That was hilarious.

As a musician, I love the fact that there’s a “♪” key, even though I would probably never use it.

There are several Azerty layouts. Some don’t allow you to type uppercase accented letters easily, some do. I’ve switched to Linux about fifteen years ago and never had an issue typing these characters with the default layout. It used to be more complicated on Windows, I don’t know if that’s still the case. I should give it a try the next time I get the occasion to type on a Windows computer.

I currently use the fr-oss Azerty layout, which is probably not perfect but has many advantages. I love being able to type thin spaces and non breaking spaces easily. The diagram doesn’t explain it, but combining the é/2 key with the Capslock key will give you an É — whereas combining it with the Maj key will give you a 2. That’s the mechanism Gueoris is alluding to here.

I still don’t get why it’s easier to type a semi-colon than a full stop, though. I love semi-colons, but even I don’t use them that much.

There’s a reason prostitution is called “the world’s oldest profession”.

Yes, it’s because it’s a lazy, overused sentence that people like to quote without thinking. There’s no solid ground to claim that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession.

People have biological needs.

Those “biological needs” aren’t porn. You can masturbate without porn. You can fantasize without porn. You can have sex without porn. And so on.

I’m not saying that this is a good measure, but “teenagers are interested in sex” ⇒ “we shouldn’t restrict what sexual media teenagers have access to” isn’t a very sound argument.

legitimate porn sites

“Legitimate” porn sites are all full of things I really wish I hadn’t seen as a middle schooler who was barely starting to get curious about sex. Or even as a high schooler who was decidedly interested in sex, actually.

Missed the point.

He didn’t. You claimed that the left had “arrest[ed] people for saying that the covid “vaccination” didn’t stop people from catching, spreading, or dying from covid.” Do you or do you not have any evidence of such a thing happening? Since you completely evaded the subject in your answer, I’m guessing not.

I live in France and only heard about it from social media: first, by sheer chance, a few months ago from a minor Mastodon account, the second time three days before the deadline, from the same Mastodon account again. I don’t browse Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Tiktok at all, so I’m not sure how the coverage was there.

A trans friend who’s normally way better informed than me about this stuff told me he heard about it less than a week before the deadline, so clearly word hadn’t spread that well, even if France already did have more signatures than most countries at the time. From what I can tell, it spread through digital “word of mouth” rather than through established medias. There was some media coverage, but reeeaally at the last time. A few politicians (mostly from the left) talked about it during the last days, too.

Like someone else said, ECIs don’t get a lot of media coverage and most people don’t even know they exist. By the way, in France, there’s also an official petition system to submit law ideas to the parliament, and it’s also not very well known. (Another problem being that most petitions on the parliament website are ludicrous because, contrary to ECI, no vetting is done before publishing the petition (as far as I know). I take a look at it now and then, and it’s really tiring to search for the legitimate stuff in the midst of all the ridiculous crap.)

Same thing in French. Doublevédoublevédoublevé. So. long.

This article is from nearly eight years ago.

Same thing in France with CB. I’ve only recently understood why I was asked to choose between “CB” and “Visa” when paying by card online, when both were written on my card. Actually, when I got my first card as a teenager, I was a bit nervous about that, I was scared of “making the wrong choice” when paying online; I rememberd asking adults around me what that was about and how to choose which one to select, and not one of them could give me an explanation, they told me that there was no difference and that I should just pick one at random. Now I feel kinda bad about all the times that I chose Visa, because from what I understand their fees are generally higher for the seller.

Right-wing should be defeated in the election and on the streets, not in the court.

This is not about defeating the far right, this is about temporarily preventing several politicians who misappropriated public money thanks to their position from gaining access to positions that would allow them to commit a repeat offence. (Let’s keep in mind that they’ve not even expressed regret about what they’ve done, instead they’ve spent all the trial playing the martyrs.)

1. The decision had nothing to do with the RN’s political leaning. Nothing. It’s beside the point.

2. The RN will still be able to take part in the presidential election. Nobody’s forbidding them to take part in the election. For example, the RN’s current president, Jordan Bardella, has not been convicted or even prosecuted (even though he was one of the fake assistants!), and is free to try to run for the election.

The article doesn’t say that they don’t care about wars and climate.

It’s not “instead of”, it’s “in addition to”. And it’s not “at least” 5 years of prison either, it could end up being less than what the prosecution asked for.

How is your comment related to the article? This trial isn’t about the National Rally’s ideas (which are indeed illiberal, fundamentally racist and plainly disgusting). It’s about them embezzling millions of euros from the European Parliament, during more than a decade, by having many of their members be “fake” MEP assistants who got paid for a job that they didn’t actually do. WTF does this have to do with religion or illiberalism.

Although not being French I do not know the extent of laicité.

Indeed you do not. Laïcité, among other things, guarantees the right to believe in (or not believe in) and practice (or not practice) a religion. What you’re proposing is religious discrimination, not laïcité.

France actually was in the same timezone as the UK before WWII and the German occupation. My grandma remembers switching to “German time”. Franco’s Spain similarly changed timezones in 1942 to match their German allies. So, yes, the change was made politically. :-) I’m guessing France is also responsible for Algeria and Morocco being in UTC+1, not sure if they’ve ever discussed changing zones.

Edit: I just checked and I was wrong about the Moroccan time zone. Algeria is in UTC+1 though (all year long, they don’t use DST), not sure why it’s in yellow on your map.

In France, normal time is UTC+1 (CET), and summer time is UTC+2 (CEST), when we actually belong in UTC+0 (and were, before being occupied by Germany). Permanently switching to the so-called “summer time” makes no sense if you’ve ever seen a map of time zones.

And by the way Spain is in the same situation. Spain, which is more western than Greenwich, is going to change time with us this night and we’re both going to spend six months in Egypt and Finland’s normal time zone. That is so wrong.

As a non-native speaker, I’d say that your summary of the upsides and downsides matches my experience.

maybe there should be a new EU-standard fonetik version.

Or maybe it’s finally time for Shavian alphabet to shine!

What are you refering to?

Yep, and while we did progress from the mindset of that time, I don’t think we made as much progress as we should have, and the recent political atmosphere is… worrying. I mean, I don’t think we would enslave Africa again, but I shudder to think of what a superpower with our far right as its head would do. Also, superpowers are intrinsically dangerous, imho.

Hm, I don’t think there’s such a thing as an “appropriate leader of the free world”. (Not even talking about how problematic the notion of “the free world” is.) We’re in this mess because one country has this much power over the rest of us. Replacing it with another (I’m saying this hypothetically, because France is in no position to gain as much power as the US anyway) doesn’t solve the problem.

Also, and I’m saying this as a French person, France has its issues, even though they’re not as cataclysmically bad as the United States’s problems right now. The far right is getting a lot stronger here too (as in many other countries) and I’m frankly worried about the future. Many people here are fighting against this, and I hope we can turn the tide somehow, but… never depend on one country.

that was more an individuals being annoyed about getting less

Not, that was about Macron trampling on the democratic process to pass a controversial law. (And yes, things needed to be adjusted with the pension system, but it didn’t have to be done this specific way, there were several options besides the one His Highness Macron curtly chose for all of us. It also didn’t need to be done that urgently.) Also, for some of these individuals, “getting less” will, concretely, mean “dying before reaching retirement age” or “falling into poverty because their company or their health won’t let them work until retirement age”, so I think it’s a bit unfair to present it like you do, as if it were mere discontentment over getting slightly less than they were hoping for.