Very cool. The grammatical basics seem a lot like Chinese, with similar word order, and a couple Japanese-esque particles thrown in (li ≈ が, e ≈ を). Lacking tense, conjugation / declension, subject / verb agreement, grammatical gender, etc., I've always felt the basics of Chinese make a pretty good foundation for a simple language.
I'm curious about the decision to include the grammatical particles, and why it seemed necessary...anyone have a full enough understanding of the grammar to know why the decision was made to allow dropping the "li" particle with "mi" and "sina", but not getting rid of it in general? Chinese similarly lacks a 'to be' copula, and gets by quite well without a subject marker.
c.f.
EN: I (am) good
TP: mi pona
ZH: 我好
EN: Water is good
TP: telo >li< pona
ZH: 水好
Japanese explicitly demarcates the subject / topic, but seems to allow a bit more variety at the beginning of the sentence + uses that demarcation to add a connotation of emphasis or contrast with a previous topic + isn't a conlang. Anyone have a feeling for what it adds here?
I think it's to distinguish between adjectives. Perhaps telo pona means good water so "telo pona li lete" is clear that "good water is cold". I don't know I'm totally guessing here :D
Your interpretation is right. There's an example somewhere in one of the official tutorials that shows how moving the li can change the meaning for this reason (although "pi", which means something like "of", was also added for a similar reason: I think Sonja's example was distinguishing two ways of grouping "tomo telo nasa", where "(tomo telo) nasa" would mean "crazy bathroom" and "tomo (telo nasa)" would mean "bar, liquor store" -- so Sonja said the second case would be expressed by "tomo pi telo nasa").
It isn't permitted in a lot of contexts where it would be used in English, but it's still the copula. Here are the examples of copula use that wikipedia gives which require 是 in Chinese:
Mary and John are my friends.
The Morning Star is the Evening Star.
She was a nurse.
Dogs are carnivorous mammals.
I am your boss.
I'd be very surprised to see a Chinese person come out with 水好 for "water is good".
One other grammatical feature borrowed from Chinese is the way of asking and answering yes-no questions.
For example:
sina wile ala wile e moku?
you want not want OBJ food?
Answer can be "mi wile" or "mi wile ala" (I want / I don't want). One can also go even more Chinese-like and drop the subject pronoun in this context.
Or:
sina kute ala kute?
you hear not hear?
Sonja did provide an alternative way of asking yes-no questions, which is making a statement and appending "anu seme?" (literally 'or what?'), kind of like German "nicht wahr?" and Portuguese "não é?", among others. I think the Chinese style is more standard and pervasive today, though.
Well, I wouldn't regard toki pona as pro-drop in general -- subject pronouns are normally required (in part because verbs don't inflect for person and number). But there is a special case for answering a yes-no question:
Yes, quality (often) has this one bad apple spoils the whole bunch property. If we have to have a math metaphor we might say that quality is multiplicative, in the sense that one low value in a sequence still impacts the entire product. Or we might say that quality has an absorbing element, by which we mean that any zero value kills the whole set (100 * 100 * 100 * 0 still equals 0). But fractal means that we see self-similarity at all levels. That hardly seems to be the case.
According to the original argument, bad software implies bad programmers which implies a bad company. That seems not only incorrect but also non-constructive. It ignores (e.g.) the idea that good employees could release bad products under bad management. Likewise, great programmers can write applications which are terrible to use. There are other skills involved in that process (interaction design, for instance). The criteria for evaluating programmers and software are vastly different and thus it doesn’t make sense to say that there’s a fractal relationship between these two vastly different kinds of entities.
How do you figure "it does not include army of unemployed people"? Census data should reflect members of the population regardless of employment status.
From a quick read of the census website linked, it appears that what unemployment data there is comes from the 2000 Census, whereas income data is much more current and numerous. That's rather concerning.
It's also the case that unemployment numbers are always underreported, something which gets worse during periods of extended unemployment. The government bases its estimates primarily on unemployment benefits filings. People who are unemployed beyond the period of available benefits don't get counted.
So, the unemployed are somewhat factored into the study, but it doesn't seem like a very clear picture of the situation.
That's my prima facie judgement at least.
Moreover, the amount of work that he has done towards this end is incredible. His productivity (at least in the early days of GNU) was astounding and inspiring. Perhaps one RMS didn't get us there, but two? Or five? It'd be a treat to know what that would have looked like.
Most of us, for fairly obvious reasons, decry the use of violence by individuals, yet we are all complicit in the use of violence by the state. Our democratic governments imprison and kill in our names both in war and for the enforcement of our laws. Sometimes (often?) wrongfully.
Why is our collective violence de rigueur but individual violence is immediately presumed to be evil and wrong?
Presumably use of violence by the state is intended to be "justified"; i.e. it is not random, emotional, or for gain (except, perhaps a societal gain of increased safety), but either for the cause of "justice", or for safety--and these calculated, functional properties with an aim of public good make the action acceptable.
The obvious difficulty of individual violence is the tendency for it to be emotional or for personal gain, or for a lack of rigor in establishment of guilt in the presumed crime of the victim. But if guilt has been firmly established, if the target of violence has, beyond a shadow of a doubt, committed heinous acts, then what is the fundamental difference? Isn't the elimination of a destructive force by an individual precisely the same in outcome as the elimination of the same force by a collection of individuals?
And in a thoroughly corrupt system which promotes, protects, and encourages these destructive forces--or a system which feigns to protect and represent its citizens (but doesn't actually do so)--mustn't the responsibilities of protecting and shepherding at some point eventually fall to the citizens themselves? Surely evil carrying your banner is still evil?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm no proponent of violence. I think (even) our government should commit considerably less violence. I think we generally need to scorn violence by the individual because of the likelihood that it be unrigorous, emotional, or selfish. But I don't know that the difference in emotional weight between "kill" and "murder"--that is to say "unlawfully kill"--should be so great. It seems to me that the philosophical basis for the two should be the same, rather than scorning one and supporting the other because it carries a badge.
> Why is our collective violence de rigueur but individual violence is immediately presumed to be evil and wrong?
The difference is one of authority. Goldman's authority to kill isn't accepted by society at large, whereas the due process of election, appointment, induction, training, and periodic evaluation is so accepted. You can argue about whether or not that acceptance is a good thing or a bad thing, and Goldman likely felt it was a bad thing, but that acceptance is the fundamental difference.
The presumption that individual violence is wrong follows from this systemization of it. When it wasn't, we did commit individual violence with no reason. This is rapidly apparent in watching children interact without intervention: they exhibit the full range of human extremes in both cooperating spectacularly but also in conflicting violently. By systematizing it, we've made it rare and remarkable.
And because it stands out, it's now considered wrong.
The consequences of that are where things get interesting:
When violence is systemized we consider it OK. When something stands out we consider it wrong. Authority is presumed to be benevolent (or, at least, extra-moral).
> Authority is presumed to be benevolent (or, at least, extra-moral).
It's subtler than that, though with our current standard of civics education it's not apparent.
It's that we presume that we ourselves is correct, and since we ourselves are a source of authority, then the authority we contribute to must therefore be correct. Benevolence has nothing to do with it; it's just egocentrism. We don't think of ourselves as nice; we think of ourselves as right.
when you conspire to kill another human being for whatever reason - it is a decision that you alone are making and have the full power to stop at any time, so you bear the full responsibility for it. When your state orders you to nuke Hiroshima, for example, it's a much more complicated situation, however horrific. So the two situations cannot be compared directly
Choosing to kill with non-governmental violence does not mean that the decision is made alone. In fact, the particular assassination in question was a plot involving multiple individuals. Killing via the government is a group decision involving more individuals. What is the magic number of individuals at which we no longer have to evaluate the morality of the situation? And, if such a number exists, what defines it?
And yes, the individuals perpetrating the action bear responsibility. But if the action is the correct one, then they bear responsibility for doing the right thing, no? Surely statehood is not an inherent justification for violence; the underlying action always has to be the correct one, regardless of the perpetrator.
I completely agree that state-ordered violence is complicated, but you’ve only begged the question that it cannot be compared to individual (or smaller-group) violence, not given a reason why it cannot.
I just noticed that you said "your state orders you", oops. That's not the situation I'm talking about. The morality of soldiers is a complex and interesting topic, but what my comment is about is the responsibility (or lack there of) borne by all citizens, given that their government (presumably) represents them in its actions.
Systemic violence so drastically outweighs "individual violence" in quantity and affect that there's just no real comparison. Me smacking a dude for talking shit doesn't even come close to the totality of systemic violence: war, poverty, houselessness, rape, abuse, racism, hunger, prison, policing, immigrant concentration camps, border security, alienation, queer bashing, trans murders, environmental catastrophe on a global scale. And that's just the present situation. This violence is felt by individuals very personally, but it is systemic in cause, affect, and result.
The police, media, and state point the finger at a very specific subset of activity and call it violence in order to distract from the overwhelming violence they perpetrate. This is particularly true of those who resist the current state of affairs. Rioters are "violent" because they smash windows. The cops who beat them are merely restoring order. Police are rarely described as "violent" even though they frequently shoot people and control populations with the use of force. Prisoners are the violent ones, not the ones who lock people up in cages. The most oppressed are the violent ones, not those who maintain the system of violence.
To give a little perspective on anarchy and violence:
Anarchism tends to reject moralism. The question isn't whether it's good or bad to kill Frick. It's not about punishing a person for a bad behavior as that sounds awfully like what the state does and it's so-called "Justice." Rather, it's about what force this activity will generate. If a hated figure is assassinated, will this spark revolt? This idea was called "propaganda of the deed" and a similar idea lives on in smashing windows and similar small-scale activities among current North American anarchists: activities that can be picked up by others easily and may spread among the wider population. Other ideas tend to focus on blowing shit up and stuff, like the CCF and FAI. That's cool and all, but I don't think that spectacular acts of violence against the state will do anything to hasten its demise.
