More news from xenophobia island and why I'm feeling particularly heated about Icelandic xenophobia today:

My day started with me going to a class that had *one* person of foreign origin in it. This person of foreign origin spoke Icelandic well enough to fully participate in the class and understand everything being said and respond clearly, and despite that, was not treated kindly by the rest of the class. I witnessed this person repeatedly patronized, ignored, and excluded by the rest of the class. After she had to leave class early I heard my other classmates talking about "why is there a foreigner in this class who can barely speak Icelandic? (hint: she didn't *barely* speak Icelandic, she spoke it well IMHO, just with a noticeable but understandable accent) and didn't she know that her presence in this class was a hindrance to the good hardworking Icelandic students of this class who have to navigate class discussions with a foreigner who can barely speak Icelandic (sic)?" This particular woman of foreign origin in this class was a white USAmerican, so being a white westerner definitely on the higher end of privilege for people of foreign origin here. I can't even imagine how much nastier her treatment and the words spoken behind her back would have been had she been a woman of color, and especially from a non-western country.

After that I went to physiotherapy, where my physiotherapist told me in all seriousness that one of the most difficult and heartbreaking experiences of her life was when her son had a foreign woman who spoke Icelandic with an accent as his kindergarten teacher, and one day her son came home from kindergarten and mispronounced his own name because he'd heard his kindergarten teacher mispronounce it. Yes, you read that right, this was one of the most difficult and heartbreaking experiences of her life. She then told me how happy and relieved she was that her son was moved to a different group with all Icelandic classmates and teachers after she complained to the school. Yes, don't worry, I will be switching physiotherapists after that.

Don't even get me started about how I had a co-worker at my last job who used to work in a kindergarten, but quit when her Icelandic co-workers kept denying snacks and drinks to immigrant children who couldn't speak Icelandic based on the fact that they were immigrant children who couldn't speak Icelandic.

After physiotherapy I went to a coffee shop to try to get some work done on my laptop. At the table next to me were two middle aged women talking about foreigners who date and/or marry Icelanders, and how those foreigners often get so "uppity" about feeling excluded and ignored by their Icelandic in-laws at family gatherings (something I have heard myself many, many times from people of foreign origin partnering with Icelanders, especially if the said person of foreign origin is a woman), and why do those foreigners expect to just be talked to and acknowledged at family gatherings, I mean they're foreigners after all, being partnered to an Icelander doesn't just make them part of an Icelandic family! Don't they know how frightening and frustrating it can be for an Icelander to actually have to talk to someone from a different country at a family gathering! (I guess fuck those people of foreign origin and however scary it might be for them to be the only immigrant at a family gathering and getting ignored and excluded by all their in-laws ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯)

I genuinely believe that a much too large fraction of the Icelandic population doesn't believe anyone of foreign origin is actually fully human. Which is actually pretty insane when there's like, 400,000 Icelanders total max, to actually believe that's the only chunk of the 8 billion people in the world who are actual real human beings.

RE: the thing about the kindergarten teacher with a foreign accent. Just like the low wage service industry jobs, a lot of people of foreign origin work as kindergarten teachers because these are one of the few places willing to hire anyone of foreign origin (since like the low wage service industry jobs it's a job that Icelanders don't want to work).

So actually, this is far from the first time I've heard an Icelander complain and get upset that their child had a foreigner as a kindergarten teacher.

Nevermind that a lot of these kindergarten teachers of foreign origin have degrees like a masters in computer engineering or they were a dentist in their home country, but of course too many Icelanders aren't willing to hire a foreigner in jobs that are well paid and have a somewhat prestigious image, so their only option is working as a kindergarten teacher where they can become some Icelandic mom's sob story about "my baby had to endure hearing his name pronounced with a foreign accent! 😭"

Also RE: the thing about people of foreign origin with an Icelandic partner being routinely ignored and excluded by their in-laws, don't even get me started on the stories of horrifying treatment by Icelandic in-laws I've heard from/about people of foreign origin, especially women.

I had a Ukrainian classmate at one point who had an Icelandic boyfriend. She told me that the way she was treated by her in-laws led her to genuinely believe that when an Icelander's son or brother is dating a woman of foreign origin, they never really view it as a real relationship the way they would if he was partnered with an Icelandic woman, it's more like they see their son or brother having a cute little pet who's not actually a person.

However, that didn't stop her in-laws from constantly laying pressure on her to give them a grandbaby. Whenever they saw her they never spoke to her to acknowledged her, except to ask when she was going to have children with their son.

I had a Swiss co-worker at my last job who was dating an Icelandic man. She told me that ever since she started dating him she left every family gathering in tears because of how ignored and excluded her boyfriend's family made her feel, until she eventually had enough and stopped going. She said her breaking point was one Christmas everyone in the family and their partners had gotten presents except her. All of her boyfriend's siblings' partners got gifts and hugs and generally warm treatment like they were part of the family, while she was ignored and excluded as always. Even the dog got a Christmas present. Her breaking point was realizing that being a woman of foreign origin put her at lower status in the family than a dog.

And just like my Ukrainian classmate, only time her in-laws ever spoke to her or acknowledged her was to ask when she was going to start having babies with their son. Her mother-in-law would say "I've started knitting baby blankets and socks for you for when you and (the Icelandic boyfriend) start having babies! Are you thinking of starting soon?" to which the Swiss co-worker would always reply that she had no interest in having children and was happily child free, and the mother in law would just dismissively say "well I'll keep knitting you some baby blankets and socks for when you're ready!"

I've mentioned in other posts that I sometimes do private 1-on-1 language tutoring for English and Icelandic as a sort of "side hustle", so I sometimes talk and network with other language teachers. (Also I work almost exclusively with immigrants, hence why I hear so many chilling stories of how they're treated by Icelanders)

One time I was speaking to a woman who'd been an Icelandic as a second language teacher for a few decades. She told me that towards the beginning of her career she had a student who was a heavily pregnant USAmerican woman married to an Icelandic man. One day her student told her "I'm taking these Icelandic classes because my mother-in-law law told me that I'm not allowed to speak English with her grandchild, and she only wants Icelandic used around her grandchild"

I do wish that this colleague of mine had the forethought and consideration to provide a bucket to vomit in before sharing this story with me. But it does confirm my already existing theory that many Icelanders with a daughter-in-law of foreign origin don't view her as a person, just as a sort of brood mare to produce grandchildren for them.

It's not as bad as this colleague's story, but one time I had a co-worker from Japan who was married to an Icelandic man, and once confided to me that she was only in Icelandic classes because her Icelandic mother-in-law had forced her to (at least partially from the assumption that this woman was going to be having her grandchildren, even though she also told me that she doesn't even want children), and that she actually wanted to stop the classes to focus on her career, but her Icelandic mother-in-law would become aggressive and yell at her if she voiced wanting to stop the Icelandic classes.

You've all probably seen and heard Iceland being praised as "the most gender equal country in the world" and all these videos and articles about what a magical gender equal paradise Iceland is. Let it be known that any semblance of gender equality in Iceland is exclusively reserved for white Icelandic women. Women of foreign origin be damned.

ALT

@havinganormalone sorry, I hope you don't mind me bringing this out of the comments to draw attention to, not just because of how absolutely spot on this is, but also I wanted to talk about how just like the gender equality of Iceland is often extremely overblown and exaggerated in the international media (and what little semblance of it actually exists is exclusively for white Icelandic women) the same can be said of LGBT+ rights in Iceland.

There is definitely quite a bit of homophobia and transphobia in Iceland, but Iceland can be quite good about making sure these stories never get out into international media, only the stories about how what a wonderful magical little paradise of equality Iceland is, where everyone is accepted with open arms! There is no war in Ba Sing Se, There is no inequality in Iceland.

In my D&D group a few years back was a gay man, and at one point he'd just started a new job. When he casually mentioned at one point that he was gay, he was quickly taken aside and told that he "isn't the right fit for the company culture" and was dismissed. The average Icelander responds to this story with "well the boss must have been a foreigner because that's not something an Icelander would do to a gay person, that's just not part of our culture" (spoiler: the boss who fired him for being gay WAS indeed Icelandic!)

There is no war in Ba Sing Se, There is no inequality in Iceland

It was actually very recent that it was in the news here that a trans woman (of foreign origin, who had moved to Iceland because she believed she would be safer here than in her home country) was violently assaulted by a group of Icelandic teenage boys so badly that she had to be hospitalized. She had never met or spoken to these boys before, and it happened while she was leaving the gym and walking to her car in broad daylight. She said in an interview that while the boys were attacking her she genuinely believed that she was going to die.

All of the comment section for this news story was Icelanders saying things so disgustingly xenophobic and transphobic that I don't even feel comfortable repeating them. The very few comments acknowledging how bad this was came from middle aged Icelandic moms saying something along the lines of "They definitely only did this because of influence from foreign social media! Foreigners are polluting the minds of our boys and filling them with hate!"

There is no war in Ba Sing Se, There is no inequality in Iceland (unless of course it's coming from those damn foreigners, coming here and polluting our beautiful pure country with their sexism and homophobia and transphobia! We must keep the damn foreigners out at all costs to protect our beautiful pure white blonde haired blue eyed women and LGBT+ people!)(I do hope you, dear reader, pick up the sarcasm and can see from everything else in this post that Icelanders need no help from foreigners or foreign influence to be bigoted and hateful)

#long post#you're right OP this is really not smth we hear about in the US#Iceland and Scandinavia and Nordic countries are all painted as a wonderland of civil rights and perfect health care#it is disheartening but important to hear about what it's really like from ppl who live there#I know a lot of queer folks in the US have dreams of escaping to Europe#but it's important to do your research on your desired country#and try to get some real insider knowledge first#not just relying on what we hear in our own news which tends to be mostly positive#get a feel for the good AND bad and how you will realistically be viewed/treated there#tw xenophobia#tw racism#tw sexism#tw transphobia#tw homophobia

Thank you for this and I hope you don't mind me bringing this out of the tags because this is a really important point.

Not just U.S. media, but a lot of media in general outside of northern Europe tends to paint northern Europe as a magical paradise of progress, equality, and civil rights. I had a co-worker who did research on this phenomenon and he claimed it was actually started by Spain sometime around the 70's or 80's to write a bunch of intrigue pieces about what a paradise of progress and equality it is here, and that media spread across the rest of Europe and from there to the rest of the world.

But it is really important that you actually listen to the people who live here, and not just the privileged white native born population whose parents and grandparents also come from here, it's extremely important that you listen to marginalized voices in these countries, especially from immigrants and double especially from immigrants of color.

If you're LGBT+ and you want to escape to northern Europe, you can't just listen to what the straight white native born population has to say, because chances are they'll just echo the international press and tell you a bunch of nationalist propaganda about how their country is such a magical paradise of equality for LGBT+ and you won't be discriminated against at all if you move here. You specifically need to talk to LGBT+ people living here and specifically LGBT+ immigrants (because honestly even white native born LGBT+ people will have a vastly different experience than LGBT+ immigrants) to get a realistic picture of how you'd be treated as an LGBT+ immigrant.

And this all goes double if you're a person of color, it's especially important to hear from people of color living here, because what they have to say is also vastly different than what white people living here have to say.

I occasionally come across Reddit threads where a person of color posts in a given Northern European subreddit something like "Hey I'm thinking about visiting your country, how are (black or asian or latino) people viewed and treated in your country? Do I have to worry about being harassed or anything while I'm there?" and of course the thread quickly fills up with replies from white native born people of that country saying something like "LMAO nobody cares what your color or ethnicity is here!" but if you were to actually ask a person of color living in that given country they will have a very different answer to that.

Usually this just ends up with you looking like a moron btw

Angrily lashing out at the suggestion that it's possible to do basic media analysis was foundational to the ragebait ecosystem of the 2010s, from which we got basically the entire culture of modern far right politics, btw.

I genuinely believe myself and others are being so sincere and literal when we say TOUCH GRASS

I went outside and got an education, that's where I learned that you can obtain knowledge and insight through analytical methods, then noticed that some people who sit on the internet yelling at strangers get really mad about that constantly.

like they understand it rationally but in their heart they're like "lin manuel miranda lied to me."

back when hamilton first came out I made my parents listen to it and afterwards my dad said "well. that's not historically accurate." and when I looked at him for clarification he added "no one in the 1770s would have referred to new york as the greatest city in the world."

I need you to FREAKING listen to me. Back when I lived with my parents my mom would watch Hallmark channel and there was this show called When Calls the Heart. It was supposed to be in like late Victorian era or Edwardian era....... I think? (they have early cars) And THIS is what the costumes look like......

Literally all you had to do to make it quasi-believable was fix their hair/facial hair and give them hats. Also fix the character's neckline, she's the only character in the show where they're like "no she must be hot and have a V neck"

Ok sorry I had to get that out of my system.

Returning to subsistence farming as a society would be better than the capitalist hellscape we live under now. So no.

imma be real with you, thats a dumb as shit thing to say and you dont really believe that

yes it is so much better for us now that we get to subsistence drive for doordash and subsistence amazon warehouse. what could be worse than growing plants that you can eat

profound misunderstanding of all concepts mentioned but i understand your desire to share thoughts on the computer

We should be working toward a society where everyone can specialise as much as is genuinely needed for the scale of society we have now.

I don't like gardening or doing outdoor work. I am disabled. I like that I can send my housemate to a grocery store with a list and he brings home foods that I can eat and easily make meals from. I am grateful to all the agricultural workers for growing and raising that food. I am grateful to the fishermen for catching and processing and freezing that fish. I am grateful to all the food service workers for dicing those vegetables for me, and making that bread for me, and making those chips and candies and beverages and cheese and hot dogs and butter and so on.

A lot of people do a lot of work to make the food on my table, and I thank them every day. I cannot do any of that work anymore, but I can do things a lot of people can't do: I'm an artist. I write stories. I can sing. I know a lot of things even if I can't do them anymore, I know how to do them, and how to teach other people to do them. That's valuable, and human society, for thousands of years, has relied on humans specialising in tasks, so that we can go farther, do more.

If we all subsistence farmed, all of that would go away. Libraries would go away. Science and all the things science gives us would go away. Your electronics and the internet would go away. Music and art and theatre would go away. Coffee shops would go away. Conventions and travel and social safety nets and movies and buses and trains and a lot of other things would GO AWAY. Because we'd all be subsistence farming. I don't want that world.

Seeing videos of bodies scattered on the ground just.... everywhere. 200 was a severe undercount. The current 538 is probably also a massive undercount.

January 7: Estimated death toll of ~24.

January 10-11: Estimated death toll of 538-544.

January 13: Over 2,000 killed.

Apparently now it’s up to 12k❤️‍🩹

💚💚💚

🤍🦁🤍

❤️❤️❤️

Yeah, it looks like it. Apparently the massacres mostly took place January 8-9, which would explain why we were getting such huge disparities in my above posts.

more extreme example but it boils my BLOOD when people say the bible says you cant wear polyester. there is no faster way to assure me of your ignorance

do people say that? why??

They do say it and it’s because they’re under a misapprehension that “shatnez” (a word they probably don’t even know) means “a mixture of any 2 fabrics” and polyester is often blended with other materials.

To be fair, if you’ve only ever seen shatnez discussed in translation, I don’t think it’s hard to come to that erroneous conclusion. Eg King James translation of Devarim 22:11: “Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woollen and linen together,” which kinda sounds like wool and linen is just one example.

Wait wait, you’ve only given me more questions!!

since you’re talking about the king james translation, I assume you’re talking about christians

do christians care about shatnez?? Why???

They don’t really and that’s typically the point. This tidbit usually comes up in a common poorly considered and unwittingly antisemitic argument against Xian homophobia - along the lines of how can you be against gay marriage because of the Bible if you wear polyester blends, a thing forbidden by the same clearly outdated Bible, CHECKMATE.

ahhhh i see! That makes sense, thanks!

Here's an AP news brief with a little more info. It's limited in the way major news outlets are right now but provides context that supports the personal account shared.

jake that first night when they served a freezer tray tv dinner and not an overflowing plate of fish that's probably going for conservatively like $40-$80 bucks a kilo but the guys decided Eh we'll catch more let's just fry it up:

i want to ensure that noone ever calls me a liar on the internet and want to confirm that island boy dinner is very real and it's waiting for you

Weird vibes police🖐🚨

Hi I'm op and my post blew up in 72 hours (pray it doesn't happen to you). For the most part people are cool and chill but unfortunately I see some fouls on the field and I'm going to hand out a couple yellow cards.

1. Polynesian Orientalism

I made a silly post about a dream place to be, absolutely my intention is for you to go ah I wanna be there... But how are you saying that.

You can be aspirational about it! You can say what a good opportunity, hope that happens to me, or we should recreate that in our own way.

We should probably NOT say ah I gotta get me some Polynesian guys. I gotta go find a Samoan man to adopt me. We should have them adopt all the white boys one by one so they can teach us their mystical ways.

That's a little weird isn't it. We won't say that.

2. I'm being language police here, I don't see any bad intentions with this oopsie just realised people don't know- Maori is a descriptor! So it's not The Maori, it's a Maori person (like it's not The Black it's a Black person)

3. I am not going to answer if my dad is Hot. I get this enough from my friends. YUCK. I will answer if the other guys on the boat are hot ummm I'm gay but objectively they're all tall and do physical labour in the sun for at least 6 hours a day and have tattoos so. Sure. I reckon so

Okay take the cards you think apply to you and resume scrolling in a mindful chiller way👍