SomeInternetBloke wrote: ↑Fri Jun 18, 2021 8:54 pm
ashi wrote: ↑Mon Jun 14, 2021 11:27 am
There are two Canadas (both alike in dignity!), anglo- and francophone...
What is the origin of the stereotype that Canadians are overwhelmingly friendly and polite and Americans are not?
Is it psychological, is it dialectical, is it financial, is it the liveability factor, is it artifact of its European past, is it the harsh weather, is it timidity toward America, is it collectivism, is it conservative laws on weapons, is friendliness specific to anglophone vs the francophone region?
I am not sure I am capable of fielding a convincing answer to this, but in short: It is wholly rooted in American fables/delusions about itself that centre on stereotypes about the few cities/regoins that matter. The American midwest is indistinguishable from anglo Canada outside the densest cities, where everyone is either an asshole, withdrawn around strangers because of the assholes, or in ethnic enclaves that have their own norms.
If you mean from the other side, well ... Canada gets a lot of the most clumsily ignorant Americans because it s far more accessible than anywhere else in the world as you don't need a passport or pesky foreign language skills to enter or navigate. (Americans will wander into Québec, stare blankly at anyone speaking French to them, and complain about signs being in French. (85% of the population speaks French natively. Many more do as a second language. Including the large number of African immigrants.) Something that only baffles me more as time goes on because peopel seem to speak non-English language everywhere in the US that I have been ... specifically, I hear Spanish and Arabic daily.
Which reminds me, I met a cute and clever Colombian lady so I am secretly improving my Spanish after letting it rot for 15 years. What with the ore reserved default setting and, uh, air of passive aggressiveness. It's an acquired taste. Or we are dicks, I don't know.
As for anglo vs francophone Canada. Ehhhh ... I may have to admit that anglo norms probably read as more friendly to Americans.
Utisz wrote: ↑Sat Jun 19, 2021 9:47 pm
The wage stuff I guess must be the result of successful anti-union propaganda or something. I guess it becomes normalised or something?
I have no sense of the timeline, but at present anti-union sentiment is extremely strong. They just take your money for nothing and block changes that would create new jobs. That coupled with the running narrative that you deserve to earn so little money and suffer, because only lazy people stay in those sorts of jobs.
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ashi wrote: ↑Fri Jun 18, 2021 10:03 pm
It is worse than that, though. Both MM-DD-YYYY and DD-MM-YYYY are used in the US, the latter especially appearing on government forms. At work I deal with both ... but our system will only accept MM-DD-YYYY, so I am regularly reading "correct" dates, thinking nothing of it, and entering them only to be hit with an "invalid date" errors. America!
Wat. Like what do you do with a date like 12-11-2021? That must be the cause of all sorts of problems.
Same as any other date. Enter it as written, which is either accepted or returns an error, in the case of the latter: enter with the first two values transposed. What could possibly go wrong.
Don't worry, though, it doesn't actually matter because the dates in question don't ever matter which is why no effort was made to ensure they are recorded correctly.
I wonder are young people in the U.S., say in their twenties, really a lot more liberal and "woke" than the later generations? Like will this neo-liberalism in the U.S. eventually "die out" to a certain extent, at least in electoral terms? Will Texas and the like turn blue in the next years?
They are only more liberal if you mean "obsessed with developing and organising around dubious micro-identities at the cost of class analysis and collective action". There is no longer any meaningful left in the US or Canada, and I'm not going to cheer for neoliberalism in pink hair and a pride T-shirt just because the only alternative is slightly worse. Liberals, mostly liberal men, have spent the last 50 years waiting for the problem people to die out while becoming them because in general, men grow more conservative as they age while women grow more radical and ignored/marginalised.
Right now, what the super woke endlessly self-congratulatory young people are doing in not voting at all while harassing reporters and candidates for the tiniest perceived misstep and comparing feminists to nazis for suggesting things like "women are oppressed on the basis of their sex". Which I realise sounds insane, but I have spent the last ten years watching feminists be harassed and attacked as these loons are increasingly brazen and free to protest any feminist event, and even libraries for carrying their books, with impunity. I have no hope for or faith in any of these assholes.