User Comments - bluealvarez
bluealvarez
Posted on: Dog Meat and Animal Rights
March 19, 2009, 03:40 PM@tripplelatte: lol your satire. ;)
@alexye: your quote: "But farmed livestocks are not natural, they are intentionally created by humans for food, and foods have no rights." - Um, you do see the logical inconsistency in this, right? By raising the animal for food, you have turned a living being into a commodity. It has no rights because you have stripped it of its rights, not because it is inherently devoid of them.
Posted on: Dog Meat and Animal Rights
March 19, 2009, 03:00 PM@Changye:
你说了，"我该怎么办才好呢？" - 我回答茹素。 我是一个素食者人（也不吃肉，蛋， 不喝牛奶）。 There was no other way for me to reconcile it. Although I have other reasons besides animal rights, and don't debate the necessity of man's eating meat to get to the point where we are now - where we no longer need to. 对我，进化很关键。
And as much as I understand how this lesson may have surprised some people, I for one say keep the controversial content coming - as long as it's relevant to 中国文化！ Life is not clean, simple, or pretty - if I wanted deculturalized language (which is useless, IMO), I'd be listening to Berlitz tapes or something.
@Henning, 我同意． 没有脑子，不后悔．
@Pete, your lovely bulleted list of reasons not to meat - yes exactly. I'm not denying some small scale farmer in Africa their right to make a living, I'm saying large scale animal farming is patently insane, and now that we can synthesize B12, there's just no need for it.
Posted on: Learning the Lei Feng Song
March 06, 2009, 04:35 PMbababardawan,
Point taken, and like I said, I'm not sure Cpod is at the point where disclaimers are necessary. And sure, it drives me nuts too to see "Caution: contents may be hot" on a *refillable* coffee thermos. Like, wouldn't I know what I put in my own thermos?
It was just the first thing that sprung to mind after reading this thread, because what one of the commenters said about having lived through enough communism and not wanting to pay for it here - it was a legitimate complaint, but not a rational one, if that makes any sense.
Anyway, these things are inevitable when learning about a living culture, since no living culture is without its faults, as many have more eloquently said here. It would be like learning english in a pop-culture vacuum - grammatically correct, but not socially useful.
Posted on: Learning the Lei Feng Song
March 05, 2009, 06:18 PMThis whole phenomenon reminds me of a quote from an old movie: "Even David is not as handsome as David." Meaning, 雷锋，榜样extraordinaire, 和 雷锋, 真的人, 不一样. Ken and Jenny even touched on this in the lesson.
The other thing I thought of is that the offended parties here don't seem to truly believe that Cpod is trying to celebrate communism, historical or otherwise. Rather, they were triggered, which is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
There's really nothing you can do about another person's triggers, and while I would have thought the title of this lesson made it a dead giveaway for those seeking to avoid communist references, maybe there's an extra step that can be taken?
Many blogs I read often touch on sensitive topics such as violence against women, etc, so they run up against this all the time. They have to post about something important, but realize not everyone will necessarily have the stomach for it, even if the post is not meant in any way to be offensive. Sometimes the sheer nature of a subject matter is enough to trigger someone if they have suffered something similar. They usually put a line saying *** trigger warning *** at the very top of the post, so people are duly warned.
I don't know if Cpod needs to take it that far just yet, but if you do consistently see people being triggered, you may want to add somewhere on the site a quick note about how "Cpod aims to cover Chinese culture as well as language, since the two are inextricably linked, and therefore some subjects may be challenging for listeners who have lived through some of those events. However Cpod does not endorse nor espouse any political or cultural viewpoints itself," etc. It would both help vulnerable parties, and 覆盖你们的屁股.
Posted on: Bad Cell Reception
March 05, 2009, 02:21 PMThanks changye & lujiaojie for your help!
Posted on: Bad Cell Reception
March 04, 2009, 09:45 PMZhenlijiang,
I've heard 念 as well, but my 老师 always insists that 读 is aloud as well. I was thinking maybe it's a regional thing, since it does drive me kind of nuts that I've yet to come across a better word for read than 看。
Posted on: Bad Cell Reception
March 04, 2009, 04:15 PMChangye,
I was told in class that 读 means "to read aloud", but here I think you're using it the way 我的老师告诉我用“看”。 这些词有什么不同？ Is 读 the more common way to say "read silently"?
Thanks!
Posted on: Saved by the Gong: Cutting Open a Frog
March 04, 2009, 03:17 AMPete,
不好意思！ 谢谢你告诉我。 I grasped at the first (and only) word for death I knew. Luckily I'm in a place here where the point is try without fear of making mistakes.
Speaking of which, I had to read that second sentence twice, because at first I thought you were saying "Don't talk so much, better to listen." and I thought, yeah, I guess that's a valid criticism. But then I realized you were probably saying "I could go on with more examples, but it's better if you just listen and pick them up as you go." Either way, fair enough. ;)
And 见马克思 is hysterical.
Posted on: Dog Meat and Animal Rights
March 19, 2009, 04:02 PM@leimengde - "I find it intersting that so many of the animal rights activists are the same folks who have little regard for human life." - any chance you want to back that gross generalization up with an example? I know PETA as an organization does some pretty reprehensible things (starting with objectification of women to promote vegetarianism - try to wrap your head around that one) but otherwise I think this statement is broadly ridiculous.
@ Calkins - Extra points for working Billy Crystal into this. :)