Wow, yeah, it's really striking how few people are aware that the Romani were also one of the primary "targets" of the Holocaust and there are so many Romani victims of WWII.

We were so glad we got such a reaction because if we placed first in the last competition, we'd win the main prize (it was like a pack of candy, but also the bragging rights!) but the organizers decided to pull some "everybody is a winner, the poems were all good" bullshit, I guess not to offend the other kids' artistic sensibilities or something. So everybody got the same amount of points for the last competition, which means it basically didn't count and the other team kept their lead and got the prize! I was so mad back then omg. Those cunts didn't even share the candy.

That's really sad. It's always bad for history to be forgotten because people don't want to talk about it.
I don't know anything about the education system of either Austria or Germany but here in Czechia we've never even learned about the Romani people at school, about their culture or history, nothing. So in a system like that it's easy for these harmful stereotypes to persist when the only "education" the kids get about the Romani is from their white trash racist uncle at family gatherings.
That's really interesting that people recognize you. Whereas most people are totally unable to tell my ethnicity. I'm a basic white girl from Czechia with some Slovak ancestry, so my heritage is basically all contained within Central Europe, but I've been told I look Spanish or Turkish (I'm pale as a corpse in winter but tan really well in the summer), Native American (bc I have huge cheekbones lol), Swedish (idk how they got that, I'm not even blonde) so really ethnicity is such a weird concept.

I'd also like to add this is also the case with Middle Eastern women, with 19th century male travel writers depicting harems as something sexy and promiscuous, when that's not what a harem is at all in the original sense. They didn't know what they were talking about of course, since men (apart from male relatives) cannot enter harems, so their imagination ran wild and they completely twisted the perception of these cultures as barbaric and licentious. Some of these Orientalist tropes are even used nowadays by far right political parties to depict refugees as backwards barbarians who have slave women in harems, so this kind of depiction has really done a lot of damage.
Of course it's the artist's freedom to paint or write about anything they want. But maybe they should've considered the implications beforehand.

I agree. I live in Czechia and discrimination of Romani people is still very real here. A lot of old people here always say that Romani people only exploit the social system and have a lot of kids so that they can get money from the state (which is especially ironic coming from the people who retired comfortably at 55 and got money from the state ever since, making retirement impossible for future generations who will have to work until we die bc the state will have no money for pensions).

lol true

Do you not toss your pasta with some olive oil? Or maybe a bit of butter? (I do not actually do the last part, I just wanted to continue the rhyme)

Good question. I don't use TikTok but from what I've seen it seemed like it has a huge diversity of content along the lines of YouTube, so it seems unlikely to me that everyone on TikTok would know about this.
Maybe he posted this story on TikTok first and now he's retelling it to his fans who don't use it? I have no idea who this guy is, if he's famous on the internet or something.

You present complaints and concerns about how scary this is (which I agree with, it's a slippery slope for corporations to control discourse - it's actually a pretty often discussed topic in Marxist academic circles, who also see a big issue in this) but offer no alternatives. What is there to be done about this? Pass legislation that lets the state control social media? While that seems like the best option at this point in time, it might set a dangerous precedent. Or have the government make their own social media made specifically for discussing politics, accepting the caveat that it will inevitably be controlled by the government? There's no guarantee that project will take off and have a stable user base, people might still prefer Twitter, Facebook etc. Or ditch social media altogether? I don't think that's possible without some serious authoritarianism. How do we create a platform that unites everyone without the need for people to flee and make their own echo chambers?

Eh, fair enough I guess. I've never played one I've just read a bunch of articles about how it's a grey area of the law and has been used by the Yakuza for money laundering.

But isn't there a type of pachinko that is basically gambling? Yes there are the game ones but there are also pachinko slot machines which have become quite widespread in the last few years.

Getting banned from Twitter is technically not violating his freedom of speech, since the 1st amendment only applies to government prosecution. However, in principle I agree. Social networks have de facto become the public square and a place where a lot of the discourse is happening, and they should be treated and regulated as such.

Huh? It's basically gambling but it's avoiding gambling laws because it's technically not using money but pachinko balls that you exchange for prizes, no?

Ha, didn't even notice that one. Maybe it belongs to the crocodile lol

Well technically her breath and the air she breathes goes above her head, right? So technically unless a tall person with covid coughs into it, it might work...? Idk.
I've seen more bizarre "masks". Such as a man wearing a sleeping mask over his mouth. His nose was out of course because that's not what sleeping masks are made for. And of course a variety of masks being worn wrong, made out of bad materials (no, a mesh mask won't work unless you also have two layers of cotton under the mesh), scarves being worn over the mouth in all kinds of weird manners, and so on.