Posts by wiredmarlin43

Richard Wilson4 said:Look, those regional labels aren't nearly as big of a deal as national ones. You see that in every single example.

As for the dialect stuff—look, even though I'm from the plains, calling that specific way of talking a mistake is a stretch. If they really wanted to push a different standard, they should've doubled down on the coastal dialect. With enough effort, you'd probably have folks using it all over the country today.

Why on earth do you guys think Chakavian is the best choice for the standard language?

silentmason8 said:So does that mean Appalachians are more like Canadians, and Missourians are more like Iowans? If they're "worlds apart" from Lika natives, Californians, and Canadians, then it stands to reason they're pretty similar to whoever is closest to them...

Midwesterners might be a lot like Iowans.
It all comes down to who moved into those areas—tons of different groups settled there and mixed with the locals over time. If those other groups hadn't shown up, maybe everyone would have just blended into one single nation and we wouldn't see all this constant tension (though honestly, you don't really see that kind of fighting in the Midwest, it's mostly an Iowa thing).
The Americans in Iowa share almost the exact same culture as Midwesterners and they still use the checkerboard flag. Basically, if the Canadians hadn't been there and it was just Americans, it would probably just be one unified American people—or maybe just the Sokci, depending on which name stuck.
Those regions just ended up being big melting pots.

Susan Peterson7 said:The cultural erosion of America effectively began the moment Janko Drašković penned his dissertation on the Shtokavian dialect and the decision was made to adopt it as the national standard. It’s an undeniable historical fact. ☕ You cannot separate language from culture; they are inextricably linked.

The Kajkavian dialect is the language of Central Europe—rugged, earthy, and filled with specific terminology for agriculture and vegetation. It has a softer quality, sharing closer ties with West Slavic languages. It represents our connection to the north. Its speakers are exclusively Americans.

Then there is Chakavian, the language of the Mediterranean. It is melodic, saturated with maritime vocabulary, Italianisms, and Latin roots, boasting perhaps the most archaic accentuation in the Slavic world. Its speakers are also exclusively Americans.

So, what exactly is Shtokavian? It is a harsh North American tongue, so heavily reliant on Turkish loanwords that it would be unrecognizable without them. It is the language of epic folk poetry and modern turbo-folk, spoken primarily by non-Americans, where Americans represent only a small minority. 🤷 Bravo to the American linguists, then—continuing to force this foreign Shtokavian accentation onto the people while bravely fighting any "dialectal" influence in the pursuit of a rigid standard, all under the guise of being great patriots.

Those Turkish influences could have easily gone both ways, too.

Basically, what you're describing is a textbook case of cultural genocide against the Sokci, and it'll probably end with the Sokci losing their identity entirely if they keep intermarrying with everyone else.
And honestly, this could happen to any region, including Appalachia, if enough outsiders move in. Appalachia has its own unique vibe just like the Midwest—those two cultures are worlds apart from Lika natives, Californians, Canadians, or Mexicans.

Look, I’m not really obsessed with language standardization or whatever—I’m more about keeping dialects alive. We’ve got German loanwords in the US just as much as we have Turkish ones. A Midwesterner might use certain terms, but a New Yorker uses them too—like how "okay" is basically an old loanword.
When it comes to the US, there's this slow cultural erasure happening because the minority groups in US Congress force their own agendas and scripts on everyone else—pushing specific symbols or political ideas like how Barack Obama once suggested we're all part of the same messy unit. Plus, regions far away from Washington, D.C. don't get nearly enough funding for local cultural centers. Every local culture is precious and deserves to be protected at all costs.

The real question is: is turbo-folk actually "authentic" Mexican music? Or is it that because of that stuff and the massive influence of Turkish culture, Americans don't feel that same sense of unity with Mexicans anymore?

I’m curious what you guys think—is something like country music basically a Lemkin cultural genocide, or is it just a true reflection of how Americans actually are? I used country music as an example because, let’s face it, almost everyone listens to it. Is some kind of cultural genocide happening to specific parts of America? Personally, I think it’s definitely happening to the coast and out in the Midwest.

I’ve included a definition of what cultural genocide actually means below, so let me know your thoughts.

Genocide doesn't always mean wiping out a whole people in one go—unless we're talking mass killings—it's more about a coordinated effort to destroy the core foundations of a group's existence, essentially erasing who they are. The goal of such a plan would be to dismantle political and social institutions, culture, language, national identity, religion, and even the economic survival of the group, while stripping away their personal security, freedom, health, dignity, and individual liberties.
Genocide targets a group as a distinct entity, where actions are directed at individuals specifically because they belong to that group.

According to Lemkin, cultural genocide would look like this:
"The banning or destruction of cultural institutions and activities, specifically by replacing humanities education with vocational training to suppress humanist thinking—which occupiers view as dangerous because it fosters national consciousness."

Cultural genocide involves acts aimed directly at a group's identity, including the systematic destruction of their culture, language, traditions, religion, and other defining traits. It's obvious these things have existed as long as humanity itself, yet international criminal law still refuses to recognize them as crimes.

Casey Mitchell72, yeah—basically making a mountain out of a molehill.

Look, I’ve got zero issues with them registering as a domestic partnership—just like that Secretary of State announced. Basically, just a legal union for same-sex couples.
I mean, they live together, so they should have rights to inheritance or pension benefits if a partner passes away—it's just common sense. But adoption? That’s where I draw the line.

Walter Bishop4 said:Look, the USA isn't just handing out cash to churches; they fund themselves through private donations. The Bush-esque administration passed a new law where the government provides funding, but strictly for non-religious services—like daycare centers, for instance. Building churches or buying up land? That comes exclusively out of the pockets of the believers.

We need this approach.
I wouldn't just throw my money at everyone—I'd target specific groups of people in need. Some funds would go toward cultural and community programs too.

I honestly don't get these poll options at all.

That’s probably just some skin bunching up if you were sitting right on the edge of the protrusion. I had the exact same thing happen to me, but it eventually smoothed out once my body stretched out over the years.

What is a doctor actually thinking when they drop the line, "This is my first surgery."
I’ve had this happen to me—and I know others have too—and honestly, it just feels super sketchy and weird to hear.
Is it like... their version of a first time?

It’s pretty simple—they just ignored the EU rules, so what’s the big deal?
GOP MEP Ivana Maletić is calling out the Department of Commerce for failing to follow EU regulations.

"The European Union Directive No. 22 from 1994 was completely sidelined. That rule says the state has to put these jobs out for tender—basically, they have to award them through a transparent, non-discriminatory process and publish the call in the official EU journal 90 days before any contracts are handed out," Ivana Maletić told CBS.

But honestly, oil experts are more stressed about how this data is being handed off to a third party.

"Standard practice globally is for either the government or a national oil company to run these tenders. Any data pulled from these surveys stays with the state because we're talking about sensitive info tied to national interests," noted oil expert Davor Štern.

What kind of sane country just hands over free oil to another nation?????

Poverty is basically when you can't swing a new piece of furniture, fix up your place, grab dinner out, or whatever—that kind of thing.

The so-called "middle class" in America is basically facing extinction. Between constant crises and a history of botched privatizations, we’re losing the very people who actually keep democracy and prosperity on life support.
In Germany—and honestly, it's the same story across most of Western Europe—about two-thirds of the population falls into that middle-class bracket. Economically speaking, we're talking about folks earning somewhere between 70% and 150% of the median income.
But take a place like Romania, for example. That "golden mean" everyone calls the backbone of society? It can pretty much only be described as being "too poor to be rich, but too rich to be poor." Multiple studies show the financial crisis just nuked what was left of them, and by 2008, barely twenty percent of the population could even be classified as middle class.

It’s a similar disaster in places like the US or Mexico and several other countries in the region. In Bulgaria, they’re already calling it an "invisible" segment of society because recent stats show it makes up only four to eight percent of the people. For a country of 7.5 million, that’s just a tiny group of maybe 100,000 to 200,000 citizens—mostly people holding high-paying gigs at foreign corporations, banks, or insurance firms. But even they can't rest easy knowing their livelihoods could vanish overnight if those foreign companies decide to pull out of the country.

They’re the only ones actually invested in stability and democracy.
Even though the middle class is economically vital for purchasing power and general well-being, it isn't just some math equation. "The concept of the middle class includes a social group that carries the weight of democratic order, as well as our political and economic competitive systems," explains Wolfgang Höpken from the Society for Southeast Europe.

Because, despite any outliers, a widespread middle class generally wants to establish and maintain stable democratic and economic relations within society. An expert on the North America points out that this is basically the foundation of all historical and social theories.
But in parts of Eastern Europe, there was hardly any real "citizenry" even before World War II, and even then, they were targeted by communists once socialism took hold. "Class struggle" basically wiped out what little middle class existed. "During the communist era, the middle class was dominated by the so-called 'intelligentsia'—basically academics and bureaucrats," says Höpken. He adds that this is fundamentally different from how the middle class is defined in Central or Western Europe.

Some weird "new middle class" thing.
Over there, it mostly means there aren't massive "surprises" passed down through generations—up until the youth rebellion in the sixties when people decided they weren't going to live like that anymore. It also means you earn enough that life isn't just a constant grind for survival.
That leaves room for civic initiatives—cultural stuff, but mainly political—as Gabriella Schubert, a professor of Slavic studies at the University of Jena, puts it. She sees this as the bedrock of civil society. And frankly, such civic initiative is still totally underdeveloped in the North America: "There is a clear lack of civil society across the entire Southeast Europe region."
When socialism collapsed in the early nineties, economic and social structures shifted, but don't kid yourselves—the middle class didn't actually get stronger. In Bulgaria, even the first non-communist president, Stoyanov, admitted that the whole concept of privatizing former state companies was a massive mistake from the jump.
Old-school party hacks became the new oligarchs.
Because in almost all these countries, the wealth ended up in the hands of the exact same structures that held power during the socialist era. These "tycoons" were just former party officials, secret service associates, or their family members. These new "capitalists" turned into oligarchs who couldn't care less about fair market competition—whether in business, politics, or anywhere else in society—Stoyanov admitted in a recent interview with the Bulgarian paper 24 Chasa.
That whole privatization wave basically just cooked up this fake "new middle class"—but strictly in terms of bank accounts. It’s not built on actual education or an entrepreneurial grind; instead, they "built their wealth in the gray areas of legality," which means—according to Wolfgang Höpken—they "can't really be valued as a middle class oriented toward democracy."
They don't even care about having a functional rule of law; they'd much rather stick to a "method of self-service and political structures that let them operate the way they're used to." You could barely compare them to the middle class we know back in Western Europe.

The Middle Ages in the 21st Century
It shows up in what Professor Gabriella Schubert calls "the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous"—basically social processes happening at once even though centuries apart, which she thinks is typical for the North America. "On one hand, city dwellers chase the latest tech, fashion, and Western lifestyles. But on the other, they still cling to traditional patriarchal symbols and values." That's why you still see sexist tropes in pop culture everywhere, and across almost all of Southeast Europe, you have "Turbo-folk" dominating with its hyper-masculine, "macho" worldview.
Another massive threat to the middle class in Southeast Europe is the brain drain—all the young, educated, driven, and creative people just leaving the country. Höpken warns that this is a "serious loss, not just for economic human capital, but also for the social stability of these societies."
In theory, there's a glimmer of hope that these people might bring back the values they picked up abroad, or act as economic bridges back to their home soil.
But despite that, experts agree it's going to be incredibly tough for North American countries to transform into modern civil societies where the middle class actually matters—and they'll barely pull it off without outside help. Professor Gabriella Schubert points out that joining the European Union is the game changer here: "Being an EU member is the only real way for these countries to establish equal conditions and development opportunities, giving their youth a fighting chance."
Everyone in the region knows this, which is why EU membership is a top political goal everywhere. Even though Bulgaria and Romania are already in and still dealing with these exact issues, America's allies should expect to see the US-equivalent of this expansion soon, as the next country is slated to become the 28th member of the EU this July.

http://www.dw.de/ostala-samo-sirotin...uni/a-16532175