Just read a perfectly fine fanfiction that took place in Germany but something that stood out to me was a chapter where the characters walk across a field and is approached by the farmer yelling at them to get off his land.

I’ve come across this plot point a few times and I feel like it’s worth telling writers that most of Europe has some version of Right To Roam. The laws aren’t the same in every country but generally you’re allowed to walk and rest on private property like fields and forests so long as you don’t destroy anything or leave trash, but not gardens or fenced in areas. The owner of the land might put up a sign asking you to follow certain guidelines like no horses or keeping your dog on a leash but but there’s no real repercussions to not following the rules besides the owner eventually fencing the area off so people can’t enjoy it anymore.

I’ve personally walked around on a field while the farmer was harvesting potatoes with his big ass machine and collected the leftovers while my dog was trotting calmly besides me and he looked straight at me and didn’t care one bit because Denmark also has an old tradition of letting people collect what’s left as a form of charity (for my fellow Danes, that’s what “rev vi marken let, det er gammel ret, fuglen og den fattige skal også være mæt” means in the song Marken Er Mejet) This is just a tradition and not a law however so it depends on the farmer.

The very north of Europe like Norway and Sweden even give people the right to put up tents and camp on other people’s private land (except gardens and such). Again, the laws vary from country to country but as a rule of thumb you have more right to roam the further north you go and less the further south but if you want to write in a specific country look up the laws there.

#reblog #europe #huh #i dont think i have a clear idea of this around here #everything is a bit of a mess #like yeah the land around the lake is private owned and also its a park and you can walk through there #idk

lilietsblog reblogged

the-goblin-cat

homunculus-argument

If you're writing a setting that's "modern fantasy", in the sense that it's like you took one of those Medieval Fantasy worlds and then society progressed to the point where it's the 2020s, and you want to throw in a fantasy conterpart culture that's basically Europe, you're 100% allowed to just make the places a janky mashup of the medieval and modern era. That's legit just what Europe looks like. You'll see a fucking castle on one side of the street, a glass panel skyscraper in the other side, and walking in the middle is a dude who looks like a fucking viking, talking on a smartphone, with a tattoo of the stone age symbol of the Spiral Adder of the Underworld tattooed on one shoulder and Hatsune Miku on the other.

My therapist's office is located on a street that was built in the 1300s and Google Maps and a modern bicycle are fucking powerless against the cobblestone chaos that was built to be manageable on foot and horse carriage. Last summer one of the restaurants there caught fire, but the fire didn't spread very far, partially because of the building regulations that were set in place the last time the city burned in 1760. There's just a thin veneer modern tech on top of 1800s stuff clumsily constructed on top of medieval stuff that's built on the foundations of something earlier and the more you look the more you realise that if you looked at all of it for long enough, it's just turtles all the way down.

And sometimes you see a guy walking down the street that you're pretty sure is straight-up 50% neanderthal and the other half is a Danish fur trader from 1500s who found a wife in a foreign port town and stayed.

#reblog #<3 #europe

lilietsblog reblogged

homunculus-argument

Anonymous asked:

I was born and raised American, but with everything that's happened over the past few years I've been considering moving to another country. but I don't know if this is just "the grass is greener". Not sure if this really fits with your blog, but as someone from Europe what's your attitude towards living in the US?

homunculus-argument answered:

I've visited there a handful of times and most of my thoughts are "damn bitch, y'all really live like this?" People in Finland like to complain about the climate, the taxes, and how stingy the welfare systems are (if you currently rely on them) or how costly they are (if you're currently not relying on them), but honestly most of the time that's because people are used to having it so good, or don't really have a perspective of how bad everyone would be doing without the infrastructure that everything runs on.

Sure, nowhere is perfect, and there's always room for improvement, but honestly the people I've met in the US only really seem to think that their system is good because they've never been anywhere else and don't know any better.

Mostly it's stuff that you'd never think about if you hadn't been to both places, like being able to trust that tap water is drinkable or that you can safely walk/bike to wherever you need to go. The US really doesn't have the kind of ability to just hang out in public places, just walking to the town and sitting on benches. Having public parks and libraries isn't really the same if you can't just walk there, and you genuinely need a car to go anywhere.

I moan and lament a lot about how the winters here are hard to endure - at the darkest time of the year the sun rises at 9 and sets before 5 pm - but I wouldn't move from here just because of that, mainly because of how reliably everything is structured here. Sure, it's all run with funds from relatively high taxes, but that is a self-feeding loop on its own. The tax-paying workforce isn't a disposable resource that's wrung dry once and tossed out when it's broken, but even when you're just another cog in the machine, you're one that's maintained, not replaced if broken.

I had a lot of breakdowns when I was younger, largely due to depression and other mental issues I had due to the undiagnosed ADHD. When I started breaking down at work in my old factory job, they couldn't just fire me on the spot because of the workers' union fought tooth and nail to make sure that you can't throw people out for getting sick, and mental illness is treated no different from other health issues. I was allowed to take two years off work in order to study into a career I thought would fit me better. That didn't turn out well either, but I was still allowed to bounce back and forth between odd jobs, sick leave, and studying - all on government pensions during the spots when I wasn't working a wage - until I found the right diagnosis, the right medications, and the right job.

It's not a hyperbole to say that I owe my life to the ample and studry social welfare systems that Finland has in place. Sure, you're just another brick in the wall, a cog in the machine, but if you keep breaking down, it takes a long time until they completely give up on you if you can somehow make them believe that you're trying, because it's cheaper for the tax system to figure out how to make you fit into the machine than just toss you out. A human being is an expensive investment and if getting you to the right job, education, diagnosis, medication or even arranged housing is what it takes to get your ass back into the workforce, they'll at least try.

I'm perfectly happy to pay the taxes here to fund the system that helped me onto my feet when I was in no condition to function, and to support the people who never do recover, find their place, or be able to support themselves on their own. And I can live with the peace of mind that even if I fall apart again, that safety net is still there. It's brutal, pragmatic, and regards your health and welfare as a means to an end - to get you working and paying taxes again - but they still do prioritise your welfare. Cogs are cheaper to maintain than replace.

adelphicoracle

Oh this is tearing up my heart inside my chest. Just imagining living in a place where I was believed to have inherent value, even if it’s only as a potential worker. Goddamn. We USians are seen as inefficient profit centers for our corporate owners: easily discarded, fungible, not worth a second thought if we even begin to malfunction. They aggressively weed out the old, the sick, the mentally “imperfect”, and the discontented, throw us aside without hesitation.

I think it's useful to frame it as "what's an issue here and it's not an issue there". As in "which thing is part of the daily worries of someone living in X that would surprise someone living in Y because they never have known anyone who had to worry about that".

I never lived in the US, but I've been working for a US company for the last 8 years, so I have made good friends and have been over there plenty of times and I have somewhat of a concept of the difference. For example:

Things that are not a thing in (western) europe

Healthcare: The obvious one. But yeah, the reality is that ... you just don't think about it, you need treatment, you get it. For "free" (yadda yadda taxes)
Retirement: You don't really have to plan if you don't want. You work until ... 62-70 (depending on the country) and then you retire and start getting a monthly pay from the state.
Education: It doesn't really care much if you go to this or that school, this or that university... things are pretty standardized. Also, University prices vary a lot by EU country, but in the worst case scenario we are talking about a few thousands per year, the idea of "technical debt" doesn't exist.
Work culture: Yeah, you are mandated by law to have between 30 and 40 (depending on the country) days off per year. It's a VERY big deal if you don't get them, so your employer will push you to do so. Yeah, you can't work more than 8 hours per day and if you do your employer may get in trouble (this varies a lot by country and sector... germany? yeah, not even a minute extra. Spain? weeeell... depending on your job it may be expected for you to discreetly stay an extra hour per day, but don't tell anyone).
Police brutality: Oh, it exists. And it's a huge problem. But it's ... more directed and less brutal. Police in Europe rarely kill people. Beat some people for not particular reason? sure. But a policeman killing someone is a huge deal that: In spain, 15 people were killed by the police in 2022, in Germany, 3, in the UK, also 3. In the US? 1176. UK+Germany+Spain have more than half the population of the US.
General weapon-related violence. Enough said.

Things that are not a thing in the US (I think)

Taxes. Well, this is not exactly right: If you are in a low-wage employment, you basically end paying about the same taxes in both places, but if you are a high-earner, in Europe your personal taxes may get close to 40%, while in the US easily will be 10 or 15% lower.
Wages: Similar situation. The wage spread is much lower in the EU: A doctor (or a computer engineer) may earn 4 or 5x what a MacDonalds server earn per month. You are not going to get rich by working in Europe, even if you get a great job (a macdonalds server earns €1200 per month before taxes in Spain, and the average wage for a doctor is around €3000 if I'm not wrong)
Housing: We europeans usually live in places that your average USian would consider the size of a wardrove. It's what it is. 1000 square feet houses? That's rich, actually rich people housing here.
Prices: Generally speaking, things are more expensive (relative to the local currency and salary averages). Housing? way more expensive in europe even if the sizes are much smaller. Using a car? massively more expensive in europe. Technology? usually more expensive in.. blahblah. Food, like raw ingredients, fruit, etc, on the other side, is much much cheaper in the EU than in the US.

If I can think of more stuff for adding to any of the sides, I'll add it in a future reblog.

#reblog #interesting!!!#europe #eu #european union #us #usa #united states of america #culture clash

lilietsblog reblogged

stirringwinds

Anonymous asked:

The british conflict with the irish was not racially motivated. It couldn't be owing to the fact irish people are white.

stirringwinds answered:

ok i’m admittedly getting a bit tired of reiterating this.

1. racism in europe and globally, is not restricted to discrimination based on the colourist categories that exist in the US. here’s what the UN says:

2. this makes plenty of sense because racism based on ethnicity is a big big thing not just in europe but in asia, the middle-east etc. race is an inherently fluid concept to begin with, so is whiteness. whiteness is marred by all sorts of ethnic faultlines in europe till today and does not exist the exact same way it does in the US. i mean, in the US so many european ethnic groups weren’t considered properly white in the past (greeks, irish etc) but they are today. which just goes further to prove that race categories are fluid.

3. people have identified with being Irish or being English (the main group with power in the UK) far longer than being “”white”” (a much more recent idea) so that still continued to matter even after the idea of whiteness was introduced to europe. so like you can’t project your idea of whiteness to say that the Irish vs English thing can’t be racism because they’re both white. i mean we literally had ridiculous things where the english tried to argue the irish were Actually Africans. even earlier, the Pope during the Norman era said the Irish were savages and barbarians. by modern US standards, the pope, the normans and the irish are surely all “white”.

4. so basically, you saying it’s not racism cos you see them both as white makes as much sense as calling the historical Chinese oppression of non-Han groups like minorities “not racism” cos to westerners, we’re all East Asian. yes, i see europeans as all “white” in comparison to myself cos i’m chinese. BUT i recognise that how i see them does not explain how they see themselves and therefore the dichotomies of oppression in europe. i mean to my parents a lot of light-skinned jewish ppl are also “white” but the european history of antisemitism clearly shows they were set apart. the conflict with the irish is of course not the exact same as racism agst ppl from the british commonwealth in terms of types of experiences or how it operates. but it is still racism. just more about ethnicity rather than colour. and both these types of racism exist in europe.

#reblog #oh my god will the people learn one day #us is not the entire world #news fucking flash #europe #racism #geography

lilietsblog

Non-US imperialism

I keep seeing stirringwind post about China - the empire that gets seen as just a single state that suffers from imperialism itself (not that it really never did, historically)... and I see that this is the same as Russia. The two giants of Eurasia that even border on each other - the empires that were overland, not overseas, and instead of falling apart bonded into a single whole. Russian language and culture is Slavic - this is Eastern Europe, this is just north and a little bit east from Ukraine. Hell, Kiev, our capital, gets called "the mother of the Russian cities" (as it was one branch of Kiev princes that went north and founded cities that eventually became Moskovia and then Russia). Meanwhile, look at the size of Russia. It gets basically the northern third or Asia - and the countries between China and the Kaspian sea that are now independent used to be a part of Soviet Union, the empire of Russian supremacy. (Trust me, it was. With a single mandatory universal language, assimilation, discrimination and all the fun stuff. It was like that even to other Slavic cultures like Ukrainian, the non-Slavs got it much worse. And these days migrants from southern neighbours of Russia - from Ukraine to Kazakhstan - get the "came to steal our jobs" treatment, complete with profiling of non-Slavs and police violence) Russia is seen as a whole country these days, at least within the borders it got after USSR fell apart. But those borders are not ethnic borders like those of the European countries, those are the borders of a successful empire. And Russian doesn't stop at them either, as violence against Georgia and now Ukraine is telling us. ... I also wanted to say a couple of words about the concept of "white guilt". I can barely find words to describe just HOW bullshit it is. 1) It lumps all "white" people together. That means, say, Ukrainians, who haven't had their own state for longer than a couple of decades since about the 12th century, are somehow complicit in atrocities committed by the British empire... or would that be by the Russian empire, as one closer and more relevant to us? Even though those atrocities were committed against us? This is erasure of all non-British "white" cultures; maybe non-Western-European, as France, Spain and Portugal at least took part in the fun too. (Although Hispanic gets defined as non-white too, somehow?) But what about everybody else? What about us? What about the Balcan countries, caught between Turks and Austro-Hungarian empire, over time equally likely to face religion-based prosecution for Islam and Christianity? 2) It centers everything on whiteness again. It's not about the pain of the oppressed, no, it's about the feelings of the oppressors. It's the concept that gives oppressors a word in the discussion again. It turns the dynamics around up to the "You are making me feel guiiiiiilty! Whaaaaa!" - classic abusive tactic, by the way: the abusee is making the abuser feel bad by pointing out bad things the abuser did to them. 3) It reeks horribly of "white man's burden". No, really, it's not about you. Chill. The point is not to exert a more benevolent and apologetic influence, the point is to retract any influence at all. Treat other nations as equals, not as poor orphaned children that need your care. (This, by the way, is exactly the ideology Russia pushes to justify its meddling in Ukrainian affairs. Slavic brothers! Poor unfortunate souls who need Big Brother Russia (yes literally, they use this phrasing) to fix all their problems! I got this from my Russian friend in early spring this year when the whole shit just started, and I keep getting it in the form of "Aw, you are just deceived by your evil government! We'll come and take care of you!" This is pure, undiluted, imperialism.)

#imperialism #culture clash #europe #geography #history #china #russia #white guilt #white man's burden

lilietsblog reblogged

stirringwinds

Anonymous asked:

I think you said the other day that Europe hasn't had a war with it's self since WW2 but I was just thinking yesterday during the 90's the UK was actually at war with Ireland (kind of), and you don't hear anything about it. In 1996 for example Manchester was bombed beyond recognition.

stirringwinds answered:

Oh by that I guess I mean an intra-European war between two different states, though the Troubles were certainly very serious. It is indeed a bit fuzzy because while it starts as basically an intra state conflict, it did spill over from Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic itself. The post WW2 era was comparatively speaking more peaceful for Western Europe compared to the centuries of wars and extremely widespread Catholic-Protestant violence during the Reformation. European faultlines still exist, (like between the English and Irish, the Catholic/Protestant dimension there etc) but I’d say the Cold War did kind of help to cool down rivalries between European countries by demanding Western Europe band together. Though of course now EU integration is under strain again.

Hmmm I wonder how much others learned about it? I did learn about it in school myself and it does reveal how Western Europe isn’t a total oasis of wealth and prosperity. Certainly there are a lot of internal issues within various European countries like the Catalan secessionists in Spain too.

lilietsblog

but what about the Balcans the Balcan countries had a lot of wars among themselves since WW2 as far as I remember

#history #europe #wars #)=#also do russian and ukraine count as europe because there's war here now #reblog

lilietsblog reblogged

theothin

wondersmith-and-sons

sometimes tumblr’s US-centric social justice makes me so fucking frustrated. Right now sweden’s third biggest party are literally neo-nazis and our elections couldn’t even get onto trending tags today, goddamit.

Okay, so the post is gaining notes and people are confused, so to explain what the hell is going on:

Swedish elections held were on last Sunday, 14th September. We’ve had a right-leaning government the past eight years and after this there will be a change of power. The new party, Socialdemocrats (S) gained a total of 31% percent. The old party, Moderaterna (M) gained 21%.

Sverigedemokraterna (SD) gained a total of 12.9%. Their policy is racist, Islamophobic, anti-immigration, anti-refugee, anti-diversity, anti-LGBT+, and anti-feminist. Basically, they tick every box on the douchebag lottery.

If you’re here to argue that they’re ~not actually~ Nazis: 1) Fuck you. 2) Fuck the horse the you rode in on. 3) I hope you get stepped on by a moose, you ignorant asswipe.

they literally started as neo nazis. They have used a Neo-Nazi movement as campaign slogans,
party members have assaulted immigrants with iron pipes (tw for racialised violence),
worn Nazi symbols
supported and helped build Neo-Nazi group SvP.

There’s probably more, but I don’t have links on hand.

They’ve been having rallies and demonstrations all over Sweden, and people have shown up just to turn their back on them and protest (this post explains it better).

In the 2010 elections, SD were pretty much considered no better than neo-Nazis and only got 5.7% votes - it put them in 6th place and was just enough to get them into parliament. In the elections before that, they got about 2.9%. In the past four years, they’ve grown exponentially in Sweden.

They’ve also run extremely extensive PR campaigns, appealing to the youth, kicking out members “exposed” of being racist, (note: these members often end up in SvP) and picking up buzzwords from the Socialdemocrats’ ideology.

29% of votes they gained this year were from swing voters who previously voted M, and the biggest gain have been in the south, in small towns and the countryside:

This is not something that’s just going on in Sweden. Europe has seen an influx of extreme-right parties over the last decade or so, often thinly disguised as a party that puts ‘traditional values’ and ‘national interest’ first.

In Greece and Hungary they’ve already been in power. In Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Finland France and UK, extreme-right-wing parties have been voted into the EU.

Because here’s the thing: we’ve forgotten what it looks like. We’ve gotten to the point where we’ve turned Nazism into a cartoonish lampoon of goose-stepping, uniforms and moral lessons that “we’ll never be like them~”, ignoring the fact nationalism is not as cut-and-dry two ends of an extreme but exists on a scale.

People have been apologising for SD’s actions for a while now because they’re not considered “extremist enough” to be neo-Nazis, because they don’t share the same beliefs, because they’ve “publicly denounced” SvP.

But the same people still get hurt. Still SD has the institutional and systematic power and privilege to oppress, degrade and humiliate people of colour, which they already have done. Stop making excuses for them. Stop making leeways for right-wing-extremists because that is how they gain tract.

Please spread this.

#reblog #sweden #europe #neo-nazis #neo-nazi #right wing