EWAN MITCHELL As AEMOND TARGARYEN 2.08 "The Queen Who Ever Was"

[241216] 원우 Weverse Post Update

trans: carats, goodnight🌙

EWAN MITCHELL as AEMOND TARGARYEN | House of the Dragon S2E4

The Meeting on the Turret Stairs feat. Fitzloved, as suggested by @thenightisland

The vast majority (around 80%) of Chinese characters are made up of a radical (the general meaning) and a phonetic.

Radical 女 nǚ (woman) and phonetic 馬 mǎ (horse) = 媽 mā, mother (your mum sounds like a horse).

But a small minority are pictograms, that is to say a picture of the thing they represent.

Pictograms are the earliest characters, thousands of years old, but many are still used every day.

If you look at the oracle bone script for rat, tiger and elephant you’ll see they are clearly pictures of the animal they signify.

But if you look at the modern versions, you’ll notice something odd, they’re all rotated 90 degrees onto their sides.

Why? Why are all these characters written with the animals balancing on their tails?

Well, it’s for a straight-forward, practical reason.

For a couple thousand years before paper was invented writing materials were limited. We had silk (expensive), bronze (expensive and impractical), and oracle bones (religious use only).

And one more…

That was cheap, plentiful, durable, and easy to erase and rewrite characters. The wonder that is…

Bamboo!

It was cut into strips, and tied into books. Long thin strips of bamboo contributed to the Chinese custom of writing vertically, from top to bottom (and right to left).

But it also meant that it’s much easier to write some characters length-ways so that they easily fit onto the strip.

So that’s it, mystery solved. That’s why a lot of Chinese picture characters are written at a right angle.

4/13/25

Dialectical Materialism-

https://youtu.be/bGPSKZgFH70?si=kYXafU_gjLnoz4Ca

Materialism: hard reality/ material conditions shape our ideas/ human thought

Idealism: our ideas (religion, culture) shape our material conditions

Philosophical debates center on which shapes the other; the material or the ideal?

Dialectics: dialogue, interaction; Hegel believed idealism comes first, but he understood back and forth relationship between ideal and material

Historical materialism: applying dialectical materialism to our understanding of history; how do hard economic realities shape how people thinks; and how do the ways we think impact how our economic realities

Marx subscribed to dialectical materialism; he believed material conditions were the primary shaper between itself and ideas, but he differentiated this from mechanical materialism; ideas still shape material conditions, but ideas are primarily shaped rather than shaper; it’s a dialectical relationship

I am not "Richard". I am your King. Now go. GO!

ANEURIN BARNARD as RICHARD III THE WHITE QUEEN: Episode 10 The Final Battle

4/12/25

Tariffs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIhO4AJ1ZBY 

High tariffs are historically accompanied by extreme wealth gains for the capitalist class

High tariffs may promote the rebirth of domestic manufacturing, but those job/salary gains are offset by an increase in consumer prices

Tariffs artificially inflate the prices of foreign products, and reduce competition for domestic producers, allowing them to jack up prices in turn

Conversely, free trade (ex. NAFTA), destroys domestic manufacturing and enables American companies to offshore manufacturing and pay foreign workers a fraction of what they would have to pay American workers, increasing corporate profits

If Trump was serious about promoting American industry and helping the working class, he would use our tax dollars to fund factory-building, but instead, he wants to cut taxes for the 1%

Trumps wants to use tariffs to fund the gov’t so he can eliminate the progressive income tax

just a big fan of his head here.