Where Light and Darkness meet

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
illwynd
carbonatedeverclear

being neutral about other peoples kinks is necessary by the way. when consenting adults are doing things between consenting adults, and you prioritize your discomfort over their autonomy and right to exist safely in a space without having their private interests excavated and recontextualized to make them out to be predators, that says way more about your willingness to place yourself in the position of moral authority than it does about them and you deputizing yourself on the basis of nothing but vibes and your personal traumas makes you very dangerous politically.

steel-type-connie

Hyperbole aside, it’s always disappointed me when people I like and respect— progressive and reasonable people— suddenly become high and mighty, loftily disgusted, when the subject of unusual kink comes up. If it’s between consenting adults, mind your fucking business. ✌️

tuulikki

They parrot progressive talking points, but their bone-deep conservatism shows when they’re challenged to defend the rights of anyone other than themselves.

alwida10
marinella-ela

phoenixwrites

#that giraffe is being so cute and curious and gentle#and that is running full speed because this is the worst fucking day if his LIFE#like IMAGINE having your butt gently scooted by the snoot of a pressence so massive#your body is not designed to even see high enough to see the top of#abd hes just gently nudging you along as you run for your life as fast as your legs can carry you#giraffe is playing humans are enjoying turtle is living out a cosmic horror story

alwida10
renthony

#this excludes writing pedo or incest.

renthony

Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.

People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"

Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.

I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.

If you look at the tags on my original post, this post was originally about hospital horror, and how it's allowed to exist even if an individual has medical trauma and doesn't like the genre. But since someone wanted to go and put some shit on my post that I disagree with:

No, actually, it doesn't exclude those things. Dark themes in fiction are allowed to exist whether you like them or not.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was not a real little girl who really got brutalized. She was a fictional character. No real child was harmed. People are not reading Lolita and going out thinking, "oh, this told me to abuse children, and clearly it's morally okay now." The existence of Lolita is not responsible for the existence of CSA.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare was pretty meta, but Freddy Krueger was still never real and never hurt any real kids, either. He's a story. None of those kids ever died, none of them ever got abused, and Fred Krueger never got burned to death, because they're all fake and never existed. Murder and CSA in the real world aren't Freddy Krueger's fault.

Jaime and Cersei Lannister are not real people. They are fake. They are words on paper, and actors on a screen. Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are not siblings, and did not ever have real sex in the show. It was fake, simulated, not real sex. No siblings actually fucked. Nobody is watching/reading Game of Thrones and thinking, "oh, I can totally go fuck my sibling with no repercussions now!" The existence of Game of Thrones is not responsible for real-world incest.

Guillermo del Toro's film Crimson Peak didn't kick off an epidemic of everyone deciding it's okay to fuck their sister and kill their wife. William Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" isn't making people kill men and sleep with their corpses, and Emily never really killed Homer because neither of them actually exist in the first place.

John Wick isn't making people run out and become hitmen. The very cute doggy that infamously dies in the first movie was not actually a real dog death--the dogs in John Wick were treated very well, according to a ScreenRant article I found!

Ghostface was played by a combination of stuntmen and a very talented voice actor, and all his murder victims were actors who were filming a pretend story. It was all choreographed and nobody really died. The benind-the-scenes stuff for the Scream series is actually really cool if you're into that sort of thing like I am.

Arcane didn't put grenade launchers in people's hands and turn them into vigilante fighters juiced up on Super Drugs--and you know what, neither did any of the things the Batman franchise has churned out. The Joker and Scarecrow and Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn aren't out there terrorizing New York City, because they're fantasy supervillains who aren't real and can't hurt you.

The endless waves of bandits in Skyrim are pixels on a screen, and I'm not killing real men when I cut them down. No real people got hurt when my Sims 4 house caught fire. Playing Super Smash Brothers hasn't gotten me into underground fighting rings, and neither did watching Fight Club.

It's all fiction.

None of it is real.

The characters are fake and do not exist.

Curate your own media experience and get your head out of your ass.

renthony

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[ID: a comment left by tumblr user msexcelfractal, which reads "Cool post OP, now do Birth of a Nation. End ID.]

Content warning: antiblackness, antisemitism, sinophobia, general discussion of bigotry and oppression

You really want to try and go there as if that's some kind of gotcha on the subject of dark fiction? Fine. Let's go there. I've got sources and free time.

Birth of a Nation is a horrific hate crime of a film. It is flagrantly racist and was connected to a surge in KKK membership. Nobody should watch that film for enjoyment. It's horrific. Nobody should be forced to watch it, either. You don't have to watch the film, and I don't recommend you do, unless you're actively involved in studying it for whatever reason. It's a bad, hateful movie.

I have not watched it in its entirety and I don't really ever intend to. There are Black scholars who have already broken it down and discussed it at length, and I don't feel I'm going to get anything out of the film that they haven't already covered. If I need to study Birth of a Nation in more depth for whatever reason, I'm going to defer to Black scholarship on the subject.

But if you tried to ban the film altogether? If you tried to erase it from existence? I would ask what the fuck is wrong with you. Banning Birth of a Nation does absolutely nothing to combat the racism that created it. It wouldn't stop racists from making racist art. It wouldn't erase the damage done by the film. It wouldn't go back in time and make it retroactively never made.

You know what banning it would do, though? It would strip film scholars of the ability to discuss it. It would prohibit people from talking about exactly why it was bad. It would inhibit honest conversations about what the film was and who it affected.

You know what you do with horrific bigoted art like Birth of a Nation? You have content warnings, like the one I put at the beginning of this reply. You don't spring it on people who don't want to discuss it. You don't put it on for people to watch without warning. You don't tell everyone you know to go and watch it and give it money.

You do things like what Warner Brothers did with their Tom and Jerry disclaimer:

“These animated shorts are products of their time. Some of them may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today’s society, these animated shorts are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.” 

You damn sure don't erase it from history and pretend that ignoring it will solve bigotry. Censorship is not the answer, because censorship is always enforced harder on marginalized artists. You ban racism in film, you ban films by Black artists who are exploring the topic from their own perspective.

When the Hays Code banned "offense to other nations," you know what happened? It didn't stop racism in film, that's for damn sure. It instead gave bigoted censors a perfectly legal and easy way to shut down art by marginalized people, which they did gladly.

The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany resulted in the Reichsfilmkammer demanding the removal of all Jewish workers from Hollywood's European locations. American films began receiving heavy censorship and bans in Germany, and so American studios complied with the Reichsfilmkammer's demands in order to avoid legal trouble in Germany.

Despite the Nazi party's outright hostility toward Hollywood, the MPPDA office discouraged any negative depiction of Germany or the Nazi party. Germany had been such a huge market for American cinema that the Reichsfilmkammer's censorship codes for German films began impacting American-made cinema. Jewish representation in cinema all but disappeared overnight. Joseph Breen, the head of the censor board, was an open antisemite, going on open tirades against Jewish people. His censorship policies were flagrantly bigoted and only served to reinforce that bigotry on a systemic level.

In 1933, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Sam Jaffe tried and failed to make an anti-Hitler film titled "The Mad Dog of Europe." The Hays Code was used to deny the film's production. On July 17, 1933, Will Hays himself ordered the filmmakers to cease and desist, all in the name of "not offending Germany."

Said Joseph Breen, "It is to be remembered that there is strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.”

Variety said about the subject, “American attitude on the matter is that American companies cannot afford to lose the German market no matter what the inconvenience of personnel shifts."

Anna May Wong, a Chinese-American actress, lost out on a leading role in the film "The Good Earth," due to the Code's explicit ban on interracial relationships. The leading man had already been cast with a white man wearing yellowface, meaning that Wong was unable to be cast as the leading lady and love interest, even though the characters were supposed to both be Chinese. The role instead went to a German-American actress wearing yellowface, who went on to win an Oscar for the role.

Censorship doesn't help anyone. Censorship does not protect anyone. Censorship does not prevent bigotry, and in fact only serves to reinforce it.

Anyone who read this far and learned something: being an independent media censorship researcher doesn't exactly pay the bills, so check out my Ko-Fi or Patreon if you learned something and feel generous.

My main sources for this post are:

  • Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934, by Thomas Doherty
  • The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code, by Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons
  • The Encyclopedia of Censorship, by Jonathon Green & Nicholas J. Karolides
  • Morality and Entertainment: The Origins of the Motion Picture Production Code - Stephen Vaughn
  • Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, by Mark A. Vieira
  • Forbidden Hollywood: The Pre-Code Era (1930-1934), When Sin Ruled the Movies, by Mark A. Vieira
  • Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration, by Thomas Doherty

And since you made me talk about Birth of a fucking Nation, here are some additional resources for people who are actually interested in Black media history:

  • Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, by Nicholas Sammond
  • Archival Rediscovery and the Production of History: Solving the Mystery of Something Good - Negro Kiss (1898), by Allyson Nadia Field
  • Humor and Ethnic Stereotypes in Vaudeville and Burlesque, by Lawrence E. Mintz
  • The Original Blues: The Emergence of the blues in African American Vaudeville, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
  • Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era, by Brenda Dixon Gottschild
  • Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop, by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen
  • Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, by Eric Lott
  • The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville, by Prof. Kathleen B. Casey
  • Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis, Jr. And the Long Civil Rights Era, by Matthew Frye Jacobson
  • Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture, by John Strausbaugh
  • A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary, by Geoffrey Jacques
  • Hollywood Black: The Stars, The Films, The Filmmakers by Donald Bogle
  • The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media: 20th Century Performances on Radio, Records, Film, and Television, by Tim Brooks
  • Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, by Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser
  • America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies, by Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin
  • White: Essays on Race and culture, by Richard Dyer
  • Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara
  • Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, by Wil Haygood
  • Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, by Ed Guerrero
  • Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, by Donald Bogle
  • White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood From the Dark Side, by James Snead
  • Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism, by Nancy Wang Yuen
  • The Hollywood Jim Crow: the Racial Politics of the Movie Industry, by Maryann Erigha
philosopherking1887
fdelopera

Yo Gentiles! Looks like I'm going to need to give some of you a crash course on what antisemitic language looks like, because I've been seeing entirely too much of it from some of you here on Tumblr.

A few things before we dive in, to give you some context:

1. I am a Jew.

2. I do NOT support the Israeli government, or its war crimes, or its occupation of Palestinian lands — I fucking despise the Israeli government, as do many Jews, and I support the Palestinian people. I support a free Palestine.

3. I do NOT owe you that opinion, and you should NOT go harassing random Jews online for their opinion on the Israeli government. I am choosing to share this information so that you know where I am coming from in this post.

4. I also do NOT support the murder of Jewish civilians, or a mass deportation or mass murder of Jews. Whatever we do, we need to avoid another mass extermination of Jewish people. And throughout history, mass killings of Jews tend to happen like clockwork every 70-100 years or so. And the Holocaust was about 80 years ago.

Now, I think it's time for a Jewish history lesson, because I've been seeing way too many Nazi-related conspiracy theories going around. If you hear contradictions to the basic information that I am about to share (i.e., if you hear someone saying that the Jewish people are "a race that originated in Europe"), it is likely that you are hearing a white supremacist, anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.

So, here's the basics of Jewish history. Jews are indigenous to the Levant have been there for thousands of years. The Semitic people that Jews descended from have been in that area of the Levant since the Bronze Age. Jews as a distinct people have been there since the Iron Age. Before it was Palestine it was Judah, then Judea, and then Judaea, and that is literally where we are from. The word Jew means "a person from the Kingdom of Judah." The Romans renamed the area Syria-Palaestina (which they borrowed from the Greek name Palestina) in the 2nd century CE after destroying the Second Temple in Jerusalem and leading another campaign to try to eradicate the Jewish people (guess what, we're still here, motherfuckers).

And even after the Romans tried to annihilate us, even after they scattered many of us into European diaspora, many Jews came back, again and again over the ages, and there have nearly always been Jewish communities in the region throughout history.

And if you come for me or try to dispute any of this history with white supremacist bullshit, I am a Jew who has studied way more Jewish history than you. And as politely as possible, you can take your white supremacist conspiracy theories and fuck off into the sun.

Okay, with all that out of the way, let's get into it!

Gloves are coming off, because this is just a sampling of the Nazi dogwhistles I've been seeing here on Tumblr about the Jewish civilians who were tortured, murdered, and worse:

- If you say shit like, "The Jews got what they deserved"...

GUESS WHAT? You're talking like a white supremacist, and you need to fucking check yourself.

- And if, on the other hand, you say shit like, "The reports were probably overblown. I think those were paid actors. I don't think those Jews were murdered. No Jewish children were killed. No Jewish bodies were desecrated" blahblahblah...

GUESS WHAT? You get to sit with the Nazis at their table for lunch.

- If you tell Jews "go back to Europe where you came from"...

GUESS WHAT? Not only are you telling the descendants of Jewish refugees to go back to the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, and the Nazi gas chambers, as I explained in this post, but you are also repeating a white supremacist conspiracy theory about the origins of European Jews.

Jews are a Semitic people from the Middle East. While there was some emigration to Europe during the late Roman Republic and the early days of the Roman Empire, the first mass migration of Jews to Europe was a forced migration. Gentiles from the Roman Empire dragged us there as captives after 70 CE, the year Rome destroyed the Second Temple.

- And if you're telling yourself that there are "good Jews" and "bad Jews," and those Jewish civilians were "bad Jews," so they deserved to be tortured and killed...

GUESS WHAT? You're spouting white supremacist ideology.

Antisemitism takes a long time to deprogram.

A lot of gentiles grow up with anti-Jewish ideology that they have never questioned.

And a lot of Christians are kept ignorant about Jewish history because preachers and priests fear it would make Christians question the many inaccuracies in the Bible.

But the first step in noticing antisemitic beliefs is to notice when you start singling people out *because* they are Jewish.

And I have been seeing some of you gleefully celebrating the murder of Jewish civilians *because* they are Jewish.

And that is antisemitism.

That is one step closer to the next generation of Jews getting shoved into the gas chambers. And there are only 16 million of us left in the entire world. We're 0.2% of the world's population. And we cannot afford another Holocaust.

And if your response to me saying that is, "Well, those Jews deserve it."

Guess what. You are making it easier for Nazis and white supremacists to spread hatred and commit acts of violence against Jewish people. And you will have to live with that blood on your conscience.

So...

If you are a gentile, and you see other gentiles repeating these kinds of white supremacist dogwhistles about Jewish people, here's how you can help:

1. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Help them direct their focus away from attacking random Jewish people online and towards helping Palestinians.

Actions that people can take right now are contributing to verified charities and relief organizations that help the people of Gaza. Some organizations that are verified by CharityNavigator.org and CharityWatch.org are:

Anera (92% rating on Charity Navigator)

Palestine Children's Relief Fund (97% rating on Charity Navigator)

Doctors Without Borders (98% on Charity Navigator)

2. Call that shit out. Tell people that they're being antisemitic, and explain that Jew-hatred is dangerous to Jewish people. Antisemitism gets Jews attacked and it gets Jews killed. In the US, many synagogues require round the clock security to protect against white supremacists who want to murder Jews. In Pittsburgh, my old home town, a group of Nazis from north of the city planned the murder of Jewish congregants at Tree of Life Synagogue, and so far only one of them (the gunman) has been arrested and convicted of the murders. The others are still at large.

3. Encourage people to condemn Netanyahu and the Israeli government. It is *essential* that we all collectively protest against the Israeli government and hold it accountable for its war crimes. AND explain them that it is antisemitic to celebrate someone's death *because* they're Jewish. ALSO, it is antisemitic to blame a random Jewish person for the actions of the Israeli government, and saying that Jews as a people are responsible for the war crimes of Netanyahu is also antisemitic.

4. Explain to people that they're not going to solve this conflict by posting antisemitic statements and memes online. All they will do is alienate the Jewish people in their lives and make those Jews feel scared and unsafe. And they will contribute to this current wave of antisemitism.

Antisemitic hatred doesn't help Palestinians. All it does is put Jewish people around the world in danger.

angryowlet
sighinastorm

“You don’t have to be that gung-ho on trans rights to realize that a world where girls’ genitals need to be inspected before they can play any sport is worse for girls than a world where once in a while there’s a trans girl on a girls’ team.” —Evan Urquhart

anoriathdunadan

House Bill 6 | 135th General Assembly | Ohio Legislature
legislature.ohio.gov

As of 10/14/2023 Here’s where the bill’s at:

image
Source: twitter.com
headspace-hotel
headspace-hotel

I literally don't care when people are like "haha americans are so annoying/dumb/whatever" cuz I can take a joke, but I've been seeing tags on posts of mine from people who like. Deeply, Viscerally, Venomously Hate USAmericans.

They see us as the privileged oppressor class of the world who willfully and gleefully fuck everyone else over so "we" can enjoy luxuries. Our big cars, our extravagant restaurants, our Disney World and McMansions, right?

And it makes something inside me die a little bit, because the USA distributes TV shows, movies, magazines, newspapers and advertisements that tell you what America is like and what luxuries Americans enjoy...

...and it's propaganda. It's propaganda, not reality. These images and mythology of a luxurious, affluent America are so inescapable, constant and penetrating, like radiation, that even Americans believe it even in spite of reality around them.

It hurts that the propaganda is all anyone sees outside the USA as well, is what I mean to say, because inside the USA it's the same. I feel average, not poor, but I have always been demeaned by these depictions that tell me, "This is a normal American" showing financial privileges I would never hope to have and that my mother or her mother would never have been able to even imagine.

Like I looked up "average american neighborhood" on google images

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And there are articles from American papers and publications that use these stock photos as images of an "American neighborhood" or "American homes" and it feels like being chipped away bit by bit, because when I was in middle school I went to the house of my friend and my friend's mom asked me condescending questions about whether my family ate instant noodles and "frozen food" (which they were too good for) and that year I was too humiliated to invite any of my wealthier friends over to my house, and yet they did not live in houses as big as the houses in these photos. THIS IS NOT AVERAGE. AVERAGE AMERICANS DO NOT LIVE HERE. WHAT THE HELL. There is a neighborhood in my town that looks like this and in my head I call it the "rich people neighborhood."

I come from the Americans that live here

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and mobile homes/trailers are around 12% of houses in my state, so it's not rare, and when my mom was growing up everybody she knew lived in one of these. But this isn't what the world is shown. And even in America when this is shown it's something to be gawked at and pitied.

"Americans buy fast fashion every month and on average only wear it a couple times" I wear my clothes until they're falling apart and many of the clothes i have now are hand-me-downs from my mom or from Goodwill. "Americans eat out at restaurants all the time" Growing up I would eat out at Red Lobster as a treat with my dad about once a year, and sometimes we couldn't afford that. "Americans work so much because they're so obsessed with money" when I was a kid I remember when my dad would sometimes be working until 11pm or later at his construction and remodeling job, coming home exhausted and covered in drywall dust, and we barely got to see him because he was trying to dig us out of our house imminently going into foreclosure.

And I know that I have it so much better than so many people that came before me. Compared with the world my mom grew up in, I grew up in a world of fabulous luxury. My Mamaw's family was sharecroppers and by the time she was highschool age she started working in the cotton mills making gold-toe socks. And being white they've got a position of relative privilege even then. At least they didn't face violence and hatred over the color of their skin.

Why do the articles and writings say "Americans" live in big houses and eat in extravagant restaurants, but they don't say "Americans" live in flimsy, non-permanent structures propped up on cinder blocks and eat whatever cheap processed food is sold at the Dollar General, which is the only store for miles around and doesn't even sell fresh fruits or vegetables?

We're all trained to identify ourselves with the folks in the big houses, not the folks who have to camp out under tarps underneath the bridge, but I would say more of us are closer to the second one than the first. The images of America don't look like people I would talk to and hang out with, they look like the people that used to look down on me and my family like we were less than.

Fact is, "americans have it sooooo much better than all those people in third world countries, everybody there would kill to have the privileges you have" is a fundamental key part of the propaganda, and the purpose is to make Americans, especially poor Americans, think they're fundamentally different than working class people in other countries.

The mythology that the USA is the best place on Earth is a threat. Truth be told, a lot of poor folks are panicky conservative reactionaries in part because they can't afford to travel and see what the cities are like, let alone another country, and they have been told their whole lives that this is the best possible society, and they are scared to death of things getting worse.

Idk where i'm going with this, I just think seeing nation states as discrete categories of people that have more in common with each other than they do with anybody outside their country is a nefarious piece of propaganda

and also I have seen people claiming specifically that Black people in America have it better than the rest of the world by virtue of being American, which is so fucking stupid but i didn't wanna start shit but now i'm sick and in bed and kinda do

we are more alike than we are unalike and the people that say otherwise are mostly trying to get us to identify with a nation state that sees us as lower than garbage

spandexbutterfly4lyfe

OP, I hope you don’t mind me tacking this on but I always say this and you’ve provided the perfect context for it:

If you believe that USAmericans are so well off and privileged, then you have also fallen for the “America is the greatest country on earth” propaganda.

library-bat-girl

I gotta be honest - I am not American, I don't fall into the "Hates Americans" group of Non-Americans but... this is not at all why people outside of America viscerally hate Americans. I'm not gonna deny that you've seen people say this sort of thing? But it's really not representative of why the rest of the world hates America, and has hated America for years. The reason why most people who aren't American hate Americans is because we KNOW how fucking bad it is over there, we know your politicians are cartoonishly incompetent, and yet you are massively fucking powerful. You're like if Homelander from The Boys was a country... which is really kind of fitting.

Your politics are a shitshow, your entire political system leans hard to the right, but as a nation America is fully convinced of it's own superiority - and has the largest military on the planet. Your country has historically broken every rule, including rules that it has set, for its own benefit, be that killing and torturing civilians, illegally seizing land overseas for personal gain, starting pointless wars for oil and profit, nuking two fucking cities, destabilising legitimate governments all over the world to suit your own agenda - while claiming to be "The good guys" in every piece of media you put out into the world. And then in your own country, you elect people like Trump, you have mass shootings on a weekly basis and do nothing about it, you have massive amounts of poverty right next to ridiculous forms of excess. We don't look at American shows where people injure themselves eating mountains of food and think "Fucking Americans, can't believe they have that and we don't", we look at them and think "That's fucking disgusting. How could anyone justify wasting that much food."

We see so much of your news and so much of your media, both the propaganda shit and the real shit, because you present yourself as being the most important country in the world - but the standards you use to filter what the average American sees and the spin you put on certain stories doesn't really make it abroad. We probably see more of the real shit than you do because your media is so incredibly biased - more than once, I've found out about shit happening in America BEFORE my American friends have because it was easier for me to get access to that information than it was for them. Most of us know that America is totally fucked up - hell, the entire world was watching the Trump presidency in abject horror wondering how the fuck things got so bad that this could even happen over there. We know exactly what America is like. We know the propaganda is bullshit.

But honestly this whole post is kind of illustrative of why people really don't like Americans anywhere but America. Even when an American is talking about how fucked America is, you're doing it because you assume we all hate you lot because we're jealous of you. Like you think that the prevailing reason why Americans are disliked across the world isn't your insane politics, your cultish religious practices, your rampant, violently exploitative capitalism, your deep seated culture of nationalism and bigotry - it's that we think you're the shit and we're jealous of you.

Do you know the most frustrating thing people say about the USA in my country? It's not "Oh those gosh dang Americans, they've got it so easy". Whenever there's some bullshit in OUR politics, whenever our government does something fucking heinous, people wave their hands and say "Ah, well at least we're not as bad as America." America is so overtly terrible in the world's eyes that other shitty governments point to yours and say "hey we could be worse" when they want to get away with doing something fucked up. The issue has never been "Americans have it so easy." The people who buy into the propaganda LOVE America, they don't buy into it halfway and decide "America is a utopia at the expense of other countries, fuck those guys", they buy into it fully and think you're the tits - and then end up sorely disappointed if they ever actually GO to America.

headspace-hotel

I think your perspective is just different from the statements I'm referring to here (encountered on the internet, which is not very representative of What People Think). These are the perfectly reasonable reasons to hate America, which I fully understand is not the same as like...hating random individual people.

To be honest this post went a lot of directions as I was writing it and I have mixed feelings now about the message I was putting forward here, because I feel like it comes off as "Here's what its Really Like in America! Please feel sorry for us."

When rather, the thoughts and emotions leading to it were like, "intense resentment at how our own media is so overwhelmingly dominated by the experience and reality of affluent/rich people, and anger at how this promotes the idea that Americans consume a great excess of goods and pollute an excessive amount because they have this wasteful lifestyle by choice, when in reality two things are true at once: 1) poor Americans consume more than the poor anywhere else and 2) consumption is hardwired into our lives to the point that we literally physically, financially, sometimes LEGALLY cannot consume less."

Like for example. The intensely wasteful American lawns are in many cities required by law to maintain. It is illegal to grow vegetables in your own yard in some American cities. This is talked about on Tumblr a lot, so it's likely no surprise, but Americans all have cars because there is no public transportation whatsoever anywhere that's not a large city, it's literally illegal to have shops and residences in the same areas of town, and many areas have no walking paths at all. The road that leads to my house, you cannot walk along it because there is no "edge" to the road, just a straight drop into a drainage ditch full of water. Homes that are thoughtfully built so they can be cool in summer and warm in winter without massive energy expenditure simply are nowhere to be found.

American newspapers and magazines love to put out these guilt-trippy thinkpieces like ooooh,,, we are sooooooo wasteful and affluent!!! and it's describing things that either 1) sound totally insane to me and like something no normal person has the money to do or 2) are something I have zero power to control.

And I see people outside the USA repeating these sorts of things, innocently I suppose, since it's usually pretty reputable publications that are writing this bullshit—and it is so frustrating that some rich fuck gets to determine what """""we""""" Americans are and are not, what we "should" do, what """""we""""" are collectively responsible for, especially when they're putting on this air of conviction and self-awareness to make themselves seem like One Of The Good Ones.

And I feel resentful at the fact that I'm expected to feel closer affinity to some rich fuck that writes an article or a book or something like How Wasteful And Affluent We, As Americans, Are (and why i'm better than you because i felt sort of bad about it), than a person from another country who is just regular. I hate how intentionally difficult it is for me to learn about and interact with the rest of the world, without treating other people's culture as something to be consumed or gawked at. Obviously I'm not the one that suffers from this, but we—all humans—need it done away with to build a world that's better.

To me it appears so important to form solidarity among people on Earth transcending international borders, and come to identify with other people who share similar struggles and fears and hopes for the future we can build even if we do not live in the same place or share the same nationality. But American culture wants to turn us all into hateful fucking troglodytes that are scared of anything different than what we know, clinging to the rich affluent American identity even though it's not attainable and never was—see ourselves as rich so we will feel guilt over the wasteful extravagances of the rich, shoulder the responsibilities of the rich, support the agendas of the rich.

I don't really know how to write it all, but it's something that has haunted me for a long time, and I wish I had worded this post in a better way that was less lecture-like and more oriented toward how personal many of these thoughts are.