Hello there!
Welcome to our daily scheduled post, the Daily Slow Chat.
If you want to just chat about your day, if you have questions for the moderators (please mark these [Mod] so we can find them), or if you just want talk about oatmeal then this is the thread for you!
Enjoying the small talk? We have a Discord server too! We'd love to have more of you over there. Do both of us a favour and use this link to join the fun.
The mod-team wishes you a nice day!
4 comments
Very rainy in Palermo during the night, though it’s stopped now.Temperature is way down too,only 11° at 7am.
I noticed yesterday that some shops already have Christmas lights and decorations up, which is early for here! The tradition is no decorations or trees before December 8th.
How’s it looking where you live? Is everything already covered in lights etc?
A few days ago there was a thread on AskTheWorld about what the major news stories were in each country.
For most countries it was very predictable. The US has all its Trump and Epstein stuff. The rest of the developed world has the political issues you’d expect from liberal democracies in the developed world. The developing world has all the political issues you’d expect from developing countries that deal with poverty and corruption. Etc.
And then there’s Japan. What’s going on in Japan, you may ask?
Well…
…in what appears to be some kind of real-life Alfred Hitchcock-style spinoff of Godzilla vs Kong, the bears have all decided they’re hungry, and they’re coming out of the mountains to take over the country and kill everyone.
[Yes, really](https://share.google/OpkoPKA1fk04FdCEg)
Speaking about Christmas…I read this morning that Angelina Jolie once bought a waterfall in California as a Christmas present for Brad Pitt.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever bought or received as a gift?
A really weird Falun Gong person wanted to speak to my parents. They’re a new religious movement that took off in the 1990s in China eventually coming to blows with the Chinese government, and many of its followers got exiled. I think they seek to overthrow the Chinese government now, and they seem to be making a lot of propaganda against it as part of that effort. She first asked if I was Chinese (uhh why, but yes and no), and then proceeded to go to my parents to rant about putting up a poster and how bad the CCP was. I mean I don’t disagree they can be quite repressive, but I really doubt they can be overthrown anytime soon. And I doubt your efforts would matter if they did, so why don’t you do something more productive.
The Cuban, Vietnamese, KMT (the survivors of Chiang Kai Shek’s army after the Chinese Civil war) diasporas used to lobby the US government to invade or take a hard line against the communist governments they fled from, but at least the Vietnamese and KMT ones seem to have dropped the most hardline attitudes over time. The younger Cubans I’ve heard don’t care as much, but there still seems to be quite the opposition to normalizing relations with Cuba. I hope the Falun Gong will come to terms with that one day, as I don’t think their goals are realistic. That said overthrowing Cuba’s government is very realistic, and I wonder if that’s why the hardline attitudes haven’t dropped.