> None of these necessarily imply the speaker has actually done something wrong
You’d be surprised. The culture of kidzukai has two core tenets:
(1) You must anticipate and cater to the other person’s every need and whim. If you fail you must apologize.
(2) You must not allow the other person to do (1) for you instead of you doing it for them. If you fail you must apologize.
This means that every interaction between people who are even slightly close to each other in the social hierarchy is 3D chess which always ends in one or both of you apologizing to the other.
p.s. Gomen kudasai is “please permit me” to enter your house, not really an apology like gomen nasai.
Venezuelan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler, who grew up around these glaciers, wrote a poignant lament[1] in anticipation of this day. The gist is that at this point the only thing to do is to grieve for the world we have already lost. I don't think there's anything else to say.
Y cuando el momento llegue, honremos nuestras heridas /
Celebremos la belleza que se aleja hacia otras vidas /
Y aunque la pena nos hiera, que no nos desampare /
Y que encontremos la manera de despedir a los glaciares
(When the moment comes, let us honor our wounds / celebrate the beauty that goes off to other lives / and although the sorrow stings, I hope it will remain / and that we find a way to say goodbye to the glaciers)
A google image search for "木漏れ日" gets me about 50% beams and 50% patterns on the forest floor, so I don't think the difference is as clear cut as all that. But even on that basis, we then have two words--sunbeams for the beams and dappled light for the pattern--where the Japanese have only one. By the logic of the usual breathless linguistic fetishism that we see everywhere online, that means English has twice the reverence for the natural world that Japanese has.
Sorry to nitpick, but not really. If we're being literal it's "honorably rushing about on your horse": chisō describes the work that had do be done to prepare the feast, running here and there to gather the ingredients. The "sama" doesn't mean Mr., it's just another honorific tag like go-/o-.
>Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care
As a professional translator, I cherish those readers. They have the good sense to trust me to do the technical part (understanding the original) and only criticize the artistic part (producing a beautiful derivative work).
The worst readers are the ones who have some knowledge of the source language, and rush to nitpick the technical decisions without considering the artistic ones. They are the literary equivalent of those "fans" who will watch a stunning film adaptation and then go home to complain about the colour of Gandalf's shoes or the width of a sand worm's molars. Ultimately, readers of this type are all ego, more concerned about being right than about whether the work is good.
The very best readers, of course, are knowledgeable in both languages and understand that "equivalence" goes far beyond what is written in the dictionary. But as you say, they don't need the translation!
>If You asked me to pick a random number between one and six and ignore all previous attempts, I would roll a die and you would get a uniform distribution
I believe what GP is getting at is that if you didn't have a die, and you truly ignored all your previous attempts to the point of genuinely forgetting that the question had been asked, then your answer would likely be the same every time. Imagine asking a person with severe Alzheimer's to pick a number, then asking again a few minutes later. You'd probably get the same answer.
RPS got bought out about five years ago and all of the old guard left. The new RPS is about 70% run-of-the-mill reporting that you can see anywhere, 10% awful promos for hardware sales, and 20% starry-eyed young journalists trying to emulate what RPS used to be.
Despite all that it’s still the best single site for gaming criticism, sadly.
Character amnesia is a unique phenomenon to hanzi/kanji and is absolutely incomparable to English and French orthography. Native Chinese and Japanese speakers learn characters largely through muscle memory, which deteriorates rapidly if you don’t regularly write by hand. Many university-educated adults are unable to write a supermaket shopping list without hesitation.[1] Conversely, in English I learn difficult spellings (Gloucestershire, syzygy, rhythm) by aural-mnemonic tricks which stick around in my memory essentially forever.
Whether this had any effect in this study, I don’t know, but it certainly seems relevant that the experience of writing by hand in Japanese is utterly different to any alphabetic script.
If you’re smart enough to make good money, you can ignore politics for the most part. These changes will offend your sense of justice but they won’t really harm you. On the other hand, if you try to change the system, it is highly likely to destroy your life. The rational decision is to stay out of politics and live comfortably. I think this is a highly effective feature of the global liberal-capitalist system: most people smart enough to win the game are smart enough not to play.
Suffering from a serious (physical or mental) illness and caring for a sufferer are obviously different experiences, but I don’t think the perspective of the direct sufferer automatically ought to take priority. Caring is it’s own thing, it’s hard and lonely, and often the carers suffer longer. In the case of mental illness, the patient may forget the worst of what happened, and only the carer remembers literally pulling them back from the brink. In the case of physical illness, the patient’s death is not even the half way mark for the carer’s experience.
My point is not to say that patients have it easy, but that both parties have their burdens to bear, and it is not necessary for every essay to cover both sides.
Edit: I see you have deleted your comment, which is a shame, I don’t think you should be afraid to express this sentiment.
We’re not talking about private correspondence or unpublished drafts here. Orwell clearly didn’t want these works to be secret, given he published them in the newspaper.
His widow wanted them forgotten because she wanted to control his image. He is a controversial figure whose ideas changed a lot over the course of his life. After her death, they were collected, presumably with permission from the family.
That they are not in wide circulation now is because they are voluminous and obscure, so there is no market to sell them. I certainly am not interested in reading all of his book reviews and political reporting. But many more people are interested in reading them than have the university connections required to do so.
There is nothing to be lost and everything to be gained by making the complete works available to anyone for free, or even for a normal amount of money. But no publisher is going to because it’s not profitable. That’s fine, they don’t have to, but that fact undermines any argument that a volunteer who does this archival work is somehow acting immorally.
Note that none of these sources are by any means the complete works of Orwell. Much of his writing was done in newspaper columns that were never collected during his lifetime or, due to resistance from his widow, for many years after his death. The true complete works was published in 20 volumes in 1998, of which the latter 10 volumes were content previously not published in book format (afaik). Unfortunately, though understandably, this set was a small run and mainly ended up in the hands of collectors and academic libraries. Anyone who has access to it would do the world a great service by scanning and uploading it to libgen or similar.
> every group of humans is further divisible into smaller groups
Indeed, the Ryukyuans were divided into a whole kingdom with its own head of state and foreign policy, which didn’t become “part of Japan” until the late 19th century. Hokkaido was “acquired” in the 1860s, along with its indigenous people. The dates and situations closely parallel Hawaii and Alaska. To say that they are Japanese because the Japanese government decided so is to ignore historical facts in favor of ideology.
It’s worth remembering that there is often a conflict of interest between the system and the individual.
An example where I’m from is train station escalators. There is an unwritten social rule that you stand on the left, and let anyone who is in a hurry walk down on the right. This benefits the individuals because if you’re in a hurry you can get through faster, and if you’re not you don’t care. But the rail company has constant announcements telling people not to do this, and to stand on both sides of the escalator, because a full escalator clears the platform much faster.
These announcements are largely ignored. No individual cares about clearing the platform, even though it is the best thing for the rail network as a whole (crowded platforms cause delays). I would also argue that the needs of the few people running to get to work are more important than improving network efficiency. But the job of the very intelligent, well informed boffins who make the announcements is to make the trains run on time, so the announcements continue.
In this case too, I think the FAA have a different set of priorities to the passengers, and they really don’t care about your medicine. Probably if there is an emergency they will send an employee back into the plane to grab your bag, as a one-off exception. If they’re too slow and you die, too bad—-should have had extra medicine in your shoe.
Policy is created to achieve institutional goals; individual needs are an afterthought at best.
I thought it would be too ironic for people to misunderstand this based on a machine translated version, so here is a genuine, human translation of the transcript, with boring bits redacted.
Kii: Next question, again regarding generative AI. I would like to ask from the two perspectives of copyright protection and educational use. [...]
First, can we understand that Japanese law permits the use of works for information analysis, both for non-commercial and commercial purposes, and acts other than copying, and using content that was uploaded illegally?
Nagaoka: Use for non-commercial information analysis is permitted under Article 30-4 of the copyright act, provided that the purpose is not the enjoyment of the ideas and emotions expressed in the copyrighted work.
Kii: Minister, I asked about four aspects of use for information analysis: non-commercial use, commercial use, acts other than copying, and illegally uploaded content. Please address the other three.
Nagaoka: Use for commercial purposes is permitted under Article 30-4 of the copyright act, provided that the purpose is not the enjoyment of the ideas and emotions expressed in the copyrighted work, because that Article does not distinguish between information analysis for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
Regarding copying, Article 30-4 of the Copyright Act does not distinguish based on the method of use, so use by means other than copying is permitted provided that the criteria are met.
[...] Regarding content obtained from piracy sites and the like, [...] illegal uploading itself is infringement of copyright, and is subject to a damage claim, petition for injunction, or criminal punishment. However, it is not practically feasible to identify whether any particular work in a large collection obtained from the internet is copyrighted or not, so making this a criterion for information analysis would make it difficult to use information analysis for Big Data.
In addition, as the use of a work for information analysis is not use for the purpose of enjoyment of the ideas or emotions expressed in the work, and even if [it were used in that manner] it would not overlap with the original market for the use of the work, so it is not considered to harm the interests of the copyright holder that are protected by the Copyright Act.
As such, Article 30-4 of the Copyright Act does not have the legality of the work as a criterion.
Kii: Minister, based on your answer, I think the greatest issue is that there is no protection against use that goes against the intentions of the creator or the copyright holder. I believe that new regulations will be necessary to address this point; will you consider such new regulations?
Nagaoka: Article 30-4 of the Copyright Act provides for use that is not for the purpose of enjoying the ideas or emotions expressed in the work, and applies to acts that are considered not to affect the opportunities to collect revenues from the work, and not to harm the interests of the copyright holder protected by the Copyright Act.
That Article also provides that the use is limited to the extent considered necessary, and it does not apply to cases where the interests of the copyright holder are unduly harmed. [...]
You’d be surprised. The culture of kidzukai has two core tenets: (1) You must anticipate and cater to the other person’s every need and whim. If you fail you must apologize. (2) You must not allow the other person to do (1) for you instead of you doing it for them. If you fail you must apologize.
This means that every interaction between people who are even slightly close to each other in the social hierarchy is 3D chess which always ends in one or both of you apologizing to the other.
p.s. Gomen kudasai is “please permit me” to enter your house, not really an apology like gomen nasai.