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Joined 6 days ago
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Cake day: December 6th, 2024

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  • As somebody who was an EU immigrant in the UK for over a decade and also lived in other countries of Europe, lets just say that New Labour are plain Rightwing (so, not even Center-Left, although the original Labour definitelly were Leftwing) and the Liberal Democrats are pure rightwing (whislt the Tories have been Far Right since at least the Leave Referendum).

    The ideology of “Thatcher’s Greatest Achievement” - a “relaxed about wealth” ideology which loves privatisation and derregulation - which took over Labour is not Left of center and the LibDems have always been even more Neolibs than that.

    The Overtoon Window in England (not as much the other UK nations) is way to the Right of the rest of Europe, so its understandable that many there think that when they neither grew up back in the days when Labour was actually a party of the Working Class and never saw politics elsewhere in Europe.


  • At a Systemic level hey’re big fans of the only true Power being Money whilst the Vote is nothing more than a bit of loud Theatre & Clown Show that doesn’t actually control the managing of a country - or in other words, of Oligarchy rather than Democracy.

    At a personal level they’re big fans of personal upside maximization with no legal, ethical or moral limits, aka Greed Is Good, or in other words, for sociopathy to be totally legal, socially aceptable and even celebrated.



  • It’s “mieren neuken”.

    A dutch person responding to my post already mentioned it.

    Also, as somebody who has moved there first and then learned Dutch whilst living there, I do recommend just learning it over there since it’s a much faster way to learn a language when you’re there surrounded by native speakers, with lots of things written in Dutch around you and with Dutch TV and Radio whilst actually using it, than it is as just learning from the outside with little in the way of useful practice with the actual experts of the actual language.

    Also you can easily get away with using English in The Netherlands whilst you’re learning Dutch - in fact if you have a recognizable accent from an English-speaking country it’s actually hard to get the Dutch to speak Dutch to you in the early and mid stage of learning their language since they tend to switch to English as most Dutch speak that very well.


  • That word isn’t originally from Portuguese from Portugal (though it is recognized thanks to the prevalence of Brazilian soap operas in Portugal) so it carries no broader “social” meaning and isn’t even commonly used there, so people wouldn’t care if you used it in Portugal as it just sounds odd there.

    If I understand the broader meaning subtleties of how it’s used in Brazilian Portuguese correctly, using “garota” for a woman is a bit like using “chick” for a woman in British English, which whilst not an outright insult carries a bit of a demeaning vibe (not as bad as the used of “bitch” - as in “my bitch” - in American English, but the same kind of treating women as inferior).

    This is probably because the original meaning of the word when not used for an adult woman (again, only in Brazilian Portuguese since it didn’t exist in Portuguese from Portugal) is “young girl”.





  • I’ve lived in a couple of European countries and speak 7 different European languages (though my German is kinda crap and my Italian not much better) and regularly take the piss by playing the “ignorant foreigner” with the expressions in other people’s languages and acting as if, by translating them literally, I totally misunderstood them.

    This works great because there are so many expressions in pretty much all languages which are have entirelly different meanings when interpreted literally but the natives don’t really think about it like that because they just learned that stuff as a whole block of meaning rather than having reached it by climb the language-learning ladder from “understanding the words first” as foreigners do.

    For example the English expression “I want to pick your brains” which has quite a different and more gruesome meaning if read literally or one the dutch expressions for “you’re wasting time in small details” which translates quite literally to “you’re fucking ants” and is my all time favorite in all languages I speak well enough to know lots of expressions in.