Belgium has some of (if not the) lowest income inequality in the OECD due to our very harsh income tax (highest median tax wedge of the OECD, yes even including the nordics). With quite a few asterisks attached to that statement of course because our fiscal system is a complete mess so if you’re special kinds of well off (e.g. you make your income on capital gains) you’ll be taxed very little.
How low income inequality doesn’t correlate to very high standards of living like it does in the Nordics… Well I’ll leave it to historians and economists to hash it out. The answer you get will almost certainly reflect that person’s personal politics. Harsh industrial decline is worth mentioning though.

Wallonia is measurably poorer than Flanders, but both regions are developed western economies. The US has a murder rate 535 % of Belgium’s, and I don’t see anyone warning students away from studying there (or well, not until the past few months).
That judge should be investigated and the prosecutor should definitely appeal, and besides there is a lot of work to do safety-wise, especially for women to be able to feel safe, but that’s hardly a problem specific to Leuven or Belgium.

The Latin thing is only a partial explanation. Some of it is changes in pronunciation coupled with a very authoritarian attitude to orthography. Few languages out there that changed so little in 400 years.

So for instance the -ent ending for plural verbs (“ils mangent”) is silent because the “ent” sounds were progressively dropped. Then the written suffix logically started disappearing, and only then did the Académie bring it back because it was more Latin. If it wasn’t for these reactionary fucks that rule would have been reformed centuries ago.

Unfortunately in the intervening time, knowledge of orthography became a very strong social marker. Because spelling French is so hard, the dictée came to disproportionately affect grades (seriously, old-fashioned schools still do it daily and it’s all graded and very severely), which coupled with the industrial revolution and alphabetization of the lower classes meant that shit spelling = prole = bad. So now orthography is at the center of the traditional value system which has all the conservatives pearl-clutching at the idea that children can’t spell “nénuphar” properly. Children’s purported inability to spell properly is like the number one moral panic that has sprung up every few years for the last century or two, but also orthographic reforms are woke (derogatory). The point of orthography, to conservative types, is for it to be hard so you can show off your perfect spelling to justify your social standing.

This ain’t an insurance claim. Multiple parties can be, and are, in the wrong.

The democratic party leadership should resign effective 10 years ago. It’s obviously entirely corrupted by corporate interests. The citizens who decided that was an excuse to sit on the sidelines to enable a full-blown fascist takeover are fascist enablers - which is not mutually exclusive with being victims. And they share the blame.

Anyway none of that fucking matters anymore because america had its last free federal election. You’ll excuse the rest of the world for being bitter about it because, and I cannot stress enough how deadly serious I am writing these words, we’ll be insanely lucky if the Palestinian Genocide ends up being the worst humanitarian disaster to come out of Trump’s electoral win. This motherfucker has fully and irreversibly upended 80 years of Pax Americana and now after decades of relative standstill Nuclear Proliferation is once again underway as american allies can no longer rely on the nuclear umbrella and enemies are no longer betting on a coherent and predictable foreign policy. Canada, Poland, South Korea, and probably more are now seriously contemplating or already working on a nuclear weapons program, not to mention that he expedited Iran’s own nuclear program in his first term in case you forgot. The genuine threat of Nuclear War is once again looming on the horizon, even if most people are too dense or too wrapped up in culture wars to notice.

So yeah, I’m real fucking mad at any fucking idiot American who ate the lies and astroturfing about Palestine, who refused to participate in harm reduction and subsequently enabled Trump and potentially doomed the whole of Humanity to a nuclear war in the medium term. From the bottom of my heart, fuck them.

1. This still broadly prevents any slogan from reaching critical mass
2. Eventually, most people are going to be afraid to even try. Self-censorship is actually worse than actual censorship, because it’s insidious and invisible.

It was with Biden, in 2021. He truly went dark Brandon on that one, Macron and the entire French government learned about it through the news.

Though the Australians did stiff themselves spectacularly. They will have to pay billions to the French with nothing to show for it, then billions more to the Americans for nuclear submarines which they could have gotten from the French if they hadn’t told them to design a diesel submarine based on their own nuclear design!! Except now Australia is tied to American nuclear fuel and maintenance, further vassalizing themselves. 5000 IQ move.

Plus now the project is in the hands of Trump and his fox news host of a defense minister so uh good luck with that. By the 2040s I project they’ll have been officially integrated in the Russian chain of command and the submarines will be delivered to Australia in the form of perfect replicas of the Moskva.