Names for avid readers 📚 by language (more and more, in the replies👇)

English/Dutch: Bookworm / Boekenwurm

Danish: Reading horse (Lesehest)

French: Ink drinker (Buveur d'encre)

German: Read-rat (Leseratte)

Indonesian: Book flea (Kutu buku)

Romanian: Library mouse (Șoarece de bibliotecă)

Norwegian: Reading horse (Lesehest)

Serbian/Polish: Book moth (Knjiški moljac / Mól książkowy)

Greek: Bookeater (βιβλιοφάγος)

Finnish: Reading maggot (Lukutoukka)

Swedish: Read-louse (Läslus)

Vietnamese: Bookwormweevil (Mọt sách) 

#books #reading

If you do not live in North America, it might be hard to grasp just how large and powerful moose are. Hopefully, this video will help.

There are two herbivores that grizzly bears will sometimes run away from. The other is bison.

Edit: possible AI video

Tourtagebuch:

Bilanz 8h Regionalbahn:

3 von vier Zügen pünktlich, eine Verspätung von 5 min. Alle Anschlüsse erreicht.

Ausreichend Platz in allen Zügen. Alle Toiletten funktionsfähig.

Anzahl maskentragender Mitreisender: 2 (Zustiege Leipzig Hbf, Erlangen)

Anzahl spöttisch-aggressiver Sprüche wegen meiner Maske: 1 (Dessau Hbf)

An excerpt from "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45", an interview with a German after WWII on why they didn't rise up against the regime due to incrementalism.

“Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free

#USpol #USpolitics

A lot of folks are worried about the U.S. “turning” fascist—no longer questioning if it will happen, but speculating on what it will look like. There’s this idea floating around that fascism is some shocking failure of the system, an accident, or an outside force creeping in. But if you dig into fascism’s roots, it’s clear that it’s not an anomaly; it’s colonialism turned inward. Fascism is just the state using the same strategies it has always used to control and dominate marginalized people, only now, those tactics will be aimed at a wider swath of the population.

The US is an interesting subject in this case, because it already maintains multiple colonies within its territory - like the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where me and my family live. The tools used against Indigenous nations like the Lakota to get us into these places - surveillance, land theft, forced assimilation, criminalization of culture - are the same ones that, under fascism, will turn inward to impose “order” on a larger scale. The tactics honed against the Lakota to get us into Prisoner of War Camp #334 (the original designation of Pine Ridge) are what you'll see applied under a fascist regime.

As Aimé Césaire put it, what the West “cannot forgive Hitler for…is the crime against the white man…that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved [for colonized peoples].” Fascism isn’t something foreign. It’s those same colonial “procedures,” just applied closer to home. And in the U.S., those procedures aren’t just present—they’re foundational to what this country is and how it was built. Surveillance, land grabs, forced submission—these are all baked into the DNA of America. That’s why so many Americans struggle to recognize fascism’s creeping return: they’ve been living with it all along. It’s the air, the background, the norm.

So if you’re wondering what American fascism will look like, start listening to Indigenous people, to Black and Brown communities who have faced these tactics for centuries - and continue to be the first targets.

Our past and present is the future fascism is bringing for settlers. While what folk experience won’t be identical to our colonization, it’s not far off. If folk want to know what might be coming, pay attention to the people who have been dealing with these systems of control and dispossession all along—because what’s being done to us is the fascist playbook.

This video of John Batiste hearing “Holiday" by Green Day for the first time and inventing a piano part is an absolute delight. And he seems like maybe the most joyous human alive?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0hSXIuPBwM