#USAmericans from an outsider perspective

[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!!

[aliusfrater]

(TW incest, rape and SPN discourse) Feel free to ignore this ask if it makes you uncomfortable. But what’s your thoughts on the idea of Soulless Sam losing his inhibitions and so giving into his darkest desires, and sexually assaulting Dean (which is how the vampire turning scene is read). I often see this tied to the idea that because of the incestuous deal and Azazel’s blood, Sam’s tainted and has this inherent darkness, specifically playing around the idea Sam’s sexuality is dark and perverse, and he harbours these feelings towards Dean and desires to assault him but feels shame and guilt for it. But as Soulless Sam he doesn’t. This reading always felt a little weird and uncomfortable to me but I couldn’t put into words why

okay first and foremost, fundamentals: i'm always going to dislike interpretations of canon that involve anything adjacent to ideas that 'because of the incestuous deal and azazel's blood, sam's tainted and has this inherent darkness' because much of my own interpretation of canon surrounds the idea of breaking down the hunting dichotomy of monstrosity, us vs them/innocent or hunter vs monster that subscribes to the idea of 'inherent evil' or 'unknowable darkness' as the imaginary dichotomy that it is and sam as the original monstrous character of the narrative that represents both 1) the inherent falseness of said dichotomy and 2) how the structures (patriarchal, familial, hunting, abuse etc.) surrounding this dichotomy are fundamentally rotting and are, themselves, the perpetrators of power dynamics that promote the same violence they allege to want to put an end to through the motivations and actions of his character and characters who mirror him. to think of sam as having any kind of inherent monstrosity rather than as a victim to a (quadfold, because samuel, mary, and john were victims here as well) violation of autonomy, or even within the context of sam as a victim, is to uncritically subscribe to this false hunting dichotomy that gets disproven over and over again within canon with sam at the centre (then mirrored within other characters as well) of how this hunting ideal both initially crumbles but reinforces itself. to be frank, sam's motivations are pretty transparently laid out within the arcs that he uses his monstrosity as agency (seasons two, four, six and eight) and the exploration of his motivations and actions in conjunction with other characters ideas and ideals about him as well as how they clash/contrast is majorly important to the falseness of the dichotomy. the usage of the word 'tainted' especially tickles me—this perspective is so unsubtle about its roots in purity culture and how it connects to the us vs them dichotomy, 'us' as the innocent to be protected and the noble/righteous knight that does the protecting. i'm sorry but that's just dipping your toes in the same usamerican fascism that's evident in the show. unfortunately that's not picked up, i guess. anyway the uncritical subscription to this dichotomy also results in the same thought and emotional reaction criminalisation to abuse (in sam's case, largely perpetual autonomy violation) that the narrative utilises within dialogue or filmic/cinematographic techniques within attempts to attribute sam to some kind of unknowable evil that runs in stark contrast to what the same narrative portrays sam as reacting to and what his motivation and literal actions were within these agencies. the dichotomy of monstrosity is also, an entirely unsubtle yet unexplored mirroring of actual bigotry—sam's character easily becomes an allegory for queerness, for brown people (in the context of supernatural as post-9/11 usamerican reactionary media), for other people of colour, Othered people within specific corners of societies, etc. i'm always going to view sam's character from outside of this box.

second of all, 1) this idea sounds like it's coming from a place of interpreting the show through a perspective that intends on finding aspects of canon that align with an idea of sam and dean as a ship which is something i don't like doing because it often hinges on omitting singular explorations of characters and their respective relationships with people within the way that's explored within canon in favour of what is not a canonical relationship/a cononically explored aspect of a relationship. soulless!sam's sexuality and how it differs from sam's is just as canonically explored as sam's motivations about his letting dean get turned and manipulating him about it through a lack of information. the differences between soulless!sam and sam's ideas of their sexuality is so fundamentally different and contrasting due to the 'lacking in inhibitions' factor that it becomes part of soulless!sam's monstrosity which does amount to the deciding of his (functional) execution but the way in which it works is already laid out—it fundamentally includes an aspect of satisfaction that lines up with soulless!sam's Task To Be Conquered/Completed + Self Preservation view of the world and himself. there's the misogynistic aspect/belief of Getting The Girl and/or pleasing her as an accomplishment and, further, sex as pleasure, release, and/or convenience (6.03, 6.09, 6.13, and later mentioned in 7.19) regardless of the contextual relationship between sam and his sexual partner or even consideration for the partner themselves (outside of the sex of course). sam's idea of sex is loaded with both implications of autonomy and while there’s the aspect of what He (believes is his fault) Has Done, as the interpretation seems to imply wrt how it frames the way his shame and guilt complexes work¹, but because what's been done to him and the resulting fates of the people he's had sexual relationships with (sam does believe these deaths are completely his fault and they’re fundamental to his guilt and shame complexes). there's that fundamental difference. while soulless!sam and sam are aspects if the same identity, and have the same memories and abilities—their ideas of themselves, the world around them and their values are drastically changed by a fundamental difference within their metaphysical being—the literal lack of a soul—and it presents within their differences in agencies and where they prioritise those agencies. soulless!sam’s concern was less so his brother and more so the completion of The Job and therefore the usage of his brother as the opportunity presented itself became a viable option, which is something sam with a soul would not have, and is shown to not have (3.15), executed without dean's consent. i'm just checking but we all saw the scene happen, right? sam and dean were working together, they split up, sam got there as it was happening and didn't attempt to stop it.²

2) this interpretation is just also, plainly, inconsistent with sam's character and how he changes as soulless!sam. getting off tangent but i’m poking hole here: even within the assumption of the narrative's dichotomy of monstrosity and how it manifests within sam's sexuality, there's been no expressions of these factors of his sexuality within the actual arcs that related to the usage of his abilities within his agency. his relationship with ruby Could Have worked here if not only for the fact that it represents the further extension of azazel's deed as an autonomy violation within the abusive dynamics of their relationship, down to the fact that a) she raped him and b) twas without his being under the influence of demon blood as well as the idea that their abusive dynamics perpetuates, within sam's perspective, beyond filling dean's role within his life during his grief. if sam's 'darkness' is inherent i don't think the expression of it within his sexuality would only be evident within the singular instance of his monstrosity that is unrelated to the demon blood. further connecting the idea of sam's autonomy violation as a baby to the idea of an inherent monstrosity that manifests within his sexuality then within this same idea of applying azazel's blood as a childhood sexual assault allegory, victims of csa do not inherently inhibit a sexuality that is dark and perverse as a result of what had happened to them. anyway, soulless!sam has been seen to take initiative before both on his own behalf either personally or to serve a hunt (and will be seen doing so well past his time in 6.22) as well as in his sexual relationships; there's the idea presented here that sam wants to assault dean and that the evidence is within the fact that soulless!sam, who has less inhibition than sam, lets dean get assaulted by someone else through nonaction, which just isn't canonically consistent with how soulless!sam's agency works. i think that if sam truly and deeply had a desire to rape dean and he was within a position where he lacked the moral compass³, shame, and guilt that we're assuming is the rasson for which he has not with a soul, he would have quite literally done so or at the very least initiated it himself rather taking advantage of dean being turned into a vampire as it happened. in 6.05, soulless!sam didn't set that up, he didn't time anything perfectly just so that he could get his rocks off at... watching dean be metaphorically raped when he indeed really wanted to do that ?? ²he took advantage of the situation as it happened and his reaction ties back to the idea of dean's violation + The Job as a Task To Be Solved. supernatural is also a show that loves mirrored and foiled circumstances/characters; if there was an intent to explore soulless!sam’s character as harbouring those feelings about dean then i think that there would've been a circumstance directly or indirectly involving soulless!sam, or maybe even sam after his ressurection, that narratively mirrored dean's forceful ingesting of vampire blood as metaphorical rape that places sam within the role of the abuser. back to the point, i do think the boundary crossing aspect of sam literally watching it happen and using its result is the point and ultimately a part of the gothic horror framing of the show and their relationship, but i just don't think the aspect of it being what sam 'secretly desires' is canonically supported but it does comes from an incredibly shallow or straight up noncanon assessment of soulless!sam’s character, intentions, and motivations for the purpose of (and this circles back to point numero uno) placing him within a specific role within a shipping interpretation of sam and sam and dean's relationship despite them literally being laid out for you in the show both within dialogue and action.

the thing about this interpretation is that it could be really interesting to me, especially regarding the mention of azazel's deal as 'incestuous'. i'm generally a fan of interpreting azazel feeding sam his blood + other aspects of the way it's narratively framed both regarding the inital event as well as how it perpetuated through sam's life—especially regarding azazel and john as foiled patriarchs and how the existence of the dichotomy of monstrosity within the hunting as existing synonymously with the winchester familial dynamic and how what hunting meant to sam within his childhood and how that itself is also framed by the narrative—as child sexual assault and the idea of sam allowing dean to have his own autonomy violated, despite not making the decision himself but ultimately indeed weaponsing his nonaction and omitting information (another instance that breaks the dichotomy btw. dean is a victim and he is still quite simply treated as dean both to be saved and as the saviour (which i'm not mentioning to negate him as a victim but the framing of his monstrosity is important to me)—in stark contrast, sam's identity is compartmentalised into the monstrous soulless!sam vs the sammy that needs to be saved, which is exactly what the interpretation you've described also does) could have been seen as a perpetuation of the abuse he was subjected to, much like how ruby herself as a perpetuation of azazel's autonomy violation and much of her relationship with sam runs concurrently with how sam's relationship with azazel worked—granted that dean is cured by the end of the episode and sam does admit to using dean's violation for the job one episode later. the thing is though that this perspective isn't particularly canon compliant either because, again, we're already privy to sam's what motivations were in 6.05 both in terms of knowing how soulless!sam's ideas of other people have changed with his lack of a soul + how his agency works as well as his literal confession lining up with how the audience knows his agency works.

i don't really know else to convey my ideas without just eventually regurgitating the episode in words.

there's also a hint of an uncritical adoption of dean's and the narrative's dean skew perspective in here somewhere that i can't put my finger on. like the attribution of sam's— the monstrous body—sexuality as something inherently Wrong and inherently having ill intent is very much how sam's sexual endeavours are treated by characters within the show that subscribes to the dichotomy of monstrosity, namely dean, as well as audience members who uncritically adopt his perspective + attribute it to sam's 'inherent (unknowable potential) darkness' (ultimately false ideology ->) despite the linear and canonical events including surrounding sam's character exploration. there's also that aspect of dean's rational canonical distrust of sam that translates into ³dean's re-assumption of authority over sam's autonomy that starts out as a teamwork effort while hunting but quickly snowballs (and soulless!sam lets him until it presents as a threat to his self-preservation)

as well as the careless yet somehow popular audience attribution of dean's facade to sam in an attempt to understand sam's character. there's the application of sam' soullessness outwards and onto aspects of sam's character that are crucial when he Does have a soul and the assumption that soulless!sam is what sam is 'truly like' when despite the obvious missing metaphysical factor that is a lack of a soul. there are other examples of characters without souls on the show and it's very easy to acknowledge how it might change a person. quite frankly i think it's kind of funny that they had sam be the most inherently capable soulless person on the show because even he channeled his 'lack of inhibition' into surefire agency rather than descending into a version of himself completely without agency. tbh the more i think about this answer, the more it becomes that thing where through applying an understanding of dean's character and how dean's character supposedly works to aspects of sam's character, and certain factors, his motivations in particular, are attributed to other factors of his characteristics unfaithfully, thereby flipping the roles of their relationship and woobifying the version of dean that's actually presented to us. like this perspective of sam is impossible to unravel because they have the ingredients but they're putting them together with the wrong combinations.

just quite fundamentally, this version of samdean just isn't canonically compliant which is like fine and cool and fun. if subscribing to the dichotomy of monstrosity within your interpretation of samdean as a ship makes you hard then go right ahead <3 but the pretense of canon compliance is what really irks me as usual

¹hilariously i've never seen this one in a samdean interpretation before. an uncritical adoption of sam's own guilt and shame complexes ?? usually people have the ability to see right through these even if it's not all the way to how dean affects it lol

[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.

[yourlocal-lichen]

okay now I'm curious.

context: (white) USAmericans have this tendency to take a DNA test to better understand their cultural heritage. then they make whatever result they got (50% Scots-Irish, 25% German, 12.5% French, as a common example) and say that they "are" those things. this is a common topic of conversation, sometimes people will even say something like "are there any Germans here" and they don't mean people who were born and raised German, they mean people who were told they were German by a DNA test.

now, I see this a bit from an outside perspective (my family is culturally French-American because my mother is a French immigrant), but it seems to me like they take this to a cultural level. I've heard people say things like "my family's Irish so St. Patrick's Day is very special to me" without it seeming like they know anything about the day they are celebrating. it's a cultural identity, but their familial culture is no different from their neighbors with a completely different genetic makeup.

for anyone who wants to participate, here's a poll and please please PLEASE reblog and tell me your deeper feelings about this this is something I feel strongly about for no particular reason. please say where you are from (to your comfort level) and why you chose what option, at least.

I think this is a deeply interesting conversation with many different avenues of thought (immigrants trying to hide otherness with descendents regretting that, what does cultural identity mean if not your blood and how does that intersect with this idea, the general concept of the "great American melting pot"; to name a few)!! I'm even doing a teacher thing and giving you examples PLEAAASE circulate this and tell me your thoughts no matter where in the world you come from

[iustuspeccator]

About Me

This is a side blog so I don't annoy my irl friends with Christian discourse lol. I'm Bel. My identity is foremost Christian and then, in no particular order: Lutheran, queer, trans, white, USAmerican. Also some other things but these are the perspectives I cannot speak outside of.

I am a first year seminarian and candidate for ministry! My current ministry interests are expressions of future church life, pathways to Christianity for the (interested) un- and de-churched, reclaiming Christianity from the American right-wing, and intra- and interfaith ecumenism. (Phrasing borrowed from Amos Yong.)

My ongoing theological/historical interests are forgiveness, the Judaic roots of Christianity, universal salvation, universalism/religious plurality, queer theology, the Apostolic Age, Patristic Age and Reformation. This doesn't mean these are areas of expertise but rather areas of exploration and questioning.

I like to argue, a word which here means to make reasoned statements to prove or refute an argument, especially for the purpose of learning. I do not like to fight. I value source citation, precision in language, and sincerity. I want to really stress again that arguing is fun for me, so if I'm arguing on your post and it's not fun for you, just block me. Or if you want to continue the discussion but it's not fun, let me know and I'll adjust my tone.

Thanks for reading, peace be with you.

PS the cat in my header is Patches and that's her laying on one of my Bibles while I read a different one because I couldn't make her leave <3

[dindjarindiaries]

I do give Omera benefit of the doubt, but I don’t think him not pushing her away immediately is an indication he was questioning anything. I don’t think he’s shown as the most confrontational person and immediately swatting her hands away may come off aggressive coming from him (he seems generally aware of how he visibly comes off) especially in a new place, where he is the outsider, and dare I say a refugee.

My perspective is tainted on this interaction bc of my own life experience living as the person with… cultural customs that USamericans label as “regressive” or “oppressive” (keeping it generalized here lol) And with that perspective, tbh, Omera just gave off the vibes, to quote frank ocean “those poor unamerican girls”

I think they wanted it to read as him questioning things, but you’re of course 100% right and valid in this perspective—and I’m very sorry you have to live with people labeling parts of your culture like that. Thank you for trusting me enough to share that with us!

[miladythewinter]

the other day me and my coworker were talking about usamerica, and about things we only know from their movies and tv, and we were suddenly struck by how actually strange and foreign that country seemed to us, seen from that detached perspective, even though we would otherwise not consider it to be so different. but it is. usually i don't think about this but once you really stop to do it it's so striking. and now i was thinking about how the internet in particular is so americanized so tons of things that circulate here on tumblr sometimes feel off in a way and it's because it comes solely from a usamerican political/historical/societal perspective (see also the classic phenomenon of "usamericans always post like everyone's american"). and then i wonder how those things are treated as universal and whether that has an actual real life impact outside of the US. cause like i said, i usually don't think about it cause it's so common and ingrained online (and to a lesser extent in real life) that it just passes unnoticed. but oh well that's life in mcdonalds world

[azothmahoushoujo]

You know what's real interesting? The reason why the democrats became what is generally conceived as the "more progressive" party in the first place, aka what dragged them to do so ain't got shit to do with what a lot of these "vote blue no matter who" useless idiot democrat liberals are doing right now. Like I know most of this country seems to systematically forget anything and everything that has happened in history beyond 5-10 years from current year, but you think these grown ass niggas would know this by now and take a fucking hint.

The democrats didn't become the "progressive" option by dumbasses voting for them no matter what the fuck they did. You wanna know why they changed and started bothering to pretend to give a fuck about what black people and other minorities think? On a wider level it was the Cold War and making the politics of the USSR less appealing to usamericans including of course the racially disenfranchised and those upset by the discrimination going on at the time such as apartheid in the South and the reactionary violence to maintain it for starters, but let's focus on what people actually did within the country to make them change for the sake of argument. The more internal thing that made them change, not forgetting the larger influence from outside forces for policy change was the national liberation struggles going all over the country, including but not limited to the black civil rights movement, the black national liberation movement, the american indian movement, the gay liberation movement, and so on. To keep it short, it was fucking activism and organized efforts to materially benefit sectors of the working class and the working class as a whole, not no damn unconditional dick sucking that "vote blue no matter who" democrats do knowadays who don't know this basic ass fact.

The democrats didn't appeal to black people and their civil rights movement because they were fucking nice you dumb motherfuckers, and black people wouldn't be nowhere we are now if the black people all went yap yap yap "we gotta vote all, we're powerless to do anything else and it's literally all we can do :(((((". If black people managed to fucking end Jim Crow than the least you motherfuckers can do is pretend to be capable of more than a goddamn ballot box and have higher standards of solidarity than conceding to an administration that is actively participating in genocide. People back then, black people, socialists in general, etc had so much solidarity for colonized peoples it's so heartening to know that people can be so not fucking useless like "vote blue no matter who" niggas. Maybe get some historical perspective maybe.

[shin-meddlesome-hero]

Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance. Very short spoiler-free review.

I had my doubts about this series because it looked like a Generic Usamerican War Story at first and to be honest it has its typical set of stock characters and underdog squad story tropes. I was also afraid that the series would end up glorifying Zeon and the One Year War. However, once I watched the final episode, the series reminded me of those one-shot episodes from the early UC Gundam shows where both sides of the war were humanized. (Like some episodes from the middle part of 0079 or the Africa Arc from ZZ). Somehow it has the essence of those melancholic short stories that helped with the world building and contributed to the overall antiwar theme of the shows. I think that the series works when you watch it with those lens, which explains why the characters aren’t super developed and why there aren’t major changes to the UC canon.

Overall, I would say that it’s skippable but it isn’t bad either. Viewers don’t need too much context to understand the story and it’s also a decent complement to Gundam.

The pacing is dynamic and entertaining. The battles are easy to understand among all the chaos and also all the scenes with the Gundam are fantastic. It’s always cool to watch the monstrosity of the Gundam from an outsider’s perspective.

Visually, the backgrounds and the Mobile Suits are pretty good; but we can’t say the same about the humans, though. As for the voice acting, I can’t really say much because I decided to watch it with the Spanish dub (it was good).

I would give it a 7 out of 10. It was ok, but it needed more interesting characters. Also there was no Char and that always means less points from me. So yeah, give it a try if you're curious about it or if you have nothing else to watch.

[campgender]

ID: a reply by @queer-chnospinci to this ask (link) which reads: Thank you so much for the in depth recommendations they sound great!! 💜 i am interested in it from a VERY outsiders perspective, having never been very christian nor american (i was raised in a culturally christian context but it is incredibly different to what americans seem to have going on) i have been falling down a rabbit hole recently. Thank you again for your recommendations (and reading all this) end ID

oh that’s super interesting!! feel free to hmu if you have questions or want to chat about anything, i always find talking to folks with an outside perspective to be helpful bc in the best scenario i help them understand some of the motivations of usamerican politics + theological justifications for imperialism & they make me feel validated for how fucked up it all was + that there are genuinely alternatives. plus it’s just a special interest of mine lol

[hawkzeyes]

hope you and your family are doing well man!! i dont live in the areas where most of the storms have hit but i do live in the south so i definitely get what you mean. its utterly upsetting and horrifying to see (usually white) northerners and non usamericans act like those of us who are in the oppressed classes and groups in the south are like, that at fault for whats happening here or anywhere else. especially when it comes to infrastructure and natural disasters, in this case. i know for a lot of us we have been voting to help these things, but it doesnt always help. for myself, i couldnt vote until this year, so it especially sucks.

anyway . longwinded way to say

i get it, to a large degree. and i hope yall are okay mentally and physicallt, or at least have the ability to recover. (feel free to rant or wtv in response to this ask idm)

It's very frustrating. I really try to be patient as I get older. I try to hear each perspective even though I have a very firmly set belief point. Trying to explain the concept of gerrymandering and voter suppression and what it does for the south and the infrastructure and prepping for disasters to anyone who has not actually seen it feels little slamming my head against a brick wall.

I've had multiple conversations with folks from blue states or folks who mock Americans outside of America recently and they really truly will not grasp it if they don't want to and they wont because these specific liberals want to be better than them, have some morality high point to an entire group. (obviously it's not everyone. Everyone is their own case) News flash, you are not better than someone because you got lucky and were born in a different state or a different country.

It was just announced Hurricane Helene survivors who need help get $750. That's it. Sure it's for necessities which you think "Hey that's great" but lets be realistic some are still stranded and can't get to the internet to request this. What good is that money if the grocery stores are being guarded so you can't get in. There isn't any new grocery deliveries coming in either cause that grocery store is just as stranded as you are. The gas is no longer good cause it sat underground with flooded waters so you can't leave in your car if you're even lucky enough to still have your car. What do you do then? Gather your family and walk?

Okay so now you and your loved ones have walked miles and miles to get somewhere you can get food. How long will it take for the government to give you those funds? How long will that last? You just lost your home. You walked out of your home town. You can afford a hotel for you and your family for maybe two days with food. Then what. What now.

and I'm supposed to be understanding that liberals are frustrated with conservatives (which isn't even the entire south) so it's okay to say the things they're saying about us?

[snovyda]

it's more desensitization from all the Fucking Shit TM that's been going on, y'know.

+ george bush milked the hell out of that to instate the 'war on terror', killing thousands times more than what happened on 9/11 and not even targetting the right people. like it's blunt he didn't care

td;lr: it's making fun of usamericans going all nationalism that's going overboard

I understand all that, and I'm not arguing or denying any of these points. My bewilderment still stands. I have seen a lot of usamericans joking about that.

Thousands of civilians were killed. The fact that these people feel no empathy for their own fellow countrymen very easily explains why they didn't give a shit about all those thousands of people that were/are being killed elsewhere after that.

It's this lack of empathy towards anyone.

I feel that that awful wave of extreme nationalism was at least in large part born not out of empathy to all those people who died, but out of maybe hurt pride? And maybe fear, too, I suppose. As in, the illusion of this "greatness" of the US got shaken, and so they responded with this horrible racism, etc.

It's just my outsider perspective, of course.

[televisionenjoyer]

Hi Ron! I’ve only watched like an episode n a half of Turkish house and some clips of American (?) house so not enough to cast judgement but… are both house and hekimoglu the same level of rudeness or is one nicer than the other ?

No Hekimoğlu is DEFINITELY nicer than House but that's because in my opinion USAmerican culture is just rudder and less personal in general and as a consequence House can get away with things that (from my perspective as a total outsider to both cultures whose only exposition is media) Turkish House could never. There's also the fact that they dialed back on the drugs a little thus far probably for cultural and legal reasons as well

[quetzalpapalotl]

can you elaborate on “quote unquote poc artist”? im glad you’re sharing with people that kahlo wasn’t a good person, just got curious about that phrasing

I made that post in a moment of frustration because I saw something about how Frida hated white people and I'm just tired of the way foreigners (and even Mexicans) talk about her. I'm not trying to say Frida was the worst person to ever live or that you can't enjoy her as an artist and relate to her struggles, because there are far more deplorable artists hailed in the canon of art history. But just... you know, she's not a perfect feminist progressive icon and you shouldn't treat her as such if you don't understand the context she hails from. But really this is just more than just her. I will try t explain but keep in mind that I'm trying to summarize very complex matters that I'm not even used to talk about it in English and I'm only just one Mexican.

I feel like the term POC should not be aplied outside of the US. I mean, I'm not a Usamerican, I don't wanna say what terms minorities there should or shouldn't use. But from my perspective, the way gringos talk about this sort of stuff is oddly fixated on skin color and blood percentages which doesn't realli make sense to me and is a poor framework to speak about ethnical and racial issues here.

But people still apply them and that's US-centrism, generally, Usamericans are very bad at recognizing their own US-centrism or that in an international conext they do have privilege, or that being Usamerican is in itself an ethnic identity, but people treat it like it isn't and the US is devoid of culture because they think of US culture as default.

So, English colonizers in what's now the US didn't exactly mix with the Natives. "White people" in the US are descendants from those colonizers or immigrants from other European countries, there was always a clear distinction between them and Native Americans. Spanish colonies worked differently, pure-blood Spaniars were at the top, but eveyone was having children with everyone and that was a part of society to the point they had this whole system to name every combination of whether you come from a mix of Spaniard, Indigenous people, Black slaves or a mix of a mix. So nowadays, most of us have indigenous ancestry. Some have light skin, some have dark skin, colorism is still very much present. Frida's skin was on the lighter side and her dad was a German, is she a POC???

So the fact that most of us do have Indigenous Ancestry makes us feel uh, entitled to prehispanic culture, but really, blood doesn't make us Original People, that's more of an Ethnic matter, because there are still Original People that maintain their culture, or a version of it that has changed over the years since the Colonization. There are many groups with different names and traditions that are supposedly legally protected and are also heavily discriminated against. When someone like Frida dresses with a tehuana, she gets praised for "connecting with her roots", when a Zapoteca woman does it, she's mocked,

Mexicans are children of rape, as Octavio Paz desribed us, which is a complicated baseline to create a cultural idetintity. Our culture is a mix of what was here and what was imposed by the Spaniards, there's the tokenization of prehispanic cultures with a sense of entitlement, the fact that the Mexican identity is in large part a post-revolutionary manufacturation, there is the hatred and idolization of Europeans, the heavy colorism, the classism, the struggles of globalization, the neo-colonialims with the intervention of foreign capitalists, the gentrification due to foreigners coming here, and, of course, the Anglo/US cultural imperialism that erodes the culture inherinted from both the Indigenous and Spanish people.

There is a whole lot going on that I have neither the words or time to unpack, but I hope it makes you understand why it bothers me so much when Usamericans try to apply their frameworks here. I really don't have a point, I just want gringos to understand that they don't understand and that blood doesn't magically make you understand. I don't even know if this makes any sense.

Anyway, uh, please don't dress up as Frida Kahlo and her clothes are a marginalized culture's regular clothes and not a costume. If you wear traditional Mexican clothing make sure you're buying them from proper artisans and try to at least learn what culture they belong to.

[mtg-player1]

ok, can I get some thoughts on this?

thinking about celebrating one's own country. nationalism, or patriotism as you might call it. Because it's like. as a Norwegian, is all of that bad? cause yk. you know. yeah.

I remember around 4th of July seeing usamericans say they didn't celebrate it cause [they're] "not a fuckings Republican".

and as a Norwegian I'm very used to celebrating the national day. it's massive. it's fun. it's a lot of culture all at once.

But is it good?

I haven't questioned it much before because well, it's normal. it's very normal. it happens every year (even to a smaller extent at the height of covid regulations). there's not much debate (around whether or not to have it) afaik.

it's kinda like, I know people are divided on the clothes thing. and I am somewhat aware of how that ties in to like xenophobia/racism/classism and that. (most people, especially women, wear a national suit, which is from where you live or somewhere your family has lived, these are ridiculously expensive and really only worn once or twice a year). also it's a bit of an "idolizing the 1800s" thing, which is kinda questionable.

this is kinda an open question so like if people have any thoughts please spill them. they don't have to be perfect, I just want some outside perspectives here.

[as always you can send an anon if you want to keep your identity private. or you can send a DM if you don't want the world to see it. or you can send a reply if you want others to know it has been a response to this. any way works, I don't really care which.]

[sputnikodin]

re: the watcher anger

i know $6 a month isn't a lot in the united states, but they have a pretty international audicence and with currency exchange, $6 is a lot. like in hong kong that's $50 a month, mexico its 102 pesos a month, in the phillipines that's 345 pesos a month, in argentina that's 5,221 argentine pesos--you get the idea. hell, i live in the us and i can't even afford to spend an extra $6 a month 😭

i agree on paying creators fairly, and i know watcher has 25 employees who deserve to paid. but the channel already pulls in over $100k a month from patreon alone; they also make bank from all their sponsors and merch sales. i mean, one of their main series is steven lim eating expensive food like gold flaked beef. i mean, he has a new tesla!

idk it just feels like that ceo thing where they aren't happy with consistent success, it needs to be increasing success. but ofc idk them, i'm just an outside observer so idk the full story, etc.

first up -- i actually think $6 a month IS a lot for some people in the US & have talked in private w friends about how i wish they'd started at like, $1-$3/mo or smth because even that would make it more affordable for a lot of their fans :-) just to clear that up! $6 is a lot when most streaming services that offer way more than 2x as much content cost like 2x as much on average (i think? the only streaming service i have is for baseball, i pirate everything else so idk). $6 a month is also a lot, Period, for many people, regardless of context. it's the principle of paying for it at all that was my main point in that post

to everything else -- great points and i appreciate the info and your perspective. re: money i know $100k/mo sounds like a lot + they have the other revenue sources you mentioned but i think it's important to keep in mind that they're not just paying for their own/their employees' lives but also funding the shit they make -- travel, gear, production costs, everything they need to buy for the videos etc. like it's not JUST 28 paychecks that the money is going towards but also the necessary costs of the job itself. not to mention that at least shane steven and ryan live in a super HCOL area ($100k/yr for a single person is literally considered "low income" in san francisco lmao & i dont even wanna know what it is in los angeles). they could still be making bank, idk! i have literally no idea what their finances look like, i'm spitballing the same as everyone else. but i think shit costs more than a lot of people realize

i have zero argument with the frustrations with how expensive this will be for their non-usamerican audiences, i'm really sorry that they didn't roll out different prices for different locations or like ... seem to take that into consideration at all. like i said in the original post, i have no beef with anyone who is personally upset about getting priced out of content they love. honestly my only point here is that i do not doubt at all that everything they release on watcher will be uploaded to piracy sites by people w accounts & that everyone anywhere who is capable of piracy (ik some countries are harsh about it but # of countries where it faces strict repercussions < # of countries where watcher's pricing is prohibitively expensive afaik) will be able to access it, and i bring that up more in hopes that it's encouraging for people worried about getting to still watch their content than bc i'm trying to argue anything

ultimately i still think this was not an outrageous thing for them to do & i empathize with people who are pissed and sad with the Way this is going down but i still at the end of the day think we gotta adjust to artists wanting & requesting to be paid regularly and directly for their work cuz that is the world we live in rn. it sucks but i can't get mad at them for it