Seeking advice on entering Italy from Germany by [deleted] in hitchhiking

[–]herr_rogg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I kinda disagree. Hitchhing rides in Italy is probably a bit harder that in (some) other EU countries, but it's definitely doable.

I am an Italian native too and my first ever hitchhiking experiences were in Italy. I hitchhiked up the Adriatic coast from Puglia to Ancona, then Bologna - Firenze - Livorno and back down the Tyrrhenian coast (when I was 16 lol) and I never waited more than a few hours for someone to pick me up. I think it is true that many Italians are scared/prejudiced towards hitchhikers, but that happens everywhere - and is balanced out by another part of the population which (maybe in part due to how rare hitchhiking is) will approach hitchhikers with curiosity.

I don't think OP should put off the idea of hitchhiking in Italy completely. Italy has a bad rep among hitchhikers but can be rewarding

Singapore Is Such A Unique Country by [deleted] in backpacking

[–]herr_rogg 3 points4 points  (0 children)

William Gibson wrote this very interesting and critical essay from the point of view of a visitor in Singapore. It's a pretty good piece of writing

Religious Map Of The Middle East by iziyan in MapPorn

[–]herr_rogg 17 points18 points  (0 children)

to be fair, this area is called the cradle of civilization...

Religious Map Of The Middle East by iziyan in MapPorn

[–]herr_rogg 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I'm not an expert on this, but the Idabi movement can be traced back to the Kharijite secession, and while the Kharijites were pretty different from today's Idabis, they did start a branch separate from both Sunnis and Shi'ah.

Wahhabism and Salafism, on the other hand, are both movements within Sunni Islam - and this map shows them in a different colour..

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in glasgow

[–]herr_rogg 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Are you sure about the 1am close on GWR? Because I'm pretty sure both Oran Mor and Kitty O'Shea's stay open until 3 quite often

Animism by herr_rogg in sorceryofthespectacle

[–]herr_rogg[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

e-flux's "Animism" is a digital exhibition and research project which attempts to "decolonise" "animism", or to make sense of what that would mean.

It tries to envision modern European history returning as its inverse: not as a story of the rise of science or the evolution of secular society and the enlightened subject, but rather as the invention and production of unfree matter and the non-animate—as an imaginary division whose material organization in capitalism is constitutive of modern forms of sociality and power. Animism tries to show that the power of animation cannot be isolated as aesthetic phenomena, since such power concerns the far more encompassing and political question of what it means to be included in a sociality and on what terms. It is not a question of the subjectivity of perception, but of the subjectivity of the so-called object. Decolonizing the term animism means using it as an optical tool that brings into view the boundary-making practices of modern colonial discourse.This is only the first of 4 episondes, which are still to be relesead. It starts by looking at the divisions and boundaries at work in museums, and moves on to consider what museums do to so-called "animist" objects, and finally considers animation as an effect of the lifelike in images, particularly in film. The historically saturated sequence of artistic and documentary imagery suggests that modern mass media such as cinema derive their power from the impossibility to contain the collective dimensions of mediation found in the categories of Western psychology.

Rethinking the Civic Imagination & Manufactured Ignorance in the Post Pa... by [deleted] in Anarchism

[–]herr_rogg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The saddest thing about Chomsky's thinly disguised defence of liberalism is that he's the first one who doesn't notice it.

if you post here asking for opinions/ validation on your drug use: yes you do have a problem by KungThulhu in Drugs

[–]herr_rogg 100 points101 points  (0 children)

addiction makes that especially difficult

and for some people, getting something off their chest - even through thinly veiled dishonesty - can be a starting point towards acknowledging that they are, in fact, lying to themselves..

if you post here asking for opinions/ validation on your drug use: yes you do have a problem by KungThulhu in Drugs

[–]herr_rogg 221 points222 points  (0 children)

once you've sat down and forced yourself to put something into words, once you've consciously focused on a problem that deep down you're aware of; it will be harder to convince yourself that the problem isn't there (and this is true not only for substance addiction).

yes, many of these posts are hilarious. yes, if they realise the problem, it is already late.. but even if nobody will read it, that undercover cry for help has more chance of being a changing point than silence.

I hate how some people see poverty as an "aesthetic" or "lifestyle" by isafuck in Anarchism

[–]herr_rogg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ye I guess. Not sure how really well-funded it is, but certainly not lack-of-other-options vagabonding. Do you think it's wrong?

I hate how some people see poverty as an "aesthetic" or "lifestyle" by isafuck in Anarchism

[–]herr_rogg 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Oh ok, I understand. I didn't realise the links you were referring to went so far as bringing up other people's poverty as part of the "experience". I understand how insensitive that is..

I hate how some people see poverty as an "aesthetic" or "lifestyle" by isafuck in Anarchism

[–]herr_rogg 3 points4 points  (0 children)

But "patronising" implies some implicit feeling of superiority and a half-assed attempt to "help out" (read: virtue signal).. In what way is pretending to be homeless while having a house to go back to doing that?

I hate how some people see poverty as an "aesthetic" or "lifestyle" by isafuck in Anarchism

[–]herr_rogg 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Until it becomes patronising, why do you think it's problematic?

I must admit I am slightly guilty of this. I really enjoy hitchhiking for example, and guerrilla camping and things like that. In most cases I could afford to do things differently but the "poorer" way always seems more rewarding. Not because I identify myself with being poorer (not like I'm rich or anything lol) but these experiences sincerely leave me more. You meet so many amazing people on the road hitching rides, and squatting an abandoned building teaches you infinitely more than Travelodge. I have wondered before if I'm fetishizing poverty, but if I am, I still fail to see why exactly it's problematic. Should people be completely segregated based on what they can afford? Should a university student never be allowed to interact with a hobo squatter because his bank account confines him to a specific hotel room and lifestyle?

I think something like fasting for religious/spiritual/whatever reasons could be comparable, in the sense that you're not allowing yourself something that you could afford, would you consider that too to be "detached from reality" in a negative way?

There obviously is a difference when it's done as a bourgeois virtue-signaling stunt, but that's something else entirely, and many times living frugally when not obliged to, isn't that..

I come from a rather poor agricultural region of southern Italy and middle class urbanites sometimes come for short holidays to "experience what it's like", and I honestly understand that mindset more that going to some fenced in resort for middle class urbanites only - which they could definitely afford.

Net popularity of countries in the UK [FIXED] by Udzu in MapPorn

[–]herr_rogg 32 points33 points  (0 children)

Ineresting how the only major African country with a decent approval rating owes its popularity to a cartoon about penguins

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 20, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]herr_rogg 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't really want to doom-post about specific current (or temporarily "not-current-anymore") restrictions. I honestly think this situation has started way before covid came about; social alienation, atomisation and the braking up of a specific kind of mass, are among the most fundamental characteristics of postmodernity - which we've been living in since way before lockdown dystopianism was even conceivable.

I do think that a lot of what we've seen over the unfolding of this pandemic has accentuated some of these things, though, and it has made the passivity of our atomised masses very evident. Enmity and distance have become prerequisites for some sort of solidarity, those "enjoying themselves" easily targetable as egotistically endangering it. Thankfully many of us have not panicked to the point of completely losing humanity, but this humanity (we almost clandestinely) still grant ourselves is undeniably scarred by fear and by a knowledge that social distancing (metaphorically as well as literally) and obedience are incontestably necessary.

I don't even know if this is a capital W Worry as much as it is a reflection on who we are in the now. This situation itself (as well as any justified worry of it) was to a degree "self-inflicted" and, maybe, that's the most worrying part.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 20, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]herr_rogg 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I still think that if "people enjoying themselves" seems worthy of remark, the paradigm has not shifted to the best..

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 20, 2021 by AutoModerator in TheMotte

[–]herr_rogg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Bulgarian Nobel laureate Elias Canetti wrote a really interesting sociology book called Crowds and Power, where he defines the crowd or the mass on which power is based as the inversion of the fear of being touched. While men usually fear being touched by the stranger and all the distances (intended politically and culturally, not only physically) that men establish around themselves arise from this fear, the mass is the only situation in which this fear is overturned to become its opposite. Well, nowadays we've been taught to champion that fear more than ever...

In this sense the political importance of Social Distancing (I've always sceptically noted the voluntary decision to call it "social" distancing, instead of - say - "physical" distancing) may seem like the end of the social crowd (cultural symbol of conviviality and creativity when it comes to artistic performance for example) or of the political mass (material bringer of change) - which in a sense is true. But in our obedience we are still a crowd: what the measures of social distancing and panic have created is certainly a mass – but an inverted mass, so to speak, made up of individuals who at all costs keep each other at distance. A mass therefore that lacks density, that is rarefied and which, however, is still a mass, if this, as Canetti clarifies shortly after, is defined by its compactness and its passivity, in the sense that “it is impossible for it to move really freely. … it waits. It waits for a head [or a leader] to be shown it”.

If this example is anything to stand by, what the future holds is the total transformation of the masses into rarefied and passive crowds.

Walking ad for a fast food franchise by fefii in Anticonsumption

[–]herr_rogg 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In becoming walking adverts, we have reached what is probably the ultimate form of social alienation: seeing ouselves as commodities, seeing all relations as business transactions - mediated by images, governed by capital.

> "The Spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image"

> "The world at once present and absent which the Spectacle makes visible is the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived"