• 0 Posts
  • 1.45K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle

  • The UK is an incredibly Classist society with a long-running “know your place” kind of mindset and very low Social Mobility for an European nation - people very much are defined by their class (all the way to ther being a very specific, non-regional, English language accent for the upper class) and one’s social class is very much inherited.

    The 60s and the 70s were the peak point for the result of the post War (that being WWII) increase in social mobility in Britain with lots of Working Class lads and lasses making it big in, amongst others, the arts (and you see it not just in Comedy but also Acting more in general and especially in Music were almost every great British star from that age had working class origins).

    All this has in the meanwhile being reversed, hence once again almost all modern British artists are the sons and daughters of the upper-middle and upper classes.

    During that golden period the massive mix of people from all origins in the arts created all kind of original and “not knowing your place” art expressions, and I believe the Money Pythons are one of those.





  • It’s especially entertaining with a Dutch accent rather than a Flemish one, as that “g” in “wagen” is said in a very unusual way compared to pretty much all other European languages and accents.

    Mind you, it’s strangely pleasant to say it that way for me as a non-native, and having picked up the local version of “God damn it” (which has a similar sounding “g”) as an expletive when I lived there, now - almost 2 decades later - it still just comes out in its own when I’m pissed at something.









  • Trust in authoritative figures (for example, actual Journalists) was burned for political gains by mainstream parties and their billionaire owners (and by “owners” I mean of both the Media and the Parties) since at least the 80s - the essence of Neoliberalist propaganda was to use convoluted half-truths, purposeful misinterpretation and information flow control (mainly cherry-picking) to deceive people into supporting that which wasn’t actually good for most of them in the medium and long term (who can forget things like “trickle down”?) and the increasing disconnect between what people were told and what they saw happen and felt, ground away the trust people had in those autoritative sources of information (and in lots of other things: trust in experts as autoritative sources of information and interpretation in their own expert areas was also ground away quite likely due to how that Neoliberal propaganda also made heavy use of technocratic speaking “experts” - notice how even the trust on medical doctors for health-related things, such as mask wearing during COVID, was clearly lacking).

    Almost everybody can be deceived about things they have no expertise on, but at some point in the past at least many if not most of those people were in some way anchored to objective-reality (-ish) by trustworthy sources of information and interpretation, and that’s not the case anymore because that trust was sistematically abused during at least 4 decades.

    In the US both the Democrats and the Republicans were doing it with gusto, so the rise of populists like Trump is really just the reaping of a crop which both those parties sowed.

    All this to say that blaming humans for being human rather than everybody that took and takes advantage of that, is at best naive and at worst being a bit of an useful idiot (for still falling for the swindle of excusing the very politicians who put us were we are now).


  • In my personal experience, even wholly within a professional domain when an expert is trying to give an overview to non-experts (for example to mid-level managers for the purpose of decision making) a lot of things end up having to be axioms (i.e. “trust me this is how it works/this is what’s needed/this is how its done” as fully trying to explained things to them would requires explanations of the explanations of the explanations.

    This is with same-industry expert-domain-adjacent professionals, so I can see how much worse it would be when explaining stuff to average whose understanding of an industry is zero.


  • I recognize gallium at least as a dopant material (what transforms the pure sillicon, which is an isolator, in the the n-side or the p-side of a semiconductor junction, where gallium specifically is used in light emitting junctions such as in LEDs) and a quick search showed that antimony is also a dopant.

    (For the curious, here’s the Wikipedia article)

    As you might have noticed, even my short explanation of what a dopant is actually requires people to understand to an advanced level what semiconductors actually are made of, so I can see why an AP article which is targetting the average person wouldn’t go into that specific rabit hole of explaining stuff that requires more stuff to be explained which in turn requires even more stuff to be explained and so on.

    Also, I would be surprised if there are more than a handful of journalists in the World with even the most basic understanding of how semi-conductors work.





  • I use “New” or even “Neue” to distinguish the Nazis that claim to represent Jews and are genocidal towards Arabs, from the Nazis who claimed to represent Arians and were genocidal towards Jews (and Roma, though “curiously” here in the West almost nobody mentions those).

    Because the etnicity targetted by one group of Nazis is the “dominant” etnicity of the other, if I don’t do this some people confuse my anti-Zionist point with being pro-Zionist, especially given that the Zionists themselves will use Nazi as a form of slander against people who criticize them.