tchaikovskaya

[tchaikovskaya]

Stop calling Israel “secular” ffs. It’s like saying ISIS is “secular” just because they dont speak for all Muslims. Israel is a theocratic-fascist society that explicitly has an official religion, discriminates based on its official religion and privileges people of certain religious backgrounds over others. The impiety of Israelis has no relation to whether its “secular” or not just as the hypocritical impiety of Saudi rulers don’t change that it’s a theocratic society.

“Secular” Israel is part of its false promise of liberation no different from pinkwashing. By calling it secular you are falling for Israeli propaganda

#‘well it’s not teeeeechnically an ethnostate’ please fuck all the way off omg

[tchaikovskaya]

[tchaikovskaya]

sun magic :) ･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

[tchaikovskaya]

We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest.

— Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"

[tchaikovskaya]

I’m having a spirited debate and need a larger sample size

#imagine having one foot fully raw and the other has both a sock and a shoe ???

[tchaikovskaya]

when I see something dated 2019 I think “oh that’s not too long ago” and then I remember that 2019 was not only five years ago but those five years have somehow contained several lifetimes

[tchaikovskaya]

The beach that makes you old

[tchaikovskaya]

I always wanted to deepthroat this shit

[tchaikovskaya]

attendinge the snoozefest today

everybodé invited !

[tchaikovskaya]

Whenever I see an Ivan Aivazovski painting the sea monster in me goes absolutely feral

[tchaikovskaya]

Customer: FINAL BOSS DMV: 8O5 STANDS OUT TO ME, AREA CODE Verdict: ACCEPTED

[tchaikovskaya]

hot take about t*ylor sw*ft she’s a decent songwriter but she literally hasn’t been Normal since she was a sophomore in high school and she has no real experience being a normie adult and she has reached the level of stardom where she has to be too vague to be raw because she’s still trying to be universally palatable OR she has to imagine fictional characters to whom dramatic things happen to write about them instead of herself

[tchaikovskaya]

citationless behavior

[tchaikovskaya]

I wonder: Do Americans know about american school buses? Not their existence in general, but how they're seen overseas.

Over here, they're one of the symbols of America, on par with the Statue of Liberty, the flag, the Eagle, and well ahead of any chain restaurant you can name. People won't know any US states, but they will know these vehicles.

The thing is, here in Germany, we don't have dedicated school buses. The general idea is that kids go to school on their own. When that's not practical, they're expected to use (and given free tickets for) public transit. Public transit is designed around this requirement; there are many places where there is a bus, and anyone can get on it, but the route and timetable really only makes sense for school children. In case a dedicated school bus is really needed, that's generally subcontracted out, and the lines either use something like a Sprinter Van for smaller routes, or a normal city or interurban bus (often a used one that's a bit older). School trips are normal public transit, or a rented bus, typically a coach or regional bus.

It's not a perfect system, in the past couple of years there's been an epidemic of people bringing their kids to school in their cars instead of letting them walk, which is less than ideal. It is what it is. But building a dedicated network of public transit lines only for students, and building dedicated vehicles only for that, has never occurred to anyone here.

Of course we know about these buses, from movies and such, but they're as foreign here as cacti or pick-up trucks (actually we're seeing more and more of these here) or yellow cabs (all europeans will assume all cabs in the US are yellow until they actually visit).

You do see these buses here at times, because people still generally like the idea of the US, even if they have a lot of issues with a lot of details, and so folks bring them over, along with stretch limos and stuff (also not really a thing here). And of course, if someone goes to all that trouble, they don't do it to haul school kids, they rent it out for city tours or as a party bus or whatever.

So you see these yellow things as a symbol of faraway places, scenic vistas, some vague undefined idea of freedom that doesn't necessarily hold up to any contact with reality, and it's just a huge part of the whole US aesthetic.

And then you go to a student exchange with the US, and you finally get the chance: You yourself get to ride in one of these iconic chrome yellow buses! It looks just like in the movies! You get in, you drive in them a little…

…and you realise they're shit. Just the worst buses in the western world. Terrible suspension. Uncomfortable seats with weirdly high backs (so they don't have to put seatbelts in, they just restrict how far kids can fly in an accident). Everything made out of the cheapest materials. Turns out the reason why the US uses school buses like that instead of normal modern city buses, which the US has, is to save money and because they just hate kids.

And then it hits you why US Americans say "as American as apple pie", a dish that is made and enjoyed literally anywhere in the world, instead of "as American as yellow school buses". Of course the Americans already knew all this. They got tortured by these things forever. It would never occur to them to see this as a symbol of America, it's just a normal part of life for them. It's a symbol of school and school life and sometimes normalcy, and tells us that these actors getting out of it are supposed to be teenagers, nothing more.

But most people in Europe have, of course, never ridden on these buses. So when they see them in movies and TV, that's a giant big yellow signifier that we're not in Hessen or Wallonia or wherever anymore. A symbol of a different world, one that may be at most a once-in-a-lifetime-experience for most people, just like a picture of a tropical beach, Incan Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or Hildesheim (there's no reason to go there twice). And I think Americans don't know that, and that's fascinating.

#re: child autonomy #my middle school literally shared a fence with my backyard and they wouldnt let me walk around the block to and from my house #bc there were no sidewalks on that road. and like. I get it but. *sigh* Americana in a nutshell

[tchaikovskaya]

Good morning. This is the best fic comment I have ever received.

[tchaikovskaya]

one of the greatest to ever do it

[tchaikovskaya]

#1 I’ve never liked smoking I have enjoyed the occasional edible but I don’t seek it out (weed)