I was actually referring to all immigrants to Europe, not Muslims in particular, though they certainly seem to get the double whammy of "you're not from around here, are you?" combined with hostility towards their religion.
Europe is traditionally a place that people leave so it's not surprising that they haven't figured out how to assimilate immigrants.
^^^^^^^^ This ^^^^^^^^
People who think the United States is hostile towards immigrants should spend some time in Europe as one, particularly one of color.
Except that people don't actually interpret the sentences that way.
You're bringing logic to a syntax fight...
If it is intended to actually double negate, then emphasis is used, "I said, I don't have NO books." This lifts the word up for consideration of special usage. And it is used this way in users of both positive and negative Negative Agreement... "I don't have any books. I don't have NO books." "I don't have no books. I don't have NO books."
Otherwise, all negative words in a clause are just glomped all together. Which is why "I don't think, that he didn't do it." tends to still double negate, even without emphasis... Even people who use negative Negative Agreement, would likely say "I don't think he did it."
Oh, one can totally learn about English grammar just by studying English grammar. But in many ways as our native language we're "too close" to it. People find it difficult to learn the distinction of a noun and a verb, because we just use English grammar, we don't think ABOUT English grammar.
It's a lot like breathing. We can think about breathing, and study the way breathing works, but in the end, from our perspective we just breathe automagically.
Discouraged by whom?
The formal register. Which unlike colloquial English has a number of stupid rules like "no double negatives" that don't actually make sense linguistically, but if you're in formal writing, you better use it, because if someone comes across it, they will immediately recognize you as lacking proper education in the formal register.
Some others immediately jump from "lack of proper education in the formal register" to "stupid" or "half-witted" or "redneck", but I do not ascribe to that opinion.
Either way, you write to your audience, and the formal English register has determined these stupid rules to be distinguishing and defining features...
But that seems like a very formal way of writing.
Which was kind of my point. German formal writing prefers this construction, whereas in English, the formal writing rules tend to prefer extremely flat sentences... "There was a woman, who gave a striped ball. She
Thanks for the gestreiften use though. I maybe would have thought of that if I weren't intentionally seeking to construct stilted formal written German...
I tend to prefer Glücklich for happy. But then I have learned a somewhat archaic form of German, due to the state of US textbooks...
When the US constitution talks of "pursuit of happiness" it isn't meant "happiness" as we know it today. They had the same sort of ambiguity at the time between luck/happiness/joy
If it were being rewritten in modern English the intent was "pursuit of fortune/wealth"
English also compounds words. We just write them with spaces in between.
"Baseball field" for one. German chooses to put the words together into one, English chooses to put a space in between them.
But either way, spoken-wise, they're a series of nouns all in a row.
$ObjectName and ObjectNumber.
When I was learning BASIC, AppleSoft BASIC only had two letters of significance in variable names... this was Apple ][e...
From there I moved on to C and Assembly from there. After I learned Assembly, everything just kind of made sense, because I could tear apart everything in assembly in my head, and know what it was doing. I stuck with C all the way until my professional career which started me in Perl, and then just recently Go.
You're quoting the Ma Bell divestiture as an example of helpful regulation?! Ma Bell:
1. Took her universal service obligations seriously.
2. Invested money into keeping her plant modern and current.
3. Was friendly to labor.
4. Threw gobs of money at Bell Labs for the sake of science, with no expectation of immediate payout or profit.
The contrast with modern day ILECs is telling. I'm less than one thousand feet from our central office and can't get DSL faster than 3mbit/s because Verizon wants out of the wireline business and is bleeding it to death. And who can blame them? They've forced to compete against unregulated cable companies while still meeting all of the legacy ILEC obligations, ranging from service commitments to labor contracts.
If Ma Bell was still around I would have had fiber many years ago. For all her flaws she put money back into the business and planned for the future.
My personal opinion is that business should pay absolutely no tax whatsoever. All tax should happen when people extract money from a business. Taxing business is just taxing investors, pay and conditions of employees, or shareholders.
You left 'customers' out of the list. Many taxes are simply passed onto customers as a cost of doing business. Of course, you're exactly right, and I've said this for a long time. A corporation can only transfer money to individuals in the form of salary (taxed) or dividends (also taxed); taxing corporate income is a form of double taxation and at the end of the day is little more than a hidden backdoor tax on individuals.
You missed his point. His point was that something will always be prohibited and they'll just move into selling that instead. It doesn't have to be drugs. Explosives and other forms of weaponry come to mind as items that are either outright banned or at least highly regulated in most of the World. Are you going to legalize and deregulate them too? Laissez faire for C-4? It would make the Fourth of July a lot more enjoyable but other than that I'm not certain it's a good idea.
If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. -- Stanley Garn
