19,630 karma · joined March 13, 2008
If one has never spent any time in all male spaces or has and thinks that men are defective women, like the average male therapist or counsellor this may not be obvious.
If they don’t catch them they don’t have a business model. They have one job. The University of London, Open University and British Council all have 50+ years experience on proctoring university exams for distance learning students and it’s not like Thomson Prometric haven’t thought about how to do it either, even if they (mostly?) do computerised exams.
By the way, the term of art for what you’re doing, of defining democracy I like as real democracy and democracy I don’t like as not democracy is to call democracy I like “liberal democracy”.
That is a really great formulation of the imago dei, image of God, doctrine.
> and thus nobody else has the right to tell them what to do without their consent.
And this is a generalisation of a principle that is downstream of the English yeomanry, of freeborn men who can kill a knight.
To see an Anglo proclaiming the universal destiny of all humanity to follow the Anglo culture is just such a stirring thing.
Your original text, edited for sequence and clarity while preserving your voice:
This doesn’t apply to the U.S. or Canada, nor has it ever since their foundings, possibly excepting some natives. The American frontier was declared closed by 1890, long before the post-WW2 population surge to California. Before that, New Englanders left farmland to settle the Midwest. Later came the Great Migration of mostly Black Southerners to northern cities. Anglophone North America has never been a peasant society where families remained rooted for generations.
Hong Kong didn’t. Counter example disproves rule.
It’s really not surprising that people followed a successful model, given that people are fashion followers. See how there was so little variation in COVID response across countries.
Entirely different my ass. Modern Hebrew is closer to liturgical Hebrew than the language of Shakespeare is to that of Britney Spears. There are some areas with a great deal of borrowing of vocabulary but you could say the same thing of modern Russian or Japanese and no one would say they were “entirely different” from the language of 1800.
Absolute bollocks. Irish is still a living language in daily use today , albeit the last monoglot almost certainly died before 1950. Of the Celtic languages Cornish is at best a zombie, revived on the basis of its incredibly close relationship to Breton. Manx has been on life support or at death’s door for 70 years, but there was still at least one fluent nerve speaker when it became something more passed on in classes than in daily life. Welsh is in relatively good health and Irish and Scots Gaelic are living languages used in daily life in small, marginal areas.
> On the other hand, Mayan languages and Nauhatul remain actively spoken across Southern Mexico and Guatemala.
Yes. The Spanish spread them with their empire after the empires that first spoke them were conquered.
Ukrainian and Belarusian were both standardised and made official languages of education and administration under the early Soviet Union, with substantial state investment. Policies did later shift toward Russification, especially under Stalin, but even then Ukrainian continued to be used widely. There was no consistent Soviet attempt to “exterminate” Polish. Poland remained outside the USSR, and while the Soviets repressed Polish culture during occupations, they never pursued linguistic elimination in the way the Russian Empire once had.
> Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate yet it has seen a pretty decent resurgence.
Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani was one of the main administrative and cultural languages under the Raj, particularly in the north. It coexisted with English and was used extensively by colonial authorities. Far from trying to wipe it out, the British helped entrench it across large parts of India. In Congress India, Hindi has been promoted heavily by the state, often to the frustration of non-Hindi speaking regions.
> I don't think any of these languages really stayed around via force. They simply had a critical mass of speakers that never went away.
Agreed.
> For Irish and Welsh, the British empire arguably committed a genocide to eliminate them.
“Arguably.” In Ireland, British policy during the famine amounted to criminal negligence or depraved indifference, but not genocide in the strict sense. In Wales, there was systematic suppression of the language, especially in education, but nothing close to genocide.
I won’t speak to crafting a good curriculum, God knows I’ve seen plenty of bad ones but it’s just not hard for me to be vastly better at any topic in English or History than any student I’m likely to see in a high school in two days because I’m that much better than them at what I do. I presume the same yawning gulf in capability exists between the average freshly minted PhD and undergraduates, or professors teaching graduate courses and PhD students.
Expertise exists, which is why I can be teaching a course that’s supposed to take 300 hours of instruction to cover in 15 hours, reasonably comfortably.
No. Imagined communities are fake communities with none of the feedback mechanisms that make real communities resilient to elements that have extremely different priorities to the median member. See how the Swedish Social Democrats imported over 1% of the Swedish population in one year from Syria.
[1] Overwhelmingly it’s one guy and if they leave the nights out and trips just stop.
I’m probably bottom quintile for social skills and I have done some extremely unwise things for one of my friends who was there for me when I needed a hand. The Hollywood idea of “close friend” is a great deal nearer to my own life experience than its representation of many other important relationships.
The people don’t want housing built near them and the politicians listened. Lower supply than demand for decades leads to steadily rising prices. If you want to see the alternative look to Tokyo, Austin or Seattle. Build so much housing that the returns on investment are low and people can afford housing.
This is a completely alien perspective to most people. Most people never even really try to be good at anything. That you think this quirk of your own psychology is the norm shows a deep disconnect with the mass of mediocre people who don’t care about being competitive because they’re not trying to get highs up on some leaderboard. https://danluu.com/p95-skill/