Aceticon

It's funny that I've never had bad experiences with the French and most of my visits to France were to Paris.

Then again I do speak French and try and take advantage of being over there to exercise my language knowledge in it as much as I can.

In my experience people almost everywhere (well, not in English-speaking countries, probably because English is the present day lingua franca so it's kinda expected that you can speak it) generally appreciate you trying to speak their language even if you're pretty bad at it and just trying to learn the local "good day", " goodbye" and "thank you" will get you a lot of goodwill.

What I find delicious is that he is implicitly stating that being on any Meta platform is not virtuous.

Sometimes ethanol (i.e. rubbing alcohol) works.

If not, try acetone, same thing used to remove nail polish.

Cats will just attack because they feel like it, no need to scare them with sudden movements.

Yeah, I was an EU immigrant in Britain at the time and the Delusions Of Grandeur of the locals were really placed in sharp relief and some of those were pretty shocking. These were especially bad for the Brexiters but for example many Remainers claimed that the UK should "Stay in the EU and shape it from the inside" (so a "we Britons know best than the rest" view, and remember that the Leave Referendum happenned after the UK Government demanded from the EU, once again, even more special treatment and was told "No").

In Britain the mindset that led to Brexit had been heavilly pushed by the Press and Politicians for decades, so this outcome wasn't totally unexpected. In fact I only know about Britons being expelled from Spain after the end of the transition period since they didn't register, because some British newspapers which had supported Brexit published outraged pieces about how Spain was expelling Britons), so even after the whole Brexit thing was done, at least part of the Press still pushed (and Britons still believed) the whole idea that Britons should have special treatment even whilst not reciprocating it.

As I see it Britain and Britons are suffering from one hell of a post-Imperial Hangover, which makes it very problematic for them to cooperate with other nations in any format other than "purelly competitive and always trying to gain an advantage over others", so they were always the odd one out in the EU and, frankly, De Gaule was right when way back he did not want to let the UK into the EU.

I remember back during the Leave Referendum that many Briton pensioners living in Spain voted Leave "To keep the Spaniards from entering 'our' country" and later were very suprised that they themselves were also impacted and had to apply to live in Spain (and apparently after the end of the transition period some even got expelled from Spain because they couldn't be arsed to register and became illegal immigrants).

Germany has supported Israel with weapons whilst knowing they were committing a Genocide, so the answer for Germany is probably "Yes", at least as an accomplice.

The answer for the Republic Of Ireland is as far as I know "No".

If you can't even follow the Mathematics of error margins when using one easy to measure characteristic as a stand-in for another harder to measure characteristic which is positively correlated with the former but not by a factor of 1 and whose correlation factor actually changes by the very action you're justifying, and, even more more sadly, have to resort to calling it "pseudo-explanation", there is no point in engaging with you using logic because that's not the level you're operating at.

Enjoy your quasi-religious relation to your ideological beliefs.

Some people genuinely have huge assumptions about the intellectual capability of women and/or their suitability for certain occupations: for example, the "women are very emotional" used as excuse for not giving them certain responsibilities such as management positions, is far too common, especially in countries were the main brand of sexism is the so-called "Benevolent Sexism" (called that not because it's actually good but because it's disguised as being for the protection of women) such as Britain.

Similarly there are prejudices about people with sexual orientations other than heterosexuality in the workplace, usually of the "they'll make other people uncomfortable" kind.

Sadly, still today, far too many people genuinely think along such lines and some aren't even aware that they're doing it because their whole lives they've lived around people who do it so for them "it's how everybody thinks" and the "normal" way of thinking.

I'm afraid that fighting oppression and restoring the past oppressed to a level playing field involves finding if actual individuals did indeed suffer from oppression and compensating them for it in some way, a far more difficult task than taking the Fascist's shortcut of presuming that everybody from a specific race, gender or sexual orientation are equally worthy or unworthy.

What my experience in The Netherlands taught me is that preserving the idea that you can presume things about people (including that they're "victims" or "discriminated against") - a.k.a. Prejudice - is a dead-end strategy for fighting discrimination because:

• It's anchored on the very same architecture of presuming things about people based on race, gender or sexual orientation - in other words, Prejudice - as Fascist ideologies are.
• Because it is literally Mathematically impossible for such a process to be improved to a point where there is full fairness of treatment for all: that process uses a person's race/gender/sexual-orientation as an indirect metric to determine something else altogether - if a person has actually suffered due to discrimination - so it has an error rate in the form of people who do belong to a supposedly discriminated against race, gender or sexual orientation but never suffered from discrimination. When such people are helped without deserving it, an injustice is committed, and the more the error rate, the more injustice is being done by helping people who do not deserve that help. The Mathematical impossibility happens because the more that process succeeds at its stated objective of reducing discrimination, the more people of a supposedly discriminated against race, gender or sexual orientation never suffered from discrimination (or in other words, the more the error rate of assuming that race, gender or sexual orientation implies being a victim of discrimination) hence the more injustice that process is committing - the closer the process gets to success the more injustice it is committing, only it's against people from different races, genders or sexual-orientations.

You can't Prejudice your way into stopping Prejudiced treatment, not Ideologically and not even Mathematically.

I suggest you read the system described by the poster from feddit.nl just below, which just removes the kind of professionally irrelevant information (including gender, race and so on) from being in the candidate selection process.

Such systems are meant to removed descrimination (even subconscious one) rather than discriminating in the opposite direction. "Discriminating but the other way around" just preserves a mindset that people should be seen and treated differently depending on gender or sexual orientation and, as I've observed first hand, that kind of system yields environments which are even more sexist.

Having lived in both Britain (which apes a lot of things from the US) and The Netherlands, I can tell you that the latter country is way much more naturally equalitarian (gender-wise and even more so when it comes to sexual orientation) than the former.

(Not perfect, mind you, but way better than average)

The knee-jerk "this must be sexism" reaction to criticism of the "let's keep treating people differently depending on the genetics they were born with" of the "anti"-descrimination systems in the Anglo-Saxon countries, in my view partly explains why in the decade and a half since I've left The Netherlands I've seen no improvement towards the much more natural gender and sexual-orientation equality of The Netherlands in either Britain or the US, quite the contrary.

I'm sorry but compared with what I've seen working in other countries the system you defend is deeply flawed and preserves the very same ideological architecture of judging people on their gender, sexual-orientation or race rather than actual personal knowledge and track record, as the one that underpins Fascists ideologies. (Which is maybe why the Neoliberals just love it)

Having lived and worked in both The Netherlands and Britain, I've seen actual American-style quotas systems in Britain that explicitly priviledged a specific gender (rather than what you describe, which is a system meant to remove any and all discrimination, even if subconscious), and the result was pretty bad, both because the worst professionals around there were from that gender and clearly only got the job due to quotas and at the same time competent professionals that happen to have that gender were not taken as seriously and were kinda second class professionals even though they did not at all deserve it.

In fact, that specific place, which is the only one I ever worked in with an American style quota system, was the most sexist place I ever worked in, in my entire career (which spans over 2 decades) - people would not say sexist things (lest HR punish them), all the while they would definitelly have different competence expectations and even levels of how seriously they took people as professionals depending on people's gender. Meanwhile the people that got in via quotas tended to be the kind that would play the system rather than do the job, which often made the whole environment even more sexist.

Interestingly, IT in The Netherlands was way less sexist in a natural way than almost all places I worked in Britain, with almost always more well balanced gender-wise teams and were - at least that I noticed - nobody assuming anything in professional terms based on people's gender or sexual orientation.

Frankly one of the things I really missed after I move to Britain from The Netherlands was exactly the general Dutch viewpoint that "that's about as relevant as eye color" when it came to judging people as professionals based on their gender or sexual orientation.

Maybe the point of the previous poster was about that American-style quotas systems.