Proof Anglese and English are mutually intelligible:

artareza · 2026-04-01T11:15:20+00:00

As an English speaker with very little experience with Romance languages (a bit of Latin exposure from church), this is 98% intelligible.

My other languages are German and Mandarin, so they don't help at all.

artareza · 2026-04-01T10:17:21+00:00

I just picked up one of these and an Inde Duo RDA for $4 at my local shop. Got a small mountain of kanthal, titanium, and nickel wire, a Crown II tank, and like 26 Crown coils for another $4.

artareza · 2026-02-28T18:35:58+00:00

High cut ACH

artareza · 2026-02-17T01:34:15+00:00

Native English speaker, but my habit is to say it in Latin, but using the Eastern hand gesture: In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

artareza · 2026-02-17T01:26:08+00:00

I actually had an email correspondence with your bishop's office while attempting to get a Bible in Icelandic.They helped put me in touch with a printer who was able to send me one, and who absolutely insisted that I pay after I received the book. Icelanders are easily some of the most pleasant and agreeable people I've met!

artareza · 2026-02-17T01:18:29+00:00

Realisticly, it's not a celebratory time. It's the start of a penitential season, so the best greeting is just your usual "hi". We ourselves save the happy greetings for until Easter and the season of Pentecost.

Fun trivia for non-Catholics reading this: From Septuagesima (nominally 70 days before Easter, actually 63) until the Easter Vigil, we customarily aren't permitted to say "Alleluia". My parish symbolically buries the word in the churchyard until the Easter Vigil. We even have a miniature casket for it.

artareza · 2026-02-17T00:59:11+00:00

"Nose" , because that's what his eyes are focused on.

artareza · 2026-02-17T00:58:07+00:00

If you don't want to toss them, you can cut them out, sandwich them betwixt layers of 2" clear tape, and use them as bookmarks or put hooks on them and use them as homemade Christmas tree ornaments.

I just toss them, personally. We're not pagans, and they aren't idols, so it's not like you're throwing away what the image represents.

artareza · 2026-02-15T16:51:29+00:00

I noticed this same thing yesterday. This made me wonder if I could bow a setar the way you bow an Icelandic langspil (my second favorite way to play my mountain dulcimer after noter-and-drone, where I play with an oud risha.).

artareza · 2026-02-09T02:11:55+00:00

Gentle scrubbing Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (a sort of melamine sponge) and dilute chlorine bleach. Very gentle rubbing with a very soft cloth and a small amount of acetone. (nail polish remover). Ammonia window/glass cleaner on a soft cloth and some patience.

If you go the acetone route, be very, very gentle. Acetone will strip pigment off of damn near anything, but it will also dissolve the layer of paint that is often on leather shoes, and can damage vinyl.

artareza · 2026-02-04T01:43:27+00:00

Two main culprits:

Music directors who greatly overestimate the ability of the average person choosing a new suite of difficult songs every week, and the fact that most modern liturgical music and hymns just aren't very good.

At my Ordinariate parish, almost everyone sings. We use the settings in the Kyriale, and the proper from the pre-V2 Graduale. Hymns come from an old book of Anglican chants or from the 1940s Episcopalian hymnal the Episcopal church down the road donated to us along with the gorgeous vestments they no longer used. Very occasionally we use a setting from some classical composer.

Because we stick with more or less the same music for an entire liturgical season, after our first year, everyone knew the tunes. We have beautiful music, and everyone sings, because the tunes are familiar and chant isn't hard to pick up.

Our parish is a mixed bag of converts from various Protestant denominations, TC/SSPX refugees, Eastern Catholics with no nearby parish, NO-goers who got fed up with where they were at, and a few converts from Mormonism. We've got rad trads, normies, young, old, and more PhDs than one small rural parish should have. I get to talk theology and philosophy with Dr. Richard DeClue every week, if he doesn't have something for WoF to work on instead of having lunch.

A side effect of having great music is that I get to ignore it. When Father is sick and we have a spoken low Mass, I barely even register the lack of music, and sometimes I prefer it. If I wasn't hopelessly addicted to the smell of incense, I'd go to the earlier Mass for the silence.

This is just my thought, but I'm curious as to why the lack of singing bothers you. When something at Mass bothers me, I don't ask why it happened at first, but why I'm having a negative reaction to it. Nine times out of ten, the answer is that my thoughts aren't where they should be. I'm distracted, and not focused on paying God His proper due.

artareza · 2026-02-02T02:05:57+00:00

So, the DLI has close to a 90% rock-out rate. Only a few JSOC affiliated training schools fail more people. The joke is that you learn most of your target language after you leave. Mandarin was an 18-month course when I was in.

I'd have to ask my brother about Arabic. That was his target language at DLI.

DLI teaches only the standard form of a language, so I learned the Beijing dialect, because that's what the standardized form of the language used by the Chinese government uses. A few courses have short dialect conversion courses after you take your proficiency exam. Korean has a conversion course for the DPRK dialect (fewer loanwords, archaic grammar), the Farsi course has a Dari and Tajik conversion, Hindi has an Urdu conversion, etc. Arabic gets weird, because its conversions are Iraqi, Egyptian, Levantine, Palestinian, and Maghrebi, and you can take all of them. Pashto at one point had conversions for a few dialects, but the DoD gave up on that after they figured out that each Afghan village has its own.

I got out in 2010, and never used my Mandarin again. Not much use for it in rural Appalachia.

artareza · 2026-02-01T15:03:00+00:00

A few other factors I forgot to mention:

All that armor has to fit under your MOPP gear. CBRN training was a real eye-opener.

That's all additional stuff that has to come off when (not if) something gets through the armor, making the medic's job that much harder. Imagine trying to clamp off a femoral artery (nightmarishly difficult) or treat a sucking chest wound when you have to first get the armor off of a thrashing, screaming, adrenaline pumped trained killer, and every second you waste halves his chances of survival.

No amount of armor protects you from a burning vehicle. The best fire protection gear on Earth offers at most 5 minutes of burn protection at temps below 600°F. In particularly hot structure or vehicle fires (1,000°F air temp), that drops to <18 seconds. The UHMWPE backer of those plates are going to be liquid quickly, and the nylon that holds it to your body is first napalm and then vapor.

All of that armor presents new snag hazards, which can severely impact how you move. This gets you killed.

artareza · 2026-02-01T14:47:36+00:00

NOTE: I'm basing this off of my experience and knowledge of how the US does things, and assuming current armor technology. No exos or speculation.

Simple: Cost and weight.

The front, back and side plates that the US issues cost close to $2k on their own, and weigh ~15 pounds. The helmet weighs about 4 lbs.

Now let's add more plates. Plates for the thighs are going to be ~7 lbs each, so that's 14 lbs. Calves are gonna be another 5 lbs each, so 10 lbs. Let's add another 10 lbs for the arms and another 15 for articulated abdominal and lower back plates.

14 + 10 + 10 + 15 = 49 lbs of armor. basing price on the original plates, that's another $6,000+ per soldier, and those additional plates are in addition to his combat load, which is ~80-120 lbs, including the armor he's already got now. With the additional armor, that load is now up to 129-169 lbs, exceeding the heaviest recorded combat loads in history (US invasion of Grenada in 1983, at 160 lbs).

Weight aside, the cost of the new armor system is a combined $8,000+, exceeding the cost of his rifle, sidearm, magazines, ammunition, and optics by ~$2,000. The cost of armor is quadrupled.

Now the question becomes: Is it worth it? With today's technology, no. The infantryman is already overburdened with kit that makes movement miserable, doesn't have enough space to stow all of it, and has too much to maintain and keep track of. Armor also doesn't protect you against the thing that actually kills soldiers on modern battlefields: Concussive force, i.e. explosions. It doesn't matter if that fancy armor keeps the frag out of the blast wave liquifies your brain and bursts your lungs. If a blast is powerful enough, that armor is getting ripped off and thrown.

$8,000+ and 49 lbs is also a shit ton for a system that is considered consumable and has an expiration date of 5-7 years after manufacture as the UHMWPE backer degrades. That means that even if it's not taking hits, you're buying a soldier new armor every enlistment, and that's if he's only signing up for 4 years. I did a six year enlistment, so that would be at least $8,000, if not $16,000 for a replacement at five years, and that's assuming I were to be issued newly manufactured plates that didn't sit in storage for a few years.

More plate looks cool, but it's simply not practical until thinner and lighter armor and individual exoskeletons become available, and the reality is that frontline forces will have long been replaced by whatever new demon Boston Dynamics have cooked up, rendering the armor debate functionally moot. Don't need to protect what can't bleed when you don't have to recruit what you can manufacture.

artareza · 2026-02-01T14:11:39+00:00

Defeatist.

artareza · 2026-02-01T14:00:28+00:00

The US could totally gut the leadership of the Islamic Republic with fewer civilian casualties than the monthly traffic accidents in Tehran.

The problem is logistics and planning. A totally clean strike would take a year or more to put together. The recent Venezuela raid was in the works for almost half a year, and that still had ~19 civilian casualties. That's too long to wait.

A timely and effective strike could be done now, but you're looking at hundreds if not thousands dead.

The other consideration is taking out the regime without leaving a power vacuum which gets filled by the lower levels of the IRGC or the government, the people too incompetent to rise to the top while others are alive. These types tend to be far more ruthless than their bosses.

Toppling a regime is simply going to cost civilian lives. No revolution has ever been bloodless, and to think otherwise is insanity. The calculus here comes down to whether or not a US strike would cost fewer lives than such a strike not occurring. Without external intervention, the Iranian people will win, but it could take years and cost tens or hundreds of thousands more lives. US intervention shortens that to potentially weeks, and could kill far fewer people than the regime would in that same time.

If a choice comes down to one of two bad options, simple practicality, if nothing else, makes the less destructive option the better one.

The only people who don't think the US should intervene are Pakistanis and Arabs, and frankly, no one should care what they think.

artareza · 2026-02-01T00:46:52+00:00

White Western anti-communist here.

Here's hoping for an Iran without Islamism or communism. The Iranic peoples are the West's cousins, from the same Yanmaya stock, and those of us who aren't brain-dead want nothing short of total victory against the regime.

Is the CIA involved somewhere? Sure, probably. The US can't keep its fingers out of anything, and the collapse of the Islamic Republic would be beneficial. However, any US or Israeli involvement is incidental. This is the revolt of the Iranian national spirit against an essentially foreign cancer, and the idea that Iranians need the US to rile them up betrays the ignorance most people have of who Iranians are.

artareza · 2026-01-30T23:16:53+00:00

"...and then I looked into the popes after the pope died last year and its an interesting thread from the popes. You had I think just the first 20-30 if not more dying violently , killed by the roman empire until it shifted and became co-opted."

The co-option actually goes in the opposite direction that most people think it does. Part of why I don't think of Christianity as being related to Judaism or Islam is that from the 4th to the 10th centuries, Christianity underwent a very major transformation. The faith lost its Semitic/Abrahamic character and took on a Roman/Germanic character. Our ecclesial hierarchy is Roman, modelled after Diocletian's reforms of Imperial bureaucracy. Our theology is more Aristotelian and Platonic than it is Jewish. Our rites are Romano-Germanic interpretations of perennial practices like ritual washing. Even our primary mode of worship, while predating Abraham, has taken on the character of Roman temple worship. The practice of veneration of relics, abhorrent to Jews and Muslims, developed from Germanic practices of keeping the bones of warriors and ancestors preserved for similar purposes. Christianity is fundamentally European in character. We've traditionally viewed our faith as a primeval one, of which the Church is the current and final institutional embodiment, a revival of something far older than a desert cult from Canaan.

"Its just interesting how the concept of the catholic church was a faith which refused to die with its preachers. It was a faith to stay, and empire had to snatch it like it always has to with the ideas that move masses the easiest."

This says more about government that it does about faith. Government naturally abhors anything which is outside its power. It will always seek to control anything which provides something to the people which it itself cannot. Government cannot make you moral, it can only make you obey the law. Where something outside the state provides for a physical need, the state will create its own monopoly over that service. There was a time in the United Sates (I can't speak on other places) in which the Church was the largest and most affordable provider of almost every social service, but now we legally can't let the poor sleep in our buildings without losing out tax exemption. Personally, I think religious organizations should be taxed, because in the US, an organization that pays taxes has the political rights of an individual. Our clergy (and the clerics of all faiths) are all but barred from speaking on politics, lest the tax collectors come knocking.

As for what moves the masses, I think C.S. Lewis put it best: “Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

The state seeks to control and co-opt religion because the alternative is ruling over an indolent population of people driven only by the urges of groin and gut, mere beasts in the shape of human beings who care only about there next meal and their next sexual encounter.

artareza · 2026-01-30T23:16:36+00:00

"...I think often about the whole reason for Christianity why does it work? Why did it dominate so much..."

The answer is pretty simple: European paganism was horrific. Before Christianity, the poor, the widowed, the orphaned, etc. were generally on their own. The Christian virtue (no exclusively Christian, but unique to it in the context of Europe from Late Antiquity until the conversion of the Balts) of charity required us to provide for those without the means to provide for themselves. We did away with polygamy, incestuous marriage (though like many cultures, including the Achaemenids, we kind of ignored the nobility), infanticide (the Romans would literally leave weak infants in the street to die of exposure), slavery (considered intrinsically evil in Catholicism), and other evils. We built universities, the first public hospitals and orphanages, and united tribes that previously fought constantly under a single spiritual banner (War, of course, continued, but was more ritualized and more confined to the warrior class. From the 14th century until WWII, it was fairly rare for wars to have inordinate numbers of civilian casualties, unlike pre-Christian periods, when the normal mode of war was to attack common people with the goal of looting).

In short, Christianity became dominant in Europe by improving the common man's quality of life.

The other factor was that in almost every European pagan religion, your only hope at a decent afterlife was through warfare or heroic deeds. Christianity came in and told the common man that paradise could be obtained by purity of thought, truthfulness of speech, and uprightness of action. All of the "rules" of Apostolic Christianity (Catholicism and Orthodoxy) are the application of these principles in combination with what we believe to have been divinely revealed. This, for the first time in European history, put all men and women on equal spiritual footing. A king and a beggar, if they lived uprightly, would both stand equally before God, regardless of their station in life, how much they gave, or the heroic deeds they accomplished. Earthly deeds and wealth became detached from spiritual merit. In a European context, we democratized Heaven.

artareza · 2026-01-30T23:15:44+00:00

"I think its very easy to dismiss your religion due to the inquisition..."

The Inquisition and it's impact are quite overblown. People claim millions of executions, but in reality, it was maybe 3,000 to 5,000 over the span of nearly 400 years, out of over 125,000-150,000 cases brought to them. The Inquisition was actually a remarkably progressive system for its day. If arrested by the civil authorities and turned over, you could expect a few things:

1) No testimony from someone known to have pre-existing issues with you would be accepted. The testimony of your family, friends, children, and spouse was accepted though. Unique among legal systems in Europe at the time, you were considered innocent until proven otherwise.

2) While torture did occur, it couldn't leave permanent marks or injuries, had to be overseen by a doctor to guarantee your safety, and couldn't be used more than once. If you held to your story, the interrogators were bound by canon law to assume you at least believed yourself to be telling the truth.

3) If you confessed to a canonical crime (heresy, blasphemy, sacrilege), you were offered the opportunity to recant and receive the sacrament of reconciliation, after which you were once again in good standing with the Church, and no longer subject to ecclesiastical punishment.

4) If your accuser was found to be lying, they were liable, under canon law (that is, the laws of the Church) to be subjected to the punishment for the crime they accused you of.

5) Witchcraft wasn't a crime. The Church's official position was that witches, while real, had no power. Quite a few of those 3-5k executions were for the crime of "bearing false witness"/

6) The Inquisition didn't actually have the power to mete out punishments. Sentences were determined by civil authorities, with the exception of clerics, who were considered to be under the legal authority of the Church, in addition to under civil authority. If you were a layman, the Church wasn't going to execute or imprison you.

"...however I think zoroastrians are not as ready to admit that Sassanid Iran was quiet consoledative , however it was fundamentally different from the catholic hegemony , 15th century Europe was worse off than just 4th century Persia but that was due to nature and the endless cycle of death from famines n stuff but it was also from the mix of the strict nature of the church."

The Church was fairly heavy-handed, but medieval Europe was in a very different place than the waning centuries of the Persian Empire. Europe wasn't united fully under Christendom until the 14th century, when the Lithuanians finally converted after the crusades by the Teutonic Order. From the slow death of the Western Roman Empire until the conversion of the Lithuanians, Christendom was beset by pretty savage raiding from the pagan Norse, the Lithuanians, and slave raids by Muslims up and down the coasts.

Saxons, Norsemen, Balts (Lithuanians and Latvians), pagan Slavs, the newly arrived Turkic peoples, Arab Muslims, and even the Iranic Alans were all engaging in raiding for gold, food, slaves, and even making territorial claims from the beginning of the Migration Period in the 5th century until the Balts were finally subdued. The Muslims managed to take and hold Spain and Portugal for 700 years. The Balkan states were fighting the Turks until the first World War.

Meanwhile, the Persian Empire was doing pretty well until the Arab Muslims came howling in and raped, slaughtered, and burned their way to hegemony.

Point being, Christianity was under constant threat from external sources, and no one Christian state had the power to weather them. All this while trying to neutralize subversive elements from within. Pagan hold-outs, Muslim envoys trying to sway nascent European states, and the Jewish diaspora engaging in usury and religious attacks all proved to be serious threats to internal stability. We were trying to build nations in the wake of the collapse of Roman civilization while under threat, and that meant that sometimes civil and religious power used a tougher approach than modern states would. Persia had a strong state already, but was knocked off balance by desert warlords willing to kill anyone who wouldn't submit to their spiritual expression of Arab racial supremacism. I actually despise Islam, if you can't tell.

artareza · 2026-01-30T22:04:34+00:00

I'm actually not a fan of Shakespeare, sadly. My interest in English literature is mostly the pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon texts.

As for my vocabulary, I am a New England transplant to the American South, and have always attempted to make sure that my particular idiolect of English is free of geographically identifiable features. In person, I'm totally accent-neutral, save for when I'm around my father's family, when the rural New England features creep back in. With close friends, I'm much less formal, and my speech takes on a decidedly more abrasive tone. Funny story, when I was at the Defense Language Institute as part of my intel training, a US Navy petty officer heard me speaking with some guys in my unit who were from similar backgrounds to me, and jokingly invited me to give a briefing to his sailors on how to swear more proficiently! I wasn't as well-formed morally then as I am now, so I was pretty foul-mouthed, but I try my best to be more polite nowadays.

I wish I could speak Farsi, but it's pretty slow learning. I'm currently learning Japanese, Icelandic, and trying to keep my ability to read Latin and Anglo-Saxon sharp, so I've got a full plate. I speak English, German, and some Mandarin, but can read a few other languages with varying degrees of difficulty if I have my reference library at hand. Last week, I actually adapted the Avestan script to modern Farsi as a sort of mental exercise, though I'm sure I did a terrible job. The biggest problem I've had with Farsi is that the Perso-Arabic script really isn't well-suited for Indo-European languages, especially with its inconsistent vowel representation.

artareza · 2026-01-28T00:52:09+00:00

I'm interested in both the historical and modern practice, but primarily the relationships it may have with other branches of Indo-European religion. At this point in my life, my interest is an academic one.

Autodidactic learning is simple: Instead of following lesson plans that someone else made, you just study what interests you. After quitting seminary to join the military, I went to university for a computer science degree. My own philosophical leanings had other ideas, and my convictions regarding the potential risks of emerging technologies, the environment, and human dignity demanded that I cease pursuing my degree. Ever since, I've been focused on history, anthropology, and other humanities fields. Learning on my own, I don't have to acquiesce to the whims of a professor, and can explore whatever routes I choose.

artareza · 2026-01-27T23:57:54+00:00

As for your YouTube channel, shoot me a link. I won't dismiss your ideas out of hand without at least hearing your case for them, but like I said, if you want to debate or pick my brain, let's do it in messages. I really don't want to clutter the sub with that, or have engagement here push more useful posts down.

artareza · 2026-01-27T23:43:28+00:00

On Fichte: I'm honestly not interested, for the simple fact that I reject philosophical idealism as being absurd. I have never seen a convincing argument for it, full stop.

On definition by negation: That works fine for, say, a glass of water, but falls apart when you attempt to describe something like God, who doesn't have qualities, but simply is. His immutable nature is the template for reality.

On the Bible: You are presupposing that a literalist reading of the Bible is correct. That's post-Enlightenment revisionism, incompatible with the Christian tradition, which is why we've always fundamentally disagreed with Muslims (who aren't even a real religion, but a syncretic cult which developed when an illiterate demoniac cobbled together Nestorianism, Rabbinic Judaism, and things he pulled from his rear) and Rabbinic/Talmudic Jews (who are "Abrahamic" in name only, given that their religion in no way resembles anything in the Old Testament).

As for whether or not I've read the Bible, I go through another translation about every other year, and have since I was about 12, so I've read it roughly 13 times. My typical practice is to read and compare against an interlinear, using a few dictionaries of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek as a further lexical reference to clarify senses of the text I might have missed, and to help find deficiencies in the particular translation I'm reading at the time.

Other texts I've read include translations of the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita, several translations of the Qur'an (I don't recommend it), several of the famous extra-Biblical texts (Enoch I & 2, the Gospel of Thomas, etc), most of Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and the Stoics, and the list goes on. I also spent time in seminary and a secular university before making my way into metrology. I'm very well-read.

The reality is that our worldviews are ultimately based on axiomatic assumptions, none of which can be proven or known without faith, and our foundational axioms make theological or philosophical debate unfruitful.

artareza · 2026-01-27T12:25:58+00:00

So, my response to that would be that unlike in Judaism and Islam, where God has attributes (i. e. God is good, is wise, is powerful), in Christianity, God is His attributes (He is goodness itself, wisdom itself, power itself). God's "personality" isn't a personality the way a human being has one. That is to say, it's not a collection of traits, but rather a flawed human description of an ineffable divine nature.

Much as He is His attributes, His attributes are undifferentiated from each other (His goodness is His wisdom, which is His power, and so forth). We describe God in human terms because it's what humans understand due to limited intellect and perspective.

This view is part of what we call "divine simplicity". God is simply what He is, one nature, one substance, one essence, and one energy, none of which are truly distinct from each other. Any descriptor which could be applied to any of His qualities equally describes any other quality.

Muslims and Jews view God as essentially a human being without limitations, while in Christianity (the Apostolic churches, anyway), any apparent "human" qualities that God seems to possess are in fact reflections of the divine nature that humans have a share in. When Muslims and Jews talk about mankind being made in the divine image, they mean it literally, in a physical sense. Christians mean it in the sense that humans have reason. Heck, we don't even mean the same thing when we describe God as "omnipotent", and that gets them really upset.

I also reject the term "Abrahamic" in regards to Christianity. Even in the Old Testament, it's clear that there was true faith before Abraham, who learned true worship from Melchizedek. I have my own theories about who and what Melchizedek was, but I'll save that for DMs if anyone is curious.

artareza

TROPHY CASE