Ok but my point is that when it doesn’t correlate, it becomes clear how grammatical gender is independent from the person’s gender.

It becomes even clearer when you consider all nouns by definition have a grammatical gender - inanimate objects, abstract concepts, etc, even though the thing described clearly doesn’t have a gender. Eg die Tür ist offen. Ich schliesse sie. (transl.: the door is open. I close it.) ‘Sie’ being the female pronoun used to refer to the grammatically female door.

When my brain interpreted ‘they’ singular to refer to a unspecified so-far unnamed person or an already mentioned group, it was definitely confusing to have it suddenly used to refer to someone who had just been referred to by name. This was definitely a novel use of ‘they’ for me at the time and I don’t understand why no-one else ever seems to have this kind of confusion. I did get used to it but I don’t think it’s as universal as some of y’all realise.

Edit: I just learnt the term ‘indeterminate antecedent’ from the Wikipedia article someone else linked. Thanks to them, I just got a little bit smarter. ;-)

Child - das Kind - grammatical gender: neuter. Referred to in context using the gender-neutral pronoun ‘es’ (it). The pronoun used correlates with the grammatical gender of the noun used, not the gender of the person referred to.

Eg Ein Kind lacht. Es hat etwas gesehen. (transl: A child laughs. He/she/they saw something.)

Agree, there’re some decent < 0.5% beers around, made with just a different strain of yeast.

“They started it.” “We are the real victims here.” “Antisemitic terrorists”

This is a case brought by 4 US citizens against the CIA. They are attorneys Margaret Ratner Kunstler and Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass. They all visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the relevant time period ~2017 and claim their 4th amendment rights have been violated. I can’t wait to see this trial unfold! The evidence that will come out of this could well mean the end of the DOJ’s pursuit of Assange.

This is a case brought by 4 US citizens against the CIA. They are attorneys Margaret Ratner Kunstler and Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass. They all visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the relevant time period ~2017 and claim their 4th amendment rights have been violated. I can’t wait to see this trial unfold! The evidence that will come out of this could well mean the end of the DOJ’s pursuit of Assange.

It’s because they operate in secrecy.

Masha Gessen erspart der Böll-Stiftung, vertreten durch den Vorstand Imme Scholz und Jan Philipp Albrecht, an diesem Abend nichts. Dieses öffentliche Gespräch sei nicht auf Einladung der Böll-Stiftung zustande gekommen, enthüllt Gessen. Imme Scholz habe nach dem Eklat um den Preis eine private Einladung ausgesprochen. „Die habe ich abgelehnt“, so Gessen. „Ich habe ein öffentliches Gespräch vorgeschlagen, sie haben sich darauf eingelassen und das weiß ich zu schätzen.“ Doch um auch das gleich zu sagen: Ein wirkliches Gespräch kam nicht zustande. Nie fragte einer auf dem Podium: „Verstehst du, Masha …?“ Und auf die Frage der Verlegerin Katharina Raabe, die im Publikum saß, warum die Böll-Stiftung es in Kauf genommen habe, eine Autorin zu beschädigen, gab es keine Antwort. Imme Scholz und Jan Philipp Albrecht fühlten sich sichtlich unwohl, auch schon vor dem an sie gerichteten Einwurf des langjährigen Aufsichtsratsmitglieds der Böll-Stiftung Hartmut Bäumer, er habe sich noch nie so geschämt.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231218235218/https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/kultur-vergnuegen/debatte/masha-gessen-in-berlin-der-versuch-mich-mundtot-zu-machen-ist-misslungen-li.2169713

I think that’s debatable. I don’t get the impression that Gessen would have won the award if she had written her Gaza article before her winning it was decided by the jury. The fact that the original ceremony was cancelled from political pressure speaks to that fact. Credit to the Berlin crew to throw host another ceremony event albeit a small one.

Masha Gessen in Berlin: Der Versuch, mich mundtot zu machen, ist misslungen https://web.archive.org/web/20231218235218/https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/kultur-vergnuegen/debatte/masha-gessen-in-berlin-der-versuch-mich-mundtot-zu-machen-ist-misslungen-li.2169713 Masha themselve said at the event that

Dieses öffentliche Gespräch sei nicht auf Einladung der Böll-Stiftung zustande gekommen

transl.: This public forum today is not on invitation of the Böll-Foundation.

So I don’t think it’s at all obvious that Hannah Arendt would today qualify for the ‘Hannah Arendt prize’ in Germany, given her body of work that is critical of the creation of the State of Israel.

Reading the article in Nachdenkseiten, it is my understanding that the local council cancelled the venue and wrote an open letter, followed by the local branch of the foundation pulling support. The Berlin branch of the foundation then took it upon themselves to still host an award-ceremony for Gessen in a secretive location for a small crowd. Hence the headline referring to a back-alley.

What are you on about?

El Pais is Spain’s biggest daily newspaper.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Pais

The controversial Gessen quote is featured in Nachdenkseiten -> https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=108755

Masha Gessen schreibt [transl. writes]:

"For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time – in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America, but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

The term ‚open-air prison‘ seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of occupied Europe, there are no prison guards – Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term ‚ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”

Instead, it’s thrown out any time an act of war appears to be particularly unfair or evil, often without full context or detail.

I often see news reports being quite careful and describing what appears in detailed evidence documenting murder by the military as ‘apparent’ war crimes.

I would argue that the credible accusation of war crimes, that is, with evidence available, requires a full investigation and trial full stop. If no trial occurs, and nobody sues for defamation, the papers can say whatever they feel confident enough to say. Except WikiLeaks…

In Australia there was the interesting defamation case recently with a civil court finding that the soldier who brought the defamation case had no case and did in fact commit war crimes in Afghanistan. He has not been charged with a crime. What does this say about impunity for war criminals? In contrast, Australian military whistleblower David McBride had to plead guilty last month for releasing evidence of war crimes and their cover-up by military leadership to a journalist with the state-broadcaster, the ABC. In both cases though, the news organisations publishing the news articles are seen to be in the right by the government and courts. (Although the ABC did get raided just a couple of months after Julian Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy, the journalist was not charged.)

iirc there was barely any opium production in Afghanistan pre-2001 under Taliban rule. It was in the following 20 years that the industry boomed and a lot of those government officials you refer to and their relatives got extremely rich from that, including President Karzai’s own little brother. The US put those people in power and propped them up for over 2 decades. It’s pretty clear the US decision-makers tried to eradicate poppy just as little as they tried to create peace in the region (not at all).

The sticks are used to destroy the fields, not beat people

That was my point exactly.

But invoking the spectre of “Sharia law” is just as vague as referring to “US law”.

May I suggest you read the article before commenting

Armed with little more than sticks, teams of counter-narcotics brigades travel the country, cutting down Afghanistan’s poppy fields.

Speaking to Sky News Australia, Assange’s brother Shipton said the news showed the US was seeking to end it’s “extremely controversial” prosecution.

“This indication from the Ambassador Caroline Kennedy shows that the US administration is looking for an off-ramp,” Mr Shipton said.

"They’ve been pursuing Julian for the past 13 years for publishing evidence of corruption, for publishing evidence of war crimes and they’re now deciding that there is a solution available.

“This is a sign that they don’t want this playing out in American courts, particularly during an election cycle, so the US administration is really looking for an off-ramp here for what is an extremely, extremely controversial press freedom prosecution.”

Asked what the outcome of a potential deal could be, Mr Shipton suggested he would expect Assange to be freed completely upon his return to Australia, saying he had already “paid” a significant price for his actions.

“Julian has been in prison for four year, he been detained one way or another for 13 years,” he said.

“This is the price that he has paid, this is the price that his family has paid as well.”