current

I think "anti-choice" is adequate, gets the point across in a different way

Divinity 2, so probably for being God 2 or something

Some people in my family line (a long time ago mind you) had "ÿ" in their surname, it came from a Russian name with "Се" (or maybe it came from the Polish counterpart spelled with "Sie"?) which they spelled with "Sÿ". Apparently the letter was used in German writing occasionally around that time period. I thought that was pretty interesting.

How is that a justification? ... You do see how that's even worse, right?

Literally 2/3 of the same comment you're replying to:

I'm not saying its right, genocide is happening as we speak and the entire world should come down on Israel hard for this, I'm just saying what is real.

Full disclosure: I condemn every organization that targets civilians with violence, regardless of country allegiances.

the second one

Tbh I don't know why people say Blahaj instead of Blaahaj. The second is the "correct" way to differentiate Å and A if you don't have diacritics. I would think it would be spelled "AO" instead since it's literally just an A with a lowercase O on top, like how German vowel letters with umlauts (Ä Ö Ü Ÿ) are spelled with an E at the end (AE OE UE YE) when you don't have diacritics available (since umlauts originated as a lowercase E above a letter). Or like how in Spanish the "correct" way to write Ñ without diacritics is to stick an N at the end like "NN".* But who knows what goes on in the minds of Swedish people... I'm pretty sure most of them don't even know that you're allegedly supposed to write "Å" as "AA".

*fun fact: the tilde was previously a lowercase "N" above a letter used in Latin & post-Latin Romance languages to replace a following nasal "n/m" after any letter (e.g. Latin "Manu" -> "Mãu" -> Portuguese "Mão", Latin "Rationes" -> Portuguese/Galician "Razões"/"Rações"/"Rasões", Latin "annus" -> Spanish "anno" -> Spanish "año") but it has been reduced to only the letters Ñ in Spanish and Ã/Õ in Portuguese

Words aren't gendered in Spanish/French/German/etc. It's called "grammatical gender" but it's just a way some languages differentiate words/word forms and do adjective/noun/verb agreement, it's only sometimes loosely correlated with actual gender and is often contradictory when it's used on living beings.

For example, many words which are used to describe women or female animals in such languages are masculine or neuter gender. Many times words for living things will have one class regardless of the actual gender.

Some grammatical gender types which might make more immediate sense are animacy (animate/inanimate, usually correlated with biotic/abiotic), human/animal/inhuman, countable vs uncountable (the difference between "a plant is here" vs "a water is here", the second one isn't grammatically correct in standard English because "water" is an uncountable noun, same with "furniture", "wind", "energy").

A word that a lot of people prefer to use rather than "grammatical gender" is "noun class", it more clearly conveys what the actual use of that sort of thing in language is. "Grammatical gender" is a pretty outdaded name for it, it was called that in a time where "gender" was more broadly used to mean any class/enumeration/kind/variants/etc. (it has the same root as the word "genre" if that helps it make sense). Only way after the term was coined did "gender" start to refer to what it does now.

Taxation in the US:

• Steals from the poor
• Does so for the benefit of the rich

I don't see what's hard to understand

My guy, Italian politicians literally publicly idolize the good ol' days of Mussolini, and talk about Mussolini in a positive light, I think that's worthy of the title fascist since they're praising the guy who CREATED FASCISM. The current PM is just a fascist.

And Putin, Orbán, Modi, the AfD are incredibly undeniably fascist. Or at the very least Modi and Orbán are fascist-adjacent (Modi is a sort of Nazi but for Hindus instead of Germans).

I don't know enough about Dutch politics/politicians to speak of it. But afaik they're going down a similar path as Germany, Sweden, etc. but even more pronounced. Argentina I don't know if the word "fascist" is accurate at all but the new president is certainly very far-right.

And in the US Republicans are descending towards fascism, they've already taken many of our rights and are in the process of taking more fundamental rights, the things the most popular Republicans publicly preach about and have like half the country's support over is sickening. The only reason we're not balls deep into stripping away the rights of anyone who doesn't fit into the majority categories (christian, white, straight/cis, male) is because Democrats exist (even though elected Democrats just play the "moderate Republican" and are complicit in the current state of the country).

Well nobody can objectively force something to impress you or not impress you. But most people speak more than one language natively or on a regular basis, hell just short of 2 billion people (1/4 the world's population) alone are from the Indian subcontinent region, and there the high variation/diversity of languages throughout the region make speaking 3-4 languages well the norm.

Similar story with Indonesia/Papua New Guinea. And most people in Central Asia and many European parts of the former USSR speak Russian as a 2nd language (nearly all Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and most Baltic people speak Russian to a high fluency, while also often speaking a 2nd and sometimes 3rd native language).

Then you consider language in European countries like the Netherlands (Dutch/English), Belgium (French/Dutch/English), Sweden (Swedish/English), Finland (Finnish/Swedish), Denmark & Norway (Denmark or Norwegian / some obscure highly derived dialect that's different enough from the standard and common languages to be counted), Spain (Castillian/some other Spanish language), Italy (Standard Italian/some other Italian language). I'd say at least a third of Europeans speak more than one language natively and two thirds can speak more than one language well at all.

Despite being a massive continent, one thing that can be said about almost all of the socities there is that most of them are polylingual. Probably less so in Arabic-speaking majority countries.

Really, monolingualism is only the norm for anglo countries – especially the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand. Not so much in like half of Canada. I think it could be said that monolingualism is the norm in most of China too, but I'm not so sure about that. AFAIK it's pretty mixed in Latin America but overall a majority of the people there speak only Spanish or Portuguese, save for places like Peru & Uruguay.

In French, words spelled with just "u" use a different sound than those spelled with "ou". "ou" (in la Métropole) is similar to the sound in English "do"/"too"/"sue"/"shoe" etc. while "u" is similar to Standard German long "ü"/"üh" like in "Lüge" but the German one is relatively reduced and isn't quite as frontal/strained/constricted.