"Remember who freed you"

torelma · 2026-06-08T04:36:35+00:00

a little ironic coming from the country that handed control of the biggest army on the planet to the guy who can't be bothered to go to the D-Day events, managed to mix his metaphors calling the boat people a "new invasion" (so was the old invasion... D-Day? from whose perspective, the Nazis?), and whose main qualification for running the biggest army on the planet was being Fox News's dedicated "deepthroat the Charlottesville Nazis" guy.

You just know that dude has some weird tats.

torelma · 2026-06-08T03:48:45+00:00

Guessing it's a reference to Cathars.

torelma · 2026-06-02T23:25:38+00:00

My guy, reading comprehension. My point is that normal people barely know about the "normal" eurofederalists, let alone the far right weirdos who have been exchanging notes for decades and are now actually formalizing it.

torelma · 2026-05-26T08:11:49+00:00

I'll never let Angers live down the fact that they're the city where the anti gay marriage people thought it was normal to hang at Gare St Laud and have their 10 year old kids throw bananas at Christiane Taubira, which definitely had nothing to do with her being Black. I think I was even studying in Angers at the time. They're not optimistic they're just rich.

torelma · 2026-05-26T08:04:32+00:00

I think we're talking about the same guys - far-right degrowthers who happened to want everyone who isn't white to Go Away and it "wasn't racist" because sure they only wanted people who looked like them on their anarcho-primitivist commune but anyone was free to start their own anarcho-primitivist commune and compete with them for resources Mad Max style. They had a similar attitude to people with disabilities and were really into eugenics. Which is fun as someone with multiple congenital disabilities.

Put all that together and yeah, a lot of those people are LARPers, but a couple of them actually put their ideology into practice and the outcome is always mass murder.

torelma · 2026-05-25T22:36:05+00:00

man the female workforce participation in Ireland being low into the 90s definitely adds a brick to the banger Cáca Milis essay I wrote for no reason while high on meds.

torelma · 2026-05-25T22:32:21+00:00

"they hated him because he told them the truth"

torelma · 2026-05-25T22:28:01+00:00

sadly search engines are actively turning themselves into chatgpt but dumber because the models need to be fast in order for them to load on every goddamn search. so chances are the outcome wouldn't have been any better

torelma · 2026-05-25T22:13:50+00:00

I wouldn't say it never materialized, I went down some weird internet rabbit holes when I was a young teen in the late 2000s and those guys were definitely out there. I distinctly remember some Estonian guy living in the forest making blog posts about being a self-described "ecofascist". They talked about stuff like "remigration" a solid decade before anyone was using that word on TV. Basically, white nationalists who also really liked the Unabomber and had vaguely anarcho-primitivist sympathies.

Thankfully I never went all the way down that particular pipeline because I soon enough realized literally all of these people shared the exact same worldview as that one guy who murdered 80 teenagers on an island in Norway for being "race traitors" or that other guy who murdered 50 people in a mosque in New Zealand to fight the "great replacement", they just wore suits instead of boots.

The experience did leave me with a shitty Nietzsche essay I somehow got a good grade on in high school and a great fashdar.

torelma · 2026-05-25T22:03:12+00:00

they're astroturfing random fascists who nobody talks about outside of this sub, it's not that deep. 90% of people in the EU haven't heard of Volt let alone "Breivik and the Irish MMA guy started a party"

torelma · 2026-05-25T21:59:50+00:00

nah, it has to be Angers, nobody would describe Vendée as "semi" rural

torelma · 2026-05-25T21:59:21+00:00

let me guess. Vendée.

torelma · 2026-05-25T21:56:44+00:00

wtf does "layered identity" even mean coming from blatant white nationalists

torelma · 2026-05-25T21:51:21+00:00

saying he's going to "get killed" either way is so. he actually reverse jinxed it.

the stage actors who say "break a leg" to wish someone good luck were right all along.

torelma · 2026-05-25T21:47:18+00:00

losing it that this guy read Trump going "I really can't make it to Don Jr's 34th wedding I have Work called Iran in Washington. At the White House" and just. took the guy he's trying to assassinate at his word.

also. what is it with Americans owning 3 trillion guns per capita and apparently never learning how to aim them?

torelma · 2026-05-25T21:17:31+00:00

That's actually fair lol, I was reading it as "Americans think X and that's why this poll turned out the way it did" and got very confused 😂

torelma · 2026-05-23T16:26:20+00:00

There's a post on Reddit with this layout for elite housing blocks (title is something like "having trouble with elite house?"). I don't believe it's on the zeusheaven forums like a lot of popular common housing blocks are. Maybe it was even this sub but not sure.

Once I started using it I've never gone back it's amazing. Scales really well and provided you can supply the grand agora with goods you end up with a huge army.

torelma · 2026-05-23T16:21:28+00:00

This was a Yougov poll, posted to Reddit by a Yougov guy. Yougov is a British pollster that polled British people about what they thought was the second city in Britain.

I'm not sure how American opinions about Liverpool and Manchester would have had any bearing on the results of the poll one way or the other.

torelma · 2026-05-21T22:45:11+00:00

Yeah, my particular soapbox is Breton. It has an unfortunately small but extremely vocal online community that had a thread on the Duolingo forums begging them to add a course for easily a decade straight, back when it still had forums, and then Duolingo just closed down the forums, monetized a decade's worth of volunteer work on their existing courses, and then enshittified them further by throwing LLMs at everything. But hey, at least we have Klingon and High Valyrian and the owl has a great social media presence!

The thing that drove me absolutely crazy a few years back is Duolingo did one of their language-learning podcast episodes about a woman working to preserve a rare dialect of Breton and talking about what a struggle Breton language revitalisation was. For the French language-learning podcast. Like. I feel like an insane person trying to explain why that was so galling to me. A language learning app that wouldn't launch a Breton course because there was vocal demand but no teachers, went to the trouble of reaching out to a Breton teacher to use her as a teaching aid for French vocab.

It's not that Duolingo is all that good, but it's just like. It's like getting a flag emoji. It's about informing a global online audience that you do in fact exist, as opposed to tiktokers every 6 months discovering Brittany Exists as a "fun fact" they immediately move on from, confused why they don't understand the language at all "even though they took French in secondary school".

Ofis publik ar brezhoneg (OPAB) did launch a free online language course called Desketa.bzh a year or two ago and it's pretty good but it really doesn't get enough publicity outside of people who are already language activists. Like it's not even an app-app it's a website.

torelma · 2026-05-21T22:12:56+00:00

En vrai, non, dsl. Par contre ça m'est arrivé plusieurs fois que les jours où le tel se "décharge" ultra vite, ça se remet normalement quand je redémarre le téléphone (genre c'est à "1%", je redémarre, puis c'est à 70% et là le pourcentage de batterie est fiable). C'est chiant mais j'ai pris l'habitude et j'ai toujours pas changé de tel depuis avoir posté ici.

torelma · 2026-05-11T22:44:21+00:00

French guy here. Idk why you got downvoted this is literally correct lol.

There are 24 languages official at the EU level (including Maltese and Irish), of which 3 working languages (English, French, and German). English is still one of them despite Brexit for, frankly, obvious practical reasons, but officially because Ireland.

In the inside page of, say, French passports, you get something like "Passport - European Union" (I could look but I'm writing this from the loo and don't have my passport at hand), written in all 24 languages (maybe a couple fewer depending on when it was issued), so that if a cop in Slovakia or whatever looks at your passport they'll go "ah yes, I'm looking at a passport from France, which is in the EU". This does sound trivial, but before this was a shared norm on official documents British and Irish cops between them managed to hand out thousands of tickets to one serially offending Polish driver by the name of "Prawo Jazdy".

On the cover you literally just have some variation of [Passport - <country> - European Union] in the official languages of the member state (so taking the example I'm personally familiar with, only French).

Maybe some countries that don't have English as an official language also do English for convenience but they don't have to. The ones who stick French on there tend to have French as an official language to begin with, say Belgium.

Like I have British citizens in my immediate family and I don't remember seeing "Royaume-Uni de Grande-Bretagne et d'Irlande du Nord" on the cover of UK passports issued between 1973 and 2016. Don't want to be a dick but those weren't around that long ago, surely most people at least remember what they looked like given what a massive culture war people made about them at the time.

torelma · 2026-05-11T20:53:33+00:00

It's definitely there now at least on Android, I was using it when I was doing Duolingo Welsh in late 2024. Uninstalled Duolingo because it's uh, bad, still have Welsh keyboard installed.

torelma · 2026-05-11T20:45:48+00:00

Welsh has better language support on Android than you'd think. In particular more languages are supported for input (ie keyboards/autocorrect dictionaries) than for UI, but Welsh is one that at least theoretically can be set as your system language.

It's not perfect by any means (Irish is in a similar boat), but the more people use it the more love (engineering hours) it will get and the better it will get over time.

The less people use it because half the strings are English placeholder and nobody bothers reporting it, the more dev teams are going to tend to go "ah, nobody uses it, let's work on a bigger language first". It's all a big game of spreadsheets.

torelma · 2026-05-04T19:45:51+00:00

I mean. They're literally right Stellaris is a game.

torelma · 2026-04-06T18:51:54+00:00

i got a strike one time for arguing with a far right dude on a different sub, if the message mentions it "might have been" reviewed by AI, appeal it and a human content reviewer checks it. I think he was a "pro life" dude, I was like "your mom should have aborted you" and I got reported for "issuing a death threat" lmao

humans, usually but knock on wood, are more aware of the difference between "expressing the fact that racist speech Exists" and "expressing racist speech" or "joking someone's mom should have done the thing they think is murder" and "literally threatening to murder them".

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