Hegar

The existence of professional sports teaches children how to arbitrarily hate people by sorting them according to team support.

You imagine a world too beautiful for humans.

Sport sucks, it’s boring and teaches kids how to sort people into us vs them based on arbitrary nonsense.

But like belief in divine agency, it’s presence across most societies throughout history probably means it’s just unfortunately a part of the human experience.

Edit: “men in womens sports”: this is absolute garbage that doesn’t happen and being worried about it marks you as gullible, hateful and ignorant.

Reposting popular material isn’t a reddit thing, it’s a human thing.

There will always be someone who just discovered that whatever from a couple years ago and likes it enough to post it. The larger the user base, the more common this becomes.

state is, ideally, composed of elected representatives

oligarch-led private armies oppressing people.

They’re the same picture.

Elections are a venue for competiting oligarchs - US elections are largely just a wealth check - with the bonus that afterwards people feel they’ve chosen their oligarchs and are less likely to notice that 90%+ of elected representatives only represent the interest of elites.

I do the same thing at work when I need mentally ill people to do what I say. “You can do what I want version A, or do what I want version B, which one?” always works better than “Do what I want!”

I agree that violence management is a very difficult problem with no easy solution. But I don’t think giving full control of legitimate violence to the rich is the best solution, which is what a state of elected representatives does.

The state is nothing but a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. To a hammer, everything is a nail. To a state, everything is a target for violence.

If we just extend that rule to everyone we’d have better cheaper stuff and fewer rich people to boot.

I’m not criticizing the author I’m criticizing the purpose that verbal tool was constructed for. It was designed to close off debate and that’s the only way it’s ever used.

It’s the best example of what it’s trying to describe. It’s a hypocrite of a phrase, engaging in what it condemns.

shouting “ACAB” in a thread about police violence, making jokes about beheading rich people, or throwing “muskrat” comments in discussions about Elon Musk

You were talking about people on lemmy insulting the powerful. Specifically the police, the rich and musk.

There is a fundamental difference between insulting the powerful and insulting people.

Having high status or power changes your brain, suppressing empathy and making you more capable of hurting others. Power makes people neurologically more evil, so it’s correct to apply different standards to the powerful.

Insulting is a way to chip away at someone’s social status, so ‘punching up’ has a (minor) positive leveling effect whereas ‘punching down’ tends to reinforce inequality and it’s enabler: prejudice.

Disrespecting the powerful is important, necessary and beneficial.

“thought terminating cliche” is a propaganda term made up during the cold war by a US academic who was trying to claim that we have reasoned, rational ideology whereas communists only have slogans that prevent them from realizing how wrong they are.

It’s a catchy collection of words, but calling another’s argument a thought terminating cliche is just using a cliche to avoid thinking about their point.

That example does sound quite different, but Wiktionary has it as from the Proto-Slavic *(j)edinъ, which is “ultimately from *h₁óy(H)nos.”

Finnish or Estonian are so wildly different

I know right?! I strongly remember the first Uralic language example I heard was the Finnish for merry christmas: hyvää joulua - it just sounded so different.

The asterisks mean that it’s a reconstructed word, not an actually attested word. No PIE writing exists, so all these words are deduced from the descendant words across the vast IE family, not recorded as definitely existing.

The numbers are h1, h2 and h3. We know that PIE had three different h-like sounds (pharyngeals). But, funny thing, every single daughter language lost them, so it’s hard to tell exactly what each one sounded like. If you see overlapping ripples in a pond, you can work out roughly where and how many things dropped, but you can’t guess the exact weight or size.

In every language, most words that most people use are still used from a very long time ago, we just pronounce them a bit differently.

*(H)óynos, *dwó, *treyes for example aren’t just uno, deux and tres, they are 1, 2 and 3 in English, French, German, Italian, Greek, Russian, Hindi, Farsi, Kurdish, Tajik etc. Literally the same word, just spoken by different groups of descendent speakers.

Some languages have undergone sound changes that make certain words sound more or less similar to how we think they sounded in PIE.

So even though though four, vier, quattuor and tessera sound quite different to us, they are all basically just how we say *kʷetwóres.

Sticking together is what good pastas do.

I’m still not sure why there is vegetarian Spam

For the same and only reason that there is regular spam, surely? For musubi.

I’ve heard so many right wingers claim that Californians aren’t real americans, and yet here they are trying to shoot their way out of the consequences of large scale systemic failures.

The first iteration had a rules of war/ethics type system where as well as K/D ratios etc. it gave you a rank for how well you obeyed the rules of war. I remember I number of articles talking about how abysmally low all the scores were.

The game was such a realistic representation of the US army that players could just war crime to their hearts content with no repercussions.

Jokes on you - I’m quick to smile, non-judgemental and a patient conversationalist! 😊 The last time someone have you a compliment in public it might’ve been me and you’d never know! 😘

I wasn’t trying to comment specifically on you or your teeth, it’s just one of those weird things that people notice about our culture, but people from here don’t realize is not the same in other cultures.

normal oral hygiene

Cranial deformation is just normal infant care in groups where it’s practiced.

Many western cultures practice dental hygiene in a way that doesn’t produce the “bleached wall” look that so many in US culture deem high-status. Teeth slowly change color and natural misalignments develop with less need to artificially modify that.

Teeth in the US are just a way more important site of identity than elsewhere. When people make fun of the US, teeth are often part of it because it’s something we’re way more intense about than other people are.

I use an unsweetened charcoal toothpaste, it’s definitely the least unappealing one I’ve found.