English is actually Chinese, scholars claim

[DewachenVagabond]

Cultures will do what they can to say they are special. The Chinese are no different than the Americans, than the Canadians, Israelis, etc.

Also the Mormons think the lost tribes of Israel were in America (Jesus was there too!) before the modern day Native Americans did a genocide.

Just a small correction. Mormons believe a group of Israelites traveled to the Americas, and from there they split into two factions, the good Nephites and the evil Lamanites (actually there was another group of people, called the Mulekites, named after Mulek, the son of King Zedekiah, who fled Jerusalem after the Babylonian conquest. However, they largely get absorbed into the Nephites). From there they believe God cursed the Lamanites with a skin of darkness so the white Nephites wouldn't be attracted to them. Eventually the Lamanites killed all of the Nephites, but God is merciful, and Mormons believe they will eventually convert the Lamanites, the modern day Native Americans, to Mormonism and save them from the traditions of their fathers. Therefore, Mormons don't believe there were lost tribes of Israel in America, they think there are lost tribes of Israel in America.

To make things more confusing, Mormons also believe there was another, earlier group of people who also traveled to the Americas after the fall of the Tower of Babel, called the Jaredites. But they killed themselves off just before the arrival of the Nephites and Lamanites, save for one, who the Nephites found but couldn't understand due to a language barrier. But they took the scriptures he had to the King and he translated them, a portion of which was inserted into the Book of Mormon as the Book of Ether.

[Caoimhghín]

If I had all the money in the world to spend on getting frivolous but hilarious degrees, I think the first course I would seek out would be one on Reformed Egytpian. I want to dwelve into the fascinating world of people who really think it's a language and who try to prove that systematically.

But I digress.

[Queequeg]

English women.

English girls they're so prissy
I can't stand them on the telephone
Sometimes I take the receiver off the hook
I don't want them to ever call at all
-Mick Jagger

These days, I feel like listening to the Rolling Stones is something I have to do in a cave, out of earshot of any Millennial feminists...

[Könchok Thrinley]

English women.

English girls they're so prissy
I can't stand them on the telephone
Sometimes I take the receiver off the hook
I don't want them to ever call at all
-Mick Jagger

These days, I feel like listening to the Rolling Stones is something I have to do in a cave, out of earshot of any Millennial feminists...

Well, I am a millennial and consider myself a feminist ... you are so busted Q.

But nah, am really dissapointed by most of these twitter "socialists/feminists". It turned into woke conservatism... but that is a discussion for another time and thread I guess.

[Queequeg]

Do millennials know what it means to take the receiver off the hook?

Back to topic....

You know who invented Chinese?

[Mantrik]

Clearly rubbish. ALL civilisation is Indian!!

[Nemo]

Han supremacy and the scapegoating of foreigners has made most of my friends in China leave already. It's becoming insane. Even if you marry someone Chinese you never get the rights of a citizen. The ever growing racism and implementation of a technological dystopia are making it a very unwelcoming place for foreigners. With the reintroduction of concentration camps and slave labour that came with the current crack down a continued economic relationship with China is unacceptable. It is time to sanction China. This experiment of using economic growth to spread liberal values has failed. It's time to decouple our economies and return to domestic manufacturing. The alternative is strengthening a country more evil than America and having been in the military I know exactly what that means. Perhaps letting oligarchs escape environmental regulation and labour standards by moving to a totalitarian country was never a good idea.

[Queequeg]

I was talking about Chinese world domination the other day with a policy analyst working for the Japanese government, particularly the belt road initiative and African investment. Both of us are skeptical the Chinese will be able to take this far and the reason is this: the tendency to centralization in their theories of political organization, which is embedded in language and culture (along with resistance and subversion, can't have yin without yang) is ill suited to dealing with diversity. Eventually, Africans will buck them, Central Asians will buck them, and lacking a means to control them other than brute Force (as they do against dissent within their borders) they'll react as East Asians tend to when denied and they lose face, insolently sulk off. That's if the subversion from within doesn't neutralize the central government first. It may be decades or it might be more, but it will happen. Hubris of that scale collapses on itself sooner or later, especially when there are other players not bound by those rigid rules competing. They will build their wall and retreat as soon as it's comfortable. They think they've figured out how to avoid the fate of all the other dynasties that ended the same way. Hubris.

[Queequeg]

Han supremacy and the scapegoating of foreigners has made most of my friends in China leave already. It's becoming insane. Even if you marry someone Chinese you never get the rights of a citizen. The ever growing racism and implementation of a technological dystopia are making it a very unwelcoming place for foreigners. With the reintroduction of concentration camps and slave labour that came with the current crack down a continued economic relationship with China is unacceptable. It is time to sanction China. This experiment of using economic growth to spread liberal values has failed. It's time to decouple our economies and return to domestic manufacturing. The alternative is strengthening a country more evil than America and having been in the military I know exactly what that means. Perhaps letting oligarchs escape environmental regulation and labour standards by moving to a totalitarian country was never a good idea.

Followed you until the last sentence. Que?

[Nemo]

Han supremacy and the scapegoating of foreigners has made most of my friends in China leave already. It's becoming insane. Even if you marry someone Chinese you never get the rights of a citizen. The ever growing racism and implementation of a technological dystopia are making it a very unwelcoming place for foreigners. With the reintroduction of concentration camps and slave labour that came with the current crack down a continued economic relationship with China is unacceptable. It is time to sanction China. This experiment of using economic growth to spread liberal values has failed. It's time to decouple our economies and return to domestic manufacturing. The alternative is strengthening a country more evil than America and having been in the military I know exactly what that means. Perhaps letting oligarchs escape environmental regulation and labour standards by moving to a totalitarian country was never a good idea.

Followed you until the last sentence. Que?

I worked for Greenpeace in the 80s. I got CFC recycling added to the Montreal Protocol. That was the last time science and the environment defeated international capital. We literally passed an international law to protect the ozone layer that applied to the entire planet. The next step was environmental regulations for carbon emissions because we all knew global warming was happening. It's why we built so many nukes. Solar was shit back then. So capital changed the game and globalized. Since then we have been utterly powerless. China saw opportunity and became the worlds largest polluter.

[Queequeg]

Step 1. Get a Democrat in the White House.
Step 2. Keep the publicity campaign on coming environmental disaster on blast - turn this shit up to 11. Make this the number 1 issue. Let Mother Nature do the talking and walking until every last stooge finally hears it.
Step 3. Repeat step 2.
Step 4. Let reality sink in. I trust in people's capacity to do the math, work out the logic. Culture will follow.

Of course, what will really happen is the house will get blown down, we will have to hunker down for the storm, and then we'll have to just hope the grass grows back.

[Queequeg]

Alternatively, considering this from a more holistic perspective, the environmental disaster is just the Earth's fever, fighting off a cancer.

What's the sound of a tree falling in the woods if no one is there to hear it? Maybe its well being.

[Nemo]

I was talking about Chinese world domination the other day with a policy analyst working for the Japanese government, particularly the belt road initiative and African investment. Both of us are skeptical the Chinese will be able to take this far and the reason is this: the tendency to centralization in their theories of political organization, which is embedded in language and culture (along with resistance and subversion, can't have yin without yang) is ill suited to dealing with diversity. Eventually, Africans will buck them, Central Asians will buck them, and lacking a means to control them other than brute Force (as they do against dissent within their borders) they'll react as East Asians tend to when denied and they lose face, insolently sulk off. That's if the subversion from within doesn't neutralize the central government first. It may be decades or it might be more, but it will happen. Hubris of that scale collapses on itself sooner or later, especially when there are other players not bound by those rigid rules competing. They will build their wall and retreat as soon as it's comfortable. They think they've figured out how to avoid the fate of all the other dynasties that ended the same way. Hubris.

It looks like they thought they would be the world's factory forever. Like no one else ever read Marx and understood how capital can exploit a pool of labour and resources. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, etc are running at 100% production capacity and adding more every day now. The unexpected consequence of the BRI is it is much easier to reach these markets now. China is being hollowed out like the USA and is using a real estate bubble and debt to cover the losses. Many of the foreigners they joyfully welcomed years ago have took their skills to where they are appreciated. Real economies are built on manufacturing. If China loses markets and manufacturing capacity they are no longer the threat they imagine themselves to be. Bottom line is the RMB is not a global exchange currency. I agree they will become crazy hermits again if this happens. They gambled big on BRI knowing escaping US market domination, trade sanctions and currency was the only path to true independence. Looks like the Yanks woke up to the obvious threat to their trading empire propped up by the world's most powerful military.

It's so sad. I really love China. Even considered retiring there. Chairman Xi has turned into a disaster for China and the world.

[Queequeg]

Americans suck, but we suck less than anyone else in a position to be emperor right now.

Last night in the Dem debate, one of the first questions was what to do about the China sanctions - if elected, will you lift the sanctions? They gave the question to Yang first - I'm not sure if that was kind of racist, but in any event, he nailed the answer. Being of Taiwanese descent, he probably had the clearest view of the situation on that stage. He said, No. And he suggested he would continue the policy, albeit with a little more organization and focus than the Orange Baboon conducting diplomacy by twitter.

I've been at social gatherings among NY liberals and they seem a little shocked when I say Trump is actually headed in the right direction on China and the border, and that my disagreement is with the idiotic way he's handling both issues. I agree sanctions on China are long over due and we need to keep them up. The problem is, this confrontation is basically a war, and war can't be handled in such a reckless way. (When I'm asked whether this risks escalating into a real war, I say, Maybe, but then I convey something I heard the first time I visited Hong Kong: I was told people drive carefully in Hong Kong because they're so worried about the cost of an accident or hospital visit. I don't know if that's still how it is in Hong Kong, but that sort of tentativeness sounded perfectly in line with prevailing East Asian attitudes I've observed over the years. Always an eye on the account ledger) I think I risk losing friends when I go on and suggest the borders need to be secured. But when I press them, they have no good answers on either issue except regurgitating slogans like "free trade is good for America" and "but what about the child separations at the border?!!!!!"

Warren had a great answer to China and other issues - the question was what leverage the US has in negotiations with other countries and she said, "Access to US markets." That goes hand in hand with the necessity of keeping up the American markets and right now America needs to refresh. We need to readjust to the post cold-war, post globalization world. US post world war 2 policy has achieved all its goals. US needs to pivot. I hope in the direction Sanders and Warren want to steer the country.

[Nemo]

Americans suck, but we suck less than anyone else in a position to be emperor right now.

Last night in the Dem debate, one of the first questions was what to do about the China sanctions - if elected, will you lift the sanctions? They gave the question to Yang first - I'm not sure if that was kind of racist, but in any event, he nailed the answer. Being of Taiwanese descent, he probably had the clearest view of the situation on that stage. He said, No. And he suggested he would continue the policy, albeit with a little more organization and focus than the Orange Baboon conducting diplomacy by twitter.

I've been at social gatherings among NY liberals and they seem a little shocked when I say Trump is actually headed in the right direction on China and the border, and that my disagreement is with the idiotic way he's handling both issues. I agree sanctions on China are long over due and we need to keep them up. The problem is, this confrontation is basically a war, and war can't be handled in such a reckless way. (When I'm asked whether this risks escalating into a real war, I say, Maybe, but then I convey something I heard the first time I visited Hong Kong: I was told people drive carefully in Hong Kong because they're so worried about the cost of an accident or hospital visit. I don't know if that's still how it is in Hong Kong, but that sort of tentativeness sounded perfectly in line with prevailing East Asian attitudes I've observed over the years. Always an eye on the account ledger) I think I risk losing friends when I go on and suggest the borders need to be secured. But when I press them, they have no good answers on either issue except regurgitating slogans like "free trade is good for America" and "but what about the child separations at the border?!!!!!"

Warren had a great answer to China and other issues - the question was what leverage the US has in negotiations with other countries and she said, "Access to US markets." That goes hand in hand with the necessity of keeping up the American markets and right now America needs to refresh. We need to readjust to the post cold-war, post globalization world. US post world war 2 policy has achieved all its goals. US needs to pivot. I hope in the direction Sanders and Warren want to steer the country.

Particularly after Bannon put his thumb on the scale during Brexit. The EU is a shambles.

There is no intelligent dialog to be had about immigration now. When I was a boy we had what we called a tap on/tap off system. Every year the Ministry of Employment would analyze the labour market and set immigration rates. So if we needed engineers, chemists or welders or whatever we could get them. But if employers were using immigrants as a cheap source of labour meaning student and part time jobs were scarce they would close the tap. Currently my local Tim Hortons is staffed by 9 immigrants and no one there has less than a Masters. This is not the good kind of immigration. I was 16 in the last tap off period and could find a part time job in about 3 hours. Considering the educational resources small countries have to invest in making doctors and lawyers to poach them and then pay them minimum wage is criminal.

Currently Canada is using immigration to fake GDP growth, job growth and keep the housing bubble inflated. In a functional economy 1 immigrant creates about 1 job. Currently they are only creating about 0.8.

Chinese troops have never been in a war. They have no idea what it is like. All they do is bully and murder unarmed minorities. Combine that with the 1 child policy and the fact that the military is for the most elite in Chinese society. Grinding them down is easy if you target the officer corps. And we have the entire officer corps already in shared databases. Unlike the Chinese we love wars. I don't think China can risk one. We just pull out of the Sandbox and we have all the equipment we need. Some American hawks are so sure they want to use military force to kick China out of the Spratly Islands to provoke them.

[Dhammanando]

An aside I just remembered: there is a whole movement that believes the Iliad and Odyssey are British epic poems that take place in Britain.

I didn't know there was a movement that believed that, but my eccentric Great Uncle Bill (aka William Comyns Beaumont, Daily Mail journalist and amateur catastrophist), published a series of books arguing that all the events in the Bible and in classical antiquity in fact took place in the British Isles.

In Facts and Fallacies (1988) published by Reader's Digest, Beaumont's views are summarized:

In a series of books published between 1946 and 1949, British journalist William Comyns Beaumont astonished the world with the following extraordinary revelations: Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified just outside Edinburgh, Scotland — the site of the ancient city of Jerusalem. Satan was a comet that collided with the earth and caused Noah's Flood. The ancient Egyptians were in fact Irishmen. Hell is to be found in western Scotland. The Greek hero Achilles spent his childhood on the Isle of Skye. Galilee, birthplace of Jesus, was Wales. Ancient Athens was in reality Bath, England... Comyns Beaumont started his radical revision of history with the belief, innocuous enough, that the lost island of Atlantis might be Britain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Comyns_Beaumont

My uncle also had an extraordinary conspiracy theory as to how people came to get both the history and geography of the ancient world so badly wrong:

That great Yorkshireman Constantine the Great decided that the real Jerusalem in Edinburgh was too far away from his new capital city in Asia Minor. So in an attempt to persuade people that the old city was actually situated in Israel, he hoodwinked his venerable old mother Helena into ‘finding’ the True Cross there. Then to make quite sure that nobody caught him out, he purged every single ancient and modern document that described the Holy Land as being in Britain. The few documents that were spared got severely mutilated.

http://fiona-pymont.blogspot.com/2011/0 ... it-up.html

His magnum opus: Britain: the Key to World History

[Simon E.]

There is of course a milder version of this particular strain of virus referenced in Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’. It refers to the legend that Jesus came to Somerset with his uncle who was Joseph of Aramathea who in the legend was a trader in tin ore.
The legend then became more elaborate with Mary journeying to England and being buried under the Wattle and Daub church that became the site of Glastonbury Abbey, which place was also the burial place of King Arthur of Round Table fame.
The ‘discovery’ of Arthur’s tomb happened at a time when Glastonbury was losing pilgrims to the newer shrine of Thomas Beckett in Canterbury, ......Which timing was jolly convenient.

[Queequeg]

An aside I just remembered: there is a whole movement that believes the Iliad and Odyssey are British epic poems that take place in Britain.

I didn't know there was a movement that believed that, but my eccentric Great Uncle Bill (aka William Comyns Beaumont, Daily Mail journalist and amateur catastrophist), published a series of books arguing that all the events in the Bible and in classical antiquity in fact took place in the British Isles.

Did he really believe it or was he a sort of pre-internet troll?

[Dhammanando]

Did he really believe it or was he a sort of pre-internet troll?

I never got a chance to ask as he died a decade before I was born. But listening to family stories about him and reading John Michell's account in Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions (link below) I sense that he really meant it.

Jerusalem in Scotland and other finding of a revisionist geographer

[Queequeg]

Wow. What a character... He was fortunate that he was able to cultivate such eccentricities...