If you could pack up and move your whole life, where would you go?

I once registered with a mutual exchange council home swap site and was looking for somewhere by the sea, even places with bad reps like Grismby or Filey but there weren't many wanting to move my way. Then I found someone with family in my area and willing to swap this way on the Isle of Man and their description of the house made it sound amazing, it had a sea facing back garden and apparently you could see the Milky Way on a clear night. But I felt like I'd end up getting murdered or chased into the sea with pitchforks and turned it down.

i fear Spiders is not what it was

Weren't they still birching people on the Isle of Man until ludicrously recently?

that wouldn't surprise me

Not that recently but recently enough:

The Isle of Man (a small island between Britain and Ireland with its own legal system as a British Crown dependency) caused a good deal of controversy by continuing to birch young offenders until 1976.

I guess sarahell is saying they wouldn't be doing a new colonisation. In essence, moving to NZ for a white American is just the same as moving somewhere else in the US - they are colonised lands but for generations have been majority of white-European heritage.

The original statement: _At least the (mostly) educated white English-speakers of ILX are choosing places where they can be with those of their kind as opposed to colonizing / gentrifying?_

I mean, this is entirely flawed, but it seems to suggest that moving to a pre-colonised place is somehow morally better than moving to another country that isn't predominantly white-European? The fear of being a new coloniser seems to be more heavy than the fear of perpetuating colonisation, not to mention the fear of becoming some sort of weird ethno-bubble?

My argument is don’t call NZ a white country in the sense its indigenous people are white - unlike, idk Ireland, where we actually are - and then say that moving there is to be with fellow elite people and it’s not colonising. I’m not sure modern day Māori much care about the motives of white westerners pricing them out or what wave of colonialism we’re splitting hairs on, you know?

fellow white, lol, thanks autocorrect

I love my house and immediate neighborhood, like an approximately one-square-mile area that has my preferred bars and shops and whatnot.

However, it would be nice if it were mounted on gigantic rails and could be moved to approximately the latitude of Savannah, Georgia in February.
Then slide it to approximately to the latitude of Freeport, Maine in August. Perhaps do this gradually, so that it's pretty much always late spring or early autumn.

Every couple of years it might be fun to have it transferred to a huge barge and towed to the vicinity of Aruba, or Cap D'Antibes, or Venice.

Or, alternatively, just keep it on a barge and move it lazily up and down the US east coast, near enough to run day excursions to art museums in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, etc.

gyac, I agree with what you're saying. I was just trying to expand on the point that I thought was being made and pick it apart a little. The picking apart wasn't really directed at a specific argument, just my thoughts on the questions brought up.

More thoughts: I do think that the morality of moving isn't all that simple - I believe in open borders, free travel and the broadening of cultural horizons, but is that extricable from the history of colonialism and current structures of privilege? Can I say "culture should be shared" when I come from a country that is notorious for stealing and stifling it?

I guess maybe I should move this to another thread, though, if it seems a bit heavy on this one?

the question is framed to imagine that you alone have this wonderful power to go and live anyplace you please

it would be an interesting thought experiment to ask if everyone in the world was given this right and, somehow, the resources, what would that look like, and what do you see yourself doing?

(Don’t say a bouncy room covered on all six sides with bouncy rubber material, don’t say a bouncy room covered on all six sides with bouncy rubber material)

a bouncy room covered on all six sides with bouncy rubber material, fuck!

could be one of the safer places to be

My argument is don’t call NZ a white country in the sense its indigenous people are white

that wasn't my intent ... but I am glad that you brought it up.

I'd think twice about Wales, if any of you were considering it.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10876967/Firebombing-threat-Welsh-holiday-homes-amid-fury-spiralling-house-prices.html

old bustedness: "Reject humanity, return to monke."

new hotness: "Reject housing, embrace bouncy."

Okay but can the bouncy room be in zero-G as well?

Because I totally want a bouncy castle that is also in space

(xp) Though as long as you're not English you might be fine.

you will likely have to get a special insurance policy for the bouncy castle ... regular property insurance will likely not cover it.

now I'm wondering what would happen if you filled a moon bounce with helium

I want to know, and also, this is why the US stopped going to the moon in the 1970s. Once the bouncy castle experiment was even brought up, barely, that one time, funding was pulled

https://images.parents.mdpcdn.com/sites/parents.com/files/styles/scale_1500_1500/public/images/550_102150555.jpg

now we're talking

You know that cardboard cat castle rents for $3,000 a month in Palo Alto

a bargain at $2,950 in Park Slope tho

now I'm wondering what would happen if you filled a moon bounce with helium

― Nutellanor Roosevelt (Ye Mad Puffin)

Bubble Boy showed how that worked out.

Karl have you been to Marfa/Alpine? I can picture you liking it a lot. Caek could comment more.

As for the OP, it’s hard for me to choose; I currently live in about the best spot in the US for my particular life priorities (which have and will change over time!), so it would be somewhere abroad. Copenhagen, maybe? Taipei?

A Costa Rican friend of mine spent time in Marfa recently. He had to keep his passport in his breast pocket at all times b/c he got stopped by the border patrol multiple times per day, patrol helicopters buzzing overhead all the time. It sounded like hell frankly, ofc my white friend had a different experience

Savannah is where i’m packing to move. Packing fucking sucks and moving sucks.

A few years ago I visited a place in Italy called Bomarzo. It's has a famous park with giant stone sculptures of monsters in it. It's miles from anywhere and tricky to reach by public transport. I had to take a train and a regional bus from Rome. It's one of those places where the last bus leaves for the nearest city at 17:45 and if you miss it the next bus is 07:45 the next morning. Perhaps because of this I remember that the house prices were really low, e.g. this nice flat for €29,000:
https://www.idealista.it/en/immobile/24922588/

It's rare that I use the alt-gr key, but that's how you write the Euro symbol. There's probably a catch that makes it a nightmare hellscape to live in, but I could imagine myself relocating there. I would sit all day in front of the computer until I have a heart attack, and then a few years later they would find my mummified corpse, but it would be in Italy so the scenery would be nicer. I could wear tight shorts and walk around the house with a hairy chest, like Pablo Picasso.

Bomarzo's scenery is pleasant - it's a hill town surrounded by woods - but slightly odd because the place looks as if it was scorched by fire and never repainted:
https://goo.gl/maps/1LJi66UaQfZWTF9R7

I remember seeing people on the top floor using a bucket with a pulley to lift their shopping. Apparently this is also a thing in Naples:
http://www.grandvoyageitaly.com/piazza/only-in-italy-opanar-the-naples-basket-lift

It's called an o'panar, and comes about because the old stone houses don't have elevators, and the Italians aren't willing to dynamite them and replace them with breeze-block-and-brick Bovis-style homes with paper-thin walls, as in the UK.

think of all the things that keep you where you are. maybe you already found your place. but if you didn't have the things you love (family, friends) and loathe (work, loans, unhappy obligations) keeping you where you are, where would you go?

*bonus question for those who like a little more direction: what if your main goal was to live in an inspiring place to paint, to be around painters, and to spend as little money as possible?

― Bruce Stingbean (Karl Malone)

Having a "fuck it" moment of my own. What if your main goal was to see all the different animals, to be around beaches, and to spend as little money as possible? And what if you didn't know how to drive?

Opportunities to care for animals and the ability opt out of human interaction much of the time would be a big plus.

Galapagos Islands are not accepting new residents, so that's out...

The California Channel Islands I think have volunteer caretakers (maybe even Santa Catalina, that has a town there). I wouldn't mind spending a few months of the year on the bigger, non-Catalina ones.

Or have perhaps consider a “reset” trip to India, travelling also to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos ? If you avoid the wealthy gap year students, you may find yourself in five years time a Buddhist monk in a remote order.

Trust me, Eastern religion is not a thing I need more of.

The non-Catalina islands look amazing! But seem to be uninhabited

They are uninhabited, but I think there are "park ranger/biological researcher" type situations where people can stay on the larger ones for a while.

ah gotcha, thanks
I'll look into that for sure but guessing i wouldn't qualify, certainly not as a researcher anyway.

What if the places you'd like to move are on paths that point to copying the things you hate about where you are right now? (What I'm trying to say here isn't fully formed in my own mind; by all means ask questions.)

If you want new animals, Madagascar would be your best bet. Unless you are already from there, in which case its abundant biodiversity is prob old hat.

Madagascar unfortunately not particular safe for fay old me, been wanting to go forever and seems a little impossible

Yeah I forgot to mention, someplace where homosexuality is not punishable by imprisonment or death would really be best.

So Borneo is probably out, too.

They are uninhabited, but I think there are "park ranger/biological researcher" type situations where people can stay on the larger ones for a while.

My gf's mom's next door neighbor got to stay at an old sheep ranch on Santa Cruz Island while they updated the signage... he said it was pretty amazing, and the food was excellent

I think some of the "biological researcher" positions are like "Here's a picture of an Island Fox, walk around and count them when you see them, and put an X on this map of where they were spotted. But these positions tend to get filled by bio major undergrads from So Cal colleges.

Honestly, I know absolutely nothing about Madagascar aside from the cool biodiversity. Didn't mean to make people upset/sad, sorry.

Aw, you didn't upset me fwiw and I took the table is the table's post more as a "great idea! but..."

I don't think homosexuality is actually criminal in Madagascar though it is in Brunei and Malaysia so I should apologize for conflating those things.

Lol

Europe is substantially poorer, more racist, less dynamic, and MUCH less free than the US

Food is bland, coffee tastes like shit, the weather is mostly awful, their primary cultural export is tourism, and they have less say in the affairs of the world https://t.co/zOrZI15O1P

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) June 27, 2022

uh the racism part is absolutely true.

Really tickled by the notion “coffee tastes like shit” like Italy just doesn’t exist and as for Vienna…

Or Paris, even, for that matter.

Shit, the coffee out of a streetside Nescafe vending machine on thw outskirts of Krakow makes better coffee than any Starbucks i’ve ever been in.

The guy is a fucking idiot

uh the racism part is absolutely true.

― broccoli rabe thomas (the table is the table), Tuesday, 28 June 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Lol no it depends where exactly in Europe you are at.