PSA: Halloween is pretty much here and it only takes on second to send a sick child in the hospital a Spook-o-gram. The best part about this is that $1 gets donated to CHLA’s Helping Hand fund each time you send one out. So let’s help some kids have a spectacular Halloween by sending them spook-o-grams and helping cause!!
This literally costs nothing but your time so please do it, you could make a kids Halloween.
Note to vacationing non-Americans: while it’s true that America doesn’t always have the best food culture, the food in our restaurants is really not representative of what most of us eat at home. The portions at Cheesecake Factory or IHOP are meant to be indulgent, not just “what Americans are used to.”
If you eat at a regular American household, during a regular meal where they’re not going out of their way to impress guests, you probably will not be served twelve pounds of chocolate-covered cream cheese. Please bear this in mind before writing yet another “omg I can’t believe American food” post.
Also, most American restaurant portions are 100% intended as two meals’ worth of food. Some of my older Irish relatives still struggle with the idea that it’s not just not rude to eat half your meal and take the rest home, it’s expected. (Apparently this is somewhat of an American custom.)
tbh the real advice I’d give to anyone is, do shit alone. go to a museum & go at your own pace & leave the instant you’re done. go somewhere you’ve never been and just wander around, duck into & out of places as it pleases you. linger as long as you’d like.
Endorsed. Going to a place like a park or museum by yourself to just wander around and experience it at your own pace, without paying attention to anyone else, is really good and hugely freeing. It’s amazing how much more you can immerse yourself in a place if you aren’t also tracking anyone else’s feelings about it or about you.
My mom tried answering “pedestrian” whenever randos got nosy about religion. She was surprised how few people seemed to register anything was off enough to even raise an eyebrow.
there’s a lot of confusion about what it means to be a Nazi in this day and age, and while you could get pedantic and say that only some Germans between 1920 and 1945 could be considered Nazis I think it’s reasonable to extend the title to anyone if:
– you think of the world as a struggle between ethnoracial groups, not social classes or individuals
– you identify the nation with the race and the race with the nation
– you expect an imminent race war and intend to win or die trying
– you believe the usual gamut of antisemitic conspiracy theories
– you prefer society to be organised on military lines, a hierarchy of appointed leaders with absolute authority and no democratic oversight or opposition
– you believe in conformity to traditional social norms and are willing to maintain them by force if necessary
Japanese and Italian fascists ticked most of these with less emphasis on the antisemitism, as do various other groups, but having the complete set makes you pretty damn close to Nazi (although it needs a note about the whole “Aryan” thing, obviously).
What I’m used to seeing here in Norway (and this appear to be fairly similar in much of Europe) is that – when political activists without personal ties to the Third Reich are seen to deliberately adopt or mimic the ideology and symbolism of the Reich, they rather consistently get called Neo-Nazis; the “Nazi” label, when applied to people without neo-type prefixes, seems to be mostly reserved for the people who actually served the Reich in some capacity back when it still existed. (This doesn’t seem strictly limited to Germans; it used to be fairly common here in Norway to have “he was a Nazi during the war” as a dark family secret, for ethnic Norwegians who actively supported the German Nazis back when they occupied Norway in the early 1940s.)
Examples of the kind of people/movements that have been getting the Neo-Nazi label here include e.g. Richard B. Spencer, the South African AWB movement, the Greek Golden Dawn party, and a lot of smaller movements throughout Europe.
I’m kind of thinking that a reason for making the Nazi vs Neo-Nazi distinction here at least is that when these sorts of movements started arising here – e.g. Erik Blucher’s Norwegian Front, founded in 1975 – a lot of people still had a rather fresh memory of what the Third Reich and the World War II Nazi occupation were like, and saw things like Blucher’s silly little organization and similar as – not really the same thing as the original German Nazism was, and as such, it got its own label.
yes, Neo-Nazi is more accurate and also sounds super lame.
When it comes to topics like revolution, anarchist education, a world without prisons, voluntary communities of consent, abolishing the whole kyriarchy,
Anarchist conversations have been going on for over a century, defining terms, debating strategies, testing and learning from praxis, passing on knowledge, reinventing our way of thinking and acting from the ground up. And those conversations are very much alive right now.
So excuse me if I’m a bit annoyed when a centrist ignores all of that and claims that their “actually, we should do less change and more status quo” without any further arguments is somehow nuanced.
You don’t have to read a hundred years of conversations, nobody does. Anarchism isn’t about how many books you’ve read. But your claim at nuance is laughable when you are completely unfamiliar with the whole conversation. Conservatism is not nuance. You’ve never even dipped a toe into the water of this topic, what makes you think you can bring nuance here.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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