I guess at the heart of my question is: Why people didn’t create new letters to fit those sounds? Sure initially people would have to learn what the new letters are so they could pronounce them, but they already have to learn all these rules and exceptions so they can pronounce the reused letters correctly in the right circumstances. Why can’t we have 38-56 letters?

Oh I didn’t know the current alphabet came from the Portuguese. I assumed it was from the French when they colonized Vietnam.

The point about the logographic characters being distinct is interesting. I guess if you don’t have to phonetically spell it out you have some more freedom in picking what written characters will represent the meanings of the two words. It is still a shame we ended up with those homophones, but I guess that’s just a path dependency thing since the spoken words came first. I guess they just had to work with what they had when they converted them into characters.

Probably some other cases too, and im not sure which one applies to the specific sound you’re struggling with but a couple of examples

A recent example I came across while doing Vietnamese vocab was several letters being used to make an “Z” or “L” sound in some cases. For compound sounds, there are things like “ng” sounding like an “M” in front of words sometimes in Vietnamese or in English we have things like “th” or “ch” where the resulting sound doesn’t sound like it comes from either of the building blocks. “T” is pronounced like “tuh” and “H” is pronounced “huh”, (there is a certain irony in trying to use letters to communicate the pronunciation of letters, but whatever.) so you’d think that “th” would be something like “tuh huh” instead of the actual pronunciation. While I was writing this I thought of an example where this is how it works: “tw” gets pronounced like “twuh” like in “twelve” or “twenty”… and then I remembered “two” exists and sounds like “too” (and “to”) for some reason. So yeah. It’s really hard to come up with a consistent rule for a lot of these.

EDIT: Oh I just remembered another funny exception for “ch”: In “Chemistry” the “H” is neither pronounced nor does it modify the “C” to make the normal “ch” sound. It just sounds like there is a “C” there. Like “Cemistry.” Except looking at that, that pattern is used in something like “Cemetery” and then the “C” sounds like an “S”. I’m going to stop now because there are so many of these I could probably go on forever if I kept thinking about it.

Huh. I hadn’t even considered how technology might affect this. Interesting.

I recently had ECT for depression. It didn’t work, but it did make me forget about a bunch of random stuff. It’s been such a weird experience. One of the more benign things that keeps coming up is I forget if I watched/finished a show or game and even if I know I did, I can’t remember much about it. I worry about what else I’ve forgotten but I don’t know yet because it hasn’t come up. Like I haven’t been able to work because of my depression, but if at some point in the future I finally get it cured, or at least under control enough to go work, I worry that I’ll just randomly not remember some important things I learned in school or something like that.

So it’s definitely possible to do things that delete memories. I don’t see a reason why with more research we could learn enough about the brain to do this selectively instead of it being a random side effect.

As for whether I’d be worried about such a technology: That has more to do with what our society would look like than the actual tech. If we finally reached a society where we are all truly free, then while I might not use it, I wouldn’t fault others who decided some memory was too painful to keep. If we still lived in a society like we have today, I’d be terrified that the rich and powerful would have yet another tool to fuck with us.

This is nice. I was really worried there would be some last minute funny business with Cuomo, but things worked out for once!

But if it’s not wrong, then that is a useful answer. If the people who are committing crimes are a military force that is willing to use force to avoid being held accountable by law… questions that depend on the rule of law being in effect are missing the point. Laws need to be enforced by some kind of superior force to the people being subject to the law. Ideally that force is mutually agreed upon by society through some political process. Modern democracies are supposed to base that legitimacy on democratic will restrained by constitutional limitations. But clearly that doesn’t strictly need to be the case for a state to operate. The most base level of political legitimacy for the use of force to govern is the mere unwillingness of the population to use their own violence to counter it. If things ever got bad enough, the thing that keeps that in check is ultimately organized resistance and revolution.

Going back to liberal democracy though, even with all of our theoretical restrictions on power, ultimately all of that only works based on some combination of the government believing in and choosing to follow those principles and if all else fails… revolution. Just think about how historically significant the first ever peaceful transition of power was. The people with all the guns just decided not to use them to keep their power. Think about how crazy it is that some of the people in the government wanted George Washington to become king and he was just like “Nah. Pass. That’s not how we’re gonna do things anymore.”

If they decided otherwise… what was a judge going to do about that? Write a strongly worded opinion paper? Then what? In order for anything to happen either the gov needed agree or enough other people with guns would have to organize to do something about it. Even if you have some police force to represent the courts independent of the main government, that police force needs to be full of people who agree with the rule of law and they have to be strong enough to enforce that court decision.

So getting back to our situation… if the main government and the military and police under its direct control has decided that the rule of law isn’t important to it, then even if you can point to the laws they’re breaking and get the courts to rule against them… you need to answer the question of who is going to make those court decisions a reality. If it isn’t going to be ICE, the US Military, or any of the other organizations engaged in the illegal activity, then it needs to be someone else and at that point it’s a war and the laws don’t really matter anymore anyway.

So that’s the decision tree for this question. If you think the government isn’t entirely run by fascists, then we can discuss the legal question. If your answer is that the government is corrupt and fascist, then answering the legal question is producing answers that are inherently incorrect and misleading. If you do genuinely believe the opposite, then yes, just giving the fascist answer is incorrect and misleading. In either case, the path we go down, if incorrect, leads us away from the more productive conversation. But the question of which of these two answers is the correct starting point for the interesting and necessary discussion.