History / Historical look at various civilisational differences between Russia and the West [159]


in russia? I did not know that.... It's the traditional way in Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey (maybe Romania).... but didn't know about russia... though I do know they still use squatters in parts of the former USSR and they sometimes have toilets without any partitions so people can watch each other? have a chat? what do you talk about at a time like that anyway?

Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]


Sex, not gender. Gender means 'culturally bound stereotypes about the sexes'.... people confuse the two leading to all sorts of muddled ideas....

It is impossible to change sex. Stereotypes about men and women can and do change over the years....

There have always been people who wanted to socially live as the other sex and mostly they haven't really caused many problems. But now a bunch of medical hucksters are telling people it's possible to physically change sex (it's not) and those who in the past would just be heterosexual transvestites (another common enough minority) have found a way to force the rest of society to play along with their kink....

Life / In Poland on holiday - need help with bad case of homesickness [108]


I've always had the impression that hypochondriacs enjoy themselves greatly finding horrible things to suffer from and being relieved when that isn't it....


If the NHS is so great why did it take so long to catch Letby? Serious question.... usually angel-of-death serial killers who target small children are found relatively quickly (those who target the very old and/or sick can avoid detection longer) but in her case officials bent over backward to keep her on the job and killing babies..... what went wrong?

History / Historical look at various civilisational differences between Russia and the West [159]


Well putain gave them a story to explain all their terrible history (or their massive failure after 1991 at least): "The west did this to you because they're jealous of russian superiority!"

It makes no sense but enough people bought it that that's the story they tell themselves...

Life / In Poland on holiday - need help with bad case of homesickness [108]


Say what you want, but hypochondriacs, as they say, tend to have overall levels of good health.

I remember after Poland entered the EU (and interest in the US disappeared I started following some British news sources) I was surprised at how often I saw stories about someone who'd seen X number doctors (often in the double digits) none of which recognized that the patient had something like stage four lung cancer.... (not just one story it seemed there was something similar on an almost weekly basis....)

A British person told me (on line) that it was culture. British doctors (following British attitudes in general) are often too optimistic and take the position that most things patients complain about are minor and will resolve themselves whereas Polish doctors tend to be pessimistic and want to test anything that moves....

As irritating as all the extra tests in Poland can be.... I'd rather go through them than be waved away when something is really wrong....

History / Historical look at various civilisational differences between Russia and the West [159]


It's worse than that....

Germany could look at its past and rightly claim that the nazi period was a fluke... an evolving civic society that took a disastrous wrong turn but many intellectual, economic and cultural achievements showed it would and could get back on a more productive path again.....

all of russian history is a clusterfkvk of dysfunction and violence.... the soviet period, as awful as it was, was far from the worse.... and not much in the way of real economic or intellectual achievements to show for it (and not that much culturally if you compare it with Germany or France for example) they even had slavery

russians don't really have any (true) story they can tell themselves to do better.... the closest they have is winning WWII but soviet/russian history after 1944 is nothing to be proud of...

It's a tragedy since many russians are very intelligent... but simple intelligence is not enough without the appropriate social insititutions which.... they don't have and they have no prospects of getting....

Ukraine is a very different case, culturally a bit more like Poles than russians (more individually oriented and more likely to openly criticize those in power)...

History / Historical look at various civilisational differences between Russia and the West [159]


That's the ongoing russian tragedy (one of them at any rate) they long for the material goods of the west but have no understanding of the institutional infrastructure needed (and no interest in learning).

So... they copy the form but the results are then, predictably, awful.... the best example is how they managed to combine industrialization with famine...

The more current russian tragedy is that they crave respect from western countries but have no understanding of what respect is based on in the west (and don't want to learn).

Germany went from one of the most hated countries in the world to one that is widely respected.... ditto Japan... how did they do that?

russians don't know they just stamp their feet like children and threaten to blow up the party....

Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]


They have.... now they're working on brand new failures!


"Gender binary" is a religious term.

Now more broadly sexual non-conformists are certainly a cultural universal and among consenting adults, I mostly approve, they make life more interesting...

But I don't approve of medical interventions for minors, sexualizing children ('drag kids'), biological men in women's spaces or the idea that a person's subjective feeling that they are the other sex should be commercialized and/or medicalized.

Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]


How is the idea of gendered souls or 'trans kids' related to evolution? You seem to think you understand it but both seem like giant steps backward to me... a fair amount of trans ideas just seem like a new type of homophobic conversion therapy.


Believing them? Acting on their perceptions? An anorexics 'lived experience' is that her (much more rarely his) extreme weight loss makes them look better...

Do you think this person should be encourage to lose more weight?

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Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]


Nothing about the idea of gendered souls ending up in the wrong meatsacks that then need expensive lifelong medical interventions to correct suggests "evolution" to me....


Another religion I do not believe in! People's subjective experience is not necessarily accurate and should not bind other people....

Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]


No. I'm recognizing sex as an organizing principle for society (male / female)

Gender is just culturally bound stereotypes about the sexes.... (which differ to some degree between cultures).


I don't follow the gender religion. Men and Women are sex categories and not metaphysical identities.


I only grumble when violent psychotic men are to be housed (or want ot be housed) in female prisons.... that's not where they belong.

Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]


Born male, impossible to change through surgery.... listening to trans ideology is like listening to Lysenkoism or Creationism... (and I'm not a believer in any of the three).

Separate facilities for trans-identifying males is a perfectly acceptable solution (along with a division in sports open / female (born)

I'm extremely reasonable.... but I have very firm boundaries around ideas like 'consenting adults' so.... minors cannot legally consent to invasive, elective surgery.

Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]


cause.... he's not a female....


I do not understand that word salad.... I have no problem with most trans adults.... I have problems with

trans 'care' extended to minors.... like puberty blockers (dangerous and not reversible) and invasive procedures like cutting off healthy breasts or castrating adolescent males in the name of 'healthcare'... it's worse than voodoo...

males competing in female categories (like "Lia" Thomas)

people thinking it's actually possible to change sex (rather than just mimic the other sex)

AGP's trying to horn their ways into female only spaces.... (and/or trying to guilt women into dating them).

I think things were better for trans people before a bunch of hack 'surgeons' began harming them with dysfunctional "medical" interventions...


It's an ongoing story that I follow (one of about a dozen or so). It's significant because it's harming children now and based on magical thinking and being pushed by corporations for reasons that don't make much sense to me....

Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]

Meanwhile, in the UK... Sarah Jane Baker as trans-identified man who's spent decades in prison for psychotic violent attacks broke the conditions of his early release but is not.... pleased that he's being housed in a male prison and has gone on a hunger strike to be sent to a women's prison where he has lots of captive targets....

And... some horribly misguided fools are supporting her....

thepinknews.com/2023/08/17/sarah-jane-baker-trans-pride-speech-protest-westminster/

Meanwhile another beautiful message of trans joy....

twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1693501960945623047/photo/1

History / What should Russia and Poland do to become if not friends, then at least not enemies? [945]


Depends on who.... traditionally in the US adults didn't integrate/assimilate but they didn't block their children from doing so.... and the same happens when Europeans move from one country to the other or when some non-Europeans move to Europe... Vietnamese that move to Europe generally accept that their children will be more like the people from the new country than them...

But muslims have a hard time with that... socialized to think they are better than others the parents often actively sabotage efforts of their children to integrate/assimilate and instead do their best to pass on their own culture shock trauma.... (see.... any European country with a large muslim population...)

Many muslims are lovely people (I've genuinely liked most muslims I've known) but large scale muslim migration to Europe has failed in bascially every country that's tried it.... the experiment's done... we know how it ends (failure) maybe we should stop trying to replicate a non-existent success and move on....

Back to the topic of the thread please

History / What should Russia and Poland do to become if not friends, then at least not enemies? [945]


last I heard only about half of the 2015 Merkel jugend have ever found employment....

Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]


Maybe some HSTS'a no AGP's (and probably no trans 'men' since that wasn't a thing then)


you seriously gonna play "А у вас негров линчуют" with me? .... seriously?

Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]


A weird thing TRAs do is retro-actively trans people.... they claim that two of the figures related to the Stonewall riots were trans...(a gay man and a lesbian both of whom occasionally cross-dressed) an identity rejected by both. Does this stop the TRAs? No. They keep saying Stonewall was caused by trans people..

They've also doctored early pictures of gay rights protests editing in pro-trans sentiments that did not exist at the time.

TRA's are the russians of progressive politics.... it's all lies and violence with them.

Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]


Most Americans, when I was there, knew there's a difference between direct democracy (largely unworkable at national scales... Switzerland comes close at time) and representative democracy...

When I left the national IQ seems to have plummeted....

Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]


Nonsense.... the trans 'movement' is partly a big pharma psy op that many naive progessives haven't looked into enough to be horrified at.... listening to stories of detransitioners should make any sane person want to pull the brakes hard on the whole psyop

Weirdly, the psyop takes the form of a pseudo-religion whose tenets posit the existence of gendered souls that sometimes get stuck into the wrong meat sacks which then need a lifetime of expensive medical interventions to maintain.

If you look at what they say with a critical eye it falls apart in seconds....

There is no such thing as a 'trans kid', there is no ethical or medical justification for giving angsty teenage girls masectomies so they can pretend to be boys

There's no medical or ethical justification for castrating teenage boys

Puberty blockers do permanent damage as do many other interventions being carried out on confused young people...

I'm not against adult trans people but it's a tiny minority that's best served through counseling and/or medical procedures no early than age 25 or so.

Travel / Being Transgender and visiting Wroclaw [467]


there has always been a very small minority of people who want to socially live as the other sex, they are simply a part of the human condition....

but now, this has been monetized by big Pharma and doctors with no scruples and they are told it is actually possible to change sex.... it's one thing if an adult chooses to undergo these.... procedures after appropriate counseling and education (they are painful and not very successful and mostly result in a simulacrum of the.... target sex.

It's completely another to be selling these to minor children (as has been done).... there is no excuse for cutting off healthy breasts of adolescent girls who are usually just going through a phase or for castrating adolescent males who, left alone, would probably simply grow up into gay men

interestingly on twitter at least many of the most vocal opponents of the trans agenda are gay men and lesbians who realize they would have been targeted if they were adolescents now

this guy puts it pretty well...

twitter.com/big_figgot/status/1688705985370533890

there's also exulansic who thought she was trans for a few years and now analyzes it as a pseudo-religion

twitter.com/TTExulansic

History / What should Russia and Poland do to become if not friends, then at least not enemies? [945]


Who is this "We" you're talking about?

Language / When do I use certain characters? [33]


It's lexically conditioned, sort of like different plural endings in German. Learn the most forms and then guess when you need to.

A few nouns (most famously krawat) seem to be able to take either....

Also -u tends to block facultative animacy (treating an inanimate noun as if it were animate).

Language / When do I use certain characters? [33]


... not really, Polish vowels are all supposed to be clearly pronounced.


when in doubt, guess, you'll be understood


Years ago I was trying to teach someone Polish. This person was multilingual including very good Latin. the problem was they couldn't switch gears from the Latin case system (all settled and cut and dried) to the Polish system which is dynamic and always changing (in small increments here and there).

At one point I was asked.... "Did something happen?.... Someting must have happened to make Polish this way!"

History / This anti-Ukrainian propaganda for no valid reasons must stop [70]


Did they tell you that Poles are just demonically possessed Germans and try to turn you into a German?

Language / When do I use certain characters? [33]


maybe.... the difference is count vs non-count? just the first thing that comes to mind.... or maybe more or less definite?

I remembering having the idea that often the genitive has an idea of uncertainty / lack of concreteness that the accusative has

chcesz kawę? / chcesz kawy? the first certainly seems more common

what's the difference between

co chcesz? / czego chcesz?

Language / When do I use certain characters? [33]


Don't beat yourself up... there are a few verbs which supposedly govern the genitive (according to dictionaries) but which in practice are often found with the accusative and potrzebować is one of those (along with używać).

History / What should Russia and Poland do to become if not friends, then at least not enemies? [945]


What else does he have?


their own choices created the years of harship and chaos.... people in Poland also had a very hard 90s but never descended into anything like mafia wars or social disintegration. different countries, different cultures, different choices.....

Life / Polish fences - complete anthology [74]


And most of the yards are very well kempt and some are quite nice to look at....

In socio-anthropological terms, I think a factor (a big difference between Poland and the British Isles) is something called Uncertainty Avoidance. British Isles are low in this and Poland is pretty high (Germany and the US are sort of inbetween the US closer to the BI and Germany closer to Poland).

The idea is people in high UA cultures (like Poland) don't like ambiguous uncertain situations. Fences help remind everybody what belongs to who and create a more structured environment while housing areas with a lack of clear boundaries incites low grade (mostly sub-conscious) anxiety.

History / What should Russia and Poland do to become if not friends, then at least not enemies? [945]


russian culture weren't a cesspit devoted to theft and war?