You described the same thing twice.
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I hate paying 5x for a German-made Bosch spare part for my car when I’m tired of the AliExpress quality lottery but I have to admit it’s one of the few hardware manufacturers I still think pretty highly of. They make Dremels too, right? I imported one of those at an extortionate price and haven’t regretted a single penny, reminds me of how old durable tools were built to actually last.
When I was a kid and you picked up something with a (for example) Sony logo on it, you know you were holding something that was at least relatively well made. Nowadays pretty much every single company gives me marrow-sucking quality-be-damned vibes. And come to think of it Bosch was not one of the companies I saw that way.
Disgusting how they’re treating their workers (who I’m assuming are damn good at their job given how highly I think of Bosch’s stuff), but someone still needs to be doing that job.
You’re making a joke but this has always been the case, and it’s not just a west thing.
In mixed company I take very explicit care to phrase any political opinion I may have as the logical conclusion of some kind of technocratic or even corporate-style “data-driven” framework and I never use words like socialism, communism, anarchism, or even left. At most I might throw out something like “Marx is actually really interesting if you look into what he writes, even if I don’t agree with everything in there, I think he fills a hole in the way most of us were taught to understand economics”. Certainly not a more exasperated and admittedly defeatist honest opinion about how we’ve made unlimited artificial hell by allowing a very narrow and predatory view of economics define what most people think economics even means but anyway
You’d be surprised how much many people who have a kneejerk reaction to words they find “yucky” are willing to accept.
The US and the West are special in that overt fascism and overt evil opinions are exploding in mainstream popularity, but the average conservative person who isn’t in a death cult can totally understand how feeding people can cut crime in half or whatever. Online lefty stuff tends to be either way too cerebral or way too blunt, but most of us know the successful labor movements weren’t groups of philosophers or irony poisoned shitposters. They were normal people who grasped pretty straightforward ideas.
In my country the biggest “”socialist”” party is an ethnosectarian feudal family’s political arm, complete with hereditary political succession. So the word socialist is not always the best one to use, since socialists is shorthand for one feudal family’s entourage. Repeat ad nauseam. Maybe politics in the US have been completely fucked since the 1950s, but I assure you, politics here in Lebanon and in many other places have been beyond fucked for much longer.
There’s strength in being able to use the right words where it’s needed but political discourse is fucked in different ways in different places.
boy that infant really shouldn’t have let that cluster bomb fall on his head was he even trying
DankPods my beloved as well. He’s not very technical with software so it’s quite interesting to hear him talk about it.
Wouldn’t even call it a pun, as someone pointed out already. I’m going to sacrifice the joke in the name of explaining it.
You have your Good Morning (≈Morning of Peace, صباح الخير) in English. In Arabic we have more variations. The standard reply to this first one is Morning of Light (صباح النور). Basically wishing each other a good day by describing what makes it good. There’s a couple but these first two in this order is the standard (and secular ) greeting.
you’ll see why that is even worth pointing out in a second
Then you have more abstract ones that imply a good day by referring to something (commonly a pleasant smelling flower), like Morning of Roses (صباح الورد) or Morning of (a specific type of) Jasmine (صباح الفل). All of these have a musical quality to them in a way I can’t write out.
You’ll get older relatives sending you standardized photos with these greetings in groups or just to text you to invite you for lunch (or to fix their phone). Here’s the google images result for Good Morning (≈Morning of Peace):
I’ve highlighted the religious stuff in red and the roses with blue, to see how common they are. The religious stuff is mostly variations with Islamic Duas (prayers asking for something - in the case of all of these it’s basically “asking” God to give the recipient good health / a good day / a pleasant path in life - it’s really just a “good luck” phrased in the only way a religious society can express it.
FWIW I’m (mostly) not from a Muslim family so I get secular or Christian versions of these. Often the photos I get are flowers, traditional breakfast food, coffee, a nice breakfast table set in a shaded garden. And often there’s very few pixels. Sometimes an aunt will just take a photo of her coffee and that’s basically a greeting. But it’s usually garbled old jpegs from 2007.
Critical subtext: these are literally forwards from grandma. Well-meaning, but eventually obnoxious, especially back when phones had 8GB of storage.
This meme says Morning of Strawberries (صباح الفراولة) which is both clunky (Arabic’s got a poetic quality and these two words put together just intuitively do not work that way. It has the meter of a punchline if that makes sense) and silly, but with the textured elephant and the 13x12 resolution as you can probably guess it’s just a surreal meme.
But now you know why it’s a surreal meme.
Come back next week for the much less wholesome next episode of Arabic forwards from Arabic grandma: videos alleging the Jews invented homosexuality, cancer, and sexWell, eating > restaurants > a list with potential promoted entries.
I really don’t think the intention of integrating this “intelligence” into Facebook is explicitly to make us dumber. I think the only real purpose is to supercharge marketing. Eroding the mental capacity of functional human beings is just a happy little accident.
The Italian food thing is pretty common in many cultures, I’ve seen it in a few countries myself and it’s big deal here in Lebanon. My own parents used to be livid about me bringing friends over and not offering anything to eat when I was younger. It’s a part of my culture I’m a bit resistant to doing, I don’t know, it’s pretty intuitive if it’s time to eat or not, and if someone’s dropping by between meals I am totally fine not setting the whole ass table. Maybe a beer or coffee (the good stuff, it’s a nice thing to share) nowadays.
The Dutch food thing has zero resemblance to my culture but it is in line with something I’ve read before about western (at least the description I read was western) food habits. Going completely off the top of my head here. As far as I remember, historically you had one heavy meal and everything else was a smaller meal. I think I was looking up “dinner” vs “supper”. The impression was that the word “dinner” was originally for the big meal of the day, and that “supper” was for a light meal at the very end of the day. “Breakfast” is more of literally breaking a fast than it is a whole meal and lunch referred to a small mid-workday meal.
So I think the idea of temperature might be connected to the size or heaviness of the meal in your Dutch thing.
Or maybe my nerves are completely cooked after work and this is more word salad than word coherent comment.
I wouldn’t blink if you told me these were randoms you picked up on the streets of Beirut or Latakia. I can probably find a doppelgänger for every person in these photos in a 5-minute stroll down the Ras Beirut corniche and recreate them with very little effort.
I wish there was anything to say about this like “Isn’t it cute how racists are willfully blind to what’s in front of them” but it’s not. I’m beyond finding the humor in shit like this.
I can’t wait until we (Lebanon) get sanctioned over this.
His face looks a bit like a stereotypical random Syrian teenager as well to me which is funny.
The monkey’s paw curls.
We now have a one-state solution where every citizen regardless of origin has full legal rights, stolen land and houses have been returned, the renamed towns have been reassigned their original names, and a sizable proportion of colonists have willingly chosen to leave because they were only ever interested in being the protected class in an apartheid society. Robust border infrastructure has been rebuilt to Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, with a direct maglev like from Al Quds to every major nearby city. The world rightly recognizes the crimes that have occurred west of the river and the Nakba now sits in the global public consciousness in the same place as Rhodesia and the Nazi Holocaust.
The catch? The country cannot be named Palestine. It has the be named Donald J Trump (PBUH) Presents: The Miraculous Peace in our Time West of the River of America Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter, Buy Gold and War Bonds
Too optimistic huh. We are allowed to dream
I always had the impression that there was an underlying censorship issue over in the US (what with everyone there hearing nothing good about Palestinians for the past half century) but to have it be so open and discussed in such a euphemistic and yet banal way, wow. I wonder how these quotes we are seeing on our screens will be remembered.
“Permission structure” on its own is incredible.
Fervently waiting their next film, Triumph of the Birth of the Will of a Nation (after they finish editing out all the woke parts)
I saw
A baby kit-
ten, half smeared into
the pavement.
I wish I could know if
It ever disavowed Hamas
Good to hear, hamdillah. I did say what I hear around me may be wrong, to be fair.
50% of the people around me are (understandably) hyper-sensitive to bad news from Palestine and will share unverified news without vigilance and the other 50% seem to not care at all (not meaningfully at least). Not a fantastic environment to know what’s actually happening.
I know you’re asking about a few users on here, but murmuring in Lebanon is that Gaza’s limited internet has been cut off since yesterday night and there’s some extra intermittent cuts in the West Bank. This is all just hearsay from around me though, I’m sure there’s a better way to check.
I love my city (Beirut) it is full of trams (Kia Picanto 2013 base model w/ automatic transmission)
I have a special bottle of cognac for Kissinger, but I was abroad for work when he returned whence he came so I didn’t get to enjoy the occasion. I haven’t opened it yet given how shit the situation everywhere is, but maybe celebrating small wins is vital even when important stuff is happening.
That’s a shame. Never had any of their household appliances so I wouldn’t know. I’m mostly thinking about power tools, auto parts, and like those laser distance things.