This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

This might just be because of the change I’ve made in my online behavior, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

I’ve talked many many times about my long stint on Twitter. Specifically the brief stint where I was highly active on leftist twitter from early to mid 2020 (where I managed to get around two thousand followers which seems crazy to me now considering I’m just a random guy). Back then tensions were high. People were getting laid off, high profile civil rights protests were happening, and there was nothing much to do but to be online. Personally my internship I had lined up during the summer (since I was just about to graduate college) ended up getting cancelled which led me to a period of depression. It’s also the reason I started spending so much time on Twitter and what led me to drink heavily and gain a bunch of weight. I imagine a lot of people who became extremely online during this period were in similar boats.

Anyways, I made a couple of online friends during this time period. It initially started as “Bernie” or “Rose” twitter. We were all pretty normal social democrats supporting Sanders for the presidency (which before Super Tuesday seemed like a big possibility). And then when it became clear that Biden would be the democratic nominee, a lot of people ended up going to the dark side. They started using hammer and sickle emojis on their display name. Started talking about how they were going to read Marx and Lenin (but they never did). They started making memes about how awesome Castro and Mao were. Bios went from “BernieOrBust” to “Marixst-Leninist-Maoist.”

A lot of talk started happening of “grow your own garden the end of the world is near” and also “arm yourselves comrades the class war is among us.” Somehow everyone became very fond of the second amendment. There were twitter accounts LARPing about joining the Socialist Rifle Association, e-girls were taking provocative pictures of themselves posing with automatic rifles in front of a Soviet flag. It became a whole thing. Some of this online behavior was covered in articles like The Cut's Before We Make Out, Wanna Dismantle Capitalism?

I ended up disconnecting from all this around September/October of 2020. I actually ended up voting for Biden in November which I wasn’t planning on when I was addicted to Twitter. I go a little bit into this detox here.

Fast forward to this year. A wave of mass shootings happen. Something that used to be a normal thing pre-pandemic but which stopped/slowed down thanks to lockdowns and schools remaining closed. With all of this in the news again, I start thinking back to the friends I used to have. And their gun loving, revolutionary wanting, “libs get the bullet too” type of tweets that they were writing back in 2020. I don’t remember most of them let alone their names. But I do remember a few.

I look them up. And there are dozens of tweets about the need for gun control. They’re talking about how nobody actually needs guns, and all of the typical liberal arguments in favor of gun control. A stark contrast to what they were saying before. They still have “socialist” in their display names and bios, though from the retweets I saw of them they were no longer following the “Mao is cool” type of people. For lack of a better term, they calmed down. They don’t long for a revolution to happen. They don’t want blood on the streets.

I think what had happened is that they all forgot what mass shootings were. How destructive they were. And now that society is mostly back to normal, including mass shootings, they remembered what that was like.

Now this is too niche of a corner on twitter to talk about in terms of larger online behavior. But back in 2020, I did predict that when Biden became president a lot of these online socialists would retreat into the liberals that they used to be. And it seems like that has happened, at least to some extent.

I mean, I’m glad for them. They seem more balanced, and it’s good that they eventually found themselves like I did (even if I did it a little quicker than they did). But it is still an interesting progression that a lot of my former online friends took.

Ten years ago, I got my first job in the field of languages. I was a "translation engineer", working on tooling for translators. I very quickly was told to never represent a language by a flag.

I'm sharing this here because this is something you either know, or don't, and many people don't.
Why is simple: languages do not map 1:1 to a country.

• A country can have multiple languages
• A language can be spoken in multiple countries
• A language can exist without being spoken in any country
• A country can exist without an officially recognised language

Today as I sit here, I'm at a language meetup where language tables each have a flag on them. Well, none of us at the Russian table are comfortable with that Russian flag, so we just turn it around and write "RU" on the other side.

Wikipedia has an article about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_icons_for_languages

So how are you supposed to do this correctly ? ISO 639 has a list of 2-letter and 3-letter codes for languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes

• You want to represent a language, use ISO 639-1: a two letter code. For example, "English" is "en" and "French" is "fr".
• You want to represent a language, but wish for a larger code for some reason (such as disambiguation with state or country codes)? You can use ISO 639-2/T: 3-letter codes for the languages. For example,
  "English" is "eng" and "French" is "fra".
• You want to represent a language, as spoken in a particular country? ISO 639 and ISO 3166 work together. You can represent "English as spoken in England" as "en_GB", "American English" as "en_US", "Canadian French" as "fr_CA", and so on. (This is a very flexible standard, allowing for a lot of variations and a topic for a more motivated person than me. Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag)
• You want to represent the abstract notion of translations or internationalization, such as for an icon to change the language? This wikipedia article may help. The two most common variations I've seen are an icon that has "A" and "文" together, or some kind of globe icon.
• You want to represent a currency? Use ISO 4217 currency codes: "USD" for US Dollar, etc. Some countries have multiple currencies, don't use a flag without disambiguating somewhere.
• You want to represent a country? You can use a flag, I don't care. But even then, ISO 3166 will probably be less political :)