with pizza second only to Americans. It’s kind of weird, because it’s so random. You don’t see this in, e.g., Southern France, and Italians seem almost ambivalent to it.

    I think it’s because, despite the world wars, Germans generally have a fondness for American culture, the same way Americans generally have a fondness for Mexican culture. They have Germanized versions of American food, like we have Americanized versions of traditional Mexican food.

    I don’t know who the French are fond of, besides themselves.


  • Because people fear having their culture and race replaced by immigrants. Even if they’re not overtly racist, few people wish to become a minority in “their own country.”

    The US is famously a melting pot, and yet we still have a bunch of descendants of white immigrants from Europe who fear that South Americans will take over; that Mexican culture will replace good old-fashioned hodge-podge Western European culture. That their language will become less dominant. That they’ll find themselves strangers in their own country.

    It’s usually an indistinct fear. It seems obvious from the verbiage in the dog-whistles, but white European immigrant descendants don’t want to become second-class.

    Now, if we treated our own minorities well, they wouldn’t be so afraid. They wouldn’t be afraid that they’d be the ones with Hispanic cops kneeling on their necks; or that Hispanic immigrants would be living in giant homes and they’d themselves be the ones having to eak out a living as seasonal workers.

    I think it’s not despicable to want to preserve your cultural heritage, your cultural language, and to have your country legislated with the values you grew up with; but people react poorly when they think it’s happening.

    What I most despise in the Republicans in the US is that they’re advocating for preserving cultural values that never existed broadly in the US. The closest subculture to what they’re pushing is a return to the Confederate South: religion, and white supremacy. The Confederates got their asses handed to them, but the racist fuckers never gave up their values, most most Americans are blind to what their real agenda is. And they’ve been good insurgents, cleverly taking advantage of weak areas in our democracy to return power to a minority: themselves. It’s been said and it’s true: if America was a true democracy and we selected leaders by popular vote, no Republican under their current platform would ever be president again.

    Anyway, getting back to your question: immigrants bring their own culture with them, and very few completely abandon it and adopt the culture and language of their new country. This dilutes the host country’s native culture, and people are afraid of that. In the US, it’s the highest form of hypocrisy, because our native culture displaced the indigenous culture, and now we’re afraid of someone else doing the same to us.



  • which is what I’d wager many think of when you say “the Internet”

    I wager you’d be right, but most people are wrong.

    I’m saying that everything is built on foundations that are fundamentally English and American, and this influenced even Berners-Lees’s creation. HTTP and HTML were fundamentally ASCII. DNS and the WWW eventually evolved broader encoding support, but it’s clearly tacked-on and awkward. All you need to do is look at URL encoding rules as proof.

    I’m not saying it’s right; I’m just saying there consequences of an English, American-centric design of what underlies all computer technology today is evident at all higher levels, no matter how hard we try to mask them.



  • I think most non-Southerners’ exposure to it is in media, where it’s almost always racist in context. There’s a surprising amount of subtly in Southern social interactions that I think it’s missing from most of the US. Sure, Midwesterners are known for raising passive-aggressiveness to an art form, but you recognize it no matter where you’re from.

    The subtly in social interactions in the South are truly exceptional, hard to get a handle on, and unmatched anywhere else in the US - IMHO. Southerners have as many ways of being condescending as Eskimos have words for snow.

    Is that phrase still acceptable, or is the Eskimo/snow comment now not PC? Is it still OK to use the term “Eskimo?” If the Eskimo thing is offensive, I sincerely apologize. An alternative would be “as North-westerners have words for rain,” but I don’t know if that’s as widely understood an idiom.


  • The internet originated in the US. All of the original specs were made by Americans. ASCII is literally built around English, and ASCII is at the foundation of every single core technology of the internet. Hell, even when they designed UTF-8, it was still Western-centric; to this day it gets some push back from the Orient, because it’s makes things harder for them - I think there was a fight to standardize on UTF-16 because it was easier for Asian languages; I may not be remembering the details correctly, but there’s some legitimate beef some Asian languages have with UTF-8.

    Now, obviously, more non-Americans are on the internet than Americans, but it’s the same argument as Critical Race Theory: when the entire foundation and infrastructure is built on a bias, that bias influences all interactions even when isn’t overtly obvious, or even intentional.


  • It’s always demeaning. Calling a full-grown man of any race “boy” is belittling them. Yes, there’s a special racist association, but it’s been used as much on white men. The female equivalent might be “little girl.”

    “What do you think you’re doing, little girl?”

    It might have the same effect as simply “girl” if said the right way, but “girl” has been more normalized and sexualized, so it’s a little different.

    Anyway, the terms are belittling, and therefore demeaning, regardless of race. The point of using them is to position yourself over that person, as a parent over a child; it’s shorthand for saying they are beneath you.



  • Yeah, me neither. I’ve liked some horror genre stories, like Clive Barker’s Book(s?) of Blood, Rawhead Rex and all; but I wouldn’t say it was because it made me afraid.

    If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say a lot of people do, or else slasher flicks wouldn’t be so popular. Hell, some years it seems as if that’s the only genre of movies released.

    But, I also loath the cringe inducing reality shows many people love; and I’m so very tired of every show having to be nonstop angst and tension: GoT was the pinnacle of this, and I absolutely hated it. Books and TV. Boardwalk Empire was so frustrating, because it so well written, acted, and produced, but I just can’t stand the unrelieved tension. Obviously, a took of people do, or else there’d be more diversity in media. It’s like, the one tool media writers know how to use, anymore.

    I say all this because I wonder if there’s a correlation: what’s the overlap between people who don’t like being jump-scared or otherwise frightened and the people who don’t like watching people being made uncomfortable (a-la Borat); or constantly bickering (The Kardashians). I love action movies, and a good adventure sci-fi or fantasy, so I’m not adverse to conflict, but I won’t watch Breaking Bad because - while I’m aware it was an excellent series - I also know it’s going to be a non-stop angst-fest, like The Sopranos.

    It’d be an interesting survey. Maybe a list of shows and movies with a simple “enjoy/don’t enjoy”, and secretly ranked by dominant emotional manipulation. Is it an endearing love story tinged with bittersweet? A slasher? A torture-tension (what’s Saw? Not a slasher). See how people are grouped.





  • Doesn’t it steal control flow? More like a break point, except you define where execution continues.

    I wonder if it’s a compile error to have multiple conflicting COMEFROM statements, or if it’s random, kind of like Go’s select statement.

    How awesome would it be to be able to steal the execution stack from arbitrary code; how much more awesome if it was indeterminate which of multiple conflicting COMEFROM frames received control! And if it included a state closure from the stolen frame?

    Now I want this.