We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!
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@kazitor This.
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Proper grammar as defined by the official rules for Serbo–Croatian, or proper grammar for the dialect that these people use?
Official rules, mostly not inflecting the nouns properly, mainly in southern Serbia.
In which case that’s most likely proper grammar for the dialect in question. Saying a dialect isn’t correct because it doesn’t conform to the rules for the standard language is basically putting down the dialect as inferior.
For example:
Odakle si? (Where are you from?)
Iz Leskovac (From Leskovac, proper noun inflection would be Leskovca)One feature of dialects around my area is the use of the word of in certain constructions that aren’t used in standard Dutch. For example:
Standard Dutch: Waar hij vandaan komt? (“Where he comes from?”)
Dialect: Wì of ie vandaen komt?Without the of, the second sentence doesn’t feel right because it’s not grammatically correct as far as dialect-speakers are concerned. But most of them wouldn’t include the word when speaking standard Dutch, because they also know it’s not really correct there.
In any case, the above also illustrates the chief problem with “write what you say.” Most speakers of standard or TV Dutch probably would for example have no idea what “wì” is supposed to mean, especially not out of context. (Although I have by now somewhat developed the opposite attitude, even if not entirely seriously: I’m being forced to write the word “wì” with three letters that don’t actually appear in it.)
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
It's not a proper grammar. There are rules for noun inflection (we have 7 cases), they don't follow them because they are uneducated peasants and too lazy to learn them.
No, they’re people who are victims of others thinking themselves superior because they follow a different set of rules. According to the grammar rules of their dialect, inflection doesn’t apply in the circumstances you used as an example — this is no more or less valid than that it does apply in standardised Serbian. Just because some group of scholars at some point decided what the rules for the standardised language are, doesn’t mean any other rules are invalid and anyone using them should be made to conform to the standard set under all circumstances.
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth Dude, you are wrong on that. We are not talking about different pronunciation or dialects like Scottish, Irish, British and US English, we are talking bad grammar. It's a small minority of poorly educated people with mixed ethnic background.
What's the mixedness of their ethnic background got to do with anything? Does that make how they talk even worse?
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@Gribnit said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth Dude, you are wrong on that. We are not talking about different pronunciation or dialects like Scottish, Irish, British and US English, we are talking bad grammar. It's a small minority of poorly educated people with mixed ethnic background.
What's the mixedness of their ethnic background got to do with anything? Does that make how they talk even worse?
So he's not only wrong and sanctimonious, he's a bigot as well. Fun.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gribnit said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth Dude, you are wrong on that. We are not talking about different pronunciation or dialects like Scottish, Irish, British and US English, we are talking bad grammar. It's a small minority of poorly educated people with mixed ethnic background.
What's the mixedness of their ethnic background got to do with anything? Does that make how they talk even worse?
So he's not only wrong and sanctimonious, he's a bigot as well. Fun.
Well, it'll be hard to tell for sure at this point because I was asking a "do you beat your wife" variant out of annoyance designed to lead a third-party to draw the conclusion of bigotry. In all fairness. Although, I wasn't working from nothing.
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@Gribnit said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Benjamin-Hall said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gribnit said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth Dude, you are wrong on that. We are not talking about different pronunciation or dialects like Scottish, Irish, British and US English, we are talking bad grammar. It's a small minority of poorly educated people with mixed ethnic background.
What's the mixedness of their ethnic background got to do with anything? Does that make how they talk even worse?
So he's not only wrong and sanctimonious, he's a bigot as well. Fun.
Well, it'll be hard to tell for sure at this point because I was asking a "do you beat your wife" variant out of annoyance designed to lead a third-party to draw the conclusion of bigotry. In all fairness. Although, I wasn't working from nothing.
He's revealed it in other places. He's a good fit for this place
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@levicki
So the form of English these people with a specific ethnic background use is a less worthy form as opposed to Irish, Welsh or Scottish form?
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It's kinda funny that the great communicator @levicki who always writes in clear and concise manner, has utterly failed to get across his point that the bad grammar isn't regional dialect thing but it's just people not bothering to learn their language properly, because the same wrong patterns show up in all regions and all ethnic backgrounds - he failed so much that people now think he's a bigot. And I'm sure he'll blame the listeners for getting it wrong.
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@Gąska That's just because people keep misinterpreting him! You couldn't seriously blame someone for being misinterpreted, could you?
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth Dude, you are wrong on that.
I’d not heard of that agreement, but those are exactly the kind of scholars I was referring to.
Languages change, whether you like it or not. I know I don’t like a lot of the recent developments in Dutch, which I consider lazy language use (like using the masculine/feminine determiner “die” /di/ to refer to neuter words as well, when it should be “dat” /dɑt/) but this is just what happens. Modern Serbian isn’t 1850’s Serbian, just like modern Dutch isn’t 1863’s Dutch (when the first rules for spelling were introduced).
Fact is that you generally get a group of language scholars who write up the rules of the language at some point — you wouldn’t want anyone else to do this, really. The problem, though, especially in the 19th century when a lot of this was going on, is that these people tended to be rather snobbish about what they considered “proper” language.
As an example, Dutch lost its case system sometime around the late Middle Ages. However, during the 16th and 17th centuries, the attitude among people who busied themselves with languages was that any language that was to be taken seriously, needed to have a case system — largely because Latin has one, and there was no language of higher standing than Latin at the time. So what did they do? Imported the German case system wholesale into “proper” Dutch, of course, which was easy enough given the similarities between the two languages.
This resulted in people in everyday life not using cases much or (probably) at all in speech, but anyone who wanted to appear learned, had to speak in public, and/or wrote things down, did use cases. In other words, they would say, Het paleis van de koning (“The palace of the king”) but write, Het paleis des konings or Des konings paleis (lit. “The king’s palace” — in English the possessive ’s is a remnant of the case system too).
That frankly ludicrous situation persisted until the official language reforms of 1946/’47, though it had already been on the decline in the decades previously (in 1930s books, some will use cases while others don’t) and even then, many older people continued the practice into the 1960s and beyond.
We are not talking about different pronunciation or dialects like Scottish, Irish, British and US English, we are talking bad grammar.
Grammar differs in some ways between those dialects of English as well.
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@kazitor said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska I find that the sort of people who tend to whinge about English are native speakers who've never tried to learn another language.
"Look at all this unphonetic spelling! The tenses!!11!!"
That's OK, I've learned at least a bit of French(1), German, Spanish, and Welsh, with odd forays into the edges of other languages, and I still think English spelling / pronunciation is goofy. The goofiness is largely the result of two things:
- A somewhat random hodge-podge of etymology (cue: bad jokes about entomology - I know the difference, thanks) that causes there to be many patterns of spelling rules.
- Spelling that hasn't really changed since it mostly settled down in the late Middle Ages(2), even though the pronunciation has undergone a number of fairly radical shifts, and thus the spelling no longer corresponds with the pronunciation.
(1) OK, yes, more than "a bit" of French.
(2) Late Middle English (around, say, the end of the 13th Century) still has a great deal of variability in its spelling for the same words, but it is recognisably, well, English. Old English is only barely recognisable as being not some form of German.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Welsh
What for?
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Welsh
What for?
Because I wanted to learn something new.
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@Steve_The_Cynic have you considered knitting?
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@kazitor said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska I find that the sort of people who tend to whinge about English are native speakers who've never tried to learn another language.
"Look at all this unphonetic spelling! The tenses!!11!!"
That's OK, I've learned at least a bit of French, German, Spanish, and Welsh, with odd forays into the edges of other languages, and I still think English spelling / pronunciation is goofy.
Mind you, I was being very generous in lending that argument to my strawman. For the biggest actually-significant flaw, it's not something that comes up too much in comparison to other perceived problems.
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Steve_The_Cynic have you considered knitting?
Once or twice, but meh.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
English spelling / pronunciation is goofy
That's for sure true. It's a legacy of a language that was never actually defined by academics (much to the frustration of certain academics!) and where spelling reforms were only ever very partial and didn't take hold widely at any point. It's made complicated by the fact that English should have far more letters than Latin script provides for (both vowels and consonants) and fixing that would end up with mutually unintelligible script instead of just strange accents and dialects. For example, there are English dialects that are almost completely impossible for Londoners to comprehend (excited Geordies and Glaswegians can be rather difficult to follow, especially when a lot of dialect words are in use).
When are such things one language and when are they really several? It's a state of mind, really; they're one language because people think they are one…
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@dkf said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
It's made complicated by the fact that English should have far more letters than Latin script provides for (both vowels and consonants) and fixing that would end up with mutually unintelligible script instead of just strange accents and dialects.
I believe the Shavian reforms ended up proposing something like 44 different letters to get in all the different sounds.
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@Steve_The_Cynic That guy has too long a beard to have been part of the Shave-ian reforms.
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@dkf said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
English should have far more letters than Latin script provides for (both vowels and consonants) and fixing that would end up with mutually unintelligible script instead of just strange accents and dialects.
Alternatively, adopt the solution other European and non-European languages have done: use multiple letters and/or accents to write a single sound. The Latin alphabet has no letter for the sound /ø/, for example, but various languages use <ø>, <ö> and <eu> to transcribe it anyway. English, of course, does this to a certain extent as well (like <sh> for /ʃ/) but probably not as much as many other nearby languages, I’d say.
Certainly the almost complete lack of using accents seems like a major oversight, especially where it would help to differentiate between words that are spelled identically otherwise. Say, *líve vs. *lìve, if you’d insist on otherwise keeping the spelling the same (else drop the silent e too, I’d say).
When are such things one language and when are they really several? It's a state of mind, really; they're one language because people think they are one…
A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot.
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@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Alternatively, adopt the solution other European and non-European languages have done: use multiple letters and/or accents to write a single sound. The Latin alphabet has no letter for the sound /ø/, for example, but various languages use <ø>, <ö> and <eu> to transcribe it anyway. English, of course, does this to a certain extent as well (like <sh> for /ʃ/) but probably not as much as many other nearby languages, I’d say.
Polish does both
ę ą ł ś ć ż ź ń
but also
sz cz rz
When we have both, why not combine?
dż dźFor added nuisance, we also have letters with exactly the same sound
u = ó
h = ch
but they are not interchangable in writing. I remember to this day writing 500 times kózka as a punishment for putting kuzka on an exam.And an amusing detail, to wrap this awful subject:
rz is a single sound, but you read it as two separate in Tarzan, because it sounds like this originally.
dż is a single sound, and you read it as two separate in budżet, because fuck you. It sounds like single dż originally.
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@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Dutch lost its case system sometime around the late Middle Ages.
So Dutch people wrote everything in upper case? Can I blame for the existence of that stupid Caps Lock key?
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth What were their options?
Whose options? Those of the Dutch language scholars who borrowed the German case system into Dutch? Well, one of the options would have been to accept that Dutch didn’t have cases anymore. That took until the 20th century, though.
Many were "borrowing" words from Germanic languages or Latin so it made sense to also import some rules to make using those words easier.
Except that in my particular example, they were shoehorning in something that had been lost through natural causes already.
As I said we have 7 cases in Serbian. If someone is not using one of the cases when grammar says they should how are they not wrong?
What you don’t seem to (want to) get through your head is that it’s not wrong in their dialect. If they were to claim to speak standard Serbian and not use a case when the rules for standard Serbian says they should, then it’s a grammatical error. But if, in their dialect, a certain combination of words never uses a certain construction that standard Serbian does, then it’s not wrong when they’re speaking their dialect.
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@Zerosquare said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
So Dutch people wrote everything in upper case? Can I blame for the existence of that stupid Caps Lock key?
You can blame the ancient Romans for that.
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@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
You can blame the ancient Romans for that.
The ancient Romans didn't have Caps Lock. Or keyboards.
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@dkf said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
You can blame the ancient Romans for that.
The ancient Romans didn't have Caps Lock. Or keyboards.
Or zero, which is why their C programs always had exit status
E_FAILURE
, heavily contributing to the fall of the empire.
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@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Zerosquare said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
So Dutch people wrote everything in upper case? Can I blame for the existence of that stupid Caps Lock key?
You can blame the ancient Romans for that.
ROMANI ITE ~
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@dkf said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
It's made complicated by the fact that English should have far more letters than Latin script provides for
Such as 'z'
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@dkf said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
It's made complicated by the fact that English should have far more letters than Latin script provides for (both vowels and consonants) and fixing that would end up with mutually unintelligible script instead of just strange accents and dialects.
I believe the Shavian reforms ended up proposing something like 44 different letters to get in all the different sounds.
TIL. Now I have something new to learn that's useless.
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@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Whose options? Those of the Dutch language scholars who borrowed the German case system into Dutch? Well, one of the options would have been to accept that Dutch didn’t have cases anymore. That took until the 20th century, though.
I'm confident that there's a special place in hell reserved for prescriptive linguists.
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@ixvedeusi said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
I'm confident that there's a special place in hell reserved for prescriptive linguists.
In a room where all the devils are using the linguist's favourite language, but are speaking it and writing it in ways that the linguist despises.
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
If they were to claim to speak standard Serbian
They do claim.
In which case they are making a mistake, but one that’s probably very easy to slip into, especially if they speak their own dialect much more than standard Serbian.
Let me try to illustrate this in a manner topical to this forum:
$ python2 >>> print 1 1 >>> ^D $ python3 >>> print 1 File "<stdin>", line 1 print 1 ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax >>> print(1) 1 >>>
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@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
If they were to claim to speak standard Serbian
They do claim.
In which case they are making a mistake, but one that’s probably very easy to slip into, especially if they speak their own dialect much more than standard Serbian.
Let me try to illustrate this in a manner topical to this forum:
$ python2 >>> print 1 1 >>> ^D $ python3 >>> print 1 File "<stdin>", line 1 print 1 ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax >>> print(1) 1 >>>
E_CAR_NOT_FOUND
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@boomzilla said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
E_CAR_NOT_FOUND
It's Serbia, not Poland.
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@boomzilla said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
E_CAR_NOT_FOUND
It's
Serbiaa Yugo, notPolanda PZInż.
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Yugo
It's called Yugo because you go, but the car doesn't
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
In which case they are making a mistake
Yes, end of discussion.
Right, so the fact that a mistake is being made is more important than the reason for said mistake.
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Understanding reasons is a to . Why would we waste a perfectly good opportunity to be angry on this forum?
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Therefore, trying to understand the reason for a mistake is an undesirable behavior which leads to a change of outcome in an observed system -- it turns a mistake into a non-mistake.
I hope you're trolling. Because otherwise... wow.
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Right, so the fact that a mistake is being made is more important than the reason for said mistake.
Trying to justify a mistake is called finding an excuse.
Excusing a mistake means that you tolerate it.
Tolerating mistakes means they will be repeated.
With enough repetition, mistake will be normalized as an acceptable behavior.You skipped the first step - how in the hell does understanding the reason become justifying the mistake.
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Right, so the fact that a mistake is being made is more important than the reason for said mistake.
Trying to justify a mistake is called finding an excuse.
That depends on the reason for trying to justify the mistake.
Excusing a mistake means that you tolerate it.
Tolerating mistakes means they will be repeated.
With enough repetition, mistake will be normalized as an acceptable behavior.And this is inherently wrong, how? (BTW, would you care to learn you made a grammatical mistake in that last sentence, one which is entirely understandable with some basic knowledge of Slavic languages?)
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@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Excusing a mistake means that you tolerate it.
Tolerating mistakes means they will be repeated.
With enough repetition, mistake will be normalized as an acceptable behavior.And this is inherently wrong, how? (BTW, would you care to learn you made a grammatical mistake in that last sentence, one which is entirely understandable with some basic knowledge of Slavic languages?)
Easy there fuzzy little man-peach, your normalizing his mistakes!
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@Gribnit said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Tsaukpaetra said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
your
you're.
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
With enough repetition, mistake will be normalized as
an acceptable behaviorcomputer technology.
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@Applied-Mediocrity referer
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@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
You skipped the first step - how in the hell does understanding the reason become justifying the mistake.
By increasing your mistake tolerance treshold.
How does merely understanding the reason increase mistake tolerance?
Do you really cannot comprehend that someone might want to understand the reasons something happens without also wanting for this thing to happen more often? You know, like epidemiology? Knowing the reason might allow you to contain the issue and prevent it from spreading.
@Gurth said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
BTW, would you care to learn you made a grammatical mistake in that last sentence
Yes.
You forgot an article before "mistake" in the last sentence.
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@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@levicki said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
@Gąska said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
You skipped the first step - how in the hell does understanding the reason become justifying the mistake.
By increasing your mistake tolerance treshold.
How does merely understanding the reason increase mistake tolerance?
Do you really cannot comprehend that someone might want to understand the reasons something happens without also wanting for this thing to happen more often? You know, like epidemiology? Knowing the reason might allow you to contain the issue and prevent it from spreading.
Didn't you know? Murder investigations merely increase tolerance for murder. 🔪
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@Tsaukpaetra said in We need to be more user hostile to help them embrace freedom!:
Didn't you know? Murder investigations merely increase tolerance for murder. 🔪
Probably true to some extent. All sorts of nuanced classifications of homicide have been invented along with several different defences, whereas historically murder was murder and hang-em-all (unless you were clergy, sufficiently wealthy or royal...)
(off-topic: it seems quite apt that the suggestion for :murder: is a red-coat solider... )