Do not, my friends, become addicted to bad news. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence.
They are only fighting it insofar to protect their own profits. They happily trained all data on libgen and archive.org for free and now that most LLM models have that data the push to block access to such sites intensified. When it comes to these things laws are always weaponized.
This is not a phenomenon limited to west at all.
Hopeless optimism at the end aside, it’s a good message. One cannot lose sight of life for the concern of it.
Oracle bone script is really cool! It actually helps a lot when you want to internalize some of the characters to remember them to look up oracle bone script originals because a lot of them are a lot more pictographic, especially things like kanjis for animals but not only.
You do inevitably learn kyuujitai variants for a lot of kanji especially when reading but I suppose with history as long as Chinese characters one has to specify what is really traditional. I am sure Han scribes would be disappoint at using typeface design characters as opposed to clerical script even if my handwriting wasn’t bad. Much like how Ottoman scribes were so indignant when Italians printed Arabic script books to sell in Ottoman markets. Still maybe I will try to practice different forms of characters too when I am at least somewhat comfortable writing the standard modern characters with a brush pen.
I was rather talking about the implications of more extensive simplification undertaken by China in second half of 20th century where they heavily cut through stroke counts in more common and complex characters such as the one for 爱 instead of 愛. It is definitely faster and easier to write the left one when handwriting is concerned but because in digital environment writing either is same key strokes rather than different brush strokes there is no extra writing difficulty while it introduces a bit more ambiguity with characters because it reduces the radical count and variance. This applies to a lot of kyuujitai as opposed to shinjitai which is why I think the count of Kanji used in Japanese material is going up instead of down.
After learning over 2000 of these characters I unfortunately have completely accepted the immortal wisdom of Chinese scribes and would always choose traditional. Interestingly while I understand why the Chinese simplified the traditional characters in 20th century to reduce stroke count and make writing faster I actually find that in computer age traditional characters have advantage in being more distinct from each other while reading them. It’s a strange trade-off.
I am currently learning Japanese so I thought something was wrong with either my eyes or brain until I realized that’s Simplified Chinese.
There is no geographical conception of “Europe”, it is a political and cultural term. Turkey and Russia are alternatively considered either part or outside of this conceptualization in part or in full. You will have people arguing for either so it’s obvious that this is not a clear cut situation. Nevertheless I wouldn’t consider Turkey as part of Europe, if nothing else Bosphorus makes for a cleaner cut off point for the cultural area of Europe.
Obviously, these populist rightwing parties aren’t a solution to anything at all. They are not going to improve living conditions of anyone but unfortunately the indifference and even disdain the ruling governments have towards the suffering of youth makes them easy prey to populism when they give them such an easily identifiable target to focus their angst towards. In other places where the situation is different that angst will be towards the incumbent governments especially if their governance has been long as it has been in many places.
Japan in particular is wildly xenophobic to begin with and it hasn’t offered a future to youth for decades, it had the advantage of being generally affordable especially in terms of housing for decades despite the stagnation but even that is no longer true as in general living standards in Tokyo started to fall behind Western cities in terms of salaries and working hours. So honestly I actually think the rightwing populism will only gain more traction if it remains in opposition because it can keep pointing fingers while the government won’t address anything real and it will never be enough.
I mean Japan is 97% Japanese and main immigrant groups are nearby nations, will problems of Japan be solved if 750k Chinese and 500k Koreans living there are removed? Yet there has been a lot of far right rabble rousing about 3000 Kurds living in Saitama, a population that’s basically otherwise irrelevant in a city like Tokyo. It is all agitation and angst and no resolution at all and it is not going to get better for them economically in their current configuration which exists between serving status quo and catering primarily to pensioners.
It’s a common issue everywhere, this is possible in many countries now because of the shift in demographic balance where elderly make a bigger voter bloc compared to rest. Whereby governments use pensions and benefits for the elderly as a source of easy votes while using policies that constantly undermine young populations with living cost concerns then foreigners make an easy target and at the same time something to associate their discontentment towards governments and economic situation. In a way these governments make immigrants partners in crime to their adherence to status quo that keeps getting more and more unsustainable when immigrants are often preferred because it is easier to exploit them with lower wages and basically no working rights while at the same time pretending they can’t do anything about it because of international laws or “because of the woke” or something like that.
I am not sure I agree with this fully, in the sense obviously Israel is a project of Western hegemony and that Israel exists and existed at behest of US and Europe as a foothold to keep the politics of the region volatile and easily influenced. So at a state level, Israel is beholden to US and the West not the other way around. However states don’t exist as some sort of supranational hivemind that dictates politics and diplomacy purely with raison d’état, a state and its institutions are composed of people who themselves have direct influence on policy that can at times go against that raison d’état or just have obvious conflicts of interests that are navigated within circumstances of policy. I don’t think at this stage anyone can deny that Israeli lobbies, chiefly AIPAC, has disproportionate influence over US politicians at legislative level, executive and judiciary is generally independent of this but house and senate seems to have reached a sort of critical mass of AIPAC-backed (directly funded and supported) candidates that essentially share a mission in Zionism and any which falls out of this line just has to fight against the establishment at very disadvantage terms.
So while I agree that the idea that Israel is somehow the ones that are pulling the strings are an antisemitic trope and ignoring the fact that Israel started as an European colonial project that was backed and supported by West for Western interests and directly tied to US policy in middle-east, and as Biden said once if it didn’t exist it’d be necessary to invent it, we can’t just ignore the undue and disproportionate influence that Israeli Zionist lobbies have in US politics especially at legislative level. Of course this is not just Israel, since there exists other lobbies such as Gulf lobby that are doing similar things and at times even seem to have more influence at executive but it is not quite at the level of AIPAC and the rest.
The saddest part of this is that Elon has never said anything interesting in his life, and is one of the most limp personalities of any public figure. It is pitiful and pathetic in a way that it almost feels wrong to look down upon.
Academic history is not very fascist so there is no need to ever concede any interest in history to any fash adjacent group. I am personally very interested in history in general and military history too and almost everything I read on the matter is written by nuanced understanding regardless of what its political or ideological leanings are which range from neoliberal conservative historians to more materialist or Marxist analysis. A lot of pop history is just very fascistic because pop history is superficial and lacks substance, that’s also the main appeal of fascism, just a generalized incoherent aesthetic vibe without anything behind it.
It’s interesting how all the talking points around what’s happening in Gaza and how it doesn’t qualify as a genocide is exactly the talking points given about Armenian Genocide by its denialists. Perhaps Israeli politicians outrage about trying to refute the genocide claims by arguing against those alikening it to holocaust serves also as a smoke screen by distracting from comparisons to other historical incidents like Armenian Genocide or what happened to Circassians.
On one hand you are right she doesn’t deserve that much effort, on the other hand she is all aesthetic no substance much like fascism so it might be befitting.
It does, he says بصر and بصيرة which are sight and insight. It is a fairly common word to mean insight or discernment or even vision.
Unfortunately the only thing which motivates large portion of male population whether liberal or conservative is to what degree they can objectify women. This is why Israel uses models as IDF propaganda.
Are you asking for a specific book talking about this concept? I am not sure if there is anything comparative this way but in a lot of cultures historical and contemporary the idea of fulfilment is tied to different formulae (sometimes evoking that image of formula, for example “Alchemy of Happiness” by Al-Ghazali), it is a broad spectrum with variety theological and philosophical understandings whether it is spiritual or mundane. Happiness can come from fulfilment but it is more of a fleeting feeling that’s not reliable as a long term goal so these religious or personal beliefs often emphasize other factors for it, from self-sacrifice to community to purpose whether one agrees or not. Consumerist culture is something else entirely, because it sells happiness which is elusive and hard to define, you are always meant to self-improve towards productivity to service this idea of acquiring happiness as an utilitarian currency which you exchange for your toil so life is proposed as an expense for goal of happiness. This latter idea of consumerism and happiness is something that has been written about specifically. As for the connection of both to each other and this event that’s a personal interpretation I made. I suppose one could just call it a “hot take” that way.
What has went wrong in American cuisine and food culture that it came to a point where eating soups and stews is considered subversive and transgressive by these health enthusiasts?
Cope with what exactly? A cursory browse through that subreddit will show you many of them aren’t even living in West and many that do also are from non-Western backgrounds. Same goes with popular mobile AI-related dating apps.