Painlessly in my bed, in the warm embrace of a loved one, it would seem.

“but” is a bigot’s favorite word!

Must resist temptation to see what the comment said…

Transphobia, just like any form of queerphobia, serves the maintenance of property rights and the reproduction of the workforce that generates billionaires’ wealth. This is where the antagonism comes from.

Also, please don’t call Elon Musk that.

Nettopp, nettopp. Jeg tror dette er vanlig for de fleste flerspråklige men blir ofte mer intenst for neurodivergente.

Det virker som du har en veldig interessant bakgrunn, kan du fortelle mer om språkene du kan, hvordan du vokste opp, hva forholdet ditt er til disse forskjellige språkene? Jeg er også nysgjerrig om språkdynamikken der du bor, mtp portugisisk og spansk og engelsk osv, og forholdene mellom disse.

Well, I should note that the situation for myself is that my mom’s first language is American English, and her second language is Norwegian, and my dad was the reverse, however both he and my mom mainly spoke English to me growing up. So I ended up growing up with both English and Norwegian, but because of the language dynamics in my family and in Norway in general, and because I was comparatively socially isolated for a long time, and because of various feedback loops, my Norwegian skills ended up basically “lagging behind” my English skills. This means that my idiolect in Norwegian has a number of prominent proscribed or eccentric features. So that’s something to keep in mind for when I put my Norwegian through this Swedish “filter” — that the Norwegian being filtered is itself already “Americanized” for lack of a better term.

Russian and Japanese are two languages that I have self-studied for a number of years. Neither of them are really up to the level I’d like, but I can still take pride in the effort I’ve put in and how far I’ve gotten, because even if my progress is slow compared to some learners, most hobbyist learners burn out and quit way sooner, right? Esperanto was one language that I tried to learn but quickly gave up on, but I’ve recently restarted learning that, and I hope and frankly expect that this time around I’ll make it to a much higher level, and it’ll become the fifth language I’ll say I can speak. And there are other languages still that I’d like to try my hands at eventually, and I’ve also been conlanging as a hobby for about a decade already, and languages are fuzzy things anyways, so just like anyone else I can sometimes understand individual words or sentences in languages I’ve never studied.

I can understand a very significant amount of Swedish but wouldn’t say I speak Swedish per se — I can rather put on an accent and apply some regular changes and switch out a few words in a crude approximation of Swedish, but is that really the same thing? There is actually a term for that sort of blending of Swedish and Norwegian, svorsk.

As expected from a government that would rather be a minority “left”-center coalition than accept SV’s rAdiCaL environmental policy

For whatever it’s worth, despite never formally studying Chinese, I managed to read both the Chinese sentences, albeit with the wrong tones. Like to be fair I have studied Japanese, and I am generally a bit of a weirdo with a knack for this sort of thing — but I do still have to wonder if more people are just going to start casually picking up hanzi just from exposure like I have, as China becomes more prominent. I could certainly see it happening.

“China is the future” is a bit of a vague question, though. Just from my interpretation of it…

I absolutely think that the USA is currently crumbling as the world’s hegemon — interestingly enough, the USA’s flag actually has stars on it to represent a “new constellation”, using the constellations in the sky as an allegory for the rise and fall of nations; so it indeed seems like the fifty-star constellation is beginning to fall beyond the horizon, as a new five-star constellation rises.

This being said, I don’t think China’s behavior as future hegemon will be the same as the USA’s current behavior as present hegemon. I don’t necessarily know what to expect from the future, though, so it’s probably best to prepare for all possibilities until we gain a clearer understanding of the situation.

Thumb-Key, hands down!

Well, I’m not going to jinx it, am I?

“Dumbing down” has tended to only cause problems for me, since if I’m too laconic and straightforward about a point, people will let their own biases color how they interpret my words, and their interpretations tend not to be as charitable as I’d like. It really is best nine times out of ten to just say what you’re thinking in as few or as many words as comes naturally, with whichever words feel natural.

What I’d say is that there is no-one on Earth who believes that fat people were enslaved and brought across an ocean to break their backs on plantations, with the descendants of these slaves still haunted by poverty to this day. There do however exist people who think that fat people are discriminated against, and to this I would say that the kids in order to make fun of that fat person had to be taught that fatness is something to make fun of in the first place, and whoever taught this idea to them had to have a reason to do so, and when the same thing keeps happening again and again, there is probably some sort of systemic cause for it.

My point with this is that acknowledging that people experience discrimination or marginalization on the basis of a specific trait, is not the same as saying that this or that form of discrimination is “the same as” the most infamous form of systemic discrimination: every form of discrimination has a different history, different manifestations, different roles and different causes, and intersects with other forms of discrimination in novel ways.

I’ve never been fat myself, mind you, but my dad was, and after he died far too young when I was just a kid, my mom told me that he died as a result of medical discrimination against fat people. Not that I am a physician myself — and by all means we would both be biased to look for someone to blame — but I still today feel like he would’ve lived much longer if the world were just more accommodating for people of all shapes and sizes.

I recently found a rap song in the endangered Tlingit language, I also recently had the opportunity to speak to a cousin in a language that stopped being passed down on that side of the family with our shared grandpa, and I also recently got to speak with an Ojibwe woman who is learning that language, about her experiences with it. An Ojibwe dub of Star Wars was recently released, as was the first ever feature film in Norwegian Sign Language. As someone who is interested in languages, their preservation and revitalization, I feel like experience and recent news gives me reason to be optimistic.

Earlier today I learned that there is such a thing as pea milk, which means that there is another and more nutritious plant-based substitute for dairy milk which can be made entirely with local-grown ingredients in Norway. As someone who wants to both see food sovereignty and veganism in Norway, these sorts of advancements in food science leave me optimistic.

When it comes to the topics mentioned in the OP, what keeps me optimistic is just remembering that the course of history is really just entropy, right? Suppression of activism, the erosion of people’s rights, the rise of fascism and the epidemic of hate crime, these are all symptoms of a broader power structure trying to sustain itself by force. But that system just doesn’t have infinite energy to sustain itself, it doesn’t have infinite resources. We see evidence of this in the “little things” like my cousin learning a language that had been forced out of our family: the forces that had pushed the language out of the family could not keep it out indefinitely, because with the effort one family member would take to relearn it, the effort needed for others to do the same gets progressively smaller.

Humans are known as persistence hunters: we certainly don’t need to hunt for food anymore, but the same strategy is certainly useful for hunting down our own oppressors. Oppressors will grow exhausted of trying to fight their inevitable failure, and that’s when they’ll easily be slain as “paper tigers”.

The best thing to focus on in the present moment is simply what you can do. Because any new skill you master, any positive interaction you have, any good news you read, all of that will prove to you that challenges can be overcome, that you can make a difference and that there is still good in the world. It is the little challenges you overcome that make the big challenges easier to overcome in time.

Well, I want to say “vampire angel from space with a super cool robot gun arm” but the better answer is probably just, like, “immortal shapeshifter”

…How, though? Is the point just that communists are obnoxious or pushy or something?

redherald.org perhaps.

The Circassian genocide is the example that comes to my mind first. In my experience, most people, at least in Western countries, when they hear “Circassian”, they will immediately think I’m actually talking about Cardassians, a race of fictional aliens from Star Trek (or they’ll at least remark on how similar these words sound).

I also think the Milan Congress is an event more people should know about. This was a congress on Deaf education in 1880 that declared a ban on sign languages in schools, causing trauma and poverty and general harm to Deaf people for nearly a century until around the time of Stokoe’s research on ASL.

Really, the amount of history that people should know is abundant, but a lot of it is also very clearly more important to know if you live in a certain area, right?

So you’re certain that revolution is impossible, but you’re also certain that if there is a “strong middle class” in the future, that you would actually be a part of it?