Sure. There's always going to be someone opposing something. But I'm not aware of cases where a disagreement in an environment good for everyone was large enough that it caused the leadership/government collapse. Similarly on a small scale, the number of grumpy people at companies I worked at scaled more or less with how good things were for everyone.
In other words, if things are good enough, there will be more people disagreeing with the totalitarian part than with the overall conditions.
The weirdest part is that they stop tracing back the second they hit someone interesting, as if nothing interesting happened before that person. If their great-great-grandfather was Scottish, they then assume everyone before him was 100% super duper Scottish, and that that has conferred "cultural traits" through some weird-ass blood magic or something.
But Europeans are diverse mutts as well.
I'm Swedish. But my last name is 100% German, easily recognisable as a German name, super common. Because my paternal ancestor immigrated from Germany in the 1600's and brought the name with him. My mother's maiden name was Czech, also very easily recognisable as such, and my uncle and my cousins have that name as well.
But I would never in a million years call myself German. I am not German. I am not Czech. My cousins aren't Czech. All of our parents were born in Sweden. All of our grandparents were born in Sweden. The vast majority of our great-grandparents were born in Sweden. We are all 100% Swedish.
The idea that I would call myself German because of my last name is completely ridiculous, but that is exactly what these cosplaying Americans are doing, even though they don't speak German, and I do. My dad speaks fluent German. My maternal grandfather spoke fluent German. I have so much more claim to "German-ness", whatever that is, than these cosplayers, and I wouldn't dream of doing it.
And then they bleat about how their great-great-whtaever was German, and because of that they "feel so connected to the Alps".
What's funny about those Europeans gatekeeping European ethnic identity from Americans, is that their tune will change immediately if we ask them if an African who has been there for 5 years is English or German.
See the response from marcus_holmes about "Irishness" in this thread. It's essentially the position of ethnic nationalist parties like Restore Britain. But in a different context he'd be ranting about civic nationalist parties like Reform UK or One Nation...
Basically, if an American is claiming to be whatever, you can use a purity standard close to the Nuremberg laws to exclude them. But an Indian or African who arrived 5 years ago is a true blood Aussie mate, because saying anything else would be doing a racism.
> those Europeans gatekeeping European ethnic identity
No no no, no-one is gatekeeping ethnicity. If you have Irish heritage, you have Irish heritage. That's a fact.
We're gatekeeping cultural identity and nationality, because these cosplaying Americans seem to think that their ethnicity confers culture and nationality by weird blood magic or something, and that's not how it works.
> if we ask them if an African who has been there for 5 years is English or German.
Someone who is not ethnically German, but has immigrated to Germany and speaks the language, is way more German than a cosplaying American whose parents and grandparents were all Americans, doesn't speak German, knows nothing about German culture, has never lived in Germany, but who has one ancestor who came from Germany.
If you're a first-generation immigrant, you get to choose what you identify as. If you speak the language of your new country and if you've become a citizen, sure, you can call yourself that. I don't think a lot of people will object to that.
Because, and this is the fuel for this clash, we care the most about culture and nationality, instead of heritage and ethnicity.
> Basically, if an American is claiming to be whatever
Because they're not, their culture is American, their nationality is American, they're American.
> But an Indian or African who arrived 5 years ago is a true blood Aussie mate, because saying anything else would be doing a racism.
No they're not, no it's not, and my what a lovely strawman you made up there.
It's not Americans doing these things. I've met plenty of Europeans with exotic identity claims, romanticizing some past culture instead of the living culture around them - Viking metal rather than folk music, to put it like that (there are also of course responsible ways to enjoy exotic metal genres).
By making it into Americans vs. Europeans you're doing a bit of what you're criticizing yourself. Yeah sure, we all agree someone walking up to you and saying they're Saxon is embarrassing, but that sweet old lady from Minnesota who's done rose painting (a national romantic fad around the time her ancestors immigrated) for 20 years is part of a living culture, which isn't simply "American", even if she has outrageous Norwegian pronounciation and otherwise isn't someone you'd like to identify with.
Viking metal is a folk music tradition of Europe! Just a very modern one that postdates the invention of the electric guitar and Tony Iommi losing his fingertips in an industrial accident :)
A lot of Viking-themed metal is pretty historically uninformed and cheesy, although that's true of lots of metal and for that matter lots of other art.
Yes, I'll accept that it's a modern folk tradition. And I'm actually OK with cheesy too, as long as something doesn't pass itself off as more historically accurate than it is. As Farya Faraji pointed out, we don't know what Norse Viking music was like, but it's unlikely to have included throat singing, and we know they liked pan pipes. (Invading England to a George Zhamfir soundtrack?)
> that sweet old lady from Minnesota who's done rose painting (a national romantic fad around the time her ancestors immigrated) for 20 years is part of a living culture, which isn't simply "American"
Hvis hun ser på seg selv som norsk, så har ikke jeg noe problem med det.
If she sees herself has Norwegian, I have no problem with that.
We should let people identify with whatever they want. Identity is deeply personal - that's kind of the whole thing with identity - and as long as you don't use your identity to argue for something that's objectively wrong (such as rewriting history to suit it) then it's fine. If someone wants to identify as the same kind of thing as me, I may be flattered or embarrassed or worst case offended, but let's go for the facts, not with the identity.
> If their great-great-grandfather was Scottish, they then assume everyone before him was 100% super duper Scottish
That is, indeed, the correct assumption to make. I would recommend having a look at the work done on population genetics at Oxford University’s People of the British Isles project[1]. Even their homepage should relieve you of some misconceptions:
> The People of the British Isles (PoBI) project was initiated by Sir Walter Bodmer in 2004, in an effort to create the first ever detailed genetic map of a country. The United Kingdom’s history bristles with immigrations, wars and invasions, so the PoBI researchers faced a tremendous task in investigating how past events impacted the genetic makeup of modern British people.
> Results included a map (image below) showing a remarkable concordance between genetic and geographical clustering of our samples across the United Kingdom.
haha, great point about the language. An Irish friend of mine would speak Gaelic to any American he met who claimed to be Irish. Obviously none of them spoke the language, and he'd ask why not? Great question.
Wow. So I guess that the 60% of Ireland's population that don't speak any Gaelic are't Irish ether. And neither were the 94% that couldn't speak any (beyond "craic" & "uisce") 10 years ago. Please tell your friend that the majority of Ireland's population is English, not Irish. After all, if they were Irish, they'd speak the language, right? And not just in school when they're forced to.
Maybe because our family were forced to flee from Ireland to survive. My irish grandmothers (on my mom's side) arrived in the US child orphans (their families died on the boats) and were adopted by German families. God they are losers for not keeping up the linguistic tradition, right? We should give up any connection to the past because those little orphan girls ended up speaking english. So superior, your Irish friend, over people just trying to have some sort of connection to the world. You are some hateful petty ass people that you come at people just trying to connect.
Edit: Funny I replied the answer to "Obviously none of them spoke the language, and he'd ask why not? Great question."
Why did you just move on? You should be happy to have your 'great question' belittling my family answered. It's because of death, and survival, and scraping by to survive, lots of pieces got lost. That was your ownage. That our families were broken people just surviving and sometimes language was one the the pieces we lost. Pieces we are excited to maybe explore when we visit europe, (until we run into people like you). I have an old family bible with Gaelic that my family wrote in it. But that isn't a connection, right?
Stop straw-manning, no-one is denying your heritage or your connections. Your grandmothers were Irish.
But you're not. You're American, with Irish heritage. You were born in America to American parents. You are super welcome to learn about Irish culture, about your heritage. You are super welcome to visit Ireland, visit the place of your fore-mothers and other ancestors. You can enjoy Irish culture as much as you want. Learn riverdancing and blast Michael Flatley all day long. You can even enjoy the bastardised commercialised version that is the totally fake US retail holiday "St Patrick's day". Wear some tacky green beads, put on a green hat, drink fifteen pints of Guiness! Sláinte! Have fun!
The one thing we're specifically asking you not to do, is to call yourself Irish. That's the only thing we're gatekeeping. You're Irish-American. You have Irish heritage. You have Irish ancestors. You have Irish family heirlooms. But you're not Irish.
Why the hell is that so important to you? I'm personally a lot more annoyed with faux "Norwegian" paraphernalia (a lot of which I see every day, because I live in a tourist town which wants to sell them what they want) than what people call themselves.
Replying to ""Obviously none of them spoke the language, and he'd ask why not? Great question." with the reason is straw manning?
Don't worry long ago I had my naivety removed by folks like you and no longer feel any fondness or interest for ireland or irishness, and passed none of it down to my kids. Ireland has never been brought up for a vacation destination where as I convinced my mom to gift me a trip to all of the UK upon graduation. Hopefully you will be relieved of the burden of having to deal with Americans with feelings of common bonds (like I used to have) after my generation passes.
I'm sorry your people have had to endure this wanting to connect from Americans and them trying to figure out if the weird/quirky things their family did come from your culture.
What's wrong with you, you're responding to literally the opposite of what I said? You are free to connect, to seek your roots, figure out weird quirky things from the culture of your ancestors, and nurture as much fondness for Ireland and Irishness as you please. No-one in Ireland (Note, I'm not Irish!!) is gonna object to any of that.
The one thing, the ONE FUCKING THING we're asking you not to do is to call yourself Irish, because that will guaranteed piss off everyone you meet in Ireland.
How is this difficult to do or understand? We're asking one thing.
Everything else is up for grabs. You can appropriate as much culture as you please, real, fake, stereotypical, exaggerated, whatever. Grab it, use it, do it, perform it, that's fine. You don't need to excuse yourself or justify yourself or claim ancestry or heritage or anything. Absolutely no-one will gatekeep the culture. Enjoy it, all of it! Do this one thing, and real Irish people will be super happy to share their culture with you.
Dude. The vast majority of Irish people can't speak a word of Gaelic. 10 years ago when I went to Ireland, the bilingual population was 0.1%!!!!! How many people use Gaelic in their daily life in Ireland? Less than 100 000. Guess the rest of you are just English, pretending to be Irish, eating fish & chips & going to Tesco's...
The only thing I ever heard from Irish people that they hated about being "Irish-American" was the idea that Ireland was a magical pixie world full of leprechauns and gold.
Do you think when my friends say 'you are mexican now' I'm negatively taking something away in that interaction? Somehow we both lose something? Or 'you are indian now'? Do you think I literally think I am now those, and stealing from them?
Thanks for giving me permission to appropriate what my family has kept as core identity. So magnanimous of you to give me your box I'm allowed to fit in (totally non judgemental and friendly with the ' fake, stereotypical, exaggerated, whatever.').
The reason we go to Ireland is to find something, to feel something, and you want us to deny that desire inside us while we are there. Why not save us all the hassle and just... not do any of it? Like I said, I didn't build that desire up in my kids. You should be HAPPY about that. You win. There isn't anything inside of them telling them they are connected to Europe because you euros have decided they aren't, should not be, and are awful people to be made fun of for feeling some sort of connection to you.
The world is small and way kinder than whatever it is you euros want to enforce over there. Irish Americans go to Ireland looking for something, and the Irish don't want to deal with Americans looking for that something. Why would I push it and force myself into the box they define for me? There's amazing surfing and kindness in Costa Rica and they don't complain I'm co-opting their Salsa Lizano. Amazing camping and kindness in Canada. Ironically Germans welcoming and happy to talk about family recipes. The coolness that is Shanghai. Why go to a place where the people there hate the reason you come and talk shit about your deep felt personal motivation as if it's fake? And if you deny that internal feeling and treat Europe just like a cool living museum, believe it or not, Euros also say that's the rude American thing to do. Ireland, the UK, France, Italy hate the inconvenience that Americans feel they have a special relationship, be happy/relieved that most of that dies with my generation and we have no connection to each other going forward. And my kids won because they much preferred the beach trips. Everyones happy and new traditions created so that Irish/Euro ones are no longer somehow made smaller by Americans excited to share in them.
I don't think anyone has a problem with saying "my family came from Ireland", or even "my family was forced to flee Ireland because the British are bastards". Or even "Irish American" would be OK.
The problem we all see is that you're saying that you are Irish. If you weren't born in Ireland, your parents weren't born in Ireland, you don't speak Irish, you don't pay taxes in Ireland, you can't vote in Irish elections, you wouldn't join the Irish military, you don't understand Irish culture, or know anything about Irish history, then in what way are you Irish?
You're not. But you have redefined "Irish" to mean something else. And that's what pisses people off. There are actual Irish people out there. Invent your own identity.
So, if you are living in London and not paying taxes(to Ireland), you are not Irish? Dude, you are clearly mixing ethnicity and nationality. Plenty of Irish in UK, that does not know Gaelic - same situation in Ireland. There are in fact more Irish Gaelic speakers living in USA/Canada than in Ireland.
And Americans are claiming ethnic ancestry - not national ancestry. And many Irish migrated out of Ireland, when it was not a country - and paying taxes is irrelevant in this gatekeeping of identities.
That is your right to not claim your German ancestry, as generally it is a viable solution to just not stand out and blend in with crowd, but frankly that is also your right to claim your ancestry and seek refuge in German speaking countries, if things go south in Sweden and Caliphate is established there or some Finns invade and makes your life impossible, so generally - this is not your gate to keep, as these can be considered as an open choices. And I would think that current age of open borders that we have now might end and claiming different identity might be the only viable option to migrate somewhere else.
I think the explanation is much simpler, we know the Norse were a bit afraid of the Sami. They viewed them as a weird non-threatening neighbour people who had a weird language and weird magic. So you traded with them, you respected them, you said please and thank you, and then you were happy to see them gone because you didn't want them to curse you. (And I would assume the Sami were very happy to foster this belief since they were much weaker militarily)
Unlike the fat and rich continental Europeans that the Norse viewed as ripe for plunder, they did not fear them at all.
The Norse had a big fear of curses, the evil eye, the "strength in weakness". I think there's a wide theme in Norse legends, which is about spite and betrayal, but it doesn't work quite like we're used to. In Rigsthula, the social origin myth of the Norse, the first king is suggested to have taken the inheritance of his wealthier brothers by force - possibly by murdering them. And in the Norse creation myth, the gods also arguably seize the world from its original owner (and creates the world as we know it from his corpse).
So the theme is that all power is illegitimate, or at the very least seized/stolen, and the robbed want it back - and they will get it back eventually. All hubris will fall, not just for the individual non-god as in Greek mythology, but for the whole world and the gods themselves. The world three has tree roots, one to the well of the norns (fates), one to the poisonous worm Nidhogg who gnaws on the root and will eventually kill it, and one to Mimir's well, the well of wisdom, where you can maybe learn secret tricks of gods and rulers to postpone the inevitable.
So spite, or nid, dark power to break rather than to rule, is the ultimate danger to kings and rulers. To invite it by acts of cruelty, especially against the weak, is to bring ill luck upon yourself. Your followers, too, believe deeply in this, so they may abandon you if you seem to "draw in bad karma".
But those who are weak, and have nothing to lose, can dip into the power of spite and hate, and do things which would be unwise for a ruler to do, such as poisonings, betrayals, or vicious cruelty. They aren't evil for doing so, it's just the way the world works - if you run afoul of this, it was your own fault for inviting their hate.
Even demand for safety can be scornful, and "nid". Kings are supposed to trust in their own strength, and to some degree accept living with threats hanging over their heads. King Nidhad, in the story of Volund, listens to his wife's advice and hamstrings Volund. It's arguably self-defense since Volund certainly hates them, but it's still a scornful, cowardly act - which Nidhad and his family end up paying dearly for.
So yes, with respect to the Finnish and Sami neighbors, they would have feared them because of potential curses, but it wasn't because they were a magical people as such, it was simply were weak.
But Christianity complicated things. Odin, like the other pagan gods, is himself subject to the laws of fate and must be wise for his own sake, but the Christian God is almighty. You do not have to fear dark curses if He is with you. As a practical matter, they were a lot more willing to build walls and engage in other "cowardly" acts of self defense, and they could get away with it because their Christian followers didn't worry (much) that this would invite fate backlash. They were also a lot less afraid of things like public executions. It made possible much higher concentration of political power.
And no, the Norse didn't view that as simply fat idiots ripe for plunder. They admired all the great walls and splendor which concentrated political power had managed to build in Europe - things they had very little of at home. They did plunder, yes, but that was like a fox eating hens in a henhouse - he's still worried about the farmer.
> If people live side by side for 1000s of years, I think that's fair to speculate - there has to be a reason they didn't just assimilate into each other.
Yeah, they had completely different lifestyles that were reliant on completely different biomes. The Norse were farmers, they needed farmland and a little bit of forest for wood and hunting. The Sami were reindeer herders, they needed tundra. Neither could live where the other lived, they spoke languages from completely different families, they had completely different cultural traditions. Neither side had much that the other side wanted. Of course they didn't assimilate, how could they?
But when the industrial revolution came and iron ore was discovered up north, suddenly the desire to assimilate them (or genocide them...) appeared, because now they had something that the people in the south wanted very, very much.
> Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time.
My understanding is that the Norse respected the Sami as a people different from them, and were a little bit afraid of their "magic", because they didn't understand it. They were perfectly happy to live apart, and do a little bit of trade in goods and services. Why go north to raid the Sami, when you could sail south and raid the fat and rich English or the French instead?
> The Norse were farmers, they needed farmland and a little bit of forest for wood and hunting. The Sami were reindeer herders, they needed tundra.
This is a common stereotype, but it's simply not accurate. Intensive reindeer herding didn't become a thing until the major predators and the wild reindeer were wiped out. Sami lived very similarly to the Norse - a bit more semi-nomadic, and a bit more adapted to use marginal land maybe, but they held sheep, fished and farmed just like their neighbors. And once intensive reindeer herding took off in the 17th-18th century, still it was a minority who lived from that.
There were raids done against Saami as well, though it is right - more profitable raids were better down south. In much later times there were also slavery raids done that included Saami people, though this cross over into times that were past viking Age as well by cultures that evolved from vikings, where there are different opinions what can be defined as vikings.
I remember the GDPRpocalypse which had a lot of Americans up in arms because of the wildly different approach to lawmaking that the EU has. Everyone on the US side was screaming for a checklist they could implement, and assumed they would get maximum penalties if they didn't cross every t and dot every i. But it just doesn't work like that, EU laws are generally not very procedural, they are a lot more about intent.
These findings are very much in line with that, they bring up a feature, a checkbox, a specific thing TikTok did to pay lip-service to protect minors, and then they're simply saying that it doesn't appear to work. So it doesn't matter that TikTok checked the box and crossed the t.
And yet, the average American pays more in taxes for public healthcare (medicare, medicaid) that they don't receive any of, than the average European pays in taxes for (some kind of) universal healthcare.
It's so bizarre seeing Americans in the debate not wanting "crazy high taxes like in Europe", because the US already spends twice as much public money per capita as the OECD average.
The dirty secret of course is that healthcare as a good is much more expensive to produce in the US than elsewhere, and a large chunk of that is because the private insurance system adds a ton of unnecessary overhead. And yet all the healthcare insurance companies in the US talk about making healthcare "affordable for all". Yeah, no, they're leeches. They're rent-seekers. They drive up the cost of everything.
Clothes dryers are a sign of shrinking real estate, not a sign of luxury.
When one lives in a tiny apartment with no balcony, you better have a dryer. When living with plenty of land, it's not a problem to hang clothes to dry in the sun.
> Clothes dryers are a sign of shrinking real estate, not a sign of luxury.
My euro family disagrees, even in places that don’t have a balcony. Get the rack out and dry indoors and it’s pretty dry overnight (in the not so humid places).
I have a dryer but avoid it for most clothes because I think it wears them out.
A lot of rent agreements in then UK explicitly forbid tenants from drying clothes indoors on a rack because it is claimed that it raises humidity and the risk of mould (being an already quite damp, cold country)
That's because UK rental homes for the hoi polloi are notoriously badly insulated, ventilated, and heated. The landlords are blaming the tenants for the landlords' failings.
Plenty of old photos of people running drying lines between them and the opposite tenement building. Not saying people should do that today, just that it's what people did when they had neither space nor means to buy a dryer (or before dryers were invented)
Many Americans would love to do this today, but every apartment I've rented in the last 15 years has strict rules against drying clothes outside along with other restrictions on what you're allowed to place or store on patios and balconies there. Most of the rules seem to be in place purely so that the complex/tower doesn't look "poor" or "trashy"
It's pretty much only Americans who think clothes on clothes lines makes a place look "poor".
Consumerism demands that everyone buys a tumble dryer, therefore not having a tumble dryer means you're a povvo!
Meanwhile, in civilisation, I have a washer, a dryer, and a collapsible wall-mounted clothesline in my apartment, and I can choose which piece of clothing goes where to dry depending on need!
You have indoor heating, right? Clothes dry just fine on a rack indoors (albeit you may need some way to remove the resulting humidity if your heating system isn't doing that job already)
One of the most indulgent approaches when money is no object, is to have enough luxurious time to be able to fix your own food, do your own dishes, and wash your own laundry.
I've been handwashing my dishes for a long time and now have a dishwasher. One of the main benefits is having a place to store the dirty dishes until there are enough to make it worth washing. I used to do 3 washes a day, with 2 tiny ones.
Have you met people?
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