On the Myth of Oppressed Minority

The myth of Oppressed Minority is as vital for USA as myths of Frontier and American Dream were. It is actually the same myth. It is always We Few against It.

We Few white colonists against It - wild land that got to be conquered; every man got to rip a peace of it for himself, fight it from harsh nature and evil savages and bring the Frontier one step further. Then it was We Few honest and hard working men who have to fight against It - soulless capitalistic machine that rules the world, rip a peace of prosperity from it, conquer it, get on top of it, fulfil an American Dream. Now its We Few oppressed minority fighting against It - oppressing majority - for our godgiven rights etc etc. Frontier begot American Dream, American Dream begot Be Different.

And there are two ways to Be Different, be among We Few - either to MAKE a difference (which is hard) or just BE different by the right of birth. Be minority. Gay, Ethnic, Religious, Female (which is statistical absurdity, but since liberalistic society treats them as such...).

The only thing is that every one of us is the oppressed minority in some regards and oppressing majority in all the other. And the choice is which part we will identify with. When I ride a bus and hear сhanson, rap or pop-puke from driver's radio I feel myself very minor and very oppressed. And of cause I would like to have a law that protect Us Few who still remember how real music sounds like from this audail hogwash. But I'm very happy that we here don't have (for now) a tradition of such kind of laws. Because every time you try to rip something from It you end up with the peace of your neighbour’s flesh at your hand. And some legally justified hand is already reaching for the peace of yours. So I'm just put on my soundproof headphones on and make a sound of Beatles louder.

It's not a problem when minority is oppressed for the sake of majority, it's kind of a definition; problem is when it's the other way around. Like for example we have a traffic lights with sound confirmation for blind. The one I refer now is set near central subway station. All day long it goes like bip bip bip bip bip bip bip bip crossing allowed crossing allowed crossing allowed bip bip bip bip... All day. There were a diner at the corner, once I've spend there 15 minutes and my brain exploded. It might be that in the office building nearby work more people then there are blind persons in the whole area. If I were working there I'd killed myself on the third day.

This traffic light is the brilliant example of such make-majority-suffer-for-the-sake-of-minority approach. To make short range radiotransmitter into traffic lights  and make blind people to wear a headphone set to specific frequency, from my point of view, is more humanistic approach. But it means stigmatizing blind people even more and blah blah bip bip bip bip...

On Holly Cows and Doomsday Trumps

Main function of a trickster is, I'd say, to gently kick holly cows of particular culture. Without it cows become fat and lazy, they lay all day long and shit under themselves. An attempt to ban cowkicking activity leads to rapid cowshiting of the area. And then instead of evergentle mischievous trickster an evil trickster appears. A guy with electric stick and butcher's knife. Someone like Trump.

Last great professional trickster of USA was, probably, George Carlin - he made real kicks although quite politely - and he has been dead for years. Daily sanitary kicking among regular people was completely wed out by installing of bizarre concept of political correctness. So it was just a question of time. It's like if it smells brimstone the Devil soon appear, and if it smells cowshit, wait for some kind of duce. Trump is historical inevitability. They have asked for him, they keep asking and they will get him. If they don't get him this year they will get him for the next term (like Ukraine got Janukovich eventually). It is their first trump, if they don't listen the last one will soon follow.

Studying English

Borges ones wrote a poem "On beginning of a studying Ancient English" and when they asked him why he had chosen such a strange topic for poetry he answered that studying of English is such a moving emotional experience for him as watching a sunrise for example. The beginning of a studying English that was in a 5th grade wasn't particularly moving (I don't think that there's any element of our educational system that apt to be compared with the sunrise) but now, when I at long last came to the average level of understanding the language I knew what he had meant. With my current level of English I need to check a dictionary no more than two times per page while reading simple fiction (and with a dictionary built in an ebook it almost don't make a stumble) so now I can at first time experience works written in English in such flow manner as I experience Russian ones.

And except that now I begin to experience first fragments of English language thinking, dreams in English etc - the birth of English mind\language which despite of its scantiness is in some ways more effective then my Russian one.

Now you can easily tell that I'm very in all that Sapir-Whorf's "language you use changes the way you think" thing. I truly believe it is. Once I've learned toki-pona (that's pocket - just 130 words - artificial language created by Canadian linguist Sonya Ellen Kissa) to check is it true. Toki-pona is very easy, you can learn it completely in a week. Now I've forgotten it 'cause I have nobody to talk too. But when I've learned it I used to try to think with it for sometime and I felt that the way I thought have being changing. And the funniest thing is that some of that changes were retained even after I forgot toki-pona completely.

So what's the difference? Russian is very specific in that sense that we have a slightly different word for everything (in "he did", "she did" and "they did" we have 3 different words for "did"). Because of that first: it's probably very hard to learn Russian if it's not your native language, and second: grammar of sentence is pretty loose so if you found right forms of words, you can put them in almost any order and sentence would be grammatically correct (ok, there are a lot of people here who make incorrect sentences, but you probably need a special talent to do that). Russian has only 3 tenses (not 16 as in English) and no changes in sequence of tenses. We don't have modal verbs (came in, came at, come by and come down - completely different words) so size of personal vocabulary is probably more crucial then in English. That's why something sounds a bit too flowery in English would probably sound just good in Russian. And opposite: it's hard to pass with Russian such feeling of "beauty of simplicity" that English language (as I think) so good at. In Russian it would probably sound a bit simple-minded.

Couple of months ago I found a game that asks you to model neuron network of a ladybug brain (http://www.biologic.com.au/bugbrain/) and I spent some time with this game. In one mission I got to create a brain that allow a bug to stop when branch is over, turn when there's other branch, stand still while the bird is near and couple of other things. It took me about 8-9 neurons to build such brain. Then I came online to look the solution and found out that guy needed only 2 neurons for this task. That was because he very carefully calculated thresholds of every input and I used only 1 and 0.5 values. And that "simplicity because of precision" is what (as I feel) distinguishes English from Russian.

One of the problems with the way I write is that I use language intuition that was developed in Russian surrounding to write in English. That causes my sentences to be too long and wordy. Other is settled constructions. With your native language you don't need to put an effort to build a sentence of some kind, you just know how to do it right. But when you apply that "knowledge" to other language it always ends up with calquing constructions from your native language onto other. (For example at first I've written "speak in English" 'cause that's how we say it in Russian but I've spotted that mistake and corrected it (and that makes me wonder how much of such mistakes I haven't spotted). And for deciding is it correct to write "into other language" or "onto other language" I've got to flip a coin (here I wrote "drop a coin" at first:) )

I think a change would do you good...

"I think a change would do you good" is not only a line from a great Sheryl Crow's song but a title of the first post from a new blog and this only could bring you to some conclusions. And if I tell you that I recently turned 30 the conclusion will probably be "a 30 year-old life crisis". So let's tag it like this. The bottom line is that now I'm trying to bring some changes into my life.

So why am I starting the blog? (When somebody "trying to bring a change" by writing about it, it looks pretty like procrastination ;) But in my case it's not. At least not entirely :) The point is that one of my "areas of change" is to improve my English usage.

English is my third language and I live in a non-English speaking environment. Due to internet I have a lot of opportunity to master my passive skills but it's pretty hard to improve language usage without native speakers arround. And the blog gives, amongst others, a great opportunity to stretch a language muscle. So feel free to comment on my style and mistakes (and I'll actually be glad if you do).

My first language is Russian and I'm pretty good with it. I write practical psychology articles for big offline magazine and do some copywriting from time to time. I also used to write personal blog in Russian but with such amount of Russian writing for work it's not so much fun or challenge anymore. English is entire different manner (I'm fascinated with this language, but I'll tell you about it next time). So I decided to dump my old blog and start a new one here.

And looking on my old one I can very precisely tell you what this blog gonna be about. Psychology. Literature. Music. Movies (mostly old or underappreciated). Everyday stuff and my life experiences. Language. Study (I'm interested in a huge amount of different things, and also I'm very interested in psychology and mechanisms of learning process). Art and design. Scientific researches. Occasional funny stuff. Etc.

So it's gonna be a personal non-commercial & non-advertising  blog but I intend to make it interesting for people who doesn't know me in a real life. And I hope to make some new friends and interesting interlocutors here. You can wish me luck on it :)