To spare the more morbid details, I somehow got it into my head that my dad died because he’d been “poisoned by accidentally swallowing mouthwash”. And so I stopped using mouthwash because I was scared that it would kill me “too”. Eventually this came up in conversation with my mom, and she told me that I was mistaken — but I just never really got back into using mouthwash despite that reassurance. I think a part of this was just that I associated mouthwash with my dad so strongly that using it without him was too uncomfortable.

I mean, my dad dying when I was a preteen, is the thing that stands out. Pretty much everything that’s happened since then has been shaped by his death in some way, everything from my philosophy and politics, to my material hardships, to my heroes and role models, to the way I clean my teeth, to the places I’ve been and people I’ve met and media I’ve enjoyed, and even to the ways I relate to gender, family, work, nationality and language, and society in general, and that’s certainly not an exhaustive list, and all of these things go into each other as well.

I’m not sure if something so profoundly impactful on every facet of one’s life can be described as “for better or worse”, though, rather than that it simply is what it is…

TO COMMUNISTS, ANARCHISTS, OR ANYONE ELSE CALLING FOR THE OVERTHROW OF SOCIETY

THIS OBVIOUSLY ISN’T MEANT FOR YOU.

It takes either a complete lack of self-awareness or a simply incredible amount of gall to ask a yes-no question and then tell all the people most likely to answer one way to zip it. You might as well have just written “la-la-la-la I can’t heaaaar yoooou”

Which client are you using?

♫ They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there: you’ll either be a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair — Which side are you on, which side are you on? ♫

Put simply, in the trolley problem, my continent would pull the lever, and your continent would give drugs to the people tied to the tracks to ease the pain.

Left and right are always relative terms. I like to describe those who feel like they are or could be represented by a political party in the governing coalition of an average western liberal democracy, as the “non plus ultra” left. This comes from the old story of the Pillars of Hercules on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar, which were said to bear the warning “non plus ultra” — “nothing further beyond”. For as far as people knew back then, there truly was no land for sailors to find further to the west of that point; but now Europeans are well aware that there is a whole gargantuan continent across the Atlantic, a continent that makes the idea of the Iberian peninsula and the Maghreb as the furthest western extent of land in the world seem downright laughable.

And so those who call themselves left-wing, but who would be comfortably represented in the government of a liberal democracy… Well, they would be left-wing by the standards of the beliefs which can be comfortably represented in the government of such a country. So they’re left-wing to that extent. But in the grand scheme of things, they’re no further left of the parliamentary center compared to Marxists and anarchists, than Gibraltar is west of the Prime Meridian compared to Alaska. As I’d see it, frankly, all the beliefs which can find success in a liberal democracy, can be said to occupy the same “continent” of politics; and all those beliefs which cannot, can be said to occupy a different “continent”, and those on the former continent would certainly stand to benefit from “crossing the sea”, so to speak.

Hell yeah

K-On!

I was raised bilingual, and speaking from my own experiences I’d say that it’s a good idea to consider the following questions if you want to maximize the child’s ability in either language:

1. Is there a parent who the child sees more or less often than the other? What will one do in case one parent dies, or in case the child has a language disorder, or there is otherwise some sort of unexpected problem that could impact the child’s language development?
2. What are the language dynamics at play in the family and in the local area? What will the child associate with each of the two languages? Can the child have all its needs met in the non-dominant language? Does the child have access to a broader community of speakers, and in what way?

I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to share my own story because it gets pretty melodramatic at points, but yeah, language skills need to be built and maintained over the course of one’s entire life, so you need to be able to adapt to changing circumstances. But as a whole I think that what you’re planning for your own kid sounds like it will work well, or at least decently well — the only way to know for sure is to get a time machine and go forwards 20 years, and until then I think it’s best to have faith in your competence as a parent. There’s no-one who knows a family better than itself.

And beyond that, one should also ask oneself… Well, what types of language skills does one want to see in one’s child, and what happens if the child ultimately does not reach the goals one has set? I’d say that I have sort of a nuanced or over-complicated relationship to so-called “bad grammar” because of my position.

I watch basically any channel with 100,000+ subscribers through Piped so that my views or retention or engagement don’t get counted by YouTube.

“Have these gentlemen ever SEEN a” yadda yadda

I only just realized that “ETA” in Internet comments stands for “edited to add”

Please don’t think that I’m necessarily agreeing with your stances and attitudes and so forth, but do think that I find ShimmeringKoi to be kind of embarrassing right now.

I’m just gonna be honest, you’re being cringe right now. “No it’s not my fault I mistook this person’s nationality, it’s their fault for coming across to me as the wrong nationality” — no, just own up to your mistake, for God’s sake, it’s not hard. Preferably you wouldn’t have made the mistake in the first place — you might’ve even been able to avoid it if you’d just read more carefully, given it even a second longer of thought, and weren’t so quick to make assumptions.

*exasperated sigh*

Wasn’t it obvious from the literal start that that person was Irish‽

och jag är faktiskt 15.

For en tilfeldighet! Jeg kan respektere ærligheten, i det minste. Jeg virkelig burde slutte å tenke at alle på Internett er like gamle som meg.

Jeg virkelig ville anbefalt å lære mer om Marx og Engels sine idéer, for eksempel Engels skrev “Om autoritet” (svensk oversettelse her — veldig kort!)

Du høres ut som meg når jeg var 15. Har du faktisk lest Marx og disse “andre teoretikerne”?

I could say that bourgeois ownership of media and academia and the state means that those institutions will represent the biases and interests of the bourgeoisie, and so people in first-world capitalist countries end up living in a sort of self-propagating anti-communist media bubble; but the thing about propaganda is that people are rarely ever truly “tricked” by it, propaganda is always most effective when it reinforces something that someone already believes on some level.

This is why the second part to building anti-communist sentiment has to do with super-exploitation, imperialism, and the labor aristocracy. This is to say, workers in first-world capitalist countries are materially invested in capitalism, through various perks and “treats” that workers of “poorer” countries are deprived of. By being materially invested in capitalism, workers of the first world are primed to take on a sort of “bourgeois mindset”, as it were.

There’s more that can be said, too, I’d strongly recommend listening to this speech by the leader of Revolutionary Grenada, Maurice Bishop, but I think that’s a good start…