The Atlas Asylum of absurd/ignorant posts IX

[parochial boy]

Going into a little bit of hot take territory here, but could you not claim something, something about the US interference in the 1948 election in Italy?

[parochial boy]

Going into a little bit of hot take territory here, but could you not claim something, something about the US interference in the 1948 election in Italy?

That's why I mentioned "my inner Pasolini", exactly. But it certainly wasn't during Roosevelt's presidency.
And no it is not a hot take, it is by now proven that CIA interfered with it.

Ah, by hot take I meant, would a PCI victory have necessarily meant Italy turning into a Soviet satellite? I’ll plead the ignorance of not really knowing how fragile Italy’s democratic institutions were at the time or how much power an eventual Communist government would have had.

The PCF participated in, even as the largest party, French 4th republic governments without ever managing to turn France into a Stalinist satellite

[parochial boy]

LA county swung right by 5 points likely due to their large Asian and Latinx population shifting right. White voters in California shifted more left from 2016 and it balanced out almost evenly.

> Latinx

I'm always a bit bemused by the way that a huge majority of even left wing posters on here are so freaked out by that term.

I'm torn between thinking this is more a sheer obstinate refusal to even try and understand the sorts of issues that are  significant outside of the English speaking world (which works the other way round too - see the "how would Belgium vote if it was a US state" type threads, where people try to calque US issues onto a context where they aren't especially relevant); or that it is simply down to the US being much more conservative on issues related to gender and LGBT equality. Nevertheless, it's remarkably different to how I see the issue being discussed by left wingers in French or German.

[parochial boy]

I mean, yes, the response to my post that gender neutral language is an apparently exclusively American concern (?!) rather seems to back up the point I was making

France literally banned neutral language in schools. Meanwhile in America plenty of idiot local institutions  who throw money towards DEI consultants will use the term Latinx in official messaging.  The idea that this is a purely American or Anglophone issue is absurd.  It started in America but unfortunately one of our main exports is wokism.

It was banned a culturally reactionary government responding to what is a mainstream political debate far beyond what "Latinx" is in the USA. As in, the push to use gender neutral language in France goes far beyond academia and twitter (and fwiw the Swiss government and schools use gender neutral language in both French and German, and this isn't a country known for its progressive outlook on these sorts of isses). The point is the handful of remaning French left-wingers have a very, very different perception on gender neutral language to the imediate dismissal that it gets from left wingers on here.

Discussions about "écriture inclusive" in French or the "gendering" in German have been a topic of debate for essentially my entire life (as mentioned above, the Swiss government adopted in its official communications in the year 2000, long before "wokeness" was even a twinkle in any generation Z left winger's eye) - I can assure you that this is not an American "woke" export. The US debate is actually much more recent, if anything imported from abroad, in particular because English doesn't even have grammatical genders like others do.

[parochial boy]

LA county swung right by 5 points likely due to their large Asian and Latinx population shifting right. White voters in California shifted more left from 2016 and it balanced out almost evenly.

> Latinx

I'm always a bit bemused by the way that a huge majority of even left wing posters on here are so freaked out by that term.

I'm torn between thinking this is more a sheer obstinate refusal to even try and understand the sorts of issues that are  significant outside of the English speaking world (which works the other way round too - see the "how would Belgium vote if it was a US state" type threads, where people try to calque US issues onto a context where they aren't especially relevant); or that it is simply down to the US being much more conservative on issues related to gender and LGBT equality. Nevertheless, it's remarkably different to how I see the issue being discussed by left wingers in French or German.

This isn't really true though. The US got same-sex marriage before a ton of European countries including yours that doesn't even have it yet (though that'll almost certainly change in the fall.)

Polls much higher support here than in the USA (~80% in favour here, which is about normal for W Europe), whereas there was a thread on here celebrating 70% support in the USA just a couple of weeks ago. Or, more to the point, it will be legal here by the end of the year, the reason is an extremely slow political process, and at least we'll have introduced it democratically. There are also some concrete areas where we are even ahead - eg anti discrimination and hate speech laws or conversion therapy being illegal; and of course, no bizarre hate campaigns against transpeople's right to use the toilet or access medical treatment.

[parochial boy]

No one is making that claim. The point is that this specific word is a very clunky attempt to de-gender the word “Latino” in English that doesn’t really make any sense in Spanish or Portuguese, and as a consequence is rarely used outside of academic/professional or activist spheres in the US. There’s a reason many in Latin America prefer the neutral “Latine” instead (in part because it’s a word that you can actually pronounce out loud).

That raises a whole host of issues besides gender (“linguistic colonialism” is a phrase I’ve seen thrown around). There's something very uncomfortable about using an English pronunciation, adopted in the US and largely used by Anglos, to refer to a US minority group that the minority group does not actually use to describe themselves (something like ~3% of US Hispanics identify with the term). On this forum, in a political context, I think it’s gotten particular attention as an easy example of the disconnect between the largely-Anglo intelligentsia that steer the ideological and cultural direction of American liberalism and the voters they rely on to hold political power.

OK, but that's fundamentally not the original point that I was making. The point was that "Latinx" is a term used to turn a generic masculin into a gender neutral term. It was not specifically about that one word, but about the fact that this is a very mainstream concern across the world. Your criticism of the term is one that seems totally reasonable and legitimate (personally I'm minded to think that anglicising the pronunciation of a loan word is completely natural and acceptable, but I come from a linguistic community that very much isn't in the dominant position that English is, so...).

That said, most criticism of the term that I see on here is along the lines that "no the word is Latino, therefore we must use Latino". As in, it's not a criticism relating to the power dynamics between linguistic communities, but a rejection of the idea of no longer using a generic masculin, or even a refusal to accept that this is actually a debate that exists in Spanish and other languages that have grammatical gender and generic masculins.

[parochial boy]

The implication is that same-sex marriage was universally unpopular before the court ruling, which is incorrect, quite a few states had already passed same-sex marriage via the democratic process prior to that or voted down bans on it (like the one I worked against!) and it was supported by almost every notable Democratic politician at that point. Also abortion is still a contentious and controversial issue almost 50 years after its relevant court ruling, so this isn't some sort of magic pill.

Above that though: if this is a reflection of the US being that much more conservative on such issues, then why isn't "Latinx" so widespread and universal in other Anglophone countries? You could point out they don't have as high Latino populations so it's less of a thing to come up, which is true, but it's blatantly incorrect and erasure of quite a few people to say they don't exist at all. The notion that a country like Australia wouldn't have as much if not significantly more backlash against "Latinx" if it was more of a thing there that described a much higher portion of their population is simply laughable.

Let me put it this way, on a French forum or discord server whose membership had broadly the same political outlook as this site's usership, gender neutral language would be, actually is, pretty much the normal way of writing. Whereas, on this forum, most of the time it feels like I am reading the most predictable outposts of the reactionary right wing French press. So for me that is actually very surprising, because France is for the most part a very reactionary, racist country; and yet this apparently left wing forum mostly takes a position that even by French standards would be considered right wing on this one particular issue.

As for gender equality - the US has a worse pay gap; doesn't even have maternity leave, let alone paternity leave; has never had a women head of state (and we all know how the last woman to stand for that position got treated); and has fewer women in its parliament than basically every western european country. These are all pretty concrete things that I think you have to accept suggest that the US is a broadly more conservative country when it comes to gender equality. (and you know, the fact that Switzerland, which was until recently incredibly bad on this issue is now ahead on every one of these measures is perhaps something that is worth paying attention to)

[parochial boy]

I wasn't aware the French even had gender neutral language.  What singular definite article do you use in that case?

There are actually a variety of ways that it is done, with varying levels of uptake and controversy. The most widespread and uncontroversial is simply to use both maculin and feminine form at the same time. As in say "the (male) teacher and the (female) teacher or something like that"; more controversial is basically always using the plural and combining it with "point médian" so that you wind up writing something like les enseignant-e-s; thirdly is using a neologism like "iel" insted of il/elle - but that is something very much restricted to woke online spaces.

And this only applies to gendered roles of  course - no-one is worried about the fact that a roof is male gendered or whatever.

If I may veer off topic a bit: how are you defining "pay gap" in the context of gender? Is Switzerland doing something to equalize incomes irrespective of hours worked or job types? I am genuinely curious how you go about that, because any country that allows you to work in whatever field you want is bound to have pay disparities. A job that pays well is not necessarily going to be your dream job, and what that dream job is varies by individual. I contend that the lack of women in STEM, for example, comes down to difference in preferences, because it has already been illegal for half a century for employers to pay women less for the exact same job as men. So to get a non-American's perspective on this would be helpful to me.

I agree with everything else and have always supported generous maternity/paternity leave, but that's not necessarily a gender issue if everyone gets the same time off. And on the flip side, perhaps Switzerland likes seeing women in power more than Americans, and even American women, do. (That is not a good or desirable thing, but I am curious how you reconcile policy with culture in these respects.)

That's the thing right? in part it is a cultural preference - so woman are more inclined to study and move into technical fields. But also, traditionally feminine jobs are relatively better paid here. Just as an example, the average salary for a nurse in Switzerland is around $90k, and a doctor earns a little over twice that - whereas the gap between a nurse's and a doctor's salary in the US is much bigger (and feminine coded low pay jobs like cleaning, child care etc... are also much better paid here).

The big thing though is all the provisions of the welfare state - maternity leave means not having the same interruption to your career / stark choice that you would have to make; paternity leave incites a cultural norm where the father is also responsible for childcare; public nursery's make affordable childcare an option, as to childcare subsidies; and on and on. The fact is, Switzerland is for the most part still really bad at all of this, and is playing catch up with the rest of the continent because the change in attitudes has been something that has really only happened over the course of my lifetime.

Which, I mean, yeah - I think culture drives a lot of these policies, but ultimately, the gender pay gap does rely on culture. It's not enough to merely legislate equal pay when you still have a culture that pushes women towards lower paying careers, or values "female" jobs less highly, or forces them to make career choices that men don't have to. So it ultimately seems that either, the US is resistant towards making these choices because of a certain level of cultural conservatism on these issues; or because of it being so signed up to (neo)liberal economics that it doesn't want to implement the sort of welfare state policies that would support gender equality. Although I'm kind of tempted to reject the second reason because, just as Switzerland has being playing catch up with regards to cultural conservatism, I don't really think that attitudes in the USA are unusually right wing with regards to the welfare state and redistribution any more.

[parochial boy]

America is the dominant economic, cultural, scientific, and military power in the world.  Our ideas of geopolitical morality have dominated the global conversation for over a century since Wilson's Fourteen Points.  The Apollo Program, the Manhattan Project, the invention of the internet, our victories in WW2 and the Cold War, and the eradication/mitigation of most deadly diseases, are all tremendous accomplishments that will still be studied and talked about 1,000 years from now.  We have built most of the engineering marvels of the modern world, including the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal, the transcontinental railroad, the interstate highway system, the Golden Gate Bridge and (until 1998) all the world's skyscrapers. We have the highest standard of living in the world[/b] and continue to push the envelope on what that even means. We take civil rights more seriously than any other nation in the worldand continue to use our global influence to force other nations to follow our lead, improving life for billions of people around the globe.

Yes, we are a great country.  Four years of having used toilet paper for a president doesn't change that.

You know people think I hate the US, which is untrue, there's a lot to like and dislike, but this is delusional.

It’s amusing in that it’s regurgitating the sort of mindless, jingoistic propaganda that we tend to think to stereotype the Americans of spouting off when we want to think the worst of Americans. Luckily there are enough thoughtful posters on here to mean that is obviously not the case. But wow was it why it eye opening to realize that there are actually people like that. Pretty sad to be so brainwashed that you can ever admit your country might have flaws.

[parochial boy]

America is the dominant economic, cultural, scientific, and military power in the world.  Our ideas of geopolitical morality have dominated the global conversation for over a century since Wilson's Fourteen Points.  The Apollo Program, the Manhattan Project, the invention of the internet, our victories in WW2 and the Cold War, and the eradication/mitigation of most deadly diseases, are all tremendous accomplishments that will still be studied and talked about 1,000 years from now.  We have built most of the engineering marvels of the modern world, including the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal, the transcontinental railroad, the interstate highway system, the Golden Gate Bridge and (until 1998) all the world's skyscrapers. We have the highest standard of living in the world[/b] and continue to push the envelope on what that even means. We take civil rights more seriously than any other nation in the worldand continue to use our global influence to force other nations to follow our lead, improving life for billions of people around the globe.

Yes, we are a great country.  Four years of having used toilet paper for a president doesn't change that.

You know people think I hate the US, which is untrue, there's a lot to like and dislike, but this is delusional.

It’s amusing in that it’s regurgitating the sort of mindless, jingoistic propaganda that we tend to think to stereotype the Americans of spouting off when we want to think the worst of Americans. Luckily there are enough thoughtful posters on here to mean that is obviously not the case. But wow was it why it eye opening to realize that there are actually people like that. Pretty sad to be so brainwashed that you can ever admit your country might have flaws.

What exactly did he say that you disagree with?

Well living standards and civil rights are objectively not true. The rest is often debatable or partially true (taking credit for the eradication of deadly diseases when antibiotics and vaccinations are both British inventions). But it’s not really the point, it’s the insistence of having to be « great ». I mean, I could cherry pick a bunch of things to make out Switzerland was a « great » country, but I don’t, because it’s just nation building propaganda to feel the need to do it. Like, be proud of your country by all means, but at least accept that it’s ambiguous and that every country deserves to be criticized. And if you want to be proud of your country at least do it in a way that doesn’t sound like a military recruitment poster

[parochial boy]

I agree on living standards. GMac has a weirdly rosy view of the American standard of living. There are parts of this country that are literally indistinguishable from a 3rd world nation, and even Americans with "high" quality of life are crippled by preventable diseases (usually related to the horrible food they eat), a lack of exercise, and cities that are constructed in ways that are genuinely hostile to human life.

Civil rights, on the other hand, is not "objectively" quantifiable. If the comparison is a handful of other western nations, then yes, we've continued to lag behind in a number of categories. Compared to the world as a whole though, the US is easily among the most inclusive societies on the planet. Sometimes I feel like left-wingers avoid comparing the US to, say, India-- because to them it feels like comparing apples and oranges. This isn't true.

Regardless, I don't think that GMac singing the praises of the US necessarily means that he ignores the innumerable problems we face, or that he thinks we're perfect. I think you are projecting that onto him because of your reflexive dislike of American jingoism.

I reflectively dislike all jingoism! If I seem to attack the US version more often (and you'll notice how I've probably attacked the French version more viciously in recent times), it is because - for obvious reasons, there is more of it on a site with an overwhelmingly US user base and US focus. Luckily we don't have many Hindutva or CCP types on here, because they are obviously worse. No-one will deny it, and it's not even a question that needs to be asked. The problem with GMac, or this post in particular, is that it has been accompanied by a pretty callous attitude towards Afghans and refusal to accept criticism of the US's actions in light of recent events. In that context, that post displaying a particularly unpleasant side of US nationalism (and there are posters here who I do think manage to be patriotic in a much more agreeable way, including among the yellow avatars) struck a sore chord - and obviously did so with a number of other posters.