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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • The “neutral language” you’re describing is called passive voice. It’s used to avoid saying who performed the actions in question and that is a form of bias.

    In the last few years, newspapers selective use of passive voice - cloaked as “neutral language” - to shield groups or organizations they’re sympathetic to from police to the idf has come under fire because people recognize it as deflecting blame from the powerful and casting the injustice and violence of those in power as unavoidable tragedy.

    He just burned to death, isn’t that sad? Alexa play despacito.



  • Sorry for the late response. Disasters happen!

    I will not vote for the democrats and no argument will convince me.

    I do want to participate in the electoral system and am not forced to vote for people or parties I have no interest in.

    You aren’t going to convince anyone with the most important election rhetoric. If a person isn’t already saying it along with you then they’ll be driven away by those words.

    I’m not throwing away my vote. It’ll be counted just like all the others. I know this from being involved in the process of elections.

    I’m not concerned with what the fascist want.

    If the democrats want my vote they can adopt a platform I support, actively pursue it to some real material ends and maybe I’ll cast a ballot for them in two years or four years.





  • Im making this reply to help you better respond to people, not to start a fight:

    Hey, just a heads up, your cfr link directly cites Adrian zenz, the person many people don’t trust to make even handed statements about China, directly twice.

    The vox link sources statements from him several times. I tried to just quickly parse what was what but I came up with seven different statements.

    The bbc article seems to reference zenz in six different claims.

    I wasn’t able to give these articles a deep read, or check if the other sources also pull from that particular controversial figure or his organizations.


  • you really might not.

    before there were mobile phones there was analog dtmf wired telephones. they replaced pulse dialing and allowed for all kinds of additional signalling and triggering. ring a bell, operate a relay, kick people off so you could call the president, entire automated analog switching centers, you name it.

    when mobile networks came on the scene there were all sorts of additional triggers but because the (second gen? the ones that could do sms) signals were actually digital, there was a much wider array of possibilities. dtmf had a handful of frequencies it supported and if you wanted to do something more you had to basically make sure the entire network you were using could send, transport and receive those frequencies.

    now imagine instead of sixteen combinations of frequencies played at the same time you have access to thousands of possible triggers. once you have simple stuff like the basic receiving of text and lighting a led or playing one of several legally distinct jingles covered, you could do do much more. and people did. there were all kinds of things pagers could do through combinations of local interface and digital communication with a cell tower, all mediated through a handful of baseband chips on the pager pcb that could have the pins for stuff they wouldn’t be used for disconnected.

    but how would you make a pager set off an explosive?

    well, the same way you use a casio f91w wristwatch to. you use its built in functionality (the speaker when the alarm goes off) to trigger a battery that can deliver enough electricity into a resistor to heat it up enough to make your (primary) explosive detonate.

    in the case of a pager, those baseband chips have all kinds of on and off switching built in. it’s not hard to imagine that basic, out of the box functionality would include pulling a pin high when it gets “*97” or some such. now tie that pin to the base of a transistor across the positive and negative terminals of the battery and sitting against a little petn and you got yourself a remotely triggered explosive.

    you wouldn’t even need a pcb.

    there’s probably a lot of stuff thats incorrect in this reply. it’s late and this is off the dome.




  • It doesn’t matter if you can contrive a situation (which has never happened) where someone is referred to as a settler but doesn’t displace someone else because that has never happened.

    If over four hundred years, every time the word settlers is used to describe someone they were part of some project to displace someone else then it doesn’t matter that you can imagine some situation where that doesn’t happen, it means that the word settlers means kicking someone out of their home so you can live there.

    I asked you to limit your search for peaceful settlers to 1900+ to make life easier on you since it’s shorter time and there’s lots of sources. If you can find a good example before then I’m open to it. The only thing I can think of is Iceland but that’s contentious because there’s the context of controlling fishing and trade routes even though there weren’t people living there permanently (this consensus is changing still and has changed in my lifetime).

    Just for clarity, the word settlers came into use in the early 1600s, so examples of settlers from before then wouldn’t really be relevant since we’re talking about the meaning of the word.

    What would convince you that you’re wrong and that the settlers are by definition part of the displacement of some other group? Would it be academic work?



  • I’m sorry, if you start with a dictionary definition you’re required to use the five paragraph format and start each one with a topic sentence.

    Surely you aren’t seriously suggesting that because the dictionary doesn’t explain the etymology, nuance and history that you have yourself recognized, said nuance, etymology and history doesn’t exist?

    That because the dictionary doesn’t say that settlers violently dispossess people of their homes it isn’t so?

    May I see even one example of that from (let’s just keep it short, we don’t care about history here, right?) the last 124 years?

    That ought to be easy. One example since 1900 of settlers just happening to come across a place to live without pushing some other population out or disrupting their lives or whatever.



  • Settlers is absolutely pinpoint precise. There isn’t a need for a different word to describe what’s going on.

    Settlers is not a superset of colonizers.

    Hypothetical situations don’t matter. There’s no grand council of English language administration that considers every bizarre possibility and issues proclamations regarding them.

    The words settler and colonist in science fiction were chosen to invoke our history and imply the question of weather human expansion beyond earth was right at best and used to sell space trades to the same people buying cowboy trades at worst.


  • Words don’t properly convey their own meaning.

    People do when they use them.

    Rather than lament the way you perceive the present understanding in absolutes, why not start using the word settlers appropriately: preceded a cuss or followed by spitting.

    If you think people don’t understand how the word settlers conveys historical meaning then do something about it instead of accepting your own transport to another grammatical space wherein you colonize the meaning and context of other words.