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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • This is because most East Asian languages actually don’t conjugate their verbs at all!

    In Chinese, for example, you always use the same exact verb, you just add extra sounds called “particles” to the sentence to contextualize what you’re saying.

    e.g. “I’m going to the store” in Chinese is 我(wǒ - ‘I’)去(qù - ‘go’)商店(shāng diàn - ‘store’). I go store.

    To say “I went to the store”, you don’t change “去/qù”. Instead you still just say “I go store”, but you add “了/le” to the end of the sentence. “Le” is a particle that means “to finish; to be completed”.

    So to say “I went to the store”, you literally say “I go store (past particle)”, and the listener knows that the statment “I go store” already happened and ended - past tense.

    This is why native English speakers often think of this type of grammatical mistake when they think of common English mistakes that East Asian language native speakers make.



  • Your question implies the answer is black and white, but its not. Its very complicated and uncertain and we’ve got to take a nuanced view of things.

    Obviously it’s not gonna sway anyone who’s gonna vote for him

    Its not this black and white. According to a poll: “only 4% of Trump’s supporters said they would withdraw their backing if he’s convicted of a felony, though another 16% said they would reconsider it.” https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/6-months-out-tight-presidential-race-trump-biden-poll/story?id=109909175

    This may or may not affect things - depends on how it plays out and where since swing districts usually decide preseidential electons.

    is there any actual way this keeps him from office

    There’s multiple ways it could influence things beyond just changing voting decisions. It could lead to the campaign spending more money on legal fees for appeal and therefore less on ads, campaign rallies etc. It could also have the opposite effect of firing up Trump’s base and leading to more donations, more votes and potentially political violence.

    Its a situation that’s never happened before, and its very complicated and uncertain. Anyone who says they have the answer is trying to sell you the fantasy of certainty in an uncertain world.