Zompist Bboard Again

lmfao I love that. the kid behind them is the mascot for the ACHS, asociación chilena de seguridad <yeah it means what english intuition suggests>. here's a recent incarnation of him. youtubelink the rest of them include various characters from chilean TV shows. I've discovered the most anxiety-indu...

oh, no, sorry if I was unclear, what's false is that what you have is selling natural resources to the highest bidder under capitalism (which I take it you did claim). sure, that's the idea in the books, but what very often happens in the third world is that you have US interventions pushing to just...

Getting back to Chile, it's worth keeping in mind that democracy wasn't the US end goal at the time at all... They were helping a military dictatorship; may I remind that the US's end goal has never been democracy? rather, it has always and forever been a) geopolitical supremacy and b) the profits ...

Just because American democracy is not perfect by any means and because the US does have very strong hegemonic tendencies does not mean one can establish an equivalence with the PRC or somehow claim that the PRC is better than the US. Remember that the PRC is well on it's way towards being a person...

I actually do think a HSR to, say, Valdivia, or Puerto Montt, would have excellent demand if it a) went faster than 200kph (making it a four or five hour trip, instead of the 10 hours it generally takes by bus), b) was a milk run (say, a short stop every hour) and c) you could park your car in a tra...

oh fuck! at least ours aren't antivax. then again, your cops *do* repress them, instead of bring them snacks. of course a line of three or four tracks from north to south would be the most logical investment to make: still, these things are very dangerous, our private businesses are famously corrupt...

Is it his fault that gods were later adopted as boddisatvas and Buddhas? That'd be like calling Christianity polytheistic only because it turned gods into saints. I don't think this is a bad thing to do! like, in the real world it's impolite to call christians polytheistic, but as far as their reli...

I don't think the vikings were all that into a multi-generational project to become the master race of faraway lands they regarded as semi-mythical, tbh.. you're thinking of early modern europpeans. There's a fair chance that the Americas had been sporadically contacted by old worlders, almost certa...

It's not very nice to the Persians to compare them to the Romans. They were not a slavery-based economy-- the percentage of slaves among the Romans or even the Greeks would astonish Darius, Hammurabi, or Ramesses. Recall that in the other big literature that formed the West, the Bible, the Persians...

for the record, the only reason I kind of use fash and liberal somewhat interchangeably sometimes is that, well, my right wingers call themselves liberal, speak like liberals, but their liberalism is paper-thin: they'll call for a bloody coup and the extermination of communists before you know it. ,...

Alexander is born in Persia as a member of a well off ethnic minority family, and ends up making britain persian for a brief time. the persian satrap, who was very close to alexander, decides not to leave and becomes Shah of Britain, formally under the authority of the king of kings in Persepolis, b...

The idea isn't that the real world isn't real... the usual Christian idea, in fact, is that God will do some reforms, but in this world... that's why the idea is that Christ comes back, rather than that we go to a "more real world" where he is. The idea is not to attain the same sort of h...

i'm more talking about how inherently big a deal a claim is. if I say "i'll sell you nice lemonade, come here", it's different from "i'll save you from the omnipocalypse in which your soul will be captured by the demon and consumed, digested for a billion trillion years before he dest...

Is a novelist evil because bad things happen to the characters? no, but that's only as clear because novel characters -or the conpeople in our conworlds- are not real and do not suffer, Sure, that's a good common sense view: novels and conworlds are some other thing that is unreal, or just not as r...

I can buy that God/gods/other could've made a world where nothing bad can ever happen...but is that a world that most people would want to live in? I mean, that's debatable (I'm attracted towards the position that yes, people would like to live in better places than in worse places, no one's life i...

The defense of "why do bad things happen to people despite there being an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God", i.e. the problem of evil, that I have seen is that God has given people and other creatures free will, which necessarily has allowed such things because free will nec...

Moose I agree that they're all political groups, but the test would yield that they're not, is what I was pointing out. And yeah, thank you, it was a really close call. My own take on this is that as long as the business classes prefer more traditional conservative types to fascists, we're not in an...

disclaimer: i'm a pretty hard atheist, by which I mean i think no gods exist and I also think i know this with good reason. that being said, though, I think this is a more commonsense position than what the imperial universalizing abrahamic religions posit. if mystical magical being of great power e...

I think this feels quite elvish in vibes, so I propose the name <something> elvish. alternatively, what I do is just when I have a definite idea of how my language sounds like, I just pick up random wordforms (I call the output of a wordgen this, cause they're not words then but they're candidate mo...

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Dec 21, 2021 2:24 pm Would there be interest in a separate thread where people could post voice recordings of their conlangs? If someone started such a thread, would anyone post in it?

me tbh