![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Picking a book to read next
Mar. 9th, 2024 02:13 pmI’m starting with a sample of Lingo, which has going for it that I. enjoyed it, it is on a topic of interest to me, and the author is Dutch.
Alas, I don’t think I’m going to be able to read it.
“But English speakers the world over have never had much of a taste for acquiring a foreign language in its entirety.”
Had he said “native English speakers”, I’d be like, sure, probably true. But the thing is, he did not say that. Non-native speakers of English are by far the majority (like, 3 to 1) and growing far faster than native speakers of English. _By definition_ English speakers the world over have a vast appetite for acquiring a foreign language in its entirety, at least that’s true of non-native speakers. Which is most of them.
I’ll finish the sample, but I doubt I will continue from there. It’s moderately entertaining to listen to Dutch people dish on everyone else on the planet, but I’ve had a lot of it over the years and my appetite for more has decreased with time and exposure. (ETA: I finished the sample, and the book is probably fine, if you are looking for an overview of language family trees with occasional moderately entertaining observations of connections between languages. It is a little too decontextualized to stick in my head, so I am unlikely to continue to read it.)
Piano lessons went well. I vacuumed the master bedroom and bathroom and wow did that need to be done. Hopefully that will help with my allergies.
ETA: It’s been a weird day, which is fine, because the last several days have been pretty odd.
I’ve had some real concerns about various things in the news. Nothing _in particular_ that is super recent — ongoing things, rather. I talked to R. about several of them and also texted with I. I don’t know exactly why I never bothered to dig into the details about the judicial changes that were proposed in Israel; they had been contextualized on TRMS as Bad Sign When People Want to Get More Control Over the Judges. Anyway. I finally asked the stupid question, and wow, the answers there are wild. First off, there isn’t a constitution; they have the Basic Laws instead. And the Supreme Court and the judiciary in general has near total control in a bunch of ways that I find incomprehensible. They kind of get to decide who can be appointed to the judiciary. They get judicial review of laws passed by the Knesset. AND they get to decide who counsel is for the various ministries _and their opinions are binding_!!!!
Honestly? This could be reined in a long ways before I would get worked up about it. Things are sufficiently different in their system that it’s hard to really understand as an outsider how things balance (or don’t). But at least at the surface level, there’s been an ongoing, successful power grab by the judiciary.
I knew from things R. had said in the past that whenever someone starts throwing around the phrase war crime, it’s worth it to dig in and try to grasp the scope and details of the situation, because war crime covers a lot of ground (look, the word “crime” in general covers a lot of ground, and there is such a thing as “good trouble”). But today, mostly because of I., I dug into things like, okay, sure, but _what_ are the specifics of corruption. And looking over the charges, some just seem bonkers, like, why would you charge that (a few K in jewelry to the wife. Really? Come on). Some seem problematic (quid pro quo with media and regulators of media and how the media covers yourself and your opponents), but then I have to compare that to shit we have here in the United States like, oh, I don’t know, Fox News. And that’s the LITE end of the corruption problem with the news. Diet Corruption. I don’t want to excuse any of this; I just want to observe that you’d be hard pressed to find a recent Republican that hadn’t done worse.
Finally, I decided to look at the alternatives. I. found Yair Lapid, and I turned up Benny Gantz. I will note that if there is one thing you can safely bet on, it is that Lapid will refuse to serve in any arbitrarily selected group of people, which feels awfully precious to me. Reading the wikipedia entry for him, specifically, the “Political Views” section makes me wonder why anyone would want Lapid over the current office holder (and indeed, not that many people really seem to).
Gantz is something else entirely, his political views far less clear, his military background much more significant. His actions so far suggest, if anything, an extremely high degree of commitment to getting all the hotheads to settle down. This is obviously appealing, and also, I have enough familiarity with the complexity of Eisenhower to be more than a little curious what is going through that head.
Not directly related to any of that, I’ve also been low-key wondering what would happen as Rutte increasingly moves away from running the Netherlands to what is looking like running Nato instead. Honestly, why anyone would want these jobs is beyond me, but I feel lucky that this is happening on the Nato side, and more than a little concerned about Geert Wilders. OTOH, R. pointed to some trends he’d been seeing in coverage of Wilders comical efforts to form a government, and how Wilders’ rhetoric has been evolving. Also, I saw some coverage of ASML thinking of maybe moving to France if NL is really gonna make it hard for them to hire people.
Whatever happens in NL, Israel can absolutely rely on their support. Wilders’ cannot be relied upon to support Ukraine, however, which is also a concern, not anything recent, just background going on and on and on.
But somehow, poking at each of these things in succession and thinking through the fears and gaining even tiny amounts of additional insight into the various participants had the effect of talking me off a ledge. Or several ledges. I feel much better. There’s a lot of nonsense, and a lot of pain, but there are also extremely sensible people out there working very hard to reduce the level of excitement and violence. It’s okay if a lot of people are confused and uncertain and if we don’t really know how to deal with these things. I think we can trust at least _some_ of these participants to provide the needed guidance.
Altho I have not found a book to read that I am actually excited about yet.
Alas, I don’t think I’m going to be able to read it.
“But English speakers the world over have never had much of a taste for acquiring a foreign language in its entirety.”
Had he said “native English speakers”, I’d be like, sure, probably true. But the thing is, he did not say that. Non-native speakers of English are by far the majority (like, 3 to 1) and growing far faster than native speakers of English. _By definition_ English speakers the world over have a vast appetite for acquiring a foreign language in its entirety, at least that’s true of non-native speakers. Which is most of them.
I’ll finish the sample, but I doubt I will continue from there. It’s moderately entertaining to listen to Dutch people dish on everyone else on the planet, but I’ve had a lot of it over the years and my appetite for more has decreased with time and exposure. (ETA: I finished the sample, and the book is probably fine, if you are looking for an overview of language family trees with occasional moderately entertaining observations of connections between languages. It is a little too decontextualized to stick in my head, so I am unlikely to continue to read it.)
Piano lessons went well. I vacuumed the master bedroom and bathroom and wow did that need to be done. Hopefully that will help with my allergies.
ETA: It’s been a weird day, which is fine, because the last several days have been pretty odd.
I’ve had some real concerns about various things in the news. Nothing _in particular_ that is super recent — ongoing things, rather. I talked to R. about several of them and also texted with I. I don’t know exactly why I never bothered to dig into the details about the judicial changes that were proposed in Israel; they had been contextualized on TRMS as Bad Sign When People Want to Get More Control Over the Judges. Anyway. I finally asked the stupid question, and wow, the answers there are wild. First off, there isn’t a constitution; they have the Basic Laws instead. And the Supreme Court and the judiciary in general has near total control in a bunch of ways that I find incomprehensible. They kind of get to decide who can be appointed to the judiciary. They get judicial review of laws passed by the Knesset. AND they get to decide who counsel is for the various ministries _and their opinions are binding_!!!!
Honestly? This could be reined in a long ways before I would get worked up about it. Things are sufficiently different in their system that it’s hard to really understand as an outsider how things balance (or don’t). But at least at the surface level, there’s been an ongoing, successful power grab by the judiciary.
I knew from things R. had said in the past that whenever someone starts throwing around the phrase war crime, it’s worth it to dig in and try to grasp the scope and details of the situation, because war crime covers a lot of ground (look, the word “crime” in general covers a lot of ground, and there is such a thing as “good trouble”). But today, mostly because of I., I dug into things like, okay, sure, but _what_ are the specifics of corruption. And looking over the charges, some just seem bonkers, like, why would you charge that (a few K in jewelry to the wife. Really? Come on). Some seem problematic (quid pro quo with media and regulators of media and how the media covers yourself and your opponents), but then I have to compare that to shit we have here in the United States like, oh, I don’t know, Fox News. And that’s the LITE end of the corruption problem with the news. Diet Corruption. I don’t want to excuse any of this; I just want to observe that you’d be hard pressed to find a recent Republican that hadn’t done worse.
Finally, I decided to look at the alternatives. I. found Yair Lapid, and I turned up Benny Gantz. I will note that if there is one thing you can safely bet on, it is that Lapid will refuse to serve in any arbitrarily selected group of people, which feels awfully precious to me. Reading the wikipedia entry for him, specifically, the “Political Views” section makes me wonder why anyone would want Lapid over the current office holder (and indeed, not that many people really seem to).
Gantz is something else entirely, his political views far less clear, his military background much more significant. His actions so far suggest, if anything, an extremely high degree of commitment to getting all the hotheads to settle down. This is obviously appealing, and also, I have enough familiarity with the complexity of Eisenhower to be more than a little curious what is going through that head.
Not directly related to any of that, I’ve also been low-key wondering what would happen as Rutte increasingly moves away from running the Netherlands to what is looking like running Nato instead. Honestly, why anyone would want these jobs is beyond me, but I feel lucky that this is happening on the Nato side, and more than a little concerned about Geert Wilders. OTOH, R. pointed to some trends he’d been seeing in coverage of Wilders comical efforts to form a government, and how Wilders’ rhetoric has been evolving. Also, I saw some coverage of ASML thinking of maybe moving to France if NL is really gonna make it hard for them to hire people.
Whatever happens in NL, Israel can absolutely rely on their support. Wilders’ cannot be relied upon to support Ukraine, however, which is also a concern, not anything recent, just background going on and on and on.
But somehow, poking at each of these things in succession and thinking through the fears and gaining even tiny amounts of additional insight into the various participants had the effect of talking me off a ledge. Or several ledges. I feel much better. There’s a lot of nonsense, and a lot of pain, but there are also extremely sensible people out there working very hard to reduce the level of excitement and violence. It’s okay if a lot of people are confused and uncertain and if we don’t really know how to deal with these things. I think we can trust at least _some_ of these participants to provide the needed guidance.
Altho I have not found a book to read that I am actually excited about yet.