I will give the exact same answer I gave to this comment on my actual blog, but don’t double count my appreciation :)
”Thanks for the kind and encouraging words, not just here but throughout my journey developing these ideas. The criticism was also very valuable.”
Fernando
Karma: 1
Expevolu, Part II: Buying land to create countries
Hey, ProgramCrafter.
Thanks for the comment.Regarding your remarks on CBs, you spotted something important that is missing in this text: how CBs would be inherited. (Not necessarily, the population would increase, as you suggested, it may stay stable or decrease.) I have an inheritance scheme designed. In case of a growing family, the children would be granted the right to hold a (proportionally) smaller area in CBs and still have citizenship. It is not a particularly inspired solution, but it seems doable.
Regarding presenting the system in a positive light, I may be guilty of that, I don’t know. It would be interesting to know what other readers think. However, lack of exploration is to be expected, given that the topic is vast. A large number of important benefits of the system were not presented in the text as well, I was not particularly excluding problems.
Thanks for the karma. Post published!
Expevolu, a laissez-faire approach to country creation
Hi, Karl. Was planning to delurk today. Had a giant post to publish, however couldn’t because I needed at least one karma point and lurking doesn’t grant karma. :(
Thanks for the comment.
Interesting that you experienced such a strong aversion to it.
“I find both the written form and spoken form distasteful for some reason. It feels gutteral. And the similarity to “it” seems dehumanizing. Trying to put my finger on it, I think it’s not in the range of words that could have been organically formed for that purpose; it feels semantically out of place.”
Couldn’t this be just lack of habituation to it?
I mean, after 6 months living in Utland would you still care?
Regarding being guttural, it doesn’t go against my aesthetics, English could be much more guttural and I wouldn’t mind. If it is a problem, however, it seems like a problem of habituation, because there are much more guttural phonemes out there which people don’t mind using it if it’s part of their language.
Regarding ‘ut’ being dehumanizing:
1) I can’t see how it is dehumanizing if it is explicitly for humans and not for things. Maybe as a first impression, yes, but once you heard ‘ut’ referring to humans 1000 times and never referring to things, I believe your mind would adjust.
2) My first idea was much more “dehumanizing”; it was just using ‘it’ itself. I am Brazilian, and in Brazilian Portuguese, the distinction between people and things that exists in English doesn’t exist. We refer to things with ‘he’ and ‘she’, just as we do with people. Since people are accustomed to it, no one cares. So, I thought ‘it’ could be used to solve the problem of referring to people of unspecified gender in the singular in English. But, quickly I realized that I didn’t need to forgo the differentiation between people and things, I just needed to modify ‘it’ to be a unique pronoun that would refer only to people, hence ‘ut’.
All that being said, you still had what seems like a very negative reaction to it, which signals that other people may also be reluctant and widespread adoption problematic.
Which I realized seems to be the case given the number of downvotes to the post.