Counterpoint: my dad sent me a cheezburger meme yesterday and I only need to go back a couple weeks to find rage comics memes in my group chats. I’m honestly surprised at how long memes can stay relevant; when they first started being called memes, it felt like they could only have a lifespan of a few weeks (though that’s basically the definition of survivorship bias).

Almost certainly- they’re on a danish server and regularly comment in danish.

I think there’s a parallel with other social clubs, too.

My medication kicked in while writing this and it shows. TLDR: in Germany, there are various social clubs including international cultural exchange groups (generally composed of immigrants/children of immigrants and Germans in a roughly 2:1 ratio) and clubs based around specific countries open only or mostly to immigrants from those or neighboring countries (whether openly or simply through convention, selection bias, and social pressure). The former are fun and the latter tend to be toxic unless there’s currently a large wave of immigration/refugees from the country they represent in Germany, in which case they can help coordinate resources and support, as well as help people deal with culture shock and the trauma of needing to flee their home country.

I’m an American immigrant in Germany. I love international groups and being able to bond with people about dealing with German bureaucracy as a non-native. I have zero interest in American emigrant groups.

In international groups, we do make fun of Germany, but it’s not mean spirited. We also commiserate about the actively negative aspects of living in Germany as an immigrant. In American groups, I suspect it would turn into U-S-A chants or something similar.

International groups here welcome Germans as a rule, whereas for groups for specific nationalities, it tends to be limited to people who can speak the language.

There’s a real need served by national groups for brand new immigrants who are overwhelmed by everything being different (often significantly more different than Germany is for an American), and they’re great for creating a sense of community that can be helpful for short term immigrants (though they can hamper long term integration).

I suspect I’ll warm up to American groups as a way to give new immigrants a crash course on German culture if we get a wave of American refugees in the next couple of years, because those are the demographics (large groups of people temporarily displaced from the same country who all come at once) that tend to benefit from these type of groups.

I’ve been told that national groups for Arab countries tend to be full of either bitter, unpleasant people and/or gay people and blatant alcohol drinkers, because everyone else just meets at the mosque. Although given that I have no first hand experience and the person telling me about it only has experience with a handful of cities, it may not be accurate for the rest of the country.

I recognize that that type of comment is supposed to be a joke (and I’ll react accordingly, because I’m not a buzzkill), but it absolutely isn’t actually funny (ha-ha) for me.

Hmm. Maybe ICE deserves to be in Nuremberg right now

I like to think that historical humans prefer it that way, if it helps.

I want my name known to people who loved me and whose life I directly impacted. I like the concept of getting to know the larger human community, but I don’t think I’ll have failed if nobody remembers my name a hundred years after my death. If the choice is between my diary being found and read by people or my name forgotten, I’d prefer the latter.

Holy shit, is that a variation on an existing icon or did you just spitball a neat visual metaphor from scratch on the spot?

Sure it is. We used to have crimped laundromat coins and if you put it in backwards, it wouldn’t work. This was baffling to people.

You’ve already made a significantly healthier assumption than that strangers seeing you in need want to lie to you.

I say “used to,” because we switched to a combination you enter on the door handle and they still can’t figure it out. Now they tell me there aren’t any buttons on the door handle.

I’ve been accused by multiple customers of lying to them about how to access our bathrooms. I have no idea what their lives are like that they assume strangers would just do that to them for no reason.

There are better antibiotics, which work with less frequent doses, but they’re only given out when medically necessary. I assume having bill gates’ wealth (and control of a whole bunch of anti malaria initiatives) means you have access to the kind of antibiotic you choose, you can even justify it by saying that you’re bill gates and you have a sixty hour workweek with the foundation, even in retirement, and you simply cannot take more than two days off, but antibiotics make you feel too weird to work, if you want.

I’m probably an egg (by which I mean I’m pretty sure I’m trans and would love to take a pill right now to make it so that I had always been a dude, but I don’t know that I’d take one that turned me into a man now, because I don’t know if it’s worth it to explain it to everyone. I also don’t think I’m actually experiencing dysphoria, just aware that I’m probably a man. I think that counts as an egg for some people, trans and closeted for others, and probably cis [lol] for transmedicalists).

If I ever do come out, it’s probably going to seem sudden as fuck to a bunch of people, because I’ve already thought about it for years, so I’ll have everything planned out as efficiently as possible and ready to go the second I decide to transition. I’ll come out to people after I’ve started hormones and right before it becomes noticeable, which I’ll time to coincide with a top surgery (my mother died young of breast cancer that was diagnosed when she was within a few years of my age, and I’m medically eligible for a full mastectomy). That might be wishful thinking, but at least from here, I think I can be patient about it.

The weirdest part for me is that he’s incapable of slipping his wife antibiotics. I get that you’re rich enough to never need to, but do you really never make her a cup of tea or anything?

Also, the choice probably isn’t “be poor or rich,” but rather ”be dead or rich.”

I ate the onion hard

Well…….not safely and legally, at least.

It’s spelled Pretti

So the United States, once the world’s exemplary liberal democracy, is now a hybrid state combining a fascist leader and a liberal Constitution; but no, it has not fallen to fascism. And it will not.

Well that’s alright then. I almost thought the Atlantic was becoming less useless for a second there

Germany’s not even willing to officially say that perhaps Israel should handle things differently in Gaza.

Because zero is an even number or because they have an even nonzero number of carpals?

Looking it up, the latter (or I guess both)

During the years when Steiner was best known as a literary critic, he published a series of articles attacking various manifestations of antisemitism and criticizing some of the most prominent anti-Semites of the time as “barbaric” and “enemies of culture”.[329][330] In contrast, however, Steiner also promoted full assimilation of the Jewish people into the nations in which they lived, suggesting that Jewish cultural and social life had lost its contemporary relevance[331] and “that Judaism still exists is an error of history”.

This bit feels very reminiscent of the “kill the Indian to save the man” type of racism that led to residential schools. Sure, he may not have thought there was an immutable negative quality associated with race, but he seems to have been a cultural supremacist.

Given that we now know that race isn’t real, I struggle to see the actual difference.