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Here we have @FeminismIsCancer , who speaks French; @adolf512 , who speaks Swedish, right? Then @Oxblood , you speak some classical languages right, although obviously not as a native speaker; but maybe you reached a high CEFR level, if you were transcribing texts?
Native speakers, or those who at least have mastery of a language, can help non-native speakers learn to speak their language competently.
What could we do with that? Well, we could dominate these foreign language editions of Wikipedia, for one thing; that's a way to reach a lot of people with your content. We could translate Vintologi and other resources into other languages, which would help with prestige.
Another thing is, you can probably even dominate the English Wikipedia in certain areas if you know foreign languages. E.g., if you can read sources that English speakers can't or wouldn't (since the only search terms they're putting into search engines are in English, and therefore they're mostly only finding English sources), then you can cite those sources in articles. There's probably a whole world of potential articles that could be written on the English Wikipedia, with an ideological slant, citing non-English sources, that monolingual English speakers wouldn't feel competent to review because they don't know those other languages.
I mean, we've seen how the Wikimedia Foundation can't even discipline some of these foreign language Wikipedias to stop denying the Holocaust, for instance, because they don't know those languages and therefore don't know how to interfere competently with their management. They don't have anyone they can put in place to run those projects who knows those tongues.
The bottom line is that in order to achieve power, you have to put in a lot of work, or be ingenious in ways that others aren't, or just be crazy enough to do stuff that others wouldn't dare to do. You have to be exceptional in some way, whether that be by being exceptionally resourceful, exceptionally hard-working, exceptionally bold, etc. A lot of times, you need a combination of two or more of these.
You can't just be like, "Okay, I'm gonna put in a token amount of effort to where I feel kinda cool that I did something others didn't." You actually have to go way above and beyond; it has to become an obsession.
This is how wars are won -- the army that trains its people to be able to carry a really heavy backpack over mountains and endure all kinds of discomfort and still obey orders has an advantage, and then equipping them with the fruits of western resourcefulness (e.g. the best weaponry, armor, intel, etc.) and training them in its use gives them even more of an advantage. The training requires setting up a school and establishing a culture, and maintaining that culture through ongoing propaganda; Hitler wrote a lot about this.
But the guerrillas try to win by being resourceful too, finding ways to set booby traps using whatever ghetto-style setup they can rig up to blow people up or maim them or whatever, maybe even using discarded equipment from the invading army; that requires a huge expenditure of effort on the part of Americans to figure out how to deal with. This is why it costs half a trillion dollars or however much to invade a country like Iraq, which makes the U.S. not want to invade too many more countries over there; so in that sense, the guerrillas pretty much won. They hurt us badly enough that for the most part, we wanna stay out of the Arab world and not fuck with them too much. Same deal with southeast Asia after Vietnam, although that was mostly the fault of Americans' not wanting to invade Hanoi.
I think it would be cool to set up a language training program; something mostly automated, and then supplemented by giving people useful work to do, as well as giving them opportunities to converse in other languages where they could get corrected by those with more proficiency.
As a group, what resources do we really have, other than language proficiency? The cool thing about that is that it's theoretically accessible to just about anyone, just like it's theoretically possible for just about anyone to learn how to discipline himself to carry a heavy backpack over mountains and set a fire with just one match, and kill a dude with just a knife, and do all the other stuff that soldiers do, with the proper training. But, the training is crucial.
One other aspect of such skills is that they're not really useful for much other than dominance. What is a soldier going to do with his killing skills when he comes back home, other than intimidate his wife into being obedient, and protect his family should the need arise, and maybe work as a bouncer or something (but even then, he'll need to regulate his aggression to use the minimal amount of force needed to get the job done, in contrast to what he did as a soldier)?
Same deal with language. Unless you're going to be a scholar, what will you do with your language skills? Thus there's potential to have a group of losers who have mostly unmarketable skills but can use those skills for achieving dominance; that's kinda what you want, is people who aren't distracted by trying to be in the work world and raise a family and all that other stuff that could prevent them from devoting themselves to helping their church or tribe or whatever grab for power.
Native speakers, or those who at least have mastery of a language, can help non-native speakers learn to speak their language competently.
What could we do with that? Well, we could dominate these foreign language editions of Wikipedia, for one thing; that's a way to reach a lot of people with your content. We could translate Vintologi and other resources into other languages, which would help with prestige.
Another thing is, you can probably even dominate the English Wikipedia in certain areas if you know foreign languages. E.g., if you can read sources that English speakers can't or wouldn't (since the only search terms they're putting into search engines are in English, and therefore they're mostly only finding English sources), then you can cite those sources in articles. There's probably a whole world of potential articles that could be written on the English Wikipedia, with an ideological slant, citing non-English sources, that monolingual English speakers wouldn't feel competent to review because they don't know those other languages.
I mean, we've seen how the Wikimedia Foundation can't even discipline some of these foreign language Wikipedias to stop denying the Holocaust, for instance, because they don't know those languages and therefore don't know how to interfere competently with their management. They don't have anyone they can put in place to run those projects who knows those tongues.
The bottom line is that in order to achieve power, you have to put in a lot of work, or be ingenious in ways that others aren't, or just be crazy enough to do stuff that others wouldn't dare to do. You have to be exceptional in some way, whether that be by being exceptionally resourceful, exceptionally hard-working, exceptionally bold, etc. A lot of times, you need a combination of two or more of these.
You can't just be like, "Okay, I'm gonna put in a token amount of effort to where I feel kinda cool that I did something others didn't." You actually have to go way above and beyond; it has to become an obsession.
This is how wars are won -- the army that trains its people to be able to carry a really heavy backpack over mountains and endure all kinds of discomfort and still obey orders has an advantage, and then equipping them with the fruits of western resourcefulness (e.g. the best weaponry, armor, intel, etc.) and training them in its use gives them even more of an advantage. The training requires setting up a school and establishing a culture, and maintaining that culture through ongoing propaganda; Hitler wrote a lot about this.
But the guerrillas try to win by being resourceful too, finding ways to set booby traps using whatever ghetto-style setup they can rig up to blow people up or maim them or whatever, maybe even using discarded equipment from the invading army; that requires a huge expenditure of effort on the part of Americans to figure out how to deal with. This is why it costs half a trillion dollars or however much to invade a country like Iraq, which makes the U.S. not want to invade too many more countries over there; so in that sense, the guerrillas pretty much won. They hurt us badly enough that for the most part, we wanna stay out of the Arab world and not fuck with them too much. Same deal with southeast Asia after Vietnam, although that was mostly the fault of Americans' not wanting to invade Hanoi.
I think it would be cool to set up a language training program; something mostly automated, and then supplemented by giving people useful work to do, as well as giving them opportunities to converse in other languages where they could get corrected by those with more proficiency.
As a group, what resources do we really have, other than language proficiency? The cool thing about that is that it's theoretically accessible to just about anyone, just like it's theoretically possible for just about anyone to learn how to discipline himself to carry a heavy backpack over mountains and set a fire with just one match, and kill a dude with just a knife, and do all the other stuff that soldiers do, with the proper training. But, the training is crucial.
One other aspect of such skills is that they're not really useful for much other than dominance. What is a soldier going to do with his killing skills when he comes back home, other than intimidate his wife into being obedient, and protect his family should the need arise, and maybe work as a bouncer or something (but even then, he'll need to regulate his aggression to use the minimal amount of force needed to get the job done, in contrast to what he did as a soldier)?
Same deal with language. Unless you're going to be a scholar, what will you do with your language skills? Thus there's potential to have a group of losers who have mostly unmarketable skills but can use those skills for achieving dominance; that's kinda what you want, is people who aren't distracted by trying to be in the work world and raise a family and all that other stuff that could prevent them from devoting themselves to helping their church or tribe or whatever grab for power.
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