A language tip for all the french guys out there
YOU ARE THE REASON
One Nice Bug Per Day

Love Begins
Cosimo Galluzzi

Product Placement
Xuebing Du

Andulka

pixel skylines
ojovivo

★
dirt enthusiast
Peter Solarz
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
noise dept.
$LAYYYTER

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RMH
Today's Document
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@kristeatime
A language tip for all the french guys out there
Jane Austen really said ‘I respect the “I can fix him” movement but that’s just not me. He’ll fix himself if knows what’s good for him’ and that’s why her works are still calling the shots today.
Meanwhile Emily Brönte just said “We can make each other worse.”
Keep the educating yourself and stand with the Palestinians 🇵🇸❤️
from @m_hushki on instagram
(via zlu6hly6g7q61.jpg (1242×1404))
The strange curse of being a geography major and seeing commentary about “shipping” on this site only to realize it has nothing to do with containerization and the transformation of the global supply chain…
YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW PLEASED I AM THAT WE’RE ALL NOW TALKING ABOUT CONTAINER SHIPS
Blackness to me is inherently gender nonconforming largely because we will never fit into binary white supremacist notions of manhood and womanhood.
Angela Davis actually touches on this in her novel Women, Race, and Class.
Essentially, she says that Black women may have been considered genderless because we did all the same work as men but then weren’t considered men when it came to sexual abuse, suddenly being forced into these feminine, submissive roles that we clearly didn’t fit into. Once the Atlantic Slave Trade was banned, Black women were then seen as breeders to provide for slaves since they couldn’t be imported. Despite this, Black women, even if we were pregnant, still had to work in the fields and suffer the same punishment as our male counterparts.
Angela Davis goes on further to say that since Black women were never seen as housewives, Black men were in turn never seen as family providers or heads of households. By this point, Black women had acquired an abundance of traits that didn’t fit into 19th century perception of what it meant to be a woman. Also, with the rise of industrialization, white women never experienced that same intensive labor which further pushed them into the housewife stereotype. Essentially, there was this white feminist movement to erase the housewife stereotype but it didn’t include the struggles of Black women because we were never seen as housewives to begin with.
All of this to say: We were genderless and outside of any gender norm within the white supremacist framework.
Reminder that we offer the novel mentioned above, Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis, as a free PDF for anyone to read under our social justice resources. Please share so everyone has equal and equitable access to education and activism!
for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’
jerry is here
my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”
When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “'Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”
I was done for the day.
This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.
I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”
I did not find my husband in this way.
In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”
“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.
The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)
Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.
I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English.
When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.
“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”
“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”
Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG
My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…
I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.
That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.
Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.
I love those stories so much…
Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.
She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.
American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)
Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)
that’s hilarious
I am officially screamlaughing at my desk from that last one OH MY
Does everyone know the prime minister who promised to fuck the country?
So in Biblical Hebrew the word for penis and weapon are the same. There is a verb meaning to arm, which modern Hebrew semanticly drifted into “fuck”: i.e. give someone your dick.
The minister was making a speech while a candidate, bemoning the state of the world. “The Soviet Union is fucking Egypt. Germany is fucking Syria. The Americans are fucking everyone. But who is fucking us? When I am prime minister, I will ensure we are fucked!”
What the hell Biblical Hebrew.
Just guessing: The path from something like “give someone a blade” to “give someone a blade, if you know what I mean ;)” is probably not that difficult or unlikely.
^Given that the Latin word for sheath (like, for a sword) is literally “vagina”, I can verify that this metaphor is a time-honored one.
Oh yeah and one time my Latin professor was at this conference in Greece and his flight was canceled, so he needed to extend his hotel stay by one more night.
Except he doesn’t speak a lick of modern Greek, and the receptionist couldn’t speak English. Or French. Or German. Or Italian. (He tried all of them.)
Finally, in a fit of inspiration, he went upstairs and got his copy of Medea in the original Greek (you know, the stuff separated from modern Greek by two and a half thousand years). He found the passage where Medea begs Jason to let her stay for one more day, went downstairs, and read it to the receptionist.
She laughed her head off, but she gave him the extra night.
All of these *chef’s kiss* but the Medea one is hands down the best
s/o to my classics professor who managed to get a tire changed on his rental car while doing research in Greece by telling them his chariot had broken down
A priest, a Baptist minister, and a rabbit walk into the Red Cross to donate blood
The nurse asks, what’s your blood type?
The rabbit says, “I’m probably a Type O”
Keep it going for the 2021 and forever (x)
This just made me realize that news articles always portray poachers as people from the area who killed them for money. But if they’re not being killed when people can’t travel there, then it’s not anyone from the area doing the killing. Makes me wonder how many of the “poachers” were actually trophy hunters from Europe or the US.
ALL OF THEM
In reality, probably not many of them. If any. The modern narrative of who’s poaching and where animal parts end up is very much entrenched in the pulp novels of the 20s and 30s. Most people think of poachers as either a Percival McLeach/Negaverse Steve Irwin/old white guy with a mustache… or as a poor African. But the reality’s a lot more complex and the media’s bad at picking up on it for a lot of reasons- largely because people hate nuance and don’t understand the difference between illegal poaching (always bad) and legal, regulated trophy hunting (complicated. sometimes bad. sometimes good. depends on the situation, the reality of where conservation dollars are coming from, and whether or not you believe one animal can or cannot be sacrificed for the good of the species.)
So here’s the thing about rhino hunting: it’s perfectly legal IF you have the permits. It’s just expensive. You have to get the permit to hunt and the permit to import back to your home country. Rhinos selected for hunting are old, post-reproductive bulls. They’re not really genetically valuable anymore, and having the ability to sell hunting rights encourages African landowners to keep rhinos on their land. Trophy hunts aren’t figured into the poaching numbers… at all. When they say that poaching has gone up or down, they are not including trophy hunting because those numbers are totalled separately. Trophy hunters have to buy permits, and this is not a financial problem for them. While it’s not completely unheard of (there’s one guy in particular, a South African big game rancher/hunter named Dawie Groenenwald, who did bring in twelve Americans to trophy hunt on his land- read more about that here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/), that’s not where the real money is. I’m certainly not saying that all trophy hunting is legitimate or even if any of it’s a good idea. What I’m saying is that it’s irrelevant to the poaching numbers.
The people killing these rhinos aren’t taking them as trophies.
They’re selling the horns in Vietnam.
Other Asian countries too, mostly China and anywhere that’s had significant sinicization, but Vietnam’s burgeoning economy and the meteoric rise of an emergent upper-middle business class has meant that it’s where all that rhino horn is going. It’s a status symbol, a way to curry favor with business higher ups (Source: http://www.poachingfacts.com/faces-of-the-poachers/buyers-of-rhino-horn/). This isn’t even a secret. The people who traffic rhino horn say openly where it goes (Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/). They talk about how it gets there, and who does the killing. It’s an enormous industry and immensely valuable. TRAFFIC has been working on this for over a decade now, figuring out who’s killing the rhinos and where the horns are going. Nine years ago, the first big report from TRAFFIC came out on the trade from the African rhino-having countries to Asia. Here’s the link to that: http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/trafficrhinoreportsummary.pdf
Nat Geo did the numbers again in 2015, in that article I linked above. Things haven’t changed much since then.
The reason poaching went down during covid isn’t that the actual hunters weren’t allowed to travel. (Besides, do you really think that if it was rich white dudes doing the majority of the poaching, it would have slowed down or stopped? Money, dear boy, can get you pretty much anything you want. A chartered flight to Kenya, a private home to stay in… a rhino permit or two…) Rather, the middleman dried up. It’s only profitable to kill a rhino if you can move the parts, and if your middleman isn’t traveling between the rhino countries and the Asian market, well…
And you can probably guess who the middlemen are. Often they’re students. Frequently they’re workers. And until recently, they were mostly Vietnamese or Chinese nationals. Now, TRAFFIC notes that many rhino horn syndicates are using white South Africans due to heightened suspicion. (Source: http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/environment/125451/profiling-ups-risk-for-asian-rhino-horn-mules.html)
And normally, there actually is a lot of traffic between China and Vietnam and the rhino countries. I don’t know if people here are quite aware of the relationship between China and several African countries- particularly Kenya, but there’s been a lot of Asian investment into Africa. In Kenya, you see a lot of Chinese workers coming in, working on development projects, and then going back to China. Something like 20% of African infrastructure projects are funded by China; one out of every three is built by Chinese firms. (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-07-19/china-s-belt-and-road-leaves-kenya-with-a-railroad-to-nowhere). Most of the part-time labor is local (source: http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/801581468195561492/pdf/WPS7614.pdf), but not all of it- and the full time labor, while mostly local, is roughly 22% Chinese citizens. There were well over 150,000 Chinese workers in Africa before the pandemic (source: http://www.sais-cari.org/data-chinese-workers-in-africa). You also saw a lot of Vietnamese workers… before the pandemic. Both China and Vietnam called their citizens home pretty quickly. Vietnam in particular. By July 2020, arrangements for most Vietnamese workers in Africa had come through after a good deal of public outcry, and they were back in Vietnam (source: https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-news/19011-stuck-in-guinea-equatorial,-vietnamese-workers-forced-to-work-despite-rampant-covid-19-cases).
No middlemen, no profit. No profit, no poaching. It’s not a triumphant story of white trophy hunters butting out of a place they don’t belong; it’s a much more complicated story of economic oppression of native Kenyans, South Africans, and citizens of other rhino countries and exported Vietnamese and Chinese workers.
Poaching isn’t what it used to be. It’s gotten a lot more complex, and reducing it to something that hasn’t been true since the 1950s-1970s means that we ignore the real problems and direct our energy into something that isn’t happening. It’s like… how when a corporation tells you to take personal responsibility for climate change. This isn’t a single person sneering and shooting a rhino. This is an entire industry that CITES and other NGOs are trying hard to grapple with. The nature of the beast has fundamentally changed. I get that it’s really easy to blame Europe and America for the shit that’s been done to subsaharan Africa’s natural resources. It’s right, too, but… the story of people attempting to extract resources from the continent isn’t over. Ignoring that the market for rhino horn isn’t the trophy industry just makes it easier for that particular black market to go unchecked.
Additional sources and information:
https://www.savetherhino.org/what-we-do/reducing-illegal-trade/
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/rich-men-rhino-horns/529455/
https://www.savetherhino.org/thorny-issues/trophy-hunting-and-sustainable-use-rhinos/
http://www.poachingfacts.com/poaching-statistics/rhino-poaching-statistics/
https://www.fws.gov/international/permits/black-rhino-import-permit.html- this oughta give you an idea on what a US import permit entails. If you have the money and time, it’s… really not that hard to hunt a rhino.
You have GOT to be FUCKING KIDDING ME
They’ve done it again
I’ve been thinking about this and how the Simpsons called it and I think maybe they just read the room way better than anyone else.
1. trump being (the former) president sounds and is and was just absolutely ridiculous, but even back then people knew he was a con man with exactly as much unearned and often pretend wealth as it would take to successfully buy the presidency, the conman’s instinct for finding out what people wanna hear and saying it over and over and the ego to be magnetic to those who are, frankly, pathetic. The Simpsons was a show that started out being reviled by a lot of Middle America. The creators were always aware just how backwards America could be, how much conservative backlash we were capable of. And trump banked on that. And he was the kind of guy that the people who were in a position to stop him would dismiss with a, “pfft, he’s a sideshow, he’ll never make it, it’s absurd”. Right up until he’s dismantling democracy from the Oval. The Simpsons was known for imagining ridiculous but not 100% impossible scenarios and just flying with it. They were the walking definition of “your chances of being killed by a cat are extremely, extremely low, but never zero.”. The chances of trump being POTUS were extremely, extremely low but sadly not zero.
2. Any female head-of-state would have to have a certain look, because misogyny. They’d have to ride the line between not too masculine (so no strong blues or reds, no neutrals) and not too feminine (no pink, yellow or pastels), not too adorned and not too plain, not so rich looking it puts the middle class off (no diamonds or big stones) but appropriately coiffed enough to make her success evidence (so some jewelry must be worn). A cool purple is a good color because it can feminine-to-neutral (a male executive could wear this as a tie color and no one would think twice) while still lending itself to an outfit that’s the spiritual heir to Hilary’s power pants suit. Pearls, as well, ride that line. They’re classy, but not flashy, they’re classic but never outdated. Reasonably good looking fakes can be obtained by the lower classes yet the upper classes continue to wear them so their status as a class marker remains.
If I were thinking carefully about how a smart, determined woman like a grown President Lisa Simpson would present herself, I’d pick just about this outfit.
So, I think that’s how we got to this place. Perceptive writers in the past, keen design sense, America being exactly as fucked up as they imagined and yet containing enough people determined to keep marching forward so that a woman could be President or Vice President.
I totally agree with your analysis but also please consider the much funnier alternative:
Kamala Harris saw this episode and did it on purpose.
the thing abt diet culture is that there’s no way any junk food could possibly be more self destructive than viewing your own body as not only a separate entity from yourself but as an enemy to be conquered
US Elevation
The america they don’t want you to see
i absolutely love this review
Hate diet culture so much bitches will b like “don’t eat processed carbs they’re so bad for you” like and??? So what?? God did not give us grain and stone to grind it with for no reason. Bread is inevitable. Bread is food for the heart and the soul. U think I’m gonna give that up in pursuit of instagram fitness?? U think I’m gonna deny myself the simple pleasure of toast with jam so I can endlessly chase an ever-shifting standard of beauty that ultimately means nothing? In 20 years I will no longer be beautiful and in 60 my body will be vacant food for other, smaller creatures. But the taste of fresh bread? Of homemade donuts and still-warm pie? I will carry the taste on my tongue into whatever follows this life. So like. Stop telling me I should diet lmao. I’m not abt to martyr myself just to get a man to look at me.