#41
the city of jasmine??? what the fuck is that... I thought this vid was from damascus. dammit gonna have to really double down here. no honey I didnt call the job centre yet.
#42
steg are you ok? want to talk about it @ RhizzIRC?
#43
no im cool. I'm really bad at learning languages so part of this is personal. thats all
#44
have you tried language immersion?
#45
damn dude. im not like that.
#46

peepaw posted:

have you ever met a journalist?

#47
how hard is arabic to learn for the average honkie? im guessing harder than french/german but not as hard as mandarin?
#48

c_man posted:

how hard is arabic to learn for the average honkie? im guessing harder than french/german but not as hard as mandarin?

foreign service language institute says arabic and mandarin are about equally as hard to learn

#49
many idiot americans are desperately guilty that they have never left the country or learned one word of a foreign language and this man is a living salve, and i bet he is way more popular in america than the uk
#50

getfiscal posted:

foreign service language institute says arabic and mandarin are about equally as hard to learn


wow. i know mandarin is supposed to be hard because of tones+huge symbolic "alphabet" so i wonder what the sticking point is for arabic. its pretty similar to hebrew, right?

#51

stegosaurus posted:

the city of jasmine??? what the fuck is that... I thought this vid was from damascus. dammit gonna have to really double down here. no honey I didnt call the job centre yet.



He's already been offered jobs by the defense industry. I guess he could have just made that up but Google did pay to fly him to America and give some some boring lecture on crowdsourcing or photo analysis so it's believable.

#52

Squalid posted:

He's already been offered jobs by the defense industry. I guess he could have just made that up but Google did pay to fly him to America and give some some boring lecture on crowdsourcing or photo analysis so it's believable.


its not like the defense industry is super picky about the quality of people that it gets. all you need is to be kinda-sorta okay but basically reliable.

#53
The thing that impresses me is how little data or research actually goes into serious foreign policy journalism. All it takes is sifting through a few thousand youtube videos and bam, you're in the New York Times, Guardian and New Yorker, cited as a source in frontpage articles.
#54
if you're too thorough or circumspect its hard to devolve it to bite-sized media-friendly increments.
#55
i feel like citing brown moses is sort of like citing wikipedia in terms of rationale behind citing him.
#56
[account deactivated]
#57
also mandarin is substantially easier to learn to speak than write
#58

He lists as his favorite authors Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and Nick Davies.

Not really sure how you could enjoy/understand these ppl then turn around and act as a tool of imperialism in the way he does.

#59
good one lol
#60

stegosaurus posted:

the city of jasmine??? what the fuck is that... I thought this vid was from damascus. dammit gonna have to really double down here. no honey I didnt call the job centre yet.

um excuse me? he made tens. of thousands. of dollars. in like two years.

#61
if brown moses is cited as an expert left and right, it's because the bar is set incredibly low when it comes to actual cultural and linguistic expertise on the middle east and as long as it supports the narrative it's all good

Edited by gastarbeiter ()

#62
SOF language school is like 2 or 3 weeks or something
#63

jools posted:

also mandarin is substantially easier to learn to speak than write

whys that. the tones were hard as fuck for me when i took it in school

#64
memorizing a vocabulary of logographic characters is a harder task for older people who did not learn a logographic system in their youth although the reason why depends on what you think about language acquisition. or thats what i was told anyway
#65
i don't think Brown Moses is as gung-ho on intervention in Syria as he was on Libya.
#66
yeah its almost like hes followed the exact status quo of the executive administration that runs the United States of America and its intelligence services and military
#67
I'm pretty sure the obama administration and the news media were pretty geared up for war, then they found out that congress and the majority of Americans outside the beltway opposed then. That plus Putin outmaneuvering them led to the whole thing fizzling out in less than a month.
#68

MadMedico posted:

I'm pretty sure the obama administration and the news media were pretty geared up for war, then they found out that congress and the majority of Americans outside the beltway opposed then. That plus Putin outmaneuvering them led to the whole thing fizzling out in less than a month.



cameron losing the syria action vote in the house of commons probably put the willies up them in DC.

#69
#70

ilmdge posted:

jools posted:

also mandarin is substantially easier to learn to speak than write

whys that. the tones were hard as fuck for me when i took it in school


Presumably because instead of an alphabet they have tens of thousands of distinct characters, and just to learn at a basic highschool level you need to learn a few thousand.

#71
there's some logic to the characters + also i guess we all learn differently because i couldnt pronounce anything for the life of me but i was able to learn characters and character strokes
#72

ilmdge posted:

there's some logic to the characters + also i guess we all learn differently because i couldnt pronounce anything for the life of me but i was able to learn characters and character strokes

that's often a symptom of profound, incurable autism or extremely-early-onset parkinson's

#73
yes being unable to pronounce words from a foreign tongue, that definitely has something to do with autism, thanks for bumnping this 2 day old thread with that update
#74
whats with the goon conspiracy of thi sguy and sean "puffy" vilerat benghazi smith?
#75
I liked when he exposed Nato's Croatian arms dealing patsies. That was cool