It always struck me as odd that the checkmate definition should be so (relatively) complicated. A much simpler definition is "you lose if the opponent captures your king". A checkmate is just a situation where you can't avoid getting your king captured. If someone doesn't notice their king is on check, then they could lose the next move. After you pass the beginner phase, this will almost never happen to you anyway, so most games will end the same way: checkmate or losing because of time.
When I was in school, we used to play blitz like that. You lost track of your king, boom, you're dead
not everything is great as everywhere, but I think because the rate of change in Saudi Arabia is so fast, we're barely keep up with the changes while the outsiders still stuck in the era before 2015. simple searches on Youtube for "riyadh boulevard" & "mdlbeast" will easily show how ignorant this comment is.
Alcohol is haram. I hear the attitude towards Jeans in SA is now more lenient but less than a decade ago would get you in hot water with the religious police.
You get the gist of it. The moment they leave that country many of its young people act very differently in ways that would not be allowed/frowned upon back home.
What is up with that? A decadent Rumspringa before they willingly return to the warm embrace of Sharia or an escape from a compulsory punitive society in which they are unwilling participants?
I think this is a relative concept. It's less secular than pretty much all other developed nations and also less secular than many other less developed countries
The USA is more consistently secular than any other Western country. Its constitution is essentially unchanged for 250 years and is designed to separate church and state.
In the same 250 years France had swung between extremes of religious monarchy and ultra-republicanism, back and forth. England’s monarch is also the head of its national church. Even progressive countries like Sweden and Finland have national churches with taxation rights enshrined in law and automatically collected by the state tax authorities.
These are just some examples of how many European countries retain deep state-level power to the church while the society has shifted towards secularism.
And yet no American Presidential candidate could be elected without professing faith in Christianity and Biblical literalism, because the American political system is overfitted for rural, and thus Christian, cultural influence. To the point that one of the two political parties that matter frames itself as the defenders of traditional Christian values. And thus the American Supreme Court is currently repealing decades of progressive law, removing abortion rights (based entirely on Christian principles) and making mandatory school prayer legal again.
America invokes the name of God on their money and their schoolchildren evoke "one nation under God" in their pledge of allegience. State governments constantly fight to be able to teach creationism and intelligent design in schools. Christianity is the reason you can't buy alcohol on Sundays in many places in the US. Christianity is the reason American media censors sex more so than violence. One could go on nearly ad infinitum.
Sure, there's no (officially sanctioned) national religion (It's Evangelical Christianity though) and churches don't collect taxes (rather, they don't pay taxes) but despite the secular (really, Deist) foundations of the Constitution, one would have to be blind not to see the degree to which the US is still very deeply influenced and controlled by Christianity.
Both of you are pretty much saying the same thing. The US is officially secular and has no state-sanctioned religion…The situation is that a lot (majority?) of Americans are Christians, so their ideologies and beliefs obviously affect how they vote and, consequently, many laws in the country.
>Most Westerners could witness the change with their own eyes in 2019 when Saudi Arabia began issuing tourist visas for the first time.
The internet is a big place and most people lurking around aren't "westerners". Most people aren't arabs nor Westeners. We are also interested in Saudia Arabia and also find their extreme gender segregation shocking. I also see this when they talk about, say, democracy in China. "We Westeners have democracy so that's why we oppose China".
Am I being too sensitive? Maybe, but it makes me feel excluded and makes me think that a bit percentage of Westeners think it's them vs the topic at hand (whether it be Saudi Arabia, China, etc).
I'm not saying the author does that. My point is that too many articles do the West vs country at hand. You can, of course, write from the perspective of South Carolina vs Saudi Arabia and make all your comparisons that way, but I think authors could sometimes take a broader perspective, since the internet is, after all, international.
Maybe more importantly, I take issue with the identification of concepts we like (democracy, human rights, etc) with being Western.
I agree, they are using two different definitions of "good listening". I'd say the "fit in with the social interaction" one is usually the most relevant. This reminds me of Wittgenstein's "language games"[1]. Maybe I'm butchering Wittgenstein's thought, but my understanding is that language works in a social situation as a game, as an activity where things "work ok" or don't work ok. It's not about me communicating my inner mental state and you making sure you're understanding my inner mental state (Wittgenstein's argument is that this is not generally possible, but also maybe it's not even what we usually care about)
Of course, when you're in a specific setting (such as doing science or a police investigation) the other definition can be more relevant.
I don't know if it's universal across the Americas, but up here it's common for us to take over the ends of each other's sentences to respond. So instead of saying like:
"The story is just so ridiculous." "Yes, I know! It reminds me of..."
my family conversations sound more like:
"The story is just[]" "Ridiculous, I know, it reminds me of..."
When I was in school, we used to play blitz like that. You lost track of your king, boom, you're dead