"... this slim, beflanneled, perversion of masculinity ..."

Then there is the YouTuber talking about Transformers, casually dropping the "Iraq war aesthetic" like it's a color palette. Desert punk. Military core. A vibe. This is what happens when your country hasn't had a war on its own soil in living memory; the violence becomes media, a backdrop for childhood toys. The explosions are no longer the sound of mothers screaming; they are cool action sequences. They are digesting the visual debris of massacre as a nostalgic fashion choice, scraping the trauma off and compressing it into a genre for their retro-futurist fantasies. The apocalypse becomes a mood board.

And finally, the girl recounting celebrity love triangles from her childhood, flippantly mentioning how the U.S. was "busy with the Iraq war or whatever." Or whatever. That single phrase is the thesis statement of American innocence. Over a million dead, a region destabilized for a century, an endless river of grief; and for her, it was the commercial break between pop culture segments. It didn't raise her rent. It didn't stop her Wi-Fi. The violence is geo-locked to brown skin and distant deserts, just background noise like a refrigerator humming. She has the luxury of forgetting because the machine doesn't eat her children, it eats yours.

Street scene in Ferney-Voltaire, Gex region of France

His spelling is really horrendous, which can't be just put on time difference between todays German and German back then. From what I can tell, he writes the way he speaks/hears German.

It is both very awkward and filled with grammar (like wrong plurals or articles) and spelling mistakes that also can‘t be just due to the big time difference.

Unfortunately, the examples chosen for Frederick‘s predecessor and successor are both in French, so it’s difficult to compare but the example chosen for his grandnephew is also in German.

These two letters are exactly 20 years apart (1786 and 1806), so not that much time apart and yet the difference in proficiency in German between these two is huge.

*English translation: