The best way to think of Wikipedia is that the site represents the consensus of everyone who is proficient in a particular language; has the means and technical understanding of how to edit Wikipedia; and has a lot of free time to edit Wikipedia.

For English, this means that most edits are made by highly educated white US-Americans, Canadians, Australians and Europeans, who either live comfortably off their parents, have a job that gives them a lot of free time, or perhaps they’re even businessowners or get paid to edit Wikipedia to promote an agenda (see: CIA edits to Wikipedia).

In any case, this is going to give Wikipedia’s most prolific editors a particular bias in terms of which sources have prestige, which topics they write about and how they write about them. There’s also a lot that can be said of the political leanings of the site’s founders, site admin/moderation, its biggest donors being Big Tech companies like Google and Amazon, etc.

Good on Diesen for getting on CGTN! Always neat to see a familiar name.

“French anarchists used this to resist prison construction in the 80s” is referring to chapter 9 of A Crime Called Freedom: The Writings of Os Cangaceiros, Volume One (text version, audio version). I’m pretty sure that zine was the first work of theory I ever read, and although I don’t see myself as an anarchist anymore, it was still formative for me and I still recommend checking it out.

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.

Some instances are more particular about copyright than others, but there’s no machine scanning your videos for copyrighted material, and it’s fully possible to leave the license section blank when you upload a video.

(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.

Note: Norway’s largest trade union, LO, will implement a comprehensive boycott of “Israel” beginning in September, provided the occupation of Ghazza has not ended by that point. Also, Norway’s parliamentary election is scheduled for September 8, and early voting has already begun.

Honestly, I already figured my posts probably were being used to train a LLM without my consent.

It just says Palestine right (فلسطين Filasṭīn/Falasṭīn)

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.

I’ve had a blast rewatching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with my net-friends lately. Is it the best kids’ cartoon ever made? Certainly not: there’s more than enough to criticize about it, but flaws and all, it is still my favorite! The characters are fun and the world really captures your imagination, and it and its fandom were a big part of my life for a long time.

Looks like somebody else has already answered your question, but I’ll still go ahead and say that ‘agentive’ is another name for this. Happy conlanging!

Upon his arrest, he gave a voluntary statement to police. When confronted with the Tumblr messages and asked if he were aroused by them, he replied, ‘I mean, in a way, it’s hard not to be.’

Despite pleading guilty to the charges, Keenan maintained that he is not sexually attracted to children, and had only stumbled upon the child pornography [sic] in 2017 while “searching for other images such as sunsets and beaches,” according to the decision.

Keenan said [he] was appalled by what he found, and decided to start a Tumblr blog to lure out paedophiles so he could report them to the site’s moderators in a kind of “undercover sting.”