#U.S. culture

[bitstitchbitch]

the counterculture in Utah (the U.S. state I’m from)is so fascinating to me. The main culture is extremely religious and fairly conservative, so it’s weird that Salt Lake City has occasionally made top ten lists for the queerest city in the U.S., and that driving through you see “free Palestine” signs and rainbow flags in windows and lots of people promoting living sustainably. But it’s extremely geographically limited - drive an hour out and that stuff is way less common. Driving from northern to southern Utah during the pandemic, there was a notable decrease in mask-wearing at each gas station. Politics are divisive, and you’re either a trumper or a progressive - Bernie Sanders beat Biden by a lot in the 2020 primaries. A lot of the stuff is just showing that you’re not LDS (Mormon for the non-Utahns). If you drink alcohol you’re weird. If you drink coffee, good luck finding non-chain coffee shops outside of Salt Lake City and also you’re weird. We celebrate “Pie and Beer Day” instead of “Pioneer Day”. Half the people I knew in Girl Scouts from high school age up to adult employees were gay because it was one of the few loudly welcoming workplaces in the state. You have to go out of your way to find authentic cultural foods because it’s so fucking white here (I say as a white person). im not even sure our counterculture counts as counterculture in other places, because the main culture is so weirdly different from everywhere else (there was a study recently that I can’t find that actually said we were the farthest from average on several points out of all US states) that our counterculture is actually just closer to everywhere else? Idk, it’s just really fucking weird being non-Mormon in Utah.

[thingsofimportanceanddelight]

Had a dream that the U.S. government passed a law that required websites to have a pop-up window saying "WARNING. You are now leaving the AMERICAN INTERNET. Proceed with CAUTION." every time you clicked a link that led to a non-U.S. site.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!

[alighted-willow]

I'm doing some research on textiles for hyperfixation art reasons and it reminded me of a conversation I hear pop up every so often; that the United States don't have culture. I would argue that we have more of a bleached culture (which is an inside joke in my family) but, more seriously, it's more of a corporate culture? It's expected for people to work, in most cases just needless busywork to sate someone else's pride, so when would anyone ever have time to be people rather than being employees? Part of that is from how the U.S. was settled by puritanical extremists who believed that hard work and suffering in life purified the spirit and it’s weird that no one really thinks about how, even to this day, that mentality pervades Everyone thinks that this mentality hasn’t effected them, especially if they're atheists, no matter how outwardly obvious it is that they've inherited these beliefs.

I've been looking into embroidery, needlework, whitework, blackwork, etcetera for over four hours now and none of it came from the U.S., all either coming from indigenous people or through immigration. Anecdotally, even when textiles are practiced in the states, it's by wealthy people who aren’t beholden to long work hours, retirees, or homeless/disabled people.

It would be amazing for these practical arts to be more commonplace bit that brings up several issues. Lack of time, obviously, but also issues such as attention span, lack of materials, lack of knowledge, and impermanence of property. As most adults only have about four hours a day for themselves, they'll habitually only do short-term projects, thus reducing one's willingness/motivation/ability to do anything that won't deliver a swift reward (which causes a whole host of issues on its own but I'm not here to talk about why we're the mental illness capital of the world). All of our manufacturers have doubled down on offering only trash that will last a few scant years maybe and which is intentionally designed for rapid degradation (cotton gets softer as it ages; polyester grows rough and thin). Even those who can cough up the money can't find actual quality materials (as my seamstress friend has attested. Multiple times).

But fundamentally, and most striking to me personally, is the fact that we don’t teach our young how to sew. It's one of the things that was shrugged off when our education system shifted to constant tests and standardization; teaching students to sew isn’t profitable so we take away teachers' funds for teaching it but we also don’t teach our own. How can we? What time do we have, what resources? I only know how to do it because my grandmother is a teacher and wanted us to know how at an early age.

Alright, I got it out of my system— for now.

[melonisopod]

Whole chapter showing war being pointless and exploitative and how the government that funded said war was all too happy to throw away the soldiers they used as literal living weapons: Apolitical.

Whole chapter about a woman urging her friends to do something about their starving neighbors and how she ended up killing a pawnbroker to enact justice but the system ensured the most helpless were still punished: Apolitical.

Whole chapter where literal Crusaders murder people for modifying their bodies and how it relates to bodily autonomy and identity; main characters visit a border crossing and witness a child being separated forcefully from their family: Apolitical.

Whole chapter about corporations appropriating and exploiting well-meaning genius inventions to benefit themselves and quite literally profit off the suffering of others: Apolitical.

Female character doesn't have her tits out: Evil Feminist Agenda, Forced Politics

[archaeologysucks]

A run-down of what a second Trump administration may mean for archaeology and cultural resources preservation in the U.S.

(thank you @weatherwaxcats for the link)

[deadboyswalking]

People who write good fic when English isn't their first language are pretty amazing, you know? Expressing these complex emotions and really, deep character studies, in a language that isn't your native language is a difficult task. Does the dialogue always sound like a native speaker? Well, no, but a lot of native English speakers struggle badly with writing dialogue too. And anyway, there are some other interesting benefits to reading things written by native speakers of other languages. When they write in English, they still bring their cultural perspective and references from their first language into the fic. This gives a really unique view of characters and plotlines, like I always walk away with a new way of understanding the canon story that I hadn't thought of before.

[fall-and-shadows]

A study published this week estimated nearly 65,000 pregnancies associated with rape occurred in the 14 states that have enacted abortion bans since the Dobbs decision in 2022.

Based on available data, researchers estimated 519,981 completed rapes occurred in this time frame, with 64,565 associated with pregnancies. Among rape-related pregnancies, 5,586 — 8.7 percent — are estimated to have occurred in states with abortion bans that included exceptions for rape.

“In this cross-sectional study, thousands of girls and women in states that banned abortion experienced rape-related pregnancy, but few (if any) obtained in-state abortions legally, suggesting that rape exceptions fail to provide reasonable access to abortion for survivors,” the study stated.

The 14 states included the study were: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.

Texas is estimated to have had the highest rate of rape-related pregnancies by far at 26,313, more than four times the second state on the list, Missouri, with an estimated 5,825.

[blueiscoool]

The Oldest Known Firearm in the U.S. Found in Arizona

Independent researchers in Arizona have unearthed a bronze cannon linked to the 16th-century expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, and it is marked to be the oldest known firearm found in the continental United States.

The 42-inch-long, roughly 40-pound sand-cast bronze cannon was discovered at the location of a Spanish stone-and-adobe structure in the Santa Cruz Valley that is thought to have been a part of the short-lived settlement San Geronimo III.

To finance an expedition to North America in 1539, Vázquez de Coronado took out large loans and mortgaged his wife’s possessions. The Spanish conquistador and his 350 soldiers intended to locate the legendary (and nonexistent) Seven Cities of Gold north of Mexico. By 1541, they had reached southern Arizona, where they established a settlement they called San Geronimo III, or Suya. San Geronimo was the first European town in the American Southwest.

Rather than accumulating immense wealth, Coronado and his men plied, and spent the next three years plundering, enslaving, and murdering their way across the region. These transgressions did not go unanswered. In the predawn hours of one fateful morning in 1541, the native Sobaipuri launched a surprise attack on the town. Many settlers were killed in their beds, and the survivors fled in disarray. The cannon — meant to intimidate and protect — was never even loaded.

Although Coronado was bankrupt and facing war crime charges when his expedition came to an end in Mexico City, his impact on North America would last for many generations.

One site in particular has produced a large number of artifacts associated with the explorers, according to the authors of a study published on November 21st in the International Journal of Historical Archeology. Researchers found European pottery, weapon parts, including a 42-inch-long bronze cannon, and glass and olive jar fragments in the ruins of a stone and adobe building in Arizona’s Santa Cruz Valley.

“Not only is it the first gun ever recovered from the Coronado expedition, but consultation with experts throughout the continent and in Europe reveal that it is also the oldest firearm ever found inside the continental USA,” Archaeologist Deni Seymour explained.

The early firearm also called a wall gun, was typically used as a defensive weapon positioned on a wooden tripod on fortification walls and required two operators. However, in Coronado’s case, such a cannon would have been used offensively, typically to pierce the weaker walls of buildings in Indigenous communities.

Archaeologists were able to date the cannon to Coronado’s time using radiocarbon dating and optically stimulated luminescence techniques, and the other artifacts matched descriptions of the supplies and possessions of his expedition. However, the wall gun’s simple casting suggests that, in contrast to more elaborate Spanish cannons, it might have been built in Mexico or the Caribbean—and possibly even acquired from Ponce de León’s previous expedition.

By Oguz Kayra.

[deusluxuria]

anyone else have this problem where you're not really an anime person but you love jojo's bizarre adventure, so you go into the anime store looking for jjba stuff and you're like "excuse me where am i"

[youredyingthatsallthereis]

i love and post a lot about entomologist roach but what about roach who got his callsign because he was terrified of insects and someone saw him freak out when he saw a cockroach

[everlastingrandom]

It's important to stress that eugenics was (is) tantamount to how we got here. Anti-miscegenation (laws against interracial marriage) has been legislated at different times in different countries around the world. But prior to the late modern era, delineations were largely based on religion, geographic location, and generational conflicts.

In the mid-19th century, UK and USA eugenicists popularized the idea that northern and western European people were biologically superior to all other races. They argued that white = fully human, therefore citizenship and inalienable rights are inherent only to white people. This belief gave North American slave owners and colonial settlers a way to reconcile their Christian morality with owning slaves and eradicating Native populations.

To ensure white "blood purity," US anti-miscegenation and segregation laws proliferated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The One-drop rule was a legal assertion that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry aka "one drop" of "black blood" was considered Black. It was used to determine slave status (which was also inherited matrilineally.) Today, with increased recognition of Multiracial identities, the one-drop rule's acceptability has significantly decreased, but remains a point of contention within the Black community.

Prior to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, Native American status was determined by kinship, lineage, and family ties. But enumeration (adding to eradication and expulsion) has been forced onto the nations by the U.S. Government since the 19th century. Blood quantum remains one of many factors used to determine enrollment to some (not all) Native American nations, yet it varies depending on the criteria they impose. It also remains a huge point of contention within indigenous communities. Other factors like tribal residence, community involvement, and genealogical documentation are also considered.

American whiteness demanded assimilation. Black Americans who socially passed as white were encouraged to move away and cut contact with their families because they would be lynched if they were discovered to have African ancestry. Indigenous children were removed from their communities and sent to residential schools, where all signifiers of their culture were removed or abandoned under punitive threat. To gain social mobility, many western European, Mediterranean, Latino, and Hispanic immigrants legally changed their family names to sound more Anglo-Saxon.

Refusal to assimilate meant social immobility. Jewish and Asian immigrants were either completely banned from entering the U.S. or encouraged to immigrate and take low-wage jobs. During the Jim crow era, East Asian immigrants were segregated with whites, while Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, South Asian, and Pacific islanders were segregated with blacks.

The U.S loves to frame itself as a multicultural juggernaut while being extremely ignorant of the ethnic makeup of other countries. Most Americans assume that most countries are homogenous while being the glamorous exception. I think that's also why white identity seems to galvanize over time. A white Midwesterner is culturally distinct from a white New Englander. But they will still go to a hate rally together and storm the capital because of racial insecurity.

I feel like whiteness collapses ethnicities into itself and shreds whatever doesn't fit into atoms, like a black hole. To me, "African-American" is an ill-tailored, patchworked ethnicity with a history of missing pieces and open wounds. But it's mine, and it's still surviving the singularity. One time a nationality poll showed up on my dashboard that said "describe your ethnicity in the tags." I read through the notes and saw "idk im white" a hundred times. Lowkey, it felt tragic in a backwards way.

Americans are strangely confident that their utterly bizarre ideas concerning ethnicity are universal, and then they get confused when that's not how things work.

Like apparently as far as they're concerned, the spanish are latino but italians are white, despite of ranging in the same colours and speaking languages so similar that I can vaguely make sense of italian by understanding the basics of french and spanish, and they're baffled when J.K. Rowling manages to be racist against white people.

[la0hu]

so many tiktok memes are insanely misogynistic but steeped in juuuuuust enough post-post-post irony for all these chronically online women to plead the fifth. "girl dinner." "i'm just a girl (in the world, that's all i'll ever be)." and now this "very demure" thing. like regardless of how self-aware, sarcastic, or genuinely critical of antifeminism the source material is, somehow these memed phrases become tools to reinforce the idea that women are delicate, soft, helpless, brainless, small creatures not worth taking seriously. that's how they're used. that's what the punchline always becomes. it's all so coquette adjacent, which is just repackaged white supremacist radfem trad wifery. even the whole "brat summer" thing is starting to become grating. i'd actually prefer someone called me a bitch rather than a brat, because at least a bitch sounds like she could actually do something, like she still has teeth

[racefortheironthrone]

Just read on Wikipedia that Heinlein ran for California State Assembly as a left-wing Democrat in the prewar era. Any idea what caused his change of heart towards crypto-fascism?

Like a lot of people, Heinlein's politics were bizarre and internally contradictory.

An Upton Sinclair Socialist who became a supposed libertarian who was fascinated by Social Credit who also believed in the need for a militaristic authoritarian one-world government but also supported Barry Goldwater for President and was very in favor of both nuclear war and Vietnam but was also an anti-racist but also had deeply weird views about gender and sexuality that I really hope he never acted on...it's hard even to describe this as a standard "red to brown" ideological shift.

The only way I can describe it is:

[watermelinoe]

independence day is such a ridiculous movie and i love it