some of my friends seem to think english is a uniquely horrible language as like… an anti-colonial thing? but that’s not true. english has fucked up orthography sure, but other than that it’s pretty good. hardly any verb conjugation and it’s all very regular, no gender, no declension. analytic rules synthetic drools
I very rarely initiate conversation but I need to pretend I am having a ball with the mutuals to make each of them slightly jealous of one another for not being invited
people casually dropping references to jokes in the group chat and shenanigans in the discord server but they’re the only one logged in.
every morning when i wake up i have a 13 minute rap battle with the ghost of czar nicolas ii. every night before i go to bed i have a 12 minute rap battle with vladimir stalin (it's shorter cause he gets tired and has to got to bed usually). perfect balance. perfect harmony. i am the only true centrist.
old time union guy who went toe to toe anesthesia or whatever her name was in a machine gun fight so he could kick out the ronimovs and become big man of the russkies. NEXT question.
Supervillain who’s imprisoned me in his lair keeps talking about the “next stage of human evolution” but honestly I don’t think he’s ever even read a book on genetics, some of these misunderstandings are very basic
You guys need some healthy dose of music guy elitism snobbery actually its so annoying seeing people in their 20s unironically calling shit like Taylor Swift 'goth girl music' 'weird ferals hoe scaring music' without a hint of embarassement. Literally u deserve a bunch of rym pretentious dudebros to kidnap u to explain the difference between grindcore and powerviolence for 12hrs straight for this clownery i cant take it anymore
Did you enjoy reading as a child? I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but the cherished hours you spent reading Harry Potter books were actually just your body’s way of dissociating in an uncomfortable environment (also RIP to your idea of JK Rowling as a decent person). Do you sometimes forget to text your friends back? It’s probably, definitely, because of a past trauma, and certainly not the natural result of a culture in which we are expected to be socially available at all times. Better get a therapist on the line! Do you struggle to concentrate at your office job, where you spend eight hours a day performing boring tasks in front of a screen? I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there’s probably something immutably wrong with the chemicals in your brain.
As far as the internet is concerned, just about everything you do might be evidence of a troubling pathology. Social media can undeniably be a great resource for people experiencing mental illness, alongside people who have ADHD, and people who fall somewhere along the autism spectrum. A condition like ADHD, for example, is still said to be underdiagnosed (particularly among women) and raising awareness about this might bring people to a diagnosis they sorely need. But as with many things online, there is a downside to a free, entirely unregulated flow of information.
This is good. It talks about capitalism too.
“I think it's great to be able to relate to people and find a community based on your traumas and how fucked up and maldapted you feel to society,” says P.E. The issue is, however, that these overly-pathologised views of mental health and neurodivergence usually invite us to situate the root of the problem firmly within ourselves, and as fixed parts of our identity. “If more and more of us all feel so maladaptive to the point that we require medication, then perhaps we can all collectively realise that something larger is going on that does not have to do with the chemical composition of our brains. I think we need to realise that it's something larger than that.”
↑ perhaps we should reflect/think more about this
I've mentioned this before, but I'm highly skeptical of the concept of "little c" culture, at least as it's typically invoked.
The term Culture, with a capital C, is sometimes used in the social sciences to denote what has also been called "the human capacity for culture" or "the human propensity for culture"; that is, the tendency of humans to gather together in groups, build institutions and systems of social norms, pass down knowledge generationally, etc. It's our wont to do social stuff larger than the family unit, basically. And, to be clear, this notion of Culture is something I very much believe in (I mean, how could you not?).
But then there's culture, with a lower-case c, which is a count noun rather than a mass noun. That is, one talks about "a culture": French culture, Japanese culture, American culture, etc. And this notion, I'm extremely skeptical of.
For one thing, it's not clear at all how one is meant to coherently draw the boundaries between different cultures. Culture often tends to vary (roughly) continuously, both over time and across geography. It's not clear, for example, if one should consider the American culture of today to be "the same one" as the American culture of 200 years ago, and/or consider the American culture of 200 years ago to be "the same one" as that of 17th century Britain, etc. This is true geographically as well: in precisely what provençal village does "French culture" transition to "Spanish culture"? You might try to use language as a proxy for this question, but even that won't work! The Romance languages (the family including French, Spanish, etc.) are a dialect continuum. There is no village where they suddenly stop speaking French and start speaking Spanish! The "French" on one side of the border and "Spanish" on the other may well be more similar to one another than either is to the Paris or Madrid standards.
In much of the world, deliberate nation building over the last few hundred years has obscured the difficulty of defining cultural boundaries. In France, for example, before the introduction of standardized education only a minority of the country spoke a Romance dialect that we would today recognize as "French". The ancestor of contemporary standard French was the dialect specifically of Paris and the surrounding region, while the rest of the country spoke... other stuff. Now, due to the policy of teaching standard French in schools and using it in most media, it is spoken by an overwhelming majority of the country.
[Sadly, it's the middle of the night and I can't dig up the source with exact numbers and years at the moment; I'll try to add it in a reblog tomorrow. IIRC the estimates were: < 30% speaking French before 1700, greater than 90% today. However, I don't feel comfortable making those specific claims without a source in hand, so take that with a grain of salt.]
This fact is a microcosm of a broader trend —that points of national and cultural unity, often interpreted as arguments for political nationalism, are more often in fact products of it.
But, prior to such nation building projects, the cultural and linguistic map of Europe looked much more like the cultural and linguistic map of Africa or the pre-colonial Americas, an intricate hodgepodge of different language varieties, institutions, customs, and political units, often with no clear line where one ends and another begins. This is not an aberration, this is the norm for human societies.
This brings me to my second point of concern over the notion of culture: there are various sorts of human activity that comprise big C Culture, and they don't always correlate with one another. Language isn't always correlated with government which isn't always correlated with tradition, etc. There are practices, concepts, institutions, and so forth that are shared by multiple "cultures", and within each "culture" there are practices, concepts, and institutions that are not shared by everyone. Thus, rather than a collection of discrete units (or even of a field of pure continuous variation between different extrema), the cultural landscape has a character more akin to a tapestry: different elements of Culture interwoven in complex and unpredictable ways, overlapping in different combinations across the map.
The consequence of all this —that cultural variation is continuous, that internal variation within "a culture" is often comparable to or greater than external variation between "cultures", and that different elements of culture often vary on axes totally orthogonal to one another— is that drawing coherent cultural boundaries can be a very hard thing to do indeed!
Finally, compounding all this difficulty, there's the issue that different people have different opinions on where we should draw these cultural lines, and those opinions are often politically motivated. Taking culture as a fundamental element in your understanding of the world requires taking a position on a thousand political debates large and small just in order to have a coherent picture of the ontology of human society. This is a very bad position to put oneself in, clarity-of-thinking wise!
Of course, the notion of "a culture" is just an abstraction, and in some cases it will be an abstraction that models reality better than in others. But in general, I tend to find that people treat culture in this sense not as an abstraction, but as a fundamental part of reality. And I think this is an extremely dangerous thing to do, both in terms of its political consequences and in terms of its impact on one's ability to think clearly about the world.
Regarding the percentage of French speakers in France over time: I wasn't able to locate the source which gives pre-1700 numbers (pretty sure it was in a linguistics textbook I read at some point, if anyone knows it please let me know!), but there are many sources from the end of the 18th century to the early 19th which paint the same picture.
At least one early set of estimates comes from Henri Grégoire's report to the National Convention in 1794 (Rapport sur la Nécessité et les Moyens d'anéantir les Patois et d'universaliser l'Usage de la Langue française). It concludes that around 6 million people (about 21% of the population) had no knowledge of French whatsoever, another 6 million "could barely conduct a conversation", and only 3 million people (about 11% of the population) spoke "pure" French —presumably meaning the Parisian variety of the langues d'oïl. Apparently Graham Robb claims in The Discovery of France that Grégoire's report almost certainly underestimated the number of people without competency in French, as even by 1880 the number of people estimated to be comfortable speaking French was less than a fifth of the population. A later report by Coquebert de Montbret in 1815 (Essai d'un travail sur la géographie de la langue française) has roughly 60% of the population speaking some variety of langue d'oïl (among them standard French) and the remaining 40% speaking other Romance languages + Breton, Basque, Alsatian, etc. How many of those langue d'oïl varieties were mutually intelligible with French is hard to say, but certainly a large proportion of them would have shown significant differences.
