the_abecedarian

Seafile or nextcloud

If your country has a better system, it is because the unions and the left have fought for it. Don’t let the Macrons of the world do to you what Reagan did to us.

In addition, medical costs in the US are higher than many places, because the insurance companies don’t have to bargain with the whole nation at once. Even Medicare and Medicaid have historically been prevented by law from using their full bargaining power in some cases.

I don’t actually know what happens to medical coverage if you have medical debt. It will eventually go to collections and can be used to garnish your wages, I believe.

Are you asking about the specific course of treatment, which will verify by type and stage, or how people pay?

As for paying, the only national programs are Medicare (restricted by age) and Medicaid (restricted by income). The US veterans administration is a separate govt program for military veterans and I believe their families, too. Everyone else either has some level of insurance provided by their employer (which will still generally be terrible), or nothing at all.

The charts here are helpful https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6778988/

It’s great that you’re trying to take care of yourself!

“Overpopulation” is a lie spread by the right wing to distract us from the way that capitalists, oligarchs, etc. take from us. You might find a useful project in looking into community movements that have rejected, in the past and currently, exploitation under capitalism and other hierarchies. https://inv.nadeko.net/playlist?list=PLvwoHdNGq9wUbrwTZ2k8yXE5oABPBQ4NX here is a playlist with short videos talking about still-active resistance groups of many kinds. There’s always something we can learn from them. https://srslywrong.com/ this podcast is a sweety pie take providing fun and funny analyses of various hierarchies in society (check the sidebar for recommended episodes).

Talk about these feelings with trusted people in addition to your therapist. Pull back from watching the news/doomscrolling/social media for a while. See if you can take a trip to a place where life looks different, for a week.

Try searxng

Yes, it can become part of one’s culture to appreciate another’s culture

It’s possible, sure, but you’d have to do a study. As I mentioned, there are plenty of ways to interpret it.

I thought by adding “or whatever it’s called” would make it clear that I’m aware that the theory is a racist and antijewish lie, but I guess that was not enough. How should I have worded that differently?

Ah, OK! I think “if white people were defensive of their culture” is what threw me.

What would it mean to take the time and effort to learn to play the Erhu, understand its history and context, but somehow not show real respect for it?

To begin with, there can always be some jerk out there who gives you a hard time no matter what, or who has had so many bad experiences with ppl thoughtlessly appropriating culture that their mind is just closed and they react badly. You’d just have to defend it and let reasonable ppl see that that person is wrong to call you out. That aside, I think showing respect means that if an instrument is sacred for some reason (I have no idea if the Erhu is), you don’t play it in a profane or silly way. Outside of that, using an instrument as like a way to make fun of the culture would be bad (e.g. playing it whenever a stereotyped character appears on screen). Just my two cents.

If you see a number of people from Asian cultures playing classical music originating from Europe, does that mean it has become part of their culture? What if they are appreciating music from another culture? What if their families originate somewhere in Asia but they feel no connection to that place? Or what if there are more extracurricular opportunities for European-style orchestras than for other kinds of musical ensembles from other cultures?

The Great Replacement Theory is a racist and antijewish lie.

Edit: a white person who put in time and effort learning to play the Erhu, understood a reasonable amount of its history and context, and showed real respect for it would be fine.

Basically, your instincts are right and the question in the last line of your post is a good one. Here’s why:

“Whiteness” doesn’t come from biology or culture. It’s really just a way of describing a hierarchy that was set up by European empires and early corporations at the dawn of capitalism to justify the enslavement of people around the world, the colonization of their lands, and the exploitation of their natural resources for profit.

This hierarchy is used to steamroll over the huge number of ethnic and cultural backgrounds people have, in order to label some “white”, others “black”, others “asian”, and so on. There can be no “white” culture (even within one country), because the boundaries of who is accepted as “white” have shifted more than once in the past few hundred years and could easily shift again. For example, look up when and why Irish people and Italian people were accepted as fully white and look up the “contingent” whiteness that Jewish people have had in the US. See How the Irish Became White, for example.

Another reason there is no white culture is because, even for people accepted as white, whiteness has erased the cultures they brought to America when they immigrated by forcing them to conform to its rules. Think about how badly even light-skinned immigrants were treated by others whose families had been in America for generations. The immense pressure to look, sound, and act “American” and “white” to avoid being bullied at school, to be able to get good jobs, and to be seen as “respectable” in the neighborhood, meant for many people that they had to give up large parts of their culture to be accepted. This compounds over the generations, until we end up with people asking questions like the post you’ve made right here.

Racists proudly defend white (or “western” if they’re cowards) culture. They’re completely unable to see how whiteness has stolen big pieces of the cultures of everyone it touches. It has bleached them into a blander, more sterile version of what they once were.