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Despite the extraordinary amount of public debate which accompanied the introduction of these laws, few people mentioned their striking historical precedent.

In the 1930's and 40's, as France began to transform Algeria into a full-blown settler colony, the French colonists started establishing what they thought would be a long-term system of exploitation of the Algerian population. This system was somewhere between apartheid and the systemic racism we have in liberal democracies today.

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Only time will tell whether this trend will continue, and increasingly stringent laws on Muslim clothing will be introduced. It seems likely.

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This second law, incidentally, was brought to us by Nicolas Sarkozy, whose most famous speech as President of the French Republic contains the sentence "Africa's mistake was that it didn't sufficiently participate in history."

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Six and a half years later, the "Law of 2010-1192: Act prohibiting concealment of the face in public space" came into effect. This law repeats the pattern established by 2004-228: nominally, it forbids anyone from having their face permanently concealed in public. In practice, however, it was introduced, voted on, and has been enforced as a ban on the burqa.

It became illegal to be too "conspicuous" a Muslim woman in France.

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On the 2nd of September 2004, just as France's children were preparing to go back to school, the "Law 2004-228 of 15 March 2004" came into effect.

Nominally, this law banned anyone from wearing "conspicuous religious symbols" in schools. In practice, however, it was widely understood to specifically target Muslim students and parents, in particular those who wore the hijab.

Girls and their mothers were now forbidden from "conspicuously" belonging to their faith.

my cat is sitting on my lap and i've been looking at train pictures for 2+ hours so i'd say i'm living my best life

@sexybenfranklin But what about people saying "octopussies" and then doing finger guns?

I feel like the biggest purpose in life is really to see how much of a positive impact you can make on the lives of people you care about and that's how I try to live

Capitalism: a cultural framework in which mutual aid is arbitrarily withheld, in service of creating hierarchy.

reclaiming the moon from the capitalists who actually lost the space race to communists and don’t deserve to have Her.

non-programmers are an important part of open source projects. non-programmer contributions are valid and useful and not second tier or otherwise less valuable.

it's easy to say programmers are the only value-add when you're fortunate enough to have enough non-programmers that you can take them for granted.

if you take away the feature requests, translations, and general chatter - many OSS projects would have never been more than flawed, narrow use case tech demos.

gender reveal party. i play you 6 minutes of static projected onto a large white sheet then look at you expectantly

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gender reveal party. the scenery dissolves away like that scene in coraline. i am cheerfully dissociating

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gender reveal party. the balloons are deflated and the cake's collapsed in on itself. i am having the time of my life

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gender reveal party. i open the airlock and we are all sucked out into the vacuum of space. you don't even remember being on a rocket in the first place

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Computer Fairies

Computer Fairies is a Mastodon instance that aims to be as queer, friendly and furry as possible. We welcome all kinds of computer fairies!