Yeah that's accurate, maybe that would have been a better way for me to say it. Turkey is another multi-ethnicity country, and Turkey actually has the same sort of uniquely impactful presence in its area that the US has globally (with the US's size and and its geography and some lucky accidents also propelling it to a position beyond just what its natural advantages would tend to get it.) Maybe it's more accurate to say that the US's multi-ethnicity combined with its other advantages to produce the position it's currently in today.
mozz
joined 2 years ago
Bro your stuff's gotta be more subtle than this at this point
It's worse than that. I have no idea why it's apparently important enough to me for me to want to investigate as much as I have, but just from the last few days:
- Here, I ask one of them what he thinks about a topic not connected to the election and he angrily refuses to answer because I must be trying to trick him or something.
- Here one of them lapses into total nonsense when forced to go beyond his talking points; he says that Biden wasn't trying hard enough to make change, and when I point out concrete ways that Biden actually enacted what he was talking about and was sometimes overruled on it, he said that Biden could have ignored the Supreme Court's cancellation of his order because it "doesn't have an enforcement arm".
I have a bunch more examples. But generally they are articulate and on-the-surface sensible when spouting one of a handful of talking points in a variety of different contexts and with different decoration around them, but anything outside that, they react like no human being I've ever had a conversation with.
“It means you assimilate. You become part of America; America doesn’t become part of you.”
This is a fascinating statement. I'm not sure how much Moreno really thought it through. But something about it seemed weird and I kept looking at it; the second part just didn't make any sense to me. Like I couldn't even parse the language.
I think I finally figured it out: When you become part of America, he's saying, you lose everything else about you. Being "American" doesn't form one piece of your identity. It becomes your entire identity. For being American to be only a single part of your identity, and you to still have other parts, is forbidden, in his mind. That is, more or less, the literal meaning of what he's saying.
Then I thought, maybe I'm reading too much into it. I think he's trying to say that you're supposed to come to America and become part of what's already there; America isn't supposed to change to include part of what you brought with you. You're supposed to change, and America's supposed to stay the same. That's not literally what the words mean, but I think that's more likely what he was aiming to say and he just didn't take the language seriously enough to get there successfully literal-meaning-wise.
I'm not trying to make it more than it is. It's just a weird little throw-away sentence. I just kept looking at it. One of those two things is what he meant. And they're both just... wrong. Like the whole value and purpose of the American story is supposed to be the exact opposite of all of that. IDK. I know they're trying to change the whole meaning of what it means to be American, but it's weird to me that the most perfect distillation of what they're getting wrong about the whole thing from start to finish came from their own explanation of how it's supposed to be.
Edit: I can't let it go. America is the only big country in the world that works the way it does. Almost every country is an ethnic monolith. Italy is full of Italian people, Japan is full of Japanese people, but America is full of white/black/Asian/Hispanic/whatever else people all working somewhat more or less together. And, somehow, America wound up being by far the world's dominant economic / military / diplomatic superpower (for now). To me those two factors are cause and effect. "Diversity is our strength" is very much a literal and serious geopolitical statement. But these guys don't like it being that way. They want to undo everything that makes America a special type of country, for all its evils and all the stuff we do wrong or badly, just because they're too insecure to get by without having a badge that says "my race is special." Fuck 'em. I really don't like it and I don't like them.
I honestly think people left of center have lost their minds with this stuff.
I think the actual human people on Lemmy have their minds very much on-point about this stuff.
There are a handful of very vocal accounts who are saying a particular way to look at Biden that makes absolutely no sense if you examine it for 2 seconds, but they all behave in a particular type of way that isn't really consistent with how people who genuinely believe the things they're saying (whether right or wrong) behave.
Trump having a second term is not, like, an ambiguous or borderline situation. I think the vast, vast majority of actual human Lemmy people are not at all confused about what will be the results of "voting for Trump" vs. "voting for Biden" vs. "not voting" in this upcoming election.
But I just can't see Biden meaningfully curbing emissions.
Biden's climate plan was estimated to reduce US emissions by 40%. 40% five years from now is not nearly enough given the scope of the crisis, and I'd be surprised if it pans out exactly according to that estimate unless more action is taken, but I am floored that he was able to get that bill to pass through the current "climate change isn't real please don't look out the window" US government. What would you refer to as "meaningful" on this topic?
I get that. But why would that mean that you would choose C++ as the language to teach a new programmer in?
it still is the only realistic option
I think we're gonna have to agree to disagree on this.
C++ is still used for some popular applications yes; this says about 10% which sounds pretty right to me. It's definitely not in the "default language and only realistic option" position that it was in 20 years ago. I was a C++ programmer for years and years but at this stage there are just better things available. The last time I tried to work with C++ with manual memory management and .first and .second and templates and just the way it does things, I actually just wound up reimplementing the whole thing I was doing in another language rather than try to work within it.
If I were trying to teach beginning programmers right now, I would have them start with C to get comfortable with the guts of what's really going on with their programs, and then once they were skilled with that, I'd teach them Python or Rust or Javascript or something as more of a "this is higher level more realistic option to do the bulk of a big programming project in" option.
But that is me, we're allowed to have a difference of opinion about it.
It is fine, but why would you want to teach new programmers C++? Surely there are many languages which are both inherently better and more popular and better-for-their-career languages.
"Fuck off Amanda you don't run me"