they’re filthy communists i tell ya

Small/Medium-sized Business

You’re just flat out lying at this point lol. 21-23% of the entire Israeli Jewish population is first-generation immigrants; 30-35% is second-generation, direct offspring of immigrants; 30-35% is third-generation; 10-15% is fourth-generation; under 5% is fifth-generation or beyond (which would include Jews who lived there since before Aliyah). These are numbers are from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. There’s also statistics that rather say 40-45% are third-generation with much less being fourth-generation or beyond, but with around the same amount or slightly less being first and second generation – I find the former estimates far more reasonable though. It’s estimated around 90-97% of Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants since 1900.

A majority of Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants of several Aliyah (immigration to “Zion” from outside of the lands of Palestine/Israel, practically starting from 1882 but mostly ramping up around the start of the British/Israeli oppression of Palestinians in the region in the early and mid 1900s). Even the most conservative estimates say that around 50-70% of Israel’s Jewish population growth since 1900 came from immigration, with most of the rest of the population growth coming from recent immigrants having children. And those are really conservative estimates, the actual amount is likely much higher than that.

A significant portion of Israeli Jews came from immigration in the 90s, especially from the Soviet Union after its collapse – 1.4-1.6 million Jews (compared to Israel’s total current Jewish population of around 7.4 million) immigrated to Israel following the collapse of the USSR. Over a fifth of the entire Israeli Jewish population in just the span of one generation. Yet second- and third-generation Israeli Jews make up like 3-3.5x as much still.

It’s crazy for you to try to state that modern Israelis aren’t primarily (nearly exclusively) descended from relatively recent immigrants who displaced (and outright genocided) the native population. You straight up just made that up without consulting any history/statistics, not even Israel’s own statistics lol. Palestine faced a colonization and replacement by Jewish immigrants – according to the Jewish Virtual Library, 8% of people in the region were Jewish in 1882; then 11-13% after the end of WW1, after the adoption of a Zionist policy for Palestine and occupation by the UK (see the Balfour Declaration); then 32% in 1947 after several Aliyah; then in 1948 – the year the Israel was formally established and immigrants were shipped in from all over the globe, and the year European immigrants to Israel started all-out total war and genocide against Palestinians – that number jumped to 82%. It is not Jews’ “indigenous land”, 93%+ of people in the region were Arab Muslims at the time of the first Aliyah, hundreds of thousands compared to the 9,000 Jews and even less Christians. Jews hadn’t been the majority in the region since the 4th century, Arabs & Muslims have been the majority since before the Magna Carta, the Crusades, European Feudalism, they were most of the population when France just started to exist.

Considering the actual facts of the situation, your justification basically becomes “colonization and apartheid in the modern day is okay because some other people they identified with lived there 1,500-3,000 years ago”, in which case I have some bad news for like, 95% of Europeans, Middle Easterners, and Asians, who all exist on lands which were someone elses in that same time period. Ethnonationalism with feeling you have a “right” to certain land you have no actual connection to based on some ancient “predecessor” civilization that had those lands stolen from them before Hindu-Arabic numerals existed is a strong hint that you’re in the wrong (see: Nazism). Modern Jews are about as indigenous to Israel as the modern Japanese are to Korea, or modern Turkish are to Mongolia.

Zionism is modern-day ethnonationalism and colonialism by predominantly non-Levantine peoples (more than half of those being primarily European in ancestry). Its purpose is creating and justifying an ethnostate where Jews are superior and have rights that other groups don’t have – and such things are cemented in the Israeli constitution and law. To exist, Israel requires relegating non-Jews to second-class personhood and requires (or required at some recent point in time) commiting acts of genocide towards certain non-Jews; abolishing that would be abolishing the concept of Israel and Zionism as a whole. There is no real moral defense of the state of Israel.

Maybe access to connected devices (e.g. your computer components or the phone you have plugged in to your computer)

Even worse, because the Kingdom of Israel stopped existing 3000 years ago. Modern Israelis have zero connection to ancient Israel

Usually the best resources you can get online for free for language learning as a beginner or intermediate is mostly pirated photoscanned books, with some online pages or YouTubers mixed in as another supplement.

For example, for Japanese, I pirated the 3rd editions of Genki 1 & Genki 2, plus the workbooks for them. I also owe a lot to the YouTuber Tokini Andy (who has videos going over the updated Genki textbooks and explains a lot of things missing/poorly explained in the book, he’s pretty great). There’s also an interactive quizzing website for Genki someone made. For definitions and stroke order I used jisho.org, and for etymology I used Wiktionary, hanziyuan.net, and dong-chinese.com. The only other website/app I regularly used was Renshuu (a spaced repitition learning app for Japanese), which was pretty great and was a good supplement for drilling in what you learned from other resources – although you have to modify the settings quite a bit to really “optimize” it. A lot of people use WaniKani which is kind of similar but I think more Kanji-oriented and used more for students studying before a test. Oh and to learn the Kana, I basically just tested myself writing down the characters in the standard order for a few days until it got drilled into my head, I also used the Tofugu Hiragana learning resource thing but it only helped for a few mneumonics. Other than that, although I’m not exactly a weeb, I tried to force myself to watch anime (in Japanese) any time I wanted to do something like watch a show or play a game, and I’d look up all the stuff I didn’t recognize. Anime isn’t exactly representative of how Japanese people speak at all, and you’re going to get your shit kicked in (by that I mean disapprovingly stared at) by Japanese people if you speak like an anime character, but I suppose it’s like learning English off of Sesame Street and SkyDoesMinecraft…

For German, I heavily utilized Deutsche Welle’s learning resources, especially Nicos Weg. I also had people to practice the language with. My German still sucks though… for whatever reason, I had the absolute most difficult time with trying to learning German out of any language. The word order magic fucked with my head especially, but I just kept mixing up basic words.

For Russian I used Memrise at first, which worked for vocabulary and got me familiar with the most very basic vocabulary, but the features locked behind monetization eventually got too disruptive so I spent pretty much all my time on (pirated) beginner Russian learning textbooks and very technical grammar books (I was a very learned linguistics major so learning from linguistics-heavy books was significantly more feasible for me than it is for the average person). I probably had the least frustrating time with Russian out of any of the languages I self-studied. I self-taught myself Cyrillic when I was like 8 because I thought slavic stuff was cool so that didn’t really require any time…

I learned passable French in high school (despite my ADHD ass not paying attention 99% of the time and basically just not being present mentally for all of French 3), which then degraded a lot in my ability to use it since I never used it and was preoccupied with other stuff, but I can still read it fine, and I can understand it spoken depending on how they speak and my state of mind. I didn’t even study outside of school or anything really, I just had a teacher from France (she was my favorite teacher). Actually thinking of the words and grammar I’m trying to say though, I’m pretty fucked in that department unless I go back and practice it. French is my 2nd language.

I self-studied Spanish after school, not very seriously though, I could already grasp it pretty well enough because of my French knowledge. I got conversational in no time – still, randomly not being able to recall random words is a pain in the ass (that goes with English too I guess). I did a bit of Duolingo at first but then just started listening to podcasts and videos and stuff, and looked up the words I didn’t know (beforehand and during the time I was already doing a lot of Spanish linguistics work so I already knew “about” the language and its phonology/spelling to pick out the things I heard). This was really only possible because, again, I was already able to understand pretty much all the French you would encounter in daily life.

For Finnish I mostly used pirated books and YouTube learning resources. The first books I used were from Leila White, “From Start to Finnish” and “A Grammar Book of Finnish” which are both great. I would definitely suggest that anyone who wants to learn Finnish goes through those books – the second one’s a reference rather than something you’re supposed to go through from beginning to end though.

I tried (and failed) to learn Arabic a reeeally long time ago. It didn’t extend much past a few obscure and not-very-helpful learning internet resources plus Duolingo (which was kind of useless for Arabic, even moreso than Duolingo typically is useless for languages). I had an unusually hard time with the script for this one (is it racist to say the damn squiggly lines all look the same), and reading it without vowel markers is very difficult to me.

slovake.eu was a helpful resource for Slovak when I was doing the necessary stuff for citizenship – I could’ve probably gotten by with only English (despite doing it myself and without an immigration lawyer) but I felt it only made sense to at least try to learn the language. It… definitely happened… I basically learned much of the core vocabulary and some grammar quirks, and played fill in the blank with Russian/Polish words except how I thought they’d be in Slovak for words for ones I didn’t know. Would not recommend doing that, but if you DO do it then just know that Slovak is the absolute best slavic language to do it in, they will probably understand you if you outright are speaking a different slavic language.

Right now I’m using this book online for Italian that’s only in Italian which is basically like, introducing grammar & topics in the language with no actual instruction or anything, it’s just a bunch of Italian sentences with images and stuff to get you to remember the grammar based off of context. It’s sick as hell, but I can’t remember what it’s called right now.

After a long time (around B2 or maybe B1 level probably) you have enough comprehension to start learning well while watching content made for natives – e.g. you can watch YouTube videos or a TV show in the language and can learn from looking up the (still large) portion of words you don’t understand.

I was originally a monolingual English speaker – only 1 native language, I didn’t have like 2 or 3 native languages like most of the world (shout out to all the kids who acquired English solely off of TV and YouTube as a kid). On one hand, being monolingual definitely makes you more ignorant to other languages and your first language might be a little bit harder (but honestly it doesn’t get much easier from there, you will still writhe in pain 4 hours a day trying to learn any subsequent languages), but on the other hand being a monolingual ENGLISH speaker opens you up to way more possibilities (resources) than not being an English speaker, so I guess overall I was pretty lucky in that regard.

I have really bad ADHD and Aphantasia which is (for the most part) a hinderance to language learning – my working memory is extremely bad, I can’t visualize SHIT and ADHD makes my non-visual memory go kaput. Language learning takes significant time, energy, it’s frustrating as fuck, and most of this comes down to a lot of it just being brute forcing memory. There is no cheat to language learning, there is no “lern basque in 23 dayz”, it is just putting thousands upon thousands of hours of very regular, very (inter)active focus and memorization methods into it until it’s drilled in your head. It can be more challenging than any job you’ve ever done and you’ll want to cry due to how little progress you feel that you’re making despite the great amounts of time and energy you put into deciphering this mess.

On the other hand, I know Autistic people with Hyperphantasia and Synthesia (specifically, the kind where you see colorful words appear in your vision when you hear, read, or think about language) and they are SIGNIFICANTLY more capable at language stuff than anyone else, although it’s still a lot of effort to put in for them of course.

Language is pretty much about constantly pushing back against the force inside of you that says “you can’t do this, you’re not improving, it’s tiring” and managing your breaks/scheduling well. It’s easy to turn a “break” into just not touching the language again. You have to be motivated a LOT to learn a language (including being motivated by pressure/necessity, go get locked up in a country with speakers of your TL or something) or else you’ll just quit as soon as you hit your first wave of roadblocks.

on y office maybe? that could be interpreted as “we work there” with very poor grammar

It is a nuanced topic that requires explanation of certain history. There is no TL;DR

pretty sure i remember just pressing ctrl-c/ctrl-v on the android studio emulator

Vintage clarinets can be very beautiful, but modern more standardized clarinets are also often beautiful (I’m quite partial to a lot of the Backun designs, but I have an old Selmer I really like too)

I can’t think of any instruments that aren’t made as “beautiful” as before. The only differences are that modern ones are just made… better, like way better. A $200-400 guitar now surpasses the quality of a guitar costing thousands of dollars from a few decades ago, and there’s way more diversity in the designs.

That being said, I don’t see what the point of musical instruments that aren’t “utilitarian” would be. It’s not a sculpture, it exists to make sound, there’s no reason for an instrument that sacrifices sound or design quality to have fancy aesthetics, unless it’s for a movie/play or something and the sound doesn’t actually matter.

Do people in cities have planes circling them 24/7 or something? I see like a few planes every month maybe and I live not far from a city with an international airport.

People with ADHD, Dyspraxia (a motor disability), and some type of insomnia disorder have significantly higher rates of car accidents – around 4x more likely for ADHD and 3x more likely for insomnia disorders (driving while sleepy is around as dangerous as driving while drunk). At minimum 25% of all car crashes involve people with ADHD or insomnia disorders (which is why your car insurance rates might skyrocket in some states if you get diagnosed)… I have all of those. Yet, somehow, they still allowed me to get my driver’s license, and I got it with single-digit hours of driving experience at the time… very American to give licenses that allow you to drive 13-ton vehicles to people who shouldn’t even qualify to drive on public roads.

I still have no reason to waste tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a few years on a car though.

Aaanyway, if you wanted to reveal my place of origin you probably could, given how you’re fond of digging through my post history. Go see if you can put together the clues. Or don’t, because if I did want to share that I would have at this point, don’t you think?

So basically what you’re saying is that you’re North American and haven’t had any education outside of North America, yet you’re trying to make it sound like you have so you can pretend you have any experience to disprove anything others say about non-western education systems. Because there is absolutely 0 possible way to pin a person’s place of origin down based on the continents they went to school in unless they’re Australian or something. That answers all the questions I need to know about.

Your argument basically boils down to “you’re making generalizations and assuming other countries’ education systems are just like the US’!” while making the assumption that other education systems are completely fundamentally different to the US’ and have no similarities (which it’s pretty easy to find out that most other countries do use the same general scale for grading and do have a massive problem with ableism especially with neurodivergent kids). And making crazy comments about how saying other countries have a problem with grading systems and ableism = ethnocentrism? Like you have provided absolutely 0 counterexamples other than vaguely saying “I know people who aren’t American” without any specificity which is pretty sus. Do you just assume the entire developing & underdeveloped world has to be “backwards” from the US or something? That would seem pretty ethnocentrist.

If your counterexample is that in multiple of the countries you went to school in the education system didn’t work like that, the obvious point is going to be “where was it that education didn’t work like that?”. I would hope you’d realize that before you even brought up your own location to make a point in the first place.

Hey, you may be shocked by this idea, but sometimes people live in places where they weren’t born for a while.

That… would make you American. I’m confused on how you think you can live and work in America for a long period of time while participating in the culture and not be American…

Regardless, you definitely could have gone through a different country’s primary/secondary education system, so how about I ask this: Which continent was it on? Out of, say, North America (including Central America and the Caribbean), South America, Europe (including Greenland, Turkey, and the Caucasus & Russia), Africa (let’s say this includes the Middle East even though most of it’s geographically Asian), Asia, and Oceania. Or which continents if you’d be so kind, since you say you went through multiple countries’.

I don’t think non-Americans would primarily be talking about specific American cities, things they experienced in America, primarily American cultural icons, and American politics while also calling American Democrats “leftists” among other American-centric ideas, but I suppose anything’s possible isn’t it. But that’s just from a few seconds of scrolling.

Not that you can’t know anything about other education systems because of that – I just find it hard to believe.

Considering you’re both American and a native English speaker, I somehow doubt that you have gone through primary or secondary schooling in East Asia, let alone anywhere outside of North America… regardless of that, it is very justified to make such generalizations considering how a majority of education is organized – most have very similar structures and are scaled-grading based with the objective to get a “passing grade” and often times those who get the highest grades get the most opportunities immediately post-education (generally college or better entry into jobs). Teaching is usually not one-on-one, and classes are mostly targetted towards neurotypical children.

Additionally, regardless of what country you go, it is a fact that the government and culture is extremely ableist, and likely has some form of rampant classism (although this is less universal than ableism). Systematic and cultural biases like that undeniably seep into the education system in every country. Your assumptions that education systems being ableist are probably not the default or widespread phenomenon really hinge on “being well-informed on the complexities of childhood/education psychology” and “proper disability awareness and accomodation” being one of the default states. It’s not, and in reality it takes significant amounts of resources and scientific approaches being pooled into specifically accomodating for neurodivergent and/or disabled and underprivileged children.

Sorry but do you know nothing of schooling in Japan, South Korea, or China? Or Germany or anywhere else in Europe? Would you be so kind as to point out a country where the part about education primarily rewarding being neurotypical, encouraging perfectionism/performance/competition over learning/personal success (and usually rewarding being privileged but not always) doesn’t apply? Where would you say has an “equal” or “fair” education system? The education systems don’t have to work the same way to have very similar and related fundamental flaws.

When I say “western world” I am using the common definition that includes South America and Eastern Europe. I suppose a better grouping to use would be primarily countries with a “medium, high, or very high” development index, considering those countries are likely to have a decently high rate of education with at least a somewhat consistent and functional education system. Considering that even includes war-torn theocratic dictatorships, I’d say it’s a pretty lenient metric.

“We” is most of the schools in a majority of education systems in the world. At least, a majority of kids in most education systems are subject to this kind of education. Especially in the western world and East Asia where education is widespread and well-established, and where typical grading is seen as god.

The way we do education is based on fundamentally flawed concepts, from the grading systems we use to the clear design towards specifically (neuro)typical and more privileged children. This is just true everywhere. Childhood psychology/developmental psychology and education are pretty complicated and poorly understood by most of the public, even educators. And obviously significant social biases also play a part in the education system.

Rich kids without ADHD generally do far better in school and get into far better colleges or professions initially than poor kids or kids with ADHD… there are exceptions, but for the most part, almost all of the kids that fail school either have some form of disability (often times an undiagnosed disorder) or are underprivileged in some way (like being poor). Generally those kids would excel in a better environment, hell usually the “gifted” classes are primarily neurodivergent kids in elementary/middle school (or equivalents).

Something people living in almost entirely racially homogenous countries don’t often get is that you can’t help the problem of racism by trying to ignore it. The only way to correctly address racism is to realize that it exists, that people do have biases based on race & ethnicity, that there are groups that are underrepresented, and to actively work to provide more ways for people to represent themselves and their identity. The fact of the matter is that more representation, even in seemingly minor ways like more emojis which they can identify with more, helps normally underrepresented people feel more comfortable with themselves and their identity and helps alleviate societal pressures for them to mask their identity/culture. Even small changes play a part.

Acting “colorblind” just makes the problem of racism worse, as it means you’d be acting blind to obvious biases based on race/ethnicity… including people who are part of a certain in-group (or multiple in-groups) being overrepresented and people of an out-group being underrepresented or represented poorly/highly stereotypically. There is no morally just approach to discrimination which attempts to pay no attention to the traits being discriminated against.

It’s pride month, this is like one of the most relevant times of year to this… It may be easier to see from that point of view instead – what purpose does queer pride exist even in places where queer people are “legal”? Why are there pride flags and events and characters and such to represent LGBT people? A similar answer may be applicable to racial minorities.

I was raised in the part of the United States with likely the most racist/racially tense history in the nation, possibly one of the most in modern history (it was the heart of the Confederacy after all, one of the most significant historical events of our nation was burning down half the state and presenting my city to the president as a Christmas gift, I’m sure it’d make a top 10 list of the big racism or something), a place that still has extremely bad problems with racial discrimination, and I used to think the “colorblind” approach and avoiding race as much as possible was the solution to racism, but I’ve realized over time that this approach is a tool that racism uses to thrive – it makes people refuse to acknowledge the racism in the first place, and it causes people to be unable to find out what racism really means and how many minor things can have major affects on minority groups. It’s a very common approach by (often conservative/“libertarian”) people here who haven’t subscribed to the whole calling people racial slurs and committing hate crimes, but still can’t face the fact that racism is alive, everywhere around us, and that they’re likely participating in it or propogating it regularly despite not actively trying to be racist.

Basically… let them have their variously skin-colored emojis