lmfao, this is where the shark has well and truly been jumped.
amio
joined 2 years ago
Or "this 'question' is obviously and patently full of shit, and is posted in bad faith".
Sure, infinite growth is impossible, living on a finite world. I don't see the relevance, though.
It isn't clear what "unbalanced infinite progressivism" entails, how it looks, or where it's happening. That makes it hard to know if OP is right to call it unreasonable. Particularly since they're seeming pretty eager to get you to agree. ("Ain't that right? That's right, right? Can we all say that's right?")
Nice debates are easier to trigger if you actually explain what you mean by stuff like "unbalanced infinite progressivism" and whether you see any of it around. Sounds a lot like a false premise or vaguely strawmannish to me.
Free speech... not absolutism per se, but I certainly had more faith in it than I do now.
The basic idea, that you should argue sensibly against points instead of censoring them, shutting them down or drowning them out, remains a good one. Censoring happens all the time, often for pretty shit reasons. The problem is that if your stance is "censorship is never acceptable", you assume people are reasonable, rational, informed about the subject matter and how civil discussions work, and not specifically looking to start shit.
When that's not the case, which is the vast majority of the time, the whole idea just doesn't work. It's too damn romantic and ignores some unfortunate facts about the human mind. People aren't rational by default. Not even about utter trivialities, let alone things that involve sense of self, values or strong feelings - all of which tend to bleed over into unrelated topics.
A lot of the idealists seem to have no understanding of how mere speech can actually damage individuals, groups and society as a whole. A lot of what's left just want to be able to say literally anything without repercussions, or as a "magic answer" instant knee-jerk defense to any criticism.
What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance?
Sort of. Grammatical gender and the interplay with grammatical case (the "role" of a noun in a sentence) allows some extra meaning to be packed in. For example, German has 3 genders and 4 cases leading to 12 different contexts for nouns to be in. Many of those have their own conjugation patterns, and separate words for the articles "a/the".
That can, theoretically, allow meaning of the type "whose what did what to whom" to be obvious or pieced together in a sentence, whereas translating it into English you might need to spell it out, lose it, or rely on context.
In practice, a lot of that sort of information is often redundant or clear from context anyway, and only matters if you're being clever or succinct. My German is shit, so I will not try to provide examples.
It's also worth pointing out that it's a naturally occurring feature, likely arisen by accident.
Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept?
It is mostly just a weird name. Some of it makes sense along (social) gender lines, much of it makes no sense at all. This thread is full of good examples of counterintuitive noun genders in all kinds of languages.
Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages?
The speakers of the language, collectively, usually with some disagreement, trial and error. Borrowing depends: a gendered noun borrowed into a non-gendered language would just slip in there. In the reverse case, people would just arrive at some gender for it arbitrarily or based on similar words, what gender any "parts" of the term might be if translated, or whatever other method. There's no correct answer.
Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it, or are you just a language hipster?
Quite likely. There's no "without it" in gendered languages, it is a more or less fundamental part of the noun and the language, like how certain nouns and verbs are just different in English. Dropping random grammar and syntax from English would just be "doing it wrong", ranging from cute foreign accent quirks to Ralph Wiggum's cave-dwelling ancestor.
Of course, fucking up is unavoidable when learning languages, and most people will give you a lot of leeway due to being foreign. Maybe not everywhere in France, though...
A lot of languages including Germanic and Romance languages have "gendered" nouns, which is a weird term for "these are some arbitrary categories we put nouns into". While that idea of noun classes is often called "gender" and they are also named "gender-y" things like masculine and feminine, the idea doesn't have a lot to do with gender as in identity.
Compare English irregular verbs - how come you don't say "swimmed"? You "just don't", that particular verb is in a different class. Same thing applies to nouns in certain languages, and affects (among other things) how they're conjugated.
Without knowing the nature of the simulation, we don't even know if there is an analogue for RAM or limited memory. Maybe you could walk in and out a door repeatedly and then glitch into a locked room. Maybe the whole thing would crash - our programs tend to do this when memory runs out. Maybe everything would just get paused or "adjusted down" to fit the restriction. The crash, pause or throttle wouldn't be apparent to us "on the inside" at all if it were happening.
Esperanto is an interesting case though but it wasn’t designed to be as simple as a language can be
Maybe not literally the simplest possible, but simplicity was certainly an important guiding principle. The idea was just to not make it too taxing to learn, since natural languages have a lot of arbitrary complexity in them.
Far Cry 3 with Ziggy's Mod for added challenge... Casual version, I kind of like it.
Ocarina of Time randomizer keeps being pretty fun.
Oldschool Runescape.
Super Mario Bros. 3 is a nostalgia mainstay.
I also gave Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion a try and got to the second boss. I mean to get back to it, as it's a cute game and pretty funny.