Grieving

I'm being downvoted here, I think mainly because frank admission of facts is considered mean. For reference, I'm speaking as a member of a tiny ethnic group that survived well into the 20th century, including a period of strong repression. What we couldn't survive was modernization. The need for work led to embracing the English language as the only way forward, and mass media, mobility, and exogamy have all contributed to extremely rapid cultural disintegration. This is the way the world works.

I'm not sure what you mean? You named a handful of languages that have survived, most of which are still in decline even if they still have substantial numbers of active speakers. The only one that seems possibly positioned to 'win out' in the long run is Guaraní, and even in Paraguay Spanish is steadily making inroads.

I agree largely with your response, but

> And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa?

In Africa, Europeans died off rapidly due to local diseases. Consequently, the early slave trade was centered in the islands off of Africa itself, and mediated by a mulatto class who were less susceptible.

I assume the person you're responding to is talking more about the aboriginal peoples of the United States.

GG&S is an interesting book, but extremely conjectural and ideological, and not well-sourced. Some of the evidence is distorted. Off the top of my head, he reproduces a table of grain yields, and when tracking down his sources for this, it turns out that he's omitted results that contradict his theory. The reasoning is sometimes shaky or circular: 'Why do we know X wasn't domesticable? Because it wasn't domesticated.' Etc. etc. I don't find his theory holds up particularly well.

That blending largely occurred in Latin America, but languages rarely survive such things both in the Americas and generally throughout history. Communication is important enough that the language of whichever group is technologically superior becomes the lingua franca, and the other slowly disappears.

I think it depends on what one considers the purpose of basketball to be. For entertainment and spectacle, high-box-score players are worth more. For pure team competition, RAPM is worth more. The latter is important because you generally want to win, but the former is what really draws fans in.

Can you point to a specific video? I watched livestreams as it was happening, and have seen a lot of the Parler videos.

My impression both from the videos and from right-wing twitter in the lead-up to this event, is that some q believers thought that various government and military leaders were going to step in, expose, and arrest members of the "deep state". Some of the more out there ones thought that the "deep state" leaders would be executed for treason. They're insane, as is par for the course in American politics, but weren't attempting a violent revolution. The rhetoric of "stop the steal" was wholly consistent with that of "the resistance".

> I think it is fair to say that no matter how much we go back and forth on this, we are never going to agree. The gulf between what you perceive and what I saw is far too great a chasm to cross. If we carried on, it'd probably get heated or it'd end up being a massive wasted effort. I've been through this rodeo too many times before. I spend the effort to go find objective sources that prove the claims I make only to be met with shifting goal posts and denialism.

I feel the same. That song and dance gets old. My goal wasn't to come to an agreement, but to introduce a different perspective in a largely one-sided discussion.

> For example the link literally describing the PB getting declared a terrorist organization. We're just hand waving that one away are we?

It's kind of downstream from this discussion, no? That designation is contingent on the facts that we were directly debating.

> In order to preserve my own sanity and respect the sanctity of hackernews' no flamewars policy I'm just going to tell you that I disagree and wish you a peaceful day.

Thank you, you too. I know we aren't able to reconcile, but I do appreciate engaging with the other side on a more civil forum.

They literally never did this. They didn't believe that the election was fair, and fought tooth and nail to make sure the results weren't certified. Even the whackiest of Q-believers, stupidly believed (and still do) that it would be the government that would step in to prevent a coup.

Trump had talked about running long before the initial announcement. My mistake for thinking that the quote I was replying to, which specifically limited the scope to 2014, was accurate.

> A week ago, a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to block the certification of Joe Biden as the next president. Even though some Capitol Police officers tried to hold back the mob and protect members of Congress, many observers wondered why the rioters did not experience the tear gas and rubber bullets used against the people protesting the killing of George Floyd. As the NAACP tweeted Wednesday, “They’ve killed us for less.”

They literally killed one of the protesters, and not with rubber bullets.

Anyway, the methodology is obviously flawed. They include alternative and mainstream news sources. Only one of these categories is granted "legitimacy", and that one skews far in the other direction.

I hate to break it to you, but I can cherry-pick examples of left-leaning protesters calling for deaths of Trump, Republicans, cops, white people, etc. When people are emotional, they are hyperbolic. Unlike those in the Chaz, for example, these didn't even attempt to seize power. They marched in, made some noise, and left.

And as for deaths, we've seen far more of those over the previous year. The only one provably murdered in this case was a protester.

> My own research analyzed about 1,500 protest-related news stories published throughout 2014

Protesting what you believe to be a corrupt system isn't overthrowing the government, else BLM are also guilty. Illegally protesting inside the capitol isn't overthrowing the government, else AOC would be in prison for leading protesters into it in 2018.

This protest was far less violent and less destructive than those that Americans have been made to accept as peaceful throughout the preceding year. This wasn't an insurrection, and none of your gaslighting will make it so.

This is such an inaccurate depiction.

"Alt-right" was a catchall label used during the 2016 election for those who were rightish, but didn't see themselves represented by the Republican party. Eventually, media found that Richard Spencer had originally used the term some time before, and attempted to tie all "alt-right" groups to neofascism. They were fairly successful, and the real, Spencerian "alt-right" began disparagingly referring to the fake "alt-right" as "alt-light". By and large, the proudboys and other "alt-light" groups caved to the pressure and abandoned the alt-right label.

> They were participants in the disastrous Unite the Right rally.

So what? They went to a political rally and did nothing wrong.

> Their beliefs include the idea that men and western culture are under siege.

True.

> They believe there is a white genocide occurring.

Some, sure. Race has never been the focus of the proud-boys. Me, personally, I tend to agree with this. "Replacement migration" certainly meets the UN's definition of genocide.

> They are often seen sporting clothing with "six million wasn't enough", a reference to the holocaust.

No they aren't. This is based on a photo of one dude standing around the Proud Boys wearing a "6MWE" shirt, which others likely wouldn't even have known the meaning of (I didn't, and I spend a lot of time keeping up with right-leaning groups).

> They are an exclusively male organization that values chauvinism.

True.

Try checking for something a bit more recent than 2014. Media still attempted to muzzle the craziness of the left at that point.

One of the worst problems of our political discourse (aside from the idea of a single political axis) is the idea that extremism results from distance from the center. There's nothing about this man's political perspective (that we know) suggesting he was in any way far-right. He is, if anything, a 'center-right' extremist.

Same kind of idea goes for proud boys, boogaloos, etc. I think they like the 'far-right' designation because it lets them liken these groups to fascism, which is about as accurate as likening AOC to Stalin.

When I got into software development around 2013-2014, only dialup and satellite internet were available in my area, and nobody had really nice computers (mine was an old, secondhand netbook). As a result, I can't overstate how much I appreciate informational sites consisting of 'plain' Web 1.0 HTML/CSS. They loaded fast, didn't lag when doing something as simple as scrolling, and didn't break when the connection dropped. They were also easier to archive with wget, which was very important to me given the instability of my connection.

Thankfully that was the heyday of jekyll/octopress, so there were a lot of accessible dev blogs.

Lockfiles don't fix a fundamentally broken dev ecosystem. Users of left-pad fell into one of two categories: people who don't understand the most basic programming tasks, and people who do understand these tasks but are so apprehensive about their own ability that they pull in random libs without even glancing at the source (a single glance would have informed them that they didn't need it). These are both signs of inexperienced programmers.

Amateurishness is normal to some extent, but JS has the ecosystem where beginner mistakes are often seen as the right way to do things.

Thanks! I'll have a listen on my drive home.

Thanks for the recommendation. I've read a little about this topic online, and while proponents often veer off into IMO very shaky territory, the basic plot line seems quite solid and backed up by evidence.

Edit: Looks like you work on htmx? If so, very cool project.

It's easy to see parallels if you really want to look. The cycle of reincarnation is the thing that Hindus want to escape from (both seek unity with god), and it can be described as monotheistic as well.

Just different approaches to the same divine.

I'm not a Christian, but a lot of this matches my experience with the overwhelming majority of atheists. There's a severe echo chamber effect and ignorance of both Christianity itself and especially of other religions, to the point that they make wide-ranging pronouncements that only really apply to a single perverted branch of a particular religion.

> As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.

I disagree here though. In a secular world, rejecting religion isn't exactly the mark of a radical truth-seeker. When I started through my own atheistic phase as a teen, the greatest disappointment was the observation that my 'companions' in that regard weren't exactly insightful, just followers of the zeitgeist; if anything they mirrored the fundamentalists in their ignorance.

Taken to its logical conclusion, nothing can be tolerated but tolerance itself.

Kind of an inversion of Chesterton's 'Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.'

> By learning Latin you multiply the speed at which you learn romance languages, which will allow you to understand and communicate with a much larger share of the world.

As someone else said, you can just as well learn a Romance language and you'll have the same benefit when learning a second. My grandfather's first language was an obscure French dialect, and he's able to communicate with Mexican Spanish speakers without much trouble.

> Moreover, but this is a personal sidenote: why do people outside of the Anglosphere need to learn how to speak perfect English (and get the usual banter about pronunciation not being spotless), while the Anglosphere generally doesn't bother returning the favour (while at the same time complaining about being treated as uneducated, rude gringos)

I don't know if this holds true elsewhere in the Anglosphere, but in my experience Americans who are interested in learning foreign languages are generally eager to perfect their pronunciation (whether or not they succeed is another question entirely, though to be fair the same is true about most English learners). That "uneducated, rude gringos" are a long-standing negative trope in popular American media reflects this insecurity. And with regard to classical languages in particular, the Anglosphere has been mocked for reviving 'spotless' classical pronunciations instead of simply using, for example, modern Italian or Greek pronunciation.

He went there after Epstein's first conviction. If you're flying to a billionaire sex-offender's private island and get offered a young girl, I'm pretty sure it would raise some red flags.

I don't think the part about giving him the benefit of the doubt is stupid, especially because it's never been clarified whether he did have sex with her, or if Epstein just suggested it to her. I just find his explanation unconvincing.

I assume it goes back to the Minsky incident. From what I understand, a trafficked woman/girl at Epstein's island was instructed to sleep with Minsky. Whether or not this was actually carried out is unclear. RMS said to give him the benefit of the doubt, that he likely wouldn't have known that she was being trafficked.

Just another RMS hot take. It was stupid, like a lot of his statements. Not worth canning him IMO.

> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender. Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate. Rocks (outside of Terry Pratchett books do not procreate).

Baseless speculation: I think I can see how gender might develop out of this paradigm. Far as I remember, there's the sky father and earth mother, and the sky impregnates the earth to create life. The animate/active is associated with the masculine, and the inanimate/passive with the feminine.

I've read a little about alchemy and the various ways one might determine the elemental nature of a thing, and this process was much more involved than one might expect, leading to a variety of interesting conclusions. I can imagine something similar behind the genders of things, at least at the beginning.

I wonder how in-scope this would be for bug bounty programs. Getting a dev's-eye view into an application would be invaluable for determining attack vectors, and there's also snooping kanban boards for low-priority bugs and slack for lazy cred sharing.

If I didn't live out in the sticks (and had done research to make sure it would be legal) I'd give it a go.

This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ5HS8GWIec) linked at the bottom of the page shows the attack in action.