Sticking to his economic prescriptions, I'm confused.
It's seems to be basically
1a. punish bankers
1b. get the global economic elite out of American politics
2. ??
3. then the profits of capitalism will be more fairly distributed to ordinary folks.
The logical and consistent thing in slot 2 is "tax the rich", but that's anathema to him (since that's what both Trump and the Tea Party say, movements that he has been expressly supportive of). So if slot 2 is not "tax the rich" then what the hell is it?
It's really too bad that he's bugfuck insane, because he's smart enough and knows enough to make sense for just long enough to convince a lot of people that he's a deep thinker rather than a straight-up crazy person, and that's all it takes to make him the leading intellectual in Trumpworld.
1 has it. He wants 'hard-nosed' 'Reaganesque' capitalism, but also wants less cronyism and more redistribution does not compute.
He wants crony capitalism where the profits are distributed among all white Christians and withheld from everyone else.
To the OP, the west is in fact fighting a long bloody war with (a subset of) Islam and has been since the 1980s; and I think we can agree that that subset has to be beaten. What Bannon presumably doesn't recognize is how small the subset and the war actually are, and that the crusades he references aren't at all the right model for winning that war.
5: Which he somehow never gets round to mentioning. He also conflates working- and middle-class all the time, and calls these people the base of the Tea Party, which is in fact based on middle- and upper-class retirees. Incoherence top to bottom. Standardly fascist, but also standardly Republican.
Further the which, interesting how he talks incessantly of the "Judaeo-Christian West" while also continually blowing anti-Semitic dogwhistles about the cosmopolitan crony capitalists at Goldman Sachs. Also how how he namechecks "Judaeo-Christian" wars against Islam, the most famous of which warmed up by killing all the Jews in the Rhineland and cooled off by killing all the Jews in Jerusalem.
Further 7, he also contrasts crony capitalism and Randian capitalism (ie. tea party capitalism) with some undefined 'Christian' capitalism which rewarded entrepreneurs and distributed gains evenly. Inasmuch as such a thing ever existed, it was created by postwar Christian Democrats in Europe (does not mix with tea parties). He does actually have a point in that Christianity used to have concepts like charity and humility, but these qualities are again totally missing from his actual supporters.
1) The countries are very specific and limited, they could have plausibly have included Tunisia, Lebanon, and Pakistan without huge pushback. Not by any means all Islamic countries, not all sources of terrorism, they are six "failed states" (without adequate border controls) that we are currently militarily involved with, and could plausibly attack or discover as an imminent threat.
With one obvious and startling exception: Iran
2) Bannon can have either his Crusades and Clash of Civilizations with cosmopolitanism and Empire, or a White Nationalist America. But not both. The world will not cooperate to give him both, and he should know it.
3) NSC changes + immigration restrictions from easy targets/potential enemies = imminent event (or false flag) and I will be shocked if we don't see one in a month.
4) I have a lot of trouble putting Trump's + Putin's + Bannon's geopolitics or Islamic enemies/allies in any kind of sane mix. I suppose they could come down on Shia Islam while leaving Alawite Syria to Putin/Erdogan. But Iran and Hezbollah...aw fuck it.
5) I can't explain his economics either.
10.4 I'm sure once Flynn gets into the mix that will clarify things.
||
In fact, Nixon was in a drunken stupor, and Kissinger was managing the Middle East crisis as a one-man show, ignoring the president. When Nixon woke up on October 25, he rescinded the alert and sent a personal conciliatory response to Brezhnev.Lots more of that shit coming down the pike!
Let's not cast aside the good parts of drunken stupors.
Trump doesn't drink, so there's that.
A lot of his spiel is just Chesterton and bad meth
That would be my guess. Meth, cocaine, or bath salts.
15: hardly. Basically the only reason Chesterton didn't like Muslims is that they didn't drink.
Right. But there are other religions that have the same views, such as Mormonism and Liver Conditions.
He wrote an entire novel about the Muslim menace. Focused on the non-drinking, but going in all sorts of racist directions. I'm stupidly fond of Chesterton anyway, but anyone who wasn't Christian and of European origin sent him into insane fits of despicable hysteria.
C. S. Lewis managed to write a whole novel about the Muslim menace and not mention non-drinking. Possibly because the protagonists were children, but probably not.
Because he had Bacchus getting drunk off his ass in another of his books with protagonists who were children.
I feel like there is a distinction to be made between C.S. Lewis and Bannon on colossal-asshole-or-not grounds, but hey, prove me wrong.
Trump doesn't drink, so there's that.
Possibly one of the few presidents where it would be better if he were blackout drunk most of the time.
19: what was the Chesterton novel? I might be looking to maintain my infuriation levels.
It will take a lot of effort for Bannon to do worse than C. S. Lewis did to Susan in The Last Battle.
"Everyone's suffering [in] the Holocaust"
"If we could wipe [the Holocaust] off the history books, we would, but we can't" Reince Priebus
I guess because the secretary of education doesn't have control over textbooks?
I used to think the European bans on Nazi symbols and Holocaust denial and such were excessive: it's just a few cranks, they get refuted, the effort of refutation just makes thinking society stronger. But people are so stupid and vicious that no, it turns out you do actually have to police thoughts if you don't want to end up with thought police. And now these fuckers have trolled me into writing quasi-koans. Assholes.
The Bannon link is super-interesting, but I'm not sure it can be read as some kind of sincere discussion of his policy preferences. I mean, the single most salient fact about the entire Trump administration -- and Bannon in particular -- is complete shamelessness about dishonesty.
For instance, will Bannon be a voice in favor of Dodd-Frank, or against? From what he says here, clearly he feels that the financial system is subject to insufficient regulatory oversight.
I don't buy it.
Does anyone think that Bannon is reluctant to endorse racism, and that he is sincere in believing that racism will eventually be purged from the movement?
He gives up the game here, when he talks about how regular folks are rebelling against corporate capitalism worldwide.
Modi's great victory was very much based on these Reaganesque principles, so I think this is a global revolt, and we are very fortunate and proud to be the news site that is reporting that throughout the world.
I don't know about Modi, but I've never heard anyone make a plausible case that Reagan was anything but a supporter of corporate capitalism. See also Bannon's defense of Putin, for all his faults, as being better than the impending caliphate.
I was thinking of Chesterton's anti-capitalism as well as the attitude to Islam, but I think Lepanto goes some way beyond a mere objection to teetotalism:
"Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye, 45
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be,
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,--
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And while I know that it's absurd to think of a man who made his fortune in Goldman Sachs as a serious anti-capitalist, you have to remember that this talk was delivered for a Catholic audience, and the Church thinks that it can do capitalism better than the capitalists.
And Chesterton's vision of the fruits of capitalism going to the honest decent gentile small businessman/farmer/craftsman is I think one of the things that appeals to the republican base. It's the 1930s version of getting the government off our backs.
8: when you say, "continually blowing anti-Semitic dogwhistles about the cosmopolitan crony capitalists at Goldman Sachs," you're referring to passages like this:
"[T]he working men and women in the world ... are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos. A group of kind of -- we're not conspiracy-theory guys, but there's certainly -- and I could see this when I worked at Goldman Sachs -- there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado, and they have more of this elite mentality that they're going to dictate to everybody how the world's going to be run."
Coming from Bannon, it's indefensible, and you're definitely right. If that statement came from an African American Democrat from Louisville, would you still read it as an anti-Semitic dogwhistle?
29 and 30: good points.
If that statement came from an African American Democrat from Louisville, would you still read it as an anti-Semitic dogwhistle?
In isolation, I still would. If it were in the context of a consistently socialist/redistributionist/anticapitalist speech, maybe not -- what makes it really pop as anti-Semitism is the distinction in Bannon's head between good capitalists and bad New Yorkers who are more loyal to their own kind overseas than to middle America. Opposing rich people and the financial industry generally isn't anti-Semitic. Using international/New Yorker elites as a stand-in for how you tell the bad rich people from the good ones is anti-Semitic.
Second 35. Another thing he does is to conflate cosmopolitanism with the financial elite, which is grossly misleading.
35: thanks. A distinction that makes Chuck Koch good but Dave Koch bad is pretty weird. Last summer, I experienced an upper-middle-class coastal-living immigrant sneering at "Bumfuck, Indiana" in terms of sites she has to visit for work. That seemed problematic for more than just the homophobia, but I'm not sure how to express it.
I'm a little testy right now, but is this really the time for another round of "The real problem is that coastal elites have contempt for the heartland?"
Also, I'm as sensitive as your average bleeding heart to language, but homophobia? Really?
36: in that most cosmopolitans are not billionaires, or in that most billionaires are not cosmopolitan? Or is it that anti-Semites often use both of the terms "cosmopolitan" and "financial elite" as dogwhistles?
39: Most cosmopolitans are not billionaires. Specifically, not part of the world-destroying financial elite. Whether most billionaires are cosmopolitans is actually an interesting question.
I always thought of "Bumfuck, &place." as an anti-rural slur. Usually employed by somebody rural, but not quite as rural as people from Bumfuck.
I've always heard it as East Bumfuck. Or West Bumfuck. Which is like even more out in the sticks rural than just plain old Bumfuck.
It's both anti-rural and IME sort of juvenile, which makes me agree that like much of the casual stigma/joking about anal sex there are homophobic undertones. But I'm also sitting and thinking about which Indiana cities might reasonably qualify.
Probably quicker to think of which don't.
I've usually heard it as Bumblefuck, implying cussed stupidity.
Originated as a Tom Cruise line in Rain Man, didn't it? It was just Bumblefuck MO. Or maybe that was just a reuse not origin.
I certainly heard it before I ever heard of Tom Cruise.
Clearly nothing ever said by Maverick could be homophobic.
I think Bumblefuck is euphemistic for Bumfuck, and that the latter is the original. And that it was probably homophobic in origin, but is bleached enough in usage that I wouldn't worry about it all now unless I got the impression that anyone particularly objected on those grounds.
but is bleached enough in usage
heh.
50: That's what the mean by "anal bleaching".
People around here say, "Bumfuck, Egypt." I found that both odd and offensive, but when I asked people about it, it was evident they hadn't given it a great deal of thought.
38: ogged posted an article with a main point being "coastal elites have contempt for the heartland." If you think that topic should not be discussed right now, take it up with him. Personally, I find the posted article confusing, and I'm trying to see what's left if I remove any parts that could be valid. I've experienced coastal, upper-middle-class+ people turn up their noses at flyover country, so I want to distinguish dogwhistles from valid coastal vs. flyover dynamics.
53: That's the way I heard it. Perhaps it has to do with Cairo, Illinois?
54: I don't understand the point you're trying to make at all. Someone you know who you describe as an immigrant but who speaks absolutely colloquial English said something dismissive about rural Indiana, and that leads to Bannon's ravings about a war on Islam... how? I'm not so much disagreeing with you, as completely failing to understand what you're saying.
54/56: In the linked piece, Bannon says a lot of things that sound reasonable (about financial regulation, say), but the overall package is totally incoherent.
I want to distinguish dogwhistles from valid coastal vs. flyover dynamics.
Further to
If that statement came from an African American Democrat from Louisville, would you still read it as an anti-Semitic dogwhistle?
If you're looking to separate wheat from chaff, it's easy enough to rail against finance without talking about Goldman Sachs Goldman Sachs Goldman Sachs, which impressionistically is mentioned far more often than its actual insidiousness warrants. Gentile sounding JPMorganChase/Barclays/UBS Warburg/Citibank were just as culpable, if not more so. Goldman IIRC was actually smart enough to get out without needing a bailout.
I think Bumblefuck is euphemistic for Bumfuck, and that the latter is the original.
I always assumed that Bumfuck was derived from Country Bumpkin.
58.last: Yes, that's an excellent point. (Although I will always treasure the reparsing of it as Gold Man-Sacks.)
Goldman IIRC was actually smart enough to get out without needing a bailout.
Are you implying this is because they're JEWISH?
They are a wise and prudent people.
Since you're here, Heebie, may I suggest reading group posts be moved to Wednesdays? I think Mondays tend to get swamped with posts.
Jesus saves. Moses invests. Moses Malone delivers, except that was Karl Malone.
Also, I'm confused by calling one of the main points of the Bannon interview that coastal elites have contempt for the heartland. I'm sure Bannon's said this sort of thing elsewhere, plenty, but in this interview he stuck pretty closely to financial elites do not serve the financial interests of the middle class -- phrased in a wacky, paranoid, xenophobic kind of way, but about money, not interpersonal insults, unless I missed something.
Am I up next week? I've lost track.
Lw is up next. Then Nathan, me, then you.
We're so amicable when we aren't fighting about stuff. Like the Gauls in Asterix.
I barely got through the fourth paragraph of Bannon's remarks. The world wars were both just one struggle between the Christian, capitalist west and the Far East? Huh?
I think people are parsing it too closely to find the "Real" problem with it. The real problem with it is, he uses populist rhetoric and then pushes policies that are neutral if not completely antithetical to any populist cause, except to the extent that nativism is a populist cause.
I know lots of people with no connection to any elite, unless I count as the elite myself. I don't know any Iowans or Indianans, and if they're the only part of the heartland we care about, I don't know what their problem is, no offense Thorn. But plenty of rural and suburban people in other states have no problem perceiving that it's rough for the little guy and the global elite hasn't done a great job of serving the interests of the lower and middle class and therefore we should reinvest in infrastructure and public education, funded by a progressive tax code.
Whether Bannon is anti-Semitic in his heart of hearts is only vaguely interesting, for one thing because his boss has Jews in the family, but he's clearly a right-wing nut and authoritarian too.
I don't mean to downplay concerns about anti-Semitism. He definitely is and it's definitely bad. But we can parse what he says for dog whistles, or we look at what he actually does (both in the past week, and over the past year or two in the form of supporting Trump), and so far that's bad enough.
I know Iowans. I try to avoid them during the fall now.
65: how do you interpret "there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado"? It mixes anti-Semitism and the American cultural trope of coastal vs. flyover. You used the word "contempt" so I went with that, but a better way to describe the interaction I witnessed was a multicultural gathering of young professionals, who chose to live in places like New York and Berlin, describing flyover country as foreign and weird. His quote would be an accurate description of us, if shorn of anti-Semitism. Is there anything left to parse from the quote san anti-Semitism?
75: I think there's plenty to parse. Bannon identifies a quite profound separation, between those who are capable of feeling empathy for people outside their own group, and those who are not*. And whatever legitimate grievances the latter may have**, I do despise those people*** and have no problem doing so.
*Obviously many other differences, but I think that one is most crucial.
**And yes, they do have.
***Not American, but have equivalents in my home country.
75: I read that line as a typical populist condemnation of global technocratic elites, which is common to both the left and the right. I missed any anti-Semitic and flyover undertones.
I read the thing trying to find a coherent, if non-standard, philosophy. But it really seems like it's pure tribalism, where the good tribe is the working class Christians, prettied up with irrelevant snippets of literature and philosophy.
I don't think the tribe is even that coherently defined.
If something sounds antisemitic and you're wondering if it's really intended that way, one thing to consider is whether the speaker is a notorious antisemite.
Goldman Sachs, by the way, did indeed need to be bailed out -- but their bailout was concealed by the fact that it was their counterparties that actually took the government funds.
Goldman was deep enough into phony securities that I suspect a failure to bail out AIG, by itself, would have sunk Goldman.
But on another level, Bannon (and the liberals) are wrong about the bailout. Most of that money got paid back. I wouldn't be shocked if the least remunerative bailout went to GM.
I am really just sick to death of the 'contempt for flyover people' trope. No matter how you want to measure it -- quantity, quality, intensity -- 'flyover' contempt for coastals is at least 2 orders of magnitude greater. And a whole lot more salient: one involves laughing at people gawking at buildings in New York City, the other involves killing everyone's health insurance to punish coastal people.
What gets me about it is the parsing of any degree of cultural difference as contempt. You bring me out to someplace where you need to drive to get anywhere, I'm going to be a little wideeyed about stuff I'm not used to. That's not contempt, that's unfamiliarity, and it's symmetrical and not indicative of hostility.
There's also some hostility -- Charley's right about the direction of most of it -- but so much of that trope I see is getting butthurt about the fact that city people aren't fluent at being rural people.
In my experience on both coasts, pointing out difference has rarely happened without also expressing contempt. And I'm tempted to go along with it, because I do think I am better than the racist, young-earth creationist coal-roller from exurban Little Rock. But when friends start laughing at People of Walmart or cow-orkers make self-congratulatory remarks about how we are thinner than people from outside the bubble, something seems a little off to me.
I am really just sick to death of the 'contempt for flyover people' trope.
George W. Bush was a horror, but the people he duped were often just that -- dupes. Trump voters may not understand the details, but broadly, they knew what they were doing.
We can no longer suppose that they can be won over with bargaining and polite dissent. That was tried. The only thing remaining is to defeat them, or be defeated by them.
If we promise that we won't regard people with contempt no matter what they do, then they will be liberated to do whatever the fuck they want.
The only thing remaining is to defeat them, or be defeated by them.
Yup. Here, too. For decades we've basically been keeping bastards down by employing shaming, public scorn, and the implicit threat of them being fucked up.* Now that the fuckers think they are in the ascendant, all of that is by the by, and total defeat is the only option. All the people who secretly held repugnant views; small minded Dacre-ist racist petty minded shitbags; they think they've won.
Respecting them, or addressing their 'very real concerns' is just pandering to those arsewipes, and massaging their egos. They _should_ feel despicable.
* by the law, by polite society, etc. I mean more than just in the sense of violence.
I think part of the problem is that people around me are painting Trump voters as those "yokels in rural Indiana" when, in reality, his voters are living among us. Most rural voters made an indefensible choice, but they were just 17% of the electorate in 2016. Trump wouldn't have won without non-rural whites. Cambridge Analytica, the firm on whose board Bannon sits and which some credit with Trump's victory, maintains offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., and London. Trump is from NYC.
(I find it especially annoying here, when it's 'Dems have contempt for rural people' because while we have our normal human share of misanthropes, Dem contempt for rural people is so muted that it isn't useful as an explanation of anything. The Governor hates his parents? The State Auditor hates the people who elected her 4 years ago (including her family)? 'Right wing media works overtime to sell trope that Dems hate rural people' -- now that's got some explanatory power.)
Broken record but: the large majority of rural voters going for Trump does not mean a majority of his supporters were rural!
Not that anyone's saying so, it's just god, the generalizations we keep unconsciously coming back to.
90: Sure, suburban and exurban whites are the real bad guys, to the extent that identifying bad guys is possible or remotely productive. And remember, "fuck everything and blame everyone." If we blame rural people out of proportion to that, it's because the Electoral College makes things look like stark regional differences, even though things are so closely split that a 55-45 split in an election would actually be a huge landslide compared to most.
I wasn't fluent at being a rural person even when I was rural person. Never been hunting, fishing was catch and release, the help my dad asked for with the wood cutting was limited.
If you don't limit what wood to cut, youth wind up with a hole in your house.
Not making a larger point here, but in Trump's home county, Queens, he got 25% of the vote or so. We know what he's like around here.
But, certainly, 25% is too much. (And he won Staten Island, which I hadn't realized until I looked just now. Disturbing.)
90: Anyway, so your coworkers are disproportionately blaming rural voters. Are you worried about this because they're wrong, and are going to be taking ineffective political actions? Or because you think their wrongness had an effect on motivating Trump voters? Or what?
I guess that's why there's a bridge to Brooklyn and only a ferry to Staten Island.
Holy fuck. Some shit is running ads asking we call Senator Casey and demand he confirm Tom Price. Is that a thing now?
I guess he's a billionaire so maybe it's just his own money.
It's as if the longest bridge in the US has been forgotten.
The one over Chesapeake Bay is scary to drive over.
102: I looked it up and I don't think it counts because it still filters the Staten Islanders through Brooklyn.
98: the former. It's easy and very tempting to underestimate them as slack-jawed children of the corn, but they are actually the "basic white dad" adjusting his mirror in the next lane or the accountant from Connecticut who loves Thai food. They are Excel whizzes who don't use slurs at work. They have above average incomes, know how to navigate the system and put a fascist in power.
They, your co-workers, or they, Trump voters? Because the latter are almost half the country -- any one sentence description is wrong.
I don't think it's an interesting conversation to have right now, and CC's 83 is completely right, but 85 seems wrong. AIKIHMHB (YA), the amount of open contempt for I experienced living in Boston from people who learned I was from KY shocked me. Much of it was "good natured", in the sense that people were in some sense trying to be friendly, but basically they assumed I had "escaped" and that I would therefore enjoy sharing in some mockery of my home state. Some pretty nasty, although not much. An astonishing number of people with the exact same "funny" remark feigning surprise that I was wearing shoes. Friends I grew up with who have moved to various other coastal cities reports similar experiences.
But ARE you wearing shoes, urple? I'm not, but I'm in bed. Probably even the most elite coastal elites don't consider that weird.
The one over Chesapeake Bay is scary to drive over.
The Chesapeake Bay, dammit. Don't be dropping the definite article like one of those stupid definite article droppers.
And yes, scary to drive over, especially if you make the mistake of getting on the span that has traffic coming in the opposite direction.
Actually, it's true, I hate wearing shoes. But I do anyway, dammit. To fit it.
KY and WV are special cases. No one makes fun of the Rockies.
Th internet doesn't seem to have the shoe commercial where the hillbilly says unlike other brands, these shoes allow his feet to breathe, so he can go to school, "I can be somebody!"
To be clear, when I said not an interesting conversation, I meant that I don't think this contempt is of national political significance. Or, to the extent it is, it's dwarfed by the significance or rural contempt for urban communities, as 83 noted.
I'm not telling you that didn't happen -- clearly, you were there, and it did. So there's at least some urban-on-rural rudeness. But in terms of political news, I have seen a lot of reactions to politicians purportedly demonstrating contempt, when it really just looked like they were slightly unfamiliar with whatever the rural shibboleth was.
114: what sort of thing are you thinking of? Your comment is reminding me of 2004 John Kerry getting shit for ordering Swiss cheese instead of cheese whiz on his Philly cheesesteak, which was spun as elitist contempt when it probably was just unfamiliarity. But that's not rural, that's Philly.
110: When you say there's a span with oncoming traffic, do you mean that it's split in the normal manner, or do you mean that you have a story about wrong-way driving?
I discreetly avoided making any cross-bay plans when recently in Williamsburg, although the nature of the bridge was only part of that - it was also that thinking about being in underwater tunnels makes me antsy, and that the trip overlapped the aftermath of this month's snowstorm.
Kerry again, talking about being a NASCAR fan, or looking uncomfortable firing a shotgun. Dean, a bunch of things like that.
Its true that people from Appalachia get mocked by people not from there. But I think that isn't because those places are rural, its because they are poor.
When you say there's a span with oncoming traffic, do you mean that it's split in the normal manner, or do you mean that you have a story about wrong-way driving?
No, just normal driving. There are two spans - one has three lanes and one has two. The one with three lanes sometimes has one lane going the opposite direction, depending on if traffic is going toward the beach, or away from it. If you ever take that bridge eastbound, make sure you stay all the way to the right to avoid being directed into that lane.
I discreetly avoided making any cross-bay plans when recently in Williamsburg
Oh, that bridge. That one is in Virginia, so its mysterious and foreboding. The real bridge is in Maryland.
Your comment is reminding me of 2004 John Kerry getting shit for ordering Swiss cheese instead of cheese whiz on his Philly cheesesteak, which was spun as elitist contempt when it probably was just unfamiliarity.
Yeah, I know Philly has its culinary traditions, but fuck Cheese Wiz when Swiss is available.
120: Ah, that type of oncoming traffic - that context is familiar after all.
I have probably also discreetly avoided the one in Maryland on some other vacation.
Wholeheartedly agree with 83.
Also 58 and 91.
Of the two, Maryland has the scarier bridge because it goes way higher. But you have to take it if you want to get to the outlet malls on the other side.
Its true that people from Appalachia get mocked by people not from there. But I think that isn't because those places are rural, its because they are poor.
Surely poor has something to do with it, but I don't think the same people would generally be comfortable openly mocking the urban poor.
117: those were interpreted as contempt? I thought they were generally interpreted as sort of bad/unconvincing attempts to create an image. Not as contempt for rural folk.
I was googling for examples, and found the guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy complaining that when he was in law school, a fellow student said that she was surprised he was ex-military, because he was really nice and she thought they all had to be a certain way, and that he's never forgotten how insulting this was. And yeah, tactless and kind of ignorant, but if that's the memorable example of how badly you've been treated, it's not much.
126: Definitely interpreted as contempt.
I don't think the same people would generally be comfortable openly mocking the urban poor.
Only because jokes about urban poor come off as racist, which is taboo. Even then, there are plenty of jokes about "the ghetto."
Poor people from Appalachia are usually white, though, so the racist angle isn't a problem.
127
Yeah, I my reaction would be to say get the fuck over yourself. If that's the worst you've experienced and you've let it scar you, you're more of a delicate crybaby than Little Lord Fauntleroy.
The number of people who claim to be strong tough salt-of-the-earth types but then reveal themselves to be hysterical thin-skinned ninnies who can't deal with the slightest discomfort or rudeness disgust me. Like, I get angry and nauseous just thinking about it.
(Sorry, too angry to be diplomatic. White fragility can go fuck itself.)
Dean, a bunch of things like that.
If you will recall Iowa: 'Howard Dean, should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New-York-Times-reading body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.'
There was definite hostility from rural areas, directed at the cosmopolitan metropolis of Vermont.
Yeah, but he reported that as a memorable insult, not as a steady rain of similar incidents. Microaggressions add up if they happen all the time. That story sounds like someone who ran into a little non-malicious ignorance, and decided to nurse a grievance over it.
Damn phone. I meant to one hundred thirty one.
During dinner, I just had three ruder comments than 127 made about my ethnic background by my boyfriend's Italian aunt, who is in general a lovely person. Instead of assuming that she put her foot in her mouth and finds Scandinavians a bit weird, I should probably start whingeing about how Nordic peoples are super oppressed. #endtheoppression #sayneitoracismagainstScandinavians #thelastacceptablehatred
Nordic peoples are super oppressed.
Wow, someones herring must have been a little underfermented this morning.
Were the 70s a Scandinavian moment because of ABBA or something? That's the last time I saw a pickled herring.
143
Don't forget I Am Curious (Yellow).
The erasure of My People's culture is endless.
html fail:
That's the last time I saw a pickled herring.
The erasure of My People's culture is endless.
They were, um, unique in texture and flavor.
You're not supposed to see them very clearly, because you're supposed to drink a bunch of akvavit first. Or at least that's my (limited) experience.
When I'm dictator, the citizenship test will just involve eating a plate of pickled herring. If you gag, you don't get citizenship.
I'm also planning on keeping men in golden cages guarded by cheetahs. Men will be kept in nothing but cheetah-print speedos, and the cheetahs and men will have matching jeweled collars. I'm still working out the rest of the details.
It will probably involve watching biathalon and ABBA. Maybe piped in ABBA music in the rooms with the cages?
How is the terror of driving over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge any different from the terror of driving anywhere else in Maryland?
ABBA cover bands = full employment for blonde musicians and singers.
Pickled herring is just the right balance of sour, salty, and sweet, and has just the right amount of chew. Akvavit and herring is a classic, but you can also just eat the herring straight. My mother has a herring and beet salad recipe, where you mix herring, beets, boiled egg, and potato with mayonnaise and sour cream.
151
Good idea. Men can get a pass from being in a cage if they're in an ABBA cover band.
No one makes fun of the Rockies.
Challenge accepted, butte lover.
It's called "The Gag Hammarskjöld".
different from the terror of driving anywhere else in Maryland?
Its true all those Virginians come up and drive on our roads like maniacs. That's what happens when you come from a place that has the intersection of Glebe Road and Glebe Road.
Pickled herring is just the right balance of sour, salty, and sweet, and has just the right amount of chew.
Sounds like snus.
107: Trump voters were under 20% of the population, but you are still correct: some were not Excel whizzes. #notalltrumpvoters #istopicdeadplz
Driving in Virginia was tricky, because I could never remember whether my next turn was supposed to be on a road named for a traitor to the Union or a traitor to the Crown.
156: As someone from out of state who experienced some horrendous driving on Glebe Road last week, I appreciate this.
I agree that folks should suck it up, but don't underestimate how much of the reaction is due to very real insecurity.
102
It's like you're forgetting about the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.
That's too low to the water to count as a bridge.
152: What, no dill? Your Northern culture is inferior to mine. Herring and dill, carrots and dill, sprats and dill. Dill.
My Scandinavian-immigrant former neighbor used to just put his baby out on the deck in the winter. I guess to prepare him to eat herring.
Just remember that Chain Bridge Road doesn't go to the Chain Bridge, but Glebe Road does.
In the Saarland, one eats pickled herrings on Jan 1. This is unrelated to the fact that the Swedes wiped out a bunch of small towns there in the Thirty Years War.
Sanford & Son was objectively funnier than Green Acres. Sorry, hillfolk.
152: sillsallad! The only way to make beetroot good. We ate it every Christmas.
The people who can't pickle herrings are Poles. They use carpet cleaner so far as I can tell.
167: Everyone in Germany says "Swedes" but if you look at the map you realise they were probably Finns.
Most of the Swedish army was German for most of the war.
Not at my books now, but the Cambrdge modern history (1936) makes special reference to the devastation left by the Finns
The Thirty Years War had enough atrocities for everyone.
115: Nobody actually in Philly gave a shit what John Kerry ate on his cheese steak. It was 100% a manufactured talking point. Kerry crushed Bush in the city itself, and carried the entirety of the Philadelphia suburbs.
Orkney and Shetland were under brutal Norse imperial rule for centuries before their eventual liberation, of course, but on the bright side they still have a) a distinctive accent that's definitely more Scandinavian than Scots and b) some very nice pickled herring.
But, still, 172 to 152.last.
169: Finns qua Finns didn't exist until a hundred years ago, so calling them Sweedes is more accurate. Of course the Finns don't really appreciate being reminded of this fact.
172: yes. I dug out my scan of the page of the CMH that dealt with the aftermath and it is *terrifying*. On the other hand, it does not specifically mention Finns, so I blame the racist Swedish half of my brain and apologise otherwise gracefully. Spent an afternoon earlier this month following the various protestant generals/warlords through wikipedia, where their entries are still largely unchanged from the 1911 Britannica originals and it was horrifying how long and how complete the devastation was. UNfortunately I can't figure out a way to export the scan or link to it as one can more easily with evernote
176: More recent scholarship has generally reduced estimated destruction. The closer they look the more variation they find from place to place. I'll try to dig up sources. IME it's striking how much Wikipedia sucks at history.
SWEDES, FINNS, POLES, ALL THE SAME.
175: How does that square with the big differences between Finnish and the Scandinavian languages?
175: So what was someone who spoke Finnish 100 years ago?
Maybe Swedes just thought they were mumbling?
Pickled herring from anywhere with a Scandinavian background is the business (although obviously the Danish stuff is best). Sild i dill is what they eat in Valhalla since the Vikings turned into Social Democratic wimps.
I refuse to recognize the pwnage in 179 as legitimate for reasons I am not prepared to state at this time.
180. Finns never say anything. I thought that was well known.
No army no navy no language. Bitch.
It's not pwnage, it's alternative winning.
173: I understand that, but that didn't stop Fox News and its ilk from trying to use it to frame Kerry as an out-of-touch elitist.
I wonder if the solution isn't to not play the game. Fuck it all and run for office in a morning suit (for day events) and monocle.
If someone tries to give you cheez whiz, ask them if the ham also comes in a jar.
177:
Historians can pinpoint hundreds of depopulated villages and reduced cities--along with hundreds of towns and villages which survived the war almost intact.Geoffrey Parker, 1984.
[...]
it has proved almost impossible to agree on the overall impact of the Thirty Years' War on Germany and the surrounding lands.
[...]
More recent estimates are much more conservative, suggesting that the population of the Holy Roman Empire may have declined by about 15 to 20 per cent, from some 20 million before the war to about 16 or 17 million after it. Nor were the population losses necessarily permanent: the post-war decades saw a considerable growth of population, and some experts suggest that the losses were already made good by 1700.
[...]
In many cases, moreover, what appeared to be a population loss was really a population transfer
Pekka and Esa are in a bar. Esa raises his vodka shot glass and says "cheers." Pekka says, "are we here to talk or drink?"
100 years ago Finns were Russian.
Finns have always been considered to be a distinct ethnic group, but the modern Finnish language was a project of 19th century nationalism, not unsimilar to modern Hebrew.
Google books will give me the top line of the page I was quoting, but no more than that, so I can't give the lurid CMH estimates without a lot of tedious retyping. But that (thoroughly outdated) estimate is a drop from 16m to 6m, of which only 350,000 were battle casualties: "famine, disease and emigration had done the rest"
192: but surely the peasantry (outside of the Bothnian provinces) never spoke Swedish, but various dialects of what we would now call Finnish?
Speaking of modern Hebrew, apparently the Trump administration is more antisemitic on Saturdays because Jared is observing Shabbat and can't counter Bannon.
152: How does it taste with snus?
Finn Family Moomintroll was of course written in Swedish.
Further to 115 et al, her in Philadelphia pretty much everyone but visiting politicians get their cheese steaks with provolone, arguably more exotic than the Swiss Cheese Kerry requested. The Cheese Wiz can is unopened most places.
And Hillary avoided that error but, unlike Kerry, received insufficient local votes to carry Pennsylvania.
192: Right, OK, hence that legal case about whether Finns counted as white.
How did that come out? Asking for a friend.
In The Connections, an elderly American couple on a cruise are seated at a table with a Norwegian couple and a Swedish couple. The Americans politely ask if they speak the same language. Conversation (in English) degenerates into an argument about which language is derivative of which, which nation committed more atrocities against the other, and which is the true ruler of the landmass of both. The bewildered Americans tune out and drink heavily.
Pickled herring is just the right balance of sour, salty, and sweet, and has just the right amount of chew.
Point on which I'm unclear: is the stuff they sell in wine with onions the exact thing you mean, or is there some distinction?
I adore herring in wine and in cream, and in Holland I enjoyed it raw at the beach.
188: I mean, I guess. Trump has a gold-plated penthouse and yet he ran as an anti-elitist. My feeling is that voters' thoughts on these issues aren't entirely rational, and politicians' actions or inactions sometimes have limited influence on the media narratives that surround them.
198: Hebrew wasn't resurrected quite like that. I mean, it was an entirely dead, liturgical language at the beginning of the 20th century, with no words for anything in modern life -- Jews spoke Yiddish or similar dialect (Ladino?) when they didn't speak the surrounding languages. Funny bit in Arthur Koestler's memoirs where he is trying to invent a hebrew language crossword, and one of the difficulties is the name, which has, um, "cross" in it.
202: To be fair, isn't that pretty much what Americans do on cruise ships regardless?
It's in tfa somewhere, damned if I can find it.
I think the judge decided that Finns had originally been Asian, but that they were pale enough to count as white for his purposes.
The only thing I know about inter-Scandinavian bitchery is that Danes complain about Swedes coming there specifically to get as drunk as possible for as little money as possible. I guess Sweden has ridiculous liquor prices.
208. No. Denmark has ridiculous liquor prices; Sweden has totally insane liquor prices.
pale enough to count as white for his purposes
Let's hope this wasn't a "Buffalo Bill" kind of purpose.
209: Yes. Also, I found British alcohol prices very high when I was there. Beer was a better deal than whisky, if I recall correctly.
201
Finns were declared white (at least in America. Lots of Swedes still felt differently).
Finnish is not an Indo-European (then called Aryan) language, and so the Finns were by extension not Indo-European (Aryan), but considered to be Asian (Mongol). Finnish-speaking Finns were (and still are, if you have older racist relatives) called "black Finns," and Swedish-speaking Finns were called "white Finns," to reflect the fact they were ethnically Swedish, and thus white/Aryan.*
In the early 20th century, Finland was part of Russia and many Finns who immigrated to the US were Communist sympathizers. The AG of Minnesota was not ok with Communist agitators coming to his state, so he tried to ban Finnish naturalization on the grounds Finns were Asian and not white. The court ruled that while Finns might have originally been Asian, they were blonde enough and "Swedish-ized" enough (not original language) that they could count as white.**
(Interestingly, in the South there was a case that was the reverse, and Indian immigrant claimed that as he was "Aryan," he should be considered white and not colored. The courts ruled that he was indeed "Aryan," but he was swarthy and Hindu and therefore deserved to be treated as colored.)
Interestingly, recent genetic studies show that at least certain pockets of Finns are indeed an genetic isolate, as well as a linguistic isolate.
*AIHMHB, my grandparents had to elope because my grandmother was Swedish and my grandfather was Finnish, and my great-grandmother opposed the marriage. Later my grandfather would claim to be Swedish-Finnish, but there's no evidence of that, and his family all spoke Finnish.
**The Nazis also had the distinctly uncomfortable problem for their whole ideology that some of their allies, the Finns and the Hungarians, were not considered "Aryan," while the Slavs and the Roma were (the Roma being originally from India and speaking an Indo-Aryan language).
Tacitus places the Fenni where they still are, in NE Europe. If they were originally from Asia it was a hell of a long time ago.
See, like I said, Buttercup knowns the whole story.
A month or two ago, Krugman raised the same issue (of urban/rural contempt, not herring), taking the LB position (New York elites unite!). Drum replied that this was ridiculous, but almost all of his examples weren't contempt for rural culture so much as contempt for mass culture: fast food, Walmart, Applebee's. At which point you're basically arguing that people consuming superior goods should pretend they aren't. I mean, not only are Walmarts deeply depressing physical environments, but they actually force manufacturers to provide them with lower quality versions of the products they sell at other stores*.
Obviously that doesn't make a Walmart shopper a contemptible person, but it's demanding a lot to ask that somebody unaccustomed to Walmart to go into one and not find it a horrible place.
I forget: do New Yorkers get sad when outsiders note the filthiness of the subways? Does that drive a longstanding grievance against the suburban elite who don't understand urban mores and the culture of rat parades on the tracks?
BTW, I get that insecurity is at the bottom of this, and that there's a punching up/down aspect. But don't tell me that, unless I take Hardee's seriously as cuisine, I'm a snob who is to blame for Americans who voted for fascism.
*a couple years ago I was in Palm Springs to do a 100 mile bike ride with a friend. My bike shorts failed to get packed, which I didn't discover until 10 p,m the night before the ride, which began at 7. 7-8 hours in the saddle without padding was unimaginable, so I ended up getting up at 5 am to drive to the nearest Walmart where the internet (correctly) told me they had bike shorts. They were crap, but I felt I had no choice. The seams failed before I even got on the bike; they were almost literal garbage. Fortunately, the vendors were set up early enough that I could buy a real pair of shorts, and all was well. But the Walmart product, IIRC sold under the Schwinn brand, was utter crap.
205
Yeah, it's not exactly the same, with Hebrew being much deader than Finnish was, but modern Finnish had to have a written script formed and lots of words had to be invented whole-cloth to make it meet the requirements of a "modern" language. In that way it was more like the process of inventing modern Hebrew than it was like, say, standardizing Italian.
I forget: do New Yorkers get sad when outsiders note the filthiness of the subways?
Based on the "Pizza Rat", I would guess the answer is no.
My grandma's "Italian" was very non-standard. Apparently Sicily was out of the mainstream of early modern Italy.
Part of it was 'p' coming out at some kind of blend between a 'b' and a real 'p' that I was never able to replicate.
Also, I don't know about Denmark, but in Sweden you have to be 25 to buy hard liquor.
One of my boyfriend's aunt's comments when I marveled at how inexpensive wine was in Italy was along the lines of, "it's funny that alcohol is so expensive in Norway and yet you all manage to all drink so much." She said that when she was in Norway, the streets was surprised at all the drunken people littering the streets.
(When I told her about my two Vietnamese refugee foster brothers, she nodded approvingly and then said she was impressed my parents fostered them because usually Scandinavians are really racist. I should have been like, "yes, but mostly against Finns.")
People shouldn't throw trash around regardless of how drunk they are.
219
That would have been a voiceless but not aspirated p, it's really hard for English speakers. Finnish also has that.
I dunno, as someone who is both connected to (if not actually part of) the urban elites, and who also likes American Trash Culture (in some of its aspects -- I've only been to a Wal-Mart twice in my life, and then as above, only under duress.) My HS friend who's now a big name in the local writing and poetry scenes just had a new book come out, and half his posts at the other place are about how much he enjoys Popeye's chicken. I don't know that many wealthy lawyers though, so maybe I'm being too broad-minded, but my sense is that most of the people actually doing activism or art or whatever the rural folx are supposed to despise are actually mostly okay with a lot of aspects of mass culture. Furthermore, a lot of my rural relatives are quite sophisticated -- writers, artists, aesthetes -- you just don't hear about that kind of rural folx very often in the corporate media.
Oh, I see I forgot a clause there. You can probably tell where I was going from context though.
I read a memoir by an Afrikaans woman born c.1890. Very nonstandard Afrikaans. Of course, she ended with a plea for her offspring to preserve 'our language' at all costs. Said language having been hacked together in her lifetime. Fucking flyovers.
215
Yeah, it's really obnoxious. Also, the whole liberal elite meme feels like it's designed to distract from who really has power. A public school teacher who likes opera and French cheese does not in any meaningful way wield more power than a hardware store owner who likes football.
203: herring in wine? No, no. "Pickled", at least for me, = preserved in vinegar (with optional added spices, herbs, onions etc. But mostly vinegar.)
Dutch raw herring, though surprising the first time you see it (respectable middle aged bloke in suit necking entire raw herring in the street, as if doing impression of penguin) is very nice.
Also, yes, Swedish alcohol prices are ludicrous. Gothenburg was very nice apart from that mind.
222: Maybe. I don't even has aspirations.
227.2: A lounge suit or evening dress.
Isn't there a ferry that Swedes take to get cheap booze, then drink it all on the way back? I'm pretty sure I heard that from a friend who used to date a Swede.
My information is 20 years of out of date, but as near as I could tell, all of Europe takes a ferry to get cheap booze (and cigarettes). Maybe with the growth of the EU, the duty-free thing doesn't work as well as back then.
215, 217: Oh, there's stuff we're touchy about. Just not about people calling the subway filthy. It is filthy.
(I actually think the rat population is way up since the eighties. Seeing a rat used to feel like much more of an event than it does now. Or maybe I was just not paying attention back then?)
Men still wore ties back in the 80s. Everything felt more like an event because people dressed for it.
|| I see that there's a general strike on for Feb 17. |>
232.2
The only clear solution is to bring wolves to NYC.
A good neoliberal would just set up incentives for consuming rats and let the market decide which carnivore is best at it.
226 I don't think it's about distraction so much as making an argument that punching down is actually punching up.
Here's the biggest US herring brand; the only options are sour cream sauce, wine sauce, and spicy wine sauce. My local fishmonger has the first two options available in bulk from another source. I'm not sure I've seen it sold in just vinegar like a pickle.
236
Really, if we eliminated food stamps, hungry poor people eating rats would solve two problems at once. Let's write to Paul Ryan.
237
Yeah, that's maybe a better way of framing it.
The only thing I know about inter-Scandinavian bitchery is that Danes complain about Swedes coming there specifically to get as drunk as possible for as little money as possible
Watch Riget (aka The Kingdom, aka the good Danish original of that terrible "Stephen King" show Kingdom Hospital). It's all about the inter-Scandinavian bitchery. "Danskjävlar!" is basically the show's catchphrase.
238
Sad!
Here, ABBA is really the way to go:
https://abba.se/produkter/sill/
I can't begin to express how disappointed I was in that link.
My bad! ABBA is the band, Abba is the herring. IIRC there was a lawsuit about that.
One can but hope that the goal of the suit was to force ABBA to sell Abba.
216 resembles more the switch from Ottoman to modern Turkish to me.
I am with 242. This is like that time I discovered that the McLaren that makes the Formula 1 cars is not the same as the Maclaren that makes the infants' pushchairs.
Why do infants have to push chairs?
I personally think a commercial for a canned food that uses "Take a chance on me" would be great. It would be perfect if the cans bulged slightly.
Abba sill is the one true herring, yes.
231: the common market killed that. No more duty free anywhere. Before then, the Silja line booze cruises from Stockholm to Helsinki were astonishing. The first thing you saw, entering the gents, was a gigantic white vomit basin set on a pedestal so that the incommoded gentleman could simply lurch up, grab each side, and spew his guts up without needing to kneel or even to bend over first.
Wait! Wait! what foul blasphem is this? Abba now make a lime and ginger flavoured herring
247. Why do you make your infants stroll?
a lime and ginger flavoured herring
With a shot of rum, a Danish Dark and Stormy.
Why do infants have to push chairs?
WE KEEP YOU ALIVE TO PUSH THIS CHAIR. PUSH WELL, AND LIVE.
240: That is totally our favorite scene, chez Natilo.
There's also the bit in one of the Martin Beck mysteries where the police commissioners of Denmark and Sweden (or Copenhagen and Malmo, I can't remember exactly) are having a big meeting, which starts off with them congratulating themselves for being able to understand each other, and by the end of the meeting they've stormed off in a huff due to misunderstandings.
Well, the one thing Norwegians, Danes, and Finns can agree on is Swedes are assholes.
(ducks, waits for response by angry Swedish commenter)
236: Plus, it's just ridiculously condescending. The guy who referred to Obama for eight years by an ethnicslur is going to suddenly join hands in fellowship because I drink Bud Light. Break me a fucking give.
257 is entirely correct: a wartime Norwegian Prime Minister wrote "There is nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing I hate with such passion and abandon as Sweden" [translation from Robert Fergusson's "The Scandinavians"]
I think it's notable that while foreigners can write good and insightful books about one of the Scandiwegian countries, they then describe the others in entirely cliched and shallow terms. I'm very conscious of the inadequacy of my own understandings of Norway, Finland, and Denmark, however much I admire or enjoy them, and when I read Fergusson on Sweden, it's obvious he has no sympathy at all.
I would love a 1000-word "differences between Scandinavian countries" piece. Now that I say that, it occurs to me that there must be a million of those. But I want extreme vetting.
I need the executive summary so I'm just going to remember "Swedes are assholes."
A few years ago I was in a coffeeshop in Copenhagen, when a guy came up and began to lecture me about the differences between Danes and Swedes. He was an immigrant from North Africa, and the most important thing he wanted me to remember was that Danes only *think* they're nicer than the Swedes.
That kind of nuance won't fit in the space I have to embroider a motto on my throw pillow.
260: There was a weird webcomic devoted to that -- Scandinavia and the World. Characters embodying national stereotypes, with cameos from the rest of the world.
https://satwcomic.com/sweden-denmark-and-norway
Danes only *think* they're nicer than the Swedes.
They also don't think they sound like they have scrambled eggs in their mouths when they talk, but they totally do.
That is, according to my Swedish friends. I could never tell the difference.
They also told me that Norwegians are pretty stupid. Is that true?
In Norway they say Danes talk like they have mashed potatoes in their mouths. The Finns say boiled potatoes.
268
How do you know a Norwegian has been writing on a computer?
There's white out on the screen.
A Swede came across a Norwegian standing by their car on the side of the road in the rain. The Swede asks what the problem is, and the Norwegian says their windshield wipers aren't working properly. The Swede gets in the car and turns them on. "You see," the Norwegian says, "now they're working, now they're not."
Some Swedish engineers told me these jokes.
But Norwegians were the poor country bumpkins of Scandinavia until recently, when they became the Beverly Hillbillies of Scandinavia.
265
I've seen that cartoon. I had my boyfriend read it because it's reasonably helpful as a primer to Scandinavian stereotypes 101. It's written by a Norwegian, so it can be, uh, less than flattering to the other Nordic countries.
260
I can do it in shorter!
Norwegians: country bumpkins. Love the outdoors. Pragmatic to a fault.
Swedes: really uptight, neurotic, and overly class conscious. Also really stingy. Would sell their grandmother to make a buck. Only adopted socialism because no one wanted anyone else to be richer than them. Also crypto Nazis.
Danes: Soft, like the butter they make. Barely Scandinavian, overly contaminated by German culture.
Finns: Not Scandinavian.
Iceland: Weird, inbred but in an attractive way.
One time in college I was with four friends of mine, and we were driving in an Audi Quattro across the Norwegian border. But the border guard stopped us and he wouldn't let us through.
"Dis is an Audi Quattro" he said.
So, we're all like, "WTF....?"
"Der are five of you and dis is an Audi Quattro," he said.
"Uh, yeah.....?
"Quattro means four," he said. "And der are five of you."
"Is that a problem, Sir?"
He says, "You can't have five people in an Audi Quattro."
So, we are really starting to freak out at this point. But at about this time he gets a call on the radio and starts having an animated conversation in Norwegian. It went on for about a minute. Then he put the radio down and he tells us we could go. He said he has bigger problems.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"I must go," he says. "Der are three Italians in a Fiat Uno."
Oh, and in the SATW comic, the British character looks weirdly Hitler-like.
271
I'll have to remember that joke.
These are so great. I love jokes about stereotypes I don't know.
How do you sink a Norwegian submarine?
Swim down and knock politely on the door
270 is incomplete. I want jokes about Faroese and Ålanders.
I work quite a bit with Norwegians. I find them utterly hilarious.
Just total blank faced deadpan stuff which you can see makes other people at conferences a bit worried and unsettled. Which is, particularly once you know the people involved, often deliberate and intentional humour partly at their own taciturn expense, and partly taking the piss out of others.
271 captures the flavour exactly.
e.g.
Big cheese at their national library starts up a powerpoint presentation.
Slide has a number. 73%
Stands and points at it and looks serious.
Lots of people in the audience nod sagely as if they know what the number is.
"So, this is a very impressive number, no?"
...
long pause
people look uncomfortable but nod as if they know wtf he is talking about
...
[scornfully] "How could you be impressed when you do not even know what this number is?"
....
I've only heard racist Scandinavian jokes from Norwegians. Let me see if I've got this one straight:
A Dane, a Swede, and a Norwegian are members of a resistance cell captured by the Nazis in WW II. The SS officer tells them that each of them can have one final request. The Dane says, "Ooo, a last meal? Let me see, definitely some of that good dark rye with scrambled eggs, and herring in wine sauce, no, herring in vinegar... and then some flatbreads with cheese. To drink? Dark beer probably. . ." And continues talking quietly to himself about planning dessert in the background.
The Swede says, "I would like to deliver a speech setting forth my ideals. There are four major headings under which the principles I die for can be set out: the economic, the moral, the emotional, and the esthetic... do you mind if I get my notes out of my rucksack? I'm going to need them to keep the subheadings straight."
And the Norwegian turns to the Nazi officer and says, "Excuse me, would you mind killing me before he starts his speech?"
There's also the old chestnut, Danes and Norwegians have the same language, except the Danes can't speak it and the Norwegians can't spell it.
It is true that Danish is unusually hard to understand. My grandmother can read written Danish perfectly, but she has a much harder for her to follow. Danes generally have very little problem understanding Norwegians, however.
Also, my grandmother used to claim that Swedes' use of umlauts instead of the slash mark indicated their Germanophilia. I don't think she actually believed it, but it's nice bit of indoctrination for small children.
She also used to say that Swedes had yellow teeth. I have naturally more yellowy teeth, and she would refer to them as my "Swedish teeth."* I am not sure where this came from, my guess is she made it up herself.
*When I was a child and teenager she would critically scrutinize my physical appearance and point out all the flaws, which she generally tied to being part Swedish (despite the fact she agreed that the Finns were the Oriental Other, she was much less critical of the Finns or "Finnish" features. She also had a bit of "we might be 1/100th Sami" and use the dark hair or almond-shaped eyes of a relative as evidence, sort of in the way Americans do with American Indians).
I'm literally in Norway right now, so this sudden conversation turn is weirding me out.
Though not enlightened or topless.
Norway is a state of mind.
282
It's not weird at all if you tell Norwegians a stranger who comments on this blog you read has a dead Norwegian grandmother who used to do x,y,z, and would they mind confirming it.
Aand, one more:
A Swede, a Dane, a Finn, and a Norwegian are good friends. They agree that whoever is the first to die, they'll all put $10 in the grave. The Dane is the first to die. The Norwegian and Finn each take out a $10 bill and drop it in the grave. The Swede takes up the two $10s, writes a check for $30, and drops it in.
Now you're just taking Jewish jokes and switching the ethnicity.
Does this work:
How do you know Jesus was Norwegian?
Because he lived at home until he was 30 and his mother thought he was God.
My father used to write musical comedies for our church. One of them was called Fiddler on the Reef, and it was a cross between Fiddler on the Roof and South Pacific, but with Norwegians instead of Jews. The stereotypes only needed minimal shifting.
289
Hmm....mostly. The living at home until 30 bit definitely works. The God bit is a bit sketchier, since Norwegian moms are not known for their coddling. They are famous for being overbearing and keeping their children in line with guilt, so that stereotype aligns up nicely with that of Jewish mothers.
287: I actually heard that one as one of several "A Franciscan, a Dominican, and a Jesuit" jokes.
292
Interesting. Which one was the stingy one?
290 is the sort of thing that keeps me coming back to unfogged.
293: The Jesuit. Not so much stingy, as cleverly unscrupulous.
265
I think SATW is written by Danes. Their stereotype of Finns is "quiet, grumpy, and always carrying a knife." If you look back far enough, almost everyone in Europe came from Asia: Germans, French, etc., or at least their ruling classes.
Back in the days of apartheid South Africa decided that Japanese were white and Chinese weren't, for geopolitical reasons.
The best song was "If I veren't Norvegian," to "If I were a rich man." One of the plot points was the adult Norwegian son fell in love with the island chieftain's daughter, but he was too awkward and bashful to hit on her. After a failed flirting attempt where he just blushes, stammers, and runs away, he sings the song wishing he were from a more suave ethnicity.
Buttercup, if you're here, any book recommendations about the historical standardizations of languages? (This just for curiosity. I have one year of linguistics, if that matters.)
... he was too awkward and bashful to hit on her.
The related joke that I;ve heard is
How can you tell if a Norwegian is flirting?
He 's looking down at your shoes while you talk.
That sounds less like "Norwegians are bashful" and more like "Norwegians have foot fetishes".
I heard that as 'How do you spot an extroverted Finn?'
I had no stereotype about Norwegians before this thread, so it's awkward now that I know I'm surrounded by stupid country bumpkins.
Despite their vaunted sovereign wealth fund, it's not clear to me that Norway is avoiding the resource curse. The two most lively industries seem to be oil, and fish. (They did have a research group win the Nobel Prize in Medicine a couple of years ago.)
305: When I visited Bergen, I recall my hosts at one dinner speculated about how screwed things would be once the oil ran out.
I didn't notice them paying inordinate attention to my shoes.
305
It goes over really well if you casually let slip that you didn't realize Norway was in independent country and instead thought it was an autonomous province of Sweden.
Also, say that you love all the Danish cheese slicers you see at the breakfast table.
If you talk to a dark haired Norwegian, make a crack that you thought all Norwegians must be tall and blond haired.
If you get in a dispute with someone, you'll automatically win the argument if you call them a Quisling. This is doubly true if it's a border agent or airport security guard.
300
I do, but I'll have to wait until I'm not desperately procrastinating to post them, like later today?
(They did have a research group win the Nobel Prize in Medicine a couple of years ago.)
That standard of research is not going to help when the oil runs out. (Not a fan of the Trondheim crowd. Ugh.)
Never been to Scandinavia, but I've watched Nobel, Wallender, Annike Bengzton, Lava Field, Case, Dicte and probably some others. Plainly infested with crazed serial killers, usually with only one person diligent enough to connect the dots. But that person's family and friends are constantly pleading with them to take more time off to spend with family.
307.1: I've already told everyone that the only things I know about Norway I learned from reading the saga of King Harald Hardrada, so I already ruined that one.
308.2: The only I know about them is that they won the Nobel. (Apparently I'm in the business of not knowing things about Norway.) What's bad about them?
309: To really understand the Norwegians and their culture, you need to watch Cold Prey and Dead Snow.
307 last: At your convenience! Though I confess I fail to see the logic in your procrastination strategy.
Also, say that you love all the Danish cheese slicers you see at the breakfast table.
Scandinavian cheese hatchets are the best.
312
Your request is too close to what I should be doing to count as actual procrastination. Much better to shoot the shit about Scandinavian stereotypes. Assign me to write a dissertation on those, however, and then you'll see me writing about women in China like it's my job.
305.1 would be a real killer, yes. One of my clearest childhood memories of emotion comes from travelling through Norway in a car with Swedish (diplomatic) plates when I was about 12. My parents would stop in the quiet country village of Skithög, Trondelag, or wherever, for petrol and a sandwich, and climb out of the car into a ring of quiet and hostility which stayed that way until they started talking English, at which point the atmosphere would be transformed to enthusiastic friendliness.
There is also a film which teeters between excruciating boredom and close observation of rural Norwegian life called "Kitchen Diaries" which drops a Swedish character into a Norwegian village.
I'm sorry Buttercup! Don't let me add to your burdens!
316
No, I really want to! I'm actually really happy you want to read about language standardization. I just need to do a little thinking because the ones on the top of my head (Language Ideologies ed. Woolard) aren't necessarily the best or most interesting if you want a general overview.
Talking Heads by Benjamin Lee is a good ling anth for non experts overview. It's not focused on language standardization per se, but there should be something on it.
Susan Gal and Judith Irvine write about language standardization.
There's a great book on the adoption of the Midwest dialect as the American standard and its roots in anti-Southern/Eastern European racism, and the author has an Italian name that begins with a B, but I can't for the life of me remember and googling key words isn't pulling it up. It will probably pop in my head 2 hours later. Leslie Milroy, a Scottish sociolinguist, writes about the Scottish influence on picking a rhotic form for American English standard.
Will add more later.
315
I love that movie!
My parents lived in Norway for a bit in the 70s, and my mother has a story that she used to take the bus every day with the same people, and no one ever made so much as eye contact with her. On her very last day, somehow it came out she was American, and suddenly everyone was extremely friendly to her.
My father has a story that he was once in Bergen and saw what looked like a little boutique filled with lots of beautiful crafts. He walked in and started looking all the objects out for display, picking some up and so forth. A woman came out and asked if he needed anything, and he responded 'no thanks, I'm just looking.' She stood there for a little bit, then went off and came back with her husband. They apologetically explained that they were not in fact a boutique but were instead expecting company so they'd just laid all their nice things out. My father realized he'd just waltzed into someone's house and started handling their stuff. They then got into an apology-off over who was being more rude, my father, or them for kicking him out.
315.3 !!
I once did something a little like that, but outside the house in question, which I had mistaken for a stuga owned by the farm where I was staying, so I walked round peering in all the windows, etc ... but this was outside Sorsele, in the Swedish backwoods. Actual manners aren't really at all different in the back country, in my experience. But you have to go much further to get to the Swedish back country. I don't think the Norwegians had nearly the same experience of rural depopulation in the 50s and 60s -- they had no Stockholm to go to.
So, it sounds like the Germans went about invading Norway the hard way.
Despite their vaunted sovereign wealth fund, it's not clear to me that Norway is avoiding the resource curse.
Well, they're doing better than Alaska, at least.
310: What's bad about them?
Short version: They're assholes.
Long version: I shouldn't have made that comment in the first place b/c I can't really tell the whole story here, and teasing isn't nice. I'm sorry about that. The best I can do is say that I am familiar with the science, personalities, and politics involved in this particular award and find much to dislike on all three counts.
321: and how. A colleague of mine just pointed me to the wiki page for Operation Fork (the British invasion of Iceland in 1940) which includes this great bit:
Just before five o'clock in the morning, Fearless, loaded with around 400 marines, set out for the harbour. A small crowd had assembled, including several policemen still waiting for the customs boat. The British consul had received advance notice of the invasion and was waiting with his associates to assist the troops when they arrived. Uncomfortable with the crowd, Consul Shepherd turned to the Icelandic police. "Would you mind ... getting the crowd to stand back a bit, so that the soldiers can get off the destroyer?" he asked. "Certainly," came the reply.
Come on, chaps, make room, we're trying to invade your country here and you aren't exactly helping.
Britain also occupied the Faroe islands. Eric Linklater wrote a novel about it. The occupation force passed the time building what remains the only airport in the islands. According to the pedia thing 170 squaddies married Faroese women, which must be a substantial percentage of both groups.
Also from the Operation FORK wikipedia page:
[German] Consul Gerlach opened, protested against the invasion, and reminded the British that Iceland was a neutral country. He was reminded, in turn, that Denmark had also been a neutral country
I think that goes to the other thread's point about how Nazis expect to gain power by breaking rules while having other people follow them.