One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with”; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I always think of that paragraph whenever I hear anti-vegan nonsense.

You might gain some insight if you were to actually study the substance of the election instead of making generalizations and assumptions.

The Bible seems like the obvious answer, what might be a more interesting question is: what is the most influential book now?

Why is it never framed…

Because I do not speak those other languages, and -attempt- not to be so presumptuous as to speak beyond my experience. But those are also problems, greater problems than the one I mentioned, problems that have been troubling this world for decades now, forever even.

Notice that I didn’t say that those projects should support English. I didn’t suggest there was anything wrong that they didn’t. And to be clear I don’t even mean to suggest that they must support any kind of IAL, even if one were agreed upon. The people of the world should be free to include others or serve their own… but I think generally people prefer to collaborate, and collaboration is something which should be facilitated.

Even the way internationalists frame things is very telling.

The way things are interpreted also says something about the reader. This is a sensitive subject for you, and I’d bet rightly so. You should take care of yourself. Try not to get so worked up.

You raise some excellent points in your response, on every point besides 2 and 6 we are generally in agreement. 6 is outside of my experience, and so I don’t have a meaningful opinion. 2 is one of the things I like about Esperanto, though you might well be right. I intend to study Mandarin, and since you mentioned it perhaps that will change my opinion regarding #2.

I did say that Esperanto isn’t perfect, truly it is itself flawed. Even besides the points you made, even in the foundation there are irregularities which exist which are scarcely justifiable:

• words which are redundant
• some root words which are simply difficult to pronounce for anyone
• the difficulties that arise from certain combinations of word parts
• constructed words which work one way in a certain set of cases, a different way in another
• the confusing resemblance to unrelated word constructions which some root words have

…to name but the things that come to mind.

And certainly if we’re going by head-count there is little reason to learn Esperanto instead of a natural language. But there is more to a language then just the number of people who speak it, there is also the question of who your going to be talking to and why. In that analysis depending on the particulars, almost any language can be about equal, even a “toy” language like Esperanto.

But it must not be forgotten what the original subject is: the question of the future of software development. Arguing in favor of any national language is like arguing for the domination of a national system of measurement, instead of metric. Certainly you probably are right that the euro-centricity of Esperanto makes it ill suited as a international language at it’s very core, and in this you and I would be in agreement, but so too in that way no national language should enter into the equation.

When I was looking at Mastodon Desktop clients a while back I came across Mikutter, which is only in Japanese. In their FAQ was a little gem which I feel may be relevant, the question “I am English speaker. Can I use Mikutter in English?” The response was in Japanese, here it is translated:

After the defeat in the war, the Japanese were forced by GHQ to adopt Shift-JIS and JAP106, and as a result, they fell far behind in the development of information technology. When I was in elementary school, when I started programming, I was frustrated because I was lined up with English that I had never learned. Also, you have released many low-quality services that do not support anything other than ASCII, which even Japanese elementary school students would not create. This mikutter is a precious opportunity for you to relive how we have been oppressed for generations.

How a programming language is written is a legitimate concern.

In my father’s house I have long referred to the cats as second class citizens. I’d love to share my food with them, but that’s not my economic reality.

…They get better health care than me anyways.

Read. I know a few people in my personal life who would be aided with their problems significantly if they could just read a book, or even a couple chapters.

Their not technically illiterate, but nevertheless this is asking too much of them.

I have found myself thinking this more and more as well, with the rising number of projects which are being developed primarily by/for speakers of other languages, sometimes with terrible to non-existent english support. This is not a new problem, but the natural consequence of the world breaking free of english hegemony. Where as the pain was felt before by others, now it will be felt by us as well.

Perhaps the problem could be offset somewhat by using software to translate the common symbols of the major programming languages (if, else, int, float, str, etc…). But generally speaking I think the time for a commonly accepted auxiliary language is now. Not necessarily Esperanto, which I think is an impressive accomplishment of it’s time (kaj kiun mi parolas), but I think a modern -and international- effort could produce a superior language.

But we do need a better solution, and I think Esperanto is a better solution.

Ĉu vi scias Esperanton? Esperanto ne estas perfekta, sed la Angla estas pli granda malordo. Mi vere dubas ke la Angla estus tiel facila kiel Esperanto.

Esperanto is ignored for political reasons, not because its bad.

Mastodon needs more angsty teens making relatable meirl depression memes

I feel there are a few too many of those already.

Its a matter of taste. For myself, I don’t like my pace being effected by a release schedule, and I generally have plenty of other (more important) things competing for my attention.

Given the state of the world, i think seeing the future would distract significantly from the chess match.

It doesnt occupy your attention uncomfortably. You never ask yourself what will happen next, because all you need to do i keep watching instead of waiting for the next episode to come out.

And I found out that Hannah Montana Linux is a thing…

Most of this doesnt seem like something i’ll use, but i appreciate it all the same.

Damn.

All we can do is to laugh as we gaze at this spectacle, for one cannot help laughing when one sees a man fighting his own imagination, smashing his own inventions, while at the same time heatedly asserting that he is smashing his opponent.

Yea thats how i felt reading Bookchin.

If you pass a shy guy and he doesnt acknowledge you, just keeps walking, until he comes to an obstacle and has to turn, or walks off the side of the platform.

This is as true to life as it is to Super Mario Brothers 2.

Although from personal experience, if they’re stressed they might act like that anyways.

I sort by “top day”, that seems to work fairly well for me… but I’m not very active either.

I heard at some point they’d found some pre-pandemic evidence of it in Italy. But it seems like it’s up in the air and it’s never coming back down.

For my understanding of it, social democracy is the idea that the existing capitalist controlled state can be gradually reformed into a worker controlled socialist state. This depends upon the capitialists which control the economy and the state to be willing to surrender their control, that is to say the source of their wealth, their capital. To my knowledge of history, in practice they have not been willing to do this, and frankly this is consistant, as a lot of their ideological literature regards the working class, the masses, the mob, the passive citizen, as subhuman.

The fundamental problem with this is that any conceits given to the working class can easily be repealed or sabotaged, providing the conservatives a basis for claiming that “it didnt work”, this has happened many times already.

The only way to make them surrender power is to leave them with no other option, to seize control and force them, and that. is a dictatorship. of the proletariat.

I use Sylvia Ritter’s speed paintings as my wallpaper, set to change automatically every hour to help me keep track of time.

Eventually some jerks start calling him Carrot…

What?

Given the things they say about us, i’d say no, we are completely alien to them. Like two completely distinct classes of people or something.

Thats interesting to me, the only libertarians I know of in my area are small businessmen who migrated into the area over the last decade.

olin.

BUT… THE FUTURE REFUSED TO CHANGE.

Toki Pona enters the chat.

What an excellent use of Sonic.

I studied mine. If I was going to address the problems we’d had, I needed to understand them. Understanding a problem isn’t always enough to solve it though, as i found out.

For my part i am often unsure.

You’ll find no sage here. When it comes to questions of how to think, I’d recommend people to read philosophy.

We’re talking about a person as a social role; a person as an idea vs a person as a reality. When I say ‘Man/Woman’, ‘Lover’, ‘Partner’, ‘Boyfriend/Girlfriend’, ‘attractive’, ‘sex’, certain thoughts come to mind, without context you likely have forms/images in your mind you would give to these words, idealized forms, possibly even multiple distinct forms for the same word, which are likely rooted in popular culture or lived experience.

Are you thinking more about the person, or the idealized form you associate with the context that person had in your life?

Can you remove the person from the role and still value them as a person?

If your ex were to love another, would you be able to have a genuinely positive reaction towards this?

“Love” is a word we should be careful with when referring to a former lover, thinking in those terms might cause confusion even if we’re attempting to mean it in the general sense. We often concieve of “love” as having some sort of profound meaning, but even if we’re not rejecting that line of reasoning outright, it is important we should distance ourselves from it in this case and answer the more basic question: Is this person, as they are, important to me? And maybe equally: Am I still of any importance to them? Because any real relationship is mutual.

That might be the limit of what I have to say on the matter, for the most part my study has been on the dialectics of relationships, not so much on how to think about them after the fact.

One of the important things to ask yourself is: do you miss the person themselves or the idea of the person? For my part i am often unsure. But if you miss them as an idea (partner, lover, companion, generalized personality traits) you should check yourself. If you miss them as a person perhaps you could assosiate with them on different terms, but you should be careful.

• Penguin Island, by Anatole France : A parody of the history of western civilization.
• Ten Days That Shook The World, by John Reed : First hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution.
• Dracula, by Bram Stoker
• Lauren Ipsum, by Carlos Bueno : Children’s book about logic and computers.

Helpu, COVID donis al mi Esperanton.

I’ve been having trouble, i welcome this.

I had some trouble adopting Searx, but once I found out about Searxng I was able to handle that. A little bit of presentation made the difference.

Very impressive.

Yes. Is that arched building in the top photo an actually existing building?