Comments by "Ra Ra" (@RaRa-eu9mw) on "RobWords" channel.

  1. Very surprised by the lack of Jan Misali in this video!
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  2. I found it cute the line of "smiles has a mile between the first and last letter" and so I hope this comment doesn't leave you feeling beleaguered, but that word has a league between the first two and last three letters, and a league is a bit longer than a mile ;)
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  3. But the former has taken more lives than the latter.
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  4. This is silly for a couple of reasons. Not all books are information, and are we really saying nuclear weapon instructions should be available to everyone?
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  5. When Joe says of Mein Kampf "it's not going to hurt you" what makes him so sure? Many neo-nazis today are inspired by the book. It kills every year.
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  6. This misses the point of the book - the "help" must come from those who know the person already.
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  7. How about if someone published a book full of slanderous claims about someone?
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  8. Oh dear
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  9. The "crash of Rhinos" one being a "fraud" is interesting. It's everywhere on the internet and comes up in pub quizzes and such too. If it's recent, can we perhaps track the earliest known usage? Find out maybe even who's responsible for this one?
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  10. A very nice little feature worth mentioning is that Plutonium has the symbol Pu because it smells ("pee-yoo!"). The more obvious choice would have been Pl, but this little joke made it into the table of elements.
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  11. Legalise libel?
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  12. I think there is a small advantage to grammatical gender. It helps with understanding. Firstly, when we use pronouns, gender can help us distinguish what's even being referred to. "The pen is on the table. It's green." Does it mean the pen or the table? Often in English we have to clarify, in situations which would be unambiguous if we had grammatical gender. Secondly, if I don't quite hear a word, the gender of the words around it gives me an additional clue of what it might be. In English, we can mishear certain nouns as others, and this problem would be reduced if the misheard version was gendered in a way that would make the rest of the sentence grammatically incorrect, forcing us to hear the correct version.
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  13.  @sydhenderson6753  Sure - but those possible confusions are all over the table already. The "pee-yoo" joke is well documented to be the reason it has the symbol Pu.
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  14.  @zweigackroyd7301  Many of us don't see that as the way forward. We need better societal support rather than increasing medicalisation. Thirteen Reasons Why emphasises the absence of this support. Including reference to professional services would be contrary to the thesis. Like arguing for veganism and putting the number of a local KFC on the back.
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  15.  @zweigackroyd7301  I think "help" is here being used euphemistically for medicalised interventions. Asher obviously cannot put the phone number of a close friend in the book, as he doesn't know who the readers' close friends are. Neither me nor Asher would see a price being paid here. We think a move towards societal support will save lives, not lose them.
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  16.  @zweigackroyd7301  The term "medicalised" here incorporates therapy, counselling etc. In the context of approaches to suicide "medicalisation" refers to any approach which pathologises, viewing the root problem with suicidality as internal to each suicidal person. I believe that only social connections and societal changes can fix the problem, yes, and someone without social connections in the current world is pretty well doomed. That's a big problem. With regards "causing suicides", any change or instability is going to do this. SSRIs famously increase suicide risk. I don't think this is a particularly strong argument against SSRIs, nor a particularly strong argument against improving society.
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  17. This is taking semantics to a needless and absurd level of contortions.
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  18.  @MarcusCactus  That's just not how the words are commonly used.
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  19. The US government stops people saying things too. Everyone has to draw the line somewhere.
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  20.  @Trav_Can  Ok? But in reality the two countries are pretty equivalent in terms of what we're allowed/not allowed to say.
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  21.  @Trav_Can  They cannot be gotten rid of, but they can be reinterpreted or straight up ignored. The US has very strict laws on libel (much stricter than the UK) and the first amendment hasn't stopped that. At the end of the day, every country's speech laws just reflect the mood of the time. The US isn't special in that regard.
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  22. 1984 is already there - it was banned in Russia and China.
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  23. The vast majority of people do not think critically. This idea is utopian naivety.
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  24. Should we do away with all laws? If they don't work?
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  25. It's a very severe racial slur.
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  26. but it's not a word
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