I had lost the arm as a child due to some sort of animal attack, but the fact that I didn't escape the animal before it severely chewed my arm such that it required amputation at the shoulder, was because in the dream I also had some sort of disorder that made me experience occasional "attacks" wherein I lost motor control and sensation in my limbs.

In any case, I was really into guns in this dream, I was in a shooting club and everything, and more specifically I was fascinated by the history of how firearms have been adapted for those with upper limb amputations and prostheses, especially the type of prosthesis that I had. I had in general made the arm a part of my identity, like I wasn't ashamed of it, I'd make jokes about it, I'd wish that the arm would work "more like in the movies" but I still managed to navigate my daily life just fine.

I guess if anything, I woke up feeling kind of freaked out by how my brain had managed to come up with such a radically different path for my life, and made me accept this path so unquestioningly, as if I had really been on it the whole time. It was kinda like Zhuangzi's famous butterfly dream in a sense, and made me wonder how much people should really stake on something so fragile and malleable as identity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Eia

Apparently he was even in fucking Body Troopers??? Wow.

So yeah, when I was in secondary school I was made to watch Sånn Er Norge, which is basically like Last Week Tonight except instead of talking about societal issues it's about how everything in society "works perfectly". It's such a profoundly masturbatory work of liberal slop that even being a liberal at the time, I was left wondering what the fuck the point of the show was, and how other people seemed to like it so much — "Are they just jerking off to the unspoken message of Norwegians' 'superior intellect' allowing this country to supposedly 'tame the beast of capitalism'? Do they just like the escapist fantasy that ours is a perfect country with no need for foreign ideas? How do my countrymen not see the hypocrisy of censuring other countries for propagandizing their youth, when this local TV show being played in this classroom is very plainly that exact thing?"

But I suppose my own circumstances pushed me to be more critical of the show than my teachers...

In any case, the name "Harald Eia" was in one ear and out the other at that time. I didn't follow along on local media much in those days, and I certainly didn't care about local celebrities. So it was only much later when I decided to go out of my way to watch more local TV shows, that the name "Harald Eia" actually started to mean something to me — indeed, Harald Eia played the owner of the isenkram store in the "Danish language" bit in Uti Vår Hage, as well as a myriad other roles in that show: Uti Vår Hage is a sketch comedy show from the 2000s, where Harald Eia, Atle Antonsen (who now hosts the Norwegian version of Taskmaster), and Bård Tufte Johansen play various characters satirizing contemporary Norwegian (or broadly Nordic) society.

And yeah, Uti Vår Hage certainly has its moments, but it also has a lot of very problematic ""comedy"". You can't exactly color me surprised that a guy who worked on a show that repeatedly makes fun of minorities ended up presenting the most masturbatory work of liberal slop that local TV can produce.

And it's like, just kind of a shame, right? 'Cause it's like if I watch or read or listen to Seppo content, I'll feel alienated from the society around me, like I'm seeing the commodification and homogenization of culture; but then I watch or read or listen to local-made Norwegian content, and I just end up thinking, "Holy hell, do I even WANT to feel like I belong with these people‽" — So I still end up feeling kind of alienated no matter what, just in a different way. Media imported from the USA and media created locally are of course under capitalism both going to take bourgeois forms — just representing different segments of the bourgeoisie. And so my predicament is really just which segment of the bourgeoisie pisses me off the least, I guess.

I suppose the true solution to my predicament would be to turn to proletarian culture in Norway. But good frickin' luck with that! I found Vømmøl Spellmannslag not too long ago, and I liked and still like their music a lot, but naturally one of the musicians in that band would go on to be an openly insufferable islamophobic reactionary dipshit. So you can't even listen to music that gladly praises Mao and Lenin, without fully escaping the seething racist bullshit in this country.

I mean, is there even a living proletarian culture in Norway‽ It feels like even my leftist friends embrace the Seppo shit far too readily.

And I suppose this is why I like translation so much: rather than needing to choose between Seppoism or home-grown reactionism, or trying to find a nonexistent local proletarian culture, I can rather enjoy localized foreign content.

I'm mostly thinking about video, but things like blogs as well, anything is good. It just feels like kind of a gap, that of all the Deaf content creators I know, their talk of audism and intersectionality never seems to progress into a more holistic critique of capitalism.

But I guess this is the same algorithms and self-selection and other factors they're subject to that make the big trans creators a bunch of liberals, too; most of the less-viewed Deaf content I've found is content from universities, or content funded by this or that charity named after this or that capitalist... And otherwise the small Deaf creators seem rather like myself as a teenager, who saw anti-autistic sentiment as a "problem of NTs" rather than a problem of capitalism, that they might see audism as a "problem of hearies".

But I'm sure there are Deaf and Coda creators who make the exact sort of content I'm interested in. I mean, there just has to be! It's just that search engines are absolutely useless at finding that type of content. Like my attempts at Internet searches only really told me that there was a textile artist in the Bauhaus called Otti Berger who was a deaf communist Jew who was killed in the Holocaust; and that there's a book called Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity and an article called Building an Organization According to Our Own Wishes: Deaf Agency in East Germany, 1945 to 1960, which might be interesting with the right expectations set. Otherwise I can confirm that Deaf communists, like, exist in the present day, which yeah, obviously, and there was a mention of "another deaf communist manifesto" on some odd Japanese and Korean language website about Deaf culture, which I don't know what that's about.

But in any case, you'd think that for such a large, clear form of marginalization with a strong cultural identity, that there would be more than three pages of search results, right? So what's causing there to be no results?

In my future fiction project I talk about the "Usonian-American split", where people basically collectively start treating those we now call "Americans" as two separate nationalities: one nationality mainly found in Europe, and another mainly found in the USA, and these nationalities are mutually antagonistic to one another.

This aspect of the future timeline was not pulled out of my butt, believe it or not. It is not an attempt at "hopium" or "good drama", it comes from me imagining if every American in Europe came to feel the way I already feel right now, since my own sense of nationality is born out of specific conditions which will possibly or even likely become progressively more common as the colonial project falters.

And yes, how I feel right now is that I see these Usonian NATO ghouls and all I can say about them is, they are not me! What, why am I supposed to act like these people are "Americans in Norway, just like me"‽ What, are we supposed to be the same nationality on the basis of a shared first language, or what‽ Well, I will not pretend that we are the same! I refuse to pretend! They are not me! They do not have the same formative experiences, the same relationships to land, culture, and labor, nothing in common with me beyond the most absolutely superficial. So I want to boo and hiss at the Seppo ghouls and tell them to fuck off, and if someone threw rocks at them, I would not feel sorry for them. I am an immigrant's child, not some asshole getting a full VIP treatment for fixing up some machines of death "made in USA".

There is no honor or dignity in the Seppos' work. I want to live in peace, unity and solidarity with all the nations of the world, but God forbid these Seppos would let me! They could never allow that! All they know is occupation and death, and if I am confused for them, even subconsciously, then this is only to the benefit of the colonial project.

Down with the Great Satan and up with brotherhood and unity, freedom for the Oceti Sakowin and Anishinaabe and Sámi, Seppos fuck outta Norway and fuck outta Ryukyu, and free Palestine.

Unfathomably based holy shit

Edit: So a TL;DR is that this was NHK's Chinese-language broadcast, and this Chinese "outsourced employee" who'd been working for NHK radio for literally half his life since the early 2000s, he'd just finished reading a report on how somebody had spray-painted the word "toilet" at the entrance to a shrine honoring a bunch of war criminals and fascist goons — and he just decides right then and there to go off-script for about 20 seconds to state among other things that the Diaoyu Islands belong to China. Like I guess that was just the last straw for him or something.

I do not have a particularly strong opinion on the Diaoyu Islands dispute, I just think that any day is a good day to undermine the "territorial integrity" of Japan. Like the entire prefecture that Japan claims the Diaoyu Islands belong to shouldn't even be part of Japan to begin with.

Not to be confused with Deluge (Poland-Lithuania).

The Deluge of Elephants, also known as simply the Deluge, was the largest refugee crisis in human history. It resulted in a major economic crisis and health crisis in much of Europe as an estimated 72 million Usonians fleeing the Second US Civil War migrated to the region in the five-year period between 2037 and 2042, triggering multiple disease outbreaks that together killed approximately 4 million people. The name of the Deluge of Elephants is in reference to the "White Elephant Brigade", a derogatory term for the Usonian migrants, associated with European tabloids' assertion that the United States of America in the midst of its second civil war was also waging an economic war against Europe by sending refugees to the region as white elephants — "possessions which are difficult to dispose of, and whose cost of upkeep greatly outweighs their value".

Europeans' attitudes towards the Usonian refugees was at the beginning of the crisis known to be largely highly positive, even with the resulting material strain. However, attitudes towards the refugees soured as the crisis deepened, famously resulting in the trend of "Laser Troopers" who would assemble in large numbers to shine illicit laser pointers into the cockpits of airplanes carrying Usonian refugees. On the other hand, though the term "oh-ro" today has more positive connotations, it was originally used to mock Europeans seen as overly sympathetic to the Usonian refugees. The term "oh-ro", or "to sing oh-ro", was specifically originally in reference to the Dublin "Deaf Ears" incident of 2038, where a flash mob performed the Irish folk song "Óró! 'Sé do bheatha 'bhaile" to welcome a group of Usonian refugees at Dublin Airport who had, unbeknownst to the mob, been deafened by an uncontrolled decompression incident mid-flight.

The first amclub was founded at Saint-Louis Middle School in Liège in 2041 in response to widespread bullying of Usonian/American students; this is considered to be the recognized beginning of the Usonian-American split. Even today, Americans are still commonly distinguished by their relationship to the Deluge of Elephants: Americans whose families have continuously lived in Europe since prior to the Deluge are today known as Old Dogs, and the descendants of the Deluge-era refugees are known as the New Litter.

The Deluge of Elephants, its origins, and its impact are of much interest to scholars. Consensus holds that the bourgeois factions of the Second US Civil War intended for the relocation of settlers to Europe among other regions to be a temporary measure, such that they could return to settler life postbellum. The ultimate failure of this plan is attributed to the state of class conflict in Europe and the USA at the time, and to contradictory interests and changing dynamics within the bourgeoisie of either region. The exact details of this analysis remain hotly debated, however.

Scholars take particular interest in how the crisis was presented by liberal political parties and media in Europe, who were criticized for xenophobic statements, scapegoating, and opportunistically co-opting and distorting the language and rhetoric of leftists during the crisis. Scholars also take particular interest in how the crisis was exacerbated by capitalism, including government policies criticized as irresponsible or as wealth transfers to the bourgeoisie; and scholars continue to debate what the exact motives of the European and Usonian bourgeoisie were during the crisis, including the degree to which the crisis was engineered versus accidental.

The Deluge of Elephants and the resulting Usonian-American split resulted in a high level of class consciousness among Americans. This is widely considered to be a major part of the prelude to both the Locotian Revolution and the Socialist Revolution in Europe.