112 Gripes About the French • Hacker News Board

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#241

Post by shijie » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

RHSeeger wrote: post #184

animal_spirits wrote: post #149

> For the right to speak involves the duty to listen. The right to criticize involves the responsibility of giving "the other side" a fair chance to make its point. I wish this could be chiseled in rock somewhere prominent

I love the idea of this, but it also plays poorly with > Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, facetious, or otherwise misleading information: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it." But I guess, to be fair, giving the other sides a fair chance to make it's p…

This just seems like a rather clever permutation of ad hominem.

“The reason I won’t refute your argument is that it is so incorrect that it would take me forever to explain why.”

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#242

Post by ThePadawan » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

techrat wrote: post #194

eplanit wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And true in Europe today. Ever been on a train in Germany in the summertime?

Ever been on the L in Chicago in a car without working air conditioning? Spoiler: Everybody stinks.

As a German, I want to add that on German trains, "in the summer" implicitly means "without working air conditioning" ;).

(Sort-of-jokingly. On ICEs, you're most likely to actually freeze body parts off due to the harsh AC. On local trains, you'll dehydrate due to excessive sweating. There is no middle ground.)

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#243

Post by esrauch » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #199

overgard wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you are willing to ignore 50% of the population, well, I don't know what to tell you other than that history does not look kindly on partisans.

Not just 50% of the population. Folks on the left will sniffily tell you that stuff where the vast majority of the rest of humanity agrees with the right isn’t even up for discussion.

Your sentence is really the same divisive "other side is crazy" crap that everyone else is complaining about. Folks on both the left and right (under US definitions) will sniffily do that same thing and act like their positions are obviously correct and the other side obviously unreasonable.

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#244

Post by sgerenser » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

tinco wrote: post #127

eplanit wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true. Europeans of that era did not bathe everyday. My stepfather escaped nazi Germany, and moved to the us in the 40s. He grudgingly adapted to daily bathing (my mother's insistence), but remarked how very American that is. He was very 20th century European, for sure.

(European here) my grandparents bathed I think once per week, we often joked about this in the family. My uncle who is a commercial construction inspector/engineer arranged for a full bathroom model a couple years before they died. When we went to sell the house he complained the bathroom was unused and looked the same as the day he signed off on it. Despite this, they never smelled bad to me, they certainly had a re…

A young Steve Jobs famously thought that as long as you ate a certain diet, you could skip showering/deodorant and still smell ok. His coworkers/manager at Atari did not agree and put him on the night shift: https://techpp.com/2017/02/24/steve-jobs-facts-you-might-not...

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#245

Post by lisper » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

orthoxerox wrote: post #222

dheera wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xkcd doesn't agree with the "duty to listen". https://xkcd.com/1357/

Randall makes a typical mistake: the constitution bans one specific form of censorship, therefore all other forms of censorship are acceptable. They are not, they just aren't so unequivocally bad that you can ban them in the constitution with a single sentence.

The exercise of editorial discretion in a privately owned publication or forum and censorship are two very different things.

What steams my clams is that the people who complain about private forums exercising editorial discretion tend to be the same people who insist that private property rights are sacrosanct, and so, for example, private property owners should be able to ban union organizers from their property [1]. This strikes me as brazenly hypocritical. Either free speech trumps private property, or private property trumps free speech. You can't have it both ways.

[1] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/supreme-court-holds-uni...

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#246

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

wyck wrote: post #160

As an outsider who speaks both french and english, and has been to both countries, it always stuck me how similar Americans and French people are. Both sides would rather die than admit they are so similar in terms of spirit an attitude, and this brotherly hate is the main reason they are so similar. It's pretty funny.

[deleted]

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#247

Post by Jasper_ » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

eplanit wrote: post #217

rvense wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The connotations of the term race has changed. It was definitely common in the fairly recent past (WWI) for English people to speak of Germans as a different race, indeed using the term more like we would use ethnicity today. See also the English division of India into martial and non-martial "races". You are implying a use of the term which is more influenced by biology and some vague, folksy notion of genetic/darwi…

The definitions I've known have remained stable until very recently. I'll stick with Race: genetics; Ethnicity: the group/tribe one "grows up" or is most shaped by; Nationality: the country you're in/from. They can all align to (mostly) one group, like in India and China, or can be mostly aligned like in northern Europe, or a melting pot like the US. It's the "connotations" (i.e. conflations) that are the reason that…

Please try and define "genetics" in a way that isn't, in some way, sociopolitical. To give one example out of many thousands across history, still somewhat alive today: do you consider South Koreans and Japanese people to be the same race? Do you know if those groups consider themselves to be of the same race?

The concept of race very much predates our understanding of genetics, which is a relatively modern science.

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#248

Post by rgoulter » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

afarrell wrote: post #139

rgoulter wrote: post #38

Does anyone know whether this had any impact on relations? My experience with seeing discussions online doesn't give me much confidence in the persuasive ability of "here are logical reasons why what you're feeling is wrong".

Online discussions are a lot more scatterbrained than sitting down to read a book. People are more willing to take a second & more logical look before responding when they cannot tweet back. Also, this has a lot of reasons why the reader is right to feel a certain way.

I saw a comic from 1898 "Un diner en famille" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_d%C3%AEner_en_famille which I understand the captions to be "Let's not discuss the Dreyfus affair" and "they discussed it".

I won't disagree that the internet can exasperate things like this.. the comic feels _too_ familiar in the internet-age.

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#249

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

shijie wrote: post #241

RHSeeger wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of this, but it also plays poorly with > Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, facetious, or otherwise misleading information: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it." But I guess, to be fair, giving the other sides a fair chance to make it's p…

This just seems like a rather clever permutation of ad hominem. “The reason I won’t refute your argument is that it is so incorrect that it would take me forever to explain why.”

[deleted]

Re: 112 Gripes About the French

#250

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

dudul wrote: post #223

wyck wrote: post #160

As an outsider who speaks both french and english, and has been to both countries, it always stuck me how similar Americans and French people are. Both sides would rather die than admit they are so similar in terms of spirit an attitude, and this brotherly hate is the main reason they are so similar. It's pretty funny.

Can you expand on that? I have dual citizenship, have spent each half of my life in both countries and I find French and Americans very different. How do you see them as similar?

[deleted]