Interesting choices of language

This post is a crosspost from Jayeless, and can be read in its original location here.

Today I was registering for a forum, and because the default language of the forum was “English (United States)” I clicked the thingamajig¹ to see what other options I had, and while there were no other Englishes, there were two versions of French. And it’s not unusual for there to be two versions of French, but they’re usually “French (France)” and “French (Canada)” (yeah apparently neither Belgium nor Switzerland have large Francophone regions), not these:

• Français (Tutoiement)
• Français (Vouvoiement)

Really!! This forum had two different language settings for people who want to be addressed as tu and people who want to be addressed as vous. That is amazing. But it couldn’t include any versions of English other than American?!

Seriously, I hope Spanish stuff gives me the option of being addressed as tú or usted. I don’t want to be “your mercy”

PS: This forum was also awesome in that “Southeastern Western Australia Standard Time” was one of the options for timezone. This is not actually a timezone, but is unofficially used in the WA-SA border region because otherwise the time difference is 1.5 hours (2.5 hours in summer!) between the two states, which is kind of ridiculous for not a large distance. 45 minutes (1 hour, 45 minutes in summer) is apparently more manageable. Additionally, the number of people “in” this timezone is estimated by Wikipedia at 200.

1. By the way, according to the ~Chrome dictionary~, “thingamajig” is a word but “thingymajig” (my first guess) is not. Sigh.

~It’s not racist to hate refugees, LOL~

This post is a crosspost from Jayeless, and can be read in its original location here.

I certainly dismiss labels like intolerant or racist because people raise concerns about border security, but we’ve also got to be very alive to the complexity of this and that there’s no quick fix
– Julia Gillard

Oh
My
God.

In Afghanistan, a terrible, brutal war is going on. We know it’s going on, because we constantly hear about its progress (if we follow the news at all). We know how much violence there is an Afghanistan, and we know about the level of oppression there is there. We know that the Taliban attacks girls for trying to go to school, and indeed tons of people who’ve done nothing wrong whatsoever. We know that Afghanistan’s occupying armies kill people, torture people, abduct people, hand people over to the Afghan police to be tortured… and many of these on highly spurious evidence at that. We know that Afghanistan’s new rulers are corrupt, oppressive, and — in many cases — no better than the Taliban they replaced. We also know about drone attacks over the border with Pakistan, in which over a hundred people can be killed because someone, somewhere, decided that a wedding party was a suspicious event.

And yet, this is apparently not a situation people would be in their right mind to want to flee? How dare you not want to be killed? How dare you not want to be tortured? How dare you want your daughters to receive educations? How dare you want to live under a less oppressive government than Hamid Karzai’s amazingly liberal regime?

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