I love that someone who goest to a health clinic because of the flu is complaining about other people misusing the services.

I think that butter colour has to do with the diet of the cows whose cream was used. In most of North America cream is homogenized prior to processing (so that tastes and colours tend not to vary regionally as much as they might in places that don't engage in the same practice); dairy cows are also usually fed the…

Pretty much this - french fries are delicious, and they satisfy all the ethical and ecological concerns that have led me to become vegetarian, so I will eat them. Enthusiastically. And much.

But what I need to know is this: if women were able to bake biscuits in the warmth and safety of the home, why did the men need to hazard out into the wilderness to bring bread home? Did people in 'The Past' really need such quantity and variety of baked goods?

Didn't you know that everything that ever happened in the past happened in 'The Past', a period that was dangerous! but also very domestic! and where men were men and women were women!

I completely agree that there is a lot going on with the difference between "ma femme" and "mon mari" is (or, similarly, with the difference between "ma fille" and "mon fils", my girl (=daughter) and my son). However, I think that it's more a matter of language-history than of the current meaning of the terms.…

Couldn't the argument against luxury products in India be made against be made against luxury products anywhere in the world though?

I have to agree with you - that character (and to some extent that show in general) basically give a sense of the justice system as some horrific mechanism for the enactment of revenge fantasies. It glorifies abuses of power on the part of the police, and gives people a really limited sense of what an accused person's…

Ferret-cat!

It makes no sense!

I've only had it happen once (over about ten years), and the check was so perfunctory that it seemed more symbolic than practical. From friends who work in retail, I know that card companies don't demand it of merchants, and pay out even if the card was stolen.

I think that it's both. There are definitely many people/laws/etc. that are bigoted against Muslims as a religious group, or against certain Muslim cultural groups, regardless of race. But historically at least, the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice in places like France was heavily interlaced to racism. Many of the…

Utter agreement.

But most of these occasions arise rarely, and can be addressed directly when necessary (e.g. it would be fair to ask that a woman show a state agent her face + an identity card bearing a photograph before voting). As for payment, I can see the argument if the person uses credit cards or cheques where better means of…

What I find odd and intriguing (rather than just depressing) about the typical justifications for niqab/burka bans is the recurring idea of a need for visible faces both as a means of identification, and as a prerequisite for a truly public interaction.

Yes, public hair covering is perfectly legal in France, provided the person's face be visible. It's also pretty common among older Catholic women in certain areas, although the practice is going out with older generations' passing.

Admittedly, I have bad taste, but still...

You make a very good point, but I think that the problem that you describe isn't limited to the South or to areas with overall poor sex-ed. I'm Canadian, and while we received pretty extensive education on the mechanical dimensions of sex (anatomy, s.t.i.s, contraceptive measures, etc.), we never actually talked about…

Same here. While I'm open to believing that many fraudsters are relatively sane and selfish, her plan is so ill-conceived, and requires such a transformation of her life and relationships in all their details, that I can't conceive that she doesn't have major mental illness of some sort.

I agree with you. My grandmother is in an advanced state of Alzheimers, and while I visit her as often as I can (I live far), send her letters and care packages on a regular basis... I don't enjoy spending time with her anymore. It's exhausting and heartbreaking to see her vulnerable and inconsolable in spite of all…