Right, and Irish-Americans have more knowledge and understanding about Irish-American culture.

The other poster was making it seem like American culture is homogenous or like descendants of immigrants can’t still retain distinct cultural traditions and identities outside of generic American. Whether or not those traditions are the same as the original country of origin is immaterial. Nobody is claiming that it is.

What I don’t understand is why Americans portray themselves as Dutch when coming to the Netherlands.

Do they, though? Are there really that many Americans who think or try to pretend they are actually Dutch, instead of Americans who are have Dutch ancestry?

It honestly sounds like they are just trying to connect by sharing a commonality and something that is (probably) important to them in some way. It’s an expression of appreciation. Even if the cultural traditions carried on in the US are different than in the modern-day country–so what? It doesnt make those cultural traditions less important to the people who celebrate them. I fail to understand what is wrong with acknowledging or appreciating where those traditions originated.

Is it just a matter of semantics and an objection to the label itself “(whatever nationality)-American”?

The level of authority that you’re speaking with about another country’s culture while clearly only having a surface-level understanding is actually wild. Maybe accept that the Americans who are telling you otherwise have more knowledge and understanding of their own culture.

Yes, that reminds me of when Florida(?) started requiring drug testing for welfare recipients and ended up spending more on the tests than whatever they saved uncovering fraud.

Very different these days. The beauty of the status bubbles and messengers of past is that you would catch each other when you both had time and desire to chat and then you’d have a back and forth conversation until one of you disengaged. You also almost never have people sending offline messages. It was more akin to an in-person interaction where you’re either visibly there and someone can approach and talk to you in real time or you aren’t.

Texting is generally of a blend between real-time messenging (but you can’t tell if they’re available) and short form email where everyone interacts differently and has their own ideas about “proper” etiquette. It’s probably somewhat cultural but in my experience, people just use messaging apps in the exact same way as they would text, so status bubbles don’t mean much.

I do this to my mom as a way to be very low-contact with her. It’s a huge relief.

I used to love texting when it was only a handful of friends but these days I hate the pressure of it being ever-present in my pocket and the social expectation to answer in a relatively timely manner. (This has led me to being a horrible texter, sorry everyone.)

I miss the old days of AOL instant messenger. Your online status did all the heavy lifting to communicate when you had some free time and felt like chatting.

Tony Hawk

My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me 😭

I want it sooo bad.

This is a complicated topic for me. I’m 35 so my experience is obviously different than today, but I self-harmed from age 12 into my 20s. Finding community and understanding in self-harm & mental illness-focused communities was transformative for me, especially in my younger teens. Many days/months/years this community felt like the only reason I was still hanging on.

Obviously I am not in favor of the “encouragement” of self-harm, but I also wonder how much nuance is applied when categorizing content as such. For example, is someone who posts about how badly they want to self-harm “encouraging” this? Or are they just seeking support? Idk. I have no answers. I just think about how even bleaker my teens would have felt had I not found my pockets of community on the early internet. On the other hand, sometimes I do wonder if we subconsciously egged each other on. Perhaps the trajectory of my mental health journey would have been different had I not found them. That’s not something I can ever be sure about, but I think given my home life and all the things I was going through already, if anything, my mental illness might have just manifested itself in a different way, like through substance abuse issues or an eating disorder or something. (And to be clear, I was hurting myself before I found the community, so it might have just been business as usual.) Like I said, I don’t have any answers, it just feels more nuanced to me, as someone who has lived some version of this.

It was being auctioned for the victims but there was also the real risk that a supporter would win who would let him he continue on business as usual. So definitely money well spent.

One thing the headlines aren’t mentioning is that the families actually even helped fund a portion of the Onion’s bid.

In order to make the bid work, a lawyer representing the families told CNN that the families “agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of the Onion’s bid, enabling its success”.