Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]


Weird idea..... fertility happens when sperm (produced by a man) meets egg (produced by a woman). At present there is no other way.

Two people who produced the same type of gamete will not reproduce.

Cishet normative.... that's what people are. Large scale deviation from that is a quick road to catastrophic population collapse.

Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]


No. Young women are inherently more valuable to a society than young men. Young men are disposable as the saying goes while young women are perishable (as their fertility diminishes).


It might have something to do with crashing fertility.... humans are a cishet normative species (because tha'ts how we reproduce) of course there is room for sexual minorities to thrive but "non-binary" nonsense doesn't scale up (it's not feasible on a large scale).

News / Coronavirus in Poland - part 2 [599]


"Sorry that you couldn't be by Grandma's bedside as she wheezed her last in total isolation.... but check it out while we bust! some! moves!"


Most of them were crappy and leaky and rushed... not the same thing as intentionally poisoned.... it's my impression that the Chinese and russian vaccines completely failed while the others possibly mitigated symptoms (at best) though probably no one under 50 should have been encouraged to take them.

Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]


that was my question...


is there a society that sends young women into battle first? Not Israel.... where women are in fact excluded from frontline combat roles.


Nope.

agencialocutores.com/can-rabbits-change-gender-sex/

News / Coronavirus in Poland - part 2 [599]


Then when did staff get time to make all those dance videos?

Any ideas?

Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]


So Israeli men of the same age stay home while they send away the young women to fight?

News / Coronavirus in Poland - part 2 [599]


No single observer/writer was more right about more things than Alex Berenson....

twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1783624890450317693


When are they supposed to swamp them?

Simple to give them real blood oxygen tests on the spot and send most away.... it's not like hospitals were overcroweded.... if they have the time for dance videos then they had time for that....

twitter.com/wideawake_media/status/1782686003720777911

News / Coronavirus in Poland - part 2 [599]


A lot of prevarication happened on all sides..... my current take is that the initial wave of covid was a really bad flu (far worse than the usual one with weird characteristics but mitigation measures ramped up the fatality levels (possibly on purpose).

Cuomo sent the infected into nursing homes which guaranteed a bunch of fatalities and Chinese protocols stressed intubating patients.... which again... ended up causing more harm than good.

And lockdowns, to the extent that they were observed did not have a good effect on peoples' immune systems.

Masks probably also did more harm than good especially since they obstructed breathing....

etc etce etc

I know a couple of people who died after getting covid and the common factor seems to have been waiting too long to go to the hospital.... a friend who had it monitored his blood oxygen levels and when they dropped under 90 for a couple of hours get himself to a hospital with all due speed and got through it (they said it was good that arrived on time).

When I had it the first time I never got below 92 (not great but not dangerous).

But how much public information was there about monitoring oxygen levels in the blood? One of the most important diagnostic measures and silence in the media from what I remember (I only knew about it from a friend in the medical field).

By May 2020 it was obvious that it was mostly dangerous to the very old and/or the already very ill.

Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]


Certainly reads like one...recently on a zoom meeting the issue of students using AI came up and I pointed out that in English AI has very clear 'voice' and it doesn't take long to recognize it, surely that's the case with Polish too....


Which?

Some fish and amphibians do, but have not heard of a mammal that produces sperm starting to produce eggs instead....


Yes, maybe at some point in the future it will be changeable but that is not now.

And yes, gender stereotypes differ a lot between cultures, though again there seem to be limits.... Is there any culture where young women 19-26 are charged with the physical defense of the group and are the first to be sent off to battle? Is there any society where young men of the same age are expected to be the primary caregivers of children?

The default model of original humanity (once a group gets big enough) seems to have a lot more sex-segregation than modern industrial societies... men hang out by themselves and women and children hang out together most of the time.

History / Why do Polish people hate to be called Eastern European? [120]


Technically in English....

Scandinavia= the mainland northern Germanic speaking countries, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

Finland differs the above three not only in terms of language but also in culture, for example see it's fetishization of alcohol which has no counterpart in any other country AFAIK.

Norden = Scandinavia plus Finland, Iceland and the overseas territories of Denmark like the Faroes and Greenland and autonomous Finnish island of Aalund.

Travel / Poland in photo riddles - part 3 [818]


Easily understandable from history... surrounded by larger countries that tried to marginalize or eliminate the language rallying around the standard is a perfectly understandable response. And the very rational nature of Polish spelling makes that easier (adopt a spelling pronunciation and you're good to go.... while the chaotic nature of English spelling locks people into their birth dialects to a much larger extent...


So what's wrong with a schwa in rabbit?

News / Coronavirus in Poland - part 2 [599]


Eveywhere that vaccinated saw skyrocketing rates.... they suppressed the immune response... if there was ever a time to self-isolate it would be just after getting vaccinated...


different waves?

News / Coronavirus in Poland - part 2 [599]


Some vaccination... the crappy leaky 'vaccines' mandated for covid have done a lot of damage to the brand.... no progress is possible until people admit that some vaccines have greatly helped humanity and the covid vaccines were mostly crap....

Travel / Poland in photo riddles - part 3 [818]


I usually pronounce the h, especially in isolation or stressed. A lot of Americans think of it as being more British (see Cool Whip jokes on Family Guy) but it's far more common in the US.

I didn't have a problem with that since the distinction been the schwa and unestressed ɪ is mostly lost in the US (a process that I think began in the west and spread Eastward). Would you pronounce 'gentleman' and 'gentlemen' differently? I don't think I do most of the time....

The traditional "RP" transcription system (although almost universally used for teaching 'British' pronunciation) is soooo weird, especially the way it has long vowels marked : without short equivalents.... I could understand [ka:t] (cart) and [kat] (cot) but the backwards a makes no sense....

But British linguistics has always been more into phonetics and matching exceedingly subtle vowel distinctions to discrete symbols while American linguistics is much more about phonemics (mental categorization) so the exact symbols used aren't so important....

(Rant off).

Travel / Poland in photo riddles - part 3 [818]


Iguana? Legwan is the usual word in Polish.... it looks like it comes from French -- l'iguane...

Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]


Those are sexes, biological and immutable.

Technically there are no 'genders' since it is about stereotypes regarding the two genders....

Travel / Poland in photo riddles - part 3 [818]


I would take issue with some of the pronunciations.... (where's the h in whale?) p

when speaking of a canine I would not normally say "poor dog!" but rather "poor doggie!" For me "poor dog" would more be about an unfortunate man (especially one whose dog-like behavior has caught up with him...)

Maybe it should be "Away from class" or "Outside the classroom" "Outside of class" rather than "Out of class" (skończyła się (komuś) klasa)

Travel / Poland in photo riddles - part 3 [818]


The way the student connected the l and e looked more like 'be' in vegetables than the le in lettuce....

Travel / Poland in photo riddles - part 3 [818]

is it supposed to be leek?

Travel / Poland in photo riddles - part 3 [818]


I see:

"lettuce * |letis|

pork - wierprzowina

beer

potatoes

rice

vegatables" (though you say it's now vegetables)

hmmm since when is 'beer' food? especially in elementary school?

maybe the word was bean?

Law / Gun control in Poland: should Polish people be allowed to own guns? [1070]


American gun nuts obsess about self-defense the same way that 400 lb women obsess about rape....

Law / Gun control in Poland: should Polish people be allowed to own guns? [1070]


Which greatly reduces the mystique of guns... I grew up around many guns and was taught basic gun safety and how to shoot by my father... and guns have never been that interesting to me (though I understand the attraction that others might feel).

Get hysterical about guns and their very existence and availability.... and you create a lot of people who end up desperately wanting guns....

News / Lech Walesa urged to "reduce Russia" to 50 million people [366]

russia might end up reducing itself to 50 million on its own....

floods in the kurgan region (preceded by decades of neglect to infrastructure in favor of invading neighbors) mean that uranium wells and radioactive mud will be entering the river tobol....

twitter.com/LXSummer1/status/1782506863747121224

Law / Gun control in Poland: should Polish people be allowed to own guns? [1070]


I just guesstimated the numbers trying to over-estimated the number of irresponsible users and they mostly shoot at each other though unfortunately they tend to have bad aim and often hit bystanders... and/or they just blindly shoot into a crowd (party shooters...).

Law / Gun control in Poland: should Polish people be allowed to own guns? [1070]

All of the safety and security arguments about this are missing the basic point....

A lot of Americans just like guns, as in they _really_ like guns.

The overwhelming majority of those who have guns (98 % or so) are responsible non-crazy people who are conscious of safety issues and are never involved in crime or other irresponsible behavior.

Those who are in favor of gun control are actually concerned primarily with urban gangs (overwhelmingly black and/or latino) but can't say so publicly because of fears of racism, so they try to justify gun control by attacking rural whites whose gun ownership very rarely involves serious problems.

The constitution sees the right to own weaponry as something a government can't interfere with.

Most Europeans just aren't that into guns and maybe a higher percentage of those who _are_ into guns are the type that probably shouldn't be around them.

Most Europeans don't think of guns as some kind of natural god-given right.

Gun crime in Europe is far lower per capita than the US (this is true of most serious crimes).

US =/= Europe, different societies formed by different historical and cultural realities and there is no need for one to become more like another.

UK, Ireland / Is it good for Poland as Sinn Fein will win today in Northen Ireland [282]


Years ago an Irish colleague who went home to Dublin for the Christmas holidays was attacked and beaten up (not bad enough to go the hospital but pretty bad) on the street (not too late at night, maybe near a McDonalds).

Anyhoo, when he told people in Poland they were horrified but he seemed to think it was pretty normal for Dublin...

Off-Topic / Random movies (not Polish) proposed by forum users [95]

Anyone see "Baby Reindeer" yet?

It starts off as a kind of conventional stalker narrative and then goes completely off the rails and every time you're suckered into thinking things have a chance to get to normal again the craziest stuff imagineable happens...

It's also kind of a dissection of a lot of 'woke' ideas about sex and sexuality (and how trauma and abuse play out longterm in the victim's life and how there are no easy quick solutions).

Off-Topic / Eurovision - Today I will be ashamed to be Polish [586]


Early on I listened to a lot of countries as they were released and now I'm hibernating until a week or two before the contest

Haven't actually heard the German entry this year

Favorites in no particular order:

Italy (great vocal and she knows what she's doing on stage, in San Remo she even fell during a performance and still won
Spain (catchy disco-ish number with great lyrics in Spanish which don't translate so well into English)
Armenia (hard ethnic and I'm all in)
Croatia (brilliant --- the hook is the rhythm that runs through the whole song I just wish they sang in their own language)
Ireland (video's a bit overdone but the basic song's pretty good)
Switzerland (I want to like it more than I do, brilliant in conception but...)
Greece (urban modern and ethnic at the same time, and I like the performer who did one of my favorite greek songs a few years ago - mantissa)

I've heard Norway, Portugal and Belgium but they leave me kind of cold, I need to listen more to Slovenia and Lithuania I think they might grow on me)

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1440]


He was, if anything, more neoliberal than Thatcher though neoliberalism had moved more toward the left by the time he was in office.

Language / Game - guess Polish idioms/sayings in direct English translation [1756]


Maybe parents? They think you're not doing something fast enough?

I had assumed that it wasn't applause per se but more like clapping your hands to get a servant's attention....