Lvxferre

Easier: n(13-n).

In this context “politics” clearly conveys “things directly related to governments, such as wars, elections, or socio-economical ideologies”. It is only a subset of the definition of politics that you’re probably using, something like “things direct or indirectly related to human groups and their conflicts of interest”.

We got a whole Lemmy to talk about Israel vs. Hamas, late stage capitalism, elections etc. We could - and should - have at least one community to chill and talk about other stuff, and without that rule we won’t have it. For example without that rule 99.99999% of the content as of late 2024 would be about Trump, as if Americans didn’t have multiple communities to talk about it already.

Ginger with turmeric? Now that’s something I need to try. Thanks for the rec!

Ginger. But only because I refuse to call yerba mate “tea”.

[Just to be clear for everyone: I’m describing the issue, not judging anyone. I’m in no position to criticise the OP.]

The unfamiliar vocab is just the cherry on the cake. The main issue is that it’s hard to track everything; at least, when reading it for the first time. And most people don’t bother reading an excerpt enough times to understand it.

Makes me wonder how many people read scriptures/manifestos.

Almost nobody, I believe. And I’d go further: I don’t think that most people read longer texts that would “train” them for this sort of stuff.

We’re both interpreting it slightly different ways:

• you - the utterance is specific, the speaker is unspecified
• me - “utterance” is a placeholder for “discourse”, the speaker is whoever answers the question

To be honest this is really cool. Now I’m curious if one of us got it right, or if we’re both reading it wrong.

As you said in the other comment, the sentence is grammatically OK¹. However, it’s still a huge sentence, with a few less common words (e.g. “utterance”), split into two co-ordinated clauses, and both clauses are by themselves complex.

To add injury there’s quite a few ways to interpret “over the airwaves” (e.g. is this just radio, or does the internet count too?)

So people are giving up parsing the whole thing.

I also write like this, in a convoluted way², but I kind of get why people gave up.

1. I’m not sure if it’s semantically OK due to the word “utterance”.
2. Except when translating stuff, since I’m forced to roughly follow the “informational layout” of the original. That’s usually a PITA but it helps wonder for clarity!

My most controversial discourse* can be roughly phrased as “screw intentions”, “your intentions don’t matter”, “go pave Hell with your «intenshuns»”. It isn’t a single utterance*; I say stuff like this all the time, and regardless of the utterance used to convey said discourse, people will still disagree with it.

The one that I’m sometimes at fault is “people who assume are pieces of shit and deserve to be treated as such”. Because sometimes it is reasonable to assume (to take something as true even if you don’t know it for sure); just nowhere as much as people do.

*I’m being specific with terminology because it’s a big deal for me. “Discourse” is what you say, regardless of the specific words; “utterance” is a specific chain of language usage (be it voiced, gestured, written, etc.)

wtf does this even mean

OP is asking two things:

• the most controversial shit that you say
• the shit that you say and think “mmh, maybe I’m wrong but I’ll keep saying it”

…or at least that’s how I interpreted it.

Happy birthday! :D

Then there’s the self-employed equivalent of that: savage some sense of freedom by sleeping up to 11:00, lunch, then spend up to 02:00 of the next day working nonstop because you got work piling up.

Ten minutes, I guess? Brazil.

Hard of hearing old lady, right before me, was struggling to vote in the 2022 elections. Apparently she typed the numbers for her candidates but they didn’t go through. All five of them (governor, state deputy, president, federal deputy, senator).

Typically it takes 2~3 minutes though.

I have never met a person who can isolate the moment when Tucker Carlson became Alex Jones. So, where did it come from exactly? …it’s very clear to me both are demons.

Greek and Roman mythologies are almost the same

Kind of. They’re like bananas and plantains - they look similar, they have a similar origin, but once you bite into them they taste completely different.

A lot of the similarities are shared since the beginning, as they backtrack to the ancient Indo-European polytheism; you often see those similarities popping up in Norse mythology and Hinduism, for the same reason.

And beyond that, the Romans went out of their way to interpret foreign gods as variations of their own native gods, or outright copy them; not just the Greek ones, even stuff like Isis and Yahweh. So those similarities between Roman and Greek mythologies got actively reinforced once the Romans conquered Greece, and you got gods like Apollo and Bacchus being borrowed.

But the Romans still had their own specific gods, without Greek equivalents; like Janus Bifrons, who governs transitions and gates. And I feel like there’s some “humanity” in the Greek myths absent from the Roman myths, almost like one saw the gods as powerful but flawed individuals and another as aspects of nature. For example you can cheat a Greek god and get away with it, but not a Roman one.

[Sorry for the info dump. I love this stuff.]

I also think that it’s interesting. And I wonder if it’s something shared by the “collective memory” of humankind, or if it’s just that flooding events are so common and impactful that any culture is almost certain to develop that myth, given enough time.

Do you want to elaborate more on how politeness cant be explained by gricean maximes?

The Gricean maxims only handle the informative part of a conversation; they don’t handle, for example, the emotional impact of the utterance on the hearer, or the social impact on the speaker. As such, in situations where politeness is a concern, you’ll see people consistently violating those maxims.

I’ll give you an example. Suppose two people in a room: Alice and Bob. Alice has a lot of cake, she’s eating some, and Bob is craving cake.

If Bob were to ask Alice for some cake, Bob could simply say “gimme cake”. It fits the four maxims to the letter - and yet typically people don’t do this, they request things through convoluted ways, like “You wouldn’t mind sharing some cake with me, would you?” (violating the maxim of manner), or even “You know, I was in a rush today, so I had no breakfast…” (implying “I’m hungry”, and violating the maxims of quantity and relation).

To handle why Bob would do this, you need to backseat Grice’s Logic for a moment and use another framework - such as Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, it explains stuff like this really well.

This is probably obvious for you (and for me), and yet you still see some pragmaticists shoehorning everything into Grice’s logic. Or some doing the exact opposite and shoehorning it into Austin’s speech acts, or B&L Politeness Theory, etc. It sounds a lot like “I got a hammer, so everything must be a nail”.

To the latter point: My biggest gripe with linguistics is the tendency to boil everything down to a simple system.

Yes, yes, and yes. You can see Language (as human faculty) as a single system but, if you do so, any accurate representation of that system is so big that it’s completely useless, like a map as large as the territory.

That’s already a tendency in Linguistics in general, but in the case of the generativists it’s their explicit goal.

To be frank the only ones that I know a bit in depth are the Guaraní and Kaingang ones, as those are the two main Amerindian peoples here in Paraná. I’m completely clueless on the Yanomami one, for example.

Accordingly to some Guaraní myths, Kuarahy (the Sun) and Jasy (the Moon) are brothers, with the Moon being the younger one. As their mother gave birth, the celestial jaguars (a type of evil spirit) killed her and stole the children, raising them in her place. The children eventually grew up and learned the truth, unleashing their vengeance towards the jaguars, killing almost all of them. They spared a pregnant female, who would eventually become the ancestor of all mundane jaguars.

That’s the origin of such enmity between man and jaguar - as men took Kuarahy and Jasy’s side, and the jaguar their ancestors’. (Jaguars fulfil in Guarani mythology a role similar to the bear in the European ones. It’s an animal to fear, to revere, to avoid, to respect, but that you’re still bound to fight).

In another myth, that would happen before the brothers’ revenge, one of the celestial jaguars (called Charia) was fishing on a river. Charia didn’t notice the brothers, so Kuarahy decided to troll Charia a wee bit - diving and pulling Charia’s hook and line, to imitate a large fish. Charia pulled the fishing rod with all force, falling behind, amusing the brothers. Kuarahy did this three times, and in all three times Charia fell for it.

Then Jasy, amused, said: “now it’s my turn!”. He dives and pulls the hook, like his brother did. However this time Charia was quicker - he fished Jasy, killed him with a wooden club, and brought Jasy’s corpse home as if it was fish, to eat with his wife.

As they were cooking “the fish”, Kuarahy went to Charia’s home, and he was invited to partake on the fish. He thanked Charia, but he said that he’d only eat some maize soup; he also asked for the fish bones, allegedly for stock. He took those bones to a remote place, and used his own divinity to resurrect his brother.

That’s why lunar eclipses happen - the Moon gets devoured by the evil spirit, with the reddish hue in the sky being the Moon’s blood. And the Moon only resurrects, always as a full Moon, because his brother Sun saves and resurrects him.

For further kawaii, I think that the Mboi-Tatá is based on the same constrictor boas that some people keep as pets. It doesn’t inject venom, it sees larger animals as potential prey, and it likes to sleep in burrows, just like the boa.

There’s quite a few other Guaraní myths involving serpents, like the Mboi Tu’i, or “serpent-parrot”. It’s a giant serpent with two legs around the waist, the head of a parrot, and plumes on the head and the neck. It has cursed eyes and a terror-inspiring scream, but it eats only fruits and protects aquatic animals, specially amphibians.

In what I believe to be the Pre-Columbian version of the myth, that serpent-parrot was the second of the Seven Legendary Monsters - the offspring of a cursed couple; their father was the evil spirit Taú and their mother was the most beautiful woman of the tribe, Keraná, who sloped together.

In another story the Mboi Tu’i was actually born as a parrot, and it had free access to The Land of No Evil. However as some mestizos shared him fermented wasp honey (i.e. mead) and the parrot got drunk, it spilled the beans with the mestizos and told them how to enter The Land of No Evil. As a punishment the parrot was partially transformed into a snake, losing the ability to fly and reach the sacred land.

I still get into this sort of dumb argument all the time, so I kind of get why the other users were arguing the troll - even if you don’t know why their comment pisses you off, you still get pissed and it’s hard to not react when pissed.