Dude, your concept of failure is my dream. I'm happy here.
aasatru
joined 1 year ago
I disagree with your answer, but I think you pointed to the right one.
It's porn. People's constant consumption of porn has completely changed what people perceive to be normal, and preferences has changed with it.
It's a huge change of culture driven by some pretty extreme shit, but we don't talk about it because it's still too much of a taboo to have a public discourse about. Very few men are willing to go into that level of critical self-evaluation of their sexual behaviour, and even less so to do it in public. Women are rarely given a platform to speak out. So what you end up with is women discussing in private about how their one night stand slapped them on the ass so they couldn't walk straight for three days and seemingly thought that was a completely normal thing to do, or going in forcefully cold without foreplay expecting it to be magically enjoyable for both parties.
Our expectations for shaving is just another point where the influence of porn shines through, albeit less violently so.
Sure, that's a different problem entirely. I'm a big proponent of universal income, universal education, and taxing billionaires out of existence.
I don't think it's possible to make up for historical (and soon to be historical, for that matter) injustice by paying for it. I am convinced we need to create a society where these injustices are not decisive for your possibilities in life. So I think we agree on this point.
(Within the academic debate on this, I find the idea of justice in acquisition to be pretty appealing. In particular the article Self-Ownership and Equality: A Lockean Reconciliation by Michael Otsuka from 2006. It's behind a paywall with its original publisher, but if you search for https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.1998.tb00061.x on sci-hub you'll find it. It's less than 30 pages and a pretty light read, as far as I remember)
a) OP is talking about racial divides, not only racism. b) Makes sense, sure. Whether it's acceptable is another question. You don't need full-on communism to erase historical inequality. Even capitalism holds a promise of meritocracy, even though it routinely fails to deliver. In the real world, wealth tax and free universal education can go a long way. But accepting that the descendants of slaves are still poorer than the descendants of their masters and considering it to be anything else than a huge problem is seriously fucked up.
Also, Scandinavian social democracies are pretty egalitarian.
That sounds super interesting! I can't watch the video right now, but look forward to checking it out. Thanks for sharing! :)
I think we carry culture on even when we don't notice, so there's still a lot of Europe left in white Americans even when they don't think about it actively. In the latest episode of Last Week Tonight John Oliver talked about how American tipping culture originates in how the British during the Tudors period would tip servants when being invited to festivities, or something like that. Just as one random example.
DNA tests to try to re-establish heritage is pretty popular among African Americans who can afford it. Samuel Jackson got himself Gabonese citizenship after DNA tests linked him to the Benga people. But entering it that way through a DNA test in adulthood obviously leaves you with a whole lot of catching up to do.
On a more positive note, it seems African nations are often quite welcoming towards African Americans who search for their ancestry. I'm not sure Europeans will extend such goodwill towards our white American cousins for very much longer.
I have never heard of him nor any of his movies, but anyone who manages to put "fuck jeff bezos" into the headlines is a friend of mine.
Racial divides are very much present in South America, but racial tension seems to be a little lighter than in the US. Culturally, Brazil might have gone particularly far down the path of considering everyone part of a shared Brazilian identity, independent of ethnicity. Then again, Brazil has incredible class differences, and how is race distributed between the gated communities and the favela?
One source observes that "[w]hite workers have 74% higher income on average compared to Black and Brown people", so just because the culture might be less racist than the US, the systematic issues are still very much there.
As for race tensions, America has a few original sins. One is slavery, another is genocide. The two meet and interact in an interesting way when one considers cultural genocide: Africans brought to the US as slaves were not only forced to work for free, but they were taken from their families, deprived of their language and culture, and forced to create something new out of their situation. That's the depressing backstory of how blues became so great.
You see this in today's America: What is there of African culture left in African Americans? African music survived and transformed into call and respond in cotton fields, which transformed into rhythm and blues, which eventually became R&B and hiphop. Other than that? I can't think of anything, but maybe I'm ignorant.
In South America, it's a different story. I went to Colombia last year and briefly got to meet some people from the Afrodescendant community working on remembrance. They too were processing not only centuries of slavery and bad treatment, but also more recent horrors of the armed conflict. They did so in ways that embraced their African roots: Their use of colour, their artwork, their whole cultural production still shows clear roots back to Africa. They also have their own food, fuelled as always by "ancestral knowledge". I also felt like their vibe was a mix between South American and African, but that's harder to measure. Importantly however, unlike their American counterparts, there was not a successful effort to cut off these roots made on the basis of pure cruelty. They are highly aware - and proud - of their ancestry.
It's a complex argument, but I think it is an important one to understand why racial divides in the US are so fucked. White Americans are so fucking obsessed about their great grandfather being Irish, yet they don't want to consider the fact that black Americans had their entire history forcefully erased as a potential issue. I think it is an issue, and I think it's part of the reason why tensions run so high in the US.
A word for users of a website to self-identify as a group will rarely not be cringe. Like, come on, is this how you self-identify?
Doesn't work so well here as the content is platform neutral. We're all just "users", really.
They can survive incredibly rough conditions.
If they feel you are threatening them, they won't run away; they'll stand up for themselves and try to scare you away by hissing at you. If this happens, you better fucking run.
Not because they make up any actual threat to you, but because the poor little fellas can get so worked up over this they have a heart attack and die right in front of you. They'll defend their nest until death.
So yeah, don't mess with lemmings. Please. They're too precious.
I use Mbin, but as a mountain person I feel strongly for defending lemmings. They're adorable little hamsters who get really worked up about pretty much anything.
Honestly, lemmings are a good metaphor for the community here. We're tiny, but we stand up and fight against something must larger than ourselves and we refuse to back down. I just hope we don't work ourselves up to a heart attack over it.
A colleage of mine working in the same field recently made a Bluesky post that I found interesting. The kinda stuff I'd share on a good day.
He got four likes and two shares - one of each came from me through Bridgy Fed. I very rarely get that little on Mastodon.
He has almost 800 followers there. I have less than 200 on Mastodon.
My takeaway is that Bluesky has this potential for posts to get pushed into every feed, but if they fall through the cracks of the algorithm they might go completely unnoticed. So you end up changing how you post in order to please the algorithm, losing yourself in the process.
Mastodon just feels chill to me. And I'm bridged, so I can always go viral on Bluesky anyway, I just won't be all that aware of it.