#(this is not to generalize all the usamericans but some of people there is just straight out dumb and ignorant asf *sigh* 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️)

[chronicangel]

I think what this person is getting caught up on is "American" as a demonym for living people.

When referring to a group of people as Americans without additional qualifiers (e.g. South American), most of the time we're talking about USAmericans because that is just the demonym that the US uses. (And like, we're not exactly spoiled for choice. What else would we do? Statesians? Uniters? Bleh.) When we talk about our nationalities, we typically refer to ourselves by demonym—Irish, Brazilian, Pakistani, Kiwi, etc. Sometimes we refer to ourselves by a demonym based on city, state, or territory, too—New Yorker, Parisian, Quebecois, Masshole (I'm KIDDING).

It's only occasionally that broader continental labels like European or African come up (except for you, Australia), and I think it's also less and less common the larger and more diverse a continent is—for example, I hear European by itself way more often than I hear just African or just Asian. And all of them almost always come with some additional context. Eastern European, South Asian, North African, and... well, okay, Middle Eastern is kind of a complicated thing on its own in the first place, but still. And even then, all of those are united continents all clumped together by a combination of geography, history, and culture (again, except for you, Australia).

If you tell someone, "I'm European," it's all going to be in the same general geographic region regardless of which country you specify or whether you specify a country at all. Which is not to say that Europe isn't wonderfully geographically and culturally diverse, I just mean that if you get me a map the size of a piece of printer paper, I can cover all of Europe with like, one finger. Maybe two, since I've got baby hands. But covering both North and South America would take a whole baby hand. (My baby hands, not infant hands. It'd probably take both of those. Maybe more than one baby, even.) Saying, "I'm American," to refer to all of North, Central, and South America gives you even less information than just saying, "I'm European," does, and that'll usually already net you questions about which country (or city or area, depending on the asker's familiarity) you're from.

All that being said, the reason that we use American as a term to refer to North, Central, and South America sometimes is because of things like history and culture (and even a little bit of geography). "Wait, didn't you just say that continents are united by those things, these are different continents!" I hear you yelling at your computer, and yes, I did say that, but when we're not talking about currently living human people, the degree of specificity that we need to use varies significantly more depending on context.

For example, when we're talking about indigenous Americans, that can refer to the 574 tribes currently federally recognized in the United States. Or maybe it's referring to the Mesoamericans who were the dominant cultural indigenous group in the Americas for over 3000 years, including when North America welcomed (I am using this term facetiously) its first European settlers in the late 15th and early 16th centuries—only, wait, Mesoamerica doesn't overlap with the US at all, it spans Central Mexico down to Costa Rica. And, I mean, the first indigenous people that Columbus and his crew ran into and promptly fucked over were in the Bahamas (which is, for those keeping score, not in the US). And maybe they've changed the curriculum since I was a lass, but personally speaking, when we learned about American history in school, my teachers always started with the Aztecs (Mexico), the Incas (Peru and Chile), and the Mayans (Mesoamerica).

And if we're talking about American politics, yes, obviously the United States has our own nightmare going on, but there is still a whole continent over here (two of them!), and occasionally, we interact with each other. Once we're at the point of trying to build a wall at the border and tossing out tariffs at any country they'll stick to, like, "Mexican American" is a different term that means a different thing in addition to just being kind of a mouthful (and yes, okay, in writing it would be Mexican-American, but sometimes people do this thing where we go outside and we talk to other people out loud with our mouth parts), and "North American" will only work as long as we stick to bullying our two immediate neighbors. Which... seems unlikely, considering.

So we have the term American, which means people who live in the United States or hail from the United States or some combination thereof. And then we have the term American, which means someone or something who at some point did something important in North, South, or Central America. And the former is useful for grumbling online or self-identifying where you are or are not from, and the latter is useful for talking about broad historical and cultural movements. Like, if you take an American History class, even in the US, it doesn't generally start in 1776 (or 1607, or 1492, pick your favorite). Not to say that most of it won't be about the US, we're pretty self-important like that, but part of that self-importance is also wanting to act like we're older and cooler than we are.

And you might be saying, "Well, the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans are dead, so they're probably not participating in Tumblr polls, and I doubt the President of the United States is on here either." Which, wrong, I stole his shoelaces. But moving past that, it still doesn't really hurt anybody to be more specific, does it? I mean, it certainly doesn't hurt the people descended from those ancient American populations we tried so hard to destroy and failed, thank G-d. It doesn't hurt USAmericans, who could stand to get our inflated senses of self-importance checked and remember that the US does not encompass even most of the Americas, so maybe we can share our toys (or our demonyms, as the case may be). It doesn't hurt the people making Tumblr polls, who have limited options for answers and need to be as specific as possible to make sure dumb dumbs online know what they're talking about.

So like, yeah, we know what people mean when they say "Americans" 99% of the time, because 99% of the time it's the US, and 99% of the time we deserved it. But like, really, why not be more specific? Why not acknowledge that there's more to America than the United States, much as we try to pretend otherwise? If it's helpful, think of "USAmerican" the way you would think of "East Asian," or maybe try to treat it as like a South African vs. Southern African thing, if that makes more sense.

Of course, I'm pretty confident sandersstudies already knows all this, and that taking a screenshot of a dictionary was just a faster and easier way to explain than writing all of this out, so I'm not trying to like, counter her or educate her or anything. But since anon felt the need to be so insanely snarky, I thought maybe they'd like to know.

USAmerican is not a word

- A Brazilian

(We don’t call ourselves American)

Just because you don’t, or don’t know someone who does, doesn’t mean that it’s not in common use. Also, it never hurts just to be extra-specific, even if USAmerican is effectively a synonym for American to most.

[gxtzeizm]

well in case if people aware about me yapping about mobile legends esports these days, noticed that i literally slanders a lot about this one particular guy who is a pro player in north america region named mobazane who once slandered malaysia region as an "easy server" which in other words, degraded about our server region...which atp idgaf anymore about those slander, srg and malaysia already proved it wrong by winning two major international tournaments this year....but posting an insta story of a photo of malaysian flag when he arrived in klia airport then label it with "noob" on it is just absolutely vile and disgusting asf wtf💀💀💀

[psychotrenny]

Given how unprincipled Liberals tend to have so much of their world view shaped by personal anecdotal experiences, the mass movement of USamericans to Chinese Social media may lead to a significant improvement in the general US public's attitude towards China. Like many USamericans will see first hand that the PRC is not some nightmarish 1984 hellstate inhabited by soulless drones. Whatever problems and differences China still seems to have, it's ultimately just a country like any other inhabited by people like any other and by seeing how those people live, interacting with them on a personal basis, this fact will become clear no matter how much Anti-Communism and Orientalism your average yank had absorbed beforehand.

While the most enthusiastic US chauvinists largely won't be the ones making the switch (too worried about their national pride and "Chinese Spyware") even the background influence from the less chauvinistic people in their life may slowly but surely wear away at the most vicious parts of their attitude. Not to mention the influence it will have on the yanks who hate their own government more than the PRC but haven't developed a position of principled anti-Imperialism, the sort who still believe a lot of lies about China even if they still see the US government as a worse or more personally relevant threat. The massive influence of the US on the other countries in their sphere of influence may also spread a general softening of public attitude towards China, even to the countries that don't contain a significant number of Chinese Social Media users. I don't think all that many people will become Marxist-Leninist purely through Xiaohongshu, but a sympathetic Liberal is still a massive improvement over chauvinist sabre-rattling.

While the general lack of genuine popular participation in Liberal Democracy makes this unlikely to influence any government positions towards China, a more China-sympathetic public at least makes it politically harder to engage in open acts of provocation and aggression. And while the Imperialist Media establishment will doubtless be working extra hard to correct this deviation, their job will become more and more difficult as their lies becoming increasingly obvious even for apathetic and "apolitical" Liberals. For as long as Social Media has existed it has primarily been a tool for Imperialism to manufacture consent and misdirect opposition. Yet now China's gradual but persistent strategy of advance seems to have paid off and Imperialist forces will find themselves increasingly threatened by the tools they once monopolised. This sort of development obviously isn't world-shattering by itself (we won't be seeing any "Xiaohongshu Revolutions") but it's a step in right direction; another contradiction added to the stack that's weighing Imperialism down and tearing it apart from within

[elbiotipo]

I remember I once got into an argument in a forum, where I said that from my observation on how the US military is revered and treated (both parties agree in two things: keeping the neoliberal order and funding the military), there is a very, very real possibility that in the not too distant future the military might just say "fuck it" and dispense with the whole pretense or democracy, or more likely, make it a supervised """democracy""" (like the Concordancia here in Argentina, or Frondizi who had his hands tied and when he went too far he was couped)

The Usamericans* argued back with me with an argument so silly that I was baffled it was their main one: that soldiers in the US ~make an oath~ to ~defend the Constitution~ and so they wouldn't do a coup, ever.

I can't even start to tell how stupid that was but newsflash, EVERY military around the world swears an oath, and most coups happen when they, in fact, use it as an excuse to "save the nation" from some enemy. Which the US military already does all the time, under "democratic" "supervision". If tomorrow, a bunch of generals decided they don't even care about the whole democracy thing anymore, every single soldier would fall in line, because that's what soldiers do. There won't be a Hero Moment where they would realize The Error Of Their Ways and try to stop the Bad General, they will obey orders. Because that's what soldiers do.

Armies, if they exist at all, should be strictly controlled by a democratic goverment accountable to and serving the people. The US army is way beyond that, it only serves itself and someday, it will decide that it doesn't even need the whole pretense any longer. And if people don't resist now, it will be even harder when they take control.

*some of them ex-military, so they apparently really believed this

[what-even-is-thiss]

In English, North America and South America are two different continents but in Spanish they’re just one continent and continents are a made up concept and what constitutes as a continent has no useful definition that fits all of our regular lists of continents and why are Europe and Asia and Africa three different continents in the first place and is Australia actually just a very big island?

Anyways that’s why I don’t type things like USAmerican because in English they’re just Americans but I understand why some people do get annoyed with that but at the same time I’ve seen zero Spanish speakers in my personal life argue for speaking that way in English and I guess my point is that we should probably be more aware of how certain people see themselves and be respectful of that but also at the same time I’m an English speaking person in an English speaking country and if I use America to refer to what we call The Americas in my everyday life people will assume I’ve made a mental typo or that I’m being contrarian and if I tried to make that a thing in my everyday speech patterns I’d come off as a pretentious idiot. If I’m speaking Spanish that’s a different story. Then yeah there’s other words for US Americans like estadounidense. Or famously gringo, more colloquially.

I’m not looking to start arguments here. Like I said I totally get why people make that distinction. But there’s also like the nuances of the lived reality of living in certain cultural contexts that I think people forget about.

I’m not here to tell you to not make that distinction in your speech. I’m not even here to tell you that you’re not allowed to be frustrated about it. I’m just here to explain why I don’t do that and why most English speaking people don’t and why it’s not inherently malicious when people do. Like if someone fully dismisses your perspective on the issue and how you view your own identity yes they’re the asshole. But also generally in English it’s The Americas or North, Central, and South America. And yes maybe that’s stupid but so is the existence of Europe as a concept and we all seem to believe that Europeans are a real thing.

And to reiterate. I’m not trying to tell anybody how to speak or how to feel here. Just trying to insert some nuance into this conversation. Because people I call Americans and you might call USAmericans are only gonna call ourselves Americans. That’s just how we view ourselves, how we understand our own identity as a nation. And some people will be jerks about it. But many of us are also just living in the world we live in, referring to ourselves in the way we always have, not aiming to tell anyone else how they ought to view themselves.

I’m American. Soy estadounidense. Some stuff unfortunately gets lost in translation.

Also continents don’t exist. If we try to get rid of the concept of continents we’d all be too confused at all times to have these disagreements. Confusion superiority. We go by tectonic plates. California is on the same continent as Japan now.

[batmanego]

i'm personally unsurprised. but i am worried -- this election (like all previous) impacts not just the people in america but the world at large. some of the people most impacted by this election and american politics in general are the people in gaza. one such person is my dear friend nader.

nader is only 17 years old and is taking on the unimaginable burden of not just surviving the current genocide in gaza, but helping support his entire family as well. this is not something he can do alone. he and his family have been displaced over nine times, and were very recently incredibly close to heavy bombardment.

they're over halfway to their goal, but they cannot do this alone. if the election is on your mind, if politics are a concern of yours, please please please match my donation of €10. if you can't match that, donate €5 or even €1.

nader is my friend. i shouldn't have to say that in order to argue for his right to live and live unimpeded and freely. please help him and his family.

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

USAmerican Christians and anti-Christians alike need to get something in their heads: White male Christians are in the minority.

And I'm not even talking about people who claim to be Christian but I believe are "bad" christians. I mean out of people that claim the religion, white men are in the minority. In the States? It's black people, and in particular black women (can confirm just from experience as a black person btw). Followed closely by Latinos.

As of now, the title of "most Christian" continent is Africa, with Latin America next, and finally Europe (tho I am suspicious of this last one).

"In terms of population distribution, Christianity will be chiefly a religion of Africa and the African diaspora, which will, in a sense, be the heartland of Christianity.” - Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom.

As such, truly devout Christians have more in common with someone we would consider "inconceivably poor" than with someone from your own location, economic status, and political party who does not believe in Jesus.

And this is all very important. To quote Dr Gina A. Zurlo, "We have a lot to learn from people who live in greater religious diversity (Asia , I’m looking at you); from Christians who have lived and worked among Muslim populations for generations (sub-Saharan Africa, that’s you); from Christians who deal with the negative consequences of climate change most acutely (yep, Oceania, that’s you); and, well, Latin America, we have a lot to learn from you, too (especially your neighbor, the USA!)."

The multi-ethnic family of God/humanity is the entire story of the bible. Understanding that is crucial. Please for the love of God do not diminish your thoughts on Christianity to some fundamentalist baptist from the American South. This is the most diverse religion in the world, we ought to start acting like it.

Tl;dr: your conviction that Christianity is a white man's religion is racist and Euro-American centric. Christianity was born in the Middle East and went to Africa before it ever reached Greece or Rome.

[txttletale]

genuinely curious as to why you like catch-22. all i’ve got from fans is “it’s funny” so um. im wondering if u have anything more detailed than that bc as a hater i respect ur opinion

iu mean i hate to do this to you but "it's funny" is a big part of it. i guess to go into more detail i like it for similar reasons to alice, i like that it's a novel that treats language as a game, and i like the added layer here that there are some characters in the novel who absolutely cannot afford for language to be a game, characters in the novel for whom this game has real and permanent consequences. and it extends language as a game to warfare as a game, to economics as a game (milo explaining his stupid egg arbitrage is probably the funniest part of the book to me)--which i think is very insightful about, like, simultaneously the power of language and the way that power is only real if backed by actual physical power. much like alice it speaks to all of my experiences with people and institutions who have power over me and the bizarre logics they employ as well as just the general careless malice of them. and i also think it's insightful into a bunch of generic usamerican-specific neuroses

[aroaceleovaldez]

i'm so happy you brought back up the topic of rick's shitty writing of anyone even remotely non white / "white passing"

with that being said, do you think the shitty script he gave to annabeth in the show has to do with him just being deeply uninterested in adapting his story to include characters of color? bc it seems like once rick encounters a character that cannot be easily erased all ethnic or racial identity of to fit them into an usamerican specifically white ass narrative, he gets lost.

i just keep thinking how the only thing that "changed" about annabeth as presented in the show was her race but her plot relevance and her characterization got downgraded severely. meanwhile percy, whiter than before (wheres the mediterranean god look......................................), got half her functions. like i just look at rick in context and i wonder if he just gives so little fuck about characters of color he cant even write a decent character arc for an adaptation of a very established persona

thoughts? thank u!

I wouldn't be surprised if it's Rick (and the writer's room, since it actually seems Rick isn't all that heavily involved if much at all with the script itself based on some interviews) just has internal biases that he refuses to reflect on. It would be a consistent trend with the uptick in offensive writing in the books themselves (see: the troglodytes in general, all the Jewish kids in CHB being in Hermes cabin, etc etc). Rick seems to want to engage with these topics but refuses to actually assess how he's approaching it and his own biases while also overemphasizing his engagement with the topics. It's a kind of big talk/words vs actions type thing to me.

[this got a wee bit long so throwing it under a cut]

I was having a couple of conversations about this topic recently - one being group reading/discussion of WottG and how, allegedly, the slightly different characterizations in that book are inspired by the actors in the show. Annabeth is repeatedly and frequently described as motherly and maternal in the book, plus some other misc characterizations that make you tilt your head and go "Wait, what about Leah made you want to write Annabeth this way?" and concerns about it leaning into stereotypes. (It's also strange, because in the show Sally is MUCH more aggressive and less maternal, and this is painted like it's supposed to be a girlboss thing cause her being too soft and motherly was too weak or something? But now book Annabeth is now being described as all soft and maternal??? What. What is happening.)

Another conversation that i had with my therapist (cause we talk about pjo a lot lol) and later repeated and discussed more with other folks on discord more specifically regarding the show was a lot of discussion about the casting. Particularly casting choices and how the writing either is refusing to take casting into consideration to respectfully approach how things would be changed to avoid problems or are actively changing the script for characters in a way that is potentially if not downright offensive. Clarisse is the number one example i bring up because a lot of people say that the reason a plus sized actress wasn't cast for her was to avoid the "fat bully" trope. The thing is, there is ALSO a POC bully trope that is just as bad if not worse, so if they were actually taking offensive tropes into consideration one would expect them to avoid that too (especially since Percy was cast as a pasty white boy - which just makes it all look worse)? (Also other plus-sized characters like Dionysus and Gabe were also cast as skinny, same with Tyson. So it just seems like they don't want to cast plus-sized actors either.)

But also they're rewriting stuff that actively puts the casting decisions into worse tropes. Like hey, why is Percy (a white guy) the one who knows the "real" versions of all these myths and is expositioning them to Annabeth (a black girl), who in the books is supposed to know more than him? Why does he know better than her for some reason and have to guide her? Why is Percy teaching Annabeth about pop culture and how to be a kid? Not to mention stuff like the show constantly encouraging the viewer to doubt or distrust characters like Grover and Clarisse and Annabeth as red herrings as to who the traitor is. Plus there's no adjustments to stuff from the books like Annabeth initially being somewhat aggressive/antagonistic towards Percy, or Clarisse's aggression and bullying towards Percy to try and circumvent those being bad tropes in the contexts of the casting.

And there's an ongoing trend of characters who are antagonistic towards Percy in the books being divided into two groups: those who continue to be antagonistic towards Percy in the show, or those who are tweaked to suddenly become kinda silly-goofy and significantly less threatening. Gabe, Dionysus, Ares, and Hades are all examples of characters that should be antagonistic towards Percy but are softened SIGNIFICANTLY and played for laughs in the show. Echidna is played as a twist antagonist because she initially because she approaches the kids as very sweet and helpful. And they're all cast as white! Meanwhile other characters like Clarisse, Luke, Zeus, etc, are still antagonistic towards Percy (plus also like Annabeth initially and again, Grover being painted as a major red herring). Plus some new additions like Hermes, Mr. Lin Manuel Miranda himself, being wholly introduced into the plot when he's not supposed to appear until book 2, and all he does is sabotage the quest. Like, it's weird! That's a weird writing decision!!!! I get wanting to get that sweet sweet LMM cameo money, but, why is Hermes an antagonist here???????? he's not even supposed to be here yet!.

We also have stuff like Poseidon (who, like many of the god/major kid pairings so far seems to have been cast to match each other appearance-wise) saving the day for Percy and being this weirdly good dad, versus the books where we get the iconic "I am sorry you were born" line and Percy and Poseidon's tension is part of their arcs. Notably, Poseidon does this by ceding to Zeus, who is actively about to start a war. While Gabe is rewritten to be a total loser, Sally is MUCH more aggressive and her yelling and screaming at young Percy is supposed to be sympathetic for some reason? If Gabe were acting like Sally does in the show, he would actually be significantly more like his book counterpart! The show is making active decisions to paint these characters the way they do!

Admittedly, part of it may just be they got overzealous with their casting (not inherently a bad thing! diverse casting is good!) and then proceeded to not consider how that casting affects the way the characters are perceived. It also doesn't bode well for certain guesses we can make going further into the show - Thalia is very at odds with Percy initially. She's a very aggressive character. They fight a lot! Also Annabeth's description already implies that they're tweaking Thalia's character to be more "tough love" versus the books where she's significantly more of a bleeding heart when she first meets Annabeth. Like, I'm very happy about Thalia's casting, her actress seems amazing, but also I'm VERY concerned with how they're going to approach her character to make sure it doesn't end up wildly offensive. Athena is similar - we can guess based on casting decisions so far that they're going to try and cast Athena as similar in appearance to Annabeth/Leah. The show has already painted Athena has antagonistic and uncaring towards her daughter. If projected trends continue, these things are not gonna be great.

And the show does seem to rarely want to engage with these topics - like the scene with the cop in the train. You can tell what they wanted to address by having Annabeth be the one to confront him. The thing is they were too cowardly to actually have that conversation! They paint the kids as being unreasonable and getting unnecessarily upset when they aren't directly being accused of destroying a room, therein painting the cop as the one in the right in that situation. The implication seems to be a little bit they were going for "Oh, this is Annabeth's hubris getting them into trouble" but. that's such a bad way to do it! That's like the worst way you could have done it! (This is also a trend in books from HoO onwards, more or less - Rick tries to engage with certain topics, often using characters of specific demographics, and then proceeds to do a really bad job of it.)

There are also some aspects that are just like - in the books, Luke being a middle-class blond-haired blue-eyed pretty white boy is relevant! Because the fact that he has privilege from that particularly in how he's perceived is part of how he came to where he is and why he acts the way he does. Percy not having those same privileges, and having aspects like constantly inherently being labeled as a trouble-maker just based on his atypical (neurodivergent) behavior and coming from a lower socioeconomical background play heavily into his character!!! Percy being both a poor and disabled kid (and implied potentially POC) plays DIRECTLY into why he feels so strongly about standing up for other disenfranchised kids (in SoM, explicitly including other disabled kids and kids of color). It directly relates to his experiences and standing up for kids who are like him because he didn't have that, versus Luke whose perceptions and goals are very self-oriented. Now, in the show, we've essentially swapped Percy and Luke's appearances, and that paints a very different narrative. And that's important to acknowledge!

[drdemonprince]

This is kind of late re: the culture conversation but I feel like I have a kind of weird perspective on this general idea of cultural appropriation re:embodiment. I’m Italian American, and indigenous South American but I was born in the US and when we immigrated to the US my South American ethnic group is so small and my parents were in Japan so long they culturally assimilated and I was raised in the Japanese immigrant community and literally went to Japanese day school.

This tension between who is “allowed” to participate in a culture or identity has always been deeply fraught for me in a way that has kind of bulldozed my understanding of cultural ownership. Not being “ethnically” Japanese has led to many people deciding for me what the appropriateness of my cultural participation is. And being indigenous South American complicates my relationship to standard cultural alignment with latinidad more broadly.

I have a lot of friends who are white USAmericans who are progressive but also deeply concerned about the boundaries between themselves and the cultures they studied in college and the countries they taught English in as migrant workers. I had a conversation with one of my friends who worked in China and he was talking about how he didn’t mind being legally disenfranchised because he was a white American migrant and didn’t feel it was necessary for him to have the same legal rights as Chinese citizens. And I had to point out that he was living in the same disenfranchised conditions as any other immigrant and there was no reason for him to downplay it. I don’t think it’s disingenuous or appropriative for him to have Chinese art in his house or cook Chinese food or participate in Chinese culture. Not because he lived there or had a complicated legal status in the country or somehow crossed some imaginary threshold of true and genuine cultural appreciation but just because culture is what you do its not a given fact of who you are. It’s a seamless part of his life and just because he sought it out doesn’t make it less genuine to me.

I think because of my complicated upbringing I have spent a lot of time with people between cultures, reconnecting, adopting new ones and feel very strongly that if there is no biological tie to culture people can incorporate whatever they want into their lives and it’s a VERY US American perspective to be so self critical and political about it.

And this isn’t to say cultural exploitation doesn’t exist but when it does happen it’s usually underpinned by a capital motivation to sell an idea of a culture and not a weird white guy who got really into Buddhism or a several generations totally removed Italian American incorporating Panettone into their Christmas celebrations. When people cross the line it’s cringe and inauthentic but it rarely goes beyond that.

When I was in college I had a professor who studied my indigenous ethnic group and I took a couple of his classes. Once I brought my grandmother and mom to campus to speak with him in our indigenous language, and my grandmother spoke to him for three hours straight. He was a white man from Michigan but also one of my only connections to my culture, a person to practice and share my language with, to connect with my family. And all because he thought South American indigenous groups were interesting and got a job with Amnesty International to investigate the dictatorship to get down there. He is the kind of man people wag their finger at and he was one of the most important cultural elders I had.

This is a long way to say basically I just really believe we are allowed to make our lives whatever we want and make ourselves whatever we want. The phenomenon of white Americans in search of culture exists for the reasons you listed below and outside of these political discussions about its appropriateness and its moral boundaries there are just people doing and embodying that cultural fluidity and exchange for a million different reasons that aren’t worth litigating. The small town gay kids who move to big cities and hang out in the leather scene, getting into punk or hardcore or goth scenes, even converting to a new religion function under the same mechanism of the kind of cultural immersion that gives you access to the community and membership in the culture that weebs who immigrate to Japan to teach English, or international students coming to America, or inter cultural or inter faith partnerships undergo.

Anyways thanks for listening to my treatise. So to whoever’s reading this take the dance class or the traditional craft class or learn a new language or learn to cook new kinds of food make all different types of friends and make new traditions out of old ones or old traditions out of new perspectives. Culture isn’t a sacred part of who we are it’s a sacred form of the things we do and embody and connect with others through :-) <3

this is an incredible, wise, compassionate message. Thank you so much for sending it. You've said so much here about the problems of tying cultural identity to a race, ethnicity, or blood, or to regard it as static or isolated. And how much the standard racist American conceptions of racial and ethnic identity make structural discussions about disenfranchisement worldwide hard to have. Said so so much far better than I could, thank you!!

[thespectrehauntingfodlan]

I feel like a lot of people, and this is really more for Usamericans than those from other countries who don't have any exposure to the internal affairs of this particular nightmare country, truly do not grasp the scale and significance of the problems and horrors here?

Literacy will be mentioned and downplayed, but a full 20% of people living here are illiterate to a degree where they cannot interact with even basic writing. That's one in five people, or almost the population of the entirety of the United Kingdom. And that's only the population that either cannot read any words at all or cannot parse sentences, an equally large amount of people can only read at a very basic level, and can't interpret and extrapolate information from text that's not direct. This is not some cry about media literacy, this is about basic functioning in society and how many are left behind from a society that increasingly isolates and diminishes them.

Manufacturing will be mentioned, and the thought most will have is that American production has been gutted and outsourced (usually leading to hostility to places like China or Vietnam), which has some truth but much of American industry has been transfered from "free" workers to prison slave labor, with some states not paying prisoners forced to work at all and the most ""generous"" states paying them a seventh of the already laughable federal minimum wage, and with the government actually subsidizing this by giving corporations a $2400 tax credit per prisoner they "employ"

Prison will be mentioned but the sheer inhumanity and brutality will never be grasped even when people recognize elements of it (usually for what passes as comedy) the totality of it will never register. One out of five of all people incarcerated on Earth are in prison in America, subjected to conditions which regularly and frequently kill them or break them, and there's not even a consistent reporting measure for people who die in prison or jail, to say nothing of the police killings which dwarf the amount of people executed by the state, which has even less of a standard for reporting. One county was simply burying the people they killed in unmarked graves nearby and never reporting it or recording it, only being discovered after years almost on accident.

Homelessness is rampant but the numbers and methods for assessing the size of the unhomed population are pitiful at best and laughable at worst, regularly undercounting and diminishing the severity because those who are homeless are barely considered people to not just the government but in the perception imposed by society.

And none of that is touching on the scale of the imperial war machine which ravages the rest of the world, how there's no way to even know how many bases the US even has, how many people it kills, how many wars it fights, who it even supports. None of us touching on the non-military methods of support and control the US provides to its proxies and cronies who prop up its hegemony.

The scale of it all is just mind breaking and I have seen excellent writing and interrogation of parts but I don't feel like the overall picture is ever even glimpsed.

[apas-95]

why do usamerican anarchists even want to cook bathtub insulin like regulations on drug manufacturing just arent exploitative relationships

the only reason anyone ever does anything incorrectly is the profit motive. if you took away all safety regulations and threw a bunch of random people into a machine shop and asked them to build medical equipment they'd do so perfectly safely and correctly, because why would they Want to do otherwise?

i joke, obviously, but that's the thought process - it's fundamentally an extension of idealism: for a politics that otherwise completely ignores the material necessities and restrictions placed on political organisation and the measures they require to apply to the real world, in favour of, essentially 'if everyone just agrees with us our ideas will win', it shouldn't be that surprising that that extends to production.

in reality, of course, there are factors outside direct human control, and the implementation of safety regulations and inspections are an incredibly obvious and necessary measure - *but*, once you accept that, the question is then 'what good are safety regulations without any form of enforcement?', which, for anyone concerned with simply the task of bettering life for the working class, would prompt a response of 'oh, you're right, we'll need some form of enforcement, then.' for a lot of people, that's the end of their relationship with anarchism.

however, the underlying motives that generate these politics - as, in general, idealist political philosophies disconnected from reality don't simply spring up by themselves - aren't about the task of bettering life for the working class. fundamentally, the interests of these worldviews are those of the small-producer, the middle class: they promote a utopia where everyone is a small business owner (whether in a commune or a 'free market'), and, providing no real method to achieve these utopias, function mainly to drive these middle classes away from their character as labourers, and towards their privileges. the question of 'authority', a nebulous concept, has always been specifically the existence of any authority *over the small-producer's enterprise*. it's for *that* reason that, when the idea of 'authority' comes into contradiction with the task of improving the lives of the working people, some *do* decide that 'authority' is more important.

there is no such thing as a definite 'left' and 'right wing' - there are left wings and right wings of individual classes, but they both share more in class interest than they often do with their counterparts of other classes. libertarianism, in all its forms, is a middle class ideology, and shares its flaws - any jab against libertarians works just as well, 'who'll build the roads', 'would you need a driver's license', 'how will you ensure medicine is produced safely', etc.

when faced with these problems, people not married to the need to avoid 'authority' will simply accept the ideology is flawed - there are people who are pre-emptively 'anti-state', but fundamentally, their opponents are not 'pro-state', just practical. the anarchists are the only people coming to the table with a pre-existing, overriding position about 'authority' and the role of the state, and they're willing to abandon all practicalities to support it. functional regulations on medicine production *have* to be considered authoritarian, because that's the point of the ideology.

[radicalitch]

so i get a lot of religious content on Instagram bc i find it all interesting, and a few months ago i stumbled across the account of this man in his early 20s who was all about being a ‘traditional Catholic’ (usamerican Catholic who has absorbed too much evangelical fundie shit, imo).

anyway he was always posting excerpts from papal bulls, scripture, and other stuff directly from the Catholic Church, yet one of the things he posted about more than once was his stance on abortion. obviously, he was pro life—nothing new there, the Catholics were some of the first to get up-in-arms over abortion.

but this man posted, more than once, about how he believed ALL women who got abortions should get the death penalty.

which told me, immediately, that the Catholic Church was not the most important part of his life as he’d proclaimed: misogyny was.

for those not in the know, the Catholic Church is notoriously anti death penalty. from official church theology/morality books to pop culture pieces like ‘dead man walking.’ i was pumped with more anti death penalty propaganda at Catholic school than i was anti abortion propaganda. catholic majority countries, such as many in South America, have really low max prison sentences and often no death penalties because of the church’s influence.

so for this dumbass to be posting about how he thinks women should be murdered by the government for having abortions—no exceptions for rape, incest, health, etc—is fundamentally against the ethos of the church he sucks off all the time, and shows he doesn’t understand Catholicism nor the church. he’s just looking to justify his misogyny.

not that any of it is surprising, really. I just usually see this shit from fundies, and it’s weird to see Catholics inching more toward fundie ideology, because, well, in instances like this, shit doesn’t add up.

these fundie-Catholic influencers (usually young and recently converted/recently started taking the religion seriously) also LOVE to shit on atheist/agnostic or otherwise critical people who went to Catholic school bc ‘just because they went to Catholic school doesn’t mean they know everything about the religion.’ like, please, i completed all my fucking years of CCD, went to mass regularly for years, come from a family that’s Catholic and attended Catholic schools for generations, and attended one myself but you, twenty year old trad Catholic influencer who went to mass for the first time last year, are more educated on the church than i am. ok.

(unsurprisingly, last i saw the dickhead’s profile, he was single and looking for Catholic women)

[pelleas-at-castle-nox]

I'm surprised I haven't really seen anybody talking about the food sourcing theme in dungeon meshi. Like, the very first thing it made me think about when I started reading the manga was like "oh yeah, this really makes you think about food, where it comes from, the work needed to create enough food for one person, let alone a small group, to eat comfortably and nutritiously. Laios even specifically calls out that 'regular' food is also made using shit and dirt, intentionally grounding it in reality and subtly asking the reader to introspect on the food they eat and where it comes from."

Like, it's fair to say kui has the old "world builder's" spirit, it's easy to extrapolate a whole world when you're willing to both ask "how does x mundane task work?" And being willing to give it as fanciful or grounded an answer as you feel is appropriate, food is the central theme, but that sort of thinking extends to every corner of the lore and world building where you can practically begin to trace back a lot of world elements to these basic questions, like "what would happen if there were people who lived for 500 years, what would happen if you fought a creature with two heads" and I think that's really cool-

But like, that core question "where does the food that sustains you come from" is like such a relevant question that we should all be asking ourselves. I suppose it's just that I think about that often, both when I'm world building, and in modern and historical contexts.

In a lot of ways it's alienation of labor, most USAmericans (to keep it at least slightly contained in scope) don't get to know where any of the food they eat actually comes from. At best, you might buy your own groceries and maybe even be able to google some information as to the conditions at the place this food was grown, maybe you're lucky/resourced enough to grow some of your own food in like a garden. At worst you get your food premade and prepackaged and you're even completely divorced from the preparation aspect.

A major symptom of this is clearly shown in dungeon meshi's opening and especially in kabru shuro and even the canaries: when food is taken for granted, it becomes easy to neglect. The party initially wiped simply because they'd not considered how suicidal it was to press onward while exhausted, Kabru is so dissociated and focused that he shuts out most of his own biological signifiers of hunger, Shuro starves himself, equating food with leisure instead of a vital practice to sustain life and energy, and of course there's mister no desires.

It's no mistake that in all of the above cases, it's seemed to be heavily implied that food is either an after thought, or someone else's responsibility, or a simple logistical concern. Senshi's whole rant (in volume 1!!) about "oh the youths of today just buying prepackaged meat wine and bread" is especially tied in to this main theme of "do you know where your food comes from?" By taking it to the next level and asking "do you know why you're eating what you're eating?"

To take a personal side tangent, I was recently diagnosed as diabetic, and it's completely changed my relationship to food on a pretty fundamental level, but I'd say I'd always had a pretty good and healthy relationship with food (after I stopped having an eating disorder but that's a story for another day) so it was an easy enough adjustment to have to start actually thinking about how much of my diet was carbs and things like that, it just became a matter of considering what I was eating and when and why. I'm still not perfect at it and it's still a learning process but I'm working on it.

Anyways, my main theory as to why I've not seen it being pontificated on is just that in general people really hate being asked "do you know what you're eating?" Around these parts in a general fashion, but like, especially with weaponized starvation going on and very real issues of things like food desserts in America, and the fact that we all have to pay for just about every little meal, I think it's important for leftists to contemplate the political implications of meals.

An army runs on its stomach after all. Rant over

[droctarine]

my dash made me curious, so I decided to take a look at the public record* to see what the most comparable assassination in recent USAmerican memory was via these two pages:

*It's wikipedia all right, I'm not doing real live research here. I am reading these pages and their biases and drawing inferences and conclusions based on them, that's all

Successful assassinations in the USA's 21st century are plentiful, but if we choose to ignore musicians and organized crime (not saying these don't count, just that they seem to me to be the least comparable to UHC), we're left with an NYC councilman, a doctor running an abortion clinic, an Arizona judge, a South Carolina state senator at the Charleston Church shooting, and an LA bishop. All of these people wielded power regionally to some extent or other, but none at the intranational level like Thompson (Possibly Dr. Tiller in his advocacy for abortion availability in the public eye, but it's a stretch).

If Dr. Tiller is actually the most notable of these persons, then the last truly notable individual USAmerican to be publicly assassinated for overtly political reasoning was in 2009. The Charleston Church shooting in 2015 arguably received equal or greater media coverage (anecdotally), but the UHC shooting was not a mass one (rather the opposite), so those will also be discounted for the sake of comparison.

As far as major attempts of the century go, none of them seem to be targeted at financial or business leaders specifically. It's Trump, Obama, a few congresspeople, and Salman Rushdie. Still nothing that fits well.

In fact, after looking through everything earlier than the 21st century, (most of these are activists, politicians, artists, or members of the media) I think there's only 3 incidents that come the closest in similarity:

Leno Labianca, murdered by the Mansons in 1969 along with his wife. Labianca was the president of local grocery/grocery wholesale companies. While it's true their deaths were generally due to their status as affluent white people, the Mansons were killing a bunch of people to try and gin up a race war, so again it seems less personally targeted and more that they simply checked enough boxes. Also multiples again.

Stanford White, murdered by jilted lover and coal/railroad tycoon Harry Kendall Thaw in 1906. White was an architect of some renown, and a partner in an influential NYC firm at the time (he also designed the Washington Square Arch in NYC if you've ever been to that!). Thaw had something of a one-sided rivalry with White, and had a lifelong battle with various mental illnesses it seems. Again, it's close in terms of persons targeted, but White still seems to be a regional figure rather than a national one (as Labianca was).

Henry Clay Frick, an attempted assassination by the anarchist Alexander Berkman in 1892. Frick was the chairman of Carnegie Steel, so he's my guess as to being the closest in terms of influence and affluence to Thompson. During the Homestead Strike, Berkman took it upon himself to see to Frick's death personally, despite the fact that he had zero contact or involvement with the striking steelworkers. Bad publicity from the failed assassination kneecapped the strike, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers never recovered from the loss.

All this to say, unless I've missed something (so majorly possible, I cannot stress enough how cursory this all was, as well as limited to the USA in scope), Brian Thompson may well be a first in this country. A CEO of a wide-reaching national company assassinated (seemingly) due to the nature of the work he and his company enact may not be entirely unprecedented, but at the very least they are in rarer company than I expected.

[elbiotipo]

I am not in a position to tell Usamericans who to vote for, not only because both options are terrible for me in the Third World, but because after years of hearing about US political stuff I've realized just how WEIRD their political system is.

Out of all representative democracies (as a system of government, not an ideal) I know of, the United States really is the strangest to me. Two parties that are practically state institutions, a supreme court that basically operates as an all-powerful council without any oversight, the sharp divisions between Republican and Democrat states (which I think is mostly artificial), the general apathy (with exceptions) towards protest and mobilization that I don't see in any other country, and more importantly, the absence of any powerful socialist movements...

It's a really strange system of goverment, which only seems normal because of their status as a superpower, but if you examine it closer as I've done from years of getting news and talking with people from there, it's not what you would see in any other country. By this I'm not saying other countries are better (I think burgeois liberal democracy is flawed and unfit for representing the working people or facing the challenges of this century), just that the United States is strange, and things I'm familiar with in my own representative republic, like powerful union movements and popular mobilization, are not found there.

I would call it some kind of "Two-Party Capitalist State", where the official ideology is capitalism liberal-conservatism and nothing outside that is admitted at all. There is no perspective of socialist change in the United States because it's not a position that is represented either on goverment or society, it simply doesn't exist, it's not allowed to exist.

If I lived in the United States, I wouldn't know who to vote for because not only none of the candidates or parties are good or represent me, but also because the whole system simply doesn't work like it supposedly does. I have to say it's a problem they need to fix themselves somehow, but I don't think "GO OUT THERE AND VOTE" is good enough.