Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It used to be different for men and women too. That’s after the women got the vote in the first place. Switzerland famously only did that in the 70s. With some women being against that. But I digress.

    For men, voting age was closely linked to legal adulthood once it wasn’t tied to land ownership or similar any more. Societies the world over have sort of agreed that 20-23 is about the age for that. With social progress since the 70s, it was lowered to 18. In the US because of Vietnam where 18yo were old enough to die senselessly in Nam but not old enough to elect the government that sent them there. That was unfair and addressed. In Europe, a lot of countries changed everything to 18 (drinking, voting, driving - don’t do it in that order though) from the 60s onwards. And some subdivision elections (local or state level) are today from 16 in the EU.

    So the question is more like why are you an adult at 18 as far as the law is concerned. That’s a compromise societies have arrived at over time and often copied from one another.


  • So there is a court ruling that the mother had sole custody. And the father tried to take the kids out of the country, possibly without the mother’s knowledge. That is probably illegally moving your children abroad. The fact that they are your own flesh and blood is superseded by the mothereffing courts. Whether you agree with it or not is irrelevant. So you have to stuff the kids into a big suitcase like any upstanding CEO of an automobile conglomerate or just not leave the country.

    There is a lot of meat on the Japan has catching up to do in regards to international custody battles bone. They favor the Japanese national, often unfairly, I think - although that’s a topic for debate for people who are more knowledgeable. However, you can’t take the law into your own hands just because you don’t agree with the decisions. And CPS could talk to the Japanese authorities if they want to (and can manage). But they can do eff all. The better point of contact would be the US embassy in Tokyo. They may not be able to do anything either but if anybody can intervene it’s them.



  • I think the best outcome is for your defense attorney to sow doubt over the recorded audio.

    There are a number of things a recording will not pick up. Somebody could make air quotes with their hand while giving the spoken word a neutral tone. You could easily get to a he said she said situation there. Did they mean it? Or did they know about the wire? Do we have witnesses who saw the air quotes? Reasonable doubt spreads from here. I saw an interesting video where a mobster was showing his technique of pouring wine in different ways to communicate to his in-group to watch their mouths if an outsider is there. A wire would miss stuff like that. It’s the sign language of House Artreides, for the people who don’t hate sand.

    There is also something to say about translations. You’ll inevitably arrive in situations where different interpretors will translate certain quotes differently depending on context. There is wiggle room. So the hypothetical Japanese wire recording could provide some fertile soil for reasonable doubt in an English speaking court as well. Less so because of the additional politeness levels but because the language drops subjects all the time. English grammar slavishly demandsa subject for most phrases and the Japanese omit them willy nilly. Who did what and to whom becomes harder to judge when you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle. Slang can be decoded; inside jokes may prove harder. “Shaka when the walls fell.” If you’re a Trekkie, you know. But if you have an inside joke like that within a small group of foreign language speakers language could obfuscate some things. But it may not be enough to render the whole recording useless.

    We have come to a point where lenses are so small. With the possibility of deepfakes, I think law enforcement may no longer just send people in with a mic only. Sure, a video can be deepfaked as well but it will be harder to fake and maybe easier to prove that it was.








  • OG’s account is 5 days old and they have amassed quite a weird post history. I would call most of it shit stirring, always nicely illustrated with a picture.

    You are welcome to read my longer post history, which is quite anti-MAGA.

    Whether we all think that excuse for a man has dementia is irrelevant. Nobody here is likely qualified to make the call. And the ones who might speak up here to do it anyway disqualify themselves by speaking up. So all this is is pointless shit stirring.







  • “Western” languages? There is no such thing. There are Turkic ones, Indo-European ones, Uralic ones, Afro-Asiatic ones. They and more are all west of wherever Chinese characters are used.

    You are picking a small number of Chinese characters that bear a distant resemblance to the meaning they carry to this day in languages that use them. Most of them have been abstracted to hell. Or simplified beyond recognition, I guess not just in the Chinese mainland. And that 火 means 🔥 was not obvious to me when I learned it. You need somebody to tell you to imagine a person with their arms on fire to see it. So the abstraction has progressed too far. Where you see a mountain I see a fork also. Therefore, I challenge your premise to the extent that this is obvious without being instructed.

    I can also teach you pyr(o) means fire and maniac is an obsessive crazy person. You can get to the meaning of pyromaniac from there too. That as a learning process is not too different from 火山 equals volcano.

    A lot of these images you presented strike me as linguistic retconning to aid children (and foreigners) learning the characters.

    The point of the Latin alphabet is not to tie meaning to the letters but to the sounds they represent in the language that uses it. So even if, hypothetically, you could trace back the letter O to a symbol representing a window in Egyptian hieroglyphics this has no bearing on how the letter is used today.

    It’s also noteworthy to me that any language using Chinese characters have invented a syllabary (like Hiragana and Katakana in Japan) or use the alphabet to an extent to teach the language (pinyin in the PRC, complete latinization in Vietnam). Korean adopted a syllabary that has a similar look and design but actually makes sense. There is a strong appeal to the utility of being able to read what’s on the page without having to think about anywhere from 1000 to 100000 abstracted characters.