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@archangeldacob
dog goes gorp
Foreigners tend to assume that the big cultural confusions between Australians and most other countries are gonna be based on our food, or social services, or weather, or weird animals. But it’s never that. In my experience, the real cultural confusions re: Australians are about The Respect Thing almost one hundred per cent of the time.
? I realize im proving your point but what
The broader Australian culture doesn’t, as a whole, have status-based respect. Some individual groups might, because they’ve brought it from other cultures they’re involved in, but the general culture doesn’t. There’s no sense that your boss or scout leader or the guy in charge of your country deserves more respect than you, or that you should behave differently to them than you would to any random person you know similarly well. (The very rare exceptions include ritualised settings, such as courtrooms, and for some reason the fact that children use “Miss/Ms/Mr” honourifics for teachers at school.)
I don’t mean Australians are a “stick it to the man, fight back against those in power” kind of people – we’re generally not. And I don’t mean we have a “we’re going to do the status thing but pretend we don’t and pretend to all be equal in mixed company” thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say is ‘above’ you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; it’s saying “I’m forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I don’t see you as a person and won’t grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equal”. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)
This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians as “friendly, but very rude”. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldn’t believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and we’d only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.
The reason I’ve been thinking of this lately is because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of countries have like… a special respect for their country’s leaders? I don’t just mean “yeah, that guy makes the rules”, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but I’ve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, it’s just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like he’s automatically the life worth saving over the others, and they’d just give up their chance in favour of him? And that’s so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided, “this guy happens to be the leader of the country” wouldn’t be a factor.
When Americans don’t like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how he’s “not my president”, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way he’s theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, I’ve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that they’re invested in whether he’s Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick who’s been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing in “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!”, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).
This is getting off-topic. Point is, in Australia you can run into the Prime Minister and ask him to help you fix your phone and if he’s not busy but refused to help you out he’d be kind of a dick; of course he should help you out. And if I walk into your restaurant and you act like I’m a movie star and you’re going to be super attentive to my every need because I’m The Customer, I’m gonna get creeped out. We’re suspicious and insulted by what most people in the world consider to be basic manners, and vice versa. And it makes interacting with foreigners super weird because I always feel like they’ve got some invisible heirarchical flowchart in the back of their minds that I don’t.
I have long noticed that Americans have absolutely the same cultural attitude to the President as they would to a serving monarchy. They just think they don’t on a technicality.
Can confirm that if I call someone ‘Sir/Madam’ I generally mean ‘asshole’ (unless talking to an animal or tiny child) and that if I get called Ma’am I feel like I’m being called the asshole, which made time in Atlanta, Georgia suoer weird.
Australians have a very good attitude to respect
…so this explains why I have spent the last fourteen years low-grade pissed off at nearly every Australian I meet, because every time I try to be American Polite at them it pisses them off. And, for that matter, why my second boss here, the one I was so careful to be Formally Respectful of and always called “sir,” took such an intense dislike to me.
Yeah, even if that boss understood that you were American and what that meant, their instincts would’ve been screaming at them the whole time that you were being a dick. It’s a difficult thing for us to get used to even when we know the culture is different’.
As a Brit visiting Australia, the most vivid experience I had of this is: in the UK it’s really uncool to get into the passenger seat of a cab - you’re expected to get in the back. In Australia the reverse was apparently true.
… I am only just now realising that inAmerican and British movies and stuff, people don’t get in the passenger seat of a taxi.
covid update: you’re now meant to get in the back seat for social distancing and IT FEELS SO RUDE. sorry taxi person I AM NOT TRYING TO SHUN YOu just I know there are rules and we’re protecting each other. let’s be intensely awkward for a while.
Reblogging this because I just remembered the time Molly Meldrum absolutely horrified Prince Charles by describing meeting the Queen as “I saw your mum last week”.
One of my favorite travel books described humanity as, broadly speaking, having two types of culture: one where formal is respectful and informal is rude, and vice versa. Australian culture sees formality as hostile or unfriendly and familiarity as warmth. It’s decidedly not the case in USA as a whole, though as with any broad category the dichotomy changes as the group gets smaller.
YOU PUT THE THING INTO WORDS!
EVERYONE PUT THIS GIF ON YOUR BLOG IMMEDIATLY IT WILL PROTECT YOU FROM THE VIRUS!!
Don’t know how it protects me from Ebola but alright alright. If it keeps me safe
Ceci n'est pas une orb
I don’t understand why people act like you’ve stolen their firstborn child when you mention the Jedi are flawed.
Like dude. The whole point of the entire franchise was The Jedi are flawed and new a Jedi Order must rise and correct the mistakes of the original Order.
Obi Wan and Yoda both tell Luke to kill his own father. And Luke saves him instead. The Jedi become political, and this leads to their blindness to the Chancellor’s true identity. Mace Windu even says they have lost their connection to the force.
Bro, that’s the point of the whole movies, it’s not a personal slight. It’s just a fact.
The Jedi can be good as individuals but flawed as a group. They can have good intentions and still be wrong.
LET THE JEDI ORDER BE MORALLY GREY IM BEGGING YOU
i rewatched revenge of the sith
I know Dracula is the bad guy of Castlevania and all, but if some zealous Christians showed up at my home and horribly murdered my wife because she did medicine too good I too would probably have gone absolutely fucking feral
Hey I’m once again seeing discourse about PewDiePie (probably because he has been welcomed back into the larger community of youtube personalities playing Among Us like Corpse Husband, JackSepticEye and Cr1tikal) and I just want to remind people of his ugly racist history that he has never properly put behind him and in fact continues to perpetuate.
His fanbase has always been racist. He was one of the first big YouTubers and he has always made racially charged jokes and has said the n-word in videos - notably, targeting somebody else with it. I watched his content when I was a young child, I experienced these things first hand. There were racist jokes, rape jokes, and generally sexual jokes targeted for his younger demographic. He has always been known as problematic, as problematic was used back in 2012.
A preamble to his first exposé: in November 2016 he showed up to a taping of his own series produced by Maker Studios (Disney) wearing a shirt with a swastika on it. Somebody told him to change. He denies this ever happened, but acknowledged that the shirt exists. There are photos of him and a friend wearing it.
The thing he got caught for was when he paid two men $5 to write and hold up a sign with the words “Death To All Jews”. His apology was half-assed. He apologized for the way that it came across and did not acknowledge the reasons that it was wrong. Febuary 2017: he descends into utter alt-right reactionism, harassing the WSJ journalist and sending his fans after the publication to the point where the Journal offered to put the journalist in a safehouse.
September 2017, he called somebody he n-word on stream, just weeks after Charlottesville occurred - where his imagery, jokes, and memes were used as motivation. He went on to say he had no idea that Nazis actually existed, that the Nazi jokes he was making weren’t funny anymore, and that he would not be making them anymore.
In March 2019, a white supremacist livestreamed himself saying “Subscribe to PewDiePie” before committing mass-shootings in two Christchurch mosques, killing dozens and injuring more. He responded with a single tweet, that he felt sickened that his name left the man’s mouth, and that his heart went out to the people affected. Later, he called for an end to the Subscribe to PewDiePie meme and promised $50,000 to the Anti-Defamation League. He then retracted his decision, saying that he did not want to donate to something that he was not passionate about.
Felix Kjellberg has never made a single attempt to rid his fanbase of actual literal Nazis and white supremacist scum because he built his platform around them. He alone has radicalized probably half of the white nationalist/supremacist/Nazi men in America ages 18-25.
I will never forgive him.
This is taken from the Guardian article from above:
You could say that today’s digital economy has spawned a new “bro-nality of evil”. Racist memes serve as in-jokes that help solidify bonds between alienated white men online. The style of these memes, their overblown exaggerated nature, means we often don’t take them seriously. Dismiss them as jokes. But this is how antisemitism creeps into our lives. Not with a bang but with a punchline.
Happy Chanukkah, everyone.
this is getting a little traction so I just wanted to point out that I’m saying this I’m not black, I am a native Jewish person with a degree in how race, gender, and class move through modern media. Nazis in America target black and Jewish people in particular and it would be an incomplete conversation if I didn’t include his racism.
The spirit of Diogenes is alive and well
This is funny, obviously, but even if you don't go to the extreme of the example above, this is a separate seat for one person, with a back and 4 legs:
But it's not a chair. It's a bar stool.
This, however, are all chairs:
Each one is missing at least one component of the chair definition above.
So like... it's almost like strict definitions are exclusionary.
Reblog to hit a transphobe with a separate seat for one person
going to spend some quiet time in the kiln
Life was good when we made dark fantasy films using muppets. No more captain america no more crisp ratt were doing gelflings some more, and those little shits from labyrinth.
The Dark Crystal series was really good but I desperately want to see what kinda fucked up muppets you can make with a $200 million budget
If we give the Jim Henson company $200 million, those felt fucks are going to be sentient
how dare you question the amazing method of farming that gives us so much food by simply killing the soil and leaving lands barren without maintaining the resources that make it work in the first place.
last year i got 1800 bushels of corn by killing the soil, as opposed to before when i only got 1200 by not killing the soil. surely i can simply keep killing more soil
wym there’s only so much soil. that’s an externality and therefore none of my concern
Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could b
well here’s the thing, under normal circumstances without human intervention soil recovery can take a long long time. with human intervention, such as mulching, cover crops (that you then turn into mulch), seeding with beneficial fungi, etc, soil buildup can be massively boosted. we can be a positive force instead of a negative one. we just have to start doing that
We literally already pulled off a 10-year turnaround by getting a company to dump a lot of orange peels in an area.
Good point! here it is:
Princeton researchers explore how discarded orange peels revived a Costa Rican forest.
people always blast right past the “if we continue with current practices” and go straight to “this is inevitable”