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#americans want to emigrate
yardsards · 1 year
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this cold snap combined with being Obligated to visit my shit parents has me fantasizing about the fact that some day i will move hundreds -perhaps thousands- of miles away from here
#eliot posts#i'm not yet sure where tho#roughly considering georgia bc it's one of the more blue of the southern states#california is always an appealing idea but the cost of living Scares Me#could also move outside of the states#prolly to south america but europe could also be neat like spain or italy or somethin#i've only done surface level research on what it's like to like in various south and central american countries#but a few of em sound good for my wants. especially uruguay i think?#alas most of the pros and cons about emigrating from the u.s. are written by the Type Of Person to blog/vlog abt that type of shit#so their complaints are shit where it's like. that just sounds like how most ppl outside of like los angeles live their life#or shit that is very much like what ot was like growing up in my rural hometown#this one bitch was weeping and moaning abt there being no amazon prime 2 day shipping#anyway tho#i do know that the immigration process is very tough (tho especially in europe)#so that would have to wait til AFTER i've spent a few years here in the states setting up a stable life and saving up money#also definitely need to get better at spanish (or learn portuguese if i wanna go to brazil) bc my spanish SUCKS i talk like a preschooler#this one lady on youtube was boohooing about ''i thought i could just learn spanish through immersion'' LIKE BRUH#you just EXPECTED the locals to accomodate you when you didn't even teach yourself RUDIMENTARY spanish beforehand???#whadda fuck
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mishkakagehishka · 1 year
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He didn't even bring a fun song Jesus. American and boring. Choose a struggle.
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hauntedbythenarrative · 4 months
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redheddebeauty · 2 years
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I really want to go abroad for an extended period of time, but I do not think I would be happy as an au pair
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vergess · 7 months
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Choosing you as the most likely to give a honest and detailed answer. Feel free to delete, however.
When people are calling Israel a colony, what do they mean? The way I understand that word, a colony is land, controlled by some other country that's elsewhere and run by citizens of that country. That doesn't seem to be the case here, since most Israel citizens are only citizens of Israel, not something else, and there's no "main" country they're representing and can return to. Or are people using "colony" metaphorically here?
Before Tumblr mobs me - I don't like Israel and don't support it.
Israel began as a British colony of Palestine in the post WW1 era, around 1920. The people responsible for the genocide are almost entirely of European origin who were moved to Palestine after WW2 (in the 1940s and 1950s) to avoid returning to the homelands where they'd been given up to the nazis by their neighbors.
Today, however, the bulk of the colonization effort is managed by the US military industrial complex.
Now, there are many other people living in Israel, of many faiths and many ethnicities. The Israeli people, be they Jews or otherwise, are also not fans of the genocide, in much the same way the American people are not fans of US genocides.
But the israeli government exists almost entirely as a puppet for US and European colonial goals, and has done since the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in the 90s.
Prior to that, there was a brief period wherein the rightfully elected leaders of Israel sought peace in the region after throwing off the shackles of British colonialism, which again founded the country and only "ended" (on paper) in the 1950s.
Israel has been a colonial effort for about 2/3s of the century it has existed, including today.
Now, this is a simplified explanation, of course. For example, although it was was a colonial effort, the "return" of Jews to their "homeland" was also a refugee effort, and a repatriation effort.
Jews never really "stopped" being indigenous to the levant even in diaspora. This is extremely obvious if you've ever lived in a Jewish neighborhood, but may come as a shock to a lot of people used to thinking of the assimilated mask Jews wear in Christian societies as our "true" selves.
My family were nondiasporic Jews until me, which I gather is an... unusual perspective that many people don't see often. You'll have to take me at my word, I think, because it's difficult to explain. But Jews never actually "became white" the way people so desperately want to believe. Some jews learned to pass for white, yes, but that isn't the same thing.
Jews, even the Ashkenazim (the "white european" ones) have a right to return home the same as anyone. And not just because I'm a fan of open borders.
But here's the deal.
Mizrahim (Jews who remained in the middle east rather than living in diaspora) are literally treated as inferior, as "arabs" (a colonial term) regardless of religion or ethnicity. To be a Jew is not enough. You have to be the right kind. This is true of other Jews of Colour in Israel as well, often to an even greater extreme, as any Ethiopian Jew in Israel damned well knows.
This also... well, I've talked about it a bit before, but this summary is also casting a very cruel light on the concept of Jewish citizenship being automatically granted in the case of Jewish descent. Which isn't fair of me at all.
In a world without all the goddamned genocide, having a reduced immigration process for the children of emigrants is perfectly fucking common and normal and many countries do it, including the US.
And this also doesn't touch upon the critical political reality that Israel exists as a place for bigots to throw their jews away instead of straight up killing us.
So, okay, this got away from me.
Basically, Israel as a state is a colony of the US (today) and UK (historic), which is armed almost entirely by the US, and which attacks targets the US deems "of interest." The fact that the colony is populated by repatriated indigenous peoples doesn't really change that.
If anything, it deepens the horror, because many of the Jews involved in the genocide against Palestine genuinely (and fairly) believe that this is the last place on earth where a Jewish person can reasonably expect religious safety. Genuinely, and fairly, believe that it's a choice between "the genocide of all Jews globally or the elimination of a single '''Arab''' city."
They're wrong, but not irrational.
In a way, the existence of global antisemitism is the justification that fuels the ongoing palestinian genocide.
Though in practical terms, it is "fueled" by US weapons. The US wants to own Israel and use it as a launching off point for US violence in the region, without the US having to take the blame.
"See? It's all just poor, innocent Israel defending itself*!"
*(entirely with US weapons and often on US orders, often with weapons given to Israel rather than purchased, solely to further destabilize a religiously and financially significant region and furthermore to instill a sense of fear of Israel's neighbors and gratitude to the US)
For another example of a colony-of-the-repatriated, you can check out the history of civil war in Liberia, after the US just dumped a bunch of freed slaves there instead of killing them. Unsurprisingly, it went fucking Badly. However, because Liberia was not considered a "valuable" colony, less study tends to be done into the complexities of that.
Or, I mean, there's always "the life history of Osama Bin Laden" which is kind of like a one man speedrun of what the US is doing with all of Israel.
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olderthannetfic · 5 months
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I just wanna highlight this comment from ONTF: It’s all a bit complicated by the fact that *some* [whatever]-Americans are zillionth generation yet claim to know all about the home country and even send money to fund political causes they don’t seem very clued in on… meanwhile, other emigrants still have close cultural ties and still others had those ties forcibly erased and remain a marked category, forever searching for their roots. I don’t think you can treat this range as all the same.
Because yesssss, brilliant! One thing I also would like to add as a European, if someone came to me and said "Hey 5+ generations ago my ancestor was from your country, I'm just really into rediscovering this part of my heritage, and engaging it it." I love that, seeing people who want to see into the past, and who want to learn more, and then build their understanding and views from actual research and a desire to learn. What I hate though is when someone has the very obvious stance of "Yeah my great grandpa was from your country, I don't care about the culture, the language, the people, but any time the country is mentioned I'll speak like I have any idea what I'm even saying and I'll pretend like my voice means more than the voices of the people still connected or directly from that country, while my entire knowledge is based on stereotypes and what random biased sites tell me." That's what I take issue in. You can be generations removed and me, and many of the people from my country would welcome you with open arms if you actually want to engage. But if you're a mouthy ass who puts themselves above everyone else, you bring no value to the talk. No matter how "close" you are generationally. A lot can change within one or two generations.
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terulakimban · 1 year
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The “cultural Christianity” stuff is making the rounds again. And what I think a lot of people who object are missing about that designation is that you have to actually leave a culture to not be part of it anymore, and even then, it will still shape a lot of how you first react to things.
I’m American. I have spent, collectively, a grand total of four months (rounded up) outside the US. My parents were born here. My grandparents were born here. I am pretty definitively culturally American, for all that literally no one in my family identifies as “American” before they identify as “Jewish.”
I can say American culture sucks. There’s a lot about it (yes, I know there’s more than one. Yes, they can be quite different. Yes, there can be a great deal of tension between them. No, that doesn’t necessarily make that much difference from the outside. Yes, that is quite relevant to the extended metaphor I’m going for here) that does. What I can’t do is say I’m not actually a part of it. I’m a citizen. I’m surrounded by other Americans at pretty much all times. I’m not emigrating, I’m not making a point of immersing myself in specific local expat communities as a cultural immersion thing. I’m certainly not “from no country.” I definitely don’t have a more objective sense of American culture than someone who isn’t American and is living here reluctantly. I may have a more in-depth sense of it, but there’s no way they don’t have the basics down, because it is fucking everywhere, and they are constantly running into people who are trying to make them assimilate into it (further) in some sort of attempt to help them be normal. And they, unlike me, have a sense of what it looks like in comparison to something else.
Now. Let’s say I decide I hate America and everything it stands for and I don’t want to live here. But my family’s here, and I’ve got positive memories. I don’t have the money to go somewhere else. So rather than actually leave, I develop a deep fixation on another country. Maybe it’s based on a shallow understanding from stereotypes, maybe it’s a genuine respectful interest. But surrounding myself with a bunch of other Americans while we go on about... I dunno, how much we love England and tea does not erase how we’ve spent our whole lives being American, and it certainly doesn’t erase how we’re still living in America. Let’s say I take it a step further. Let’s say I actually emigrate somewhere. There’s two extremes. Either I fully immerse myself in my new country. I learn the language, I participate in the culture, I genuinely try to immerse myself. Or, I feel uncomfortable because things are weird and different and not quite what I’m used to, so I surround myself with a bunch of other American expats, and we spend all of our time talking about America. Maybe we talk about how much we hated it and how awesome we are for leaving it and how much it sucks and how everyone who’s there is terrible. Maybe we talk about the good things. But we’re still centering our existence around America.
But even in the first of those options, where I genuinely try to acculturate, there’s still going to be things that pop up for the rest of my life where those initial few decades of life in the US will shape my expectations. Maybe they’ll be small things “oh right, sales tax is listed on prices here.” Maybe they’ll be big things “excuse me, what just happened in parliament?” But I will always have that American lens with me. Even if I hate it. Even if I found it traumatizing. That’s not a moral judgement on me, it’s just how formative life experiences work. I can become not-American. I can’t become never-American. 
Cultural existence in a religious framework -any religious framework -works the same way, because religion both has and shapes culture. When I bitch about the omnipresence of cultural Christianity, I’m not calling anyone who is culturally Christian bad. I’m complaining about the pervasiveness of Christian hegemony. When I complain about culturally Christian atheists (which I only ever do in the context of specific behaviors by specific people), I’m not saying “these people are terrible and unredeemable,” I’m saying “there is a very clear pattern of people taking the step of saying they dislike Christianity but then trying to enforce Christian hegemony by claiming the parts they like are secular, thereby effectively coming across from an outside perspective as a continuation of the general attempt at forced Christianization.”
If you hated the Christian family you grew up with and everything about them and Christianity but like Christmas and want to celebrate it, that’s fine. Genuinely happy for you you’ve got something you enjoy! Have fun! Nog your eggs! Deck your halls! Call it Festivus and put up a pole instead of a tree! Do an anti-Christmas where you decorate with Halloween decorations in Santa costumes and celebrate with spooky stuff! But that doesn’t make it secular. It makes it you finding the one bright spot you had in darkness and hanging onto it. I sincerely respect that -it’s difficult to do. The thing is, I’m not in that darkness, and you trying to insist everyone have that light of yours comes across as yet another person shining the interrogation light of “why can’t you just be normal like me” in my face.
I don’t want Christmas. I want freedom from it. “Everyone can have Christmas” in response to “I don’t want Christmas” doesn’t come across as a friendly offer to share. It comes across as an aggressive attempt to force assimilation specifically on people who say they’re actively fighting it.
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luimnigh · 7 months
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Fun Fact: Ireland is one of only a few countries in Europe that does not allow voting from outside the state.
You'll see a lot of countries setting up ballot boxes at Embassies or community centres, for their citizens abroad to cast their votes, but Ireland does not allow for this.
You might think that's weird, given that Ireland is quite famous for it's emigrating population, but that's actually precisely the reason why.
According to a 2011 study, there are three million people with Irish citizenship living abroad, including 2 million who have never lived in Ireland. As of 2022, Ireland has a population of 5 million.
See, so long as one of your grandparents were Irish, you qualify for Irish citizenship. So there are literally millions of people across the world who qualify for Irish citizenship without ever spending a day in Ireland.
Allowing them to vote would mean the voices of people actually living in Ireland would be diluted at best.
At worst?
Well, in 2016, the BBC estimated that 6.7 million Britons qualified for Irish citizenship.
There are enough potential Irish citizens in Britain alone to outnumber the entire population of Ireland.
I don't even want to think about percentage of America's 33 million Irish-Americans qualify for citizenship.
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octuscle · 11 months
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Hello is this Chronivac Support? I've been trying to use your app to become a really beefy and big russian bodybuilder but I can't seem to get past the changes page. I always wanted to be like the ones in the movies that speak no nonsense and get shit done all the time while looking like I rip through t-shirts on the daily and as a russian american myself I'm a bit envious of their looks...
But then you obviously have the right genes, so something can be done. I can't quite understand why nothing has happened so far… Probably your change requests were not formulated precisely enough. I have now formulated it as follows: You become one year younger every day. And every day you have lived one year longer formally in the gym. Since the invasion of Ukraine in the Ukrainian village in Chicago, before that in Sevastopol. There you had your own gym, now you use your good contacts to different laboratories to bring more or less legal substances to the USA. You yourself are clean, all natural!Just lie down and relax, I'll activate the transformation in 15 minutes! Now lie down and relax, I'll activate the transformation in 15 minutes!
When you wake up the next morning, not much has changed. Except your bed. It is now in a small boarding house in Chicago. You turn on the television. Russian news. Even though it's nasty propaganda, it's still a piece of your culture. There's something Russian in you, too. To wake up, you do a few push-ups. And then off to the gym. Before you open the training area, you want to lift some iron yourself. You still feel a little lost among all the bulks. But the training is starting to have an effect, and in your mid-30s you still have a good chance of achieving a lot. Besides, you like the guys here. Many refugees from Ukraine. But also young guys from Russia who fled the war effort. All with their hearts in the right place. And most of them good customers when it comes to nutritional supplements…. After you've cleaned up and wiped through, you stand in front of the mirror and do a few poses. Yes, you're starting to see something. You are quite satisfied.
The next mornings always the same routine that you had since the hasty departure from Sevastopol. It was actually quite a good idea, as a Russian-born man, to set up a business there. Nobody could have guessed that war would break out after such a short time. Now you are building up your new business here and you are actually quite satisfied. For the Russian-Ukrainian community, especially for the young men, you have already become a central point of contact. And you yourself have been able to make good use of the year and a half here to put on some muscle. You are definitely no longer one of the little boys here. And the really big boys come at lunchtime to eat your special protein pirogues. You just have to be inventive to build and keep clientele. And with you, necessity was the mother of invention.
After one week, the transformation is complete. You are still living in the boarding house where you moved in after fleeing from the Crimea. But in the meantime it belongs to you. Fortunately, you were able to sell your well-functioning gym in Sevastopol through straw men and continue a good part of your import and export business. You miss Crimea. You are 28, at the age of 21 you returned to your parents' homeland to seek your fortune. And in the end you found it in your old homeland. Even though you have a heavy Russian accent, you were born here. Even though you met most of your friends here on the Black Sea, it was emigration to the USA that really brought you together.
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And even if you are officially American, no one can get the Russian out of you. No one is more of a man than a real Russian!
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morlock-holmes · 9 months
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The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes—I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether— is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often. At the end of a television program on which Malcom X and I both appeared, Malcolm was stopped by a white member of the audience who said, “I have a thousand dollars and an acre of land. What’s going to happen to me?” I admired the directness of the man’s question, but I didn’t hear Malcolm’s reply, because I was trying to explain to someone else that the situation of the Irish a hundred years ago and the situation of the Negro today cannot very usefully be compared. Negroes were brought here in chains long before the Irish ever thought of leaving Ireland; what manner of consolation is it to be told that emigrants arriving here—voluntarily—long after you did have risen far above you? In the hall, as I was waiting for the elevator, someone shook my hand and said, “Goodbye, Mr. James Baldwin. We'll soon be addressing you as Mr. James X.” And I thought, for an awful moment, My God, if this goes on much longer, you probably will.
James Baldwin - The Fire Next TIme
Man, man I followed a chain of links and found that paper, "Decolonization is not a metaphor" and I read like three quarters of the dang thing before I realized that we all already got mad at it because it is morally insane.
This is less about the idea of a literal mass expropriation of land, and therefore wealth, from the current owners in the US, which A) is not going to happen any time soon (Land acknowledgements are acknowledging that you ain't giving the damn land back to anybody); and B) if you tell me that the land I live in will be given to the local indigenous people my first question is,
"So will they be raising the rent as much as the previous owners did?"
What's morally insane is... Okay, no, I object to the idea that the question is irrelevent, although the authors of the paper do say fairly explicitly that it is wholly irrelevant.
What I find morally insane about the paper is not the idea that the authors wish to ignore my feelings on the matter, but the very strong suggestion that I should train myself not to have an opinion on the matter.
I linked the paper up there, I don't want to summarize too much, but essentially, it posits a triad of indiginous person/settler/slave, which in the US context maps more or less onto Native American/white/black.
Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how we/they came to be in a particular place - indeed how we/they came to be a place. Our/their relationships to land comprise our/their epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies. For the settlers, Indigenous peoples are in the way and, in the destruction of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities, and over time and through law and policy, Indigenous peoples’ claims to land under settler regimes, land is recast as property and as a resource.
Settler, in this paper, is not meant very literally. The settlement of the US involved not just the theft of land specifically, but the creation of certain narratives about who has rights to use land and in what way. My ancestors in this country go back hundreds of years but they are, to our best knowledge, legally white, and I am therefore a settler in the sense of having a certain relationship to certain racial and conceptual categories.
Don't get me wrong: the history of this country makes at least certain versions of that idea very plausible.
So what am I supposed to do with that?
If I take the authors of this paper morally seriously, (And once I took similar views very seriously, in some ways I still do) where does that put me?
Settlers in a country like the US do not and cannot have a creation story about how we came to be in a certain place. That I am a settler in the US very much does not make me somehow indigenous to Brittany where many of my ancestors come from; I do not have a story of how my people came to be in Brittany or Great Brittain any more than I have one for how we came to be in the USA.
What I can become, perhaps, is an immigrant:
Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to.
Here's a question: How, as a settler, would I acquire the moral right to influence the laws and epistemologies of whichever land I should migrate to?
I don't have the legitimizing moral narratives that indigenous peoples do, am I doomed to simply occupy a subordinate place in a new hierarchy?
The authors, I should note, explicitly say no, but also explicitly say that they basically can't explain why not and so I just shouldn't worry about the question for now.
Honestly I think a tremendous amount of American history involves attempts to deal, psychologically, with the fact that the question of who has power and who doesn't has been decided in a way which is at odds with most of our country's moral pretensions. I think that shame has been one of the great psychological factors driving white attitudes in the US, both racist and anti-racist.
Think about what the "moves to innocence" that the authors delineate would mean if you took their moral position seriously. Those moves to innocence are attempts, I am quite sure, to find a way to act in the world for your own benefit without feeling shame. The indigenous person can ask for the control of the land they occupy without shame; for the settler, even to occupy the land is to make yourself part of a shameful process.
"Decolonization is not a metaphor" treats the desire to express oneself without feeling shame around it as essentially a distraction.
The settler is simultaneously morally obligated to exercise a tremendous amount of power and effort, because how could the non-metaphorical expropriation of all US land and the end of the USA as a functioning state take anything other than a tremendous amount of power and effort, but also to have no thought at all about what the ethical exercise of power from a settler would look like.
It is morally imperative that the settler begin to act and use his power in a moral way and at the same time the very question of how the settler would do so is understood as a frustrating distraction from more important questions.
The only possible response for a person who takes this seriously and conceives of themselves as a settler is to just fall back on an entirely incoherent self-image because the demands being made of them are fundamentally incoherent, to feel a kind of shame without shame.
I have probably over-explained this and yet not quite gotten to the central problem. I really disagree with this paper, and I think it is fundamentally unserious and fundamentally poisonous.
Not because the authors propose a massive reorganization of land but because they are utterly unwilling to think about what that would mean on any level whatsoever.
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itsmenefertiti · 7 months
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A historical lesson about the countries, cities and regions that were nominated to be a homeland to Israel.
1. State of Ararat (Buffalo, NY)
The American Jewish diplomat and journalist, Mordechai Manuel Noah, proposed the idea of ​​establishing a homeland for the Jews in Buffalo, New York, in 1825, however the Jews weren’t fond of the idea.
Source: Anatolia - BBC
2. State of Argentina
In 1891, the Jews relied on agricultural colonialism under the supervision of the German Jew Maurice de Hirsch, who bought millions of hectares in Argentina, however the idea and plan failed and the Jews had to emigrate from there as a result of economic crises in Argentina.
Source: Anatolia - BBC
3. State of Sinai (Sinai, Egypt)
In 1897, the founder of international Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wanted to settle Jews in the city of Al-Arish in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, which was under British colonial rule, but the rejection of the idea by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid prevented its implementation.
Source: Anatolia - BBC
4. State of Uganda
In 1903, British Colonial Secretary Chamberlain proposed establishing a temporary homeland for the Jews in Uganda, but the idea received great opposition from the Zionists, who saw Palestine as the only appropriate place to establish their state.
Source: Anatolia - BBC
5. Birobidzhan State
The Jews planned to build a state in the city of Birobidzhan in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast region, which prompted them to emigrate there in 1928, but that ended after Soviet leader Stalin suppressed them, executed the head of government, and closed the synagogues.
Source: Anatolia - BBC
They were against making Uganda a homeland because they have the perception that Palestine is the appropriate land to establish their state. This just means that they had it all in their mind a long time ago from decades and centuries. They had a plan all along!!!
Imagine after all this, they still claim they have a “land” and they are the rightful owners of the Palestinian land. If Palestine was originally their land why did they have many attempts conquering other lands to make it their home? the only answer is that they have no homeland.
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itskattkm · 11 months
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New York New Rules Pt. 5
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Warnings: Violence, Trauma, Fluff, maybe Smut, mental health, blood
Summary: Y/N meets the survivors of the last events in Woodsborrow and gets on Ghostface's list. But there is also a darkness in Y/N wich path is she going to choose
Female Y/N x Tara Carpenter
Sorry for bad writing. I'm using a translator and hope you guys can enjoy it. Also, this is going to be a slow burn
A/N damn guys I wrote that on the plane and what happens before I finished? I deleted everything by accident… and then I had to rewrite. What means, I couldn’t write it like I I did in my first draft. Hope you still like the chapter, and if I hadn’t rewrite it, well it would also be longer
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4,
Now I stood here and made the pizza for the Woodsborrow Gang. I was basically free on Friday because of the therapy. Maria had even insisted on this herself because I worked here most of the time on the weekends. But now I didn't have a therapist anymore, how would I do it now? On the other hand, I had done it this way so far.
Heavy steps that just moved over the ground came closer to me and the next moment Maria kept me company. I would recognize Maria's steps of hundreds of meters. But to defend her at this point, she is already around 50 years old and had opened the pizzeria here with her family when they had emigrated from Italy to America. They wanted to get a taste of the American dream and in the end they got it too. Maria was a great inspiration at this point, she had always stuck to her wish, no matter how difficult the way there was. Thanks to the job with her, I always had the advantage of baking pizza when I wanted and as much as I wanted or I took something else from the restaurant with me. My mother doesn't feel that I was still eating pizza, but at least it was something. I always called it the pizza diet back then.
When suddenly something wet hit me on my neck I looked shocked at Maria she had hit me with her rag "Don't you think that's too many jalapeños?" She said with her arms crossed and looked skeptically at the pizza I had just topped "It was a special wish" I said with a smile. Now Maria raised her eyebrow, looked at me skeptically. Her brown hair with the caramel highlites had been put together into a messy bun when she said with a strong accent "Y/N you don't have to exaggerate right away, I hardly see the tomato sauce or the cheese" I grinned and looked at the pizza "that's still possible" she sighed "hopefully this is the first and last pizza you did this way“
Where would I be without Maria?
I listened to her while she was talking in Italian until she was finished. Now there was a short silence, she was interrupted by the entrance door. When it had opened and touched the bell. I degenerated on Maria's usual greeting, but it never came. Confused, I turned my gaze forward and wiped my hands on the black apron I was wearing around my hip. I took it off as I walked around the workplaces and ran towards the restaurant. When I stood at the door frame, I found Maria on the floor. Her eyes were wide open as she held her hand firmly on her neck. Blood.
She was flooded with blood and had leaned against the wall. Slowly my gaze wandered in and met him.
Ghostface. He was here...
I had held my breath in the hope of becoming invisible.
"Y/N I would have called you, but unfortunately I don't have your cell phone number," he said and looked at me crookedly.
My gaze wandered over the white empty face of him and got stuck in his black eyes.
"You could have called the pizzeria," I said before my brain could process any information and situation. Was that the adrenaline? Or did the survival instinct felt like that? Carefully, I took a step back and looked back to Maria. His knife was in her neck. Maybe she would survive? But there was already so much blood. Way too much... how could she stay so calm?
With her eyes she tried to tell me something when she looked at the kitchen several times. I understood and turned my attention back to Ghostface "you wouldn't have answered on your day off," he said.
Analyze. Analyze! I screamed in my head. Okay Y/N that was now the chance to take information with you. How often would I run through the Ghostface otherwise? Let alone survive?
Note one, he definitely seemed taller than me. So it must have been a man, but the robe made it very difficult to distinguish that. I understood why the killers had chosen this costume. Okay note, two he had a Voice distortion and then his face. Damn you couldn't see anything except a crooked look here and there. But wait... Note three...
"How do you know that I work here and have Fridays off? And since you don't have my number, maybe Mindy's statement wasn't so wrong... you're Ethan" I said cooler than I thought. Ghostface straightened up and did not answer. His body language told me that he was pissed off.
Fuck. The next moment he sprinted towards me so quickly that I almost stumbled when I ran back into the kitchen. I reached for everything I found to put as many obstacles in his way as possible. After I had made a round around the work surface, I grabbed the noodle wood and threw it on his face on the way to the restaurant. However, I only missed him there slightly. So I grabbed every chair in the restaurant I got into my hands and threw them mercilessly at him. If I could do something well, then it was to throw chairs!
When I hit him again, he fell to the ground. That was my chance! I grabbed another chair and started hitting him with it. There it was, the anger. Fear? No, I wasn't afraid.
Suddenly Ghostface was able to reach for the chair and now turned the tables when he began to press it firmly against me.
I fell hard with my back on the floor.
No. No. No. I quickly tried to get up, but realized that I had slipped and was now in a blood trail. My gaze followed the blood pool and I found Maria lying on the floor next to the small reception. No... my gaze continued to follow her tips that she had left behind and there was the phone itself, it hung down the wall.
The next moment, Ghostface lay over me and pushed me firmly to the ground. He put both hands around my neck and began to choke me. No. I certainly wouldn't die now! Not after what Maria had done. And then there was this feeling again but I couldn't say if it was the adrenaline. I grabbed Ghostface firmly by the shoulders "Fuck you!" I screamed and hit my head against his. His grips left my body and he groaned in pain. I fell back exhausted and suddenly he took a knife over me the next moment. Ghostface pulled out and I would immediately be hit by a pain that I couldn’t avoid... but what I could do was to decide where this pain would hit me. With a force that I never expected, the knife came towards me and pierced my left hand when I came to meet the knife with it. Trembling, I resisted him a few centimeters above my face. Why didn't I feel any pain? I asked myself now, I barely took how the blade had drilled through my hand. I looked into the black of his eyes and screamed as he began to move the blade in my hand. He would cut my hand in half just between my fingers and I couldn't do anything about it. On the contrary, I continued to exert pressure to push him away from me. I felt his strength read and could perceive his astonishment despite the mask.
Piece by piece I felt the metal destroying every one-liner muscle and that tendon. Only a few centimeters were missing and my hand wouldn’t be one piece.
Just when I thought my cry would be the last thing I would hear and ghostface's face would be the last I saw before my death, a sound appeared that I never thought I would feel safe of it.
Sirens. Ghostface resistance disappeared from now on. I smiled dirty at him and whispered " now you're fucked!" His gaze fell to the window. The red and blue lights of the siren were reflected in the white of his mask.
And then he gave me one last look and ran into the kitchen. The door was torn open and I was met with a relief that I would never have wished for. Kirby held her gun in position and glanced through the restaurant, behind her a SWAT team and some police officers.
When my vision deteriorated and the pain hit me like a bullet in the chest, I croaked "K -Kirby" and I no longer had to stare at the darkness, I saw in Kirby's eyes that were as bright as the sky. Worried, she looked at me "kitchen" I whispered and let my head fall back. " Hurry up!" She called out to the team and was by my side the next moment. I shook my head "Maria..." Kirby followed my gaze and I recognized so many feelings in her at once, but she managed to collect them and gave clear instructions. Her gaze fell on the police officers "paramedics immediately!" Already a group of them stormed in and they gathered around Maria.
Was she still living? Did she have another chance? I had to know I had to see her.
"Why cant I see anything!" I said without a voice and shook my head. Kirby straightened up much carefully and leaned my upper body over hers as she pressed me into her arms and began to wipe over my face.
"Tell me that you can save her! "I called the paramedics in my half voice. I hadn't realized how much I had screamed while Ghostface was about to kill me.
I began to breathe hard. Kirby's grip around me became stronger and she wiped away more and more of my tears. So they were the reason why I couldn't see.
"Williams... I need you here," Kirby said sternly and one of the paramedics turned around. He came to my side and raised my arm to look at my hand.
My head burned and pounded... my voice was now just a soft whisper. "I -I was so scared Kirby... i -I thought I was dying" tormented she looked at me and nodded "everything will be fine Y/N" I shook my head "no... no it won't"
I resisted her grip and wanted to stand up, I wanted to destroy something. I wanted to hurt Someone like I was hurt and there I was hit by a small sting on the upper arm. Confused, I saw to my right upper arm " fuuuck..." I whispered before everything got dark I began to fall.
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acesandocs · 29 days
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Before I post the short story I've been working on, I wanted to introduce some of Ace’s family, since they're going to be featured. I tried to edit it down to the important stuff but if anyone wants to know more just ask.
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Solveig Liv Årud/Sylvia Hall, Ace's Mother
Ace's mom Solveig was born in Kapp along with her two brothers, One of her neighbors was a music teacher and taught her to play the Hardanger fiddle. When she was seventeen she became pregnant by one of her neighbor's students but was urged by her neighbor to never tell him or anyone else of the child's parentage. Having had Ace outside of wedlock Solveig faced a lot of social ostracisation. Her sister in law, who was deeply religious and judged Solveig for having a child without marrying. A rumor amongst the townspeople was that Ace's father was actually a fossegrim, that Solveig agreed to have a child with in exchange for teaching her to play the fiddle so well. (there is actually a lot to say on how this affected Ace and his view of himself but we don't have time to get into it rn). After a flood made her and her family homeless they emigrated to America in 1920 at the advice of some friends.
Once they arrived in New York Ace became very ill and bedridden causing them to be left behind as the rest of their family continued further up to Minnesota. While Ace was sick Solveig met and later fell in love with a Swedish immigrant named Eric Hall. She married Eric after knowing him for half a year. Solveig had kept Ace close all her life and not really letting her grow up or stand on her own. So he reacted badly to Solveig marrying. Being jealous and being unable to deal with not being her mothers center of attention, making him lash out. After an argument where Solveig slapped Ace for being disrespectful to her stepfather Ace ran away from home. Ace and Solveig have been estranged ever since, both being too stubborn to try to reconcile. After Solveig married Eric she tried very hard to adapt to American culture, Americanizing her name to Sylvia and trying her best to learn English and not speak with an accent. She currently has two children with Eric. Neither them nor Ace know of each other's existence.
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Torbjørn Olaug Årud and Lena Årud, Ace's Grandparents
Lena was born in Kapp and Torbjørn was born in the Lofoten area. He traveled down to Toten to live with a family friend after he became orphaned. He later met Lena and they eventually married. They later had 2 sons, the youngest of them dying as a child, five years later they had a daughter and three years after that another daughter they named Solveig. When Solveig became pregnant at seventeen they decided to support her and help her take care of their granddaughter. In the years immediately after Ace was born she and Solveig lived with them before moving into a smaller house on their property. By this time their oldest had married and taken over the main house on the farm and Torbjørn and Lena moved into another small house on the property.
They emigrated to America with the rest of their family in 1920 and went with the rest to Minnesota leaving Solveig and Ace behind. Lena later died in 1922 after becoming sick. Ace does not know this happened.
Info on the art:
Ace is supposed to be a tortoiseshell cat, witch is something that can be seen in her mother and grandmother as well. this is a reference to the fact that tortoiseshells are mostly female. (source)
Her grandfather is supposed to be a Norwegian forest cat.
The implement Solveig is holding is called a Lyster and it is used to fish. Lyster fishing was usually done when it was dark out, using the Lyster to stab the fish. it was banned in the 1860 but was most likely still practiced afterwards. Today it has become completely illegal. The fish in the bucket are trout, a fish that was commonly caught with a Lyster. (source) Here is a painting depicting it.
I apologize for any spelling mistakes or weird wording, i try my best to read though these before i post them but some mistakes often slip through.
Edit: fixed up a bunch of spelling mistakes and weird sentences. I promise im good at English😭
i think i should look into getting a dyslexia diagnosis
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uptoolateart · 1 year
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Education Systems
I'm updating this because a French fan has now added to the conversation, for accuracy.
I think a lot of people have misunderstood the French education system, after watching Confrontation. I did a bunch of research into this for one of my fics - I have lived in the UK since I was 16 and have children in the British education system - and I originally grew up in the US. With all that in mind...
When you finish the first major stage of education:
France - Age 15
UK - Age 16
US - Age 18
Picking your focus / specialism(s):
France - Age 15, you can pick a stream, focusing on subjects relevant to what you want to do in life.
UK - Age 16, you can pick a stream, focusing on subjects relevant to what you want to do in life - there are also vocational courses, if you’re not remotely academic, and I bet there is something like this in France.
US - You are required to take all general mandatory subjects, even if you suck at them, until age 18, at which point you can finally specialise.
Speaking personally, when I lived in the US I was only given one elective in high school, and for my junior year (age 16) I realised I would have no time to fit that elective into my schedule because of all the science and maths requirements...subjects I was all but failing, because I knew I was artistic / literary-minded from a very young age. I was forced to suffer falling self-esteem, feeling like I was stupid and not good enough, simply because I didn’t have the ‘right’ brain type to fit with what the school wanted. There were other schools in the area that had slightly different requirements, but they all did some form of the same thing.
If you don’t know what you want to focus on yet:
France - There are generalist academic options where you do the usual variety of subjects, with the proviso that you get to choose if it’s more heavily weighted towards maths / science or towards liberal arts (see my personal anecdote above).
UK - Does something similar to France.
US - I was seriously considering dropping out of high school as soon as legally able (age 16) because I couldn’t cope with the pressures of the school system and my shattered confidence, despite previously being a straight-A student. However, if you drop out, you bear that stigma for life, no matter how much else you do - even though there are countries like France and the UK that legally release you from that education system at the same age or even younger. I’ve seen this happen to a lot of extremely intelligent American friends.
At university:
UK - You ONLY do classes directly related to your degree.
France - I'm told it's the same but that you don't get to choose unrelated electives for fun (you can do that in the UK - not lots, but a few over the years).
US - You are forced to take a lot of mandated subjects that have nothing to do with your course, e.g. local government or trigonometry even though you’re doing a writing degree, and you pay an absolute fortune for these / the required textbooks. (The most I ever spent on a book for my UK English degree course was £15, whereas textbooks in the US cost in the hundreds.)
What if you change your mind?
UK - Most jobs don’t care what degree you did, just that you did a degree. If you decide to do something that does need special qualifications, you can always go back and undertake them, at any age...with the proviso that you need to find the time and money.
France - I have been told it can be difficult, although in ways similar to the UK (and probably the US), where it depends on the job. Some jobs will always require retraining. It's always easier to do that training when you're younger and have fewer obligations
US - I can’t specifically comment, as I emigrated, but see above. Also, I have American friends who have gone through a LOT of hoops to try to change career paths in later life. This is probably an area where all countries could improve.
In conclusion:
The French (and UK) system is not necessarily forcing teenagers to lock into a fixed career path with no looking back, at the age of 15. Nothing is perfect, but in many ways, I think the French system actually offers options for greater flexibility by allowing greater choice at a younger age, instead of being forced to take all these other classes they may never use again in life, possibly at the detriment of their mental health.
Don’t get me wrong - there are a lot of things I prefer about the US vs the UK system in the lead up to high school (I can’t comment on the French system during those years, as I have no experience). But I’m a big believer that we need to allow kids greater choice at a younger age, with the option to stay in generalist education if that’s really what they want.
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valcaira · 5 months
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Seeing US american leftists call for a withholding of their votes felt like a cruel joke to me at first.
You live in a democracy, arguably the rarest political governance in the entire world. The ability to vote is a privilege. Political participation is a privilege. The ability to protest, form political organizations and vote are all privileges.
Do you really think that witholding your vote to the democrats will cause the republicans to do the same? It's naive to think it will do anything but shift the voter ratio to Trump's favor.
You've seen the republican's proposal for 2024. Trump is a genocidal maniac who would cause even more plight for Palestine - hell even the entire Middle East as a whole. Don't you remember 2016 - 2020? How he handled Covid? MILLIONS of Americans died.
As a voter in a democracy you have power and responsibility. If you are able to vote but refuse that responsibility you are nothing short of a naive dumbass.
You talk about wanting to fight and change things. You CAN change and fight by VOTING. Via political participation. Do it at least for those who cannot vote (there are many reasons why, ranging from laws to lack of accessibility. I know well for a fact most voting ballots are inaccessible to disabled people in the US and that's a whole other conversation).
Yes you must choose between two evils. Choose the lesser. Don't choose to do nothing.
If my mother hadn't emigrated from Belarus to Germany I would be stuck living in a dictatorship. I wouldn't be able to vote. Fuck, a huge part of my family is still suffering under Lukashenko's dictatorship. Their hands are tied. Knowing y'all's attention span you likely already forgot about what was going on in Belarus in 2020. Despite having blogged about it. Funny.
It's just something so ironic I don't know if I should laugh or cry.
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olderthannetfic · 11 months
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I'm a run of the mill White American, and I've been doing a lot of geneological research recently and can't help but feel a deep sense of loss. It's not my own loss, but it''s something my ancestors lost and thus were unable to pass down to me.
One of my great great grandfathers, for example, emigrated from Ireland as a child. From what I hear, he spoke English with a mild Irish accent and faced all the anti-Irish discrimination that was common in his time. His daughter, my great grandmother, had an American accent and there was nothing Irish about her aside from her surname. She had no stories or recipes or songs or festivals from Ireland to pass down toher own children, and by the time we got to me the fact that that side of the family was Irish at all had even been forgotten. Word of mouth in my parent's generation was that that brand of the family was Scottish (it was a common Mc/Mac surname, spelled variously in different records), and it wasn't until I traced my great grandmother's census records back to her birth that I learned that my great great grandfather's name was Patrick and he was born in Ireland. Anything Irish, even the very fact that he was Irish, that this man brought with him from his home was entirely lost within the space of a single generation. That loss of culture and identity is tragic, even if it's not my own loss.
The same thing happens on nearly every branch of my family.
Another great great grandfather emigrated from Italy as an adult; records from 1890 described him as a naturalised citizen who looks and sounds Italian. His son, my great grandfather, had am American accent, did not speak any Italian, and had no Italian culture to pass down to his children. Aside from the name and the basic fact that the surname is Italian, all Italian culture and identity was lost, again within the space of a single generation. All the Italian food my parents cooked when I was growing up were things they learned from recipe books simply because they liked it, and had nothing to do with my father's Italian heritage.
Another branch of my family is Swiss, it took one generation to lose Swiss accents, language, and culture there, too.
Another is Danish. it seems to have taken two generations for all Danishness to have disapeared.
The Dutch and German branches of the family both came to the US earlier than these, so it's harder to track down information about who came from where and when, but there was no Dutchness or Germanness in those respective branches by 1900, they spoke English and were considered Americans, and if they had any specifically Dutch-American or German-American culture or traditions, they did not pass them down to my great grandparents' generation.
All these cultures are things I could have had, but that my ancestors lost or hid or had taken from them before we got to me. I'm comfortable in my cultural identity as a white American, I don't feel any need to go out and claim to be Italian or Irish or Danish or Swiss or anything, and I especailly don't want to talk over anyone actually from those parts of the world, but for my American identity to exist, countless people lost their own European cultural identites. Some were more marginalised than others (a recent reblog posted some newspaper ads that demonstrated how German Americans were prefered over Irish Americans, and I can't help but think about that in context of my own German and Irish ancestors who were in the US at that time), and some are more at risk than others. The Italian language isn't going anywhere any time soon, but every person who learns to speak Irish is one more drop in the bucket against that language going extinct.
I think it's important for White Americans to remember where we came from and to know what our ancestors lost to create the identity we have today. Even if I have no Italian-American culture, it's good to be able to say "my surname is from Italy and I know what the world was like for my great great grandfather". It's also important to realise that our ancestors' identities are not our own, and what they lost cannot be regained simply by claiming their identities for ourselves. I can try to learn about and participate in their cultures, I can learn to speak Italian and cook Danish food and sing Irish songs, and in doing so I can even help keep at-risk cultures or languages or traditions alive, and this is good, but we also have to keep in mind that having an Irish great great grandfather does not mean that we are Irish the same way he was.
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The loss of culture is sad, though one thing I will say is that immigrants between anywhere and anywhere tend to lose their old language by the third generation unless they're going back and forth or there are a lot of monolingual speakers in the new country. That probably wouldn't ever have stuck around, but the food and the festivals could have.
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