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gaael @lemmy.world
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Comments 295
A faked orgasm is just another kind of participation trophy
  • I've had a penis since birth and I can still have amazing sex without orgasming. For me it's more a matter of habit. When I started having sex, I wanted to orgasm every time. As I got more experienced, I started enjoying all the other stuff in sex more, and I regularly have sex with my partner without orgasming - most of my orgasms now come from masturbation.

  • French parliamentary election: Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally (RN) projected to win first round, beating the leftist NPF alliance and Emmanuel Macron's centrist Ensemble
  • As I see it, the biggest frustration from the left is that he makes right-wing changes.
    The right pretends to be frustrated by his policies because they need to disagree if they want to have a reason to exist - and they've been leaning towards the far right for years to find a place on the political spectrum because Macron took their place.

    A few examples, I hope I'll be able to explain correctly.

    So in France we got something called the "prudhommes" which is a board that specializes in dealing with employee vs company legal matters. Usually, when you get fired and you think they didn't do it right, you go to the prudhommes and you can sue them for money.
    The prudhommes are important for the workers because they can charge bug fines to the companies, and once one worker has won their case, it becomes easier for their colleagues to do so if they were wronged in the same way.
    It's a powerful tool that kind of forces companies to follow the "code du travail" aka workers' rights.
    When he changed (read: degraded) lots of stuff about workers' rights just after his first election in 2017, Macron introduced an important change: there is now a maximum amount that the prudhommes can force a company to pay. This changes the balance of power because now companies can now how much breaking the law will cost them and decide that it's the cost of doing business. Worst thing is, this amount can be changed by the government at any time without requiring a vote from the national assembly - this is read by many commenters as the start if the prudhommes' dismantlement.

    In France, we've had (I believe since the eighties) a kind of universal basic income. It's far from a livable income (it's around 600€/month currently) but it's still more than nothing. You need to be french (we wouldn't want to share nice thingd with refugees, right?) and jump through a few hoops to claim it, but it exists. Until Macron, the only condition you had to fulfill was having no other income.
    This is used a lot by people who are unable to work but can't apply for unemployment or sick pay mechanisms. It's always been the last safety: when everything else fails, at least you get something.
    Since Macron, you now have to be actively looking for a job to qualify for it. Which means that if your unemployment office thinks you're not looking hard enough, you can get excluded from this income and have absolutely nothing (which then leads to homelessness and a whole life of fun). And of course over the past 7 years of Macron, the unemployment offices are under an ever increasing pressure to find people who are not deserving enough.

    In terms of image, Macron took lessons from Trump: truth and facts don't matter and you don't even have to be coherent. Time and time again, he and his governement have lied, contradicted themselves... They are of course not the first to do it, but they are the first to not give a shit. Before Macron, they tried not to get caught lying, and when they got caught they tried to get out of it "that's not what I meant". Sometimes they even apologized. Macron and his government have had a different strategy: we don't even care.
    When Macron visited the french carribean, he said in a public discourse "the chlordecone [a nasty pesticid wildly used by french companies in the carribean until y2k] is not cancerigen". Right after the discourse, scientists and physicians were like "well yes it is, it's been known for 30 years". Macron didn't even bother answering himself, but his services blantly told the press "he never said it was not cancerigen" even though he said it a few hours earlier in front of all tvs and radios. This is just one example of something that now happens weekly.

    These changes might seem small, not structural. But they change fundamental things in the balances of power, the way we treat people and the way we do politics. Especially since there are lots and lots of them in a lot of areas, when you take them together, french legislative and checks/balances landscapes have changed a lot in 7 years, much more so than they had since the nineties (Idk before that).

    Macron is from the bourgeoisie, is fighting the class war and has been waging and winning more battles than his predecessors by a lot. He is not interested in the status quo at all.

    I hope this makes sense and answers your question ;)

  • French parliamentary election: Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally (RN) projected to win first round, beating the leftist NPF alliance and Emmanuel Macron's centrist Ensemble
  • having policies that make small adjustments to the current system

    Well, that's not really what happened the past few years. Civil rights and social protections have been degraded wayyy faster than by previous rightwing (not claiming to be centrist) governments. Structural change has happened several times, making big changes in some areas. Macron and their buddies don't want to play it small, they want to make big changes.

  • gotdamn
  • For those who,like me, didn't get the fitzgerald reference:

    SS Edmund Fitzgerald was an American Great Lakes freighter that sank in Lake Superior during a storm on November 10, 1975, with the loss of the entire crew of 29 men.

    From the Wikipedia article

  • SpaceX's Starlink May Be Keeping the Ozone From Healing, Research Finds
  • Maybe I didn't get my facts straight, but iirc there are around 7.5k satellites up there, with starlink current count about 5.5k. And I think I read they got the greenlight for the 7.5k gen 2 sats launches.
    That looks like a scale change to me. Associated with the short lifespan (which contrasts with the situation 30 years ago, where launches were more expensive), it's kind of a new situation and should have warranted a more careful approach.

    So musk isn't the first one to launch satellites, I agree. But the way it's done is kinda new, and mostly on the worse side. And I'm not saying the old way was good, and not absolving previous actors from responsability in the pollution.

  • SpaceX's Starlink May Be Keeping the Ozone From Healing, Research Finds
  • Like maybe wait a few years and finance some science to check that your mega constellation of satellites (built to fail after only a few years to make sure your rocket company never goes out of work) won't be a fucking nuisance on so many levels before you actually launch them ?
    This "get all the facts before taking action" ?

    Edit: I think I knee-jerked

  • Orcas Just Sank Another Yacht
  • You're right, thanks!
    In my language there is a bug difference between a yacht and a 15 meters sailboat, but it seems it's not the case in english. Anyway, my mistake.

    200k is a nice, quite recent boat with nothing to be done before you can go and sail.
    Where I live, lots of people buy older boats which need a bit of work before they can use them. You can find nice older 15 meters sailboats for 60-70k if you're willing to have them in dry dock for a year while you do repairs and look for used parts to do the repairs.
    It's still fucking expensive (and you have easily 5k/year of anchorage and upkeep), and lots of workers can definitely not afford that, but it's still possible without being really rich (I meet teachers teachers, nurses, engineers... who own their boats when I go sailing).

  • Orcas Just Sank Another Yacht
  • I live in France, and my parents (both teachers in highschool) bought one 10 years ago. It is an old one (built in the 1980s), lots of work to had to be done but they could afford it on a 10 years mortgage.
    Harbour is about 4k/year, wich is definitely not nothing and lots of people can't afford it, but they manage.

    Idk how it is where you live, but from what I've seen, on most of Northern Europe coasts (France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Sweden) it's far from impossible to own a nice sailboat even when you're not really rich.
    Sailboats from the 80s-90s with some work to do would range from the 30-35k for 10-11 meters to 60-70k for up to 15 meters. Of course, if you want to have the most recent one and if you can't/don't want to do most of the repairs yourself, it's another story.
    It may have something to do with our sailing culture from the 70s-80s, where lots of people actually built their sailboats to go and travel the world.

    And just to be clear, I'm not saying it's easy and everyone can do it. Lots of working class people can barely make ends meet, so owning a boat wouldn't be possible. But in Europe, it's not reserved for the super rich either.

  • JK Rowling slammed for asking if she can be Black if she likes “Motown & fancy myself in cornrows”
  • Yep. I despise her opinions since I've heard/read them, but reading HP still is a treasured child memory and I pick them up again every few years. But I'm never buying anything that contributes to her wealth and I'm not going to rate the books positevely on goodreads or whatever.
    I surely makes no difference to her, but it allows me to feel okay about it.

  • Orcas Just Sank Another Yacht
  • I love orcas and the idea that some of them are doing something because we pissed them off is really sexy.

    But a 15-ish meters sailboat is not a yacht, far from there, and in Europe a lot of people who sail are working class (more teachers and engineers than uber drivers or cleaning crews, but still far from rich).
    In this case, the crew consisted of two members of the Ocean Care NGO. The crew members and the NGO stated that they didn't blame the orcas and didn't see there an agression from them but believed more in a kind of game because the orcas noticed boats can be rocked and find it fun.

    Let's eat the rich ourselves, they are much more our responsability than the orca's.

  • I think people in prison should be allowed to vote
  • In France we treat our prisoners like utter shit. If they way you treat the people you have power over is an important marker of civilization/democracy (and I believe it is), we fail this test real hard.

    That being said, the tribunal has to specifically add to the prison sentence an exclusion from the right to vote. Iirc, about 25k prisoners (among the 75 or 80k total) have been deprived from the right to vote during their sentence.

    Voting from prison in France is complicated,there are 3 options afaik:

    • you can delegate your vote to someone on the outside
    • you can resquest a "day off" to go to the polls
    • since 2019 you can vote by correspondance

    The "can I please go out to vote" has to be approved by the warden, and dosen't happen much.
    Delegating your vote isn't always easy either, prison has a tendancy to isolate people from their former close ones.
    The correspondance vote is recent and seems like the best of the three. In 2017 (presidential electio ), less than 2% of imprisoned people had voted. In the 2022 presidential election, more than 20% of them did.

    So far, voting logistics and the feeling that society doesn't want you has imo prevented far more people to vote than the "you can't vote for the next x years" addendum to sentences.