I can understand some Portuguese\Spanish similarities but it's usually on Liveleak when a Brazilian newscaster is narrating video of an "off-duty" cop taking out some thugs. So it helps when there is context and they speak clearly like a newscaster does. And it helps that it's Brazilian Portuguese, the Portugal accent sounds much different to my ear. I was hoping that studying Spanish for years would give me a leg up on Portuguese but I'm kidding myself.

I checked out some of the LangFocus vids on Youtube, thanks to your post.

To me Portuguese initially sounds like Spanish, but I can't understand a single word so I know it's Portuguese instead. Written is a bit easier to guess a few words.

Good stuff. I will have to check if he has a video doing the same comparison between Spanish and Portuguese.

I know it's Colbert's shtick and I never really got into it, but still...

"I have friends who live and work in London. They said "don't worry,we're very sensible people."

What's sensible for people in London might not be sensible for people in Salford. Or Boston. Or Wolverhampton. London, or the South-East in general, is as representative of the UK as the East/West Coast is of the US.

The hinterland has been drained at the expense of the center, on both a global and a national scale. If you live and work in the City of London, things might look quite ok, and whatever issues there are only need some reforms to no longer be an issue. But if your factory, the factory that provided jobs for the people in your home town, closed down ten, twenty years ago and now the best you can get is zero-hour contracts, then no, things are not ok.

People up top keep telling you that the economy is growing, that everyone's gonna be better off, that it's ok for multinational corporations and rich individuals to optimise their taxes, while they cut your welfare. Banks get a bailout, you get to pay the bedroom tax.

So no, your sensible friends, if they exist, live in a different universe than many of their countrymen. That's the disconnect we've been talking about.

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"The British economy is tanking. The pound has plunged to its lowest level since 1985... The Dow lost 611 points."

Again, so what? If the economy is growing and it has no effect on you, why should you give a jar of cold piss about the value of the pound or the stock exchange? Arguably, a drop in the exchange rate of the pound makes it easier for you to export your goods and raises the prices for imports, thereby encouraging you to produce the shit yourself. The UK does have a sovereign currency, unlike the Spanish, the Greeks, the Portuguese or the Italians who have to suffer internal devaluations, because Wolfgang Schäuble says so.

"Equity losses over $2 trillion"

Why should that matter? QE has pushed up stock prices beyond any resonable level, so what meaning do these book values hold? Not to mention that a lot of people made a shitload of money by shorting these stocks, including George Soros against Deutsche.

"There'll be no more money"

QE never trickled down anyway, makes no difference. Corbyn's people call their version "QE for the People" and "Green QE" for a reason: the previous version was only meant to prop up banks and stock values.

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On a more general note, the hatred, the racism, the xenophobia... in most cases, it's a pressure valve. You leash out against someone else, you need someone to blame. The narrative is that we're living in a meritocracy, which makes it your fault that you didn't inherit an investment portfolio. So you start blaming yourself. You're a fuck-up. You worked hard and not only didn't climb the ladder, you actually went down. There's depression for ya. Guess what happens if someone, a person of perceived authority, then comes along and tells you it's not your fault, it's the fault of the immigrants. That narrative is very appealing if history is any indication. Even the supposedly most prosperous country in the EU, Germany, has the very same issue in the eastern parts, where there is no hope for a meaningful job.

People need work, meaningful work. Wanna guess how many of those "xenophobes" would be out in the street protesting against immigrants if they had a meaningful job with decent pay? Not to many would be my guess.

So the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are providing the narrative. But the lack of social cohesion is a result of market fundamentalism, of Thatcherism, of Third Way social-democrats leaving the lower half of the income distribution to the wolves. You can't exclude large swaths of the population from the benefits of increased productivity, etc. Social dividend, they called it. It's what keeps the torches and pitchforks locked away in the barn.

Battlefield: Now with more trenchfoot and Spanish flu than ever before!

I'm not sure why it has to be an either/or kind of thing. I went to preschool where we learned letters, numbers, colors, shapes, and some Spanish. After school every day (unless it was raining, and even then sometimes), I played outside climbing trees, catching bugs, and playing in mud. Neither interfered with the other.

I have studied Spanish all my life and am constantly reminded how grateful I am that I didn't have to learn English as a second language. The difference in the details of spelling and pronunciation between the two languages is orders of magnitude apart. On the other hand verbs, nouns and adjectives are less complex in English. I'm still trying to get a grip on the subjunctive tense after all these years.

Hiking near mt Aconcagua in Argentina (tallest mountain in the Americas, 22800 ft; across the border from Santiago Chile).

The original text accompanying the video is in Spanish, a tidied up Google Translation version is as follows:

“Avalanche between Horcones (park entrance) and Confluence (first base camp of the Aconcagua field). Julian Insarralde [who posted the video], Nico Aguero and Naco Choulet were working for INOUT ADVENTURE. During a trek lasting three days. We are going to customers to avoid them being splashed with mud as it is an area of avalanches at that time of year. The warning was a sound similar to an airplane sound, which is why Julian Insarralde is looking back and is able to warn that an avalanche is coming. That’s why we ran and we did not abandon people so that we were in the safe zone. They are things that can happen when we work in real natural environments”.

Italy:
Renzi is creating the conditons for a new bubble? Through deficit spending on... what? Unless they start building highways in the middle of nowhere like they did in Spain, I don't see any form of bubble coming out of deficit spending in Italy. The country's been in a major recession for quite some time now, with no light at the end of the tunnel and a massive shortfall in private spending. But meaningful deficit spending requires Renzi to tell Germany and the Eurogroup to pound sand -- not sure his balls have descended far enough for that just yet.

Referendum in Switzerland:
"Vollgeld". That's the German term for what the initiators of this referendum are aiming for: 100% reserve banking. It's monetarism in disguise, and they are adament to not be called monetarists. But that's what it is. Pure old-fashioned monetarism. Even if you don't give a jar of cold piss about all these fancy economic terms and theories, let me ask you this: the currency you use is quite an important part of all your daily life, isn't it? So why would anyone in his or her right mind remove it entirely from democratic control (even constitutionally)?
If you want to get into the economic nightmares of it, here are a few bullet points:
- no Overt Monetary Financing (printing money for deficit spending) means no lender of last resort and complete dependence on the market, S&P can tell you to fuck off and die as they did with PIIGS
- notion that the "right amount of money in circulation" will enable the market to keep itself in balance -- as if that ever worked
- notion that a bunch of technocrats can empirically determine this very amount in regular intervalls
- central bank is supposed to maintain price stability, nothing else -- single mandate, works beautifully for the ECB, at least if you like 25% unemployment
- concept is founded in the notion that the financial economy is the source of (almost) all problems of the "real" economy, thereby completely ignoring the fact that decades of wage suppression have simply killed widescale purchasing power of the masses, aka demand

Visegrad nations:
From a German perspective, they are walking on thin ice as it is. The conflict with Russia never had much support of the public to begin with, but even the establishment is becoming more divided on this issue. Given the authoritarian policies put in place in Poland recently and the utter refusal to take in their share of refugees, support might fade even more. If the Visegrad governments then decide to push for further conflict with Russia, Brussels and Berlin might tell them, very discreetly, to pipe the fuck down.

Turkey:
Wildcard. He mentioned how they will mess with Syria, the Kurds and Russia, but forgot to mention the conflict between Turkey and the EU. As of now, it seems as if Brussels is ready to pay Ankara in hard cash if they keep refugees away from Greece. Very similar to the deal with Morocco vis-a-vis the Spanish enclave. As long as they die out of sight, all is good for Brussels.

I would add France as a point of interest:
They recently announced that the state of emergency will be extended until ISIS is beaten. In other words, it'll be permanent, just like the Patriot Act in the US. A lof of attention has been given to the authoritarian shift of politics in Poland, all the while ignoring the equally disturbing shift in France. Those emergency measures basically suspend the rule of law in favour of a covert police state. Add the economic situation (abysmal), the Socialist President who avoids socialist policies, and the still ongoing rise of Front National... well, you get the picture.

Regarding the EU, I'll say this: between the refugee crisis (border controls, domestic problems, etc) and the economic crisis, they finally managed to convince me that this whole thing might come apart at the seams after all. Not this year, though, even if the Brits decide to distance themselves from this rotten creation.

Many self professed feminists believe it is about hating men too, but I assume "no true feminist" would ever do that right?

I wasn't trying to wilfully misunderstand you, but rather to pursue my whole contention about any political/social argument:

Individual People and specific arguments over ideologies always.

When the reverse is true and ideology is placed before people or the specific merits of an argument, the result is dehumanising and anti-intellectual (even if by the slimmest margins sometimes).

That's not to say that, where mutual understanding already exists, ideological terms are completely useless. But the moment individuals disagree, those ideological assumptions are going to get in the way of a productive dialogue.

My whole point I guess is that this seems rather anti-humanist if you will pardon the irony of taking an ideological position.
If as a humanist one believes that the optimal way is for everyone to be judged only on the merits of their individual words, deeds and capacity.

Rather than by culture, race, gender or some other involuntary and/or irrelevant factors.

Assuming you agree in principle with that definition of humanism in terms of goals, then what we are arguing here really is collectivism vs individualism.

You are suggesting we can get better results by pushing the "right" version of said ideology and suppressing the "wrong", correct?

I am arguing ultimately that we seem to get better results in the long term, by encouraging free and critical thought and allowing all ideas (no matter how egregious) a fair fight.

This puts me contrary to many tenets of the various feminist ideologies and concordant with others. Sometimes wildly so.

If I want to try to be a good humanist, I have no choice but to try and understand each on their own terms.

When someone describes themselves as a "Feminist", that could mean anything from "kill all men" to "women should have fundamental legal equality".

It seems almost as redundant as racial and cultural epithets, it tells me very little really important about you or how you really think, to know you are Black, or White or Asian or Polish, Spanish etc. etc. It's just another excuse to put an idea above the person in front of you or to not have to think too much about ones own.

i.e. Collectivist thinking.

I think this may represent the very antithesis of intellectual progress.

However I am a Hegelian and I just defined a Thesis-antithesis relationship............ That means the next great breakthrough should lie in the synthesis of the two.......

................

Collective individualism! All we should need is a mass movement of free critical thought and.....bollocks.

It's over people, we have officially peaked as a species! I'm calling it

I find this stuff very interesting, will be visiting that site. Something I noticed about native Spanish speakers is that when they speak English they put a slight "eh" sound at the beginning of English words that start with "st" or "sp", as no Spanish words start with those consonants. So they pronounce the word "Spanish" as "ehSpanish". Which leads to Ricky Ricardo over-correcting and trying to perfect his accent by removing the "e" sound where it actually belongs, like "(ex)splaining" and "(e)xactly".

I've never seen Google Translate work like that on my phone. I used it to help me play the Korean version of Black Desert (prior to the English patch being out, and even occasionally after it came out as lots of stuff doesn't translate well), I start the App, point the camera to the screen and then take a picture of the region of screen I need translated. Then it scans that region for Korean text. I then have to manually highlight the text I want translated. It then gives the usual Google Translate translation, which is word by word translation, but not a proper translation. I've never seen a video feature and the photo one isn't as quick as seen here. If they've managed to make the video and photo feature work automatically and much faster than I've seen so far (though perhaps Spanish is easier to translate than Korean as it uses the same letters) then I'm super impressed. The App has the ability to take text typed as one would expect, and can also supposedly translate speech, I haven't really tried it, perhaps I can load up an Anime and see if it works...

Production values, vocal talent, choreography... But the real killer is that Spanish doesn't fit the rhythm of the lyrics. Honestly, I would have thought it would be closer than it was, but...

It was mostly redeemed by the afterword.

So I guess people like Rosa Parks were also tools? Perhaps Alice Paul was a tool for standing up for the rights of women to vote? I suppose Mahatma Gandhi was a tool for resisting British oppression and rule?

This is what you cannot seem to grasp, although I will try in the most basic method to explain it to you. Rights = GOOD, Oppression = BAD. Now, what does this mean? It means you have rights that are expected to be yours in a civilized society.

For instance, lets say you were Hispanic and in Arizona. Due to the fact that the Supreme Court allowed portions of SB1070, the 'paper's, please' law to remain in effect, you can be forced as a Hispanic to provide clear proof that you are a citizen in any situation as long as the officer has a reason to suspect that you might be an illegal immigrant.

The reasonable suspicion is entirely at the discretion of the officer, an individual who is not in any way psychic or specifically trained to spot 'illegal immigrants'. So let's say you are wearing a shirt that says Viva La Raza, just a saying that means you are proud of your race. If I was an officer, I could claim that you wearing a shirt with Spanish on it and being Hispanic could mean that you are illegally here. Ludicrous, I know, but I could claim it and get away with it the way the law is worded. I could stop you in the middle of the sidewalk, force you to submit to an ID request, and question you at the bare minimum. I could say a bulge in your pocket looked like drug paraphernalia and that you smelled of drugs, leading to a body search.

Now let me ask you, even if you were perfectly innocent, had no drugs, were not illegal, and were minding your own business, would this not piss you off? Assuming it didn't that one time, would you get pissed off when it happened over and over?

Look, I'm Caucasian and a male, and even I know that stuff like this is horseshit. At a certain point, if you don't stand up or support the ones who do, then when they come for you there won't be anyone left to help.

If you can't get the point and still feel the way you say, I feel sorry for you. Thankfully others do and even though you think they are tools, they will take the fall so you can continue to live your delusions.

FYI, this bull probably was not going to a bull fight (yet). Its a spanish tradition in many villages to cordon off the town square and let a young-ish bull in there and have the folks 'play' with him. He does not get poked or killed at the end of it.

That said, that jackass was asking for it.