Ah, well, fuck. Then I don't really have a positive spin on it.
Maybe the US crashing and burning will at least limit US influence on the Arab world, opening at least a slight hope for improvements in the region in the long run. It's a weird world - yesterday it was Europe and the US against the rest, today Europe stands alone and Russia is paralysed in Syria. Maybe tomorrow we'll see genuine alliances between Europe and countries in the Arab world that are not entirely built around exploitation and sucking up to dictators.
I hate myself for being pedantic, but: You haven't emigrated yet. Immigration is coming, emigration is leaving.
I'm guessing you're from Iran? The only good thing I can really say is that they're as afraid of you as you are of them. But they are fucking terrifying, and as you well know you're right to be careful. I can't believe the stuff we seemingly choose to turn a blind eye to coming from foreign authoritarian regimes on European soil.
It only post to communities where it has explicitly been made welcome, either after you talking to the admins or in a community you run
A lot of people, myself included, are hesitant to take the time to look at content if nobody took the time to manually share it. But for a use-case like you mentioned, for a local community that is too small to be established naturally any time soon, I think it could make sense. Especially for local news — YouTube videos should maybe still go through a human screening before being shared.
I guess it might make sense for some people, not for others. It does allow you to see things from a little bit of a different angle, especially in the all feed.
I'm not American thank god, but it matches the experiences of American women I have talked to about it. And it matches experiences of European women I've talked to. And I wouldn't be surprised if it held true other places as well.
The amount and nature of porn being consumed obviously affects people's expectations everywhere it is happening. I'm sure this argument does not apply to secluded tribes in the Amazon or whatever, but that's just not what I'm talking about here.
Of course people have shaved since they figured out how to do it, and there have been trends throughout history. But good luck finding another moment in history where a large portion of society thought there was something wrong with an unshaved private part, regardless of gender.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's a Reddit post for the Toyota cybertruck, which looks pretty legit to me. I also really love it - I can't tell if it's the fact that it's an incredibly unconvincing camouflage, or that it looks like it's trying to ruin Toyota's good name by signing it on this piece of junk.
There's also a picture of a Tesla with an Audi sticker going around, but that one was posted to Reddit two years ago so before Elon Musk went full nazi. I like that one because if I saw it in traffic I would have genuinely believed it was an Audi - I don't give enough of a shit about modern car design to notice. Maybe until it starts making fart sounds or crashes into something because the driver is occupied with the gigantic dashboard iPad. But I digress.
Not everything on the internet is fake. There's a bunch of Tesla owners out there, and a lot of them are looking for ways to communicate that driving their car is not an endorsement of fascism.
I've been considering buying some nice stickers that can achieve similar effects without destroying the car, and leaving them under the windshield wipers of parked Teslas around town with alongside a friendly note. I'm sure some people would be happy to use them.
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.
Ah, well, fuck. Then I don't really have a positive spin on it.
Maybe the US crashing and burning will at least limit US influence on the Arab world, opening at least a slight hope for improvements in the region in the long run. It's a weird world - yesterday it was Europe and the US against the rest, today Europe stands alone and Russia is paralysed in Syria. Maybe tomorrow we'll see genuine alliances between Europe and countries in the Arab world that are not entirely built around exploitation and sucking up to dictators.
Maybe. But I'm not holding my breath.