skells @skells@qoto.org

@jk @djsundog wrote a whole bit about transformations into stanza space but it started to undermine my faith in causality so I stopped

@11112011 I do what I can

@11112011 mate, not only that, I remove your socks at night so your feet can breathe.

I put them back on before you wake up so you don't freak out. sometimes I swap them to see if you notice.

you don't.

@nosleep @lain "obey the rules, fascist!"

@solidsanek I hope you know what you're doing

@solidsanek The King must ascend to Heaven or the Gods shall rage for a thousand years... have you not read the prophecies?

@solidsanek For he shall be delicious with chips, and a nice red.

@solidsanek He has returned. I shall notify the Clan Elders.

@11112011 even brain go brrrrrr

@FailForward
The Germans are much harder to put ones finger on tbh, probably why I left them out.

The idea of Europe being a tripartite of Britain, France and Germany is obviously nonsense and these are simplifications based on limited personal experience; most French, Germans and British don't resemble these clumsy strokes. Also, the more cosmopolitan the individual the more these features may fade into the background.

Caveats aside, the Germans appear unequalled in mastering the nuances of a given field but can suffer from tunnel vision because of it. They are precise and it comes from a steadfast discipline that you don't see in British resourcefulness or French élan. It's a cliché but they do take rules quite seriously without the ability to "play" with them quite like the French do (or ignore them like the British.) This makes them less creative but also more reliable.

All that being said... the British can be flexible because they don't reflect much on values; the French can be nimble because they don't have profound commitments. From my limited experience the Germans have a much deeper, instinctual relationship with their values. A Frenchman or a Brit might shrug off some internal inconsistency but a German may become either deeply conflicted or unreasonably dogmatic about it - you'd probably never see it though, just someone steadfastly doing it "their own way."

Interested to hear other people's thoughts, particularly French or Germans telling me why I'm an idiot.

One of the things I love about the French is their readiness to take abstract reasoning and theory seriously. It allows them to use that reasoning to penetrate much more deeply into the nature of reality - to think strategically.

The Anglosphere often disdains this kind of reasoning and prefer heuristic arguements and common sense. While this is great at cutting through the bullshit it gets caught in provincial thinking and struggles to adapt once the low hanging fruit has been picked.

The French attitude (broadly speaking) might fall into ideology more often than the English/American, but they have to tools to parse between ideologies and meaningfully develop them.

Anglos remain flexible in the face of the matter at hand but we're often subtly beholden to many values which we don't have the tools to meaningfully analyse. I think these values are generally speaking good but their development tends to occur organically and over a long period of time.

Don't get me started on the Germans.

coarsely cut coriander

"MY DAD CAN BEAT UP YOUR DAD"
- Authoritarians of every stripe