Without a doubt, whiteness is a bigger enemy of “white culture” than anything else.
As for me, if I had to name my ethnicity, I guess I’m German-American; and once upon a time, that used to really *mean* something, used to be something deeper and more meaningful than Lutheran church and polka music and pretending to give a shit about soccer. There used to be extended families, schools, Sprachenbund, festivals, distinct communities, all that good stuff, but that’s all gone now. “Now it is just another someplace where automobiles live,” as Herr Vonnegut once said. And it’s the same story with Irish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, et cetera and so forth immigrants to this brokedick country; there used to be rich, vibrant communities of European immigrants and the children of European immigrants that kept alive art, music, folklore, language, all that good stuff, that said loudly and proudly, “We are here, and this is who we are.”
That’s all gone now. Nowadays, ethnicity within whiteness is just an excuse to drink expensive beer at a folk festival once a year. And people of color didn’t do that, naw, the dominant WASP society did that, and we were complicit in going along with it, because we benefited materially from it, nevermind what we had to give up along the way. They’ll try to sell you a bill of goods about how integration did this; it’s actually the opposite.
White pride is not cultural pride because whiteness is not a culture; whiteness is the Borg. The truth is that white-identitarianism is how come I never got the opportunity to learn Diets on my Oma’s knee.
It’s stuffy and takes a long time to set up and is more reading than anyone feels like doing but Rudolf Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture is a huge-ass take on basically this by other means.
As a Jewish person who married into an Irish-German-Geek family, this is scarily accurate. They were astonished that my family had this entire side-culture that had nothing to do with America OR really to do with religion, but was entirely about being Jewish (culture) – music and food and jokes and language.They had no traditions that were specifically German or Irish or Greek (or even any celebration of that particular blending). My husband didn’t even have the (to me) expected smattering of German or Greek words in his vocabulary, and had no knowledge of the cuisines.
Even their Christmas traditions were kind of… homogenized Americana.
I have felt this strongly for a very very long time.
I have nothing of my Greek or Hungarian backgrounds, and almost nothing of my Jewish background because to earn whiteness, my family shed its cultures, its languages, its stories, and its everything. What I have of those things, I have had to excavate myself and there is so much that I don’t have the tools to access. Whiteness is like a gaping wound in my identity, its a sucking void that prevents me from finding the ground of my history to put my feet on.
whiteness requires that we do violence to ourselves in order to access it, there should be no surprise that it is expressed through diverting and amplifying that violence outward.
I experience whiteness as violence, and I genuinely do not understand how other white people find a place within it, and doubt that any of us do.
and maybe this is the source of white insecurity, the instinctual knowledge that we are trying to exist in a non-space, a space of lack, an emptiness. We defend whiteness because we live in a world that tells us that it will keep us safe, when we know on a gut level that the shield is made of cardboard, that the protection it affords is barely more than a placebo.
Whiteness is a poison. we can choose to counter it with an antidote, or we can poison ourselves and those around us for the appearance of safety.
Whiteness = Cultural Bleach
I’m more Scottish than I am Lebanese, and I only have a cultural connection to one of those.
im part irish and also about a quarter czechslovakian. czechoslovakian. my heritage comes from a country thats gone, thats been turned into the czech republic and slovakia. and despite this, despite knowing the basic facts of my heritage, i know nothing else. hell, i dont even know what language they spoke in czechoslovakia. i can assume it was czech, or that it was a slovak language, but i dont know for sure, and i likely never will. ill likely never know anything about the culture of my grandfather, of my great grandparents, simply because of the pervasive whiteness described previously in this post. yes, i will say i tend to be very sacrilegious but despite that, i would love to learn the culture of my family and ancestors but at this point? unlikely, as all the full czechoslovakians or irish people in my family are dead
The photo above is the closest humanity has ever come to creating Medusa. If you were to look at this, you would die instantly.
The image is of a reactor core lava formation in the basement of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. It’s called the Elephant’s Foot and weighs hundreds of tons, but is only a couple meters across.
Oh, and regarding the Medusa thing, this picture was taken through a mirror around the corner of the hallway. Because the wheeled camera they sent up to take pictures of it was destroyed by the radiation. The Elephant’s Foot is almost as if it is a living creature.
Friendly reminder that this blob of core material was so hot and dense, it melted/burned through three floors of the building before coming to rest in the lowest basement.
And there’s now a unique species of black mold that feeds off the gamma radiation it produces.
Is no one else seriously freaked out by that mold? No? Just me, then?
This post is BLATANTLY untrue in more ways than anything has a right to be, to the point that I don’t even know where to start. I’m not even an expert on this stuff, but it sounded wrong and about 2 minutes of googling got me better sources than whatever the OP used – though I half wonder if the reason is that they didn’t consult any at all in the hopes of telling a “spooky” story.
First of all, you absolutely would not “die instantly” looking at it. Radiation doesn’t work that way outside of badly-written comic books. While formations like this can inflict lethal doses, it’s most likely to be in the form of “an amount that causes cancer in you somewhere down the line” – not a death ray. And in case you don’t believe me, here’s another picture, that I literally just nabbed from the Wikipedia page for the Elephant’s Foot:
Yes, that’s someone not only in the same room, but looking at it (possibly even taking samples), and notably not keeled over on the ground in the throes of immediate death as a result of their hubris.
The photo OP posted was admittedly taken by a wheeled camera device, as it was pretty rightfullyconsidered too dangerous to approach immediately after the disaster (the second photo I added is from 1996, and the meltdown was in ‘86, 10 years earlier). And it’s still not something you’d want to hang out around – enough exposure will definitely still prove lethal on the scale of days.
So is it deadly? Yes. But even right after it was discovered, it would kill you on the scale of about a minute, and nowadays it’s more like an hour. Neither of which is an instant Medusa-like effect.
Again, this took me like 10 minutes to do enough research to write this reblog, even with a background in different enough sciences that I didn’t know anything for sure. Please, guys, if something sounds kind of weird, consider checking some very basic sources to either verify or disprove your gut instinct before sharing it with other people.
Mateo is in one of my facebook groups and posted this about what happened (reposted with permission):
“Hello!
My name is Mateo. I am a bisexual, indigenous Latino Paraguayan
immigrant, disabled, Jewish, autistic, transgender man. On Monday
October 29,2018 I stood up to Jeff Sessions in Boston, MA and the media
didn’t cover it. I am going to spread the word to the transgender
community through social media platforms that they were defended on
Monday. Would you please share this photo or the video from my profile? I would greatly appreciate it!
I am physically disabled in a wheelchair. When the police escorted me
out, he yanked me out by the neck collar and refused to let me use my
wheelchair. I asked for it and said I’d peacefully leave and he said
“one of the officers will get it.” They brought it to me in the hall.
The officer pushed me further than I can normally walk. The pain was
still throbbing hours later so I went to the ER. Confirmed sprain in
left ankle, neck and right shoulder. My tendons and muscles are already
weak and more fragile due to my medical condition, Fluoroquinolone
Toxicity. (Cipro Poisoning Associated Disability) I can’t walk more than
250 ft without support. And Jeff Sessions smirked and the Trumpsters
clapped…“
I genuinely didn’t know he was Jewish! Thank you so much for posting added information and a link to his Facebook profile. This is horrifying and I wish him a refuah shlema, a fast and full recovery.
I would have included him in the Mi Shebeirach this morning had I known.
i’m so sick of arguing with canadians. their delusional brand of “at least we’re not american” patriotism is probably one of the reasons why social change is so fucking slow to pass in this country
like, american activists and community organizers are excellent at mobilizing towards common goals and their outreach to the wider public is so much greater especially in recent years because people acknowledge that there are problems. people work towards reducing them. americans of colour have been leading social change everywhere and people focus on tackling root problems despite the scary political climate. if anything, the political climate serves as a good motivator for even white people and mild liberals to listen up and try to make life better for everyone–how many americans have been educating themselves and going out to protests and joining community movements in the past years? (it’s another question whether they will continue showing up but the point is that more people are listening to leaders of colour and the midterm elections were just some evidence of that)
social change in canada is a nightmare because this infatuation with comparing everything to america. everyone focuses on american news, everyone laughs at trump’s statements, everyone flicks on the tv and goes “at least we’re not american!”
no one listens to indigenous people. no one listens to canadians of colour. no one cares about our communities, our immigration issues, the rising popularity of racist and fascist hate groups, the high suicide rates in indigenous communities, the mainstreaming of further and further right-wing ideologies in our governments.
because “at least we’re not american,” right? i’m finding it harder and harder to come across people who actually know what trudeau has been up to these past years because nobody thinks it’s as important as following the events to the south of the border as if it’s some exciting drama we have to keep up with.
this weird trend of political voyeurism is a perfectly convenient way to ignore local issues and it’s really getting in the way of our ability to move towards any positive change in this country
yes, there are those who are working hard towards positive goals and are trying to spread awareness of the things i mentioned, but what good is it if everyone just washes their hands of responsibility after voting “liberal” and pretend that everything is okay? that because you can’t see through the smokescreen of canadian “progressiveness” you can’t see that there is so much to be done?
no offens but people being overworked to death in industries like animation and making video games is a huge issue… like holy shit i’d prefer my favorite anime being delayed or a video game’s release being a bit late if it means people don’t suffer under intense conditions and stress
aceofsquiddles 