askchapo

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2688493

i live in a predominantly white area so i get some racially-motivated and provocative comments from time to time

i just ignore them with a clear look of disapproval (+ sometimes a side-eye) because i don't have the time to educate every single random stranger and it's just not something i want to bother myself with (though i know i should to an extent).

i feel like replying with an insult that they won't understand would make it very clear that i take offence with that they said/did without them reacting to what i actually said and would make me feel better that i retaliated rather than keeping quiet.

(plus responding to an ignorant comment with something they'll be ignorant of feels pretty retaliatory to me)

so what are some non-English (or obscure English) retaliatory insults? ideally they should be a common insult (though it's optional ig), short and should sound like an insult to an English speaker

EDIT: to clarify, i'm not concerned about further escalations as virtually all of these exchanges happen in passing where no one is able to continue the conversation (which is why i'm okay with responding in a potentially rude way).

but maybe ignore the last point about the insult sounding like an insult. saying an unknown phrase in a different language should be enough to suggest my disapproval

Lately, we've seen DnD and Pathfinder move away from some of the more blatant signifiers, like renaming "race" into "species" and "ancestry," and in the case of Pathfinder, having systems in place to mix ancestries in a character build. DnD has decoupled good and evil from species, and pathfinder has done away with good and evil entirely ( keeping a vestige of it present for things like demons and angels).

Race is almost alwys tied to a language and a culture, with, say, kobolds having the same certain cultural signifiers all over the world. To an extent, this makes semse because different peoples in these games can have different physical abilities, or have different origins entirely, which would naturally lead to them developing along different lines -- If one people can breathe underwater and another was born from a volcano by a specific god's decree, that would inform how these cultures behave.

Is it possible to have a fantasy along these lines with a materialist underpinning, or is this very idea of inborn powers anathema to that sort of approach?

It does often seem to be correlated to reactionary conspiracy sentiments. There is the "non-white people could not have possibly stacked rocks this big!" thing

I guess also flat earth?

With the Norwegian government recently deciding to massively increase the US military presence in this country, I just really want to have some derogatory way of referring to Usonians in the Norwegian language. The problem is that I cannot find any good word for this: existing words fall short; foreign words I'm familiar with either don't translate well, or don't sound good when loaned, or aren't easily understood; and I'm having a hard time coming up with a brand new word to fill this gap myself.

I'm hoping that by asking here that I might be able to find some inspiration, or perhaps even be enlightened about a Norwegian-language term that I didn't know before.

(I posted this on lemmygrad but I want to get some discussion from here too.)

I’ve been meaning to ask about some stuff regarding parenti that I see come up on different places.

One of them being about parenti’s book blackshirts and reds. So I’ve run into specific people who have claimed and bought up that parenti is lying about : how social democrats in germany gave fascists a path and its actually fault of soviets.

To paraphrase them

Soviets gave kpd direction to be hostile and also it wasn’t just “socdems will ally with nazis”. It was cause soviets gave advice to be hostile to the spd.

To boil it down, they say that parenti is wrong about rise of fascism and he whitewashed soviet mistakes.

The other thing that's bought up is the bombing of germany and american industrial ties. I see it brought up that parenti is just lying about bombing in cologne of ford factory. And its actually all lies and say the charlie higham “trading with the enemy” reference is bullshit. They go on to say that american industrialist involvement with german industry is not that deep. And that parenti (and other communists) lie about this to make a grand narrative of american involvement. They bring up nazi economy book by tooze and this site as a debunking lies material.

Now my post isn’t so much about parenti, I wanna broadly discuss about the whole notion that soviets or german communists were the reason nazis came to power and that socdems were really not at fault.

And also to discuss that american industrialists involved with germany is some bullshit conspiracy. Which it isn’t, given the lengths across the board they spread collaborating after and before the war. I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on dulles, hw, and nazis spread across into different places for american interests. So I don’t think american involvement is some fake conspiracy.

What are your thoughts? (Sorry if this post is too long)

I read the tiny Wikipedia article on it but I couldn't draw any conclusions from it and not sure how accurate it is

Scholars have discussed this issue for eons, if I bolt a DshKA to a cargo bike, is it a technical? We need to find an answer

I'm very introverted, so loneliness was usually not a big problem for me. But now I feel like I just need some more people to talk to. Just something else to do besides work.

How do you all do it?

Since you gotta bomb places to do freedom and all, how do the freedoms stay so free in burger land? Are there secret bombs being dropped on us?

Edit:

Edit 2: guys, I don't wanna know anymore of where our freedoms come from.

In the 2020 primaries, Donald Trump said that Mayo Pete looks like Alfred E. Neuman (which is devastatingly accurate), and Pete countered that he'd never heard of Alfred E. Neuman and it "must be an old person thing." That was incredibly weird to me, because I'm younger than Pete Buttigieg and I know who Alfred E. Neuman is.

It seems like there's three possibilities: One is that Pete does know who Alfred E. Neuman is, and his retort was simply try-hard and pathetic. Another possibility is that Pete does not know who Alfred E. Neuman is because he's been such a careerist psycho his whole life that he knows nothing but the most basic of pop culture references and whatever his staffers tell him about. The third possibility is that I'm unusual in my age cohort for knowing Alfred E. Neuman. My friends and I read Mag Magazine as kids, but we were nerds, and it may have been well past the heyday when Mad was a universal cultural touchstone for kids.

show your work

No, it's not the one about how Democracy isn't Coca-Cola

The main phrase of it was something along the lines of "The Communist Party must follow the people into the fire", that is, it must defer to the outcome of votes and the popular will even when it believes the outcome will be for the worse (presumably while expressing its own view) so that it does not grow out of touch with the people and instead gains trust and credibility from them in the long term.

It's not on redsails, unfortunately, but I'm sure one of you all linked it to me in the first place.

I just got a comment deleted and my account banned from noncredibledefense@shitjustworks (or however they parse that out). It was a shitty meme fantasizing about Japan getting to do more murdering in China, in the event of a war over Taiwan. I got called a tankie and banned for questioning whether Japan had any appetite for a war with China, and that I thought S Korea would be kept out of the conflict by the threat from N Korea.

Friends, I did not glorify communism, nor did I take any position on the disposition of Taiwan. Basically my sin seems to have been pointing out the "non-credibility" of the meme.

Anyway, I just didn't know where else to post about this (can't even message the mod that banned me!). I know hexbears shun that whole server, so I guess I'm really finding out why.

Without going into too much detail I’ll be participating in a strike action tomorrow related to the college encampments from the past month. While I’m excited to be a part of on the ground action, my anxiety over confrontation is flaring up quite a bit. Especially with there being such a big Zionist presence in my city, I’m worried about not just the police, but reactionaries coming to pick a fight. And while organizers say the likelihood of this is low, it’s something that will always be on the back of my mind. Is there any advice for overcoming these fears and making the most out of tomorrow?

Which one is faster?

Some friends on Discord say that Opera could be better and, hell, some don't understand why I use Mozilla Firefox to begin with outside of privacy concerns.

Apparently, Opera can do more and is faster.

Thoughts?

Think I should switch to Opera?

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4657758

Can you find love after 30?

Can a guy who hasn’t had much luck with women until his 30s find love by then or is it already too late for him?

I'm trying to write a thing.

I keep seeing this online and in person. I don't know how to respond

I am starting to shave most of my body, but I have an issue, and that issue is a safety razor. It works well for my face, albeit with some irritation. The blades also dull pretty fast, as I have really coarse hair, and this issue only gets worse if I'm trying to shave my legs. It also takes quite a long time to get everything with a safety razor, in addition to it being irritating and also failing at it's one job. I appreciate any recommendation and/or reply, thanks in advance y'all!

Also search engines suck, everything is SEO and affiliate links, I promise I wouldn't be bugging y'all otherwise ;)

I feel like this has been a concept for a long time within imperialist studies, but I can't find it. Surely it's a thing. What would you call it?

EDIT: thanks for all the brilliant responses

as an aside in the latest Trillbillies episode Terrence said that we need degrowth communism and it got me wondering what that means to everyone. to hopefully stifle any silly debates i'll clarify that i'm talking about the West, not underdeveloped/overexploited nations in the Global South.

an end to oil drilling, gas extraction, and coal mining will obviously be necessary to stop climate change. how much modern technology can we replicate without relying on those things or other ecologically violent resource extraction? what does an agriculture system that doesn't rely on petrochem-derived fertilizers and herbicides look like? how do we repair the immense damage that's already been done?

i'd really appreciate some book recommendations on this topic as well as everyone's thoughts

I understand that Hexbear has young and vulnerable people, making it potentially unsafe for something as personal and private as sexuality, but I was wondering if there are many online spaces that are friendly and nonjudgmental for that.

There are topics I'd like to discuss like classism in hookup culture/kink communities, but I don't want to make people uncomfortable. I also can't account for wreckers and just general topic derailment.

Also in general, are there considerations I should take when broaching these topics in online spaces?

I feel like we're doing a good job of protecting people from sex pests and I don't want to make a safe place unsafe.