Katie in Jesse's body, because it would be interesting to see (a) what Katie would do with a male body, and (b) swapping back, whether her sense of her own mascness (did I make up that word?) would be recalibrated.
Oh for God's sake Helen, I'm 50, thought I'd come to terms with my weird sexuality and basically retired from all that shit anyway, and you had to do this. [Vic Reeves YOU WOULDN'T LET IT LIE gif]
On the indigeneity of the Sámi. The usual use of the term "indigenous" would suggest that, since the Sámi are known as the indigenous people of Norway and Finland, they are older than the non-indigenous populations of said countries. Yet that is not actually true, since there is no evidence that the Sámi arrived in what is now Norway and Finland before these countries' non-indigenous inhabitants -- in both cases, we're talking thousands of years ago.
But that does not mean that the label "indigenous" is, technically speaking, misapplied here. The reason why is that the Sámi people on the one hand, and "non-indigenous" populations of Norway and Finland on the other, lived in different regions. The "non-indigenous" populations have, for roughly five centuries, been encroaching on those (more northern) areas where the Sámi live, giving rise to the sort of oppressive ethno-colonial dynamic usually evoked by the term "indigenous." Yet the underlying historical circumstances are quite different, and misaligned with what “indigenous" suggests.
I agree, but that would also be true of other situations that are usually described as colonial encroachment upon indigenous people. This gets at the general issue of why certain forms of historical domination are deemed uniquely malignant, and others merely as the normal ebb and flow of history and so meriting no present condemnation or redress. All the same, and though I was skeptical at first, the label seems useful: the cultural repression of the Sámi is reminiscent of the treatment of indigenous American populations, residential schools and all. I would be interested to learn to what extent Swedish/Finnish treatment of the Sámi was informed by New-World examples.
The history is muddy, but both Finns and Sámi were marginalised by the Swedish Crown long before the Finnish state turned around and oppressed the Sámi. In the Swedish Empire, Finns were essentially a peasant class providing grain and foot soldiers for endless wars, while the Sámi were valued for specialised taxes and high-value luxury goods like furs. They occupied different but similarly low rungs in the social hierarchy until the Lappmark Proclamations of 1673 and 1695. Once these effectively declared terra nullius in the north, the Swedish state used tax subsidies and military exemptions to push Finnish peasants, who were often just poor and desperate, into Sámi lands to establish permanent farms.
It’s not to say the Sámi only ever lived in the north. Toponymy and place names provide clear evidence that they lived quite far south as well (it's widely believed that the name for Nuuksio national park just outside Helsinki comes from the Sámi word njukča for swan). Both Finns and Sámi have been in Finland for millennia with no clear evidence of 'who came first' as you said. Instead, the Sámi were gradually pushed north as they were either assimilated into growing agricultural communities or forced to leave as those settled farms made traditional hunting and migration increasingly difficult. Thus, it was more Swedish colonialism of the 'wild' north using Finnish peasants than anything else.
As Finland became an autonomous Duchy of Russia in the 19th century, its burgeoning nationalist movement (for instance, the Kalevala was published in 1835) was desperate to escape the racial hierarchies of the time. The golden age of Western 'Race Science' (1870–1930) often categorised Finns as 'Mongoloid' or 'East Baltic'. They were effectively 'non-white.' It was a legal reality Finns had to fight in US courts just to be classified as 'white' alongside the Irish. To prove their 'European' legitimacy, the Finnish state doubled down on terra nullius policies. After independence in 1917, while asserting its sovereignty against Russia and Sweden, the new state applied intense 'civilising' pressures on the Sámi. They were performing the role of a modern, sovereign power by aggressively assimilating their 'internal others' to prove they finally belonged at the European table. To escape their own 'non-white' classification and appear respectable, the Finnish state became obsessed with appearing 'more European' than the Sámi, despite their shared ancestry, in some cases, and history.
So, to get to your question, rather than a Finn visiting the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and saying 'hell yeah', they were simply adopting the global standard for how a 'modern nation' manages its 'primitive others' to secure a seat at the European table.
The history of these schools is complex: while the Swedish started 'Lapp schools' in the 1600s for Christianisation, the Finns later built permanent schoolhouses in the North that mirrored the residential model. Utsjoki was established in 1878 just a year before Carlisle in the US. Initially, they were 'residential' because of the vast distances, but the policy quickly shifted from using Sámi to teach the Bible to using Finnish to manufacture 'citizens'. By the 1920s, this civilising mission took on a new life, becoming an aggressive assimilation project that shared much more in common with the boarding school systems of the US and Canada.
My mom was so taken aback when my husband pulled back his eyes and did a Chinese impression with some gibberish Mandarin. Mostly because HE'S ALSO ASIAN 😂 and it just didn't fit with our American perception of racism where only white people can be the baddies.
Asians is a huge umbrella term that, imo, means nothing as far as ethnicity and culture.
It's about as culturally descriptive as "American".
Intra Asian racism is very common in my experience. Vietnamese hate the Chinese, Indonesians hate the Chinese, Koreans hate the Chinese. They all hate the Japanese. And they totally describe it in absolutely racist terms. Like "Chinese are....".
At least everyone I ran into when traveling once they opened up. lol
---
edit
On reading, I thought I'd add I saw the same thing in Europe. It's a people thing. Europeans are happy to tell you what kind of people germans or Italians are. . . . and then there's the French.
The Chinese are like the Jews of SE Asia, large enclaves of Chinese in most major SE Asian cities that tend to be wealthy/well educated. Except imagine if Israel was a superpower.
Ok. I’m not Swede but have lived here one million years (feels like) and have been exposed to enough children’s social studies material to feel like I can gently disagree with Jesse when he said it feels like the language around the Sami people being a discriminated minority is borrowed from language and ideas around the treatment of American indigenous groups. I don’t think this is quite right. At least in Sweden there is a well-documented history of discrimination against the Sami people including forced religious conversion, attempts to prevent them from speaking their own languages, and of course land/ resource theft. And of course the old Swedish head measurement stuff.
Maybe it seems harder to imagine because of the Sami people’s white skin/ features, but like many indigenous groups, they suffered real colonial oppression.
He wasn't suggesting that describing the Sámi as a discriminated minority is a "borrowed" concept. The history of forced conversion, language suppression, and racial biology (like the Uppsala institute) is, as you said, well-documented and very real. Rather, he was pointing out that the modern language and framing used in these debates has taken on modern American social justice "hues".
The timeline adds up. Jesse mentioned visiting Helsinki just before COVID, which was exactly when the UN issued rulings against Finland for violating Sámi self-determination regarding their electoral roll.
To Jesse's point, the rhetoric in Finland has shifted significantly. Historically, post-war Sámi activism focused on tangible issues like land rights, fishing permits, and specific language laws; the discourse around the 1995 Sámi Parliament Act, for instance, was primarily a bureaucratic fight over legal definitions and historical tax records. Today, the discourse, especially among influencers on TikTok and Instagram (like @idabenoni on TikTok to give a concrete example), is couched in terms like "Internalised Colonialism," "Generational Trauma," and "Erasure."
I’m very sympathetic to these causes but the danger of using a purely American-style rhetorical framework is that it can make the Finnish public defensive on a historically nuanced issue. The "White Coloniser" vs. "Indigenous Victim" binary creates a massive disconnect in Finland. It ignores the reality that for centuries, Finns were themselves a racialised peasant class, oppressed by the Swedish and Russian Empires and used as foot soldiers in their wars and not regarded as 'white'. The Finnish "coloniser" in the North was often a starving peasant incentivised to move onto Sámi land by tax breaks and exemptions from military enrolment by the Swedish. It's not right by modern standards but it's the reason behind the loss of Sámi lands.
When you apply an imported American lens to that "colonised-coloniser" paradox, you lose the nuance required to actually solve the local conflict.
I wrote a longer post in this thread on some of the history in Finland here:
Perhaps. I understood him to be looking through an American viewpoint and finding the reckoning of the discriminatory past to be colored by the American experience. It may have happened approximately simultaneously in time but I don’t think it was heightened out of imitation which I think was implied. If that wasn’t his intention, that is fine. It’s possible others misinterpreted as I did and my point still stands.
Prejudice based on skin color is very much a new world phenomenon. For most of human history, people were ecumenical. They disliked all outsiders- different language - dumb barbarian, maybe they steal. Live a few villages over- can’t trust them. Case in point - all of human history, continuing to this day. Ask Northern Italian what they think of Southern Italians.
In the 90s, the Yugoslav wars led a lot of Slavs to flee West and North. Even though Slavs are “white,” other Europeans didn’t welcome them as “white people.”
British writer Kenan Malik has written a lot about this.
One obvious example is the Irish who weren’t considered ‘white’ for a long while, nor indeed were the working class.
Malik found a 19th newspaper paper report from an English newspaper about working class protestors ie ordinary ‘white’ English people. The newspaper referred to the protestors as ‘negros’.
related: There was a 1995 book about the Irish in the U.S., experience: "How the Irish Became White", by Noel Ignatiev, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Became_White. (I've never read it; and it got mixed reviews; score 3.72 at Goodreads.)
I wouldn’t take Goodreads reviews that seriously, I’m sure he’s making a really serious argument & I’m sure it’s a fascinating history.
As was Sean in a joking way, suggesting the same thing to some degree happened with Italians…,and probably Poles as well.
I guess the difference with the Irish is it’s not just the US, it’s a huge thing in the UK as well.
The whole thing around race is complex and it’s a mistake to think how it’s seen now is some fixed reflection of an objective reality.
One other thing Malik talks about is how pre Darwinian science prejudice against other ‘races’ tended to be based on difference, or see them as ‘backward’ or ‘heathens’, it wasn’t biological.
We now think of the biological aspect to be a literal black/white thing, but originally race science was applied to groups we’d now see as ‘white’. The poverty and underdevelopment of work class groups was seen by some based on a biological difference.
I don’t know who this “Gia” is but I’m the one who asked the body swap question. I’ve thought about it for an embarrassing long amount. And for the comedy factor alone, you gotta go Katie in Jesse’s body.
Katie in Jesse’s body would be like Freaky Friday. She’d get him a good haircut, take him to a personal shopper, and deal with his pigeon problem. Jesse would just dress Katie in cargo shorts. No one puts Katie in cargo shorts!
Again, my elderly straight male privilege shows, having had sex with only one person in about the past quarter century. I’m not okay with sharing. Sorry, not sorry.
On CHAZ, I suspect there’s a Soverign immunity fight coming soon. Politicians and government employees do really shitty jobs knowing that they will never, personally, face any consequences. I used the word, “shitty,” on purpose in light of what happened with the DC Sewer, where a bunch of excrement was discharged into the Potomac during the cold weather. When the ice started melting…holy shit. Has anyone been disciplined DEI-focused agency head? How much money will be lost to businesses because of this?
Whatever. They’re insured, and Trump is responsible.
If you're asking why pity for Lindy West is life affirming, it's probably because women are generally bullied into polyamory by closeted gay or otherwise abusive partners. The 20% of women for whom this isn't the case are themselves abusive cluster-B cases. There is no middle, having met 100-200 polyamorous women I've never seen a third type.
Whenever I see overly sensitive precious comments from Chinese or Indians online about something offensive some Westerner did that happens to hit virality, I am made aware of 2 things that don't translate well:
1. They seem to think white people have an explicit, spoken belief in their own superiority and "good manners" or "civilization". I don't know if this is inferiority complex, but those in the East really don't understand the concept of white guilt or shame over colonialism.
2. There also is this concept that it SHOULD be illegal to say anything racist or burn flags or insult foreign governments and cultures, and that failure to prosecute someone for doing an insensitivity makes the entire country guilty.
Anyway, it is weird to also see Japanese people jumping into the fray here as I would have thought they understood these dynamics a little better and aren't as sensitive with the many historical grievances other countries harbor. What do I know, though.
- In a lot of countries, people can and do get jailed or fined for their speech, so it’s not surprising non-Americans jump to the extreme on this. Especially in spaces like X.
- People outside of the west in general aren’t as sensitive to stuff like this. In online spaces though, the people who make the most noise tend to be the terminally online…so of course there will be all sorts of people piling on.
- I’m one of the token Asians here and I think it was offensive and racist, but as always with stuff like this the piling on has been excessive. Just call her a bitch and move on maybe.
Oh, (hapa here, so you’re semi not alone), it definitely was racist and absurd for politicians to jump in, and says something about awareness of these issues in Finland.
What is ironic though is people from Japan (which is where my dad is from) being sensitive about this when they can be quite insensitive about other issues not concerning them (usually out of ignorance and less malice).
I'm Japanese actually. But I have a complicated background (my dad is yonsei, my mom is from Japan, I was born in Japan) -- my dad, as an American who dealt with racism for most of his life, would find it more offensive than my mom, who would probably roll her eyes at the ignorance of the Finnish lady and move on. I think it's primarily because she, as an older person, is not terminally online or really spends much time there.
Kinda feel like we should settle the body swap thing with a poll.
Jesse’s poll, or Jesse's poll with Katie's mind?
No Helen we should not! Please get those images out of my head!
Noooooooooooooooo Helen Noooooooooooooooo
Ok, I vote that you answer the question.
Isn’t it obvious? Katie’s mind in Jesses body? Unless you’re a horse and then obviously you’d want Jesse’s mind to ensure he’d be attracted to you.
Katie in Jesse's body, because it would be interesting to see (a) what Katie would do with a male body, and (b) swapping back, whether her sense of her own mascness (did I make up that word?) would be recalibrated.
Oh for God's sake Helen, I'm 50, thought I'd come to terms with my weird sexuality and basically retired from all that shit anyway, and you had to do this. [Vic Reeves YOU WOULDN'T LET IT LIE gif]
On the indigeneity of the Sámi. The usual use of the term "indigenous" would suggest that, since the Sámi are known as the indigenous people of Norway and Finland, they are older than the non-indigenous populations of said countries. Yet that is not actually true, since there is no evidence that the Sámi arrived in what is now Norway and Finland before these countries' non-indigenous inhabitants -- in both cases, we're talking thousands of years ago.
But that does not mean that the label "indigenous" is, technically speaking, misapplied here. The reason why is that the Sámi people on the one hand, and "non-indigenous" populations of Norway and Finland on the other, lived in different regions. The "non-indigenous" populations have, for roughly five centuries, been encroaching on those (more northern) areas where the Sámi live, giving rise to the sort of oppressive ethno-colonial dynamic usually evoked by the term "indigenous." Yet the underlying historical circumstances are quite different, and misaligned with what “indigenous" suggests.
Isn’t this more like the ancient conflict between nomadic tribes and settled civilizations that has played out countless times in human history?
I agree, but that would also be true of other situations that are usually described as colonial encroachment upon indigenous people. This gets at the general issue of why certain forms of historical domination are deemed uniquely malignant, and others merely as the normal ebb and flow of history and so meriting no present condemnation or redress. All the same, and though I was skeptical at first, the label seems useful: the cultural repression of the Sámi is reminiscent of the treatment of indigenous American populations, residential schools and all. I would be interested to learn to what extent Swedish/Finnish treatment of the Sámi was informed by New-World examples.
The history is muddy, but both Finns and Sámi were marginalised by the Swedish Crown long before the Finnish state turned around and oppressed the Sámi. In the Swedish Empire, Finns were essentially a peasant class providing grain and foot soldiers for endless wars, while the Sámi were valued for specialised taxes and high-value luxury goods like furs. They occupied different but similarly low rungs in the social hierarchy until the Lappmark Proclamations of 1673 and 1695. Once these effectively declared terra nullius in the north, the Swedish state used tax subsidies and military exemptions to push Finnish peasants, who were often just poor and desperate, into Sámi lands to establish permanent farms.
It’s not to say the Sámi only ever lived in the north. Toponymy and place names provide clear evidence that they lived quite far south as well (it's widely believed that the name for Nuuksio national park just outside Helsinki comes from the Sámi word njukča for swan). Both Finns and Sámi have been in Finland for millennia with no clear evidence of 'who came first' as you said. Instead, the Sámi were gradually pushed north as they were either assimilated into growing agricultural communities or forced to leave as those settled farms made traditional hunting and migration increasingly difficult. Thus, it was more Swedish colonialism of the 'wild' north using Finnish peasants than anything else.
As Finland became an autonomous Duchy of Russia in the 19th century, its burgeoning nationalist movement (for instance, the Kalevala was published in 1835) was desperate to escape the racial hierarchies of the time. The golden age of Western 'Race Science' (1870–1930) often categorised Finns as 'Mongoloid' or 'East Baltic'. They were effectively 'non-white.' It was a legal reality Finns had to fight in US courts just to be classified as 'white' alongside the Irish. To prove their 'European' legitimacy, the Finnish state doubled down on terra nullius policies. After independence in 1917, while asserting its sovereignty against Russia and Sweden, the new state applied intense 'civilising' pressures on the Sámi. They were performing the role of a modern, sovereign power by aggressively assimilating their 'internal others' to prove they finally belonged at the European table. To escape their own 'non-white' classification and appear respectable, the Finnish state became obsessed with appearing 'more European' than the Sámi, despite their shared ancestry, in some cases, and history.
So, to get to your question, rather than a Finn visiting the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and saying 'hell yeah', they were simply adopting the global standard for how a 'modern nation' manages its 'primitive others' to secure a seat at the European table.
The history of these schools is complex: while the Swedish started 'Lapp schools' in the 1600s for Christianisation, the Finns later built permanent schoolhouses in the North that mirrored the residential model. Utsjoki was established in 1878 just a year before Carlisle in the US. Initially, they were 'residential' because of the vast distances, but the policy quickly shifted from using Sámi to teach the Bible to using Finnish to manufacture 'citizens'. By the 1920s, this civilising mission took on a new life, becoming an aggressive assimilation project that shared much more in common with the boarding school systems of the US and Canada.
Thank you! This is fascinating and extremely helpful. I know very little about this and was operating on generalizations.
My mom was so taken aback when my husband pulled back his eyes and did a Chinese impression with some gibberish Mandarin. Mostly because HE'S ALSO ASIAN 😂 and it just didn't fit with our American perception of racism where only white people can be the baddies.
Is he Chinese?
He's Indonesian (Javanese). They have beef with the Chinese-Indonesians bc the ethnic Chinese tend to be much wealthier.
Asians is a huge umbrella term that, imo, means nothing as far as ethnicity and culture.
It's about as culturally descriptive as "American".
Intra Asian racism is very common in my experience. Vietnamese hate the Chinese, Indonesians hate the Chinese, Koreans hate the Chinese. They all hate the Japanese. And they totally describe it in absolutely racist terms. Like "Chinese are....".
At least everyone I ran into when traveling once they opened up. lol
---
edit
On reading, I thought I'd add I saw the same thing in Europe. It's a people thing. Europeans are happy to tell you what kind of people germans or Italians are. . . . and then there's the French.
The Chinese are like the Jews of SE Asia, large enclaves of Chinese in most major SE Asian cities that tend to be wealthy/well educated. Except imagine if Israel was a superpower.
Ok. I’m not Swede but have lived here one million years (feels like) and have been exposed to enough children’s social studies material to feel like I can gently disagree with Jesse when he said it feels like the language around the Sami people being a discriminated minority is borrowed from language and ideas around the treatment of American indigenous groups. I don’t think this is quite right. At least in Sweden there is a well-documented history of discrimination against the Sami people including forced religious conversion, attempts to prevent them from speaking their own languages, and of course land/ resource theft. And of course the old Swedish head measurement stuff.
Maybe it seems harder to imagine because of the Sami people’s white skin/ features, but like many indigenous groups, they suffered real colonial oppression.
I think you misunderstood Jesse’s point.
He wasn't suggesting that describing the Sámi as a discriminated minority is a "borrowed" concept. The history of forced conversion, language suppression, and racial biology (like the Uppsala institute) is, as you said, well-documented and very real. Rather, he was pointing out that the modern language and framing used in these debates has taken on modern American social justice "hues".
The timeline adds up. Jesse mentioned visiting Helsinki just before COVID, which was exactly when the UN issued rulings against Finland for violating Sámi self-determination regarding their electoral roll.
To Jesse's point, the rhetoric in Finland has shifted significantly. Historically, post-war Sámi activism focused on tangible issues like land rights, fishing permits, and specific language laws; the discourse around the 1995 Sámi Parliament Act, for instance, was primarily a bureaucratic fight over legal definitions and historical tax records. Today, the discourse, especially among influencers on TikTok and Instagram (like @idabenoni on TikTok to give a concrete example), is couched in terms like "Internalised Colonialism," "Generational Trauma," and "Erasure."
I’m very sympathetic to these causes but the danger of using a purely American-style rhetorical framework is that it can make the Finnish public defensive on a historically nuanced issue. The "White Coloniser" vs. "Indigenous Victim" binary creates a massive disconnect in Finland. It ignores the reality that for centuries, Finns were themselves a racialised peasant class, oppressed by the Swedish and Russian Empires and used as foot soldiers in their wars and not regarded as 'white'. The Finnish "coloniser" in the North was often a starving peasant incentivised to move onto Sámi land by tax breaks and exemptions from military enrolment by the Swedish. It's not right by modern standards but it's the reason behind the loss of Sámi lands.
When you apply an imported American lens to that "colonised-coloniser" paradox, you lose the nuance required to actually solve the local conflict.
I wrote a longer post in this thread on some of the history in Finland here:
https://blockedandreported.substack.com/p/episode-298-miss-finland-and-the?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=225348157
Perhaps. I understood him to be looking through an American viewpoint and finding the reckoning of the discriminatory past to be colored by the American experience. It may have happened approximately simultaneously in time but I don’t think it was heightened out of imitation which I think was implied. If that wasn’t his intention, that is fine. It’s possible others misinterpreted as I did and my point still stands.
Sweden has a history of doing that to non-indigenous people around Europe too, including Finns.
Can't wait to listen while playing the newly released, critically acclaimed Slay the Spire 2.
I’m listening to this episode while my husband plays Slay the Spire 2 in the same room. Worlds colliding!
Jesse said he was waiting to play Claire Obscur expedition 33 until he finished his book.
I have doubts his will power will be as strong when it comes to sts2.
He will make the book a bit shorter. He put "trannies gone mad" into chatgpt and calls it a day.
My son is so so so happy about this release.
I laughed at loud at the Chile/Colombia comment.
Prejudice based on skin color is very much a new world phenomenon. For most of human history, people were ecumenical. They disliked all outsiders- different language - dumb barbarian, maybe they steal. Live a few villages over- can’t trust them. Case in point - all of human history, continuing to this day. Ask Northern Italian what they think of Southern Italians.
In the 90s, the Yugoslav wars led a lot of Slavs to flee West and North. Even though Slavs are “white,” other Europeans didn’t welcome them as “white people.”
British writer Kenan Malik has written a lot about this.
One obvious example is the Irish who weren’t considered ‘white’ for a long while, nor indeed were the working class.
Malik found a 19th newspaper paper report from an English newspaper about working class protestors ie ordinary ‘white’ English people. The newspaper referred to the protestors as ‘negros’.
related: There was a 1995 book about the Irish in the U.S., experience: "How the Irish Became White", by Noel Ignatiev, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Became_White. (I've never read it; and it got mixed reviews; score 3.72 at Goodreads.)
I wouldn’t take Goodreads reviews that seriously, I’m sure he’s making a really serious argument & I’m sure it’s a fascinating history.
As was Sean in a joking way, suggesting the same thing to some degree happened with Italians…,and probably Poles as well.
I guess the difference with the Irish is it’s not just the US, it’s a huge thing in the UK as well.
The whole thing around race is complex and it’s a mistake to think how it’s seen now is some fixed reflection of an objective reality.
One other thing Malik talks about is how pre Darwinian science prejudice against other ‘races’ tended to be based on difference, or see them as ‘backward’ or ‘heathens’, it wasn’t biological.
We now think of the biological aspect to be a literal black/white thing, but originally race science was applied to groups we’d now see as ‘white’. The poverty and underdevelopment of work class groups was seen by some based on a biological difference.
The Irish are absolutely white. It’s those Eye-Talians you got to watch out for!
Can I submit a future episode title for any Bryan Johnson story: Protocols of the Elders of Bryan
I don’t know who this “Gia” is but I’m the one who asked the body swap question. I’ve thought about it for an embarrassing long amount. And for the comedy factor alone, you gotta go Katie in Jesse’s body.
Solid logic, Gia.
Katie in Jesse’s body would be like Freaky Friday. She’d get him a good haircut, take him to a personal shopper, and deal with his pigeon problem. Jesse would just dress Katie in cargo shorts. No one puts Katie in cargo shorts!
It'd be like putting baby in the corner!
The same Katie who wears a baseball hat and grungy t-shirts for livestreams? Not much of an upgrade for Jesse.
Lindsey Wests husband should become a lobbyist. His ability to twist words and meanings is epic.....
Pity everywhere for Lindsey West is both sad and life-affirming
Qua?
Again, my elderly straight male privilege shows, having had sex with only one person in about the past quarter century. I’m not okay with sharing. Sorry, not sorry.
On CHAZ, I suspect there’s a Soverign immunity fight coming soon. Politicians and government employees do really shitty jobs knowing that they will never, personally, face any consequences. I used the word, “shitty,” on purpose in light of what happened with the DC Sewer, where a bunch of excrement was discharged into the Potomac during the cold weather. When the ice started melting…holy shit. Has anyone been disciplined DEI-focused agency head? How much money will be lost to businesses because of this?
Whatever. They’re insured, and Trump is responsible.
If you're asking why pity for Lindy West is life affirming, it's probably because women are generally bullied into polyamory by closeted gay or otherwise abusive partners. The 20% of women for whom this isn't the case are themselves abusive cluster-B cases. There is no middle, having met 100-200 polyamorous women I've never seen a third type.
"Can't play around with an african star without being racist."
'Afrikan tähti' (African Star) is a popular children's board game in Finland. Think of Candy Land but your mission is to get from Cairo to Capetown.
Please don't make me think of Candy Land. Worst board game ever, except for maybe Snakes & Ladders
Afrikan tähti sucks too so it's appropriate.
I don't get board games that seem to be specifically engineered to induce frustration and meltdowns in children. Just why?
So they can learn to deal with frustration in a controlled, safe way.
All games do that though. Most provide something else along the way... Candy Land is only frustration.
Whenever I see overly sensitive precious comments from Chinese or Indians online about something offensive some Westerner did that happens to hit virality, I am made aware of 2 things that don't translate well:
1. They seem to think white people have an explicit, spoken belief in their own superiority and "good manners" or "civilization". I don't know if this is inferiority complex, but those in the East really don't understand the concept of white guilt or shame over colonialism.
2. There also is this concept that it SHOULD be illegal to say anything racist or burn flags or insult foreign governments and cultures, and that failure to prosecute someone for doing an insensitivity makes the entire country guilty.
Anyway, it is weird to also see Japanese people jumping into the fray here as I would have thought they understood these dynamics a little better and aren't as sensitive with the many historical grievances other countries harbor. What do I know, though.
- In a lot of countries, people can and do get jailed or fined for their speech, so it’s not surprising non-Americans jump to the extreme on this. Especially in spaces like X.
- People outside of the west in general aren’t as sensitive to stuff like this. In online spaces though, the people who make the most noise tend to be the terminally online…so of course there will be all sorts of people piling on.
- I’m one of the token Asians here and I think it was offensive and racist, but as always with stuff like this the piling on has been excessive. Just call her a bitch and move on maybe.
Oh, (hapa here, so you’re semi not alone), it definitely was racist and absurd for politicians to jump in, and says something about awareness of these issues in Finland.
What is ironic though is people from Japan (which is where my dad is from) being sensitive about this when they can be quite insensitive about other issues not concerning them (usually out of ignorance and less malice).
I'm Japanese actually. But I have a complicated background (my dad is yonsei, my mom is from Japan, I was born in Japan) -- my dad, as an American who dealt with racism for most of his life, would find it more offensive than my mom, who would probably roll her eyes at the ignorance of the Finnish lady and move on. I think it's primarily because she, as an older person, is not terminally online or really spends much time there.
At around 45 minutes, Jesse says "Swinland and Feeden"
Throw away line that Drake is white. Excuse me? That Canadian is a Jew.
"like me, a muff diver who refuses to shave for political and dry skin reasons"
these flow off her tongue so easily..
Finno-Nauruan Hyper War avoided. That was a close one.