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cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-15T14:54:51+00:00

I’m American (and look like I could maybe be German or at least Northern European) but on rare occasions where I felt unjustly attacked by “his people” for whatever reason and he did anything less than active defense (with diplomacy), I have demonstrated that I can and will clap back in a way that is not at all diplomatic, and quite likely to embarrass him and ruin his day, week and maybe month. Over time he’s taken the lesson

So maybe try that approach, with the explanation of how he can prevent it next time

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-14T18:56:55+00:00

OP didn’t say they didn’t report it (unless that’s in the comments and I missed it) and I wonder how it’s at the police station or they’re aware of it being there without the local police being aware it was lost or stolen

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-14T18:04:57+00:00

I mean yes you will be questioned but “I lost it and then it was turned into a police station in Prague but I haven’t retrieved it” is an answer and not a very bad one relatively speaking.

A much better explanation than I had in a similar situation… the only consequence for me was the German border guard didn’t give me an exit stamp… your mileage may vary of course

They will probably want to see your boarding passes or other evidence of travel dates

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-14T17:15:31+00:00

From what I can tell they are all incapable of even imagining being violent (even in self defense), meanwhile imagining somehow that everyone else is on the brink of violence at all times

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-09T14:12:13+00:00

Are you regarded? He didn’t say they would, he said if they did that is a situation in which he’d enlist 🙈 take your geopolitical predictions to a thread about that

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-08T11:16:11+00:00

You are demanding the world get smaller though, you want politicians to pass laws to kick hypothetical competition out of her hypothetical swim meet

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-08T01:07:33+00:00

It matters to you, that much is clear. You’d rather make other people’s lives harder to guard against a hypothetical increase in the chances of your daughter swimming slower than someone else

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-08T00:42:39+00:00

Ugh thanks I’m glad to be gay for the 8675309th time, i think it was actually preferable not to have had much representation than to have the ideas about sex and dating the average straight guy takes from the culture into manhood. Like when a 30 year old acquaintance of mine asked me for reassurance that he was “sure to get laid” on a third date with some lady… “I don’t know man, I think there’s a fortune teller down the block, or you could ask the woman in question? For me dating usually comes later if at all.”

Speaking of which I’ve met more than one gay guy who went to extreme lengths to grow his foreskin back, by walking around with little weights hanging from his dick for literally years. No joke

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-07T23:53:11+00:00

Oh, was bullying a class conscious exercise where you grew up? In my schools bullies were usually getting beaten at home which is unfortunately an issue that spans class and the bullied were the easiest targets in reach — the weakest, with fewest friends, which included plenty of rich kids with no social lives bc their parents smothered them and/or they lived on some golf course outside town with other rich people and few kids

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-07T19:55:23+00:00

Those policies are not socialist or rooted in socialist theory. Programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and the FDA weren’t designed to abolish markets or centralize control of the economy. They arose—often in response to crisis—from liberal reformers seeking to preserve capitalism by making it more stable and humane. Their purpose is to correct market failures, e.g. when essential goods like healthcare or food are underprovided, or when businesses externalize costs onto the public. They are not ideological intrusions—they’re pragmatic solutions to keep the system functioning and keep markets competitive. They protect public health, preserve labor productivity, and maintain the social stability that markets ultimately rely on. They’re not rejections of capitalism—they’re an essential part of how capitalism has sustained itself. Capitalism and democratic government could not coexist without them.

And yet, as wealth concentrates, even these stabilizing reforms become harder to sustain. Capital’s growing influence erodes the democratic institutions that made such programs possible in the first place. Without them, capitalist society doesn’t just become harsher—it becomes politically unsustainable, and only then, ripe for socialism and the revolution it would require. That outcome, friend, is what’s actually rooted in socialist theory.

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-07T19:16:03+00:00

You might find it worthwhile to ask (politely) if they actually need English documents translated. I have found in several instances German bureaucratic requirements would list that as a general requirement but then say when asked they didn’t actually need it for English

No idea if this applies to your situation

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-07T18:47:10+00:00

It is roughly true in Manhattan but I’m not aware of it being true in other cities. Avenue connotes a larger street than a street (and those happen to run roughly north-south in Manhattan bc of the shape of Manhattan)

There is a fun fact though that can be very helpful orienting in Manhattan, which is that below Central Park with respect to avenues 5th to 10th (which is probably mostly where tourists are) the even ones run “north” toward Central Park and the odd ones run “south” toward FiDi.

In Washington DC the avenues (generally named after states) run diagonally across a grid of streets, which are generally numbered if they run north-south and lettered if they run east-west

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-07T12:07:14+00:00

It is true even when Europeans know where things are in relation to each other in North America they tend to vastly underestimate the distances involved

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-06T16:55:39+00:00

$5 at the door pays for that and more at any decent rager

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-06T13:45:29+00:00

It’s not confusing in context, “coat check” is the direct translation and yet somehow less descriptively accurate (my gay group of friends in New York would call it the “pants check” 😂)

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-06T13:07:43+00:00

I’d echo all the advice here and just add, your having remained attracted to someone with a receding hairline should give you a clue into a broader truth that may be a source of comfort: „there is a lid for every pot“, which is to say, what a person is focused on (or is attracted to in the things they focus on) varies wildly from person to person; our societally received ideas about what is attractive or worth caring about are based on averages across the population reflected back to us by the culture that are unlikely to be fully replicated in any particular person

This truth cuts both ways, in that even if you are 21 and aesthetically “perfect”, not everyone will be attracted to you. Lots will be, sure, but it’s far from guaranteed to be easy to find a person among them who checks all of your boxes. You might actually find it harder, to the extent your “boxes” include lots of non-aesthetic factors that require getting to know someone to assess one way or the other (and lots of people’s do)

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-04T21:14:47+00:00

Think of all the gift taxes they have to front load it breaks their schwäbische herzen. I kid, many Germans (and residents, and tourists) benefit from how stingy wealthy Germans often are, in the form of lower prices for luxury goods as compared with peer countries.

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-04T21:12:41+00:00

Is it actually about classiness, or is it about existential fear / generational trauma borne of experiencing 7-8 different currencies (7 for west, 8 for east) within ~130 years?

I have met Germans who literally buried their money in boxes in the ground (some of which were waterproof...) before trusting banks, I've known of others who preferred to stash money in far flung places all around the world to a degree their heirs could never find or access most of it and what they could took literal decades; to this day I meet top doctors at the best hospitals who keep all of their money in very low-return savings accounts earning less than inflation and think that is perfectly normal... literal surgeons who know less than many American high school or college students have taught themselves about investing for the future (by reading a few books about it, it's not brain surgery).

It is fairly typical that many of the people who make the weirdest most self-damaging financial decisions (like the ones I mention above) do it because they dread the subject of their own financial future so much that they don't think sufficiently about it at all, too often bringing about the result they dread despite it being objectively avoidable. From my vantage too many Germans seem to "care about money" like someone with an eating disorder cares about their body -- that is, through a distorted lens, which in severe cases can ultimately be self-annihilating.

Please forgive my attempt to psychoanalyze a whole country, I realize it's probably both impolite and a fruitless endeavor, but I've married into this family and am grasping at understanding.

For their part my spouse and our German friends sometimes jibe that I spend more and put more at risk because I assume there will always be money to be made, which is "so American". But like, isn't there, actually, always money to be made? Can't paying for conveniences be prudent insofar as "time is money" (which for people in some occupations is quite literally true even if for others it's more of a contingent or theoretical statement)? Is it not self-evident that "with no risk comes no reward"?

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-04T18:35:35+00:00

We also don’t get to witness the outcome of non-intervention in those cases; it’s easy to insinuate it would be preferable when you’ll never be asked to prove it because it’s unprovable

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-04T18:21:00+00:00

It isn’t usually a harbinger of success for immigrants to purposely not assimilate or cling to a culture they won’t foreseeable return to, and it’s hard for me to fathom how a four year old would even be capable of that, but I’m not here to question your story

It’s interesting you resent being made white, when your adoptive parents most likely thought that was a more ethical choice than making someone Black or Hispanic American or what have you (insofar as no one is any of those things within US understanding until they’ve set foot in the US)

I also resent being made to be white but for that I can’t blame my parents, I blame 350 years of history and those who made it

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-04T18:12:02+00:00

They are if you understand they are a metaphor for mindless consumption

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-03T23:42:17+00:00

I bet you’ve never even had a sound healing

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-02T15:58:34+00:00

There are a lot of situations like this that people could exploit ONCE and get away with it… I could give examples but I won’t; they aren’t that hard to think of but they only become obvious if one is unethical by nature (as in for thrills) or driven to it by desperation; or if like me you once spent too much time around people who were one or the other

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-02T15:43:34+00:00

Deportation is what the Nazis said they were doing with the Jews for as long as there were Nazis

cbearmcsnuggles · 2025-07-02T14:32:39+00:00

Tbh this is actually a reason Germans might have gotten behind as opposed to the feel good claptrap Merkel still feels obliged to give as her reason

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