There are rules to handle foreign names in a language with declinsion. I don’t see why you can’t use those.

Besides, most inflected languages I know will handle names differently from other nouns. Definitely true in German, but also Italian. E.g. you say “Faccio una foto del duomo.” (I’m taking a picture of the dome.) but “Faccio una foto di Mike.” (I’m taking a picture of Mike.)

The only language where this doesn’t work that I know of would be Latin, which is why people in the past latinized names.

We never had different names in language classes and the idea is so weird to me. My name is my name, I don’t introduce myself with a different name when I go to Italy or Spain.

About two days without food, a bit more if I remember correctly, and around one day without water.

I had to have a knee surgery with general anesthesia, so I wasn’t allowed to eat several hours before and couldn’t drink either. Due to the timing of the surgery the last time I would have been allowed to drink was like 1 am, but I’m a morning person and was anxious so I went to bed at my normal 10pm and also ate and drank at my normal 7-8pm or so. Or maybe I had to stop eating earlier, I don’t remember exactly.

Anyway, the surgery happened, my parents picked me up and took me home. My mother had one of her many many meltdowns. They hadn’t brought me snacks or drinks to the hospital and she just mocked me that I couldn’t hold it together for the 1 hour ride home. We get home, I hobbled to my bed. My mother refused to bring me food or drinks and forbid my father from bringing me anything. I could come to the kitchen and sit at the table “like a normal person” if I wanted to eat. In the evening my spineles POS father at least brought me a bottle of water, much to my mother’s dismay.

The next day I managed to hobble to the table, so I was allowed to eat and drink.

This wasn’t entirely new, my parents had a habit of locking me up in my room without food or water for an entire day when I was little. They never thought that was a big deal. My mother even told me after the surgery that she wouldn’t bring me food to not “enable my spoiled behaviour” and that it was a good chance to finally lose some weight. (I was just slightly overweight, maybe 80kg at 172).

In case you’re wondering: yes, I’ve been no contact with my family for years.

There is another article on the website about a rise in violence and bullying in schools. Makes you wonder what the reason behind that is.

I’m jealous.

Never. I have a very rare first Name and the combination with my last Name is unique. I also have cut contact with my abusive family so I don’t want them to find me.

I’m not talking about friend groups, just groups that are open to the public. Friend groups are OK in whatever constellation you wish.

Your choir has a good reason to be men only, since that creates a certain sound.

It gets tricky when the point of the group or club is something not related to gender. I don’t think an all-female board game club that is open to the public but only lets women join would be OK. Personally I think you can have your meetings for only people of your gender when you organize them only for yourself. But as soon as you do something publicly, you don’t get to say “everybody can come except group X” without a good reason.

That goes for men and women, I’m also not a fan of “xy only for girls” clubs without a good reason.

Gender exclusive groups are OK when there is a legitimate reason. Unfortunately it just so happens that women-exclusive groups have a legitimate reason very often, which is usually “I don’t want to be hit on in every activity I do”.

Why are there women only career events? Because many women experience going to “normal” career events, have nice conversations, thinking they made a good business connection just to be asked out on a date and ghosted when they decline. They don’t get the same benefits out of “normal” events as men do.

Why are there women only gyms? Because women want to do sports without being hit on regularly.

Now you could say “Well, but that’s a problem of some men not sticking to the rules. Just enforce the rules.” But the problem is, the rules aren’t being enforced, women aren’t taken seriously or just told to suck it up, that’s part of life. You’re in a public space so it’s OK for a man to ask you out. To which the women’s reaction is: “Well, then I’d rather do X in a private space where there aren’t any men who could hit on me.”

As long as there are struggles that men face exclusively it’s totally ok to have men only groups. The problem:

1. men do not face the problem of being put in uncomfortable situations by women almost anywhere they go, so they have less topics or activities where they feel like they need a men’s only group. For most topics/activities men can go to a mixed-gender group and have the same experience as they would in a male-only group. Women can’t.

2. a lot of men’s groups do not form around “we want to address a typical male problem” but “we have prejudices about women being bad at x” or “we just hate women”.

And lastly historically the reason why women wanted to join male-only groups was because those groups were often used to make decisions and policies. Business is being made in golf clubs and was made in “gentlemen’s clubs”. Women wanting to join those wasn’t about playing golf. Sure, we can have a women’s club to play golf. It was about being left out of the informal decision making process, the deal making. In my personal experience women are more likely to discuss work matters at work with everybody and at any “women only” outing with colleagues work was hardly a topic. Whereas when it happened that men went drinking with “just the boys” the next day important decisions had been made and suddenly Mark was in charge of the new project. Just my personal experience and I’m not saying it can’t happen the other way around in female dominated fields.

Because women’s shelters need to exist even if men are domestically abused too and never in my fucking life have I heard anyone suggest a battered men’s shelter might even maybe be a good idea.

I don’t know where you live but men’s shelters are a thing. At least I know about them in Germany, the US has them, too. A large problem for men’s shelters (and why there aren’t as many as women’s shelters) is that they want to have only male staff (just like women’s shelters employ only women as staff), but there are less men going into social work. Also, men’s shelters don’t get the publicity women’s shelters get, so that is definitely a thing that should change. Men talking about being abused by women should be made more normal and I think it would help if there were more stories in the media about men fleeing from abuse and going to a men’s shelter. That would make the concept more widely known.

While they didn’t 100% buy into all the details of Nazi ideology, the Japenese did believe themselves to be the superior race among the Asian peoples.

This is going to get some confused posts from pen&paper rpg nerds 😆. My first thought was it’s about rpgs.

Ragebait content has also increased. Most stories are made up to increase engagement with over-the-top problems. You can find some normal questions if you sort by new and they will have a handful of answers and soon disappear. The posts that get a lot of engagement are the ones with crazy stories.

Aren’t these the kind of people who’d get mad at immigrants in the US if they don’t speak English? Why don’t they learn proper Russian and integrate?

I find that a bit funny given that in the last 15 years or so Japan has officially done a lot to attract tourists. Wanting to become a tourist destination, branding themselves as a place for holidays. I’ve seen so many “Visit Japan” campaigns, usually sponsored by the Japanese government, in the last decade or so. I get that it sucks for the people living in those cities and good for them that their city council does something to help, it still feels weird after years and years of campaigns to attract more tourists to Japan.

I think is is fascinating how much time Japanese teachers spendon extracurriculars

From what I know, a lot of hobby activies happen in school in Japan and are supervised by the school’s teachers: choirs, soccer teams, guitar lessons, baseball, judo etc. These are all things that in most other countries aren’t connected to the school system and are organized either by volunteer groups or professionel instructors (e.g. in seperate music schools or neighbourhood soccer clubs).

They already won several positions and majorities in some cities and broke all promises they made. Still growing in numbers.

My guess is they want mostly bots on the site and no pesky users that contradict the bots. What counts isn’t active human users, but that the website pops up in search results.

The name and character are from a children’s book and for that it’s a fine name.

When I was small my parents just didn’t bring me to hotels that weren’t explicitly for families. Those normal boring grown-up hotels just weren’t for us until we were old enough, so we went to the fun hotels with playgrounds. Why can’t we go back to that?

And people wouldn’t be so annoyed by children if the parents didn’t insist that they should be allowed to run around and do whatever they want. It’s not just “let me go everywhere with my kids”, it’s “let me bring my kids and then let them yell and smash things and cry as much as they want because they are kids.” There’s a nice café in my city where I don’t go anymore, because it’s full of mothers with their toddlers from the nearby playground who just continue playing as loudly as ever. Last time I went I ended up with sand in my coffee when some kid waved around his toy car that was full of sand from the playground. The mother refused to buy me a new coffee because “he’s just a kid”. A beach bar by the river actual changed their policy and now refuses entry to children under 12, because it had become too expensive for them to keep replacing food and drinks every time a kid threw the sand around. And of course the parents usually refused to pay for what their kids destroyed.

If parents can’t be trusted to make good decisions like “My 4-year-old who can’t sit still for more than a minute should not be brought to a spa where people come to relax.” or at the very least feel responsible for what they destroy, this is what happens. And if too many parents refuse to pay up when their kid destroys something, owners will prefer to ban kids.

People who say they don’t like children are being hated on, but 99% of the time they just don’t like children who are allowed to do whatever they want whereever they are and parents who take zero responsibility under the guise of it’s just a child.

I found the general culture on reddit pretty discouraging, too. You post an answer to a question and all the contrarians flock to it, twist your words or just sift through your profile in order to find a gotcha. “Haha, you wrote X but three years ago on subreddit Y you mentioned you’re Z, so that means you can’t possibly know anything about X!” Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s necessary in order to point out trolls and liars, but I often found it exaggerated. It made me not want to participate in discussions. Not to mention attacking people for their grammar and spelling when a large part of the platform doesn’t speak English as their mother language.