el-smacko

[el-smacko]

Guys the credit score thing isn’t even funny. They tried it out, we propagandized their version was some kind of eugenics thing, and then they phased it out after determining credit scores suck while they’re used here to keep my generation in debt and the legacy of racism alive. Like come on can we please drop the high and mighty “don’t fall for propaganda” and realize the stark reality: when we wanted to make them look bad we lied about them but when they wanted to make us look bad they told the truth. Who ended up being more propagandized?

[el-smacko]

Bro like how embarrassing is it that a lot of us finding out that no, actually, individual Chinese people are not rated by their government according to how productive they are but in reality they were pilot programs testing credit scores which they decided sucked and didn’t help people but here in the US credit scores were adopted at the same time and are used to perpetuate racism like come on

[el-smacko]

[el-smacko]

trans people will literally go “i have a complicated relationship with my history with gender and sometimes see it as a gender i ‘used to be’ and i don’t really look like a cis person of either gender and i don’t think i can fit it into simple categories” and everyone will spontaneously combust

[el-smacko]

This is because it was the end of the Phoenician alphabet! Hebrew, which was originally a dialect of Phoenician, ends with tav, Greek tau. When the Greeks borrowed it they added new letters to the end! The alphabet at that point was ABG instead of ABC. The Etruscans got it after that and they didn’t distinguish between the similar sounds of C, K, and hard G, so when the Romans got it from them, they used C for a K sound when it had been hard G before—except, they had a hard G sound so they needed a new letter. It was close to C so they just gave the letter a sick little curl to make it G. They needed somewhere in the alphabet to put it and they didn’t have a Z sound, so they put it where Z used to be, which was right after F. Except, when they started to interact with the Greeks a lot more they needed Z again to write Greek words, so they added it back again at the end of the alphabet, where it has stayed for over two thousand years.

The rest are easier to explain: F used to make a W sound and looked like this: 𐤅. If you drop the tail you get U, which in Latin could either be a consonant (W) or a vowel (U), and they needed a new letter for that because the Etruscans had been weird and made F make an F sound (they wrote it like FH so it was probably supposed to be a V sound and that’s really close to F). V is very close to W (in German W is used to write V) and so it’s a consonantal U, and was the way the Romans would originally write U. For English, we used U for the vowel and V for the consonant, as well as W, which had indeed originally been UU and if you tried to go “oo-oo” you’d notice you make the W sound in the middle. As for Y, the Greeks had borrowed Phoenician 𐤉, which had originally been both I and Y, to only stand for I. You can really see how it became Greek ι when you look at Hebrew י. They needed a U, so they made two letters out of 𐤅, which had been both the consonant W (which they made F) and the vowel U, which they made Y. The Romans again used U for both U and W, so they got rid of Y but kept I, which was either a vowel or a consonant, Y. But then they started gettin with the Greeks again and their U wasn’t exactly Greek Y (which was a bit softer) so they used Y and put it at the end with Z. The Y sound as we know it in English at first was made by I like the Romans had done. We made a separate letter for consonantal I and put it right next door, J. It’s still like this in German. Then, in English, because of the French we started using J for the sound we’re familiar with, but now we needed a new way to write Y, so we chose to make Y both a vowel and a consonant, like it had been in Phoenician (except that had been Phoenician 𐤉 but confounding we were using letters that had evolved from 𐤅).

So the end of the alphabet was T and the rest of it is a weird jumble because new letters had just been added at the end as the alphabet was borrowed and adapted to new languages.

T is basically the last great letter before the alphabet completely goes off the rails

[el-smacko]

Sorry, εὐεργέτης in Greek meant “benefactor,” the Latinate equivalent, so evergetism (I prefer to make intervocalic upsilons “v” like in the name Evander rather than Euänder, Greek Εὔανδρος) would be “benefaction.” “Godly” in that translation is probably supposed to be “goodly,” since eu- is a Greek element meaning “well” or “good,” or even just positive (like presence versus absence) as in “eukaryote,” which indicates a cell has a nucleus (Greek karyon, but nucleus is the diminutive of nux, “nut” or “knot,” so it really ought to be a karydion, but whatever).

Something very sad and dumb is happening. During the slow collapse of the Roman empire we lost many "luxury" trades and techniques due to them not being sustainable in a post-roman less connected world. People didn't get dumber, and they kept using and inventing new things to improve their quality of life, but, to take an exemple out of many, the recipe of the seawater concrete that was so closely tied to Rome's monumental architectural projects was forgotten for over a thousand years simply because for quite some time there just weren't cities vast enough to attract the kind of patrons to fund them, which stopped the process known as euergetism to take place. Somehow we have been going through the same process again over the past hundred and so years, not because there's no upper class to chase civic recognition by sponsoring the arts, but because the upper class has lost interest in sponsoring the arts at all. It seems like rich people have become more and more into the idea alone of accumulating money, and just can't think of ways to spend it that wouldn't also be thought off by the most basic dudebros around. Not to glorify rich people at any point in time but it used to be that when you had an insane amount of money you'd use it to foster a court of artist, build gigantic public baths or commission a rank in the navy to discover new continents. Nowadays it all goes towards a dick measuring contest of yachts, mansions and what just seems like the least satisfying way one could ever spend their money. This wouldn't be so much of a problem considering the lower class has had more spending money than ever before in history, but aside from that and in lock step with exponential capitalism, rich people seem to take personal exception to the arts existing at all, opting instead to commodify everything, copy it and sell it for cheap. We're staring down the barrel of losing thousands of crafts honed over dozens of generations simply because the mercantile hellscape we live in does not, for whatever reason, value having the best possible teapot ever produced, or the best knife, or the best brush, etc... instead these products are undermined by cheap imitations sponsored by rich assholes wanting the appearance of quality over the real thing for revenues' sake, possibly because the idea that an ultra-skilled artisan class getting paid insane amounts of money completely proportional to their labor feels alien to this bunch of parasites. And I don't think that trickle down economics has ever been a thing, but it sure as hell feels like we went from being the paid monkeys of the elite, to them not being willing to spend the piss it would take to save us from a fire.

[el-smacko]

The Matrix of Leadership in The Transformers: The Movie (1986) when it finally opened for Rodimus Prime

So y’all know the classic edge trope of “my blade cannot be sheathed until it has tasted blood”? What if a magic sword that has that requirement, except it’s sort of inverted. A sword that, instead of being inhabited by an evil spirit which once awakened cannot be lulled back to sleep except by blood sacrifice, was inhabited by a benevolent spirit who would not allow the sword to be drawn unless bloodshed were the only possible solution. A sword whose power could never be misused because it would only allow itself to be used in situations where it was justified. What about a Paladin who spends their entire journey fighting with a sheathed sword, incapacitating but never killing or maiming. The party believes that the Paladin has taken an oath of no killing, until they face the big villain. And it is in that moment, and that moment alone, that the sword will allow itself to be drawn.

Idk, this image set my mindwheels a-turning.

But do y’all see the vision?

[el-smacko]

Okay so 1) If last election seemed like it had the most checked-out, uninformed, and uninvolved electorate, this could’ve at least contributed to that

2) A bunch of states are suing Meta over its apps’ psychological malignancy and their internal documents show they are aware their apps are addictive and that division boosts engagement, so we can immediately dismiss the idea that they suppressed political content for their users’ mental health

and 3) Isn’t it fucking interesting that they didn’t recommend political content when there were fact checkers and now that the fact checkers are gone they’re going to recommend political content again? Like, there’s a consistency there, right, a favoring of misinformation? And not recommending political content with fact checkers during a Democratic administration but then recommending political content without fact checkers during a Republican administration obviously favors one side’s official narrative over the other.

Everyone keeps saying Zuckerberg is trying to appeal to the incoming administration but that’s giving him too much credit. He’s not putting on a mask, he’s coming mask off now that he doesn’t have to hide it anymore.

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This man put more effort into undermining the far right’s efforts to overturn the 2024 election than the entire Democratic Party put into actually winning an election for them to overturn 🙃

Outraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.

This is such a wild story like holy shit dude

[el-smacko]

In the Platonic interpretation of Genesis 2 (“rib” actually means “face” [i.e. “side” rather than “thing of the side”] and Adam had two faces before Eve was cleft from him, which is why humans crave companionship) Adam was originally made androgynous in Gd’s image but Gd made him incomplete (i.e. not like Gd, who is One) and thus more like the animals, which had been explicitly made “male and female.” We can only sin like the animals, which merely lack mens rea without the apple, because of that incompleteness. Anyway, since we are ultimately referring to the Bible, it can be argued that, according to one mishnah (Bereshit Rabbah 8) and the Talmud (Eruvin 18a) syncretizing Plato’s Symposium (189&seq), all animals are (unactionable) criminals.

I'm watching Pingu right now and wow how did I forget that Pingu once tried to recreate the Tower of Babel.

[el-smacko]

‎𐤉𐤔𐤇𐤕•𐤐𐤕𐤊•𐤓𐤔𐤐

Fans of Iron Age curses might enjoy “may burning strike your pussy” in Phoenician/Aramaic

(yšḥt ptk ršp)

[el-smacko]

Not a crime? That’s just copaganda?

[el-smacko]

There’s a type of Phoenician monument that was called or commemorated something called a mlk (vocalization unknown but molk is conventional and milka doesn’t seem unlikely to me), which because of Biblical and antique accounts are referred to as “child sacrifices.” “Molech,” a supposed pagan god and recipient of such offerings, is an invention of later interpreters after the practice had been centuries out of favor, voweled like bosheth, which means “shame.” In reality, the word is m- (Semitic noun-forming prefix) and (h)lk, “to send,” so “a sending off.” However, the actual sacrifice of children seems like an exception resorted to in extreme circumstances like the siege of a city. It seems much more probable to me that, because of high infant mortality, a god would be appealed to for the life of a child. If they survived, a substitute like a lamb/kid would be offered. If they didn’t, they would be burned like a “holocaust,” or “whole burning” in Greek. The majority of urns marking them are children rather than animals, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering the rate of infant mortality, especially if these are for difficult births and not just average ones. Further, it could be that these are infants who don’t survive after a period of prolonged infertility, so they had been prayed for AND didn’t survive. We know that such children, when they did survive, would be given as attendants to temples of the god. In the Bible, something like the latter were called Nazirites, from nzr, a word related to the ndr, or “vow,” that many mlk were explicitly given to fulfill. This accords much better with surviving narratives and, importantly, human nature.

The post I just reblogged made me think about "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" and how, now, in our time of dramatically reduced infant and child mortality and increased abundance, the more statistically likely interpretation of that six-word story is this:

"Extended family and friends have gifted us too much stuff for our kid. They didn't even get a chance to wear these shoes before they outgrew them." And if that's not an indication of amazing progress, I don't know what is.

[el-smacko]

I love capybaras because I also feel like if a rat was a deer

[el-smacko]

I will readily admit to falling into the deradicalization pipeline, the pseudo-anarchist trajectory from Sanders to Trotsky, also referred to as “liberal, but with Good Opinions and No Intentions.” I thought that if we—if I, if I’m being honest—could develop a pure sociology, its mere introduction to the liberal marketplace of ideas would spontaneously catalyze a global proletarian Rapture—er, I mean Revolution. At the head of the Glorious Revolution (a term I used only half-ironically) would be the sociologist intellectuals currently making six figures with books and speaking events who (unlike the third world barbarians whose condemnable bloodlust—comparable in the liberal estimation to that of the fascists—prevented them from achieving True Socialism) represented the bleeding edge of scientific materialism, impracticality (to say nothing of impracticability) notwithstanding. Anyway I was made a Marxist Leninist when I realized that HOAs are in dire need of dekulakization.

Can everyone please be a marxist-leninist this year? I'm really tired of explaining this shit to people. Can everyone just grow up and be a marxist-leninist already?

[el-smacko]

Has anyone else noticed that Controversy sections have been disappearing from the Wikipedias of corporations

[el-smacko]

London goes back to having cholera water because it decided to act like London did when it had cholera water, among other things we could’ve easily predicted

Wow! A service that's essential to preserving human health but cannot be done profitably?? Who could have foreseen such a thing???