There is a white couple somewhere ready to tackle this.
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That road, deadass, goes through five war zones. Hell no.
Sudan, Palestine, Ukraine, ____, and ____?
Syria and Gaza. Plus, it runs up along the Congo for quite a ways. That’s a route with some chest hair!
And then there’s the matter of whether to start in Cape Town or end in Cape Town
first one, then the other
It goes near, but not through Ukraine.
Adventure!
They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something. You’d have to walk this road about 2 and a half times just to become an expert at walking.
I believe that goes through the Road of Bones in Siberia. From what I saw of Long Way Round (where Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman ride around the world on motorcycles), it’s not really a road much of the year. You wouldn’t want to walk it in the winter for obvious reasons. You also wouldn’t want to walk it in the warmer seasons, because the snow melts and floods the road.
It’s only a road in the sense that Google Maps marks it as one.
The documentary simply couldn’t continue on the planned route, and they hucked it over to Alaska early on. That was after putting up with some shit ass mud in and around Mongolia where they were dropping their bikes every 10 feet (and I am not exaggerating).
This would take over 187 days if you didn’t have to stop to sleep.
So I walked the Pacific Crest Trail in 106 days. That’s 2650mi/4264km so I walked about 25mi/40km per day.
So if I could maintain that pace (which is debatable because the PCT doesn’t go through different countries or warzones) this would take me 557 days, or about 18 months.
This is the road our grandparents used to walk to get to school if the stories they tell are true…
That’s what they meant by “uphill both ways”. Probably referring to having to cross the equator twice. This makes so much sense now.
Fun fact: If you were able to cross the Bering Straight then the only thing that would keep this road from reaching Argentina would be the Darien Gap, a stretch of dense rainforest that separates Panama from Colombia. Unfortunately it’s one of the most inhospitable places on Earth!
If immigrants can do it, then i can too
if you could cross this impassable stretch of inhospitable wilderness then all you would need to do is cross this other impassable stretch of inhospitable wilderness!
I know what you meant but it was funny to me haha
Could always do the old school google walking route and take a kayak with you.
There are paths through.
i didn t get it
I really don’t understand Americans and their racial stuff. Why white?
Their society is so fixated into that that is haunting. I can’t imagine the histeria that a “PoC” has to endure.
as if white supremacy and racial strife originated in america
Best way I can explain American’s “fixation” on race is that our country’s history is based on the attempt to create a racist white utopia through law (slavery, ethnic cleansing, manifest destiny, segregation, Jim Crow, private prisons etc.).
Many of the historical debates, protests, rebellions, riots, and wars we’ve had were largely surrounding the issue of racial equality. And… it never went away because racist white people have evolved their political tactics. They still want “the South to rise again”, they still want “to Make American Great Again”, they still want segregation, slavery, and woman subordination.
You might be thinking, “it’s not that serious”, but the mere fact that America is becoming the de facto Nazi Regime of the West now says it all. Hitler was deeply inspired by America’s Jim Crow laws and used it as a platform to address “the Jewish Question”. But, White American’s racism didn’t just materialize out of nothing. It’s descendant of Western Imperialism and Colonialism that was being exported across the globe by Europeans who had finally come to a geopolitical status quo on their continent after checks notes thousands of years of fighting over whose nation and religion is better.
TL;DR: American’s being fixated on race is just the next phase of geopolitical infighting that came after thousands of years of Europeans fixating on nationality and religion, both of which are becoming less relevant each day than one’s ethnic and cultural identity.
The real reason is less about creating an actual “whites only country” and more about creating a political outgroup to scapegoat so they can stoke hatred on that line and cause the working class to be distracted fighting each other, so they don’t band together to fight their mutual enemy of those playing the puppetmaster. It’s been the goto strategy since the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion. Races don’t exist from a biological perspective, there’s more variation within a “race” than between them.
You need to learn about the history of Western scientific racism as it would fill a few holes in your thinking here. Essentially Europeans needed a way to justify enslaving fellow Christians which normally is extremely illegal under canonical law. Scientific racism was the way these Europeans justified breaking this law.
Please don’t assume what I do and don’t know about history lmao. I’m very aware of the history of scientific racism. I studied sociology and anthropology in university which is the academic antithesis of scientific racism as a pseudoscience. The modern concept of we understand today was developed by a Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and a German professor of medicine, Johann Frederich Blumenbach, in the late 17th century.
What you’ve mentioned isn’t really that far off from my initial comment. You’re just going to into more historical detail about my claim that racism derives from Western European imperialism/colonialism.
Oh, I know why they’re obsessed with race. What I don’t understand is why this meme can get upvoted and not discarded as racist. And I’m not crying about “wah racism against whites” I mean real racism.
Because it’s not really racist, is it? I don’t see how this meme contributes to the suffering or oppression of any white person. I suppose the meme can be taken in different ways. Some people are perceiving it as racist. Others are perceiving it as one of the admirable characteristics of white people.
Something I’ve noticed about a lot of white people who do take offense to memes like this is that they simply do not like being made aware of their race at all, which is just not a reality most non-white people get to experience.
I said I’m not talking about racism against white people. I think it’s racist because the joke appears to be that white people have disposable income and like to travel and do adventurous things. So, to me, it’s saying non-white people don’t have money and don’t travel or do fun things. And I think that’s bad. I don’t feel like I’m doing backflips to get to this conclusion, I genuinely don’t understand how it’s not seen this way by everybody else.
I interpreted it as a stereotype of certain privileged classes of white people that are so out of touch with the struggles of the world that they don’t realise how dangerous it is to try this. In fact, I think there has been cases of upper/middle-upper class people who have gone on these kinds of tourism-pilgrimage and have ended up dead.
Yeah it makes sense from that perspective, thanks for the explanation!
That’s a stretch, and ironically, such a black and white perspective. At the end of the day, it’s just a meme. A meme joking about one group of people’s extreme form of recreation is not making the absolute claim that non-whites don’t do any of these things.
But, there is truth to the statement that white Westerners are able to travel more with disposable income. Facts are not racist. Pointing those facts out in a lighthearted meme is not racist, to white people nor non-white people.
Would it be racist to make the claim that white British people were able to colonize several countries while Thailand was not? No, because that’s a historical fact; one that also explains why white Westerners today have more disposable income on average than non-whites.
In a roundabout way, you want to point at this meme and say it’s racist against non-whites but this was most likely made by a non-white person pointing out what they have noticed in our country, pertaining the subject of race and socioeconomic background. That being said, there are plenty of extremely impoverished white people in America. That doesn’t negate the truth of this meme though.
I don’t think “it’s just a meme” or “it’s just stating the facts” will ever be a good defense against racist stereotyping, so I’m going to ignore that line of argument. Fair enough if it was made by a non-white person trying to poke fun at white people, that makes it better, but that context isn’t obvious to me at all. I guess it’s easier for Americans to infer, which brings us full circle
Americans (especially non white Americans) tend to speak very frankly about race in a way that can make Europeans uncomfortable. In this context “white” is simply meant to conjure an image of someone with disposable income.
(See “black twitter”)
We’re not uncomfortable, we’re baffled at your fixation on race, and on skin colour specifically. In European countries, generally, mostly, there is no this weird racial tribalism. Some people are racist, for sure, and a bunch of institutional racism is still a thing, but it’s a bad thing and we understand it in this context.
You don’t fight racism by ignoring it. Being out there in a frank manner is a precondition to fixing it.
What?
It still just sounds racist to me. The joke is that black people are poor?
The joke is that white people are so pampered they have to find absolutely insane sounding activities to have fun, like throwing yourself out of perfectly good airplanes, diving in caves, or walking the longest road on earth.
And to do so relatively cluelessly with the optimism that it will all work out fine because American, white, and money. Instagramming selfies with their kidnappers kinda thing.
This ↑
Those things sound fun, why are they bad? Do non white people not do those activities?
They are all hazardous to your health. Never said they were bad. I dunno. I don’t do any of them, except I threw myself out of perfectly good planes in the military and there were plenty of not white people there.
I threw myself out of perfectly good planes in the military and there were plenty of not white people there
That’s the difference between paying to jump out of a plane vs being paid to jump out of a plane
I absolutely did not get that from this post.
It is racist. White people are the only people it’s politically acceptable to be racist about.
racism requires a power structure to be historically against the oppressed. you cannot be racist against white people. you can be prejudiced, and I suppose you could make some argument that the above is prejudiced if you tried really hard, but calling it racism disregards the basis of what racism is
edit: for people down voting, please go read some books, take a class from your local community college, or just talk to your neighbors. this statement isn’t meant to be decisive, nor would it be in any race and diversity class.
So if a white person says “I hate all black people because they are black”, that’s racist. But if a black person says “I hate all white people because they are white”, that’s just prejudiced and somehow not as bad? Sounds to me like you might be racist.
You are projecting an insane amount, and you can be racist against any group of people. And you made yourself sound racist af.
Do you not know about Nazi Germany? Miss that part in school? And you are telling others to read books?
Except you’ve confused the definition from common use to sociological use, you’d understand the difference if you hadn’t stopped before critical thinking
Fuck off with that academic bullshit.
Racism is prejudice based on race. The addition of a power structure was added to make racism against Whites more palatable. It’s a mix of denial and rationalization. And it’s racist as hell.
Edit: I assume you also think it’s impossible to be sexist against men? Or heterophobic against straight people? All this is is an attempt to whitewash racism against people who look like the people doing the oppressing. It’s a generalization based on race, which is—by definition—racist. Why not direct your anger at the incredibly tiny group of people actually creating the power structures of the world, rather than funneling it into useless and hypocritical counter-racism?
So a white Zimbabwean can say the most vile racist slurs against black people because white people were oppressed in Zimbabwe…
Interesting paradigme…
But the problem is that the internet is not one country with one history.
They are talking about America. You need to always assume they’re talking about America, other countries don’t really exist.
where did you gain that I thought racism was ok from that? I’m merely pointing out that it’s a false equivalency
Well it is not racisme it is just prejudice, so it is ok…
/s
Prejudice is a broader term that include race among other factors.
Power is not necessary to be racist. My neighbor is super racist but has absolutely no power.
Power is part of the equation as a multipier. It creates greater negative impact.
your neighbor may not have individual power, but his statements still carry more weight than the opposite. there’s a reason (most) white people would never dream of saying the n word, and that there’s no equivalent for the other way around, and it’s because there’s an inherent power dynamic baked into that word and its origins
I agree with you, but I’m not arguing about the relative weight/ power/emotional damage etc. of one racist word against another. Those words are still racist independently of who holds the power.
Please go to another country and experience the exact opposite. In South Africa the EFF political party publicly chants to kill all white people.
“I will only be offended if a white person says the n-word” - so you are an absolute racist…
That’s like saying using deadly violence in self defense isn’t killing because it’s self defense, not attacking. But it is still killing, just a form that’s treated differently.
deleted by creator
I think it has to do with the very high number of “van life” vloggers who overwhelmingly seem to be white American couples. Google van life vloggers and take a look at the image results.
Most of which probably park that van in their 5-car garage between shoots. 😂
Yeah that sounds about right.
after living in the US for some time i think i’m starting to get it…
one thing about the life in the US that the hollywood movies don’t show you very well is that the country is extremely tribal. the stories of diversity or of outsiders building their american dream are almost pure fantasy - you don’t make it in america because of the environment but in spite of it.
the way things work here is that you have to be a part of a group and you habe to stick with that group no matter what. because otherwise you are done. that’s why it is so hard for either democrats or republicans to admit when their politicians do even the most insane shit. that’s why people would rarher risk their kids lives rather than go against their peer group and vaccinate them. and that’s also why it is so important that the couple is “white” and not black, latino or (god forbid) mixed…
racism, xenofobia, nationalism and mysoginy are just side effects of a society that is split into constantly competing groups that reserve all the benefits for their own members… constant positive and negative discrimination that forces everyone to fall in or be left behind and that is stoked by any entity interested in exploiting those fragmented groups more easily.
USA definitely is tribal but I have to say that Democrats do things when their politicians do something crazy. They resign over stuff that a Republican would just ignore. The Democrats have their issues but policing behavior isn’t one of them.
Unless it’s tied to capital and power then senile people can rule even if that is in fact insane.
Because whoever wrote that is a racist.
They shop at REI and drive Subarus
This is the farthest distance not the longest road
Case in point
“I live at 0024 Long as Fuck Road.”
“OMG, we live on the same street! I live on 999999 Long As Fuck Road.”
That ain’t the longest road you can squiggle down the alleys in the cities. The longest road probably has like 3/4 of the distance just moving down the roads in the cities in a zig zag pattern.
Worse. You would be walking in a circular pattern approaching the center whilst’d skipping every other intersection. Then you would proceed outwards on the roads you skipped initially. Do that in every city you encounter.
Or go on a roundabout for 20000km
But that’s not one road but multiple
Pretty sure the roads are discontinuous in the original post too
Walking from Italy to Greece? Good luck!
legitimately one of the cool things about white people
Legit sounds like the Out of Eden Walk
https://www.npr.org/2013/01/10/168961210/what-do-you-pack-for-a-seven-year-trip
In the very loose meaning of “can walk”. This road crosses several dangerous areas for multiple reasons, from war and jungles, to deserts and tundra, not to mention all the visas you’d need.
Dude even excluding the human factors like politics, war, etc, the terrain would just be insanely rough and dangerous in basically every possible way
This route walks up the Nile and crosses the desert um Sudan. It then walks down remote roads in the DRC. It’s just so over the top insane.
There’s a guy on Youtube who crossed the entire length of Africa on foot. Got kidnapped twice IIRC.
Russ Cook.
i can think of much more exciting things to do if i had a death wish tbh
holy shit i was thinking exactly that…i wonder how many other people are
Same, and most of those things begin and end with copious amounts of drugs.
I got curious. The map/path is real.
BUT
The map begins and ends pretty arbitrarily. Both roads keep going before and beyond those points.
It assumes a ferry ride across the Suez canal (although there is seemingly a new-ish floating bridge that allows pedestrians to cross the canal, but it is only floated out at certain times (and maybe doesn’t exist anymore after a boat collision incident?))
