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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • This gate keeping of cuisine is ridiculous. It would logically follow that you have to throw out anything that’s made with something originally from a different zone. So no potatoes, tomatoes, corn or other new world crops… Well, anywhere but one of these sections. Anything that comes from cultural exchange is, apparently, right out. So good luck with whatever the fuck they were eating in mesopotamia and the Indus river valley civilisation. I hope you like your beer to be bread.

    If it’s been made by people who identify culturally as being “of that zone”, and they self-identify it as part of their culture, then that’s from there. Pretending that the awful colonisation of the entire world by white Europeans just… didn’t happen is insanely naïve.



  • Yes, monster myths have always held the function of moral lessons for the many cultures that birthed them. The Wendigo is a moral metaphor for the taboo against eating human flesh, and the necessity of working together through harsh winters, as opposed to greedy wendigo, that works only to sate itself, and thus is cursed never to be sated. The Vampire is a moral warning against demanding excess in all things carnal, monetary, and gluttonous, and for this reason it resonated with Victorian england. The zombie, however, was originally just someone who had been drugged into submission. The modern zombie does, however, make an excellent metaphor for herd mentality and “us-vs-them”. We change our monsters (or make new ones) to fit the social mores and taboos of the culture of the time. There is a reason that many examples of “The Monster” in literature focus not on the actual villainy of the Monster, but on the villainy of the other humans in the story. Monsters are a mirror, held up to the face of the reader, demanding that we stare at the worst parts of what it is to be human.


  • I would argue that at least 15% of the blame lies with the racist expectation in the US that all names need be anglicized, when we have fucking Unicode. If someone whose second language is English can be expected to be able to pronounce “Rayleigh Monaghan McTavish”, then the least that the anglophone people of the US could do is learn to pronounce things in a few other common languages. There is, quite simply, no excuse for the government of the united States, in which there is no official language (even though a traitor, invalidated by the insurrection clause of the 14th amendment, had some fuckwit draft a document trying to declare it without congressional approval), to mandate the use of a single language.


  • I would like to provide a counterexample. There are plenty of these people in the US intermountain west, but there are at least some cases where there is no one at fault. Next time you see one of these names without context (though we clearly have the context in this case), before judging, consider Nariaw:

    I am a teacher, and one year I found that my roster included a student named “Nariaw”. As a public school, we register your student based on what’s on the birth certificate. I ask all of my students to pronounce their names for me when I first meet them, for the reason we see in so many of the replies here and with shit like “abcde”. However, when this girl came to my class, she said her name was pronounced “Miriam”. I spent a good twenty seconds looking at my roster, and had to ask her to spell it for me. I didn’t ask any rude and impertinent questions at that point, so it wasn’t until a few months later that I got the full story:

    Her mother, an immigrant from Ethiopia, was still unfamiliar with Latin script when her daughter was born here in the US. So when she attempted to write out the name, which she wanted to transliterate as “Mariam”, she ended up writing only half of the first M, and wrote the second one upside-down. Whoever did the data entry for the government records dutifully recorded the child’s name as “Nariaw”. Was the mother at fault for being expected to write a name which, while she knew how to represent it in Amharic, she was forced to write in a language in which she was illiterate?




  • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.worksto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneBird Flrule
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    7 months ago

    I recall a story, can’t remember where I read it, where a creator deity demonstrates their displeasure with the leader’s treatment of a downtrodden minority by sending a large number of “plagues”. I remember there was a plague of flies, all the livestock started dying of sudden disease, and an epidemic of boils broke out… Hmm… If only the US were filled with people who believed in the literal interpretation of certain old books…

    ETA: of course, that would require these people to be able to read.