Dude, you’re off on a tangent about semantics (That’s the spelling, btw), which is not at all the point.

Which is fine, or if you didn’t keep saying “by definition” as though there’s only one fucking definition and usage. So, while I respect the inaccurate pedantry effort, I’m not interested. If you want to argue about semantics, it might be useful to actually understand what they are, and why your insistence on one single usage isn’t accurate semantically.

One aspect of semantics is the study of usages of words, or the multiple meanings and interpretation of words.

And, by definition in the common internet available dictionaries, rather than the field specific jargon you keep repeating like it’s useful for the discussion here, you aren’t using an actual definition in common usage.

So, my homie, again, I appreciate some pedantry, but you’re not just being tangential, you’re inaccurate, which means there’s no point to further interaction about this. I’m done

Well, yes and no.

Wherever the first humans existed are fully native, if the people there descend from the first humans in a relatively straight line. Which, we all come from them, but anyone that moved away and their descendants came back, it would be hard guy else descendants in particular to claim to be natives there.

Anyone and everyone else had ancestors that colonized somewhere. Like, the mayans were descendants of colonists, just not European colonists. Same for Cherokee, Cree, Inca, Hopi, whoever. Their ancestors got here first for sure, and they colonized these continents. So, they’re native, but not pre-colonization because nobody was here until they came here from somewhere else.

So, yeah, in one context, if you only refer to the people that came after whoever got there first as colonists and pretend that that’s the only meaning of colonization, then that definition fits. But it isn’t the only definition, and it’s not the one under discussion here.

To give a different view on it, what would we call the first humans to go to Mars and stay there? Colonists, right? We’d have a colony on mars.

You can use the word native to mean the people born on mars, and that’s what you were saying, that the people born in a place are native to that place, and any further waves are called something that. But with other definitions of native, it’s impossible for there to ever be human natives on mars at all, because nobody evolved on mars that we know of.

And that’s what I’m getting at. Here in the U.S. in specific, and across the Americas in general, everyone came from somewhere else originally, regardless of how long ago that was.

Which is why I personally prefer the way Canada refers to the people that were here first, as First Nations. They conquered and colonized this side of the planet first. The rest of us need to respect that, but we also need to recognize and respect that being an immigrant isn’t a bad thing at all because everyone here is either an immigrant or the descendants of immigrants. We’re connected in that way, and should treat each other more as neighbors and family than insiders and outsiders.

Well, yeah, that’s the point. I didn’t bring Europe and Asia into it since the original thing was about the U.S., but it applies there too. It applies everywhere.

We aren’t some magically unique group because of where we live. There’s no inherent barrier between people just because someone got somewhere first.

I’m not saying that there’s no point in borders, or that nations don’t/can’t have rules about such things.

I’m just saying that when it comes to the U.S. and the rhetoric around immigration and immigrants, there’s a lot less differences between everyone over on these continents than differences.

Dude, bugger off with this shit

I never said that, and you know I never said it

Hell, the native Americans are immigrants too, they’re just the descendants of the first ones to get here.

I’m not saying this to detract from the point of the land being stolen by invaders from Europe, I’m saying it to point out that every nation in North, South, and Central America was populated by groups moving here looking for a good place to live. It’s the single most fundamental fact of the continents that we are all, all linked by something; we’re all one big, extended family.

Since that was what I said, just phrased differently, maybe you can see how it looks like you’re trolling.

Maybe also notice that you’re the only one that took it that way.

Are you fucking joking?

If that’s really where you thought I was going with that, you’re the racist.

If you’re trying to troll, good job because now I think you’re either a troll, a racist, or an idiot. I prefer to think you’re a troll.

It’s artificial boosting of the same bigotry that’s been ongoing for generations. The new part switching the target.

See, there’s been a very concerted effort to radicalize the right wing of the American populace by media oligarchs. It’s part of an overall strategy going back to at least the post-nixon era.

Want to crush black people? Find a way to villainize them indirectly. “Inner city” crime. Step up arrests for things that are disproportionately a part of black people’s lives. Spread drugs into the chaos brought about by destabilizing black communities to engender greater violence between gangs. And it worked. Look at how many black people are in jail compared to pretty much any other group.

Go back to Stonewall, when the biggest movements for gay rights got going hard, and remember that trans people were involved from the beginning, but didn’t have a convenient label, they didn’t have a way to be a distinct group. Gay rights efforts worked to some degree. Enough that the far right plans to use gay people as the enemy had to find another target the same way that they had to change targets from black people to Hispanic people in the form of “illegal aliens”.

When your plan rests on fomenting anger, hate, and fear to stir up the lowest common denominator of a populace you have to have a target, ideally more than one since there’s always going to be gaps where your desired audience will fall prey to the manipulation for one hate focus, but not another, like when you run into conservatives that aren’t actually racist, but hate anyone in the LGBTQ+ umbrella because of religion, or sheer stupidity.

So, when gays weren’t a useful target for hate any more because enough people knew gay people, and there were enough gay people of prominence to make it harder, why not switch to the next best thing? Trans people!

See, we had a major shift in awareness of trans issues back in the late nineties and early naughties. That’s was followed by a large shift in trans people now having a serious chance at transitioning as medicine advanced, funding shifted, and there was just enough support that more people could transition and not be alone.

This meant that the assholes pushing their agenda to gain and maintain both wealth and power had a gift given to them. A new label to attack, using the exact same rhetoric they’d been using against gay people. “It’s unnatural”, “but what about the children?”, along with the ability to use lingering misogyny via to attack trans women in specific since they are now women, but used to be men (in the rhetoric), so they must be groomers sneaking into bathrooms.

It’s the exact same bullshit over again.

People have forgotten that the same methodology has been in place every time people in power needed to scare the populace enough to achieve a goal. Remember reefer madness? Before my time, but the entire thing was built in order to continue the oppression of black people, to keep them firmly under the boot.

Go back further, and it was the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, whatever group was “other” at the time.

But the modern version is so directly a rehash of the anti gay rhetoric that’s not even fifty years in the past that I’m amazed it isn’t glaringly obvious even to the people that have jumped on the bandwagon of both.

I’ve said it before, but people are stupid. They’re easy to manipulate, easy to fool, and that’s the majority. Even the ones that aren’t easy to manipulate can still fall prey to it if they aren’t paying attention. People are also lazy, and have little long term thinking ability, or attention spans. That’s why we got zero lasting changes after George Floyd was murdered. Anyone that’s made it this far, think for a second. How long did it take you to remember that name and what it means? Now, ask yourself how many people didn’t remember at all.

That’s why trans hate is working. People suck. The vast majority are easy to control, and will believe anything fed to them with the right language behind it. It just so happens that while all of the distractions being used to build up the hate also created a smoke screen to hide gerrymandering, which ends up with more and more control over what language is being used everywhere.

So, here we are with a manufactured, strawman enemy being propped up as the target and then painted with the word “trans”. None of the bullshit used to build up the hate is true, it isn’t accurate, and most of the people behind the hate actually know it’s bullshit, but they aren’t allowed to hate the blacks and the gays out loud any more. They can’t just scream the n word or call people faggots at whim the way they used to.

So, now they’ve got trans people to hate. And they want that hate because it means they don’t have to look at themselves, their own lives and choices. They don’t have to stop and think that maybe everything they’ve built their identity around is empty, so they scream about “wokeness” and “transgenderism” as code words.

There’s no serious, legitimate arguments against trans people being allowed to have the full protection of the law, to have full medical access, to have whatever gender they want on their driver’s license. There’s just the bullshit excuses to have someone to hate. There’s not even a good argument about bathrooms, they’re all built on bullshit too, and that’s the one that’s the low hanging fruit because it seems reasonable to people that aren’t buying all the bullshit immediately, but aren’t quite bright enough to think it through all the way on their own. Which, again, that’s the majority, stupid people too drowned in lies and manipulation to bother thinking.

So, Don, if you’ve gotten this far, I know I went wide of what you asked, but it really is all related. It all comes down to the same thing in different faces over time.

For anyone else, I know this got a little ranty in parts. I know it is long enough to look a little crazed. IDGAF. This shit is patently obvious, it’s not even a secret. The people that have been running the right wing of things for my entire lifetime and before have outright and publicly talked about it. One part of it, the “southern strategy” they brag about. It’s infuriating, so I get ranty.

Did they make a choice though? As in a fully informed, conscious choice unaffected by internal and external pressures?

That’s the key to empathizing with addiction.

Most people don’t set out to be addicts. They don’t set out to OD as the goal of using. It’s fair to say that most addicts started out either partying, or self medicating.

The party addicts tend to not realize how damn fast and hard addiction can set in. They know it happens, but it isn’t real, it’s impersonal and distant, because they also know that people really can just use a few times and not do it again. But each time gets harder, and they start needing it to feel good at all. It isn’t done with intent, and they may not even be aware of what they’re actually taking. People are stupid. They’ll trust someone, and when they get handed a pill or a drink and the person they trust doesn’t explain, but they trust them.

And even when it’s someone arrogant that thinks they’re the exception, that’s still a very human thing.

For the ones chasing an escape from ugly reality, a way to feel good, no matter how temporary, sometimes the risk is irrelevant because to them, what they’re trying to escape is worse than any of the stories they’ve heard. Self medicating mental health issues, or physical health issues, or to numb the pain of a life situation they can’t escape otherwise, that’s as human as it gets.

Empathy. It’s also a human thing. We aren’t required to feel it for everyone everyone all the time. If you don’t feel it, you can’t make it magically happen. But we all want it to some degree or another. We all need some degree of human kindness to stay sane in a society that keeps staying ugly over millennia.

So, when we see someone that’s in a bad place, it’s part of that, that we at least try to find empathy for them, if only on a transactional level where we would wish someone make that effort for us.

It is, however, not equally easy for everyone. The human mind and brain is a diverse thing. Some people are born with brains that simply can’t empathize. Others can lose the ability. And there’s also people that have trouble doing it without some kind of “trigger” that gives them a connection to the other person in a way they can understand. Some of us over empathize.

But, at the core of it, the reason we are expected to try is that none of us are immune to the ugly parts of life. Every single one of us is one post surgical dose away from feeling withdrawals. Every single one of us is capable of feeling pain so deep we’ll do anything up escape it.

If you can’t empathize, that’s okay. Though going through the effort of rationalizing how others empathize would help you out a lot when dealing with others. If you make the effort to figure out how the same thing could happen to you, even if you don’t feel sorry for the person, you’ll have fulfilled your part of the social contract as regards the idea of “there but for the grace of the flying spaghetti monster go I”, or “judge not lest ye be judged”, or any other saying that boils down to recognizing that we’re all just flawed beings doing the best we can with what we’ve got.

Lots of poo.

A good bit actually though. I’m disabled, so no job. This means that while I’m on my ass recovering from the necessities of living like cooking and cleaning, I have a shit ton of spare time.

Part of that is spent fucking around on lemmy.

The rest is usually spent on some variety or another of writing fiction. Short stories, a few ongoing novels, that sort of thing. Here and there a poem or song will pop in my head.

Then there’s a bit of panting, occasional drawing, that kind of visual art.

I’ve also been known to run ttrpg sessions here and there, which is its own art form in a way.

Sure. There’s a rather vibrant writers’ community, plenty of visual artists (including photography that isn’t just cats and hiking), and the endless political shit.

You don’t get as much of the random people running their mouths though.

The key to Mastodon is the # curation over time. Search your interests, use the hashtags to set up your feed, and only use the full federated feed to find terms you didn’t think to search for, or that aren’t obviously connected to your interests.

As an example, if you’re a writer, you’ll obviously follow something lunge #writing, but you might not find #pennedpossibilities, or #writerscoffeeclub by searching, despite them being active prompt based groups that end up having a lot of good interactions between writers (casual, amateurs, and pros).

Tbh, the least represented segment is the typically nerdy stuff. Much more prevalent on lemmy. There’s plenty there, it just isn’t as common as other segments.

Considering how rare it is for anyone to pay enough attention to the complex and difficult processing needed to feed an obligate carnivore a vegan diet without fucking it up, I’m going to call bullshit on a vegan being allowed to have a cat. If you believe that strongly in whatever it is, just don’t have a cat instead of screwing them up.

Even a dog is dubious, because again, most people can’t be trusted to make their own dog food with meat and not screw the animal up. The extra steps to make it a vegetarian diet is beyond most people, and a vegan diet is harder to manage. So, you know, pick a companion animal that doesn’t eat meat at all, you’ll all be happier.

It isn’t the diet itself that’s the problem. It’s humans being fucking morons and thinking they can handle the job when they can barely handle picking their nose. It’s like the idiots that feed their dog grapes, raisins, and chocolate because “it hasn’t hurt him any”. Yet is the word they forget to add.

And, as shitty as it will seem, vegans aren’t smarter or more reliable than anyone else. If anything, the kind of zealot that’s going to try and feed a cat vegan instead of just picking good foods that are sourced well are less capable of using their brain properly because blind faith is a sign of stupidity.

Instrumental metal is what you’d search to get where you want to be. There’s plenty of bands that don’t have vocals at all, and even more that do instrumental tracks here and there.

Thing is, you’ll run into a pretty broad range of styles under that heading since a lot of sub genres are defined by vocals and/or lyrical content. But instrumental is a sub genre of its own. It just gets defined by the lack of vocals rather than any distinct sound like the way thrash is going to have that “thrashy” vibe.

Edit: Animals as Leaders is pretty much the go to recommendation for instrumental metal. They run closer to prog than death, but so do most instrument only bands.

Nothing new to add, but since crowd sourcing answers is more reliable when you have more of them, I figure it’s worth it.

As everyone before this said, it isn’t a perfect compatibility, so you can’t just grab any random kit and be certain it’ll be 100% right. But, there’s a decent chance it will be, or that you can improvise things enough to get it to work long enough to get the exact right bits.

Biggest problem I’ve run into over the years is flappers not making a good seal, and the pipe not fitting well. The flapper is harder to deal with, but the pipe can usually be made to work with a gasket cut to size, long enough to get a better one at convenience rather than having to run right back out.

Jfc, that’s where I got mine!

If this holds up, then mint users are rocking a thirty year old one cup drip machine that only has one button, and only makes one regular mug at a time.

Ikr?

Just got head!

Well, there’s a whole shit ton to unpack about identity.

Let’s start with definitions.

Ethnicity is essentially genetic. There’s usually an associated culture that goes with a given ethnicity.

Culture is the combination of practices, beliefs, and “tradition” of a given group, whatever that group may consist of.

Nationality is where you live.

Race is a loose grouping based on primarily skin color and the region one’s ethnicity came from.

Identity is the parts of those things you internalize, what you self label as.

So, based on what you’ve said in your post, you’re multiethnic, a mix of multiple peoples and places. You can freely choose which of those you integrate into your identity. It won’t ever mean that you aren’t those things, as regards external factors like the kind of hair color you have because of being north african in ancestry.

You could freely choose to integrate Mexican culture into your identity, or not. It would not, however, change your nationality.

If you move to the states, then you’d also have to deal with the legal side of things, which is not the same as identity. It’s an ugly truth, but race matters here, way more than it should. As such, you can’t really just pick your race on legal documents. It has to be as accurate as it’s possible to get, or there can be consequences. If you look white, but put down black, it’s going to end up being a pain in the ass for you.

However, since race itself is arbitrary in a lot of ways, there’s some wiggle room. There are some pretty damn dark white folks, and some pretty damn light Hispanics. And it isn’t like most people can look at someone and tell if they’re greek, arab, or south american. A lot of forms specify the difference between being white Hispanic and white, non Hispanic.

So there’s room to pick your race unless you’re black, in which case, it doesn’t matter what ancestry you are, you’re black and stuck with it because the us is fucked you in that regard. You don’t even have to be of African descent to get shoved into being black, you just have to be dark enough. Which is very fucked up, even for a country as fucked regarding race as this country can get.

So, you do have to be thoughtful in what you put in official documents, or it can end up fucking you later on.

But we can all identify as whatever we want, within reason. My pasty white ass could try to identify as black, but it ain’t going to end well, despite having grown up in a black neighborhood and having a lot more in common with my neighbors than the arbitrary similarities I’m supposed to have with other crackers. But if I want to internalize my Irish heritage, nothing is stopping me. Same with my German heritage, the traces of Polish, Welsh, Spanish, and Scottish. I can identify as man, as a southerner, as a resident of my state, of my town, as an american, as whatever, really.

Largely, as long as there’s no cognitive dissonance to overcome, most people don’t give a fuck about someone else’s identity. Like if my pale ass says I identify as black, that’s going to be strange enough that people are going to wonder if I’m an idiot, a troll, or pulling some kind of racist shit. If my big bearded ass puts on a dress and claims to be a woman, there’s going to be people that can’t accept the difference between the claim and the visual reality. Now, if I shaved and lost more muscle, it wouldn’t be as hard to overcome. You see what I mean? The more people have to think against their senses and preconceptions, the harder it is to lay external claim to an internal identity.

There is the flip side though. If you come here, claim the identity of whiteness, but you don’t also lay claim to the external factors of the culture of white america, then it doesn’t matter what your skin color is, you aren’t going to have much support. And yes, there is such a thing as white culture in the US. There’s actually multiple versions of it. It’s just hard to see since it dominates all the other race based cultures, and becomes the default american cultural base. But it is distinct from the more general american culture.

All of it is largely a construct though. Even ethnicity has a degree of arbitrary limits to it, since most ethnicities aren’t isolated enough in origin for there to be no bleeding between a given ethnicity and one a hundred miles away in origin. And, an ethnicity may ignore subethnicities in general usage, like “black” Irish largely being ignored as an ethnicity that’s distinct from Irish. And you’ll have regional variations that get ignored in the same way.

There’s really a lot to it all. More than I can reasonably pack into a comment and it still be readable by most people (screen reading is harder to follow than printed). So I’ll not belabor the subject.

The real advice is to not bullshit. Treat any paperwork as needing as direct an interpretation as possible, and leave identity out of it, relegating identity to non official usage

Well, that’s an accurate origin of latino.

But that doesn’t mean someone is obligated to internalize being latino. That’s extra true when a person is the child of immigrants. They can be raised within their parent’s culture, and then take on varying degrees of identification with either that culture, or the surrounding one.

And there’s nothing saying that someone in the Latin American country they’re born in can’t separate themselves, at least internally, from the culture of their country, or their region.

That’s true of any culture. You can be from the us and take on any degree of identity as an american, or reject that entirely and build your own identity on any number of factors.

You never met anyone that’s of latino origins that assimilated fully into the culture of a different country? It’s pretty common. My best friend’s husband is Nicaraguan, and identifies as that, Latino, and American. He’s got siblings that were raised in Nicaragua before the family moved here that outright ignore that culture and don’t even speak Spanish with anyone poster than their parents. He’s got nieces and nephews that embrace being latino, but not necessarily Nicaraguan, and vice versa.

A sense of cultural identity is largely voluntary.