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ah right, so the legacy of christianity I suppose. A lesson to learn for sure, I'd expect that it was better to be poor and gay or trans in Cuba or the USSR regardless since a person could be like the rich you mention & not worry so much about survival and instead focus on their social roles, rights and perceptions? Or were the pogroms and anti-lgbtq campaigns that bad?

fatness is indisputably tied to lazyness and greed right? It's just materially the case that more food and less activity lead to being fat, it's how our bodies work. Sure we can say not in all cases (medical issues), but then in the vast majority of cases this is true surely, just like with capitalists and those in power in the west usually being white people?

there's already a negative perception of being overweight, because it's unhealthy and also because it uses more resources than others, which I see as reasonable perceptions given that they're true, unlike for example the idea that being gay is decadent or immoral or unnatural. Naturally there's no need to persecute fat people rather we should help them, but does this mean we can't persecute rich fat people too - if we portray rich capitalists as healthy and fit and attractive people will look up to them, it's why these figurehead CEOs like zuckerberg and bezos work out and spend on cosmetic surgery.

most (all?) capitalists in propaganda have other contextual markers like piles of cash or fancy clothes or sitting on the backs of the poor. I get your point, but there's also a positive fat trope of a kind of good natured person who gives gifts or makes people happy or protects people. Isn't it pretty apparant in anti capitalist propaganda that being fat itself isn't the target, but instead greed and hoarding? Like when capitalists are portrayed as white, surely poor white people don't feel targeted because they know they're not rich, they get who the image is referencing? Maybe i'm wrong but don't people identify more with others based on shared values and conditions or experience rather than appearance?

I find it a little difficult to believe that 'fatcat' propaganda will lead to fat people being rounded up or opressed post-revolution, (there's too many of them for one thing). Is it really a risk?

i see the comparison to so called moral decadence, apologies for my ignorance but which revolution are you referencing wrt anti-lgbtq propaganda, pogroms, brutal oppression or similar?

but then don't many or even most people see a yacht or whatever as aspirational, whereas almost everyone sees being unhealthy as not so - specifically in regards to the effectiveness of propaganda?

well it's still true in most of the world surely? Sure there's a handfull of figurehead CEOs or a few politicians who rely more on their image and therefore choose to spend their abundant resources on exercising or eating more healthily, but aren't most people in power overweight? That's the case in my country at least - politicians, business owners, landlords, judges, anyone in a position of seniority or management etc are mostly overweight.

then when I look at people in my industry (a manual one, paid min wage so relatively poor and exhausting) there's some (fewer, mostly older people) people overweight, but then mechanisation of manual tasks or owning a car means they're fairly sedentary in any case compared to people who do the same job but without a machine or labor laws to restrict their energy expenditure. Which of course are a resource that lets them get that way.

obviously there's other factors to consider as you mention like sugar addictiveness, or food being designed to keep you hungry, or a lack of education in cooking, or a lack of communal sports. But generally speaking it's still broadly true that wealth, sloth, and greed lead to obesity right? The wealth can come in the form of things you don't truly own or can harm you, but it's still an abundance of resources and lack of activity that comes with wealth or priviledges.

somebody working in my industry doesn't do anywhere near the amount of work and has more and better food than someone in the same industry in a different country is what I'm getting at I think - we all benefit from the plunder of imperialism in some ways.

isn't a lot of anti-capitalist propaganda 'fatphobic' in this sense?

obviously there's a bunch of factors involved in weight issues, but greed and an over-abundance of material resources is one thing that commonly leads to being overweight right?

I've not really been following this drama so I might have a bad understanding of it but naturally i'll comment on it anyways

isn't this a good thing overall? these kinds of attempts at redress should be shot down or crushed, ideally in a humiliating way, people need to learn what works and what doesn't.

the people involved obviously don't fully understand that it's a class war, because in a war different people have different roles - if you're going to engage with the enemy's mouthpiece you need someone who's capable of doing that, or else don't try.

I did find the interview interesting because to me a dogwalker is a modern day page or jack, and this was like an aristo gently (because they don't want to bully their servents too much or be percieved to be doing that) telling them to get back in their lane.

some of that, but mostly their class interests. demographics of people who're more likely to be online

they don't want actual radical change, they want to be able to walk out of the mess with their heads held high

cleaning should be an agency/bureau/ministry of the state, so state employees. I don't think any place or organisation outside of people's homes should be able to set their own standards of cleanliness & hygiene or maintainence. This is just my personal view though idk what the correct marxist take on cleaning is.

they give a bunch of fake reasons, but the real reason is US imperialism/capitalism (monsanto, bill gates etc)

not a huge difference though

presumably a bunch of reasons for this, one I'd guess is that working class people are much more likely to interact with muslims and live near them - there's a lot of population control that goes into deciding who lives where, immigrant communities are often used to break up working class community areas, including areas of previous immigrants of course.

Working class/poor people (who the br*ts fear and despise, most snobbish nation in the world) are also much more targeted by anti-racisism campaigns than people with money - same goes for any initiative like against vaccine hesistancy for example. Islam in general is also more appealing for poor people than the older two, being less sociopathic, more practical, less self-flagellating, less obviously corrupt.

right, thanks for that distinction - I don't think I was making it correctly at all. I always read culture as both, if it's strictly 'pot making/decorating technique horizon' it makes more sense to me, having fewer connotations and being more explainable by what materials and techniques they had than what they thought or felt about things.

Ah ok thanks, it makes sense that it's an uncertain field with lots of revision, I suppose we've still got a lot to dig up.

So it's more just a few common threads between otherwise possibly very different cultures or languages or peoples?

"Because the descendants of PIE split many times..."

Like actual descendents, or not necessarily related? Is descendent being used in a 'linguistic family' sense here like not necessarily related people - or can we find out from DNA or similar?

With the pottery, I see how different designs would help, but can't even complex aesthetics be independently arrived - there's only so many ways you can decorate a pot using cords? I'm glad it's not just pot sherds, but I'm still caught on the whole spoon thing, spoons all look the same but we don't say 'spoon culture horizons'. I don't have an issue with technology sharing, it seems natural & makes sense, but when chinaware or even civil service exams spread to England for example we don't say Chinese and English culture are the same or even especially related. Maybe I'm using 'culture' in a less focused way, but what does it mean to call a group of peoples a culture if it's based on a few material artifacts?

"Not trying to put you down, but this paragraph shows how little you understand this stuff."

Oh sure, no worries, I understand very little it's why i'm asking questions.

"You’ve got a pattern of underestimating how much we actually know about ancient people... Greek Gods"

Yeah probably. But aren't Greek gods comparatively easy, we've got written records - this isn't true of much of europe and steppe asia, though, especially prior to greeks writing about them. And they can call a sun god a different name or sex but it's the same thing being worshipped, so how do we differentiate cultures and peoples from that, where it's a comonality of the natural world that pretty much everyone worships in some way? Couldn't any similar name look like a connection, even if it were happenstance? Or is that seen as unlikely?

"Because they spread at different times via different mechanisms. Just totally different situations."

Sure, I was wondering what the different situations were. But I think you indicate it's to do with horse domestication?

"PIEs weren’t the first people in these regions. They were predated by other inhabitants for many thousands of years."

This makes sense, can we reconstruct those older languages from PIE in this case?

"The best bet for how it actually happened is that the PIE made a few key technological advancements related to horses - chariots and saddles, probably - that let them roll over a vast section of the world. Central Asian horse people would continue this for thousands and thousands of years, but the OG PIEs got the farthest because they were mostly going against people who had just started settling into cities and practicing agriculture, not the organized states of later millennia. They didn’t just conquer either, and they often lost - they made no headway in Mesopotamia or the Levant, where there were established states with large scale military organisation. It should be noted this wasn’t some grand empire that ruled all of this land. Just a bunch of different people with an increasingly distant shared heritage spreading and retreating in different waves of conquest, trade, and migration."

That makes a level of sense. But ultimately, is the perspective that their culture and ways of life replaced those of the previous inhabitants? Except where they encountered more organised states I guess? Do we have records from Egypt/mesopotamia of encountering these early PIE peoples like loan words or technology or religious changes?

"We actually do know a lot about how it was spoken. We can read hieroglyphics phonetically."

Really? That's impressive, how do we know how they said the squiggly water one? How does the rosetta stone (isn't it greek/persian/egyptian?) let you do that if it's just writing - does it give grammar/prononciation advice or are there accent symbols that help?

"So, we aren’t reconstructing Egyptian. We know the language pretty well. Reconstruction is for languages that we don’t have any direct records of. What we do is look at their descendants we do have records of (this can be as ancient as Egyptian or Assyrian or as modern as the English we’re using to communicate right now). We use the sound correspondences I mentioned in my last post as the key mechanism. Basically, we can say, “500 years ago, language X could start words with /b/, but then that changed so all of those words start with /p/ now”. We look at the related languages, figure out as many correspondences as possible, and work backwards to figure out what the ancestral language is. We know this works because we can use the methodology on languages with a well-attested ancestor and closely reconstruct that language - basically, use Spanish and Italian and Romanian and reconstruct “Latin” to get something very close to what we actually know about Latin."

this makes sense, thanks. I get the p/b thing, but how do we tell how they pronounced the p or b sound? Translation to greek/persian words? Just because spanish pronounces some letters differently right, even though they're the same. And hebrew has a weird ch sound that's different from other k or c or cz sounds.

Thanks for your patience & explainations! Feel free to tell me to just go read a book and stop bothering you (not wikipedia tho please)

Edit:

Sorry this is too long already, but to lay my cards on the table so to speak, my worry going into this was that for european academics 'culture' has replaced 'race', there's still a 'homeland' for us to conquer, the cultural-lingustic map looks very similar to other maps. By analogy, while i'm sure it's well supported, big bang cosmology looks to me a lot like judeo-christian-greek cosmology - creation from nothing, light first etc. I'm pretty uneducated of course, it's just what it looks like to me, I'm probably wrong but there's also the worry that to the ancient greeks ex-nihilo & then logos seemed very reasonable and well supported too.

yeah, thanks that part makes sense.

If anthropology & archeaology have been sucessfully de-colonialised as jack says, why do we call it a 'cultural horizon' is what I'm getting at I think. Something changed, sure, but why is that a cultural change or even association?

I think I was confused by Iranian languages being in a sub-group, I suppose the question is why is it a sub group, or why did that particular sub group happen, or I guess what's the reason for there being seemingly an Indo half and a European half?

the pottery thing makes sense, but why is it called a culture? Is a cultural connection necessary for people to make the same kind of pots, could it be due to materials available in a given region (I assume they've thought of this & there's a good reason). Like we all make spoons in a similar shape because the shape works, but is that a cultural connection? Isn't it better described as a 'Pottery horizon'?

I can see how elements of religious thought can be transfered alongside or via language, but isn't it like looking at African Christians for example and then making conjectures about pre-Christian African religion? Further, ancient Chinese people worshipped the Sun, and so did ancient Europeans, without (seemingly) any linguistic or 'cultural' connection, how do they differentiate between thought independently coming about and that transfered by trade or migration etc?

Indian polytheism (and other theologies) spread all over Asia (like China, Indonesia etc), what's the theory as to why in the PIE example that apparantly came with big linguistic changes where it seemingly didn't in those places?

Doesn't PIE have to go back further than 5-6kya, given that we've found civilisation remains in the areas it's claimed to exist that go back much further? Like in Pakistan and Turkey for example.

Yeah I got most of what I do know about it from wikipedia, partly why I'm cautious about it. Maybe this is a bad summary, but it looks like the idea is that a group living around the Caspian Sea somehow expanded and conquered or migrated to a seemingly vast area of the world and replaced (or absorbed?) original languages (and cultures, religions?), and also acted as a germ for all these modern languages - it looks a lot like Aryanism with a kind of Conan the Cimmerian twist. Though I understand it's not that in academia.

Also, we have the written ancient Egyptian language, but afaik nobody has a clue how it was spoken, how do they go about reconstructing old languages like this?

Thanks for taking the time to answer, it's interesting stuff.

the end game is zero covid - it's still possible to eradicate it, this isn't a deterministic inevitability. China isn't the only nation with this approach either, just the one that gets talked about.

there's no reason they can't keep it up until the globe comes around to their obviously correct approach, however long that takes. There's a lot of pressure from capitalist institutions sure but the economic and societal damage caused by 'letting it rip' will make the west crumble before China does. Plagues always cause radical change, I think the effects of this one are nowhere near over, especially combined with other shifts in the world order, climate change, economic issues like currency devaluation, geopolitical manueverings etc.

i think social media has a lot of bot spread propaganda that makes it seem like that.

anyways, a good way of thinking about it is like Judo, mass/size doesn't matter if you use training & brains to flip it.

ok thanks for explaining, it makes sense. Do you know a good academic but dumbed down source for getting an idea of the modern non-fash perspective on it?

terminology like language 'families' puts me off a little, like english is spoken by a lot of people and there's nothing familial about the reasons for that if you see what I mean. But I guess they mean in a sense similar to use in other classification systems?

Also, as well as Albanian, why does it just skip the Iranian Plateau - is that an answered question?

And if you happen to know, what's up with 'cultural horizons' - is that part of PIE theories? It looks to my ignorant eyes like they just use pottery manufacture/design features to indicate a whole lot about huge geographic areas and peoples.

lastly, is it a traceable cultural heritage? I think I read that snake comes from an Indian area word, what's being traced in language theories? I see how language forms part of culture, but does an ancient Indian making a similar sound to describe a similar thing indicate a similarity or 'lineage' in perspective or thought?