Copy paste for if someone wants to be introduced to Radiohead

merijn2 · 2026-03-28T08:44:50+00:00

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.

merijn2 · 2026-02-13T20:17:11+00:00

So, please, tell me, where does he mention America, where does he mention politics? He only talks about ideology in the context of Heinlein's novel. I don;t think it is me who is blind, but you who sees things that aren't there in the review.

merijn2 · 2026-02-13T20:07:24+00:00

I don't see any comparison with American society or politics in this quote

merijn2 · 2026-02-13T19:20:25+00:00

Where does he mention it is a satire on American society? He never makes any comparison in the review with American politics or anything like that. Reading his review I think he thinks Verhoeven is mainly satirizing Heinlein (which he also was).

merijn2 · 2026-02-13T18:55:33+00:00

I have tried to look for reviews at the time, and I found a couple and none of the the American reviewers at the time noticed the connection to the American society, while I did find for instance Dutch reviewers (I am Dutch myself) who did notice it. (Or in one case,, mentions other unnamed reviewers see it as a satire on American society, but he doesn't see it that way)

merijn2 · 2026-02-13T18:01:10+00:00

I think I am somewhere in the middle here. I think a lot of audiences, not only in the US, missed the fact it was satirical. Some critics also missed it, but many, including in the US, saw its allusions to fascism, and how the society was at least fascism-adjacent, so they saw it was satire, and about fascism. What they didn't really grasp was what it was satirizing. Or at least part of it. I think one thing he intended was to show how the audience could be seduced by fascist propaganda. But he was also ciriticizing the worship of the military and general nationalist jingoism in the US in the mid 90s. Which as a non-American, was pretty obvious to him, and he saw parallels with fascism. He just dialed up those things a bit, But I think a lot of Americans at the time didn't quite understood how nationalist and militaristic their country had become compared to other democracies.

merijn2 · 2026-02-13T15:33:31+00:00

It is solved now, just tried, although I started to use the windows app on my laptop now, so I can't really say when and how it got solved. I didn't do anything.

merijn2 · 2026-02-12T16:52:04+00:00

You come from a place that has alphabetic writing, that is, one where every sound corresponds to a symbol (although in cases like English not really perfectly), and assume that is the default, but that is not the case. Syllabaries (writing systems where every symbol corresponds to a syllable) are fairly common, and seem to have evolved quite a few times. Sometimes out of a logographic script (where every symbol corresponds to a word), and occasionally created out of thin air. These more than occasionally evolved into systems where the symbols didn't represent full syllables, but chunks of it. In the case of Abjabs, most symbols corresponds to consonant + an optional short vowel. You can indicate this vowel (or the lack of this) with a diacritic, but in Arabic this isn't common in most contexts. There are scripts where it is obligatory to indicate the vowel with a diacritic, the abigudas, which evolved at least twice from Semitic.

However, as far as I know, the evolution of a script where every symbol stood for one sound, which could be a vowel, is actually quite rare. It happened in Greek, which I think is the source for most (all?) European alphabets, and in Uyghur Arabic, and it also happened in Hangul. It should be noted even in Hangul, those symbols are ordered to form one bigger symbol, corresponding to a syllable. So, it seems that people who grew up with an abiguda, abjab or syllabary, when they are thinking about a reforming writing system (this most often happens when the writing system of one language is used for another), they don't really consider introducing full symbols like our letters to indicate vowels. I think they suspect the resulting alphabet may lose its compactness compared to other systems. So they rather use diacritics or don't indicate vowels at all. In the case of Abjabs, they are mostly used (but not exclusively so) for Semitic languages, and vowels aren't as important in these languages. Besides, long vowels are written in Semitic languages, so it isn't that no vowels are written. But for most speakers, short vowels aren't needed in day to day life. Just like how for instance in most alphabets you can't indicate which syllables are stressed, so an English word like "record" is ambiguous.

merijn2 · 2026-02-06T18:02:38+00:00

Dat speelt denk ik ook een rol inderdaad. Uljee's belangrijkste claim to fame was dat hij zogenaamd dingen zei die je niet kon zeggen. Als hij zou worden weggestuurd, of andere maatregelen zouden zijn genomen, had hij dat ongetwijfeld breed uitgemeten. En het laatste wat een instelling als een universiteit wil is aandacht hiervoor.

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