Latino Humpty Dumptess..? 🤔
Yeah, I’ll be back in Qld by next week. Not rural though, but at least it’s not Melbourne lol!
But yeah, Melbourne is, I guess, vaguely California-like, although I would go more LA than Frisco, personally…
Definitely a shithole though, yes.
It’s just depressing to see it get even worse than it was last time I visited…
Update to this: bartender really took a dislike to me for some reason (I don’t think I did anything to warrant that, lol, she just didn’t like me), and holy fuck do I dislike this city in general…
Hasn’t changed that much in a year, in terms of businesses and infrastructure and the like, but just, the vibe, and the general… Crowded, immigrant-filled nature of it is just… Not me, I think. Not anymore…
Yeah, but India is far too dysfunctional/fucked up to actually take over “our” country, thank fuck, lol…
China, on the other hand…
But yeah, I agree, on a lot of counts. Subcontinentals are… Something.
Although at least I get less of a feeling of “I want to kill you and your entire family” (as in, what they’re thinking) from them, compared to the Arabs and Africans here, lol…
On the Nepalese - yeah, they’ve unironically ruined both the pub scene, and the private education sector, in my home city (you know the one. The one with the mountain, lol), and the fucking Sudanese have made my hometown (not city, even more local) so unsafe that I no longer go to local soccer matches, for fear of them stoking shit…
Or at least that’s how it was a year or so ago. I hate to think how it is now…
Lol, yeah, I’m currently sitting in a (classic) pub, and the tattooed, pierced, dyed-haired (but still very attractive) barmaid is bitching about the place to the largely lesbian clientele, and talking about moving to your (Harbour?) city…
So there is hope yet, if even she can see that “the People’s Republic of Greater Brunswick” has gone to shit, lol…
The referendum result last year (landslide “No” vote, against the “Voice to Parliament”, in every state and territory except the Capital, which is extremely similar to DC, lol), tbh, and the resulting scrapping of “Land Acknowledgements” by some local councils. Only happened in the two most “conservative” states, so far, that they’ve scrapped the wokespeak, but still, there’s momentum…
But yeah, the urban/rural divide, and the divide between the four less urbanized states/territories, and the other four (which hold like 65% of the population), has become almost untenable… Much like the red/blue divide in the US…
I’m from one of the traditional “blue states”, you could say, but I’ve been living in a “red state” for a while. It’s like two different countries, at this point…
I hear Texas is mostly fine, still, except Austin and Sant Antonio, no..?
But I know a lot of Californians have moved over there, this last few years, so I imagine that has shifted things a bit…
I’m currently transiting through areas where my ex used to live (unintentionally, but it’s on the way to where I’m going), and I think even she, woke bitch though she was, would have to admit that things in this part of town are worse now, than even when we were together, a few years back…
This level of urban population growth and demographic change just isn’t sustainable, anywhere. Let alone somewhere as already woke as Melbourne…
Yeah, even ten years ago was better than this. Or, and I admit to being optimistic that this wouldn’t be the case (i.e. thinking that a change of government might be a good thing), prior to 2007, when Labor won the federal election here for the first time in 11 years…
But fuck is it bad now. Like, country areas might be salvageable, but the cities (at least the state capitals, where most of us live) feel virtually wrecked, at this point.
Which is sad. But people keep voting for this shit, so… Fuck ‘em.
Is it not them..? Because that's what it says for me on normal Youtube, too... Is it not their channel?
Nah, Quakers, actually. But similarly "sacrilegious", at least 300-400 years ago, lol. So you were sort of on the right track!
Quaker school. They call it "Meeting House". Basically sit in silence for an hour, unless someone pipes up with something.
Actually not that terrible, in hindsight. But sacrilege to some mainstream folk, I appreciate, yes...
Agreed. I hate the music, but they're young (like, most barely look out of their teens) and they're having fun. I really don't see anything particularly wrong with this...
It would be like judging a whole generation of young dudes for their (milquetoast) behaviour at a rock concert - drawing a very long bow, at that...
The original was massive in my early teens. So much so that at one point, one of the jocks did a performance of it in our equivalent of weekly church (people performed during that time, sometimes), but he swapped out the lyrics to be "Most-Popular-Girl-in-School's Mum has got in goin' on"... I think we all thought it was rather clever, at the time (even if she obviously hated it).
So this feels almost like sacrilege, to me, as someone who grew up in that era, lol...
Yeah, it's fine. But that's all it is. Fine. Dull. Beige. "Adequate". Perfect if you don't care about never fitting in (I tried. Really damn hard), or having decent bars, or good (beyond average) cuisine...
But I can honestly say that it's no mystery to me why most expats (from other Western countries) hate it here...
Did your friends go up North? Because I believe that's where most of the more exciting, "authentic" experiences are to be found.
Stockholm is just meh. Overpriced, over-competitive meh.
Hard disagree.
Sontag was also a childless lesbian (sort of. She swung both ways). I disagree with her (and Orwell) on many things. That absolutely does not mean discounting them on things when they are generally right.
Both her and Orwell's observations were extremely on point. Just because they don't align with your personal prejudices against certain groups doesn't invalidate their opinions here.
Yeah, I guess. But I would personally argue that bottling up almost all emotions like they do here is not particularly healthy…
Hence the extremely high suicide rates. And the related fact that so many of them live alone, and die alone (there’s a documentary on this, the Swedish Theory of Love, and it is revealing)… And the alcoholism, and the domestic violence. It’s just not healthy, whatever moral superiority complex people here may claim…
It also results in extreme conformity and compliance, to the point where I could easily see how an authoritarian leader, of whatever political persuasion, could win here, and convince the population to do bad things, “for the greater good”…
They’re not very rebellious (anymore). They’re not particularly brave (men are so cowardly that they just… Don't even talk to women, here. So thus I stand out, and that’s despite my usually being piss-poor at that). The main objective seems to be “Don’t stand out. Don’t do anything flashy. I don’t matter and neither do you. And you should never think you’re special.”
I just… Don’t find all that particularly healthy. And neither has any foreigner I have met (or dated) while here.
I’m not sure how much of that translates to your family in Minnesota, though, and I certainly don’t mean any offence.
I’ve dated a number of Swedish girls. I obviously chose to move here. But I just… I see a lot of problems with the culture, post-1970s, here. And I think it’s important to point them out (just as I do with Aus), because no one here does that. And someone damn well needs to…
I’m here right now. I’ve been here for almost exactly six months.
It’s… Ok. That is the best I can say about it.
The national bird (possible even animal) is a blackbird. The weather is, for six months of the year, solidly beige, if not outright grey. I would describe their “national character” as also beige.
It’s just… Meh. Like a giant suburb.
Yes, the average woman here is more attractive than in Anglo countries. And yes, it’s fairly safe (depending where you are), and pay is fairly good. But it’s expensive, accommodation is shit, and culturally it’s just… A bit off.
As I have discussed extensively with other foreigners here (mostly English-speakers, but also French et al), it’s just… Very “cold” culturally, and very… Reserved. Exactly as Sontag described it. And they judge you fairly openly. And they fucking love staring…
You know what I would say to really piss Swedes off..? I preferred Denmark. And it’s true. I did. I also preferred Finland, for that matter…
But I’m glad your friends had a great time. I don’t… Hate it here, but if, for some reason, I decided to come back again, long-term, I don’t think I would live in Stockholm.
Quite literally everywhere else I have been in Sweden, with the exception of the village I lived in for three months, has been better than the capital…
Stockholm just… Doesn’t work, for me. I’m not sure why, but it doesn’t.
Unlike Gothenburg or Malmö, that is.
My favourite bit, I think:
"One of the great hatchet jobs of modern American letters, Sontag’s 16-page Letter from Sweden, published in the July 1969 issue of Ramparts magazine, spared few sections of Swedish society. Swedes were obsessively obedient of petty rules: “Old ladies glare at you when you cross an empty street against the light”. But when things go wrong “hardly anyone gets fired”: Sontag saw Swedes as so pathologically frightened of conflict that they turn a blind eye to incompetence and failure. Southern European immigrants told Sontag they found Swedes “unbearably cold, stiff and priggish”, and Sontag agreed.
Superficially, Sontag considered Sweden to be much like the US or West Germany – “six-lane highways, suburban shopping centres… refined and partly detoxified by the condition of advanced ‘welfare state enlightenment’”. But on closer examination she found Sweden full of meanness and pedantry. Swedes split restaurant and taxi bills to the last cent, were notoriously shifty about planning social engagements, and – worst of all – continually smoked Sontag’s cigarettes without returning the favour."
If anything, these habitws seem to have gotten worse, not better, since this country's open embrace of high-level low-skill immigration, feminism and "socialism". It's been 55 years, but I still see those pathologies every day, here, lol...
It's painfully accurate. No wonder people here get so prickly about that letter she wrote, lol.
Or, in the case of female PhDs, they never actually struggled that much for “popularity”, but are still insecure, so have decided they are “smort”, and deserve academic recognition for their weird niche pursuits…
I know someone who is pursuing a PhD in “musicology”. She’s really not a nice person to be around, but then again, she’s thought the sun shines out of her own arse for at least a decade, so… Yeah.
Ironically was quite a nice person when we were younger, but then something changed (I never figured out exactly what, so I can only guess), and her whole personality did a 180, and she developed an ever-bigger ego. Not the only girl I know who that happened to (all academic “high achievers”, not coincidentally), but I try not to think about it too much…
Nah, I hate them too, dude. It’s just cringe, to me…
But I’ve been hanging out with Zoomers a bit, and it is all they do, at parties/when out unfortunately…
Going to a (depressingly, sober) “rave” with said Zoomers was made thoroughly less enjoyable by this fact.
I’ve asked this before, but what is with liberals and drag..? They even force it into completely unrelated shit, like advertising for phone companies, or the lottery, now. I just don’t get it.
It genuinely makes my skin crawl. But it’s fucking everywhere, in almost every Western country (except France, which was nice) I’ve been to in the last few years…
It’s also because higher degrees have become so devalued…
Masters is the new Bachelors. PhD is the new Masters. And yet the number of actually useful things one can do a PhD in has remained largely the same. Hence the utter devaluation of the qualification…
I went to a PhD information session where I was essentially told that if you wanted funding, and to “do well”, you would pick from this list of topics your (woke) faculty had pre-ordained, and take whatever supervisor they recommended you…
Higher level academia was never meant to work like that. That’s a recipe for disaster…
But, gotta keep churning out those grads, I guess!
It was… Disappointing, to say the least.
I hate to think how bad it must be in the Humanities, now…
Wait, then doesn’t that make it definitely consensual..?
If she agreed to that part (regardless of what happened after the photo - whether they went off together or not), then doesn’t that completely negate this claim that it was non-consensual..??
Fucking wack…