ashi wrote: ↑Sat Jun 19, 2021 11:34 pm
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.
This also (pleasantly) surprised me in New York. Was there with a Chilean PhD student whose English is not so good, but to whom I am grateful because when I first arrived to Chile, he would speak Spanish to me when hardly nobody else would. Anyways, we were speaking Spanish a lot in New York and it surprised me that a lot of (non-hispanic) people would talk to us in Spanish. Like waiters and waitresses in restaurants and stuff. Kinda broke a stereotype for me that a lot of (non-hispanic, non-Asian) folks in the U.S. are monolingual.
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.
If I understand the lay of the land correctly, there was a lot of union corruption, and the old-school unions were often intertwined with mob-ish influences, or at least with more mundane forms of corruption. This has muddied the waters considerably regarding unions?
My perspective of unions in the U.S. is also influenced a bit by police unions, which I perceive to be influential, but in a harmful way, kinda like those unions relating to those with power amplify that power, but unions to represent the powerless don't even exist?
That's a huge pity. The lack of collective bargaining in the U.S. seems to create a huge power imbalance.
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.
My overall impression is/was that those obsessed with micro-identities are overly amplified in social media, relative to the actual representation, also amplified by the right. Like a lot of ire (like CRT) is really a thing invented by the right to broadly paint the left with?
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.
It reminds me of something I heard about U.S. politics like the people on the right will vote for the devil if they lean towards any of the shibboleth policies (anti-abortion, pro-guns, etc.), whereas the left are looking to fall in love and will hate anyone who makes the slightest misstep.
starjots wrote: ↑Sun Jun 20, 2021 6:45 am
We are going to attend a kid's 'real' wedding in Mexico, I hope, this September. My wife is concerned about how formal they may or may not be - my daughter-in-law's family comes from Mexico City and are much more sophisticated than we are.
I'd say that they locals won't really care. I mean inevitably they will put it down to cultural differences, and probably they are also concerned about making y'all at home.
This was a thing for my brother's wedding as well. He got married to someone from Malaysia, and her father owns several hospitals there, or something, very well to do, whereas my family is from rural Ireland. I dunno. I think most of those sorts of problems are invented in people's own heads.