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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 25th, 2023

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  • no actually, i’m done sitting and acting like that sort of shit is acceptable, no thanks.

    paradox of tolerance demands you completely and decisively shut these fucks down before they takeover your society with their shitty ass rhetoric of hate. i’d rather it begin and end here on a dinky little internet forum than 15 years down the line in another gettysburg. i won’t aid and abet in the breakdown of common norms and decency, as you so kindly suggested.


  • lmfao what a fucking excuse of a reason. i hope you know i hate you. not hyperbole. i hope everyone else knows i hate you too. like genuinely, and actually; blatantly being a terrible person like you are is a large part of what is wrong with the world and i despise every single one of you chucklefucks that inches us ever further away from common decency, day by day. life isnt some fucking game.

    do you recognize you’re doing olympic level mental gymnastics throughout these comments in order to make the people you identify with in the internet story the good guys or are you just incredibly dense and/or like fucking with people for kicks?




  • oh yeah, it’s surely a privilege to be allowed to participate in society.

    the argument “driving isn’t a right, it’s a privilege” falls entirely flat on its face when there exist no alternatives for a large majority of people and their lives. hardcore boomer energy that blatantly ignores the reality on the ground.

    i agree, there are people who shouldn’t drive. i wish i didn’t have to drive.

    that simply isn’t feasible in the current reality, tho.

    driving can once again be a privilege only after it returns to no longer being a necessity. it is the natural right of all peoples to participate in their society. i agree with the sentiment, driving is a privilege that should be earned. but we should do ground work to make that true, we can’t just ignore the real world and indignantly say whatever we feel like; real life isn’t harry potter and the symbols and words we create bare no direct power over reality. driving is not a privilege in todays america, you don’t get to be the arbiter of decision here. in a practical sense, driving is necessary. the right to transportation and movement evolves with the age, man; it doesn’t get narrower as time goes on in the way a lot of western law seems to want to imply nowadays.


  • “… get people off the road who shouldn’t be there in the first place…”

    i get the sentiment but i think this is problematic.

    who deserves the right to drive then?

    i hear you, “people who are capable”. but real life isn’t so cut and dry. the way it works in america now is awful fs, you can back this up with death statistics fairly easily; however, i think this tribalistic “us vs them” attitude drivers get is emblematic of deeper problems in our culture.

    everyone is all for the animal farm until they’re the other. cliche, i know, but it’s true.


  • jwmgregory@lemmy.dbzer0.comto196@lemmy.blahaj.zone11 years ago
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    2 months ago

    i like this comment but i feel the need to reply because it touches upon a pet peeve of mine in linguistics: there is a persistent myth in the modern period that grammatical gender is useless, pointless, or somehow arbitrary and is just some sort of vestigial, rotting, lexical limb that made it to the 21st century by fluke.

    this is simply not true. just because grammatical gender often appears arbitrary or illogical doesn’t mean it actually is. and just because grammatical gender follows many, many rules does not mean there are no rules. grammatical gender is just a fairly common form of noun class system. as with most forms of noun classing, what the rules are in a given dialect can be a little wishy-washy but they are certainly not arbitrary.

    for example, you point out the german Mädchen as an example of illogical noun gendering. this is an opinion often expressed by foreigners learning the language, and even by linguistically-ignorant germans. it makes sense on the face of it, this word has a similar meaning to the english phrase “little girl,” so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?

    well, no. it isn’t strange and it isn’t illogical, in actuality. -chen is a diminutive in german. for those who are unaware, diminutives are suffixes/prefixes in languages that serve to make nouns feel smaller or more cute in a language. think booklet vs book or dog vs doggie for some english examples.

    what are some examples of more german diminutives?

    das Kätzchen - kitten

    das Hündchen - puppy

    das Plätzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)

    das Ohrläppchen - earlobe

    noticing a trend? these are all neuter! and thus we uncover a little grammatical rule that grammatical gender was trying to tell us. all diminutives are neuter.

    most every “arbitrary” example of grammatical gender people provide has some sort of similar reasoning or rule behind it, some story or information it is trying to give you that makes speaking the language that much easier.

    just because what it is encoding doesn’t seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesn’t mean it is not. grammatical gender is much more than just gender-washing everyday speech for kicks and does carry useful meaning, if you can be bothered to puzzle it out. attempts i’ve seen to “de-gender” spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is they’re even trying to do and often opt for rotely tearing out the entire gendered case system without offering proper lexical and linguistic infrastructure for the language to actually effectively function without it. these attempts sound clunky because they are clunky! and to be perfectly clear i’m not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts i’ve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think it’s relevant bc it showcases how modern misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is can realize as actual, negative manifestations in the non-conceptual world. why this is important to think about more than passingly!

    edit:formatting