SoyViking [he/him]

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  • 55 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2020

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  • The closest I can come is blackletter or fraktur scripts that were once used for generic languages. As far as letters go they are silly and overcomplicated, with Latin scripts being far easier to read and more adaptable to different visual styles.

    With that being said, they do have their own old-timey charm and there is something satisfying in being able to pick up a old book in blackletter and read it when you know that most people can not.

    Fun fact: Blackletter was only used for Germanic languages. If a text contained non-Germanic passages it was normal to set those in Latin letters while the rest was set in blackletter.






  • I’ve received checks three or four times in my life. I’ve never written one. As a kid I had a physical paper booklet for the savings account I put my birthday money into. The only way I can get to own a house is by winning the lottery. I remember when small shops had manual credit card machines that would transfer your account details to a slip of paper. I also remember when local stores would give credit to people from the community. I get low-key annoyed when I have to use cash instead of digital payments. My retirement plan is not to retire.


  • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.nettoMemes@lemmy.mluntil we meet again!
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    6 months ago

    This is where the idea of “personal responsibility” is useful for liberals. Flatly admitting that they want a desperate underclass is too mask off for them to feel like good people so they invent a way of blaming individual victims rather than the economic system.

    The poor has a theoretical opportunity to pull themselves up by the bootstraps so when they don’t do that it’s really their own fault. Of course that theoretical opportunity doesn’t translate into actual opportunity for most people but that’s fine, as there’s enough window dressing of meritocracy to make the opportunity look real if you are careful not to go into too much detail.

    This is also the reason why liberals hate discussing real-world examples. Their logic only works in abstract thought experiments where they get to control the variables. Saying that everyone has the opportunity to succeed is a lot easier than saying that Bob, who has a set of very concrete and undeniable material conditions, has the opportunity succeed.


  • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlNuclear Power
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    6 months ago

    It’s so annoying that being irrationality afraid of nuclear power is simply assumed to be a leftist position where I live, by leftists and non-leftists alike. No thought goes into it, nuclear power is scary because of nuclear bombs and Chernobyl and that’s it.


  • I once read that when Sweden decided to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar they didn’t do it all at once, disliking the idea of jumping so many days forwards/backwards (I can’t remember which way the Julian is out of sync). Instead they opted for a plan to move their calendar one single day every year over several decades. I remember the place I read about it saying that it just confused everyone and the plan was scrapped after a few years.






  • Tides of History is a very well-produced history podcast that deals with ancient history. It tells history in an engaging way and is founded in recent scholarship.

    Podcasting is Praxis, a funny politics podcast made by British communists.

    Blowback, all the praise heaped upon it is absolutely justified. Listen to it.

    We Are Not So Different, an entertaining podcast about medieval history. It has a leftist outlook on things and treats medieval people like people and avoids romanticising as well as looking down on them.

    A People’s History of Ideas. An amazingly detailed history of the Chinese revolution with offshoots into international Maoism. If you want to listen to an episode about how CPC safehouses worked in Shanghai in the early 1930’s, this is a podcast for you.


  • In Denmark, the social democratic Nordic welfare paradise, universal healthcare does not cover dental care for adults. If you’re really poor and have an emergency you might have some luck begging the local municipality to pay for having the offending tooth pulled out but that’s about it.

    The result is a wide class disparity in dental health and even people who are not poor think twice before going to the dentist, resulting in issues growing worse than they had to be.

    Some private insurance exists but they are free to reject you as a customer if your dental health is already bad.

    Nobody likes the current system or want to be seen defending it. The only argument that’s given for maintaining the status quo is that doing the right thing would be too expensive.