Loaf. Nouns, adjectives, and occasionally, verbs. Trying to post more oc, likely failing The basic rundown - White * Agender*~40 *xe/hir* Gothytype * Neurodivergent * Queer * in a rlly gay polyam relationship
This is so silly but I'm watching a short video essay on sincerity in cinema and the creator is talking about how he watched Lord of the Rings for the first time at 17. He explains that he'd grown so used to the 'ironic' meta style commentary in the movies of the 2010's that as he was watching the opening narration of LotR, he spent the entire time waiting for the joke to come. For someone to take it all back with a zinger line. He listened to Blanchett describe and explain the backstory, and he waited for the other comedic shoe to drop.
And he kept doing it. Scene after scene.
He spent the film expecting someone to make a joke about how unserious things were or to break the fourth wall or do some other self referential type thing.
Now, maybe I'm just at that point in my cycle or maybe I'm too delicate in general, but I literally teared up hearing that. Straight up cried a bit. It is so fucking sad that sincerity and genuineness is being bred out of people.
People say all the time 'this generation can't take anything seriously!' and really, is it any wonder? Younger people have been trained out of it. You are no longer encouraged to be genuine or show emotion or be honest. You are actively punished for it. In fact, you are almost guaranteed to suffer for it.
That is so fucked up. I'm sorry to go on a bit of a random ramble rant but it's so fucking gut wrenching to see younger people lose that element of themselves. You can't express your passion without being told you're 'crashing out' or 'cringe'. You have to live in this neutral state of fear of perception, and god forbid anybody step outside of it!
You're told you should only consume and succumb and be ironic and emotionless and cool.
Listen, if you're following me and you're like.... 25 or under, let's say. Please. I beg of you. Do not fall for this rhetoric. Please, for the love of all things, feel. Feel and create and be honest with yourself. Indulge in things that make you happy. Be sincere. Wear your heart on your sleeve. Do not let this hyper-capitalistic, hyper-consumerist, self-centred, individualist culture take that from you.
Bleed yourself into the work you create. Live. Don't fucking let anyone tell you different.
Billionaire solipsism, dictator solipsism, AI, and the fascist paradigm
TOMORROW (May 14), I’m doing a free virtual event for the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Wendy “Abolish Silicon Valley” Liu, on the theme of “How to Disenshittify the Internet.”
With great power comes great solipsism: the more power you wield over other people, the less real they become to you. To rule is to see people as aggregates, statistical artifacts, as a means to an end. It's how people seem when you're at the bottom of a k-hole.
Per Granny Weatherwax, this is the root of all evil: "Sin is when you treat people like things":
The problem (for powerful people) is that other people aren't things; they're people, with stubborn attachments to their own priorities and needs. This is a huge problem for social media bosses, since the force that keeps you stuck to their platforms is your love of your friends, which sucks (for social media bosses), because your friends refuse to organize their interactions with you to "maximize engagement." There is a group of platform users who are dedicated to maximizing your engagement: performers (which is why legacy social media platforms have reduced the quantum of your feed given over to your friends to a bare minimum and swapped in the amateur dramatics of theater kids). But even "influencers" demand treatment as people, not things (which is why legacy social media is squeezing out performers in favor of slop):
Running a social media service is especially solipsism-inducing, since the back-end of a social media service always reduces people to statistical artifacts to be steered, thwarted, or rewarded based on the degree to which they are "maximizing engagement." No wonder zuckermuskian social media bosses mythologize themselves as dopamine-hacking wizards who've built a mind-control ray. Skinnerism and solipsism fit together very neatly, seducing you into the belief that everyone else is a stimulus-responding automaton, programmed to think they have free will:
But in truth, any corporate boss is prone to solipsism. To maximize corporate profits, you must view other people – employees, suppliers and customers – as inconvenient problems to be solved, not true people with feelings and needs that are co-equal with your own.
This is why AI is so attractive to the ruling class. For corporate leaders, the fantasy of your own worth is always dangerously close to collapsing, due to the haunting knowledge that if you don't show up for work, everything continues as per normal; while if your workers don't show up for work, the shop closes down and stays closed. Bosses really want to be in the driver's seat, but ultimately they know that they're strapped into the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI is a way to wire that toy steering wheel directly into the drive-train: it's the fantasy that a boss can have an idea and the corporation will execute it, without any messy human needs or demands getting in the way:
Solipsism is why bosses fetishize IP and ignore process knowledge. IP is the part of the job that the worker can explain (and that you can train an AI model on). Process knowledge is the part of the job that can't be abstracted, alienated or commodified. The very existence of process knowledge is the major impediment to de-skilling workers so they can be interchanged with other, more desperate, more timid workers (or with sycophantic AI):
Of course, there's a whole group of powerful people outside of the political world who are gripped by solipsistic AI fantasies: politicians. Like social media bosses, politicians deal with people as statistical artifacts who respond to policy inputs with semi-predictable outputs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
And of course, politicians have their own detested class of workers whom they fantasize about replacing with chatbots: bureaucracies. When Trump et al bemoan the "deep state," they are engaged in the politicians' version of the corporate boss's solipsism: "I make policies, but to enact them, I have to convince civil servants to turn my agenda into action. This sucks. Can't we just have an all-powerful executive who decides on things and then those things just happen?"
Writing for Columbia's Knight First Amendment Institute, political scientist Henry Farrell and statistician Cosma Rohilla Shalizi have produced the definitive account of how AI psychosis has infected our political classes:
Farrell and Shalizi use this political AI psychosis to explain DOGE, framing DOGE as a project where politicians and their loyal vassals cut such a deep wound in the administrative state on the basis that general AI was about to emerge. With godlike AI around the corner, these bureaucrats – who insist on having opinions based on long experience and ethical sensibilities – could be replaced with sycophantic chatbots who'd turn the will of the unitary executive into policy without any filtration through unreliable, squishy humans.
This is a political version of my maxim that "the fact that an AI can't do your job doesn't stop an AI salesman from convincing your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job." Private sector bosses are easy marks for AI salesmen, and not just because they want to reduce their wage bills, but also because it will fulfill the solipsist's fantasy of a corporation that turns the singular genius of the boss into a product without any messy demands from workers (and, if you're Zuckerberg and convinced that you've created a mind-control ray, your product can be rolled out without any messy demands from your customers, either, since you've hypnotized them into doing as they're told).
The public sector version of this is the fantasy that you can eliminate the civil service and use an army of chatbots to do the job – not merely as a way of slashing the federal budget, but also as a way of purifying the transfer of the leader's will to the people without any intervening loss of fidelity resulting from the need to have your policies interpreted (and willfuly misinterpreted) by bureaucrats.
This is a very important framing, and it explains why fascists like Trump and dead-eyed technocrats like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney are hell-bent on gutting their countries' civil service and replacing it with chatbots:
This is how Muskism and DOGE connect to Trumpism and AI: Musk doesn't believe other people are real. He calls them "NPCs" (non-player characters). He wants to put a microchip in your head so he can "replace your bad programming":
It's the fascist paradigm: the idea that people are incapable of self-rule, save for a very small number of singular geniuses who should be put in a position of absolute authority over all of us, to keep us safe from our own foolish impulses:
The Technocrats – a protofascist Italian movement that once captured the imagination of Musk's great-grandfather, and now are frequently quoted and alluded to by the likes of Mark Andreessen – were addicted to the quantitative fallacy that infects economics and other disciplines. That's the idea that every social process can be expressed as a mathematical model, which can then be optimized.
The problem, of course, is that much of the real world is qualitative, and the act of quantizing those qualia is a very lossy process. To quantize a qualitative question is to incinerate all the qualitative aspects and then do mathematics on the dubious quantitative ash that is left behind:
But of course, we optimize trade-offs all the time. That's what being a boss means, and it's also at the very core of self-determination: the right to decide what trade-offs you want to make. What Recht means is "you can't optimize a trade-off for everyone else." Those stubborn not-quite-people – customers, workers, bureaucrats – insist that they want different trade-offs.
In translating the will of a supreme leader to policy without any intervening need for buy-in by humans, fascist projects like DOGE seek to optimize trade-offs according to the preferences of the supreme leader. AI in government is grounded in the idea that a sufficiently deserving leader can be trusted to vibe-code the entire apparatus of state, checked only by his own sense of rightness:
Farrell and Shalizi forcefully make the point that statecraft is not a set of discrete problems with provably correct answers that must be solved. Government is a matter of making choices between mutually exclusive policies that have benefits and costs, and those costs and benefits befall different groups differently.
The idea that you can simply feed every fact about a society into a chatbot and order it to "solve" the nation reveals a profound ignorance about the nature of political contests. There's no empirical way of deciding whose priorities deserve to be realized and who must be disappointed. There isn't even an empirical way to compare the benefits that one group receives to the costs another group pays.
What's more, any system that uses LLMs to make high-stakes tradeoffs between different societal priorities will be relentlessly targeted by the groups that stand to win or lose based on those decisions, and by bureaucrats whose careers depend on making the number go up. They will poison the LLMs' training data, figure out how to trick it into deceiving their bosses about the situation on the ground.
Back in 2018, Yuval Harari predicted that LLMs would supercharge dictatorships by overcoming "authoritarian blindness" – when the suppression of political opinion is so effective that the first sign that a dictator has of his waning support is a mob that burns the presidential palace down. This prediction failed, because people who live under dictators have switched all the energy they used to use to put on a good show for the secret police into putting a good show on for the chatbots:
Meanwhile, the "variability" introduced by bureaucrats who adapt political policies is a feature, not a bug. When a long-tenured public official receives a directive from on-high that they know will be a disaster if implemented unchanged, they can tweak the policy so that it is at least partially successful.
Fire that bureaucrat and hand the policy to a rigidly loyal LLM that will not deviate from its strict instructions and you will end up with nothing (rather than a perfect policy implementation). Indeed, you may end up with less than nothing, as resentful local populations sabotage your agenda.
Both Hayek and Marx agreed that people at the very periphery of the system have insights into local conditions that no boss/central planner can know (though they disagreed about what that fact implied). An LLM is the ultimate micro-manager, and government by Computer Says No would only work if the person writing the system prompt knew everything about everyone everywhere.
As Farrell and Shalizi write,
The frustrations of actually existing bureaucracy do not merely arise from inept or technically-inadequate solutions to the principal-agent problem. They emerge too from the collision of multiple incommensurable demands, each with its own problems and benefits, so that there are no optimal design solutions. Those who build or reform bureaucracies, like those who build other artifacts, need to satisfice across multiple intersecting needs and pathologies. Designs that neatly address one kind of problem may radically worsen others. Actually-existing AI has its own imperfections, some of which are endemic. Grafting AI systems onto existing bureaucracies will solve some problems but will worsen others and make altogether new ones. It will not eliminate the political difficulties of mediating across different, often non-commensurable, goals. Imagining replacing bureaucracy wholesale with AI is only plausible if one waves away the actual difficulties associated with real social technologies.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
ID: A screenshot of tags left on the tumblr post. They read "#it's actually kind of a reverse Chekhov's Gun #Chekhov's Gun says "If there is setup there must be payoff" #Asimov's Tail says "if there is payoff there must be setup" #and I think the tail is also important #a tail is not something you'd expect to see on a character unless explicitly pointed out #someone stepping on the tail not only reveals its existence but also tells us things about it #eg it's floor length sensitive and the character either can't or won't keep it out of the way of foot traffic #the upshot seems to be "acclimatise your audience to things they don't understand before you use them" #you don't need to explain how a gun on the mantelpiece works in the same way you need to explain how your protagonist's tail does" End ID.
listen I understand. they're amazing movies and I do think it's awesome that they were filmed here!!!!! but holy shit! it's the only thing anyone seems to be able to talk about when there is ANY discussion of these islands!! I would super love to be able to discuss our ecology, politics, culture, landscapes, and people without needing to hear about hobbiton every single time
I don't knowwww. it shouldn't be a huge deal but at the same time, the image an overwhelming amount of people have of aotearoa comes from those movies. our struggling ecosystems get overshadowed by fields and grassy hills and other non-native biomes that were explicitly chosen to depict the england-inspired fantasy land of middle earth. these same biomes only exist here because english settlers historically slashed and burned massive swaths of forest to create them, and now they're framed as famous and beautiful. mass deforestation of precious native forests. I don't know man. it annoys me juuuuust a little when every other post I make about this place gets a lotr joke plastered on it.
there are 53 volcanoes in the most populated city in the country
the largest eagle to ever exist (pouākai) was endemic to aotearoa
same with the tallest bird to ever exist (moa)
tuatara is only remaining species in the order sphenodontia and only exists here (for context- the other three extant reptile orders are snakes+lizards, turtles+tortoises, and crocodiles+alligators+caimans)
only two native land mammals and they're both tiny bats
kea is the only alpine parrot on earth
wētāpunga is the heaviest insect on earth
hard to condense into a quick "fun fact" but matariki is an incredibly celebration that has a lot of fascinating history and tradition behind it, totally worth researching!!
less of a fact more of a "check this out" but showing people photos of rotorua's geothermal areas is a favourite of mine
we were the first nation to give women the right to vote in 1893, almost a decade before any other country on earth!
we have the most colourful fungi out of anywhere on the planet!! this is due to our massive abundance of native birds. the fungi mimics the bright colours of fruit, causing birds to eat them!!
Those two bat species are the only two that survived the environmental upheaval triggered by the arrival of the europeans, there used to be three species of bat on New Zealand.
Due to a lack of predators, at least one bat species evolved to predominantly walk instead of fly.
On this day, 13 May 1985, Philadelphia police attacked the home of Black liberation and environmentalist group MOVE with automatic weapons, then dropped a bomb on it, killing five adults and six children, destroying 61 homes in the predominantly Black neighbourhood, and making 250 people homeless.
Almost 500 police officers fired over 10,000 rounds of ammunition into the house, which was filled with women and children, while other officers blew holes in the walls with explosives. The police commissioner then ordered the house to be bombed, which they did using an improvised device made from C4 given to them by the FBI.
Only two people survived the blast and ensuing fire: Ramona Africa, and Michael Ward, aged 13. While no officials were prosecuted, Ramona Africa was subsequently jailed for seven years on riot and conspiracy charges. The incident occurred during the tenure of Philadelphia’s first Black mayor, a Democrat named Wilson Goode.
The children killed were named Katricia Dotson (Tree), Netta, Delitia, Phil, and Tomasa Africa and the adults were Rhonda, Teresa, Frank, CP, Conrad, and John Africa.
In April 2021, it was revealed that anthropologists at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania had the bones of one of the children, unbeknownst to the families.
*
Learn more about institutional white supremacy in the police in this book: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/the-end-of-policing-alex-s-vitale https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1986639618187845/?type=3
i don't remember them playing mahjong but they do other old man things like going to the wet market together and drinking soup and taking walks. anyway go watch suk suk / twilight's kiss
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Yesterday, I attended a workshop on systems thinking and political change, which included a presentation on the work of Donella Meadows, whose Thinking in Systems is a canonical work on the subject:
"Systems thinking" is an analytical framework that treats the world as a mesh of interconnected, nonlinear components and relationships that can't be easily understood or steered. A complex system isn't merely "complicated." A mechanical watch is complicated, in that it has many parts that work together in ways that require training and specialized knowledge to understand. But it isn't "complex" because each part has a specific function that can be understood and adjusted.
In a complex system – say, an ecosystem – the parts are meshed in a web of unobvious relationships that make it difficult to predict what effect will follow from a given perturbation. When a blight kills off a plant species, the soil stability declines, resulting in landslides during the rainy season, changing the mineral content of nearby waterways, which creates microbial blooms or fish die-offs in a distant, downstream lake.
But systems thinking isn't a counsel of despair that insists that you shouldn't do anything because you can never predict what will come of your actions. In Thinking in Systems, Meadows presents a hierarchy of leverage points for changing a system, ranked from least effective ("Constants, numbers, parameters") to most ("The power to shift paradigms to deal with new challenges"):
In all, Meadows theorizes 12 different "places to intervene in a system." The least effective of these – constants like taxes and standards, negative and positive feedback loops – are the sites of most of our political fights, and rightly so. They are the fine-tuning knobs of the system that adjust its margins. Once you have the rule of law ("the rules of the system"), you can drive change by amending, repealing or passing a law:
But when you're confronted with a system that is significantly, persistently dysfunctional, you will likely have to work at sites that are further up the hierarchy, such as "the distribution of power over the rules of the system" or "the goals of the system"; or the most profound of all, "the paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises."
Thinking about paradigms is a form of "meta-cognition," which is to say, "thinking about how you think." Your paradigm encompasses all your assumptions, including your assumptions about how to proceed from your other assumptions: "if x, then y" is a paradigm.
The workshop where we were discussing all of this is part of a group whose goal is reversing the antidemocratic movement in our society and the climate emergency that is its backdrop. But as I listened to the speaker and the ensuing discussion, it occurred to me that Meadows' theoretical work was a very good way of describing the successes of the fascist movement in the UK and around the world.
Fascists like Farage and Trump are, at their root, anti-democratic. Their pitch is that the people are incapable of self-determination (as Peter Thiel puts it, "democracy is incompatible with freedom"). They want us to think that all our neighbors are irrational and foolish, and that we, too, are irrational and foolish, and that our safety and prosperity can only be safeguarded if we seek out those few people who are born to rule and liberate them from the petty niceties and regulations that democracy and the rule of law demand.
In other words, the paradigm of democracy is that all of us are capable of both wise self-governance and self-rationalized misgovernance, and each of us has a useful perspective to contribute. The fascist paradigm is that we can't be trusted to rule ourselves, and only the people who are born with "good blood" are capable of directing our lives:
This is the theory behind "race realism" and "human diversity" and all the other polite names the modern fascist uses to obscure the fact that they're reviving eugenics. It explains the panic over DEI, a panic driven by the belief that lesser people are being elevated to positions of rule and authority that they are genetically incapable of carrying out.
That's why, whenever a disaster arises, fascists demand to know the gender, race and sexual orientation of the pilot, the ship's captain, or the official in charge. If the person who crashed the cargo ship into the bridge has brown skin, we can add another line to the ledger of costs associated with the doomed project to put people who were born to be bossed around in the boss's seat (of course, if the pilot turns out to be a white guy, that proves nothing, except that mistakes sometimes happen).
The revival of fascism in this century has been scarily effective, and at times it can feel unstoppable. Meadows' work on systems thinking provides an explanation for that efficacy – and suggests a theory of change for dispatching fascism back to the graveyard of history. Fascists have made changes to things like laws and feedback loops, rules and distribution of power, but this all stems from a more profound alteration to the system, at the level of the paradigm.
Which suggests that the real fight we have is over that paradigm: we have to convince our neighbors that they are smart enough to rule themselves, and so are we, and so is everyone else. We have to convince them that even the smartest and wisest person (including us, including them) is capable of folly and needs to have checks on their (our) authority.
We need to attack the theory of the "unitary executive" and every other autocratic ideology head on. We have to insist that these aren't just unconstitutional, but that they are ideologically catastrophic. "No kings," because even an omnibenevolent king isn't omniscient, and that means that omnipotence is always omnidestructive in the long run.
The fascist revival has been scarily effective and resilient – and systems thinking offers an explanation for both that efficacy and that resiliency.
Which suggests that the real fight we have is over that paradigm: we have to convince our neighbors that they are smart enough to rule themselves, and so are we, and so is everyone else. We have to convince them that even the smartest and wisest person (including us, including them) is capable of folly and needs to have checks on their (our) authority.
I have said this for decades now, and I still stand by it:
The single greatest danger to freedom has always been the people who want to be led.
Without them, no soi-disant "leader" has any power at all.
This reminds me of something said on the podcast Behind the Bastards, in the episode titled The History of American Masculinity. Robert (host) quotes one of his sources, The Crisis of American Masculinity by Arthur Sleschinger Jr, an article written in 1958:
“The pre-democratic world was characteristically a world of status, in which people were provided with ready made identities, but modern Western society, free, equalitarian, democratic, has swept away all the old niches in which people, for so many centuries, found safe refuge. Only a few people at any time in human history have enjoyed the challenge of making themselves. Most have fled from the unendurable burden of freedom into the womblike security of the group. The new age of social mobility may be fine for those strong enough to discover and develop their own roles, but for the timid and the frightened, who constitute the majority in any age, the great vacant spaces of egalitarian society can become a nightmare filled with nameless horrors."
Guest: Yeah all right, yep, didn't miss on that one.
Robert: Yeah, he didn't miss on that one. I think that really gets a lot of what's going on with these guys, is there's this… they have freedom, they could be whoever they wanted to be, right, and they see… I think it's part of, it's not all of, but it's part of, like, why trans people are such a constant focus for them. They see some people take this freedom that exists in our society and that to some extent was increased by the coming of the digital age, and they're angry and jealous because they don't have the courage to find or make themselves in the same way, and so they want to attack those people who are authentically creating themselves, right.
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.
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.
…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.
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.
Look there’s honestly a lot of history that build our culture today to be like this. We never really had a true aristocracy or class system in Australia and was still considered the dirty colonies up until federation in 1901. Even when we had the gold rush in the 19th century there were rich people but also anyone could dig up a nugget and get rich so no one really bothered with the rich = better than you thing because old johnno down the road who normally is on the piss all day and lives in a swag just picked up a 2lb piece of gold that’s worth thousands of dollars so now he can go buy his own pub and sell his own beer but everyone will still think of him as that guy who was always cracking bad jokes at the end of the bar and drinking a minimum of 8 beers a day. Sure we have rich people but we also pull them back down to earth when they get hoity toity. Australia is one of the most unionised countries in the world and yeah its true we dont get upset by much but when we do, all hell breaks loose. Look up some of Australia’s biggest protests and union movements like the convict rebellions, Eureka stockade, the campaign for the 8 hour day, and he general history of our Australian Labor Party. Australia was the second country in the world to grant women’s suffrage. So many unions and strikes and demands we made in Australia demanding equal and fair rights to working class in the 19th century that by federation in 1901 we were ahead of the world with workers rights and equality. Really the only class system we had was the employer employee divide but we still never bowed down and took it from them just because they boss. I’m not going to go into what happened in the 20th century but if you’re interested definitely look up post war Australia, the women’s working unions in the middle of the century, definitely look up the late Bob Hawke and his legacy, the nurse’s strike in Victoria in the 80s, the land rights movement and Eddie Mabo, and go from there.
I remember in school we were always taught to treat others how you wanted to be treated. You were no better or worse than anyone else. You want to be treated equal to everyone else and that meant being polite and showing decency and helping each other out. It’s true we only use titles for teachers or elders (indigenous Australians use “Aunty” and “Uncle” as a show of respect to their elders) but outside of that if someone calls you Miss y/n or sir or whatever it’s just uncomfortable. In hospitality and retail some of us will still use sir/ma'am mainly because we don’t know customers names but even then that’s rare and usually applied only to elderly. We personally don’t want to be addressed by titles or even surnames (unless it’s a nickname which I’ll get to) so we don’t use the titles or surnames for other people. With surnames often we use them as a nickname if we dont/can’t shorten their names. Getting a nickname (a good one, not one that is intentionally meant to bully you ofc. E.g. ScoMo is the nickname for our PM but he’s a piece of shit and ScoMo sounds a lot like Scum-mo) is the biggest show of respect in Australia. Usually it’s simply just adding a vowel or changing it up a little. I.e. John = johnno, Darren = Dazza, etc. If we can’t do it to your first name we do it to your last name. If we can’t do it to your last name it’s either a feature or behaviour and we put it in a good light. You ever notice that Australians like to make fun of each other and “insult” each other? There’s a very subtle difference when it’s truly meant to be insulting but that’s our way of being affectionate for each other. We will point out your flaws and make fun of you (and stop if you say no) and we will give you a nickname and it’s all in good humour. It’s one of the things I find foreigners get really upset about because they dont understand why we are so rude to each other. You build up a hard skin in this country and forget hat sometimes that stuff IS a bit insulting.
It’s a very backwards system of respect but it is a very honest one. No one is better than you. No one is worse than you. We are all humans.
We treat our acquaintances like friends and our friends like family. Teasing your friends is expected the same way it is for siblings. If you act like someone is above you, in a not-joking way, that’s basically declaring that you don’t see them as potential friend material—that something about them repels you and you want as many barriers between you as possible.
It would hurt my dad so badly if I ever called him “sir.”
Yep, and the automatic assumption that you think I’m an idiot/bitch if I’m called ma'am. The only time it has ever happened and I haven’t taken offence has been brand new army recruits/cadets, who are required to use it while in public to show deference to civilians.
I legit take less offense from being referred to as a pigdog cunt than I do being called ma'am. Getting a sweary character reference or having a friend call you a mad cbomb is totally fine in Aus. Ma'am is not something I associate with respect, being included as part of the group, or acceptance in any way - it’s pointing out rather emphatically that you are “other”
This is interesting as hell as an American raised in an Active Duty environment. As a kid I called everyone Ma’am or Sir and I wonder how jarring that child would be in Australia
Whenever I watch an American show and a kid calls their parents ‘sir’ and/or ‘ma'am’ I immediately assume that the intention is to clue the audience in on the fact that that child is being very severely abused. Addressing an elderly neighbour or something like that would be seen as charmingly respectful from a kid, but doing it to all adults would set off alarm bells in the heads of any Australian adult who wasn’t familiar with your past. They’d get it once they learned you were raised around American soldiers though, and expect you to grow out of it.
I played an Australian teacher in America in a oneact play earlier this year who repeatedly called a highschool student “Miss [Lastname]” and I know you said it’s different for teacher-student interactions, but now I have to assume that that would also be taken very differently in Australia. He wasn’t originally written to be Australian but now its really funny to think about what is theoretically going on in his head, because there’s no actual reason for him to hate this student but given the context of the rest of the play it Decidedly makes me wonder lmaooooo
If he does that to all the students, it would indicate (to an Australian audience) that he’s very recently changed jobs from a super fancy private school that rich people send their kids to to pretend to be foreign royalty or whatever. If he does it only to that student, he fucking hates her and thinks she’s a snobbish airhead who thinks too highly of herself, and he wants everyone to know it. Teachers don’t ‘miss’ students except in weirdo niche private schools.
and to the children in the notes saying we need this fucking baby talk to get around censorship online; there's been no credible evidence that any site other that YouTube (which will only demonetize your video, ftr) will actually censor or hide content that include words like rape, pedophile, gun, terrorist, etc. etc. and even if we take as a given they were (which, again, they are not), do not fucking comply in advance, you absolute fucking coward. and ESPECIALLY do not comply by altering your real life fucking vocabulary. don't let the technocrats dictate what words you say holy fucking shit dude!!!!!!!!!!!!
Since it's Jewish American Heritage Month I'm sharing some of my favorite pieces connected to my culture 🫣 I love being here n I love sharing my world with you and I'm lucky y'all enjoy my world too ❤️
to elaborate: every piece of demographic information recorded on your passport is designed to deny you rights, not grant them. nationality? denies entry to countries that don't match it. age? denies access to products, services, and locations that the state deems inappropriate. sex? denies... wait a moment, why is this information written here? race and sexuality aren't, so why sex? so when TERFs talk about "defending sex-based rights", not only are they referring to something that has no legal precedent (rights are not "sex-based") - they're also defending the state's power to deny rights based on the "sex" marker in your ID.
in the UK, political parties are pushing for mandatory universal digital identification. queer people ought to know in advance exactly what this will entail.
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