Dolly?

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As they say, “everything is political”. And yes, “only the information I say is political is allowed” is quite the overreach.

Believing that you’re the only person who deserves to exist and that everyone else should be killed is still a political view, and one that must be allowed to exist in a democracy as long as you don’t actually start killing people. Odious and hateful ideas are still political ideas (see: American Democrats and Republicans arguing that the others’ ideas are odious and hateful, for example), and if we believe in democracy we have to believe that the people can be trusted with unrestricted political information.

A manipulable minority that acts on these calls to violence is enough to deeply damage a democracy.

That’s why acting on those calls to violence is illegal, while speech is not.

The majority did vote for democratic parties but that isn’t enough, it has to be an overhelming majority that votes for democratic parties.

Yes, that’s a huge flaw of coalition system governments, but it doesn’t change the overall point - you either trust the people with the choice of electing their government, or you don’t. If you only trust some of the people with electing their government, you don’t have a democracy - you just have a slightly-larger-than-normal autocracy.

Also, unless I’m misunderstanding something (which I very well may be), it seems to me that 70% of the people voted for democracy in Germany - your elected representatives not being able to agree with each other is what appears to be the problem.

Also: I’d argue that representative democracies are a lot more susceptible to this kind of flaw where parties have to resort to manipulation to get the votes of people.

I was going to argue in my previous comment that representative democracies are dangerously close to autocracies already, but thought it too far afield from my main point. So, I think I agree with you here.

A system where more political decisions are voted on through direct democracy and representatives are only chosen to enact the policies already selected by the people would be less susceptible to these problems (but, again, would rely much more heavily on the people, which, again, is the entire question).

(Also, I’ve enjoyed this conversation so far - thanks!)

I believe that if we allow advertisements at all, we must do so on the assumption that the majority of people have complete free will while shopping, especially in the modern world where we have so many more ways of accessing and sharing information than has ever been possible. It is, however, reasonable for the majority to enact advertising protections that would benefit the dumb/manipulable minority.

The difference is that we can’t do so for political information in a democracy, because the entity that enacts and enforces the supposed “protections” (i.e. the government) is exactly the same entity that is directly affected by the subsequent political choices of the people based on that information.

Once again, the question is, “Are the majority of people too dumb or easily manipulated to be trusted with the system?” If so, then we should do away with the system altogether and have a government of philosopher-kings decide how resources should be distributed.

As for what I personally think, about both advertising and government? Nowadays I go back and forth. When I was younger and more naive, I believed that people could be trusted with making their own decisions, but the older I get and the more I see how truly stupid people are, the more I question whether that’s actually the case.

At this point, politically I’m still firmly in the camp of, “The people must be fully trusted with information to make their own political decisions, for good or ill,” because to believe otherwise is to believe that democracy is not possible, and I’m not ready to make that step quite yet (and I honestly don’t really want to).

What I do know is that there is no middle ground. I do not believe in “democracy” where the government restricts in any way the information that the people have access to when making decisions about that very government. That’s already autocracy under the guise of “democracy”, so we might as well stop fooling ourselves at that point.

If the people are too dumb to be trusted with an unrestricted marketplace of ideas, the they’re too dumb to be allowed to vote for their own government.

If you believe in democracy, you have to also believe that the majority of people can be trusted with the information necessary to make informed political choices.

If the people can’t be trusted to act in their best interests in an informed manner, then we might as well just adopt Plato’s philosopher-kings system instead, and make all of the peoples’ decisions for them.

They already have thought about it - see the part where they’re glad our rights aren’t curtailed just because someone might say some words that hurt your feelings.

Germany can take their nanny state bullshit and fuck right off.

Here’s my comment from the last time this came up (like a week ago):

“There’s been no meaning shift. The “possessive” and “envious” uses of jealous both date from the 14th century in English, and both senses were present in the ancestors of these words all the way back to Greek.”

It’s always been synonymous with “envious”, as far back as we can trace.

This isn’t the case, because humans can handle significantly larger deviations from “comfortable” on the cold side than the hot side, so again Fahrenheit gets it pretty much right.

This is horrible logic. If anything, it should be: you need to learn Celsius if you are doing science, but most people aren’t scientists and therefore don’t need to learn Celsius, so this isn’t really a problem that comes up for a lot of Fahrenheit users.

According to Wikipedia Rankine is properly used with the degree symbol, but sometimes is not by analogy with Kelvin.

I just cancelled my gas station rewards program because they moved everything to a mandatory app. I will not use your app.

(on mobile, so sorry for any formatting weirdness)

English teachers will only give you an arbitrary, subjective answer about whether it’s a word - you want a linguist if you want an objective answer.

Since we’re dealing with two different “words” (roots) here, factory and overclocked, the first thing to look for is compound stress. Many compound words in English get initial stress: compare “blackbird” and “a black bird”.

This isn’t foolproof, however. For some speakers there are compounds that don’t get compound stress - some speakers say “paper towel” as expected, while others say “paper towel”, but it’s still a compound either way.

So how can we actually tell that paper towel is one word? See if the first member of the potential compound (the non-head) can be modified in any way.

For example, we know doghouse is a compound because in “a big doghouse” big can only refer to the house, and cannot refer to “the house of a big dog”. Similarly, blackboard must be one word because it can take what appear to be contradictory modifiers: " a green blackboard".

So, in the same way, paper towel and toilet paper are one word because “big paper towel” can’t mean “a towel made from big paper” and “pink toilet paper” can’t mean “paper for a pink toilet”. (Toilet paper also gets compound stress.)

Yet another way to test is by semantic drift (meaning shift). As mentioned earlier, blackboards don’t have to be black, so the meaning of the compound doesn’t perfectly correspond to the pieces of the word - instead, the fact that it’s a vertical board you write on in chalk is much more important to the meaning. This is because once the pieces combine to form a new word, that new word can start to shift away from the meaning of the pieces. Again, however this process takes time, so it’s not a perfect test.

So, back to the original question: is “factory-overclocked” one word?

Well, it doesn’t get compound stress, and for me I can still say things like “it’s home-factory-overclocked” to mean that it was overclocked in its home factory, so the first member can take modifiers. And, the whole thing still means what the pieces mean.

So, in my grammar, “factory-overclocked” is two words. But for some of you “home factory overclocked” may not be possible, which would indicate that it’s started to become one word for you. Everyone’s grammar is different, but we can still test for these categories.

If you instead mean by your question, “can factory and overclocked be combined with a hyphen?”, however, I can’t help you, because language-specific writing conventions are subjective and arbitrary, and not something that linguists usually care very much about.

Same. Sauce ruins good fries.

I always just go to America’s Best. $80 for an eye exam and two pairs of glasses is hard to beat.

… but then you remembered that there are 8,000 languages in the world other than English, and recalled that “ok” has been borrowed into a ton of them.

Just bought $50 of merch off their website – this is the sort of journalism we should all be supporting.

You’re the one that originally said that Anglo-Canadians didn’t realize how racist they are toward French-Canadians, not me. All I’m doing here is agreeing with you, and adding that French-Canadians do realize how racist they are, because for them it’s literally a matter of widely supported, highly publicized government policy in addition to being a deeply-ingrained cultural chip-on-the-shoulder.

You can either take our lived experience at face value and gain some perspective, or you can continue to bury your head in the sand. Either way I’m tired of yet another Quebecer gaslighting me about how good I have it here, so I think I’m done. Bonne nuit.

I’ve been here two years, so my family is right in the middle of the “get fucked” zone in basically every possible way for the foreseeable future. (This also includes being repeatedly denied permanent residency that we would automatically be granted if we lived 50km west of where we do, i.e. in Ontario. According to the HR director at my company, after the passage of the law Immigration has started an unofficial policy of putting residency applications that otherwise have enough points to qualify but don’t speak French directly into the “reject” pile.)

I appreciate you taking time to provide the links and advice though.

I’m definitely not saying that French-Canadians have it better in the rest of Canada and that has never been my argument – I completely agree with your original comment that Anglo-Canadians are unintentionally racist toward French-Canadians, but my original comment is also 100% true, that French-Canadians are instead intentionally racist toward English speakers.

The only places where you’ll have a hard time getting service in English is in rural regions very far from major city centers.

This just shows that you either don’t live here or are a French-speaker and therefore don’t see it (which is ironic given your initial comment). In Quebec City I’ve been refused service in French for even asking about service in English.

Which is still lower than the price it costs for out of province students to go to school in other provinces

Where are you getting this info? Most of the sources I can find show that most Quebec students pay rates comparable to in-province students across Anglophone Canada. Quebec seems to be the only one actively legislating discriminatory policies here.

One of either parents needs to have went to school in English

We both went to school in English, but it’s still illegal for us because we’re immigrants. Trust me, we’ve checked, and the fact that you automatically jumped to assuming that I’d even know where to find an “anti-French journal” speaks volumes about your perspective on this conversation.

Edit: I just realized you probably meant “newspaper” here. I get all of my info about stuff like this from the government website, and from calling government services to make sure I fully understand my (lack of) rights.

Fear mongering by English media and not the reality? Who would have thought? 😱

I’m not sure how something I have to deal with on a weekly basis is fear mongering. The problem with your source there is that to be seen at any of those facilities I first have to go through RAMQ, and literally every time I call RAMQ I have to declare, under penalty of perjury, that I’m legally entitled to use English in order to use it, and again, I’m not legally entitled to use it because I’m an immigrant, so I have to stumble through MY FUCKING HEALTHCARE in a language I don’t speak fluently, when they literally have service available in the language but just refuse it to me for prejudicial reasons.

By this point it’s clear that you have no interest in opening your eyes to the realities that many English speakers face in Quebec, possibly for the nationalistic reasons that led to these (increasingly severe) discriminatory policies in the first place, so I see little reason to continue this conversation.

For everyone else following this convo, just keep in mind that linguistic discrimination can happen to English speakers just like it can to other languages (though in aggregate English obviously still holds a place of privilege relative to most other languages). And if you’re reading this and you’re lucky enough to have voting rights in Quebec, please vote for candidates that support non-discriminatory language policies.

They do that by bending backwards and talking English whenever there’s an Anglophone present no matter if they’re the only one in a group of ten that doesn’t speak French fluently

Sure, if you’re lucky enough to be on the south side of Montreal and literally nowhere else.

They do that by having the biggest college and university in Quebec be English ones (the latter being the third richest in Canada)

They’re so generous that they just doubled tuition for out-of-province students, a clear attack on their English-speaking institutions, and one so severe that many programs at these schools will have to cut up to 25% of their course offerings to make up the budget shortfalls. Clearly they’re throwing their full support behind their internationally-acclaimed English institutions.

They do that by being more bilingual

Lol, again, sure, if you happen to live in the southern half of Montreal, maybe. And that’s not counting the huge number of people who clearly speak English but refuse to do so for nationalistic reasons. I know literally zero French-speaking Anglo-Canadians who show similar behavior.

They do that by never having prevented them from learning their language in school contrary to what happened to French Canadians outside Quebec

It is literally illegal for me to send my two kids to an English-speaking school right now, so you can go peddle that crock of shit to someone who doesn’t have to deal with Quebec’s language bullshit on a daily basis. And that’s not even to mention Quebec’s abysmal record, both historically and recently on first nations language policies.

(By the way, it’s also illegal for me to try to seek healthcare in English in Quebec now too. Just another fun fyi for ya.)

Fucking French Canadians and their hate for the english language! Truly they’re bigots all of them!

This, but (mostly) unironically.