I have not believed in the Canadian politics series for a few years now. So in the year of the Black Pharaoh 2024 I have a thread of longform descriptions of cultures which don't slip in to telling you to be angry about them or scared of them.
Literary magazine The Paris Review on the CIA writers' club
(https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/01/09/invisible-ink-at-the-cias-creative-writing-group/)
Sleuthsayers (https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2023/12/an-early-christmas-present-florence.html) with an article from 1991 which uses the trial of Lizzie Borden paints a word picture of WASP culture as the author imagines it (just note how much the author asserts purely on the basis of intuition, like 'who stole the family jewels before the murders?'
The History of William Marshall on the Battle of Lincoln (1217) (https://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2006/10/joy-of-battle-in-history-of-william.htm)
Edit: Leo Frankowski, of the Polish Engineer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Stargard) novels (modern person goes back to 1240 and saves Poland from the Mongols while acquiring lots of female companionship - yes, some of them were published with Baen Books), was the archetype of a right-wing American sci fi author from the 20th century as his story of how he acquired two Russian wives (https://web.archive.org/web/20060206214937/http:/leofrankowski.com/content/?q=why_i_came_to_russia) shows. I hope his widow got something nice with his money!
Patrick McKenzie talks about the vicious hate that people from different classes, educational backgrounds, and across the urban/rural divide in the USA often feel for one another (https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-business-of-check-cashing/). Just keep in mind that he spent from the late oughties until 2020 living in Japan and he returned as a rich man with very rich friends. So the confidence and feeling of insight are not necessarily backed by recent experience more profound than 'living in San Francisco'.
Quote
One very real reason this type of business exists in the world is to be a firewall between social classes and the businesses that serve them. Check cashing establishments insulate banks, which are indispensable for cashing checks, from needing to talk to certain people.
A check cashing business is "alternative finance." It is alternative to the banking world of smartly dressed middle class employees, free coffee, and firm handshakes.
A check cashing clerk and a bank teller look to many to be similar jobs done by similar people and crucially they are not. Bank tellers do not make much money but know they must present as middle class. They work in a built environment where surveillance is absolutely ubiquitous and where deviant behavior (like using certain prescribed words) will have one referred to an alternative court system for swift and certain punishment.
That is to say: bank tellers work for an American corporation with an HR department. And bank tellers, in their hearts and in their actions, internalize the class that they must, must, must present as. There are classes of people that the bank does not want to do business with. (Banks are, as we have frequently covered, not allowed to say this in as many words.) The tellers do not want to speak to them, either, and this disdain radiates from them as palpable waves.
The clerk at a check cashing business is not a bank teller. She does not disdain talking to poor people; being able to do that in such a way that most poor people end up liking her is her job. Don't take my word for it; take the customers'. We have studied this industry extensively. We ran surveys. The customers keep saying things like "I like my local check cashing place because the girl behind the counter is kind and doesn't judge me like those #%*(#%( at the bank." You can present as being kind to almost all of your customers and be obviously unemployable as a bank teller.
You will deal with thousands of customers. If you use "kind girl behind the counter" language about the 0.01% most aggravating customer once, you will not be a bank teller tomorrow. So bank tellers basically never use those words, and instead can inflect "Can I help you, sir?" in a way which leaves absolutely no doubt as to how welcome the new arrival to the branch is.
I don't know what to do about this other than try to treat people as people and not let myself get recruited by one side in these conflicts. I can't heal 300 million people from a lifetime of real and perceived disrespect. And his theory that bank tellers in the USA learn to perform specific prejudices in specific ways because it seems expected of the kind of person they are pretending to be is very human.
Remember the Canadian Lieutenant-General Trevor Cadieu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Cadieu) who was accused in 2021 of committing sexual assault in 1994/5? Wikipedia claims that he actually went to Ukraine and that an Azov spokesman said that he was besieged in Azovstal but not captured. Charges were stayed in October 2023 on procedural grounds. This is another story which deserves a fuller telling! I think you could separate the story of Cadieu in Ukraine from the story of the awful events in 1994/5 and the subsequent push to keep them quiet (because someone assaulted a fellow cadet even if the courts won't rule on who).
A local paper in Ontario has a long-form piece on a serial swindler who got caught when he appeared on a livestream with a series of hard-right figures and someone matched his face to an earlier alias https://lfpress.com/feature/the-piano-player-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-con-man-with-many-names
Stormy Daniels' life after suing Donald Trump included a ghost-hunting vlog (https://www.youtube.com/@SpookyBabesParanormal) https://www.patheos.com/blogs/fivefoldlaw/2021/06/21/stormy-justice-and-justice-for-stormy/ Ghost hunting and the paranormal appeal to rural older men with less formal education in the USA, so I guess this fits her tours of rural strip clubs? All forms of video rely on putting cute people with melodious voices in front, although you can succeed in any of them without being cute and pleasant-sounding. The trouble with doing so online is that many of the SoCal tech firms keep blacklists of uppity women to suppress (15 years ago it was literal text files which they traded, today its probably a little bit more complex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning)).
Doug Saunders has a journalistic essay from 2015 on the type of people who migrate from Africa and West Asia to Europe (a lot of people with training or education looking to turn a good-life-for-Nigeria into a good life and limited by state policies which make migration an all-or-nothing process rather than something you can try out for a few years) https://www.dougsaunders.net/2016/06/2395/
In a 'Surprised Eel Historian' story Fisheries and Oceans Canada caught someone trying to smuggle 109 kg of chilled eels https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-officials-seize-around-500000-worth-of-elvers-from-toronto-pearson/
The Globe and Mail (older and less politically conservative of the two Toronto papers which call themselves national) has a story about the decline of small prairie hamlets (they call them towns but a few hundred people is only a town in the legal sense) through the lense of the decline of their hotel-bars https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-on-the-rocks-the-death-and-life-of-canadas-little-bars-on-the-prairie/
Narendra Modi has joined the exclusive club with the Kims in North Korea by claiming that he was implanted in his mother's womb by his God to fulfill God's will (I don't know this specific paper and its political position but just as example https://www.telegraphindia.com/elections/lok-sabha-election-2024/prime-minister-narendra-modi-convinced-to-be-emissary-of-god-questions-his-biological-origins/cid/2021726 ) That trope goes back to the Bronze Age!
Quote from: dubsartur on June 06, 2024, 08:15:39 PM
Narendra Modi has joined the exclusive club with the Kims in North Korea by claiming that he was implanted in his mother's womb by his God to fulfill God's will (I don't know this specific paper and its political position but just as example https://www.telegraphindia.com/elections/lok-sabha-election-2024/prime-minister-narendra-modi-convinced-to-be-emissary-of-god-questions-his-biological-origins/cid/2021726 ) That trope goes back to the Bronze Age!
Huh, I hadn't seen this story. It definitely says something about the hubris that doesn't actually seem to have gone down as well with the public as he'd hoped...
The confession that he did not dare say this while his mother was alive is very human.
I wonder what traditions India has similar to demigods in ancient Greece.
Some Hindu deities are certainly very human in some ways - and IIRC there's perhaps more leeway in that tradition for someone to be human but simultaneously being an aspect or avatar-status for a separate divinity, which I don't think is quite as common in Abrahamic, Germanic/Northern European, or Classical mediterranean myths. Rama for example is clearly at least to a large extent a deity, but he's portrayed (again, my limited understanding) as having been born in a city in a kingdom of humans with clear human descent.
I've read the same summaries of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana which other nerds have, but I wonder what there is more recently and creatively in Indian culture? Did any of the Marathas toy with that kind of strategy?
Quote from: dubsartur on June 09, 2024, 01:26:16 AM
I've read the same summaries of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana which other nerds have, but I wonder what there is more recently and creatively in Indian culture? Did any of the Marathas toy with that kind of strategy?
Very good question - sadly not one I'm properly equipped to answer either, my limited reading on Indian history really only goes up to the late medieval period.
Wired has a longform article about OnlyFans chatters (people hired to chat with subscribers, often pretending to be the account owner and often selling them 'premium content' on commission) which is also about job hunting in the age of remote gig work https://archive.ph/Rbz5I
The CBC has a long piece on the fad for raw (ie. unpasteurized) milk https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/raw-milk-alberta-black-market-1.7245538 Canada has very strict restrictions on selling raw milk. Milk-borne diseases such as tuberculosis used to be major killers, and pasteurization is a very simple process that just involves sterile containers and heat.
Quote from: dubsartur on June 13, 2024, 07:45:36 PM
Wired has a longform article about OnlyFans chatters (people hired to chat with subscribers, often pretending to be the account owner and often selling them 'premium content' on commission) which is also about job hunting in the age of remote gig work https://archive.ph/Rbz5I
Of course, AI is now attempting to make these people's job obsolete: I've seen a lot of advertisements on the bad sorts of social media recently for AI chatbots that are designed as 'virtual girlfriend' bots. I guess with image generation AI they can even send you pictures as long as you don't try to count how many fingers they have...
CBC article on contraband tobacco. They grow some tobacco in ON and QC and it used to be said that some reserves on the Canadian-US border smuggled the stuff out of the USA https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-s-contraband-tobacco-trade-not-easily-extinguished-investigators-warn-1.7264039
I feel like I hear a lot less about drugs and contraband issues than I used to. It felt when I was growing up that there was a lot of societal angst about people doing drugs, and politicians spent a lot of time talking about drug gangs and smuggling, and these days I see the occasional story but it just doesn't seem to have the same headline-grab power as it did 15 years ago. Maybe I'm just tuned into different facets of the media, I'm not sure.
Quote from: Jubal on July 23, 2024, 05:22:23 PMI feel like I hear a lot less about drugs and contraband issues than I used to. It felt when I was growing up that there was a lot of societal angst about people doing drugs, and politicians spent a lot of time talking about drug gangs and smuggling, and these days I see the occasional story but it just doesn't seem to have the same headline-grab power as it did 15 years ago. Maybe I'm just tuned into different facets of the media, I'm not sure.
In BC the leading cause of death among young people is tainted substances (https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2024PSSG0054-000872), there are massive arguments about decriminalization, and organized crime is one of two or three major causes of murders. Are things different in the UK? Austria has no ports so the drug import trade is other people's problem but lots of people grow weed, and many roll their own cigarettes.
The police today have less need to respect journalists' power than they did 20 years ago, and most people have read plenty of stories where "we arrested the gang and seized a load of product at 7.55 am Monday, and another gang had taken over their turf and offered a special discount rate by 1 pm." A significant number of news stories about crime were planted by the police.
I think in the UK, decriminalisation is firmly off the table because neither the Labour or Conservative parties support it (people in other countries regularly expect Labour to be a lot less small-c conservative on social issues than it actually is). So that reduces the political side of the debate to occasional fringe discussions around elections. I think lots of people grow and smoke weed, but it's often not something a lot of police resource is focused on unless it's being done on a very industrial scale because the police are too stretched. In any case, I've no idea if the scale of the drug problem in the UK has changed or just the scale and tone of the coverage, either is possible - but it doesn't feel like it's a debate we're having in public a lot right now.
The CBC has some urban archaeology and the story of the time only 55 years ago when contraception was restricted or illegal in Canada https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/condoms-decades-old-found-in-london-ontario-reno-1.7294705 (the linked museum catalogue entry (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_1377447#:~:text=was%20part%20of%20a%20package,by%20a%20stereotypical%20Arabic%20sheik.) talks about the origin of a romance-novel trope, the Sexy Sheikh and his Reluctant Bride)
Pot is legal in Canada, and British Columbia decriminalized small amounts of some other substances but did not bring in a safe supply and there is pushback.
In the Canadian Prairies its very common to work at remote distant sites in mining, forestry, or construction on a "2n days on, n days off" schedule. A mayor is taking this to extremes by working two provinces away while holding down a position as small-town mayor https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/northern-rockies-regional-muicipality-mayor-saskatchewan-1.7368106
A suburban stag has killed a large dog https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/aggressive-deer-kills-dog-in-oak-bay-yard-9747784
How much do Canadian town mayors really do? The position in a small British town is usually honorary and/or at least involves rather little regular work.
Macleans has a long-form piece on the explosion in Canada's rat population and Alberta's success at keeping the pests out https://macleans.ca/society/how-canadas-cities-got-so-repulsively-ratty/
I have never lived anywhere with less than 100,000 people or worked in local government so am not the person to ask about small-town government. Would it help to know that he is mayor of an area four times as big as Wales? https://www.northernrockies.ca/en/our-government/about-us.aspx
Huh, yeah, on this side of the pond there's almost nowhere really between the Atlantic and Siberia/the Steppes where you could describe someone as "small-town local government" while administering an area of that scale! That's enormous. Though also it does have about half the population of Diss, the rural market town where I went to high school. It's very strange as a European to appreciate just how empty some chunks of Canada are.
Also that's a lot more than you'd get at the town or even in some cases county level in the UK: roads and property taxes and stuff are all pretty centralised here though they might have some local components in them. The UK is unusually centralised by European standards though.
Fort Nelson itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Nelson%2C_British_Columbia) has about 3000 residents.
Basically a large chunk of boreal forest got included with BC rather than Alberta by 19th-century mapmakers (further south the border runs along a crest of the Rockies so has some geological validity). Its a very remote area because it has few economic natural resources (its not on the coast so logging is relatively expensive) and because its cut off from the rest of the province by mountains and snow but next to an empty part of northern Alberta.
And yes, Canada has an effective federal system with well-defined separation of powers. Wiki on regional districts might be helpful? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regional_districts_of_British_Columbia
A big issue in BC politics is municipalities etc. not reflecting the reality on the ground, and whether to amalgamate them. Towns and rural areas are often shrinking or in financial trouble due to the decline of fishing and forestry (or their takeover by international capital at the expense of locals and workers) while the big cities of Greater Vancouver and the Capital Regional District have grown to include multiple theoretically independent municipalities as one continuous urban area.
Statistics Canada gives the whole regional district a population around 4k or 5k depending on the state of the local resource industries https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E I think its too far north and too remote for much farming, furs are out of fashion, so there are forestry, mines, and oil/gas (and tourism and hunting).
The issues with farming the north are not just cold and lack of light but also poor soils. There are not huge local markets for produce either.
Yep - whereas Diss, where I went to high school, has about a 10,000 population (this would be big enough that it elects three councillors to its district of South Norfolk, which has a district population of 144,000 or so across an area of 351 square miles: that's quite rural by English standards!).
Norfolk, the county, then has its own council covering the total population of a bit under a million, so there's much less of a jump between district and the next level up, and indeed a lot of English council areas are now "unitary" which is to say there's just one main level of local council below the national government. Norfolk has avoided this partly because 1 million is considered too big for a single unitary council but nobody can agree how to divide Norfolk up - it has about enough people for what successive governments would consider about two unitary councils, but the population concentrations make it really hard to work out any system for bisecting it.
Back to Canada, I do wonder if there'll be more pressure on trying to farm further north, poor soils or no, if crop yields in hotter areas of the Americas (and the world) start dropping nastily with more extreme heat in the coming years.
Kashmiri saffron crops are being ravaged by hungry porcupines https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/4/16/kashmirs-famed-saffron-faces-devastating-new-terror-porcupines
More about the late Edmonton landlord Abdullah Shah and the law's delays (Shah was murdered in 2022, a case about a 2005 arson has just made its way through the courts) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-landlord-abdullah-shah-allegedly-directed-man-charged-in-alberta-avenue-arsons-1.7523404 Canada's courts are notoriously understaffed even though our culture is not very litigious.