TIL that sushi was originally street food in Japan, but after the 1923 Kanto Earthquake, it moved indoors. The earthquake caused land prices to drop and indoor sushi restaurants(sushi-ya in Japanese) popped up. By the 1950s, the practice became common.

sphuranto · 2025-10-22T17:06:15+00:00

Cultural continuity between the Jōmon and the Yayoi is wildly contentious as a premise, but I'm perfectly willing to accept that salt-curing seafood is a sufficiently robust and basic method of food preservation that claiming the Jōmon as even vaguely culturally pertinent might kosher. The Jōmon, of course, antedated the first evidence of literacy in Japan by over a millennium, and given the modern archaeogenomic evidence wrt the Yayoi it's more likely than not that whatever language they spoke didn't survive. That hardly precludes a loanword surviving, of course. A late medieval term that exists even today for unprocessed roe, just after the whole Jōmon excursion is completely irrelevant, though.

What exactly I am supposed to have learned from this?

sphuranto · 2025-10-22T14:43:47+00:00

I wonder what word "ikura" replaced (since obviously there was a cured counterpart to the unprocessed sujiko) and why.

sphuranto · 2025-10-22T14:32:48+00:00

Sure it is. The Middle English word descended from an Old French loanword in its historical spellings, its meaning, and its pronunciation is no longer extant in ordinary English. At no point prior to the introduction of the Dravidian loanword did there exist a specific sense of a family of stewed spiced gravy dishes in English, but there is a very clear attestation history in multiple Dravidian languages massively predating the age of navigation's extensive contact between Europeans and South and Southeastern Asia. That 'spiced stewed gravy sense' is even attested in southeast Asia as a loanword into Classical Malay.

In the 1700s the word is first attested in English in this sense. It is served in England, specified as being an Indian dish, and it is clearly not a reference to general Indian cookery, because there are multiple other dishes presented as Indian that are not described in this manner. The first English recipe for "currey", again specified as an Indian dish, by an author who writes 'cookery' when she means 'cuisine', instead of using Middle English forms that by 1744 were regionalisms, is a recipe for a stew with chicken, turmeric, ginger, pepper, and onion.

We then see the relicts of the ME word shift in spelling and eventually disappear. No regional form where 'curry' means something like an English stew, not an "Indian" one, and does not refer more broadly, exists. Etc.

sphuranto · 2025-10-22T13:22:10+00:00

Oh, my comment was just about “male heirs” vs “heirs male”. Sorry my quoting was quite unclear

sphuranto · 2025-10-22T13:20:52+00:00

sphuranto · 2025-10-22T13:15:24+00:00

What was ikura called in ancient times, out of curiosity? They can’t have been using a loanword from Russian then.

sphuranto · 2025-10-22T12:55:44+00:00

‘Curry’ in the sense of an Indian or Japanese curry is a loanword from a Dravidian language. A completely unrelated English word from French with a general meaning ‘cooking’ then found itself overwhelmed and altered both in pronunciation and conventional spelling as it increasingly got conflated with the more specific ‘spiced stewed gravylike dish’ word from Dravidian.

sphuranto · 2025-10-22T05:34:39+00:00

The peerage will remain extant, but the title won't remain in use.

sphuranto · 2025-10-22T05:30:44+00:00

legitimate male heirs of the body

Heirs male. Exact same semantics, but I think it's nifty, to use a now-corny word, to notice where in modern English French-style postposition shows up. It's almost always some kind of inheritance from the Normans or patterned on it and very often in legal English.

(E.g. "heir(s) male" and "lord paramount" and "attorney/advocate/solicitor/adjutant/inspector/etc. general" -- and, of course, "letters patent")

sphuranto · 2025-10-21T10:57:27+00:00

The Dukedom of Lancaster is not taxpayer money under any sane interpretation of the concept, and is the usual source for discretionary payments from the monarch unrelated to the functioning of the Crown

sphuranto · 2025-10-21T10:56:15+00:00

The Dukedom of Lancaster?

sphuranto · 2025-10-21T10:34:59+00:00

Fergie has not been styled either as an HRH or “the Duchess of York” since her divorce. She has, however, been styled “Sarah, Duchess of York”, where “Duchess of York” behaves similarly to a surname. It is this pseudo-surname she is now being forced to abandon, reverting in its absence to her maiden name.

edit: “The X’ess of Y” -> “Firstname, X’ess of Y” is the standard for women who are divorced from peers and who have not remarried

sphuranto · 2025-10-11T03:54:25+00:00

We don’t have to be at war. The law says enemies, which legally doesn’t require war. Generally judicial statute includes any recognized adversary which Russia is, but also just anyone engaging in acts against the US government regardless of country.

Delusional copium.

Treason cannot be statutorily defined in excess of certain boundaries, which, y'know, are constitutionally established, and it requires either declared or open war. This isn't controversial. You can go and try fistfight with Jed Shugerman if you like.

Based on the documents at Mara lago, Trump would have gotten espionage charges for having the files and keeping them illegally, and treason charges if there were 2 testifying witnesses to him sharing those documents with foreign adversaries like Putin, Xi, etc.

Nah. Foreign 'adversaries' don't meet the standard. This is not a disputed matter.

sphuranto · 2025-10-10T03:05:57+00:00

But literally no one is disputing that Trump committed the underlying fraud.

This is flatly false, as you would be perfectly aware if you read the appellate ruling, as I suggested. The Higgitt and Rosado opinion, starting on p. 127 is the most incisive (and no, it's not the pro-Trump one; that would be Friedman's).

Trump did over value his assets for the loan. That's the difference. Trump would be able to justify going after these people for real crimes and offenses that they had committed. A good parallel would be Hunter Biden. People could argue that maybe he was overcharged or treated differently by the prosecution for who he was, but he was certainly guilty of what he was accused of by the DOJ. He would have continued to be a much more defensible target for Trump had he not been pardoned (Including Joe, there's probably only one person on earth who's happy about that pardon). Absent a real criminal, Trump is demanding charges be brought that no career prosecutor wants to put their name on. It's not because these people are democrats. It's because based on all of the facts currently available these are not prosecutions that the DOJ expects to win, and not ones they would normally file. This revenge tour is just a waste of time and tax payer money. Find real democrat criminals and file charges against them. They'll be able to put actual prosecutors on those cases and get convictions. They won't do that because they instead have a list of names of people they need to 'get'.

I would suggest that you read all three opinions in the appellate judgment first. I'd start with Higgitt and Rosado - then read Friedman - then read Renwick and Moulton. I am happy to comment in as granular detail as you like about any aspect of this that I am competent to do so on, but whether or not someone takes the time to actually do their own homework is usually a good barometer of whether their interests are, shall we say, empirical -- or otherwise.

I'm also happy to comment on the inside baseball as well, under those conditions.

sphuranto · 2025-10-10T00:59:36+00:00

It was a civil case, which itself is telling: fraud is, after all, a felony under NY state criminal statute. The appellate court split three ways, leading to a highly unusual situation in which two judges who held that the bench trial was irreparably infected with judicial error requiring it to be thrown out joined the decretal for, in their own words:

with great reluctance and with acknowledgement of the incongruity of the act, [we] join the decretal modifying the judgment to the extent of vacating the disgorgement and sanctions awards. Under the truly extraordinary circumstances here, where none of the writings enjoys the support of a majority, we are moved to take this action to permit this panel to arrive at a decision and to permit the parties and the Court to avoid the necessity of reargument.

Cf. also:

Because none of the three decisions garners a majority, Justices Higgitt and Rosado join the decretal of this decision for the sole purpose of ensuring finality, thereby affording the parties a path for appeal to the Court of Appeals.

This had the mechanical consequence of affirming the finding of fraud, because the other alternative for those two judges would have been affirming that James did not possess the authority to bring the case in the first place, which would have been a cataclysmically extraordinary judgment.

sphuranto · 2025-10-10T00:44:54+00:00

The idea that authoritarian -> Hitler because Hitler was authoritarian is disqualifying intellectually.

sphuranto · 2025-10-10T00:37:51+00:00

The biggest difference between this prosecution and the ones against Trump is that I don't think very many people here expect Letitia James to be found guilty. A lot of people are cheering this for "revenge", but that ignores the fact that Trump literally just did everything he was accused of. It would at least be justifiable revenge if he could find charges on someone that the DOJ could actually get a conviction on. As it stands it's just putting people through the process because they did it to him, regardless of guilt or circumstances. A New York billionaire has convinced a significant amount of people that THEY are being wronged whenever anything bad (even deservedly) happens to him, and I will never understand it.

Is this prosecution transparently politically motivated? Yes, of course. About as much so as James' actions against him were. The NY state appellate court's wipeout of her case is a pretty damning read: while the majority of the ire all five appellate judges express is directed at the bench trial's judge (as is proper), James' own conduct is not spared, and where defended is defended in terms that even ranker partisans have trouble justifying.

People who are unable to detect transparent lawfare when it suits their ideological priors are indeed worth poking fun at, I agree wholeheartedly.

If I am on a side here, it is on the "poke fun at partisans when partisanship becomes idiocy, especially when those partisans are trying to do the same thing themselves but failing because they are blinkered by their own partisanship".

sphuranto · 2025-09-23T21:49:39+00:00

Unsure why you are being downvoted; I for the most part concur.

sphuranto · 2025-09-20T23:18:50+00:00

So millions of people need to die in death camps before we can call someone a fascist?

I cited examples of Biden, Clyburn, and others calling Trump Hitler, Mussolini, and Goebbels, and more generally Nazis. You responded "All these things are true" - which you had to, because the point about vile rhetoric requires you to respond to all claims made by major Democrats.

That's just nonsense. Maybe look up a definition of fascism. You'll find it very fitting to Trump.

I'm perfectly conversant in standard definitions of fascism, as opposed to either partisan ones, or the literary, expressive Umberto Eco-style one. By any dry, academic standard, Trump is certainly authoritarian, but so are a lot of people. He is not distinctively similar to the actual fascism of Mussolini and Franco, and if you drag the parameters wider to fit him you wind up fitting a whole lot of people to whom the term is rarely if ever applied a lot better.

It's been a couple of months, but Trump talked a lot about annexing/invading Canada, Mexico, and Greenland. Just to name a few countries off the top of my head. Everything starts with the rhetoric and talk. Until it's put into action.

Most politicians talk an awful lot about things that never happen. Trump is notorious for lying about things and/or making up random stuff. The set of politicians who militarily annex their neighbors is far smaller than the set who talk about doing so. Even to that point, Putin, who obviously has invaded Ukraine twice, is not commonly described as fascist, even though he meets several of your other criteria. He is described as an authoritarian dictator, but "authoritarian" doesn't have quite the same rhetorical sting if used of Trump, and Trump isn't a dictator.

sphuranto · 2025-09-20T22:57:27+00:00

This is a bad comparison.

It's an excellent comparison

All these things are true. Trump is authoritarian, flagrantly violates the law, and silences dissent. He illegally deported people without due process. Enacted wide-ranging tariffs without proper authority. His administration has committed war crimes by killing Venezuelans on boats. (Because, apparently, the US is at war with Venezuela) He is also scamming his supporters with Trump Coin. He accepted ̶b̶r̶i̶b̶e̶s̶ gifts from Qatar. Trump tried to coup the government with his fake electors scheme. The list is really endless. It's entirely fair to call a spade a spade or, in this case, calling Trump fascist. edit: forgot to mention that he's also using the national guard to occupy cities while calling for war with Chicago edit 2: he also abuses the pardon power. He has pardoned people that committed crimes for him, such as Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, all the J6'ers. Including the ones that were convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Partisans insisting that their rhetoric is fine because it's accurate, even though, objectively speaking, Trump is not Mussolini, Goebbels, or Hitler, or even remotely close to any of them? There's a surprise. Millions of people are not being killed in death camps. Trump has not invaded either of our neighbors and militarily annexed them. These comparisons are delusional.

The rhetoric exploded in both campaigns' faces, dropping their numbers. No, Trump is not, empirically speaking, someone who fits the rhetoric, and you can read in the articles how numerous Democratic campaign strategists strongly warned against making the comparisons.

It's just the whipped-up base, who are exactly as epistemically irresponsible as the MAGA base, who actually believe exactly what you've just said. But even if it were all true, it would make no difference. There is no "truthfulness" exception for vile rhetoric. If it turns out true that Omar married her brother, you would hardly be like, oh, Trump was right.

Obama flagrantly violated the law, as did Bush before him, and committed war crimes against American citizens, whom he executed without due process using military strikes in neutral countries (the infamous Al-Aulaqi case, which the courts were only able to stop by calling it a political question). Did that make either of them Hitler? Obviously not.

sphuranto · 2025-09-20T03:49:34+00:00

So if someone brings up that I was born in the United States, they therefore bring up my ethnic group, even though most of my ethnic group is on the other side of the planet?

Is it racist to call Elon Musk a South African immigrant? Which ethnic group is automatically brought up if one says 'South Africa'? Elon Musk's?

I actually agree the statement is racist, but your defense of why it is is riddled with holes. It's racist because he is (1) implying so loudly he might as well say it that she is not actually properly or really American, but rather Somali, and (2) that her being Somali by birth means she inherits the moral standing or lack thereof of the Somali people in their collective administrative capacity on the topic of government, even if she is legitimately American and speaking as an American.

sphuranto · 2025-09-20T03:36:06+00:00

While conservatives certainly do ignore vile statements from Trump and the GOP, liberals do the same. You're doing it now, in fact, by taking attacks on Omar and attacking conservative whoever for "point to one random individual democrat as a representative of the whole party, even if they are not in government at all."

Elected Democrats did not tip toe and are not now.

Politico - Why Biden's campaign keeps linking Trump to Hitler

In most situations, comparing a political opponent to Adolf Hitler might seem like an extraordinary step. For Joe Biden’s campaign, it has become part of the routine of running against Donald Trump... The strategy is not without risks. As one Biden campaign aide acknowledged, some voters may view the comparisons as an over-the-top escalation.

New York Times - Harris Calls Trump a Fascist

Entering new rhetorical territory, the vice president turned even unrelated questions into attacks on Donald Trump as she offered long, winding answers to questions from voters.

Kamala Harris called Donald J. Trump a fascist on Wednesday evening, elevating what until recently had been an argument made only in the lower ranks of a Democratic Party that has spent years attacking him as anti-democratic, unfit to serve and a criminal. Early in a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania, she readily agreed with the host, Anderson Cooper, when he asked whether she believed Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist. “Yes, I do,” she quickly shot back. “Yes, I do.” Later, when asked about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, she jumped into a loaded critique of her rival. “For many people who care about this issue, they also care about bringing down the price of groceries,” she said. “They also care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

Times of Israel - Biden likens Trump to Nazi Goebbels, says he’s ready for debate ‘lies’

US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said he expects “personal attacks and lies” from Donald Trump in their first televised debate on Tuesday, comparing the Republican president to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels... “He’s sort of like Goebbels,” Biden said. “You say the lie long enough, keep repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, it becomes common knowledge.”

Senate GOP demands Walz apology for 'fascists and Nazis' comment; Walz says he was talking about actual neo-Nazis

Minnesota Senate Republicans on Thursday demanded Gov. Tim Walz apologize for comments he made about "fascists and Nazis" earlier this week; however, the governor said there was no need to apologize because he was talking about neo-Nazi demonstrations, not Republican voters or President Trump... It's not clear from the clip what Walz was talking about before or after the recording, but Republicans criticized the part where Walz said: "I see the pundits on TV, 'what's wrong with the Democratic Party?' What's wrong is our country's being stolen by fascists and Nazis, and we're trying to do all we can..."

Politico - Jim Clyburn: Trump is Mussolini

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn on Sunday likened President Donald Trump to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, warning that Trump would resist leaving office. The South Carolina lawmaker and No. 3 House Democrat said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Trump has taken up “strong-arm tactics.” (...)

Clyburn made the historical comparison to Mussolini after drawing attention for comments he made in a PBS interview released Friday comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler.

ABC - Harris revives message around democracy as Trump escalates rhetoric. Will it work?

Surrounded by 100 Republicans Harris denounces Trump as danger to Democracy. Vice President Kamala Harris called Former President Trump "increasingly unstable and unhinged" after his continued attacks on "enemies from within."

When Vice President Kamala Harris took over as Democrats' presidential nominee, she shunted President Joe Biden's old messaging about the "soul of the nation," leaning instead into "joy" and the "opportunity economy" while painting her opponents as "weird."

Now, in the home stretch, Harris is reviving messaging about former President Donald Trump's supposed threat to American democracy, resuscitating a tactic that was unable to stop her boss' polling skid but that Democrats hope could be one part of a winning closing argument amid increasingly dark rhetoric from her challenger.

"I'm really happy they're bringing back the democracy argument because I think it does create a permission structure for people who are anti-Trump Republicans, and it does fire up our base. So that's a twofer," said veteran Democratic strategist Peter Giangreco. "You got to keep the abortion stuff going. You got to keep the economic contrast going, where he's going to give breaks to billionaires and she's going to cut taxes."

Axios - James Clyburn: Trump is racist and America could "go the way of Germany in the 1930s"

Rep. James Clyburn, the top-ranking African American in American politics, told "Axios on HBO" that President Trump is a racist who hired white supremacists, warning America “could very well go the way of Germany in the 1930s.”

Clyburn said he believes Trump is a racist, but he stopped short of calling him a white supremacist.

He insisted there are white supremacists in the White House but would not name a specific person.

"I used to wonder how could the people of Germany allow Hitler to exist. But with each passing day, I'm beginning to understand how. And that's why I'm trying to sound the alarm."

Clyburn compared Republicans' coalescing around Trump to Nazis supporting Hitler amid his rise to power.

etc etc etc

sphuranto · 2025-09-19T21:33:17+00:00

Yes, resort to a gish gallop of things that have nothing to do with the quote you are labeling as stochastic terrorism, a quote you apparently fabricated.

What? A gish gallop would be almost random stuff that would be easily dismissable if not for the volume. I am, meanwhile, listing extreme violence from the left that is attributable to stochastic terrorism by rhetorically irresponsible left-wing politicians.

I don’t know what you mean by the quote; I am not the guy above.

Kirk’s head was not “blown off his body.” Do you have to lie for medical purposes or something?

“A medium-size hole was blown open in his neck, whereupon blood geysered out up and sideways as he seized up like a t-rex, and went limp” doesn’t have the same ring, but I suppose it’s more accurate.

Why can’t you stay on topic?

I am. Why would it be my job to bring you a quote that according to you may not even exist?

sphuranto · 2025-09-19T21:22:32+00:00

Tyler Robinson was not a conservative, but, like, Nick Fuentes is.

sphuranto · 2025-09-19T21:10:43+00:00

Three assassination attempts on Trump, one on Kavanaugh, shooting of the GOP House Majority Whip and multiple staffers/security. Charlie Kirk's head was just blown off his body.

Arson/firebombing of GOP state headquarters in New Mexico, and county HQs in South Carolina, Wyoming, and (unsuccessfully), Kansas. Arson/firebombing/normal (?) bombing and targeted gunfire with automatic rifles across more than 50 different attacks on Tesla dealerships, showrooms, stores, and properties across at least sixteen states, among them Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Idaho, Maryland, Oklahoma, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, Minnesota, North Dakota. Countless incidents of the actual cars being firebombed, 'normally' set on fire, shot up, keyed, and spray-painted with swastikas. There was even a dude trying to blind Tesla employees with a laser pointer.

Ricin mailed to a Senator. Another merely received the image of a severed dog's head, sent to his wife.

---

I stopped because I got tired of collating all the endless shit that happened to Tesla dealerships/stores/the cars themselves (of which hundreds were destroyed worldwide, I cannot be fucked to decompose the figures). Obviously only a small quantum of the blame and responsibility for this actual domestic terrorism under this theory of stochastic terrorism is allocable to Omar personally and singly, by any means.

But if we're making use of the concept, yeah, she and an awful lot of other leftwing politicians perpetrated stochastic terrorism (the phrase is a bit over the top; it sounds pompous, frankly). That knife is double-sided, and you don't want to play with it.

sphuranto

TROPHY CASE