Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "Vox"
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An oddity for you: when my father graduated from college, in pharmacy, in the 1930s, his first job was translating English-language pharmacy texts into Welsh. He lasted two weeks in the job, he told me, and quit, believing the whole thing was useless.
My former partner's first job, when she first left higher education because of the civil war, was translating English language texts into Tik-Monjiaang, ("Language of The People," aka "Dinka"). Exactly parallel story: she quit within weeks, believing that the whole effort was going nowhere.
(Today, a generation later, both efforts, in Welsh and in Dinka, are back in operation -- at scales comparable perhaps to that in Catalan in this excellent video.)
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Anonymous troll "theawecabinet" is passing on a current rightwing lie to the effect that the United Nations is asking the United States to "get rid of the 1st Amendment." It isn't.
An obscure subcommittee within the UN has tut-tutted about hate speech but has said exactly the opposite to what this troll has claimed, i.e. it has emphasised the importance of freedom of expression. (Google up "United Nations, 1st Amendment" if you're interested. But it's dull, because it's the usual stupid lie.)
The Supreme Court of the US has ruled over and over that the First Amendment to the Constitution does not grant absolute "freedom of speech." Legal limitation on, and punishment for, speech are common in the United States, as they are in the many countries which, unlike the US, have democratic governments, universal adult suffrage, and civillian control over their police and military.
It will be nice if the United States ever advances to their level of modern popular governance.
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@Supertomiman Shanghai is a huge city built on an unpopulated mud flat. It replaces no traditional culture. It introduces inland Chinese, refugee European, and sophisticated Northern Chinese cultures to an area where there was formerly nothing.
Mixing with the culture and linguistic accent of the surrounding provinces, Jiangsu, Anhui, and Zhejiang, the sophisticated urban mix of Shanghai is producing a new culture. At the same time, the surrounding older ones are prospering. Nearby Suzhou, for instance, was a nondescript backwater before Shanghai's prosperity enriched and enlarged it. With wealth has come the rise of a proud, distinct, and flourishing Suzhou niche culture.
Long story short: you're on the right track, cultural change, but you're headed 180 degrees in the wrong direction. We're seeing vibrancy and flourishing, not exhaustion and extinction of the many cultures of China.
And a footnote: Welsh, which was clearly headed for extinction in my childhood, has recovered nicely, thank you very much. Romany is doing the same -- and I'd never even heard of Occitan until it popped up as one of the options on Notepad++ - everywhere in the world.
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@Supertomiman
Quite the contrary, that Shanghai skyline is uniquely Shanghai's. Nowhere else will you see several of those peculiarly Shanghai skyscrapers, the ball-shaped one, the one with the dipped air-flow gap, and several others.
What we are seeing here is the unique genius of Chinese engineering -- quite different from the Graeco-Roman blocks that typify the original American skyscrapers which started the genre a century ago.
Certainly it could be in the UAE -- but it isn't. That's all: there is a factual world out there, and it coesn't care much about your theories.
I guess it's a tough life, being an anonymous, opinionated Internet troll that reality won't comply with. Sad.
Now there is a global culture, you're right -- but note its individuality: everybody who pays attention and isn't carrying your particular set of grudges knows Shanghai from the UAE, and can tell both of them from New York or San Francisco -- equally international and equally unique cities.
If you're bored by it, you've certainly got a problem -- but it's your problem, not ours, much as you try to bore us with your repeated whines in text here.
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Calling the US a democracy in 1862 is off by about 103 years -- or by three if we want to be charitable.
At our nicest we can say that the US started to think about democracy with the 13th and 14th Amendments, after the Civil War. This made it into a theoretical, property-based, males-only, and quite limited democracy.
The serious attempt to put a government by male and female adults of all "races," i.e. colours, starts with the later civil rights acts, e.g. the LBJ 1965 one. This is still under constant attack by Republicans in several states, and is not very well implemented anywhere.
All the American democracies, the United States of America and its South American fellow-republics, are very recent works in progress. About a third of the human race, Europe the British Commonwealth, Taiwan, Japan, and the Tigers, can claim to be functioning, stable, and reasonably achieved democracies.
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