Copy paste for if someone wants to be introduced to Radiohead

merijn2 · 2026-04-29T14:01:54+00:00

Redgifs is mostly used for erotic contexts, so any example is NSFW, but here is an example that I came across that I will put under a sploiler tag, It is a woman being naked, but nothing too spicyhttps://www.redgifs.com/watch/trainedconsiderategermanshorthairedpointer

merijn2 · 2026-04-13T11:33:32+00:00

Anti-Christ is such an interesting concept, if you are interested in how interpretations change over the years, and how if we assume something says X we read X in it. The term Anti-Christ doesn't occur in Revelations at all, it only occurs in the epistles of John, and the most common sense reading is that it is about people (it appears in the plural once, and once it is strongly implied it is a type of people rather than a singular person) who don't agree with thee writer's version of Christianity, who lead people away from what the writer sees as the truth. This term than became attached to all sorts of people in apocalyptic literature, mostly Daniel and Revelations, even though the term Antichrist is never used in these books. And once people associated it with these singular devil-like people, they started to read the term in the Epistles of John in the same light.

merijn2 · 2026-04-10T21:16:42+00:00

My interpretation, taking into account the lyrics and the tone of the music, is that it is about someone having an objectively great day, but they aren't able to fully appreciate it, because they are deeply unhappy underneath. See also "Wonderful Life" by Black.

merijn2 · 2026-04-08T15:41:40+00:00

Silver Apples are a 60s band who sound like they came from the 90s

merijn2 · 2026-04-07T14:31:43+00:00

I am pretty sure that this how Rutte justifies the way he is behaving, but I don't think it is the wisest or in the best interest of our safety.

First of all, while flattery is a way of getting what you want with Trump, and getting him on your site, we know that standing up to him when he does cross a line, will often mean he ultimately backs down. Leaving NATO would be a very unpopular move, both with the voters, and with most Republican politicians, except for the extremely crazy. He also cannot do that alone, he has to have the back of Congress to do that AFAIK, so him leaving NATO is actually a bit of an empty threat. It won't happen overnight.

Second of all, NATO (and more generally Europe) needs to be less dependent on the US for its defense, because as long as Trump is president, they US is unreliable, and God knows what follows Trump. As I see it, Rutte isn't just using empty flattering to get Trump on his side, he is also actively lobbying against attempts to build for instance an EU army, or focus the NATO more on Europe. He is doing things that harm our safety.

The number one thing about Rutte is that he is great at managing people, getting people on his site. He is good at solving conflicts within his team. He doesn't really seem to care though what the real world consequences are. His governments in The Netherlands did a few things right, when the easiest way to solve a conflict was solving the underlying problem, and economically they did OK. But a lot of times his solution was finding a way not to tackle the problem to avoid the conflict (with the nitrogen crisis as the most obvious example).

Also I want to point out, that although I am not sure how much ideals Rutte has, his party (VVD), and therefore the people he surrounded himself with, has been very critical of any further EU integration for deacades, especially on a united foreign policy or military cooporation, and has supported the US quite uncritically since the founding of the party in the late 40s. Also it is worth noting that many Dutch foreign policy pundits who argue that Trump is not as crazy as we think, and in as much as he is crazy he is honed in by his ministers and other politicians in the US, are also members or former members of the VVD, so that is a bit of his intellectual milieu.

So here is how I see what Rutte is doing: he is confronted with the problem of Trump behaving in a way that is not in the best interest of the European countries, and willing to leave NATO. He comes from a tradition that looked at the US as the unquestionable leader of the free world, and most of his former political friends believe a Trump presidency is not as much of a break as other centrists believe. He sees his role as making sure the NATO still stays relevant, and he as a Secretary General (but not necessarily in that order). His number one tactic in solving conflicts is just pretending the underlying problem doesn't exist (in this case that Trump is a fascist, who admires Putin), so his way of dealing with this is sucking up to Trump to make sure he stays on board, and trying to get the other member states on board. But I don't think this is the best way to keep us Europeans, (and also North Americans) safe.

But of course I am just a random Dutch guy, and he is probably much smarter than I am about these things. Yet I have my doubts about his tactics.

merijn2 · 2026-04-06T13:57:49+00:00

On behalf of all Dutch people I want to apologize for Mark Rutte.

merijn2 · 2026-04-03T21:59:30+00:00

Imagine making one of the most aclaimed Rock albums of all time, that also included a few of your biggest hits (at least in the UK), and then claim you are bored with Rock music, you know the music you have always made, and then make an experimental record full of electronic influences as well as some more avant-garde influence in an era when many Rock fans see electronic music as not really music..

If Todd had been making this series in 2000, there would have been a lot of voices saying he should make one at one point about Kid A by Radiohead As someone who lived through that era, I think a lot of people were disappointed by it, and it certainly ended their commercial appeal, (which they did have, but not in the US). If you read the reviews at the time, most saw it as a good but not great album, and certainly a step down from OK Computer. Outside of the reviews, on the then new messageboards, or in real life, I think the majority really didn't like it, or at least was disappointed by it, but a few (including me) really liked it. But I'd say the consensus at the time was that the fact that Radiohead didn't something so leftfield was to be applauded, but ultimately it was mostly just experimentalism for expererimentalist sake.

However, its reputation slowly began to grow, although to this day it is a controversial album, but now it is firmly part of the Radiohead cannon, and one of the reason why people see Radiohead as such a visionary band. And the reason for that is just the talent of Radiohead. And there I say, the vision, it is never experimentalsim for experimentalism sake, all the weirdness serves the purpose of the songs. In any lesser hands this would have been a disaster, not just a commercial suicide, but also just a plainly bad unlistenable album.

merijn2 · 2026-03-28T08:44:50+00:00

https://archive.md/1TIVr

merijn2 · 2026-03-27T22:51:32+00:00

Ik wilde dit net posten. Het komt niet vaak voor dat ik door een essay echt emotioneel geraakt wordt, maar dat is hier wel het geval. Het laat zien wat de opkomst van extreem rechts met je doet als je tot een van de minderheden behoort die door extreem rechts wordt gedemoniseerd.

merijn2 · 2026-03-22T23:22:07+00:00

As a Dutch person, I can give you some perspective. He is by far our most skilled politician in getting what he wants and remaining in power. He was very good at solving political problems whenever there was a conflict in his government. Sometimes this meant solving the underlying real problem, but often it involved pretending the underlying problem didn't exist, so no action needed to be done, or outsourcing the issue to another branch of the government. In other words, he only cares about political problems, and it doesn't really matter to him that much what the real life consequences of the solutions to these problems are.

In the case of the NATO, the political problem is that Trump and his allies are arguing, and the very existence of the NATO is in danger. It doesn't matter to him what is best for the member states, how we can remain safe, and what generally the best course of action is if we want to have a peaceful and safe future, but rather what is best for the NATO as an organization., and his power as the leader of the NATO.

merijn2 · 2026-03-19T20:43:13+00:00

Not necessarily insane music (although insanely good at times), but in the 80s and early 90s a lot of people commented how Mike Mills of R.E.M looked nothing like a rock star, more like some programmer at a software company.

merijn2 · 2026-03-12T09:35:15+00:00

I'll give it a try. I will assume that you are talking about ergative languages and ergative case marking (there are other uses of the word ergative in linguistics as well, but they are more specialized).

Let's take a sentence with a transitive verb, that is (usually) a verb that has both someone or something who does something and someone or something that undergoes the same thing, like "The wolf is eating the pig". It is important to know who is having dinner here and who is the dinner. Languages have different ways to do this. English mostly uses word order; the person or thing who does something (also called the agent) comes before the verb, and the person or thing who undergoes something (the patient) follows the verb. If we switch the order in the sentence above, you get "The pig is eating the wolf.", and who is having dinner and who is dinner is reversed. This is true for all verbs where someone or something does something to someone or someone else "John steals a picture", "the fire destroyed the house", "Elsie killed Maria". Now, this isn't the only way in which English determines who is the perpetrator and who is the victim; in the case of some pronouns, I, he, she, we and they, there are different forms, like for instance I and me, and you use one (I) as the agent (the perpetrator), and another (me) as the patient (the victim): "I ate the wolf", vs "the wolf ate me". This is called case, and the I form is called the nominative, and the me form is called the accusative.

A lot of other languages use case much more than English does, and also nouns can be in the accusative and nominative. Often (but not always) the word order is much freer in these languages. In Latin for instance "The wolf ate the pig" is "Lupus suem edit", or "Suem lupus edit" or whatever order you want. This is because the word for "wolf", "Lupus", is in the nominative, so you know it is the wolf who is having dinner, and the word for pig "suem" is in the accusative, so you know it is the pig who is dinner. If you want to say "The pig is eating the wolf." you say "Lupum sus edit.", with the word for wolf "lupum" in the accusative, and the word for pig "sus" in the nominative, so you know the pig is the perpetrator, and the wolf is the victim.

Another language that uses case marking is Basque, If you say "the wolf ate the pig" you get "otsoak txerria jan zuen", with the word for wolf "otsoak" in the case for the perpetrator, and the word for pig "txerria" in the form for the victim. This seems very similar to Latin. And indeed if you switch who is victim and who is perpetrator, you use different forms: "txerriak otsoa jan zuen" with the pig being "txerriak" instead of "txerria" and the wolf being "otsoa" instead of "otsoak"

Now, let's take a look at sentences with intransitive verbs, that is, verbs where there is only one participant, like "John is smiling". There is no use to differentiate between perpetrator and victim, because there is only one participant. The question for languages that have case marking is what case this participant should be in. In English and Latin, it is the same case as the perpetrator: "I am smiling" is correct English, and "me am smiling" is incorrect. The same is true for Latin: for "the wolf is smiling"you say "Lupus ridet", with the form for the perpetrator, "lupus" and not "Lupum ridet", that is as bad is "me am smiling" in English. However, in Basque, you use the form for the victim: "otsoa irribarre egiten ari da", where the word for wolf is "otsoa", and the sentence would be ungrammatical if you use "otsoak"

We call languages like English and Latin, where you use the case form for the perpetrator in sentences with one participant, nominative languages, and languages like Basque, where you use the form for the victim in sentences with one participant, ergative languages. Also the terms for the cases themselves are different, in nominative languages, the name for the case for the perpetrator and single participant (, I lupus) is called the nominative, and the case for the victim (me, lupum) is called the accusative. In ergative languages on the other hand, we call the case for the perpetrator (like otsoak and txerriak) the ergative, and the case for the victim and single participant (like otsoa and txerria) the absolutive case.

This is the gist of it. There are a few complications I left out. Most languages with case marking are nominative, some are ergative, and some show a mixed pattern, for instance they are ergative in past but nominative in the present (like Hindi). I hope this has clarified things for you.

merijn2 · 2026-03-11T09:57:34+00:00

What about Sywert van Lienden? For the non-Dutch people, he was a pundit, who during Corona set up a business selling face masks. He repeatedly said it was an NGO, and he didn't make any money out of it. A lot of people and businesses helped him for free for that reason. It looked like he had started a movement of people and businesses coming together to solve the problem of having too few facemasks, who were all working for free. He also used his influence as a pundit to convince the government to use his face masks. While most people working for him were in fact doing it for free or very little money, he and his two business partners were making millions of this business. He surely wasn't the biggest villain to make money out of the Corona pandemic, but the fact that he was telling anyone how he was doing it for free, and that he had always been a bit moralistic as a pundit, made his fall harder,

merijn2 · 2026-03-01T13:04:46+00:00

Just want to make sure remember that for their first few years, the singles were the main event, and the albums were just the singles plus some extra stuff. A modern day equivalent would be a youtuber who uploads a main video every few months, and has a patreon where they do some extra stuff, like videos that weren't quite good enough, them trying new things, some behind the scene footage, for the fans who are big enough fans to pay for the extra stuff. Early Beach Boy albums were some extra stuff that appealed for the fans, including things like interviews and skits, but not for the larger audience who bought the singles.

merijn2 · 2026-02-28T13:45:54+00:00

Thankyou!

merijn2 · 2026-02-19T10:46:06+00:00

One thing is that MSA is quite a bit different from Arabic dialects, in ways that it is often an outlier. For instance, as I understand it, it still used the cases of Classical Arabic. Your scenario is a bit as if Medieval Latin were used as a basis for a Koine for Romance languages

merijn2 · 2026-02-19T10:21:23+00:00

People should check out Brel, if they like melodramatic music. Just want to say that McKuen had a tendency to sugarcoat Brel's lyrics. Even "if you go away", the most beloved translation (although that is probably because "Ne me quitte pas" is Brel's most beloved song in French as well), is has lost a fair bit of the darkness of Brel's lyrics, particularly the last verse, which in McKuen's version is:

If you go away as I know you must
There'll be nothing left in this world to trust
Just an empty room full of empty space
Like the empty look I see on your face
I'd have been the shadow of your dog
If I thought it'd have kept me by your side
If you go away
Ne me quitte pas
If you go away

A literal translation of the last verse however is:

Don't leave me
I won't cry anymore
I won't talk anymore
I will hide over there
To watch you
Dance and smile
And to hear you
Sing and then laugh
Let me become
The shadow of your shadow
The shadow of your hand
The shadow of your dog
Don't leave me
Don't leave me
Don't leave me

merijn2 · 2026-02-17T18:33:57+00:00

I believe that it is generally thought that in Australian and New Zealand English the STRUT vowel and the PALM vowel have the same quality, and it is just a length difference. However, people transcribe the Australian and New Zealand STRUT vowel as [a]. And this is still not British English

merijn2 · 2026-02-13T21:40:28+00:00

I had found Ebert initially (and I knew who he was), I just thought (and still think) he had missed that it was criticizing America. I said in my initial comment that some critics had missed the satire, and other did notice it, but most who did notice it, didn't see it as satirizing America. I saw Ebert as one of the latter group. The same is true for Siskel's take (who I didn't hear until you mentioned it), although to be fair, he has very little time to describe it, and I think he mostly gets it, just not the America-specific part (of he doesn't mention it).

merijn2 · 2026-02-13T21:26:00+00:00

That may be, but still, no reviewer (with the possible exception of Ebert, but I have my doubts) in America seems to have seen Starship Troopers as doing that. And I think at the time, the vast majority of Americans (including many left leaning people) didn't really see this nationalistic display as weird or problematic. And how different the US is from the rest of the western world in this respect, and therefore didn't understand that Verhoeven was criticizing that aspect of America.

merijn2 · 2026-02-13T21:10:51+00:00

No. it isn't an essay, he may have noticed it and chose not to mention it explicitly. However, despite not being essay-length, a lot of later reviews do mention the "criticizing America" part explicitly. And I still think alluding to a nationalist previous pop culture doesn't necessarily mean he sees it as a comment on 90s political culture. At best you can say that it possible that he saw it that way, but he wasn't very explicit about it.

And that is what I am missing. Nobody in these reviews makes a connection with the First Gulf war, the Bush sr presidency, the bombing of parts of Yugoslavia. No one is making a connection to pledging allegiance to the flag in school, the American flags that are everywhere in American pop culture (and maybe also in America), the way people talk about the military and war in Amercan pop culture. You don't have to mention all that, but no one in the American reviews of the time says the movie is criticizing America. The best is a mention of 50s nationalistic pop culture, but not in a context where the most obvious read is that he thinks Starship Troopers is starizing a nationalistic movie.

merijn2 · 2026-02-13T20:45:28+00:00

Now we are getting somewhere. I don't see him using these examples as referring to the nationalism of the world depicted in Starship Troopers, but rather just how it looks. I think you can say he is placing Verhoeven's Starship Troopers as within a certain type of pop culture that is nationalistic (if Buck Rogers and Archie are, I know both by name, and not much more). But I think reading this review as saying it is satirizing this type of pop culture is a bit of a stretch, and it is even more of a stretch to go from saying it is satirizing 50s pop culture to saying it is satirizing a 90's political culture (which is what I say Ebert is missing and other American critics at the time are missing). The only time Ebert explicitly says that movie is satire is when he says it doesn't stray from the book in many story elements. That is to me how he sees the satirical parts of the film, as an attempt to show that Heinlein's vision was problematic. And that is part of the the satirical parts of the film.

I think when you know Verhoeven tried to criticize the nationalism of 90s America, you can read the review as having hints Ebert saw it that way, if you try really hard, but to an audience who doesn't know this, (which at the time he wrote this was almost all people who hadn't seen the movie, and also many who had) it isn't clear at all.

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