SSCReader
6d ago
It generally corresponds with scale and culture, and is much more the case in
Absolutely it can I agree. But even in a small tea shop in the Cotswolds if you go in, and ask them how the labor relations are between management and staff, after saying you don't want to buy anything, I'm not sure you'll get much of an answer.
SSCReader
6d ago
inhumanity of the fact that two 'normal' people can't talk anymore about current events because of...all the stuff you just said
Setting aside whether she might get fired, it is entirely human not to want to talk to random strangers about things at your job. Being a neighbor is just geographical proximity. Even is she lived next door she may not want to talk to you about anything and that is very human. Especially if she can detect the disdain in which you hold her.
If you want her to act as you think a neighbor should then you need to make an effort to not judge her like:
"almost comically short and fat, like a cube. Her hair was greasy, thin, obviously unwashed, and would've benefited from a cut some months ago. She was curt, bordering on rude, asking what I wanted. When I told her I wasn't necessarily interested in ordering anything, but was very much interested in her thoughts on the 'strike' et al she gave me a stare that made a cow look intelligent."
Is this how you describe the people you want to form a neighborly community with? Is this how you talk about them? Never once in your vent did you speculate that your neighbor maybe overworked and underpaid, that she might be working multiple jobs, that she might have a point in what she did, that perhaps she picked up on your immediate reaction to seeing her. You described her entirely in a negative fashion. You called her a soulless NPC.
Why should she act like a neighbor to you? Did you act like a neighbor to her? You didn't even buy a coffee at the place she works, you went out of entirely selfish reasons and on the very first time you met her, asked her a badly thought through question. You didn't start with small talk about the weather or any of the other socially acceptable ways we have of building rapport.
If you want to have a neighborly community, then you need to start treating people like your friendly neighbors. Not treating them like sources of information to satisfy your curiosity, going into their place of business with no intention of buying anything. You admitted below you should have at least bought something, so that is a start. You skipped over a whole bunch of steps in the making friendly neighbors dance, and then are confused when she doesn't treat you like one.
When a guy moves in next door, he is not automatically your friendly neighbor you can ask possibly difficult questions to, because of geography, you have to build that relationship before you ask "Hey, your employer is having a labor dispute, what is the real skinny on that real quick?" You invite him over for a bbq, you ask if you can help him move in, you lend him your lawnmower, tell him where the best bar is. We have social conventions and rules and structures for a reason. They are crucial in building relationships.
So make up your mind, was she a soulless dumb fat cow? Or was she a neighbor you want to build a real communal relationship with? If she read what you said about her, do you think it is likely to make her want to treat you more like a friendly neighbor or less likely?
SSCReader
6d ago
I was happy to buy a coffee and buy one for the employee, or one of her colleagues, for their candid take on current events. I am their neighbor, at least, on paper. This entire conversation is satanic.
Note that is not what you said in your OP! You never mentioned anything about telling her you were willing to offer anything in return.
"When I told her I wasn't necessarily interested in ordering anything, but was very much interested in her thoughts on the 'strike' et al she gave me a stare that made a cow look intelligent."
But you are not their neighbor. That implies they know you already. You are a stranger. A potential customer. This is their place of work, not a place to make friends. As an ex customer service worker myself I really want to stress this. People suck to deal with. The workers generally don't want to make friends with you. They want you to engage in the transaction that they are being paid for, so they can earn their money and go home. It is not their job to give you their take on current events about their business. Especially with the possibility their job is at risk.
If you want to reorganize society such that a Starbucks employee giving their honest opinion at work to a random customer, means they do not risk being fired for it, then go ahead and work on that, but note that still does not mean they have to engage with you on anything outside the service they are being paid to deliver to you. Your relationship is transactional. Nothing more. The barista is not your friend, she is not even an acquaintance. She sees hundreds of people every day. Some of whom are nice and some of whom are unpleasant. She likely just wants to get through her mind numbing shift as easily as possible.
If you want to talk to someone who is off duty and make that same offer, then you have a bit more leeway. They aren't on the clock, they are probably a bit more relaxed, not being measured by their productivity, not having other employees over their shoulder, so many customer service employees will be much more happy to give you the truth (though they may still be suspicious if you come across as a journalist in a situation where there is a national protest or something going on).
SSCReader
6d ago
For asking a question that you should have known if she answered may have got her fired? Back in my customer service days I'd have just rolled my eyes and ignored you, and called for the next person, as you had already said you didn't want to buy anything. Perfect plausible deniability for me. Then bitched about you to a colleague once you left. You'd probably make the "Can you believe what this customer did?" list when winding down after work. You may not have been at the top of the list. There are a lot of customers who do unbelievable things after all, but you'd probably have been on it.
To recap you walked into a retail establishment, to ask a contentious question about a labor dispute to a basic barista out loud in the open, where anyone could hear, and apparently did not consider that the barista would have been gambling that you weren't a snitch or that anyone overheard her, and expected her to answer. That is probably not your finest hour to put it mildly.
I don't think you thought through the consequences of what might have happened from her point of view. And therefore you are entitled to her scorn. That she kept it professional is to her credit. You are entitled to be treated professionally when ordering a latte or asking where they source their soy milk from. When you ask questions, the answers to which might get someone fired, you are off that reservation, and out on your own. She is not paid to answer those questions. It was rude of you to ask. Therefore rudeness back should be your expectation.
SSCReader
6d ago
When I told her I wasn't necessarily interested in ordering anything, but was very much interested in her thoughts on the 'strike' et al she gave me a stare that made a cow look intelligent. When she told me she didn't have anything to say about that, and would I like to order anything, I asked for a glass of water and if she'd mind if asked one of her colleagues instead.
Why would you expect a random employee to answer you honestly on a question that is obviously contentious with her employer and may get her fired if you are recording her or from management? Your "just for fun" is her job, and for a working class person can be very precarious. Retail workers are not dancing monkeys, especially when you weren't even going to buy anything or tip her!
I'd say the fact she treated you professionally is more than you had any right to expect, given your approach. She may well have looked at you and was judging YOUR intelligence for asking such a question right there in the open.
Welcome to Starbucks - we hate people who ask questions that might get us fired (and aren't even going to tip), seems like an entirely reasonable position.
Honestly you come off as being very entitled here. Did you even consider that if she did answer you and was reported she might get in trouble or lose her job, or that she might worry about that? Would that be worth sating your desire for an anthropological survey, with absolutely nothing to gain for her? Heck anthropologists at least brought shiny beads to gift their subjects!
As for Starbucks itself, it's overpriced but the benefit is as with all chains that you know roughly what you are going to get. The little Ethiopian coffee shop down the road is probably better, but may not have such a broad selection, is much more variable and harder to find.
SSCReader
27d ago
I have not watched all their output, but I would say Humphries was the least risque, Mrs Browns Boys does have a lot of adult humor and vulgarity and the like and may be more of a match for O'Grady's non-primetime stuff. Some say: "With its emphasis on profanity, drag, vulgar sexual humour, physical clowning and sentimental family values, Mrs Brown’s Boys is a show that unashamedly taps into an end-of-the-pier comedy tradition"
Mrs Brown: I remember one night, me and Redser, walking along the beach at Portmarnock. He started chasing me into the sand dunes…so I was lying there, I said (flirtatious, sexy voice), ‘What do you want?’ (laughs remembering). He said I want your knickers around your ankles (flirtatious laugh). I had to get my feckin’ handbag and put them on!"
SSCReader
27d ago
But also did appear as Lily Savage on Breakfast programs and primetime television shows. Pantomime humor from Panto dames is built heavily on innuendo and adult jokes that go over children's heads, but can entertain their parents. Lily Savage was very close to this, just dialled up a notch. Seriously go on Youtube and pull up Blankety Blank which was a primetime show. They call it risque but it's just the same kind of innuendo you would find in panto. Now it is on a spectrum and Savage is more crude than a panto dame at his worst, but he settled into a fairly generic prime time career.
Lily Savage's prime time persona was fairly tame. Whether the actor playing the character is gay or not has no real impact on what the character said. Indeed O'Grady himself was much tamer than Savage in his TV persona once he switched out. He himself made the point he only dressed as a woman for money, just like Humphries et al.
SSCReader
27d ago
Lily Savage (Paul O'Grady) was a pretty standard Drag Queen until they broke out to become a prime time TV star with what was essentially a panto dame performance. So some crossover at least. I'd say panto dames certainly used to be what I would call a sub culture, I don't think it is as big a thing as it used to be though.
Drag brunches tend to be PG (with some light innuendo) and remind me pretty heavily of panto dame performances, which is what made me think of it.
SSCReader
27d ago
Pantomime dames in the UK/Australia, which leads into crossdressimg comedians/entertainers like Dame Edna Everage and Mrs Brown?
SSCReader
29d ago
Ahh no harm at all done, it's hard enough keeping track of peoples politics let alone their personal histories!
SSCReader
29d ago
Not unless we're counting being a senior civil servant as a disgusting job!
I have slaughtered and cleaned animals on my grandfathers farm and mucked out cowsheds and unblocked septic tanks and the like but I was never paid for that. Just part of my upbringing with a mostly rural family.
SSCReader
1mo ago
After all, the first question St Peter asks you is "What was your GDP?"
Milton Friedman outcompeted St Peter in efficiency, by leveraging capitalist incentives, now like entering New Vegas you need to have proof of wealth. Turns out you CAN take it with you.
SSCReader
1mo ago
We should write in ways that do not feed the wolf of anger, as the old parable goes. We should write such that others are not explicitly excluded. But there's no way to avoid all the possible tripwires.
Nope, but we can get most of them. It's not that difficult, I don't think. And the main issue that gets people banned is they don't even try as far as I can see. It's just the same repetitive reflexive boo outgroup stuff.
But I disagree above, we can in fact overcome those gulfs. And in fact if you find it makes you resentful that is (in my opinion) part of the problem. It doesn't make me resentful when I have to rephrase something so I don't offend a Christian or a white nationalist. Why should it? I WANT them to read and engage. I want to hear from them, so spending a bit of time to hopefully increase their engagement is a positive thing in my mind.
Letting go of all of the emotional baggage of what people do outside of this space, is I think key. Treat it as its own world. Even if 99.9% of gay librarians or white nationalists would just yell or seethe, we are writing for those who come here and want to engage. Don't resent rewriting your words, that's the whole point of the space. See how well you can predict those you disagree with, if you have a good understanding of them, then you should be able to do well in reducing heat, if you don't, then that's the other thing this space is for!
I've been here and back when we were on Reddit for years, and I don't think I have ever even picked up a mod warning let alone a ban. I am sure I will at some point, but avoiding the most obvious boo outgroup stuff, and wording that is likely to enrage or annoy your opponents is fairly easy. You just have to want to spend the time and energy to do it. Regardless of (to go back to my original point) how much you hate or despise or think they will be ungrateful, or wouldn't do the same in reverse. Do it for you, not for them. Because you want the conversation that might result. Those moments when you can for a second connect with someone you think is entirely wrong about the world and might even be harming it, when you can see through their eyes for just a second. Even if they never see through yours.
What we do here has no impact on the outcome of the culture war, there are no stakes. It's just for the love of the game.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Several years experience and the fact we're on our... third? fourth? retreat location is indicative that there are, in fact, absolutely zero ways to write complaints in a way a progressive gay librarian would want to engage with.
That does not follow. Just because there would not be many doesn't mean there are none. We are all unusual here in one way or another. After all I consider myself on the left and I am here. And we have had people farther to the left of me. Most white nationalists probably don't want to post here either. And very few Red Tribe normie conservatives. But we should want them as well.
And if that means hewing close to our mission statement and "writing as if everyone else is reading and we want them to be included." then I am more than happy to do it.
Otherwise we aren't doing anything here we couldn't do on Red State or Truth Social.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Yeah, and it is a useful distinction, even if its not a perfect set of descriptors. Which is why I often try and oush back towards Scott's formulation. Even if that is a losing battle.
And there's nothing wrong with being a Blue Tribe conservative, but in general that conservatism is not exactky like Red Tribe conservatism so we're missing a pretty important part of America's "voice".
SSCReader
1mo ago
Right, one of the issues with keeping the Red Tribe going is they are (or were) supporters of their kids going to college. I've mentioned before how miners and steel workers in small town America don't necessarily want their kids to do those jobs because they know how dangerous and back breaking they can be. Now I think they're more interested in the perceived benefits of getting a degree (better, easier, less body destroying jobs) but they are to sn extent the architect of their own destruction, by buying into that part of the American dream. If you send your kids off to college in bigger towns and cities, some of them will get assimilated, and stay and some will choose to stay for those better jobs. So even before neoliberalism crushed the steel and mining sectors, they were on a slow steady road to decline.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Your corner (and in fact many or most corners) may be reasonable but a large enough chunk of it is not reasonable that it causes real problems and for those of us who have seen it - .....well burning everything to the ground doesn't sound terribly unreasonable.
That's fair! But if it is many or most corners that are reasonable, then presumably it makes sense for people in those corners to oppose you burning down the whole thing, even if they don't think you should be treated the way you are.
If it's 80% bad and 20% good that is one thing overall but if it is 20% bad and 80% good then that is entirely another. Whether you're in the bad or good part it's hard to tell which overall world we are actually living in.
SSCReader
1mo ago
If we're going by this analogy, I'd say it's far more accurate to say that wokeness is a sort of autoimmune disease on the antibody
Sure I can see that as being a workable analogy. We could probably argue about how much is positive or negative, but I can absolutely see there are at least some negative parts. A mutation of the antibodies which means it attacks not only what it is supposed to attack but also other parts of the body maybe.
Like, even if you have an auto-immune disease, your immune system is still doing some useful things, it's just also attacking your gut or brain or whatever.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Over the last several thousand years society has developed an insufficient but ultimately extant immune system for dealing with overreach by religions. That's an infectious memeplex that leads to lack of introspection and hypocrisy and all kinds of bad outcomes. We are reasonably good at dealing with that.
I don't think this is exactly true really. There are still large swathes of America who haven't rejected the older infectious memeplexes in your terminology. Wokeness is a reaction to that memeplex and is part of the antibody response to further your analogy, it's actually part of the dealing with the overreach. That those antibodies continue to attack the infection is exactly what they should do (from the point of view of the antibody). The infection is perhaps contained somewhat but it isn't from the point of view of an immune response actually eradicated. It's not even really like shingles in that is dormant. It's still actively influencing the host.
And this is where the analogy breaks I think, because it's not possible for wokeness to "win" completely. At some point it will push too far and ebb. That may or may not be already starting to happen. And whatever immune response forms to fight that, will rise and then push too far, then ebb and so on and so forth.
Would it be better to have a kind of symbiosis instead of this push and pull mechanic? Probably, but I don't really see a path to that.
SSCReader
1mo ago
guess what I'm getting at is that there seems to be an assumption that certain good attributes are definitionally associated with woke politics and the greater left as far as some are concerned, and some of that drifts into beliefs of competence and descriptions of such. Likewise bad attributes can never apply to team blue.
I think that is just a failure state of all belief systems, like when I came "out" as an atheist, I heard a lot of "but you're a good person, how can you want to be an atheist" and the like, and many Christians say they don't think atheists can be moral people at all. That is basically the same argument you are getting.
If I think my values are good (and I must otherwise I would not hold them) then someone holding different, especially opposite values must be bad, otherwise they would hold my values instead. It's a failure state, I would agree, but a very common one. I elected not to reveal I was an atheist when I moved to a small Red town to avoid that exact scenario.
It's more of a problem for you because your industry is by the sound of it very Blue and one where we expect people to actually care. If you are pattern matched to a group that is seen to care about (for example) gay people less, then it doesn't take much of a push to expect you to treat some people worse than others. Because historically some people in your grouping have treated gay people badly. Even if of course, you personally would not.
Everyone wants to think they are good, therefore anyone who disagrees is at that the very least not good and at the worst actually bad. This is exacerbated by tribal politics and can grow from even small disagreements. See my own homeland where even two sects of Christians ended up murdering and discriminating against each other, even though to any outside view their differences in religion are much smaller than their similarities. Even though both their faiths say do not murder. They can rationalize it away, because they're bad Fenians or bad Prods.
SSCReader
1mo ago
What appearance and demographics if you would you mind sharing? I'm a straight white, relatively tall, big blonde/red bearded white man and I've never perceived anything like that. The default assumption is anyone here is Blue as far as I can tell. (Which is an issue but a slightly different one, I think)
Now as soon as I open my mouth its clear I'm British not American and that often surprises people. And when I do talk about my history and my family being essentially rednecks it surprises them more because they seem to have the idea all Europeans are quasi-communists.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Hmm, No, as I don't think he was a perfect exemplar, just the closest we have here in a specifically online unusual space. Just because most Blues don't want to farm, doesn't mean none of them do, they are still Blues even if unusual.
None of my neighbors have ever mentioned Hobbes for example. But their fundamental ideas seem to match his reasonably well even if he backs his up with more of a philosophical bent.
You don't have to know anything about Hobbes to have ideas that match. Whether it's because you worked it out yourself or the culture you were brought up in taught you something similar without ever talking about Enlightenment philosophy specifically. I don't know that many Blues outside of academia would know much about Mill either.
My grandfather didn't know Hobbes from Paine from Locke but his thoughts on human nature and people being selfish and violent if not restrained mesh pretty well.
Philosophers do not have exclusivity on making observations about people. They just write about it more. As opposed to my grandfather who kept a shotgun under his bed and wrote very little that wasn't accounting for his farm.
He'd probably have thought Hobbes should have got a real job, and that he was making basic observations sound fancier than they were. But he would roughly have agreed about the fundamental nature of men.
Having said that, he wasn't against learning. He asked my father who was a maths teacher to help him with his books and towards the end of his life, investments because he said an educated man doesn't have to break his back. He left money to help pay for my kids to go to university. He valued useful knowledge.
I don't know if I would call it anti-intellectual as much as pro-practical. And of course generalizing elides that people are varied even between cultures or tribes.
Does that make more sense?
SSCReader
1mo ago
The frustration I think everyone's feeling with this discussion is that while what you're saying is true in a certain way and for certain sample of people, it applies to almost no one here.
Because most people here are not actually Red Tribe conservatives. We're mostly Blue Tribers and Blue Tribe dissidents (or Grey Tribe). Hlynka's conservatism was closer to the Red Tribe people I know in person than to most of the conservatives we have here I think, (particularly in being hostile to HBD), but he was pretty unusual compared to the median Motte poster.
Not really, I'm from Northern Ireland, and I lived in England for a long while, so those are the places I know best. My insight into the South of Ireland is likely to be slightly superficial. I was raised Protestant so I don't have a lot of close links south of the border.
Dublin, I know is expensive and its likely immigration is contributing to that, and I think the Irish government much like the English has been reasonably pro-immigration for some time, so I'd imagine its the same pressures driving resentment as elsewhere. The Gardai don't to my knowledge have much of a reputation for unnecessary brutality, but they are part of the establishment and its very easy for an us vs them mentality to result in overreaction. To see the mass of people not the individuals.
@FtttG may have more local knowledge.
I appreciate your kind words by the way.
I'm a neo-liberal capitalist with a twist actually. And it was very nice of you with the gas station worker, bit that illustrates my point. You built a relationship with her over time then she could ask you for a favor.
You can't speedrun the relationship.
Danish Miss Teen America (?) takes your order sure. Try asking a French waiter a stupid question though. Norms are different in different places at different time for different people. You have to learn to navigate the ones in front of you. Not the ones you wish there were.
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