Eight: English, German, French, Spanish, Latin, Russian, Japanese, ASL.

Bonus question: do you ever do your counting in a non-native language, just to make it more interesting?

Russian occasionally. ASL when I’m counting how many seconds the cat has to stay quiet before I give her a treat.

Split Colemak on an Iris keyboard.

Famously, The Lion King is Hamlet with a happy ending, for example. Any other ones you’re thinking of?

anarchocristianism

To me this means Dorothy Day or Tolstoy. What does it mean to you?

For a start, look at the history of major companies traded in the first stock markets, such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the British East India Company (EIC), the Hudson’s Bay Company, etc. These were colonial ventures, but they raised money through the sale of shares traded publicly.

However, they were not subject to competition in the market, as they enjoyed legal monopolies and used military force. They also frequently employed slave labor.

Too many American right-wingers use “freedom” to mean “I get to impose costs on you; you don’t get to impose costs on me.” It’s not equality; it’s strictly positional. Look at the association of “freedom” with shitty driving for a little example: “I get to threaten you on the highway, pollute your air, tear up the land with my off-roading … but taxing my gasoline is on offense to the Founders.”

Thing is, the economists are right about free markets being a good idea; and free markets depend on a certain kind of regulation to exist. The trouble with capitalism is that it’s never been a reliable ally of freedom of any sort; going back to the origins of capitalism in the private funding of colonial slaver monopolies. The association of capitalism with free markets is largely propaganda; capitalism started with colonial slaver monopolies like the VOC; to a first approximation every firm wants to be a monopoly, and a great way of doing that is political corruption; see today’s USA.

But there’s a reason every government since ever — from empires to democracies — has done things like standardize weights & measures, build public goods like roads to enable trade, and establish courts of law to enforce contracts and fair dealing. Those things are really good ideas! And I’m not sure I can credit the left-anarchist proposals to replace them any more than I can credit the anarcho-capitalist ones.

Mutualism sure has some nice ideas though.

I use an Iris split keyboard from keeb.io. it’s comfy. Actually I have two of them; the heavy clicky custom one with steel plates stays home; the light quiet one is for travel.

I drifted slowly from right-libertarian to a more leftish position: pro-union, pro-social-programs, skeptical of the compatibility of unregulated capitalism with individual freedom. Still no fan of tankies.

This wasn’t from anyone sitting down and trying to convince me, though. Part of it was discovering how close right-libertarianism had always been to white-supremacism: some old Ron Paul newsletters were unpleasantly enlightening. Part was seeing people who called themselves “libertarians” line up with the far right to support state violence, especially against black and brown people. And heck, part was from getting richer and seeing how that worked.

I have a lot of sympathy for the frustrations that get young men into right-wing positions and occasionally I try to puncture some of the nonsense they’re being fed.

Maoism did a lot of evil without any religion. Were all of its perpetrators bad people?

Anti-science, misogyny, etc. are bad independently of whether they are done in the name of religion, or pseudoscience, or political ideology. Doing bad things in the name of religion is exactly as bad as doing them in the name of communism, or capitalism, or racial ideology, etc.

Imagine if that person did all the same things they do, but without the label of “religion” being attached.

Charity? Awesome! Habitat for Humanity is an explicitly Christian organization and does great work. In my neighborhood, the local Lutheran and Quaker churches give out free food to the poor, and they don’t sneak any Lutheran or Quaker cooties into it. If you’re good to others because you think God wants you to be good to others, that still really does count as being good to others.

Prayer? Okay, take “religion” off of it and they’re meditating, thinking, or talking to themselves. That’s good. Unless they’re thinking and talking about torturing their neighbors eternally, or something creepy like that. (But even then, better to keep those fantasies to yourself than to act them out in public.) Die Gedanken sind frei — thoughts are free.

Going to worship services? Okay, they’ve got a weekly social event where they sing songs and listen to speeches. Sounds great, unless the songs are about “everyone outside this room is a terrible person and deserves to suffer forever” and the speeches are about hate politics. If they’re about how wonderful it is to be nice to each other, or being brave and standing up against oppression, or something else that would be positive even without the label of “religion” on it, great!

Dietary rules? It’s okay to have preferences, distinct cultures, cuisines, and so forth. For that matter: my family isn’t Jewish, but when I was little, we ate kosher beef hot dogs, because my mom expected the rabbis would care about the meat being sanitary. (Unfortunately in retrospect, kosher slaughter is, shall we say, not clearly better than secular slaughter.)

Lapdogs have been around for thousands of years. It’s only very recently that they’ve been bred so extremely that they can’t breathe.