Starts typing gibberish in Microsoft Word because the magic hand still hasn’t told me how to get started coding.

To provide a dissenting opinion, I’ve always preferred harpsichords to pianos, which is one of the reasons I love Bach so much.

Pianos somehow sound simultaneously harsher than harpsichords with the off-putting initial clunk of the keys, and boringly muted in comparison.

Ok, then stop making blanket statements that all men’s spaces are like that, when that’s clearly not the case.

In fact, to answer your original question in a more complete manner: one thing women could do to help men’s lives improve is to stop systemically demonizing men in general.

Literally nobody said anything about “comfort women”, or that male loneliness even has anything to do with sexuality, for that matter.

One thing women could do to help is to stop demonizing and dismantling male-only spaces that provide men an opportunity for bonding and comradeship while hypocritically demanding more and more women-only spaces.

Not really, since that’s just the same ill-defined “Earnings Gap” nonsense constantly peddled as a “wage gap” for decades. As this article from Forbes and the sources inside explain, and has been well-known for a decade at this point, “When comparing two people in the same profession, with the same seniority, working the same number of hours, and so forth, women earn $0.98 for every dollar that a man earns.”

Their source for that number has since updated that number to $0.99 for every dollar a man earns for the same work.

So, unless you think that women should be paid significantly more than men for the same work (which wouldn’t surprise me, given your other comments in this thread), Rejoice! for the “wage gap” is no more!

I originally wasn’t going to respond to this post, but there’s so much revisionism, omissions, and outright inaccuracies here that I ultimately couldn’t ignore it, and that’s just when it comes to the Minoans and Hittites, which I’m most familiar with. As such, I assume your comments about the others are equally one-sided in order to serve the really odd, unnecessary narrative you have going on here.

First off, we know very little about the Minoans, since, y’know, Linear A hasn’t been deciphered yet, but from what we do know, they had an incredibly gender-segregated society, far more than we have today. In lists of family members, for example, the men and the women are in completely separate lists, which would be pretty weird for a place that didn’t have “arbitrary social constructs” like gender roles, and women seem to have been forbidden from most traditionally male jobs in their society.

Their art emphasized sexual dimorphism, and for you to assume that nakedness of the breasts in clothing trends implies the same thing for them that it would in our society today just adds to the evidence that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

They did have indoor plumbing, so at least you’re right about that.

For the Hittites it’s even worse, since their code of laws enforced separate punishments for crimes against men and women, with crimes against men carrying much more stringent penalties than crimes against women. Also, Hittite men wielded a large amount of legal power over their wives, which is indicated in their marriage ritual, where the man would “take” his wife so he could “possess” her afterward. Yes, it’s better than the ancient Greeks a thousand years later, but by how much is debatable.

Further, tawananna (queens) only ruled when their kings were away, or after they had died until the next king was chosen, and not a single queen is listed in Hittite histories as a legitimate successor to the dynasty at any point. Their role in court was mostly religious, and while they did conduct diplomatic relations with other countries, to act like Hittite queens were on par with Hittite kings in any way is completely false.

So we’re operating from what’s effectively misogynistic propaganda treated as a blueprint carried forward and reinforced in the historical record. It’s not “how it’s always been” at all. It’s just how it’s been recorded as having been by one side.

While there are definitely plenty of excellent examples of strong female leaders throughout history, and their achievements should certainly be celebrated, the ridiculous Bronze Age revisionism you’ve written here sounds much more like propaganda than what’s actually attested in the “historical record”.

I’m pretty sure that by this point most reasonable people have realized that the wage gap is a myth, so that’s probably not your best example.

Exactly. Feminist terminology like “toxic masculinity” and “patriarchy” has been very carefully chosen to be misandrist enough to result in the intended widespread popular demonization of men that we’ve seen over the past few decades, while also giving feminists enough deniability to gaslight with “that’s not what the terms ackchually mean though”.

The misandry is a feature, not a bug.

Exactly. More lenient sentencing is definitely part of female privilege.

Oh wait, no, I mean part of the horrible misogynist practice of “putting women on a pedestal”, of course. Gotta make sure that we frame all of the privilege that being a woman brings as actually just more evidence of how bad men are!

Brosef, the term “patriarchy” itself is (and has always been) intentionally misleading and inherently misandrist, and has played a huge role in the modern demonization of men as a result. The “academic definition” of the term is irrelevant, as the (fully intended) real world negative consequences of the term for men in the cultural zeitgeist have been systemic and pervasive, as we can see all over this thread.

Fleming himself was a British agent, and knew SMERSH so well that he put this foreword at the beginning of From Russia With Love:

"Not that it matters, but a great deal of the background to this story is accurate.

SMERSH, a contraction of Smiert Spionam–Death to Spies–exists and remains today the most secret department of the Soviet government.

At the beginning of 1956, when this book was written, the strength of SMERSH at home and abroad was about 40,000 and General Grubozaboyschikov was its chief. My description of his appearance is correct.

Today the headquarters of SMERSH are where, in Chapter 4, I have placed them–at No 13 Sretenka Ulitsa, Moscow. The Conference Room is faithfully described and the Intelligence chiefs who meet round the table are real officials who are frequently summoned to that room for purposes similar to those I have recounted.

I. F."

Spoken language is acquired, not learned. This is a formal distinction in the literature, used (in general) to distinguish unconscious behaviors from conscious ones.

Learning involves something you have conscious knowledge about - you can learn how to build a birdhouse, and then you can teach me how to build one as well, because you’ve consciously learned the rules for doing so.

Acquisition is involuntary, and unconscious. Children don’t try to learn languages - any human infant given language input from any human language will acquire that language over time, seemingly without effort.

Also, the knowledge we gain from language acquisition is unconscious knowledge - as an English speaker, you can’t tell me why “John hit the ball” is a sentence of English and “John ball the hit” is not, other than to give an explanation that will eventually boil down to “because it just isn’t”. You don’t know why your language is the way it is - you just implicitly know exactly how it is, and how it isn’t.

So, acquisition being distinct from learning requires no magic - just an understanding of the differences between these two processes, in the same way as we can also understand the differences between writing and language, one of which is that language is an unconscious, acquired behavior, and that writing is a conscious, learned behavior.

Writing isn’t language at all, for reasons discussed in my comments below.

Which is part of what makes linguistics work on ancient languages so difficult - we’re having to use these imperfect symbols, which themselves aren’t language, to try to glean as many features about the actual grammars they’re intended to represent, which are language.

This is why we know much less about ancient languages than we do modern ones - because we have actual recordings of modern languages (the recordings themselves are also not language, of course; they just encode language much better than writing does), so we can get at many more features of the language in question.

Fair enough.

What would you say about a dog growling at you, communicating its displeasure at how close you are? If you back away, understanding what the dog intends to convey with its growl, does that make the dog’s growl language?

Is a honeybee secreting a pheromone to get the hive to swarm language?

If so, how is language meaningfully different from “communication”? And, is human communication with each other the same type of phenomenon as the cases you and I mentioned, or is there some sort of categorical difference there?

(Also, this definition isn’t classical - it’s quite modern. The tendency to conflate writing with language in cultures that have writing is as old as writing is, and disentangling the two is a relatively modern discovery.)

Written Chinese could arguably be considered its own language.

Sure, by someone other than people who scientifically study human language, for the reasons outlined above. The study of orthography is its own separate (though closely related) field for good reason, though it’s nowhere as big as linguistics, since it’s not as scientifically interesting.

There are several spoken languages in China which are unintelligible to each other, but that look the same when written down since the written language doesn’t codify phonemes or even spoken words, but concepts.

You do understand why this supports my argument, right? Writing is just a largely arbitrary system of (imperfectly) encoding/representing human language, which must be learned, and is not acquired the way human language is. For this reason, it makes perfect sense that what is effectively a “code” for language could be used to represent multiple languages. You could just as easily do the same with written English. Heck, formal logic is specifically designed to do this for all human languages, but that doesn’t make it a language itself.

Here’s a pop article talking about the distinction, reflecting the discussion above (spoilers for the movie Arrival, which I highly recommend if you haven’t seen it). I can’t point you to any peer-reviewed articles on the subject, of course, because this has been decided science since the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s 1913 Course in General Linguistics.

I hate referring to Wikipedia (again however, there are no articles on this because it’s century-old settled science), but note that the article for Writing system correctly identifies writing as representing human language and not actually consisting of it.

That depends on your definition of “language”, where some definitions are much more scientifically useful than others. Defining language as “a system of communication” is not very useful, since there are important defining characteristics most people, and especially most linguists, believe that language possesses that other more general forms of communication do not.

Under the definition used by most linguists (for the kind of object we’re talking about here, that is - there are many other relevant objects of study that can be called a “language”), spoken/signed human languages have all of the characteristics of language, while “body language”/animal “languages” do not.

Sign language is language, since it has a systematic, unconscious mental grammar that meets all of the characteristics above, and writing is not considered language, since it’s just a means of encoding/preserving a language that already exists.

Another way of stating this is that writing is not itself the output of a mental grammar - it’s the output of a translation algorithm that acts on the output of a grammar, and so can’t be considered language itself (again, under one of the most common definitions of “language” used in the scientific study of human language).

Writing isn’t language, otherwise the thousands of unwritten languages wouldn’t be considered languages.

What an ass-backward decision.

Website called “The Economist” talks about the economy.

Lemmy.ml users: shocked-Pikachu-face

It would be if they hadn’t chickened out with the last episode. Unfortunately that kind of tarnishes the impact of the penultimate episode in hindsight.