The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Half seriously, what if the election proves to be a "mandate" for things that truly disgust you?

Part of me wants to move to Portland, OR.
Vermont is where my family place is and it's pretty nice.
My wife and kids recently got their German citizenship (oh, the irony), so the EU is certainly in the mix.
A few years ago Chile looked really good, but OMG it's disintegrating.
If Mexico survives the pandemic...no, forget Mexico.

Is Canada still an option? Erin's been brushing up on her French in DuoLingo to help us earn a few more points on their "qualifying for emigration" scale. This is a question that we're seriously thinking about though. Most realistic actual place that we would move to right now barring any unforeseen upheaval would be Bend, OR where parents and sister are. But I'm not sure about moving to Oregon if there are going to be caravans of heavily armed white supremacists openly roving the state.

I tried to move to Canada in 2011 - not due to problems with the administration at that time, but due to immigration issues. We were not considered legally married in the US, so my husband’s status was at risk. We figured the safest way to remain in North America would be to move to Canada, where our marriage was recognized, and I would be able to keep my job, and my husband would be able to seek employment, and it would be a mere 3-hour drive to family and friends in Seattle.

Our attempt to obtain any kind of legal status in Canada was extremely difficult. We paid several thousand dollars in attorney fees and application fees. I had to take both an English exam and a French exam (I bailed out of the French exam; turns out 3 years of high school French classes wasn’t enough for me to even be able to read the website well enough to register for the test). Oddly, the application paperwork was based on the assumption that you were already in Canada and trying to stay there, instead of living outside of Canada and trying to move there.

Our first application was over 200 pages long. It was rejected because our attorneys submitted a photocopy of a page that was supposed to be an original document. Shortly afterwards there was a long moratorium on any applications, and then on June 26, 2013 the Supreme Court determined that bans on same sex marriage violated the US Constitution so we didn't need to relocate to Canada anymore. Thank you Joe Biden for your vocal support of gay marriage earlier than anyone in the executive branch was willing to do so. That dude should be President.

As for the general notion of moving away when someone terrible gets elected, I can’t help but think of a verse from Andrew Jackson Jihad’s song “Lady Liberty”:

Give me your tired, give me your tired, give me your poor
When our government acts like this, I don't wanna live here anymore
Sure I could be a pussy and move to Portland or New York
Or I could stay and change the place where I was born

Of course it’s easy for me to tout that lyric: the place I was born is a very blue state, and when I relocated I moved to an even bluer state. And I think YOLO also applies to general satisfaction, so I can’t fault people for relocating to places with fewer confederate flags, fewer Westboro Baptists and fewer QAnon imbeciles.

I wouldn't leave. That would just make the diversity of viewpoints where I live even lower. Most of my family lives in the southeastern US and I like being near them. I'm also an avid forager and have spent the past 5 years learning as many of the local wild plants and mushrooms as possible and moving far away would mean I'd have to start over. I've also made a point to try and get more involved in my local community and I don't want to lose my connections. Finally, while my field is neat, I have a pretty sweet job where I am and don't want to half to worry about it.

I have no persecution related reasons to flee. The southeast is my home and I'm not leaving, for all its flaws.

We originally visited Europe for the first time in 2013, when I was accepted to speak at an art conference in Scotland. We flew to Germany from the UK and then hired a car to drive through Germany, Austria, Italy and France. Driving through Germany in particular was a real wake up call. There were solar and wind farms everywhere, and as an Australian I felt so ashamed in comparison to the level of progress back home in a country that gets more sunlight than it knows what to do with. There was also an Australian General Election while we were in Frankfurt, where the conservative right wing party was elected on the back of repealing Labor’s carbon tax. We started making general plans then to move.

Originally we had flights to the UK, as Toshiro has dual citizenship through his dad who was born there. Then Brexit happened and we sat down and looked at our options. We decided to move to Ireland because the politics of the country were becoming more progressive, they’d started to recover well from the GFC, and the primary language is English. Toshiro is here as an EU citizen (still, as we moved before the UK thing became an issue) and I’m on an EU Stamp-4 Family Member Visa. It took 10 months to come through where I wasn’t officially allowed to work, but it was free as the spouse of an EU-citizen (although, oddly, if I was married to an Irish person I would’ve had to pay €400 or something) and it gives me the broadest rights. The plan is to apply for my Irish citizenship in 2023 then potentially retire elsewhere in mainland Europe, most likely France.

I’ma stay here and fight. If shitbag wins you should all visit here too so we can stand outside his rental house and flip him off.

Feel free to fight for DC Statehood in your local area. What would 2 more Democrat Senators mean? Well for me it would mean my federal taxes are backed by representation in Congress...

We absolutely plan on visiting the USA once that dickhead is no longer in charge and travel is a thing again. It’s our number 1 prerequisite.

I'm staying. It would be them that suck, why should I leave?

It's too much for me to type on this funny-phone, but where we are and where we are headed, is not good. I'm glad I live in the best state in the union (sorry other 49, DC, PR, etc) but there's no shortage of nitwits here either. But man. Shit is fucking whacked.

At the thought of fleeing, though, my first thought was Canada. Maybe French Polynesia is more in order. Cue C-Ray to quell that idea, most likely.

Paco Del Stinko wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 01, 2020 6:42 pm

. Maybe French Polynesia is more in order. Cue C-Ray to quell that idea, most likely.

Yep. Avoid those nuclear testing merde-tetes. Come to Kiribati with me. We will have to deal with sea level rise - but there is cool ukule music.

jb wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 01, 2020 1:45 pm

I’ma stay here and fight. If shitbag wins you should all visit here too so we can stand outside his rental house and flip him off.

Why? The place is fucked.

Why not just go somewhere sensible?

Somewhere where carrying guns around isn’t a normal thing.

Caravan Ray wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 02, 2020 5:14 am

jb wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 01, 2020 1:45 pm

I’ma stay here and fight. If shitbag wins you should all visit here too so we can stand outside his rental house and flip him off.

Why? The place is fucked.

Why not just go somewhere sensible?

Somewhere where carrying guns around isn’t a normal thing.

What’s the deal? You’ve been here a bunch of times and we’ve hung out. I still have the hat you gave me in Santa Cruz. You know those news reports are a small fraction of what it’s like here, just as every shoe in Australia doesn’t have a redback spider in it. Are you just trolling?

crumpart wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 01, 2020 2:29 pm

We absolutely plan on visiting the USA once that dickhead is no longer in charge and travel is a thing again. It’s our number 1 prerequisite.

Nuh. Cycling in Tuscany next, then Iceland. Unless it is SongFight related - there really is no reason to visit the US. Sadly -it has come to this.

jb wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 02, 2020 5:52 am

Caravan Ray wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 02, 2020 5:14 am

jb wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 01, 2020 1:45 pm

I’ma stay here and fight. If shitbag wins you should all visit here too so we can stand outside his rental house and flip him off.

Why? The place is fucked.

Why not just go somewhere sensible?

Somewhere where carrying guns around isn’t a normal thing.

What’s the deal? You’ve been here a bunch of times and we’ve hung out. I still have the hat you gave me in Santa Cruz. You know those news reports are a small fraction of what it’s like here, just as every shoe in Australia doesn’t have a redback spider in it. Are you just trolling?

Errr.. you are the one suggesting staying and fighting if a shit bag wins.

When you get to those sort of declarations - you are in shithole country.

Whatever. Have fun in Tuscany.

One of the great things about not living in Australia anymore is it's much easier to visit more than one country in a fairly small timeframe. This time last year I was in Portugal. It was great. Our next holiday (one day, you know) will probably be to Greece. It'll only take seven hours to fly from Ireland to New York! Seven hours; that's a trifle! Planning any kind of trip from Australia to almost any other country is a huge investment of both time and money, and not something I have to really worry about anymore. On that note, part of the reason we want to eventually live on mainland Europe is that we'll be able to visit a lot of vastly different places without getting on a plane at all.

Honestly, mid Missouri is pretty darn rural and red as a whole, but CoMo is a population over 150K with three colleges and is pretty darn blue. It's a nice balance. I'm never happy but I'm never completely batshit pissed off, either.

I really like parts of Texas. My wife likes Tennessee. If things go crazy I still think here's better than most places.

Seriously Caravan -- you make it sound like the entirety of the US is a completely degenerate hellhole filled with a bunch of gun-toting rednecks that'll shoot you in the face if you dare criticize god emperor Trump. I live in a relatively small town in Georgia and yeah, sure, lots of people *own* guns, but the vast majority of the population doesn't open carry or even concealed carry for that matter. And yeah, there's some weird political opinions here, a lot of which I suspect have to do with the fact that somehow the Republican party managed to integrate itself heavily into evangelical christianity for some reason... but I mean geez, it's really not that bad. You know what most of our gun owners do? Collect them. Or sometimes go down to the gun range and periodically waste their money by firing bullets at targets. But it's not really even a waste of money if they're having fun. It's not my thing, but geez.

I have only known a small number of people who have even been shot. Of those, most were by themselves because they were committing suicide. One good friend of mine was shot in malice as part of a drunken argument where he stupidly confronted a domestic abuser who he knew to be carrying. That's about the extent of the "rampant gun violence". Yes, we have a higher incidence of mass casualty shootings here than in your beloved country, but again -- when you consider the massive size of the US, the vast, vast majority of the nation is unaffected by those. Are they awful yes? Am I downplaying them? Not intentionally.

Does the US have problems? Oh, absolutely. Our healthcare system is dogshit. There's no denying that. Our news media is heavily propagandized, with one major outlet (Fox) essentially a mouthpiece for Republican propaganda and another (CNN) being essentially a mouthpiece for Democratic propaganda. I will also thank Australia for birthing Rupert Murdoch, who came from your completely flawless nation to corrupt ours. Our nation's foreign policy? Ha, "let's put bases everywhere, claim to be a vessel of freedom and independence, and leave behind chaos in our wake as we pretty much screw everyone over for our share of national resources". There's an extreme level of dysfunction to our collective ideology.

But does that mean that there's absolutely nothing of value here and that the entire place is just horrible horribleness? Hell no.

Anyway, I have nothing against Australia or Australians (or you for that matter), but since you won't visit ours because of over-exaggerated concerns, I will sarcastically say I don't want to visit yours because I'm afraid a gum tree branch will fall on my head and then I'll burn to death in a bushfire.

somehow the Republican party managed to integrate itself heavily into evangelical christianity for some reason

It's more like the other way around from some little that I have read about this recently.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... he-family/
https://www.netflix.com/title/80063867
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fello ... anization)

Some "genius" decided to "flip the script" on Christianity and say it's really about protecting the _strong_ not the _weak_. These folks have been working for nearly 100 years to make America into an Evangelical Christian fascist authoritarian state in order to "save the world". "Imagine what someone like Hitler could have done if he'd been working for Jesus?" is the general idea.

sleepysilverdoor wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 02, 2020 2:28 pm

the US is a completely degenerate hellhole filled with a bunch of gun-toting rednecks that'll shoot you in the face if you dare criticize god emperor Trump.

That is a great opening line for a song!

But seriously - I apologise if you think I was criticising the USA. I thought the whole premise of this thread was that the USA had taken a direction that people in the USA did not agree with. I apologise that if as a foreigner, I was not allowed to agree with that premise.

Just for the record - I have visited the USA 6 times over the years, to 9 states and the DC - and I am bitterly disappointed I am not there now for SF Live. I know it is a wonderful place full of wonderful people - some of whom are my friends.

sleepysilverdoor wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 02, 2020 2:28 pm

lots of people *own* guns

And that is a completely fucked thing to thinks as "normal". Its isn't normal.

sleepysilverdoor wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 02, 2020 2:28 pm

I will also thank Australia for birthing Rupert Murdoch, who came from your completely flawless nation to corrupt ours.

Good call. What a cunt. I am very ashamed he is one of ours. And his tentacles are still here. Complete arsehole of a human being.

...but..to be fair - I have never described my country as flawless. My songfight repertoire will back that up. " Start a Witch Hunt" would be a good place to start.

sleepysilverdoor wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 02, 2020 2:28 pm

I don't want to visit yours because I'm afraid a gum tree branch will fall on my head and then I'll burn to death in a bushfire.

After last summer - that is entirely valid fear. I am not even being facetious - this is the prime reason why I would leave Australia again. If the Federal government continues to deny global warming and its impacts on forest management - I am out of here. I have 30 years of professional experience in natural resource management - and I will not put up with that shit.

jb wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 02, 2020 5:52 am

Caravan Ray wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 02, 2020 5:14 am

jb wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 01, 2020 1:45 pm

I’ma stay here and fight. If shitbag wins you should all visit here too so we can stand outside his rental house and flip him off.

Why? The place is fucked.

Why not just go somewhere sensible?

Somewhere where carrying guns around isn’t a normal thing.

What’s the deal? You’ve been here a bunch of times and we’ve hung out. I still have the hat you gave me in Santa Cruz. You know those news reports are a small fraction of what it’s like here, just as every shoe in Australia doesn’t have a redback spider in it. Are you just trolling?

You didn't answer the question JB

Why would you stay in a place run by a shitbag? Why not leave?