Because they make more money than they’re paying in fines. They also may be making more money violating laws than they’re paying in fines, but that’s how they’ll have to determine how they conduct business.

Basically - and this is mostly for tech but I suspect it applies to other markets - the US is the single largest market. “Europe” is second, depending on how you want to define it, but even just the EU is a very big market. China is big and growing, and most companies are trying their best to keep growth there. Asia collectively could be huge, but the attempts to collectivize Asia have not worked out well, historically speaking.

But the takeaway is that a company will exit s market if it’s losing money, generally speaking. No one is sacrificing earnings to make sure Belgians have access to the latest phones out of the goodness of their hearts.

Fascism. It’s fascism.

Economic and social collapse dislocates a lot of people. It dislocates people who think they shouldn’t be dislocated, because they played by the rules. They go to church, they had a job, they’re patriotic to their best understanding of the word.

Then, in their minds, something must have changed. It might be the immigrants, or the Jews, or the gays, or weirdly drag queens for some reason this time around. Then someone comes along who validates them as victims and promises a return to their historical glory days.

The last paroxysm is the election or ascendency of a far right populist who elevates that narrative. They promise to restore national pride and return to traditional values, and to return the nation to its roots which had made it strong and put them on top.

It’s happened multiple times around the world, and there are a lot of books and articles on how and why it happens.

Please keep in mind that these books should be acceptable by the school and approachable by students who would be unlikely to accept or read very progressive material, so themes that strongly (just strongly) contradict Western narratives should be avoided.

This made me hesitate, but then I decided that you’re more than capable of reading a summary or skimming a book and deciding whether or not it makes a fit.

Let me start with some obvious ones:

• Orientalism by Edward Said

• A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

• 90% of Chomsky’s work

• 21 Things They Don’t Teach You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. Chang is an economist who I believe studied under the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. They both research the economies of developing countries, with Chang having a specialization in South Korea. He accused developed countries of “kicking away the ladder” when they force the Washington Consensus on developing economies while having violated those norms as their own economies developed.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond - There’s a lot wrong with the book but it does make for an effective deconstruction of the myth of western cultural superiority by proposing a physical/geographical explanation.

Better than GGS would be any book by David Graeber, who for my money was the greatest anthropologist of our time and who brings a radical preconception of some of the most treasured but false narratives in the development of western history and capitalism. Debt is his most famous work, I think, but I’d especially recommend The Dawn of Everything.

Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson - the best bio of Che that I’ve read, but it’s really, really long. Maybe just watch Motorcycle Diaries and Even The Rain (which is about modern and even liberal colonialism but not Che).

Anything about James Baldwin

The Social Conquest of the Earth by EO Wilson. Wilson was the biologist who founded the field of sociobiology and who towards the end of his career came to the conclusion that its because humans exhibit the highest levels of cooperation (eusociality) that we’ve come to dominate the planet, for better and for worse.

I realize that a lot of these are US centric, and I’ve left out virtually everything on LGBT history and culture, but I think this might be a good start.

Send your squire to fetch the breastplate stretcher!

Yes. The basic method is listen and repeat with variations thrown in. You might be able to get the old FSI recordings for free, and I think there’s a commercial remastering or something like that available for sale. I got those out of curiosity at one point. Pimsleur is an updated version of the same approach with better structure, better voice actors, and in the most updated version available as an app/application.

I’m going off of memory here, but they’re a series of about 3-5 courses (the most popular languages go further) of 30 hour long sessions each, and I would do them while commuting. It would generally take me a few times to get through each course, but it’s really remarkable to think about how in the first course (and many after) what starts out sounding like a string of completely undifferentiated sounds turns into language. At some point some dial really starts to turn and you’ll have your first dream in Spanish or whatever. It’s pretty amazing.

Yup - you’re right. I kinda have the same hang ups with both, and it’s late, so I got them confused.

It’s been too long for me to remember off the top of my head, but this SPLC article on Tom Metzger and the White Aryan Resistance should give you a starting point and some terms to search for. The Hammerskins were one of the bigger gangs back then that had a presence in multiple states and I think in the UK. The ADL also has great records and studies on these groups and are a key resource for researchers.

It’s been a while since I saw it, but I believe the older guy in AHX was supposed to represent Metzger. They were very much alike.

That’s fair. I struggled to find the word, but it was (again, at the time) a counterculture movement on the fringes of a counterculture movement (the punk/hardcore scene in general). There was a time when I was pretty elbows deep in researching groups like WAR and the role of bands like Skrewdriver and gangs like the Hammerskins. I even interviewed some people. They were all very surreally open to talking - you can see that if you watch some documentaries from the time.

I really don’t want to get back into that though. It’s a dark hole, and it’s getting close enough to mainstream politics that it’s an entirely different phenomenon.

What I guess I was trying to say is that Fight Club spoke to more people, and might have helped convert them. AHX was only seen as an endorsement by people who didn’t need converting, and who were such a tiny fraction of the population that they didn’t pose a large scale threat (although they did beat the crap out of me on a couple of occasions).

The fan interpretation of the movie as literally that really colors my perception of the movie. I love Bukowski (with some trepidation), and I know that the dudebro interpretation is 180 degrees from the intended meaning, but when it’s that badly misinterpreted I can’t help but feel like the cultural baggage weighs it down. It’s been decades since I’ve seen it, but when I started becoming aware of the PUA culture ((which I think provided the nucleus to the incel/maga culture we see today), they were leaning hard into it.

Contrast that with American History X, which I’ve been told has been interpreted by skinhead/WP subcultures as a film that portrays them positively and justifies their POV. I don’t associate that movie with that interpretation because they’re a much more marginalized community (at least until 2016), and because the movie really beats you over the head with the message so much that misinterpretation cannot be attributed to the film.

Agreed. The FSI method is the best I’ve found, and Pimsleur is the best implementation of it. The biggest weakness IMO was that it was about listening and speaking and had only a minor reading component. The new software versions correct for that.

From there, you should be able to have some simple conversations and watch TV shows, at least with the foreign subtitles on. As a note, I found that (as in English) the subs might not match the spoken words, but I found that in some types of media (eg telenovellas) they match pretty well.

I kno.

This is the correct answer. It doesn’t address the multiple mistakes in English and spelling that the OP ended up writing, though. Nor does it address the spelling variant, although that does not seem to be the particular focus of the original enquiry.

This is my favorite thing I’ve read all week.

Unless you’re really, really good at theory. See Von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, John Nash, and many others. It really goes for anyone who’s talented significantly above their peers in tech, the arts, sports…

The problem is that it scales with talent, so someone who’s modestly brilliant will get less leeway than a Nobel (or EGOT) level talent, and talent seems to scale non-linearly.

The problematic bit here is if the person (say, Hitler, in this case) is a true psychopath. This is where the mind/body (or soul, if you prefer) dichotomy starts to fall apart. I do not believe that free will exists, but I can give a light version of this that doesn’t depend on a complete rejection of free will.

We know as a medical fact that a history of traumatic brain injury (tbi) has a strong correlation with violent and aggressive behavior. Over half the people in prisons for violent crime have a history of tbi, versus about 10% in the general public. We can find similar correlations to other events that are known to physically alter people’s brains, from malnutrition to childhood trauma to growing up in a system of racism and violence. These experiences literally and physically rewire brains and alter neuroanatomy. These neuroanatomical changes result in neuropsychological changes, which result in behavioral changes. Think about today’s story of the banking manager who was recently arrested for shoplifting a couple of hundred dollars worth of goods from Target. She is a kleptomaniac (not sure if that’s the current term, apologies if not). She has no more conscious control over her actions than a person with epilepsy has control over their seizures.

Now, if your physical form were to go away, those impulses would theoretically be gone. You couldn’t feel any guilt over them - you had virtually no control. If you keep your physical form (as some Catholics believe), you’d theoretically keep your neuroanatomy. Then your “repentance” would have to be god fixing your brain, as it were, which raises the question why he didn’t just do that in the first place.

Obviously there’s way more problems just around this subject than I’m getting into here - memories of trauma that altered your limbic system, genetic and epigenetic drivers of behavior… is there a “fix” for that? - but the root of the problem is that the religions, in order to identify a behavior as “sin,” have to make assumptions about behavioral plasticity and more importantly a behavioral driver separate and apart from the physical brain, that’s just implausible. The facts are simply incompatible with that kind of redemption.

In the Bay Area, I doubt that’s even a starter home in a bad neighborhood. Most other neighborhoods are priced like that for a tear down.

Oh man, that’s a blast from the past. I remember that from Usenet days in the early-mid 90s or something. So, like 15 years ago.

Thank you thank you thank you!

دست شما درد نکنه

If you happen to remember which episodes, please let me know! I haven’t noticed that on any of my pass throughs.

My mind was blown while re-watching The Wire (where I also never skipped the intro). I said to myself “The singers change but the song remains the same.” Then my brain blew up because that’s the entire point of the series.

Iirc the GoT intros gave you a hint about the episode by highlighting the map areas that the episode was going to cover. But S8 ended up being so bad that it went back in time and ruined the entire series for me, so I never rewatched it and might be misremembering.

Right now I never skip the intro for What We Do in the Shadows. It’s the same every time, but the song is just too much fun to skip. I am probably on my fourth watching of that series.

I think I also sit through most of the Star Trek intros just because I enjoy the visuals.