Don Antonio Magino

This isn’t a new position. Putin has already said years back that he doesn’t care if Ukraine joins the EU.

I get Hungary, but you’d expect all constructive countries to be invited.

Saudi Arabia isn’t an ICC member state, though, so they don’t have to comply with the warrant (probably part of why they picked Saudi Arabia).

If they want Europe to enforce the peace in Ukraine, a ‘deal’ without Europe is meaningless as well (you’d hope, anyway. Otherwise the European establishment would agree with America treating Europe like their bitch).

Hey, we at least already have this great new small-scale social medium called Feddit.nl.

(relatively new, anyway)

deleted by creator

I’ll share a somewhat relevant Dutch song from the German occupation. The NSB was the main Dutch nazi party collaborating with the Germans, Volk en Vaderland (People and Fatherland) was their newspaper.

On the corner of the street stands a Pharisee

It’s not a man nor a woman, it’s one from the NSB

With a newspaper in his hand he’s peddling his wares

He sells his People and Fatherland for six lousy cents

Did he do it with FACTS and LOGIC?

Then we’ll have to conquer Russia and convince China to rename itself Eastasia.

This can’t be the whole truth, though. What ivanafterall is describing is true for essentially the whole western world. Media (or at least high-brow media) feel they need to be respectable, and to be respectable you have to be perfectly neutral. Not just in America did established media feel the need trivialise Musk’s obvious Hitler salute, this happened all over. I follow Dutch and German media, and haven’t seen a mainline newspaper call it what it was.

Judging from this very polemic article by linguistic anthropologist Kathryn E. Graber, the argument is that a linguistic distinction that exists in Russian (and Ukrainian) is mirrorred in other languages using the definite article. ‘Na Ukraine’ on the one hand literally means ‘on Ukraine’, ‘v Ukraine’ on the other ‘in Ukraine’. Graber goes on to say that ‘In Russian, a person is “na” an unbounded territory, such as a hill, but “v” a bounded territory that is defined politically or institutionally, such as a nation-state.’ She would then probably also argue that the same, in English, goes for names like ‘the Congo’, being named after a river. The claim that this is a Soviet-era practice (if what she means by that is that it arose during the Soviet Union), is simply not true, though. In Google Books you can find plenty of titles with ‘the Ukraine’ from before 1900. The earliest mention I found in English (though I didn’t look very well) was from 1672.

It anyway strikes me as very performative. You can well argue that language influences the way we view the world (though, I think the way we view the world influences the language we use much more). Even so, there are obviously much bigger (concrete) threats to Ukrainian sovereignty than (to Ukrainians) foreigners using a definite article or not. Thus, it becomes less a matter of protecting sovereignty, and more a matter of simple respect to Ukrainian sensibilities. Ukrainians may take offence at you using the definite article, and you may want to prevent that by not saying ‘the Ukraine’.

I’m not sure what you mean here. As far as spelling goes, Dutch is far more consistent than English.

You’re mentioning some none-standard Dutch which is often perceived as incorrect (and it is indeed according to the rules of the standard language norm). Yet, if you were correct in your claim that ‘groter als jij’ was ‘never proper Dutch and sound[s] wrong to every native Dutch speaker’, no native Dutch speaker would ever use ‘groter als jij’. Native Dutch speakers do this often, though, and have been doing it at least since the seventeenth century (eg. this quote from 1670: ‘Zy [de vrucht ”Peci”] is niet veel groter als een kastanie …, vol sap en aengenaem van smaek: herder dan een gemeine appel, en een weinig zuurachtig,’ - ‘It [the fruit “Peci”] is not much bigger than a chestnut …, full of juice and pleasantly tasting: harder than a common apple, and a bit sourish,’).

Sorry to have gone so off-topic here, though.

Reading the title I was genuinely worried they had done the Musk Salute I mean, Awkward Gesture.

Wilders apparently isn’t 100% Trump’s bitch. In Madrid, he said that ‘Trump has caused an earthquake, though we may not agree with everything he does and says’, which the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad mainly explains by him not wanting more money to go to defence than 2% of the GDP, and the tariffs, which can cause actual issues for the PVV in the cabinet, being essentially a ‘free beer party’.

EDIT: Woops, got confused myself

The plural -s in Dutch only gets an apostrophe if the stem word ends on an open vowel. So it’s cavia-cavia’s on the one hand, but kikker-kikkers on the other (and la[de]-lades). So even in Dutch this’d be incorrect ;)

The only thing worse than idiots watching one vapid TikTok clip after the other (preferably in the silent compartment, of course), was when I was on a train to Berlin from Amsterdam, and the people on the other side of the aisle were trying to keep their kid calm by playing him Baby Shark over and over and fucking over again…