SatanicNotMessianic

I think that Toyota recently announced they sold a total of 14,000 (in the US, I’m assuming). They also announced that they were planning on continuing production on the same article, but I don’t know what this will do to their plans.

Yes. The basic method is listen and repeat with variations thrown in. You might be able to get the old FSI recordings for free, and I think there’s a commercial remastering or something like that available for sale. I got those out of curiosity at one point. Pimsleur is an updated version of the same approach with better structure, better voice actors, and in the most updated version available as an app/application.

I’m going off of memory here, but they’re a series of about 3-5 courses (the most popular languages go further) of 30 hour long sessions each, and I would do them while commuting. It would generally take me a few times to get through each course, but it’s really remarkable to think about how in the first course (and many after) what starts out sounding like a string of completely undifferentiated sounds turns into language. At some point some dial really starts to turn and you’ll have your first dream in Spanish or whatever. It’s pretty amazing.

Yup - you’re right. I kinda have the same hang ups with both, and it’s late, so I got them confused.

It’s been too long for me to remember off the top of my head, but this SPLC article on Tom Metzger and the White Aryan Resistance should give you a starting point and some terms to search for. The Hammerskins were one of the bigger gangs back then that had a presence in multiple states and I think in the UK. The ADL also has great records and studies on these groups and are a key resource for researchers.

It’s been a while since I saw it, but I believe the older guy in AHX was supposed to represent Metzger. They were very much alike.

That’s fair. I struggled to find the word, but it was (again, at the time) a counterculture movement on the fringes of a counterculture movement (the punk/hardcore scene in general). There was a time when I was pretty elbows deep in researching groups like WAR and the role of bands like Skrewdriver and gangs like the Hammerskins. I even interviewed some people. They were all very surreally open to talking - you can see that if you watch some documentaries from the time.

I really don’t want to get back into that though. It’s a dark hole, and it’s getting close enough to mainstream politics that it’s an entirely different phenomenon.

What I guess I was trying to say is that Fight Club spoke to more people, and might have helped convert them. AHX was only seen as an endorsement by people who didn’t need converting, and who were such a tiny fraction of the population that they didn’t pose a large scale threat (although they did beat the crap out of me on a couple of occasions).

The fan interpretation of the movie as literally that really colors my perception of the movie. I love Bukowski (with some trepidation), and I know that the dudebro interpretation is 180 degrees from the intended meaning, but when it’s that badly misinterpreted I can’t help but feel like the cultural baggage weighs it down. It’s been decades since I’ve seen it, but when I started becoming aware of the PUA culture ((which I think provided the nucleus to the incel/maga culture we see today), they were leaning hard into it.

Contrast that with American History X, which I’ve been told has been interpreted by skinhead/WP subcultures as a film that portrays them positively and justifies their POV. I don’t associate that movie with that interpretation because they’re a much more marginalized community (at least until 2016), and because the movie really beats you over the head with the message so much that misinterpretation cannot be attributed to the film.

Agreed. The FSI method is the best I’ve found, and Pimsleur is the best implementation of it. The biggest weakness IMO was that it was about listening and speaking and had only a minor reading component. The new software versions correct for that.

From there, you should be able to have some simple conversations and watch TV shows, at least with the foreign subtitles on. As a note, I found that (as in English) the subs might not match the spoken words, but I found that in some types of media (eg telenovellas) they match pretty well.

I kno.

This is the correct answer. It doesn’t address the multiple mistakes in English and spelling that the OP ended up writing, though. Nor does it address the spelling variant, although that does not seem to be the particular focus of the original enquiry.

This is my favorite thing I’ve read all week.

Unless you’re really, really good at theory. See Von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, John Nash, and many others. It really goes for anyone who’s talented significantly above their peers in tech, the arts, sports…

The problem is that it scales with talent, so someone who’s modestly brilliant will get less leeway than a Nobel (or EGOT) level talent, and talent seems to scale non-linearly.

The problematic bit here is if the person (say, Hitler, in this case) is a true psychopath. This is where the mind/body (or soul, if you prefer) dichotomy starts to fall apart. I do not believe that free will exists, but I can give a light version of this that doesn’t depend on a complete rejection of free will.

We know as a medical fact that a history of traumatic brain injury (tbi) has a strong correlation with violent and aggressive behavior. Over half the people in prisons for violent crime have a history of tbi, versus about 10% in the general public. We can find similar correlations to other events that are known to physically alter people’s brains, from malnutrition to childhood trauma to growing up in a system of racism and violence. These experiences literally and physically rewire brains and alter neuroanatomy. These neuroanatomical changes result in neuropsychological changes, which result in behavioral changes. Think about today’s story of the banking manager who was recently arrested for shoplifting a couple of hundred dollars worth of goods from Target. She is a kleptomaniac (not sure if that’s the current term, apologies if not). She has no more conscious control over her actions than a person with epilepsy has control over their seizures.

Now, if your physical form were to go away, those impulses would theoretically be gone. You couldn’t feel any guilt over them - you had virtually no control. If you keep your physical form (as some Catholics believe), you’d theoretically keep your neuroanatomy. Then your “repentance” would have to be god fixing your brain, as it were, which raises the question why he didn’t just do that in the first place.

Obviously there’s way more problems just around this subject than I’m getting into here - memories of trauma that altered your limbic system, genetic and epigenetic drivers of behavior… is there a “fix” for that? - but the root of the problem is that the religions, in order to identify a behavior as “sin,” have to make assumptions about behavioral plasticity and more importantly a behavioral driver separate and apart from the physical brain, that’s just implausible. The facts are simply incompatible with that kind of redemption.