Apparently I’ve somehow picked up on how to read the phrase “alhamdulillah” in Arabic despite never studying the language. Neat!

I basically recognize “Allah” ﷲ based on the shape of the whole word rather than the individual letters, and I learned to read that word through exposure. In the phrase الْحَمْدُ لِلّٰهِ alhamdulillah I see there’s no alif at the start of Allah, though.

I think I learned to read ال al- just through repeat exposure since al- is literally the most common prefix in Arabic — it’s even at the start of Allah! — but I also know the letters alif and lam on their own because ا alif is memorable to me as the “simplest letter for the simplest sound”, and ل lam is memorable to me because it looks like (and literally is, in a sense) a backwards L.

After recognizing “al-??? lillah” I was already figuring from context that the text probably said “alhamdulillah”, but I still tried to confirm this by looking at the remaining letters:

• Medial ha ح‍ looked a lot like the initial kha خ‍ in the word khatam (as in خاتم النبيين khatam an-nabiyin, “Seal of the Prophets”), so I figured that the two letters ha/kha had to be variants of each other with similar h-like sounds. Previously, I’d known the letter ha really just from its isolated/final forms ح, just from going down an Arabizi rabbit hole once: ح ha is often written as 7 in Arabizi due to the similarity of the numeral 7 to the isolated shape of the letter ha.
• Medial meem ﻤ looked a lot like the final form of the related Hebrew letter mem ם, which also, very coincidentally, looks like the Korean letter ㅁ mieum, which was derived from the shape of the mouth to represent the fact that you say M with your lips. The origin of the Korean letter is completely unrelated to the Arabic and Hebrew letters but still makes them more memorable to me.
• Dal د is not a letter I had any real chance of recognizing. It’s related to its Hebrew, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic equivalents but is not particularly similar to any of them. But if I got to the point where I could tell that the text said “al-ham?? lillah” then there was really zero chance the unrecognizable last letter could be anything other than dal.

Learning new writing systems is really fun because you get to return to the joy of first learning to read your native language as a little kid. I wonder if I’ll manage to learn the entire Arabic script through passive exposure!

Suicide (fuck algospeak) is unlikely, nor do I think his heart will explode due to rage, nor do I think he’s likely to die in a natural disaster. Trump could “die of old age” (whatever that means in practice), he could die of COVID, or he could slip and fall, or he could be assassinated by any number of people who may want his head whether they say it or not.

I think it is pretty likely Trump will die during this term, if for no other reason than that fascism is one side of the same coin as liberal democracy, and by having a fascist leader who has always been in such remarkably poor health from the moment he took power, at that such a fascist leader who gives people both guns and reasons to shoot him… Well, it basically ensures that fascism will not last very long and liberal democracy will be restored “in due time” once Trump and Trumpism has “expended its purpose”.

If that’s how you want to describe your past self then you have every right to.

Sort of, «мат» is profanity and «мать» is mother, though the former is indeed derived from the latter.

I think I’ll mention “★☆SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl☆★ Ep 1: The Perfect Perfect School Year”. It’s from a few years ago, but I first saw it this year, and that’s all that matters for the purposes of this question, right? I could certainly mention a number of other YT videos I saw this year, that were made this year; but for the most part YouTube just feels like overly short or overly long disposable one-time slop, right? By contrast, Sparkle on Raven and other “fanime” I saw this year are things I’ve actively returned to, shown others, referenced, and reflected on, so their impact on me has lasted for more than just one week.

(Note: this didn’t actually happen)

Try searching the name of that lemmy.world post on lemmy.ml and see if you can find it on lemmy.ml.

There once was a father who told his son, “All swans are white.” One day, he and his son went to Australia on vacation. While there, at a park with a large pond, his son pointed out, “Look, Dad, black swans!”

“No, Son,” the father laughed, “all swans are white!”

Given the political leanings of Lemmy’s lead developers, and relatedly the whole reason why Lemmy started development in the first place, it should not be surprising to anyone that many Lemmy users have since the very beginning of Lemmy’s existence had stances that could be called, in a word, “pro-Russia” or “pro-China”.

The problem arises when people who don’t hold these views look at them only through their own myopic biases, where, rather than genuinely interrogating why people might hold these attitudes, they instead more readily believe that a social media platform that most people have never even heard of is actually crawling with paid actors trying to influence public opinion.

No, to understand my own views on Russia, you need to understand my views on Atlanticism; to understand my views on Atlanticism, you need to understand my views on class, among other things. None of that comes across clearly in a one-liner or a four-panel meme. I’m sure I could discuss it in a more fitting space provided I’m not too drained of energy from having stayed up until five in the morning for the umpteenth time.

Supposedly the best thing to do is to lay perfectly motionless in bed despite being wide awake, because that’s still a form of rest and “better than nothing”. This isn’t always what I do myself, though: sometimes I will take an extra melatonin tablet or use the bathroom, and I always wear my trusty eye mask in any case; but if you absolutely have to fidget with something in bed, I think the most recommendable thing is physical paper books. Either books for reading, including comic books; or a notebook into which you can jot down ideas, journal, doodle, whatever it may be.

like idfk how you got that from my post

I don’t know how you got that from my post! I said be engaged in, not be aware of — because obviously we both think being up to date on current events is worthwhile when this community is literally called “US news”, why would that even be a point of discussion? What I’m talking about is actually going out and doing stuff, which could be protests, but should not be protests alone. Because as you’re saying, protests actually need to have something behind them to be effective, and the No Kings protests have pretty much nothing behind them: they’re somewhere between an excuse to make silly signs and play dress up for a picnic, and a way to vent frustrations in a way that doesn’t actually change anything.

I’m just saying that it doesn’t have to be that way. The overseas Yankees in my country who protested yesterday with signs reading things like “No Turd Reich” didn’t really achieve much, they got some local news coverage but that’s basically it; but if I were to organize my own protest, I would’ve perhaps elected for signs reading things like “Divest from the USA” or “Withdraw from the base treaty” — because these are actual policies that my country, or its institutions, or even its individual citizens to some extent, could adopt, furthering my political aims in a tangible way. But even this would be meaningless without more direct actions at the same time, of varying degrees of legality. The protests can serve as a way to gain publicity and make connections with other activists, or might sometimes be useful for some other aims, but are in any case not the beginning and end of all advocacy. But that doesn’t mean that they’re always invariably completely pointless.

This is the point I’m trying to make.

The problem is that these protests and the party organizing them are generally a feckless form of controlled opposition, not that overseas citizens shouldn’t be engaged in the politics of a country they still pay taxes to and still have relatives living in.

Me, an American living in a country with a monarchy:

I was saying “no kings”…

The few points I’d bring up are:

1. If you want to reach a high level of proficiency you should basically be in love with the language. If you’re forcing yourself to do something, learning it won’t come as easily.
2. You should use a diversity of tactics, experiment, and find what works best for you.
3. Comprehensible input is a very good idea. There are different standards for what makes for the best comprehensible input, but I would say you should focus on finding songs, books, comics, shows and movies etc where you can still get something out of them even if you don’t understand everything, and beyond that learn not to expect to understand everything. Being around L1s can also be very helpful, but it depends on how you make use of their input.
4. Define what you actually want to get out of your language learning by setting realistic goals. If you want to learn a new language because you hear it makes you less likely to get dementia later in life, then you might prefer a more game-y or puzzle-y approach. If you’re interested in translating into your first language, then focus on understanding input more than generating output. And so forth.

Norwegian fаg (subject, discipline, etc) is cognate with English fack (sense: rumen) and Fach (method of classifying opera singers’ voices), all from Proto-West Germanic *fak (division, compartment, period, interval), which is speculated to come from the PIE root *peh₂ǵ- (attach, fix, fasten) which also gives us words as diverse as fang, fast, propaganda, hapax and peace.

Å slutte (to end, stop, quit etc) from Low German sluten from Proto-Germanic *sleutaną (to bolt, lock, shut, close) which is where we get the word slot (sense: broad, flat wooden bar for securing a door or window) from. Believably from the PIE root *(s)kleh₁w- (hook, cross, peg; to close something) whence also words like close, clavicle, cloister and claustrophobia.

This being said, slutt datafаg is not really a normal way to say “graduate computer science”. To me it reads more like commanding someone to “quit computer science!”, more like dropping out than graduating, right? A more normal phrasing in my eyes might be, I dunno, å fullføre utdanningen sin i datafаg, “to complete one’s education in computer science”.

Sometimes you see a headline like this and you just have to stop for a moment and reflect on how mindboggling it is that genocidality could become so popular in a society. The fact is of course that this is the character of every genocide in history: genocides only happen if most people in a society passively or actively accept them. But when oneself is so far removed from that cultural context that enables this most horrible of crimes to happen, it becomes difficult to even fathom how a society could end up in a situation where one could meet ten people in the dominant group and find that nine of them want the marginalized group — largely children no less! — reduced to bags of nondescript red mush. Even the tenth person is probably still incredibly racist and a tacit supporter of genocide, just not an active supporter of it.

It feels cliché to mention how Zionist settlers are themselves to a pretty large extent descended from the survivors of pogroms and one of the worst genocides in human history, because the apparent irony of that is just not what makes the genocidality of so-called “Jewish” “Israelis” so horrifying, revolting, and tragic. People are not their great-grandparents, and Zionists, although they use Jewish aesthetics, are still a product of the cultural climate of Anglo settlerism and German volkism more than they are a product of anything Jewish. The Zionist settlers are, in a word, “not Jews”.

No, this is a human matter, not an ethnoreligious one. It’s a matter of me expecting to be able to look a member of my own species in the eyes and see a soul capable of empathy; all human beings are after all cousins if you go back far enough, and I would gladly welcome anyone as my own family. So even if people’s actions hurt others, I like to believe that people are largely just misguided and could be set on a better path, that people simply mean well but don’t always know how to do well.

But Zionists, in the way they talk, in the way they act, in the lack of any brightness in their eyes, there is just… no humanity left. Whatever humanity the Zionist settlers had was “left at the door” like shoes and coats when they decided to become settlers, and they’ll put their shoes and coats back on when the wretched, moribund system they benefit from finally collapses on them, which will be soon, God willing. And perhaps then, and only then, to paraphrase my own favorite ex-Zionist, ĉiu vidos en sia proksimulo nur homon kaj fraton.everyone will see in their neighbor only a man and a brother.

Yes, the app Xiaohongshu, also known as Rednote. Although originally aimed at people in China, the app saw a brief flash of popularity in Seppoland/USA after TikTok was banned.

It seems highly unlikely.

Oh, I see, so you misunderstood the title of the article. Honestly though that would be AWESOME for real. It would make for a good party name or something, too.

In Norwegian it is known as Landsorganisasjonenthe National Organization iin NorgeNorway, hence the abbreviation LO.