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I stayed with a succession of farmers while cycling across South Africa (with all the land fenced off, your only choice at the end of the day is finding a driveway and following it up to the farmhouse in order to ask…
"For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat." They certainly were in the context we are speaking of here. Official Soviet terminology, apparently starting at least from Lenin…
This reminds me of the wide range of reactions sparked by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, his most avant-garde film. On one hand, you can put that film on before a gathering of fairly open-minded cinephile friends, and even…
Exactly. Those churning out such posts on LinkedIn, would very much prefer if other people did not even carefully read the actual content, but rather simply assumed “Wow, this person is capable of generating a wall of…
I wonder if that means that lower sex drive does not necessarily mean lower testosterone? This is not a purely theoretical question. I spend half the year traveling the world in ways that let me talk a lot with local…
Taping your camera doesn't necessarily look like anything. I have a small piece of electrical tape over my webcam, and it blends in so perfectly with the background that other people probably wouldn't see it unless they…
I don't think you realize how powerful OpenWRT is. It's a whole Linux environment where you can write your own shell scripts and schedule jobs, etc. If you have created a set of your own personal customizations over the…
I did some FOSS hacking as a teenager a quarter-century ago, so learned Emacs, but then ultimately chose a career unrelated to software development. I still use Emacs for anything and everything text-related: email…
The Nordic countries have a longstanding tradition of state-run “folk high schools”. In fact, in modern economies where it is harder for unemployed middle-age people to find new work, and AI might cause unemployment in…
> It would have been much more useful if you could just mount it like a hard drive without special library management software. When I got my first iPod in 2006, I immediately put Rockbox on it, where the iPod indeed…
In Muslim society, one can choose not to believe in Islam and have no problem, as long as one continues to outwardly perform the expected public rituals, recite the shahada etc. (Quiet personal atheism is much more…
> the West African tribes often sold the slaves to Europeans I think that you are being disingenuous here. The African tribes that sold slaves were not necessarily the slave’s own tribe, but rather a different tribe…
It's easy to see African chattel slavery in the US as worse than the Barbary practices: European slaves of Barbary owners could be and often were ransomed out of slavery by their societies back home, but West Africans…
"eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much 'there' there as they supposed." Let's be honest: most of us here know there is more 'there' on the myriad university-press books available free on…
The US is frequently called late to ending African chattel slavery because it already happened in France and England decades before, and even English conservatives were calling for an end (of various degrees of…
You're not using the terms "structuralism" and "post-structuralism" correctly. The term "structuralism" has its roots in Saussure, in linguistics and the notion of l'arbitraire du signe. Semiotics and the…
People often consider the 2000 X-Men film to kick off the explosion of superhero films in the new millennium, and that was pre-September 11, so I’m not sure that correlation is causation here. Moreover, a lot of…
"I've almost never heard of Hi Res with a totally new master that wouldn't have been previously available as CD, to be honest. This isn't common, right?" It has been a few years now since I did all this collecting, but…
"one of the few human characteristics that hasn't been used to justify discriminations" Of course it has. That notions like “Napoleon complex” circulate in pop culture, suggests that society broadly considers…
Not if all the Muslims around you also don't believe in the Hajj. Orthodox Muslim belief is highly rigid today, but the medieval era there was a time and region when Muslim concepts could be questioned and given some…
Romania dropped several zeros in 2005, so 1,000,000 became 100. As someone who was around at that time, I still tend to think of prices in the old system, which makes me look ridiculous to younger people and even most…
"the whole fucking point of leisure activities is to escape from the hellscape that is life and reality" I get that you don’t like woke, but that is too blanket a claim. There has just been too much popular literature…
It has been years since I read the Sea of Fertility, but I remember one Western scholar of Japan claiming that the fourth volume was a shoddy work compared to the previous three, written hastily as Mishima was preparing…
The primary complaint I have seen about Murakami in internet books forums, is how repetitive his writing ultimately became. His treatment of women that strikes many as problematic, is just one of the things that get…
[flagged]
I stayed with a succession of farmers while cycling across South Africa (with all the land fenced off, your only choice at the end of the day is finding a driveway and following it up to the farmhouse in order to ask…
"For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat." They certainly were in the context we are speaking of here. Official Soviet terminology, apparently starting at least from Lenin…
This reminds me of the wide range of reactions sparked by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, his most avant-garde film. On one hand, you can put that film on before a gathering of fairly open-minded cinephile friends, and even…
Exactly. Those churning out such posts on LinkedIn, would very much prefer if other people did not even carefully read the actual content, but rather simply assumed “Wow, this person is capable of generating a wall of…
I wonder if that means that lower sex drive does not necessarily mean lower testosterone? This is not a purely theoretical question. I spend half the year traveling the world in ways that let me talk a lot with local…
Taping your camera doesn't necessarily look like anything. I have a small piece of electrical tape over my webcam, and it blends in so perfectly with the background that other people probably wouldn't see it unless they…
I don't think you realize how powerful OpenWRT is. It's a whole Linux environment where you can write your own shell scripts and schedule jobs, etc. If you have created a set of your own personal customizations over the…
I did some FOSS hacking as a teenager a quarter-century ago, so learned Emacs, but then ultimately chose a career unrelated to software development. I still use Emacs for anything and everything text-related: email…
The Nordic countries have a longstanding tradition of state-run “folk high schools”. In fact, in modern economies where it is harder for unemployed middle-age people to find new work, and AI might cause unemployment in…
> It would have been much more useful if you could just mount it like a hard drive without special library management software. When I got my first iPod in 2006, I immediately put Rockbox on it, where the iPod indeed…
In Muslim society, one can choose not to believe in Islam and have no problem, as long as one continues to outwardly perform the expected public rituals, recite the shahada etc. (Quiet personal atheism is much more…
> the West African tribes often sold the slaves to Europeans I think that you are being disingenuous here. The African tribes that sold slaves were not necessarily the slave’s own tribe, but rather a different tribe…
It's easy to see African chattel slavery in the US as worse than the Barbary practices: European slaves of Barbary owners could be and often were ransomed out of slavery by their societies back home, but West Africans…
"eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much 'there' there as they supposed." Let's be honest: most of us here know there is more 'there' on the myriad university-press books available free on…
The US is frequently called late to ending African chattel slavery because it already happened in France and England decades before, and even English conservatives were calling for an end (of various degrees of…
You're not using the terms "structuralism" and "post-structuralism" correctly. The term "structuralism" has its roots in Saussure, in linguistics and the notion of l'arbitraire du signe. Semiotics and the…
People often consider the 2000 X-Men film to kick off the explosion of superhero films in the new millennium, and that was pre-September 11, so I’m not sure that correlation is causation here. Moreover, a lot of…
"I've almost never heard of Hi Res with a totally new master that wouldn't have been previously available as CD, to be honest. This isn't common, right?" It has been a few years now since I did all this collecting, but…
"one of the few human characteristics that hasn't been used to justify discriminations" Of course it has. That notions like “Napoleon complex” circulate in pop culture, suggests that society broadly considers…
Not if all the Muslims around you also don't believe in the Hajj. Orthodox Muslim belief is highly rigid today, but the medieval era there was a time and region when Muslim concepts could be questioned and given some…
Romania dropped several zeros in 2005, so 1,000,000 became 100. As someone who was around at that time, I still tend to think of prices in the old system, which makes me look ridiculous to younger people and even most…
"the whole fucking point of leisure activities is to escape from the hellscape that is life and reality" I get that you don’t like woke, but that is too blanket a claim. There has just been too much popular literature…
It has been years since I read the Sea of Fertility, but I remember one Western scholar of Japan claiming that the fourth volume was a shoddy work compared to the previous three, written hastily as Mishima was preparing…
The primary complaint I have seen about Murakami in internet books forums, is how repetitive his writing ultimately became. His treatment of women that strikes many as problematic, is just one of the things that get…