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Joined 12 days ago
Cake day: July 28th, 2025
  • bryndos@fedia.iotoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Was there a Cold War conflict where the Soviets funded the right-wingers and the Americans funded the communists?
    11·
    6 hours ago

    Demagogues like to reduce complex problems to a binary choice, so they can label one as righteous and the other as witchcraft . If they find something complex, they create an arbitrary (and often flexible) dividing line. That’s their method of creating fear, hate and fervent support for their case to have power.

    Will any economic system necessarily succumb to demagoguery? maybe, it is a depressing thought. But I do think they’re more like cyclical memes. They’re not very stable societies - fear is a great short term motivator, but not so in the longer term - so they probably don’t last too long, but may rear their ugly heads after enough people forgot how bad they were. And short term might be 10-20 years in this context.

    There are always socialist and individualist elements with any society or economy, such as between partners, families, neighborhoods, within small businesses, between vendors and buyers, or small teams within larger businesses. I think most large armies are ran similar to socialist dictatorships at the top level - at least the ones based on soldier’s labour, but there will be individualistic parts within, like ‘you look after your own sidearm’. Just like there are always private and individualistic elements within each of those groups, the types of relationships between people and businesses are never as simple as black and white, trust matters, legal system matters, past experience matters, ability to demonstrate ‘skin in the game’ matters, expectations about the future matters (reciprocity), observability/transparency matters, the possibility of free ridership, the benefits of free ridership, the emergence of standards and so on. All of these things influence some economic and social interactions to appear more ’ social’ in some cases, and more ‘individual’ in others.

    Certainly two party democracies are basically set up for the top level to disintegrate into demagogic shit slinging about ‘our side’ vs ‘their side’, but real people and businesses will always have a diversity of types of behaviour and relationships - and I really don’t believe you can genuinely classify any economy (a collaboration of people) as ‘left’ or ‘right’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘individualist’.

    Their “leaders” might well call them that though.

  • bryndos@fedia.iotoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•If you put a "s" in front of the "sh" in chivalry, they turn into a "k" like in schism
    1·
    7 hours ago

    The point is pretty much exactly what you said. It doesn’t really matter what letters you put any where in any word in English; people will pronounce it however they like anyway. And then there will always be some opinionated arrogant contrary fucker - that’s the role that I decided to play in this case - will accuse everyone else of speaking wrong.

    Personally, I see and sometimes hear a a difference between ‘sk’ and ‘sch’. Just like I enjoy pronouncing both r’s in ‘February’ unlike most people. I think ‘color’ should be pronounced differently from ‘colour’ too, and ‘meter’ is different from ‘metre’ . And don’t get me started on the difference between ‘a’ and ‘ar’. But all of that is just pettifoggery .

    People are going to say it the way they say it anyway. Listen to how most Scots pronounce ‘where’, ‘what’ etc.; it’s been many hundreds of years since the letters were switched, but most Scots still pronounce it much more like the old spellings ‘hwer’, hwat’ and so on.

    So add whatever letters you like, say it however you like, because everyone else will keep on doing whatever fits their culture irrespective of spelling.