Language acts simply as a constituency signal (“not in my language? Not a voter of mine...”). That is expected and even legitimate - why should a MEP listen to other voices over the ones of people they actually represent? If you really want to influence a MEP, you would get better chances by finding allies in his constituency. This is not really different than with national parliaments.

In terms of this or that national block outvoting a position, it is less frequent than one would expect, and depends largely on how European parties organise. Most parties have some sort of nominated board that agrees a line for the entire group, regardless of national boundaries. Some countries might have a larger influence on the group because of their electoral dynamics (German MEPs for the Greens, for example, will outnumber Italian ones to ridiculous degrees; and some parties are single-country, typically the isolationist ones), but that’s usually not the case in major parties (PSE and PPE).

That's a bit patronizing, and a view of internet users that belongs to the '90s. These voters might (for example) like memes and forums very much, but not value them enough to shift political alliances over a proposal like this. Not everyone lives 10 hours a day on the internet.

Now, I don't know where the majority stands on this issue but being outvoted by the majority is called democracy. The French, even assuming French representatives in the EU are all on the same side, cannot force EU legislation. Any legislation has majority support (including at member states' governments level).

This is a very interesting twitter thread. The script, and the posted screenshots, repeatedly demonstrate the solution to a single very simple math problem for particular values of input variables. It seems that Alec Muffett is relying on the idea that he wrote a script -- a script which was easy to write and solves a very easy problem -- to provide more credibility than the laws of probability have in their own right, which is -- to me -- 100% backwards. If your script disagrees with the math, particularly at this level, the odds are overwhelming that your script has a bug, not that the math was wrong.

TLDR: In an optimistic estimate, to stop 300 illegitimate copyright infringing posting, we would have to block 150.000 non-infringing posts.

Whoever suggests this as a policy, must have received serious payoffs to close their eyes for the overwhelmingly negative effects this law will have.

Some countries are also really self centered in terms of news, etc. Here in Spain, for example, most national news deal mostly with corruption scandals, political issues in Catalonia, sports, and little else. Geopolitical and/or European issues are given surprisingly little time considering we're the fifth largest economy in the union (about to be the fourth after/if the UK leaves).

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It is also still the only language that is taught as a foreign language in close to all primary and secondary schools in the Union. It's the most spoken language in the Union. It's relatively easy to learn as a foreign language. It's also the de facto language of international trade, of science, of culture and of international diplomacy (sorry France).

There’s still the Irish.

A better question is why not Spanish?

However I'm just looking at my kids that are tri-lingual at the moment with fourth in the works and they prefer to use English even though we actively force them to speak my wife's and my native languages at home... which are of European group too, so not even close in complexity to Chinese or Arabic. English has less exceptions, there is no conjugation, no gender-specific adjective forms, not that many verb tenses, etc. It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.

EDIT: You edited your comment, so:

> English has less exceptions

Where? Verb tenses form essentially at random.

> It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.

I disagree. It might not have conjugation, genders, etc, but it managed to more than make up for the lack of complexity with superb amounts of complexity in spelling, phrasal verbs, irregular verbs, etc.

This just sounds like cherry-picking. You're completely glossing over the issue of spelling being insane and concluding that the language is easy because there are no gendered adjectives and many tenses, even though the existing tenses are largely completely irregular.

It's just so far ahead in these structural things that supporting any other language does not seem to make any sense anymore at this point.

I could speak and understand decent English when I was less than 10 or so due to watching so many subtitled shows and playing video games.

My native language is Finnish. Which is farther from English than Hindi (Which is in indo-european language tree unlike Finnish).

The biggest obstacle to using something like Mandarin is the writing system. Hieroglyphs are imho just fundamentally inferior to systems using alphabets.

As an American, I've been studying German for about 15 years, but although I've never officially studied Spanish, I speak and understand casual Spanish better then I do German. I wouldn't be able to read a Spanish novel like I can in German, but I can understand Spanish speakers and text message Spanish speakers far better than I can in German. All of this is from picking up the language through media, listening to Spanish speakers in my town, and hearing some of my wife's family speaking Spanish to each other.

German, on the other hand, is very difficult for me to encounter on the street and nearly as difficult to find cultural material to consume (Amazon carries German-language Harry Potter, 50 Shades of Grey, and that's about it).

There is a lot to be said about passively learning a language just from hearing it constantly.

Every language is irregular because humans are irregular, but I don't think it is justified to paint English as somehow more difficult than other languages. The difficulty of a language just depends on the languages you already know, prior exposure, available resources to learn it etc - and the last two of these are typically much better for English than most other languages.

Male

> or wondering which one of 14 cases to use.

14 cases (rules) are much easier to remember that thousands of specific cases.

- Because English already has a great momentum (with the number of speakers of English as a second language, pop culture and the Internet)?