LiberalSoCalist

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • The majority of that age range still considers China an enemy, but a tiny fraction of ambivalent onlookers out of an overwhelming majority of a reflexively anti-China populace is enough for the Economist to dedicate an article to a fucking YouGov poll.

    It’s just another pearl-clutching “what’s wrong with today’s youths” headline to panic the elderly while flattering compliant millennials/zoomers for being one of the few (despite still being the majority!) “good ones” that march goose-step with consensus Western political thought.












  • couldn’t help to find Hitler unlikable

    I think you meant, to quote Orwell himself:

    I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler.

    More on the list in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell's_list

    There is a notable and obvious overlap in Orwell’s notebook between many of 1940s London’s prominent gay, Jewish and anti-colonial public figures and the accused “cryptos.” Orwell’s bigoted commentaries fill his suspects notebook. Jews are clearly labeled (“Polish Jew,” “English Jew,” “Jewess”) whilst others were mislabeled (“Charlie Chaplin — Jewish?”). The African-American bass singer and future civil rights activist Paul Robeson finds himself in Orwell’s list with the note “very anti-white,” whilst the half-Jewish poet Stephen Spender is damned as a “sentimental sympathiser… tendency towards homosexuality.”

    It’ll always be funny that the dude who wrote something like 1984 was such an eager proto-McCarthyite snitch for the propaganda unit of the British Foreign Office.







  • Chaak-ming Lau, an assistant professor of linguistics at the Education University of Hong Kong, believes that despite increased use of Mandarin in Hong Kong society, the city is not at risk of losing Cantonese. In Hong Kong’s 2021 census, over 6.3 million people aged 5 and up still have Cantonese as their usual spoken language. The Hong Kong government’s official stance is promoting biliteracy in English and written Chinese, and trilingualism in English, Putonghua, and Cantonese. And in the Ethnologue, the world’s most comprehensive catalog of languages, Cantonese—as part of the Yue Chinese family—has “institutional vitality,” which means communities and institutions use it extensively. “Cantonese is very far from being endangered,” Lau tells TIME.

    6.3 million out of 7 million people still use it as their main language. I can see how calling for the “preservation of Cantonese” could be viewed as a separatist dogwhistle. The essay that caught the attention of the government was one that described the future of Hong Kong as one where Cantonese and local culture is all but wiped out by the mainland government in 20 years. One character in the story calls the protagonist who grew up in England “more qualified to be a Hong Konger than any of us” because they were saved from the see see pee mind virus. It’s very funny.