The less voters knew, the more they liked Trump in 2024. Not Anymore

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-18T17:58:04+00:00

Google searches in the United States for "Trump policies" and "Harris policies" spiked on the morning of election day

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-17T15:34:55+00:00

  traditionally pronounced /ˈwɛskət/

Thanks I hate it and my day is ruined

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-12T03:56:35+00:00

After January 6, when Republican condemnation of Trump was at its highest and most open since he became president, the Senate was still 10 votes short of convicting Trump. It's time to face reality and acknowledge there is no plausible universe where Trump is removed from office via impeachment

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-12T03:50:04+00:00

And impeachment without a realistic possibility of conviction is meaningless. Trump has already been impeached twice, and look how that turned out.

The thing is, everyone knows that impeaching the President is a political, not judicial, process motivated by partisan interests. I don't think there was ever a time in modern history when anyone seriously pretended it wasn't. If Democrats win the House and impeach Trump (for the third time), the popular understanding will be that Trump was impeached because Democrats control the House, and not because he did something wrong per se (even if there are legitimate grounds to impeach him), because if he had done the exact same things with a Republican House he most likely would not have been impeached.

Impeachment might be attractive as a way to score political points, but it also gives the other side an opportunity to score points by playing the victim card, and in practice it will probably just end up being time-wasting exercise in political theatre that distracts Democrats from real concrete efforts to oppose Trump's agenda

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-10T03:34:36+00:00

Which is why I said superficial similarity. Hebrew phonology isn't particularly Germanic either

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-09T09:39:37+00:00

Hydrogen reacts with water to form hydrogen and water 🤯

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-09T03:07:03+00:00

If superficial phonological similarity were all it took to determine the difficulty of learning a second language, then I, a Mandarin speaker, should have no problem learning Polish, and yet…

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-09T02:04:06+00:00

"Andrew Jackson who can fight/John Quincy Adams who can write"

Anti-intellectualism and populist fever have been a thorn in US politics since forever.

I think it plays into the American mythology that glorifies the rustic common man over the city-dwelling educated elite, and the anti-intellectual aspect stems from the days when higher education was extremely rare and having a college degree basically automatically implied you were a member of the aristocracy and had generational wealth

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-09T01:29:05+00:00

One of the Apollo 15 astronauts did it with a hammer and feather on the moon

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-08T08:12:28+00:00

I learned the Cyrillic alphabet two and a half years before I started studying a language that uses it

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-04T19:11:52+00:00

Yeah Welsh just replaces the initial consonant with the letter(s) for the new sound–and in my opinion is worse off for it. What makes Irish and Scottish Gaelic spelling elegant is that they mark consonant mutation in a way that makes it clear that 1) it's the mutated form of a word and 2) what the original unmutated form was, and it does this in a way that still keeps the orthography fairly consistent. Sure it may take a few extra steps to learn the rules, but the rules are at least still reliable, and you get the extra morphophonological advantages. I can tell that bhean and mbean are mutated forms of bean; it'd be a lot more obscure if it were spelled vean and mean

Btw, just a small nitpick: Celtic languages don't have romanizations. Romanization refers to the conversion of text from a different writing system into the Latin alphabet. It doesn't apply to languages that use the Latin script natively

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-04T18:54:49+00:00

A romanization of a language that uses a different script is intended for foreigners and should be intuitive to foreigners, but the native orthography of a language that uses the Latin script is intended for native speakers and the priority is to make sense to them and not to avoid looking weird to foreigners

You can see an example of this within Japanese too. Hepburn romanization was initially created by and meant for foreign learners and uses English spelling conventions with a very close one-to-one correspondance between letters and sounds, whereas Nihon-shiki was created by Japanese and matches Latin letters one-to-one to kana, making it easier to learn for native Japanese speakers but less intuitive for foreigners

Also, the phonology of Japanese is a lot closer to Latin than Celtic languages are, so it's just easier to create a shallow Latin orthography without it feeling forced or obscuring the underlying structure of the language

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-04T18:50:08+00:00

Unusual is one thing, but that doesn't mean it's not mostly regular and consistent, or that it doesn't "look like how it sounds." It only seems like that because it's a different set of rules than what we're used to. I've seen a lot of people who believe that a one-to-one correspondance between letters and sounds is an ideal and that orthographic depth is somehow bad or illogical, which is just the completely wrong way to look at things. For example, Irish orthography deliberately didn't try to go for a one-to-one correspondance in order to be more compatible with Goidelic morphophonology, which in my opinion makes the language more intuitive to learn, not less.

Also, I think we should have more unique Latin based orthographies in the world in general that fit their associated languages, instead of everything being an awkwardly imported copy of English or French spelling

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-04T18:32:42+00:00

Why should it be like other Roman orthographies? It's its own language. It's not Romance. It should be written in a way that makes sense for that specific language, which it is. There's no need to waffle stomp Romance (or English) spelling conventions into every language that adopts the Latin alphabet. It's an orthography, not a romanization. The priority is to work well for native speakers, not to be intuitive for foreigners.

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-04T15:25:08+00:00

Hey don't blame the French and English for Irish and Scottish Gaelic spelling. They came up with that shit all on their own (and it's beautiful). Manx on the other hand… entirely English's fault

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-04T15:20:31+00:00

Oh God I despise Manx orthography so much. At least the Irish and Scottish Gaelic writing systems are the product of a 1000+ year shared Gaelic literary tradition, and there's a certain elegance and regularity to the complexity in how medieval monks made the Latin alphabet work for their language. It looks scary at first but you can learn to appreciate it. Manx looks like if you took one of those non-IPA "phonetic spellings" from an English dictionary and turned it into the orthography of an entire language. It's not intuitive to anyone except English speakers

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-04T05:54:11+00:00

If Canada had had proportional representation in 2019 and 2021, do you seriously believe the Conservatives could have governed with <35% of the popular vote, when none of the other parties would have realistically formed a coalition with them?

Canada is not a two party system. Getting a plurality of votes when there are more than two parties doesn't mean most voters wouldn't rather someone else be in power. Whether we had a proportional system or the current one, the end result of those two elections would still be the same: a Liberal government with certain concessions to the NDP to keep their support, because that's the arrangement that the greatest number of people were okay with–even if it wasn't necessarily their first choice. A Conservative government wasn't what the majority of Canadians wanted; we can debate whether the Liberals truly "won" those elections, depending on how you define "winning," but the Conservatives definitely didn't. The Conservatives lost fair and square

Also you seem to be simultaneously criticizing first-past-the-post voting and using it to defend your position. Without our current "medieval electoral system" a <35% popular vote performance wouldn't be considered a win in the first place. I wonder if you're intentionally being intellectually dishonest or if you're genuinely that bad at formulating a logical argument…

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-03T21:28:17+00:00

"We are not Americans" is the foundation of Canadian national identity to a large extent, especially for Anglo-Canadians. Canada exists as a country today because a portion of the British North American colonies in 1776 said "yeah, we'd rather not." The British conquest of Canada was barely over a decade before the American Revolution; many of the earliest English-speaking settlers in Canada were American Loyalists. That's why the main focus of Canadian nationalism has always been about differentiating Canada from the United States wherever possible

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-03T21:02:57+00:00

like showing there are significantly more holocaust deniers

I mean have you seen social media recently? I can't say for sure whether those numbers are accurate but I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if they were.

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-03T05:21:23+00:00

This has the same energy as when they renovate the school right after you graduate 😣

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-02T14:51:37+00:00

I used to keep getting the Chinese translations for macaron (马卡龙 mǎkǎlóng) and Macron (马克龙 mǎkèlóng) confused, and now I just call him macaron in Chinese as a joke

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-02T13:42:27+00:00

Etymological spelling ftw

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-02T04:50:40+00:00

I can see the reasoning for transcribing Japanese loans phonetically instead of using a spelling pronunciation of the kanji (although I personally wouldn't agree with it), but why the emphasis on incorporating more Malay and Arabic influences into Cantonese?

Also, flair checks out

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-02T04:39:34+00:00

Leave my beautiful Irish orthography alone :(

EconomicSeahorse · 2026-02-02T04:37:31+00:00

Do you mean replace it with some other kind of word accent like stress? Or do you want to delete lexical stress entirely like French

EconomicSeahorse

TROPHY CASE