The word has negative connotations, but I stand by it. I an not saying there result isn’t stronger, but if you extend cultural mixing out to the maximum - say humans and the planet survives another thousand years, and global travel is no harder than traveling to the next town over - what you end up with is homogeneity, and this would be sad, I think. Imagine it: the entire world speaking some pidgin derivative mashup of Mandarin, English, and Hindi, with essentially the same culture everywhere on the planet. Just as has already happened, languages are lost, because nobody speaks them natively anymore. All that’s left of the original cultures are some UNESCO sites and preserved old movies. I can’t say the world wouldn’t be stronger for it, but in the process, something irrecoverable is lost.

I don’t know about this meme, but you know memes come in waves. It’s just the nature of memes.

That said, Germans - at least the Bavarians - have a special relationship with pizza second only to Americans. It’s kind of weird, because it’s so random. You don’t see this in, e.g., Southern France, and Italians seem almost ambivalent to it.

I think it’s because, despite the world wars, Germans generally have a fondness for American culture, the same way Americans generally have a fondness for Mexican culture. They have Germanized versions of American food, like we have Americanized versions of traditional Mexican food.

I don’t know who the French are fond of, besides themselves.

Because people fear having their culture and race replaced by immigrants. Even if they’re not overtly racist, few people wish to become a minority in “their own country.”

The US is famously a melting pot, and yet we still have a bunch of descendants of white immigrants from Europe who fear that South Americans will take over; that Mexican culture will replace good old-fashioned hodge-podge Western European culture. That their language will become less dominant. That they’ll find themselves strangers in their own country.

It’s usually an indistinct fear. It seems obvious from the verbiage in the dog-whistles, but white European immigrant descendants don’t want to become second-class.

Now, if we treated our own minorities well, they wouldn’t be so afraid. They wouldn’t be afraid that they’d be the ones with Hispanic cops kneeling on their necks; or that Hispanic immigrants would be living in giant homes and they’d themselves be the ones having to eak out a living as seasonal workers.

I think it’s not despicable to want to preserve your cultural heritage, your cultural language, and to have your country legislated with the values you grew up with; but people react poorly when they think it’s happening.

What I most despise in the Republicans in the US is that they’re advocating for preserving cultural values that never existed broadly in the US. The closest subculture to what they’re pushing is a return to the Confederate South: religion, and white supremacy. The Confederates got their asses handed to them, but the racist fuckers never gave up their values, most most Americans are blind to what their real agenda is. And they’ve been good insurgents, cleverly taking advantage of weak areas in our democracy to return power to a minority: themselves. It’s been said and it’s true: if America was a true democracy and we selected leaders by popular vote, no Republican under their current platform would ever be president again.

Anyway, getting back to your question: immigrants bring their own culture with them, and very few completely abandon it and adopt the culture and language of their new country. This dilutes the host country’s native culture, and people are afraid of that. In the US, it’s the highest form of hypocrisy, because our native culture displaced the indigenous culture, and now we’re afraid of someone else doing the same to us.

It’s the angle. Can you hold your weight with your arms straight out to the sides? Sure, you can do push-ups, but can you do this?

or this?

Most people can’t.

That’s not how I meant it.

There’s a cultural value in virginity in girls. It’s pretty common across cultures: for marriage, virgin women are more desirable than non-virgins. It’s biased; the virginity only increases value for girls, and it probably stems from men wanting to be sure than any prodigy are actually theirs. Women can be nearly 100% sure a kid they have is theirs (not quite 100%, as there’s a brief period when a channeling swap could conceivably be made), but the men can never be certain. The best odds you have is to get yourself a virgin. So female virginity has been valued through history (by men), and I think this is where the fetish of having sex with virgins comes from.

That’s what I’m taking about. I’ve never understood the appeal of “being a girl’s/boy’s first.”

The top YouTube comment hit the nail on the head, though: the problem is that 49 million people didn’t watch the Carolina rally.

I have never, ever, understood the appeal of virginity. Who prefers someone who is uncomfortable, awkward, and doesn’t have any experience?

This has always baffled me. This is one reason why I think sex workers should hold a high status in society: they provide an valuable service in training the uninitiated and unskilled. It’s like taking tennis lessons, and all your future partners should be grateful for their lessons.

Man I hope there’s a brace across his back, because a human’s arms are not strong enough to overcome that much resistance.

But it there were a sturdy brace, that looks like almost enough resistance to keep him from dying, if he can keep from tumbling. Which he probably can’t.

Yeah, that guy’s best outcome is a lot of broken bones.

Yeah, it’d have to be a Lemmy design change, and then all of the many clients would have to implement it… momentum is a powerful force in the software world, and difficult and dangerous to overcome. Look at the fiasco of Python 3; that was a cock-up of epic proportions. Lemmy’s got enough users and clients now that changes have to be made extremely carefully.

which is what I’d wager many think of when you say “the Internet”

I wager you’d be right, but most people are wrong.

I’m saying that everything is built on foundations that are fundamentally English and American, and this influenced even Berners-Lees’s creation. HTTP and HTML were fundamentally ASCII. DNS and the WWW eventually evolved broader encoding support, but it’s clearly tacked-on and awkward. All you need to do is look at URL encoding rules as proof.

I’m not saying it’s right; I’m just saying there consequences of an English, American-centric design of what underlies all computer technology today is evident at all higher levels, no matter how hard we try to mask them.

They need a “follow accounts” button here. Like if a reporter used

Thank you!

And: dude! I have totally thought the same thing! It’s so weird that Mastodon has follow-accounts, but no communities; Lemmy has join-communities but no follow-accounts; and they’re both ActivityPub. You’d think that would be a no-brainer feature, right?

I think most non-Southerners’ exposure to it is in media, where it’s almost always racist in context. There’s a surprising amount of subtly in Southern social interactions that I think it’s missing from most of the US. Sure, Midwesterners are known for raising passive-aggressiveness to an art form, but you recognize it no matter where you’re from.

The subtly in social interactions in the South are truly exceptional, hard to get a handle on, and unmatched anywhere else in the US - IMHO. Southerners have as many ways of being condescending as Eskimos have words for snow.

Is that phrase still acceptable, or is the Eskimo/snow comment now not PC? Is it still OK to use the term “Eskimo?” If the Eskimo thing is offensive, I sincerely apologize. An alternative would be “as North-westerners have words for rain,” but I don’t know if that’s as widely understood an idiom.

The internet originated in the US. All of the original specs were made by Americans. ASCII is literally built around English, and ASCII is at the foundation of every single core technology of the internet. Hell, even when they designed UTF-8, it was still Western-centric; to this day it gets some push back from the Orient, because it’s makes things harder for them - I think there was a fight to standardize on UTF-16 because it was easier for Asian languages; I may not be remembering the details correctly, but there’s some legitimate beef some Asian languages have with UTF-8.

Now, obviously, more non-Americans are on the internet than Americans, but it’s the same argument as Critical Race Theory: when the entire foundation and infrastructure is built on a bias, that bias influences all interactions even when isn’t overtly obvious, or even intentional.

It’s always demeaning. Calling a full-grown man of any race “boy” is belittling them. Yes, there’s a special racist association, but it’s been used as much on white men. The female equivalent might be “little girl.”

“What do you think you’re doing, little girl?”

It might have the same effect as simply “girl” if said the right way, but “girl” has been more normalized and sexualized, so it’s a little different.

Anyway, the terms are belittling, and therefore demeaning, regardless of race. The point of using them is to position yourself over that person, as a parent over a child; it’s shorthand for saying they are beneath you.

“… that meltdown, boy.”

You’re doing it, I say, you’re doing it wrong, boy.

Would you be able to show a picture of what you’re talking about?

Oh, yeah. I took tons of photos of those walls over the years. Most of them are in archives, though; like I said, we lived there over a decade ago, but I have one in my front photo album:

I do have a picture of one end pillar, but that has pointing, and it’s not obvious that pointing is aesthetic and not structural mortar (although it is often applied over mortered stone). Anyway, you can’t tell the stone isn’t mortared b/c of the pointing, so it isn’t a useful illustration.

That photo above, however, is clear there’s no mortar, and yet that hundred y/o wall is astonishingly straight and level.

Ah, but I agree with you! It’s commendable that we care for our weak who would otherwise die.

The other wolf, though, thinks there’s a good chance the stupid are going to drive us to extinction.

Thanks for not taking offense when you legitimately could have. Reason 1 why Lemmy > Reddit.

Maybe? Natural selection seems to work for the rest of everything in nature. But humans are special, aren’t we? Above nature; different rules apply to us, nature itself treats us differently.

I do agree that humans are fundamentally different in that more of our individual value is learned than inherited. OTOH, more of our value is learned than inherited, and that’s where the problem lies. It’s not there genes, it’s the parents and the parenting. I’m not suggesting we’ll improve humanity by removing stupidity through evolution; I’m saying there are a lot of people who I don’t believe are fit to raise children. And there’s a corpus of examples that could support that argument; how about that guy who literally shook his infant to death last week? Good father, him?

I’m not a parent myself, and I will never be one. Maybe I’d make a good father, maybe not. But I’m not breeding, so taking me out doesn’t affect the gene pool; I’m not playing in the gene pool.

And, no, I did not misunderstand the point. What I said was that if I could get a guarantee that others would also be removed, I’d volunteer to be in the group.

That was hyperbole, BTW; if I really believed it, I’d go to a Trump rally with a bunch of C4 and ball bearings wrapped around my torso. Even if I were an Einstein, it’d be a net benefit to humanity.

Dude. If I could guarantee that my sacrifice would also remove some N>1 number of dumbshits who shouldn’t be contributing to the ecological load the Earth’s ecosystem is bearing, I’d volunteer.

The Idiocracy intro got a lot of things right.

No.

A decade or so ago, we owned a small rural house in Pennsylvania where the roads in the area were lined with 5’ high stone walls. Turns out, about a hundred years before, a rich family (for whom there were towns in the area named) had built themselves a giant stone mansion nearby, and to do so, they imported a bunch of Italian stone masons, and built little houses for them in the surrounding lands. To keep them busy when they weren’t working on the mansion (or whatever other projects they were doing), they had them build all of these roadside walls.

Everything was dry laid. No morter, nothing. Just rocks, stacked in top of one another. Not even particularly regularly shaped; they just jigsawed them together. The walls were 5’ high, 2’ across at the top and maybe 3’ at the base, and they lined every road for miles around. And this was the busywork these guys did.

I’m most places, these walls had stood unmoving for decades - again, with no morter or joining. When we bought our place, some previous owner wanted an actual driveway instead of just a road to the barn and had simply pushed a hole through the wall with a bulldozer and left these giant stones alongside the driveway.

A few years in, we hired some local Amish guys to use the stone to build proper end-cap pillars for the driveway. Those guys also did not use morter, except on the caps to make little roofs. They just lego’d the pillars out of the left-over stone, and we got a small discount for letting them take whatever they hadn’t used. I have no idea what these stones weighed, but certainly several hundred pounds each. The work crew was 3 guys, and no heavy machinery. They arrived in a pickup truck, were dropped off, and were picked up at the end of the day (it did take them a couple of weeks to do the job). They partially deconstructed the ends of the wall to integrate the pillars; it looked all of a piece at the end.

I think you greatly underestimate people’s ability to stack rocks, especially healthy, fit men used to labor.

P.S. I’m not saying it doesn’t take skill; I couldn’t have done it, even when in my prime; not well anyway. Not the first time. But none of those ziggurats were anyone’s first time stacking rocks.