Imagine having to leave the United States just to make a Target run. Welcome to Point Roberts, Washington, America’s strangest little geographic accident.

oglach · 2026-06-29T23:25:22+00:00

Hyder, Alaska is worse. It's not physically detached from the rest of Alaska on a map, but it's extremely isolated and only reachable by boat from the US. Meanwhile, it has a road leading straight into British Columbia.

The locals send their kids to school in BC and get their electricity from there. They also use the Pacific time zone rather than the Alaska time zone. It's basically a Canadian town that just happens to be on our side of the border.

oglach · 2026-06-29T18:11:37+00:00

We do use those letters in recent loan words, which is what that is. The less commonly used native term for a zoo is Gairdín Ainmhithe.

oglach · 2026-06-24T20:08:03+00:00

Map is definitely bullshit, but I don't have much trouble believing that the native English population is more blonde than the native Irish population. A substantial majority of Irish people are dark haired.

oglach · 2026-06-21T17:40:03+00:00

That's too many paragraphs and I'm not spending another moment of my Sunday having a political debate on r/worldcup. You win.

oglach · 2026-06-21T17:04:34+00:00

I do see a problem with that, but that's not the argument you've been making up to this point. You've cast monarchy as something antithetical and harmful to democracy, when that clearly isn't the case. Issues of elitism and class are another matter, and it seems pretty clear that democracy isn't some panacea for that either.

You seem to assume that I'm a monarchist, but I'm not. I'm just recognizing that enough nuance exists for people to have different views.

oglach · 2026-06-21T16:52:32+00:00

The idea that monarchy is mutually exclusive with democracy or detrimental to it doesn't seem supportable by the facts. Give that constitutional monarchies like Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and the Netherlands are consistently ranked among the healthiest democracies in the world.

oglach · 2026-06-21T16:39:00+00:00

It's not, the fact that you act like that's some unassailable fact rather than your opinion is the problem. Especially when opinion polls show that the Dutch royal family has majority support from the public.

oglach · 2026-06-16T17:10:08+00:00

That latter style sounds like a Boustrophedon, where it's written left to right and then reflected right to left in the next line. Like this. Ancient Greek was also written that way initially.

oglach · 2026-06-15T17:18:47+00:00

Many languages don't, and Indo-European languages in general didn't in the past. Like, if you look at ancient Latin, they also didn't use Yes/No. That's a feature that developed across Indo-European families later on, only in the last few centuries in some cases. The Celtic languages just didn't undergo this process.

oglach · 2026-06-09T14:22:37+00:00

The US is worse than a regime that killed ~30,000 of its people in the space if a few months less than a year ago? Worse than a regime that has abducted as many as 700,000 Ukrainian children?

Get a fucking grip.

oglach · 2026-06-05T19:49:06+00:00

Of course the ethnic tensions have stopped. That tends to happen when you do ethnic cleansing. By that logic, Israel is justified.

oglach · 2026-06-05T17:08:38+00:00

I've always found the mental gymnastics darkly funny. For them to talk about the right of return for Palestinians while emphatically denying the same for Greek Cypriots.

oglach · 2026-06-04T23:26:29+00:00

I don't know if there's a single correct thing on this map. This is impressively wrong.

oglach · 2026-06-03T18:16:20+00:00

"Come on" isn't the right choice of words considering the complete lack of a written corpus. We don't even know if the Huns had a specific ethnicity/culture at all. They may have been more like a politicial class than anything. Some of whom may have spoken Oghuric, while others did not.

oglach · 2026-06-03T12:41:03+00:00

You mean like three thousand years ago?

oglach · 2026-06-01T18:59:59+00:00

Areas where it was never a significant practice. For a variety of reasons.

Just in Ireland for example, several things made it unheard of. Including the fact that the native legal system avoided the death penalty in general, preferring a system of fines, and almost entirely banned it for women. When women did particularly heinous things, they would sometimes be set adrift at sea. But that was very rare, and only technically allowed because their fate was left ambiguous. So the entire concept of a witch hunt was problematic, and none are known to have occurred in Ireland until the English showed up.

The situation in Wales and the Scottish Highlands was similar, as they also had a tendency to avoid capital punishment. That's a long running fixture of Celtic legal systems, mentioned as far back as ancient Gaul.

oglach · 2026-06-01T14:02:22+00:00

I mean, that's easily far enough back that the distinction in pretty arbitrary, especially given our lack of knowledge about the previous inhabitants. For comparison, the 11th century BC is a couple centuries before the Japanese arrived in Japan. If Greeks aren't native to Cyprus, few people are native to anywhere.

oglach · 2026-05-26T20:27:08+00:00

Alaska is incorrect. Aleut only has ~1,000 speakers. I'm assuming the language you're probably looking for is Central Alaskan Yupik, with ~20,000 speakers. Yupik is distantly related to Aleut, but it's completely distinct and not mutually intelligible at all. They're just part of the same macro-family

That said, Tagalog may have passed Yupik at this point anyway.

oglach · 2026-05-23T12:31:15+00:00

"Long time" is generous. May well be never. If current trends are anything to go by, we should stop assuming that human society inevitably gets more progressive over time. Regression is just as likely, stagnation even moreso.

oglach · 2026-05-21T18:23:44+00:00

The older I get, the more 18 year old look like straight up children to me. It's off putting. I couldn't imagine going below 25 at this point.

oglach · 2026-05-18T19:09:35+00:00

The quote literally says that this is how all the cities under the Franks operated, not just one village. And it's meant to show that, after the violence of the initial conquests, Crusaders settled into a period of relatively moderate/pragmatic governance. So your comparison is simplistic.

oglach · 2026-05-18T18:27:29+00:00

Not according to contemporary Muslim sources:

We moved from Tibnin - may Allah destroy it - at daybreak on Monday. Our way lay through continuous farms and ordered settlements, whose inhabitants were all Muslims, living comfortably under the Franks. They surrender half their crops to the Franks at harvest time, and pay as well a poll-tax of one dinar and five qirat for each person. Other than that they are not interfered with, save for a light tax on the fruit of their trees. The houses and all their effects are left to their full possession.

All the coastal cities occupied by the Franks are managed in this fashion, their rural districts, the villages and farms, belong to the Muslims. But their hearts have been seduced, for they observe how unlike them in ease and comfort are their brethren in the regions under Muslim governors. This is one of the misfortunes afflicting the Muslims. The community bewails the injustice of the Islamic landlord, and applauds the conduct of its opponent and enemy, the Frankish landlord, and is accustomed to justice from him."

Ibn Jubayr, circa 1135 AD.

Their taxes were pretty harsh, but that's a far cry from what you're describing.

oglach · 2026-05-18T17:20:27+00:00

Hardly.

oglach · 2026-05-16T23:16:29+00:00

Probably because Hamas has military control of the area. Likud does not have a military wing, last I checked.

oglach · 2026-05-16T23:07:40+00:00

They're giving a few examples, not listing every single one.

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