• 11 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 13th, 2022

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  • The Democrats knew this was going to happen. There’s no way they couldn’t. And I don’t mean Democrat supporters, many of whom were vehement that Biden was fine like so many anecdotes in this thread recount. I mean the Democrat leadership, who manage his campaign and more than likely manage his presidency. Unlike the public, they have access to him. They have his medical records, the reports of his doctors and caregivers, everything. There’s no way they didn’t know this would happen if he debated.

    They might start seeding support for a different candidate into their supporter’s discourse after this, but they will have been planning for this outcome long ago. And when a left-leaning (left from a US Overton window) news platform hosts a debate that shows him up that badly and then publishes commentary like this, you have to wonder if that caused friction with the DNC or if they assented to it.

    As the party starts singling out a replacement, the question I hope people start asking is why they didn’t replace Biden earlier? Did they need to wait until the urgency of imminent elections made their new candidate more palatable? And if they don’t replace Biden, why are they letting Trump win?










  • “We did it! We time travelled! But what year is it?”

    “I’ll ask that guy over there. Hey stranger, are you aware that Palestine is being illegally occupied by a genocidal Zionist state?”

    “Yes.”

    “So we’re somewhere between 1948 and 2025…”

    “I can narrow it down. Hey again stranger, are you a liberal?”

    “Yes.”

    “So we’re somewhere between 2023 and 2025.”









  • Firstly, while i am no expert on the subject, it appears to me that this is a clear legacy of colonialism. Secondly, judging by how many modifications the Vietnamese alphabet has, all the various diacritics and tone indicators that are necessary to make it work, this would suggest to me that the Latin alphabet is just not a good fit for the specific phonology and tonal nature of the Vietnamese language.

    This is correct. France’s particular style of colonialism was particularly aggressive about erasing native languages and forcing them to adopt French. Do an image search for a map of Francophone countries and you can see the scar they left across West Africa, for example. In Vietnam, they were starting to use Latin alphabet as an alternative to using Chinese characters before the French came, but the French pushed them towards exclusively using the Latin alphabet as part of their process of converting them to Francophones.

    There’s not really a historical writing system to re-adopt - the Chinese character system and its derivatives are just as ‘imported’ as Latin, and I think if you go back earlier than that there’s multiple cultures and ethnic groups and not really a unifying language on the peninsula.

    I’m not sure why the Vietnamese haven’t created a new writing system, but I know they’ve considered it multiple times and chose to stick to what they have. Completely switching the writing system is a lot of work. Shifting the infrastructure and education systems and planning a transitional phase where both systems are used is a huge effort on top of everything else the new government had on its plate.



  • I was in an international school, in occupied Hong Kong, right after it happened.

    I remember my teacher showing us the tank man photo on the front page of the South China Morning Post.

    I remember him telling us to think about (i.e. assume) what would happen next to that brave man.

    I remember it vividly, because I was an 8-year-old being told by a trusted adult to imagine a man being run over by a tank. I wouldn’t see the actual tank man video and find out what really happened next for nearly 2 decades.

    Fucking wormtongue ghouls.