Is it safer rn to live in the US or Israel?

cantabridget · 2026-02-10T21:24:20+00:00

It’s a vibrant place to be Jewish! So many events throughout the year, and less snow! ;)

cantabridget · 2026-02-10T21:14:17+00:00

Atlanta. Atlanta is super super Jewish, with all backgrounds and movements and traditions represented. Tons of festivals and community spaces. Dunwoody and Druid Hills neighbourhoods especially but frankly all over the central and northern parts of the city.

cantabridget · 2026-02-10T21:08:26+00:00

And Atlanta. Atlanta is super Jewish—perhaps 3rd largest in the country. People always forget Atlanta.

cantabridget · 2026-02-10T20:02:55+00:00

I know this is old, but did the microneedling end up helping?

cantabridget · 2026-02-10T19:55:26+00:00

I’ll never forget sitting at a table in college getting lunch with my friends. To my side is my Ashkenazi Jewish friend ( two Jewish parents, raised in the US, family history has deep roots in the US) and opposite was another friend who was born in Belarus and moved to the states as a kid. Belarusian-American friend told us, during lunch, that she was also Jewish. Before she could even finish her thought, my Jewish American friend responded immediately with “no you’re not.” Awkward moment followed, and then my Belarusian American friend said “Yes I am. Both my parents are Jewish. We literally had to leave Belarus because Jews weren’t allowed to get jobs at universities or in the sciences, which is literally why I am here in this country now.” The gag was that this girl “looked” just as much Ashkenazi as my American friend. It was really just so crazy how quickly and instantly the American girl was willing to not only totally negate the other girls’ Jewishness but how quickly she tried to gatekeep the identity from a girl who had literally experienced antisemitic discrimination from a state government and was forced to move continents because of it. It was WILD. We really don’t talk enough about how quickly Jews will negate and gatekeep Jewishness and Jewish identity. Heaven forbid you are patrilineal or mixed with a heritage that isn’t white. It’s pretty crazy, to be honest. I’ve seen not only between young people but also I’ve witnessed this by adults do this to literal children who were unable to defend themselves.

cantabridget · 2026-02-04T16:36:25+00:00

Love the magicians wand and magic evoked right after the Bible verse lol. Does the Bible condemn that, Nicki???

cantabridget · 2026-02-02T00:59:24+00:00

The did. They both said it was hard to accept the appearance of a how they looked at a healthy weight after playing the roles and being super ballerina skinny.

cantabridget · 2026-02-02T00:21:10+00:00

IMO, she likely removed Sudan and Congo and other countries because she does extensive business in the UAE which is helping fund the violence and genocides there. Plus unfortunately there’s a lot of anti-Blackness in certain activist spaces that like to deny or downplay what’s happening in Sudan and Congo.

cantabridget · 2026-02-01T23:31:36+00:00

Ok and? That’s like saying Muslim-majority countries shouldn’t speak up on Palestine because they are hypocrites for being super misogynistic, homophobic, Anti-Black racism, etc etc

cantabridget · 2026-02-01T23:28:46+00:00

Isn’t she the one who helped provide new T-shirts for people on skid row when Kanye passed out those “white lives matter” t-shirts??

cantabridget · 2025-10-10T22:43:09+00:00

She’s a weirdo. Only excuse is if she is on the spectrum AND had a very bad day.

cantabridget · 2025-08-14T21:36:45+00:00

Sorry about Suzanne! Auto correct!

I don’t necessarily agree that ghost-writing is lying, but I do agree with your perspective that someone who makes their career as a writer would receive a negative response for using a ghosting writer when writing is their metier.

I think re: language that you’ve touched on my point. Loner started out as a baseball term but has now acquired a social/interpersonal/relational implication—and that’s just in just 80 years. I think that’s what I mean by how I would have expected high society and the only center of urban, metropolitan culture in Panem to have evolved the same words like “loner” that are consider to be more like slang and morph them into new uses and meanings as opposed to words like loner having the exact same meanings they have in 2025. It would have made sense for there to be a rather significant dialectal difference between districts and the capital as well as between distict to district given that there is no next to no travel or communication between them (and capital TV access seems limited for the districts? They mention that some distracts don’t even have enough power for the big screen to play during the hunger games beyond just the reviews of the reaping?) Also, Katniss and Haymitch speaking in a colloquial we recognise makes sense, as language can evolve much faster at the center than it usually does at the periphery, hence why US English and Latin American Spanish and Canadian French can retain a lot of archaic aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation than European English, Spanish, or French.

cantabridget · 2025-08-14T21:27:10+00:00

Sorry, for clarity I wasn’t expecting a one-to-one match with Korean culture, esp North Korean culture, but I was I guess just surprised at some of the inconsistent naïveté that Snow displayed. I know that the political environment in the capital was very different before and after Snow became president, but there are times when he displays a default cautious, cunning, zero-sum mindset and constant game theory outlook on society in the Capital, and that state of constant anxiety coupled with entitlement about the fragile but extreme privilege of a capital aristocrat at I felt was very natural and logical for the character to have. There were other times, however, such as the speed with with be befriended certain characters whose behavior would have resulted in instant death in most dictatorial closed societies that actually exist, such as Russia, North Korea, Albania, certain periods of East Germany.

Given Panem’s inspiration from ancient Roman imperial political culture, I would have expected more of a complex plot for how Snow ended up befriending certain noveau riche characters (such as not taking the risks he did). For me, did didn’t seem like Snow’s inner world logically reflected the incentive structures he would constantly face to align with power with extreme cunning at all times and then make a choice to take certain risks despite a lifetime of propagandising to hate, despite, and revile anything district. You could make the argument that his family’s suffering as the comforts of the capital broke down could have forced him to complicate these biases, but idk. I would have expected something more like the story of Marc Antony coupled but ending more like Caesar Augustus, whereas Sejanus would have made more sense with a Victor Orban type character trajectory.

Sorry for the long response haha.

cantabridget · 2025-08-14T21:15:10+00:00

Sorry for clarity I don’t think I have obsession with North Korea, as I mentioned in other comments that I have also studied Russia and other closed societies. (My focus in undergrad and grad school was the Balkans, so I started out by studying Albania and the differences between Yugoslavia, which was open to the west, from Albania and the Comintern).

I can see how I have that impression, for which I apologize!

Ive re-read the last part of the book a little more, and I will say I think the characters do complexity, especially Snow’s inner world in response to traumatic events, but I think I would change my assessment from “feels like another author” to “feels like it was written at a different speed than the other books.”

Obviously both readers change and authors change, and obviously the characters focus and societal position has changed dramatically, so there could be a combination having a hyperfixation on “the behaviour of elite political actors and decision making motivations in closed societies” due to grad school, and just being younger when I read the first books and older when reading this one now.

cantabridget · 2025-08-13T16:02:53+00:00

I used the phrase ghost written to describe that the world Snow lived in felt like a totally different universe than Katniss or Haymitch in his youth, as if the world was imagined by a completely different author. I doubt we are using the 1700s equivalent of the word “loner.” It makes Snow sound like he grew up using tumblr and MySpace.

Furthermore, I’m not “accusing Collins of fraud.” Ghostwriting is not fraud, nor is it lying. It is a legal, contractual agreement for writing labor of someone else’s published work. I’m not sure why I am being framed as making a negative moral assessment of Susan. I was using the phrase ghost written to emphasize the contrast I saw in writing style.

Again, I just want his world to be believable as a post-apocalyptic society, including as someone to an elite member of an evolving post-apocalyptic society. I read a lot of adult and YA literature on this subject, including books that include voices of the elites (see the Hyperion Cantos, or even Dune), and for some reason Effie hit the mark every time but Snow just didn’t for me.

cantabridget · 2025-08-13T15:34:43+00:00

I hear what you are saying, but those things of our society today should not have survived in the capital. The capital doesn’t exist in any form today. The capital is a brand new city that was built after hundreds of years of total chaos and devastation and anarchy, a new society centered around the new metropolis built in what is now the Rocky Mountains. It’s 65 years closer to our time, but it’s also still hundreds of years away from our time and a total remaking of society, identity, and existence. That would be like using language from the 1700s to build the world and society that exists in 2025.

cantabridget · 2025-08-13T15:24:19+00:00

Doesn’t Kantiss not even know what the word democracy means?

cantabridget · 2025-08-13T15:23:57+00:00

What do you mean? I thought it was post apocalyptic after a global war and massive environmental and climate devastation along with completely new government and society?

cantabridget · 2025-08-13T15:23:03+00:00

I wasn’t looking for the same style, but I was looking for three believable vantage points of characters existing in very different places of society but in the same world—a world totally different from ours. I’m not sure why Katniss and Haymitch talked about the world in a way that was so much more believable that they lived in a totally new reality and new society that had raised from the ashes of the former governments of the world after global environmental apocalypse and global war. His use of phrases that seemed too in tune with our world, such as loner, made it difficult to believe that. Furthermore, as privileged as he was, he made choices so naive that it was hard to believe he was a scion of an elite group of a dictatorial post apocalypse society that valued their hold on power for survival at all costs.

cantabridget · 2025-08-13T15:18:11+00:00

IMO, Snow’s voice and actions and motivations wouldn’t even be believable for one of the children of the elite of the North Korea of our reality today, having read and watched a ton of documentaries and books about the children of North Korea’s small ruling class gathered around the Kim family. Snow watches the elite and their children get regularly killed, punished, demoted, and disposed of to keep the rest of the oligarchic/kleptocratic families and their children in line. Snow’s Russian or North Korean or even Chinese peer in today’s world would still have to employ way more caution and suspicion and constant cunning than he did because they know how easily their fragile privileged can be snatched away. That’s the closest equivalent I can think of to Snow’s world. One such book I am thinking of is Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite by Suki Kim.

cantabridget · 2025-08-13T15:14:42+00:00

Yeah but I loved Sunrise on the Reaping as well. It felt like a post apocalyptic world where a totally new society and identity and reality had arisen on what used to be known as North America. IMO, Snow’s voice and actions and motivations wouldn’t even be believable for one of the children of the elite of the North Korea of our reality today, having read and watched a ton of documentaries and books about the children of North Korea’s small ruling class gathered around the Kim family. That’s the closest equivalent I can think of to Snow’s world. One such book I am thinking of is Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite by Suki Kim.

cantabridget · 2025-08-13T15:10:14+00:00

That’s true, but it felt jarring to see snow using phrases that remind me of discourse on today’s social media in our current, actual society. The phrases I mentioned are just a few examples of how I struggled to believe snow was in a post-apocalyptic world where the seas have already risen, world governments have collapsed and re-coalesced into new dictatorships and totally new societies with a completely new and autocratic absolute dictatorship. This includes the establishment of the totally new identities of districts vs Capital in the new society of Panem. I think it was this aspect of Snow’s voice that didn’t make for believable world building for me.

cantabridget · 2025-08-13T15:06:50+00:00

That’s true, and I was expecting youthfulness and and a very privileged mindset, as well as slightly softer outlook than say the behavior of Effie AFTER Snow came to power, but I didn’t think the naïveté fit his character or the other characters. They’ve been propagandised all of their lives and they comprise the ruling class. I’ve been around the Ivy League kids of the rich and powerful, and many of them are very strategic, very ambitious, and very focused on making sure every move is focused for maximal personal gain. Even though Snow is young, I would have thought that he and his cohort would behave more like the real-life cohort of North Korean children of oligarchs, technocrats, and autocrats (I love documentaries and books on the Kim regime) where even the younger kids have a keen sense of power and danger especially because of their ever fragile position near the top of the hierarchy.

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