Cultures are Weird

[dubsartur]

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


Sleuthsayers 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)

Edit: Leo Frankowski, of the Polish Engineer 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 shows.  I hope his widow got something nice with his money!

[dubsartur]

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.  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'. 

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.

[dubsartur]

Remember the Canadian Lieutenant-General 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).

[dubsartur]

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

[dubsartur]

Stormy Daniels' life after suing Donald Trump included a ghost-hunting vlog 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).

[dubsartur]

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/

[dubsartur]

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/

[dubsartur]

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!

[Jubal]

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...

[dubsartur]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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?

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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

[dubsartur]

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.