sxan
@sxan@midwest.social
🅸 🅰🅼 🆃🅷🅴 🅻🅰🆆.
𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍
- Comment on Why don't low birth-rate countries make immigration to their country easier? 22 hours ago:
Because people fear having their culture and race replaced by immigrants. Even if they’re not overtly racist, few people wish to become a minority in “their own country.”
The US is famously a melting pot, and yet we still have a bunch of descendants of white immigrants from Europe who fear that South Americans will take over; that Mexican culture will replace good old-fashioned hodge-podge Western European culture. That their language will become less dominant. That they’ll find themselves strangers in their own country.
It’s usually an indistinct fear. It seems obvious from the verbiage in the dog-whistles, but white European immigrant descendants don’t want to become second-class.
Now, if we treated our own minorities well, they wouldn’t be so afraid. They wouldn’t be afraid that they’d be the ones with Hispanic cops kneeling on their necks; or that Hispanic immigrants would be living in giant homes and they’d themselves be the ones having to eak out a living as seasonal workers.
I think it’s not despicable to want to preserve your cultural heritage, your cultural language, and to have your country legislated with the values you grew up with; but people react poorly when they think it’s happening.
What I most despise in the Republicans in the US is that they’re advocating for preserving cultural values that never existed broadly in the US. The closest subculture to what they’re pushing is a return to the Confederate South: religion, and white supremacy. The Confederates got their asses handed to them, but the racist fuckers never gave up their values, most most Americans are blind to what their real agenda is. And they’ve been good insurgents, cleverly taking advantage of weak areas in our democracy to return power to a minority: themselves. It’s been said and it’s true: if America was a true democracy and we selected leaders by popular vote, no Republican under their current platform would ever be president again.
Anyway, getting back to your question: immigrants bring their own culture with them, and very few completely abandon it and adopt the culture and language of their new country. This dilutes the host country’s native culture, and people are afraid of that. In the US, it’s the highest form of hypocrisy, because our native culture displaced the indigenous culture, and now we’re afraid of someone else doing the same to us.
- Comment on Air Friar 1 day ago:
- Comment on Life pro tip: Maybe give her some pointers if it's her first blow job. 2 days ago:
That’s not how I meant it.
There’s a cultural value in virginity in girls. It’s pretty common across cultures: for marriage, virgin women are more desirable than non-virgins. It’s biased; the virginity only increases value for girls, and it probably stems from men wanting to be sure than any prodigy are actually theirs. Women can be nearly 100% sure a kid they have is theirs (not quite 100%, as there’s a brief period when a channeling swap could conceivably be made), but the men can never be certain. The best odds you have is to get yourself a virgin. So female virginity has been valued through history (by men), and I think this is where the fetish of having sex with virgins comes from.
That’s what I’m taking about. I’ve never understood the appeal of “being a girl’s/boy’s first.”
- Comment on Life pro tip: Maybe give her some pointers if it's her first blow job. 2 days ago:
I have never, ever, understood the appeal of virginity. Who prefers someone who is uncomfortable, awkward, and doesn’t have any experience?
This has always baffled me. This is one reason why I think sex workers should hold a high status in society: they provide an valuable service in training the uninitiated and unskilled. It’s like taking tennis lessons, and all your future partners should be grateful for their lessons.
- Comment on Air Friar 2 days ago:
Man I hope there’s a brace across his back, because a human’s arms are not strong enough to overcome that much resistance.
But it there were a sturdy brace, that looks like almost enough resistance to keep him from dying, if he can keep from tumbling. Which he probably can’t.
Yeah, that guy’s best outcome is a lot of broken bones.
- Comment on All political views should end with the word boy in a southern voice. 2 days ago:
Yeah, it’d have to be a Lemmy design change, and then all of the many clients would have to implement it… momentum is a powerful force in the software world, and difficult and dangerous to overcome. Look at the fiasco of Python 3; that was a cock-up of epic proportions. Lemmy’s got enough users and clients now that changes have to be made extremely carefully.
- Comment on The US population only accounts for 4.2% of the world. 2 days ago:
which is what I’d wager many think of when you say “the Internet”
I wager you’d be right, but most people are wrong.
I’m saying that everything is built on foundations that are fundamentally English and American, and this influenced even Berners-Lees’s creation. HTTP and HTML were fundamentally ASCII. DNS and the WWW eventually evolved broader encoding support, but it’s clearly tacked-on and awkward. All you need to do is look at URL encoding rules as proof.
I’m not saying it’s right; I’m just saying there consequences of an English, American-centric design of what underlies all computer technology today is evident at all higher levels, no matter how hard we try to mask them.
- Comment on All political views should end with the word boy in a southern voice. 3 days ago:
They need a “follow accounts” button here. Like if a reporter used
Thank you!
And: dude! I have totally thought the same thing! It’s so weird that Mastodon has follow-accounts, but no communities; Lemmy has join-communities but no follow-accounts; and they’re both ActivityPub. You’d think that would be a no-brainer feature, right?
- Comment on All political views should end with the word boy in a southern voice. 3 days ago:
I think most non-Southerners’ exposure to it is in media, where it’s almost always racist in context. There’s a surprising amount of subtly in Southern social interactions that I think it’s missing from most of the US. Sure, Midwesterners are known for raising passive-aggressiveness to an art form, but you recognize it no matter where you’re from.
The subtly in social interactions in the South are truly exceptional, hard to get a handle on, and unmatched anywhere else in the US - IMHO. Southerners have as many ways of being condescending as Eskimos have words for snow.
Is that phrase still acceptable, or is the Eskimo/snow comment now not PC? Is it still OK to use the term “Eskimo?” If the Eskimo thing is offensive, I sincerely apologize. An alternative would be “as North-westerners have words for rain,” but I don’t know if that’s as widely understood an idiom.
- Comment on The US population only accounts for 4.2% of the world. 3 days ago:
The internet originated in the US. All of the original specs were made by Americans. ASCII is literally built around English, and ASCII is at the foundation of every single core technology of the internet. Hell, even when they designed UTF-8, it was still Western-centric; to this day it gets some push back from the Orient, because it’s makes things harder for them - I think there was a fight to standardize on UTF-16 because it was easier for Asian languages; I may not be remembering the details correctly, but there’s some legitimate beef some Asian languages have with UTF-8.
Now, obviously, more non-Americans are on the internet than Americans, but it’s the same argument as Critical Race Theory: when the entire foundation and infrastructure is built on a bias, that bias influences all interactions even when isn’t overtly obvious, or even intentional.
- Comment on All political views should end with the word boy in a southern voice. 4 days ago:
It’s always demeaning. Calling a full-grown man of any race “boy” is belittling them. Yes, there’s a special racist association, but it’s been used as much on white men. The female equivalent might be “little girl.”
“What do you think you’re doing, little girl?”
It might have the same effect as simply “girl” if said the right way, but “girl” has been more normalized and sexualized, so it’s a little different.
Anyway, the terms are belittling, and therefore demeaning, regardless of race. The point of using them is to position yourself over that person, as a parent over a child; it’s shorthand for saying they are beneath you.
- Comment on All political views should end with the word boy in a southern voice. 4 days ago:
“… that meltdown, boy.”
You’re doing it, I say, you’re doing it wrong, boy.
- Comment on Just Plain Terrifying 5 days ago:
Ah, but I agree with you! It’s commendable that we care for our weak who would otherwise die.
The other wolf, though, thinks there’s a good chance the stupid are going to drive us to extinction.
Thanks for not taking offense when you legitimately could have. Reason 1 why Lemmy > Reddit.
- Comment on Just Plain Terrifying 5 days ago:
Maybe? Natural selection seems to work for the rest of everything in nature. But humans are special, aren’t we? Above nature; different rules apply to us, nature itself treats us differently.
I do agree that humans are fundamentally different in that more of our individual value is learned than inherited. OTOH, more of our value is learned than inherited, and that’s where the problem lies. It’s not there genes, it’s the parents and the parenting. I’m not suggesting we’ll improve humanity by removing stupidity through evolution; I’m saying there are a lot of people who I don’t believe are fit to raise children. And there’s a corpus of examples that could support that argument; how about that guy who literally shook his infant to death last week? Good father, him?
I’m not a parent myself, and I will never be one. Maybe I’d make a good father, maybe not. But I’m not breeding, so taking me out doesn’t affect the gene pool; I’m not playing in the gene pool.
And, no, I did not misunderstand the point. What I said was that if I could get a guarantee that others would also be removed, I’d volunteer to be in the group.
That was hyperbole, BTW; if I really believed it, I’d go to a Trump rally with a bunch of C4 and ball bearings wrapped around my torso. Even if I were an Einstein, it’d be a net benefit to humanity.
- Submitted 5 days ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on Just Plain Terrifying 6 days ago:
Dude. If I could guarantee that my sacrifice would also remove some N>1 number of dumbshits who shouldn’t be contributing to the ecological load the Earth’s ecosystem is bearing, I’d volunteer.
The Idiocracy intro got a lot of things right.
- Comment on How long would it take to create a Pyramid today? 6 days ago:
Of course not. Aliens don’t use slavery.
- Comment on New evidence US blocked Ukraine-Russia peace deal, and a new Ukrainian excuse for walking away 6 days ago:
My wife totally blocked me from paying $30,000 to fill our driveway with human shit. I mean, I wasn’t going to do it anyway, but still… she totally blocked me.
- Comment on Extreme sports are weird 6 days ago:
Yeah, me neither. I’ve liked some horror genre stories, like Clive Barker’s Book(s?) of Blood, Rawhead Rex and all; but I wouldn’t say it was because it made me afraid.
If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say a lot of people do, or else slasher flicks wouldn’t be so popular. Hell, some years it seems as if that’s the only genre of movies released.
But, I also loath the cringe inducing reality shows many people love; and I’m so very tired of every show having to be nonstop angst and tension: GoT was the pinnacle of this, and I absolutely hated it. Books and TV. Boardwalk Empire was so frustrating, because it so well written, acted, and produced, but I just can’t stand the unrelieved tension. Obviously, a took of people do, or else there’d be more diversity in media. It’s like, the one tool media writers know how to use, anymore.
I say all this because I wonder if there’s a correlation: what’s the overlap between people who don’t like being jump-scared or otherwise frightened and the people who don’t like watching people being made uncomfortable (a-la Borat); or constantly bickering (The Kardashians). I love action movies, and a good adventure sci-fi or fantasy, so I’m not adverse to conflict, but I won’t watch Breaking Bad because - while I’m aware it was an excellent series - I also know it’s going to be a non-stop angst-fest, like The Sopranos.
It’d be an interesting survey. Maybe a list of shows and movies with a simple “enjoy/don’t enjoy”, and secretly ranked by dominant emotional manipulation. Is it an endearing love story tinged with bittersweet? A slasher? A torture-tension (what’s Saw? Not a slasher). See how people are grouped.
- Comment on Extreme sports are weird 6 days ago:
I’m afraid you’ve angered me, Sir!
- Comment on Technically, almost all video games are puzzle games. 1 week ago:
(I didn’t downvote you - it wasn’t me!)
Yeah. I think anything that passes time by giving you dopamine hits qualifies as a game. However, that wasn’t my point. I was saying, you declared a statement, and then when given counter-examples, declare they aren’t really games because they don’t meet your previously declared statement. It’s a logical fallacy.
- Comment on Technically, almost all video games are puzzle games. 1 week ago:
I would argue those are not really games though.
You were doing well until the No Real Scotsman fallacy.
- Comment on tread upon lands fair and foul 1 week ago:
At first I read “Portland,” saw my mistake, shrugged and thought, “either way.”
I’ve never been to Poland. I’m sure it’s nicer than Portland.
- Comment on Farting 1 week ago:
Few abilities will protect you from muggings as the ability to squirt substances from your ass on demand.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
When I was in the Army, shaving was the bane of my existence. Well, shaving in the field was; I hated it so much. Never enough water, more shit to carry, winters are the worst because getting hot water is hard enough, and shaving with cold water sucks.
So, like OP, I found hair remover for men, and I’m like, “WTH why do men shave when we have this??”
The answer is: because these are all noxious chemicals, they feel like noxious chemicals, they smell like noxious chemicals, and they leave your skin raw and red. They really are only useful for guys for whom normal shaving is even worse, usually because of a tendency to ingrown hair problems from shaving. Or maybe there are guys with sandpaper skin; I don’t know. But there’s a reason why men (at least) still shave.
Someday maybe there will be a depilatory that’s as gentle as it is in sci-fi, but right now it’s just a caustic, irritating hot mess.
I really feel for OP. :-(
- Comment on I just realised that this is not a painting by René Magritte 5 weeks ago:
😆 that’s a good one! I haven’t seen it before, and I thought I’d gone through all of them (to date)! Cheers!
- Comment on Starbuck milkshake is like tobacco 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, something went wrong. Probably PEBCAK, but let’s blame the software, shall we?
- Comment on I just realised that this is not a painting by René Magritte 1 month ago:
Agreed. OP did well.
And it’s an opportunity for me to re-post this seminal picture (or, one instance of it):
Image by Wendy D. Stolyarov
- Comment on Starbuck milkshake is like tobacco 1 month ago:
It doesn’t. I was trying to reply to someone else who was saying there was more than the two extremes of drinks.
- Comment on If one conjoined twin commits a murder without the consent of their twin, will both have to go to prison or nobody? 1 month ago:
Looks like an interesting documentary. One of the twins looks remarkably like Matt Damon!
A Drug Homily
