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My proofreader sort of suggested the line about Europeans & I added it in kind of paraphrased because sometime Reggie needs to be weirdly adversarial about random things. He’s got some kind of axe to grind with Europe that’s never been explored, and may never be. It might be something as American as using the metric system, or any number of the random unfounded things Americans dislike Europeans for, but Reggie has to be a jerk randomly for seemingly no reason because that’s who he is. Everyone is like that sometimes of course. Some innocuous comment suddenly makes you reveal just how much you hate the Dutch & it’s such an issue the slightest mention makes you spit a little bit. Pffft, the Dutch… They is dildos. I don’t know if I have any Dutch readers, but that’s just a running gag from a show I liked. As an American I’m not required to know anything about the rest of the world. XD

Reggie is very much the kind of person who goes to comment sections to write long rants about his various nitpicks. The kind that evolved into cultural commentary channels. Or like the athiest blogs that evolved into movie reviews when that wasn’t fun to debate anymore. Like all the scrubs who want to be Red Letter Media, but have no worthwhile opinions, or an ounce of charisma. Reggie isn’t a lost cause though. He’s someone that can work his way up to not being a piece of shit. That’s kind of his arc. In some ways it’s all of humanity’s arc.

36 Comments

as an european chucklefuck : screw you and your units and the way you write dates XD

That’s fair

Apparently the Americans use “cup” as a measure for cake ingredients; is this so people can decide how much of a greedy fuck they want to be?

No, it’s because we use cups.

Rowling is from England, Where they use wands instead of cups.
I think the Swiss use coins, and Russia uses shot glasses instead of cups.
If Spain hasn’t gone metric, they’re probably using swords! My name is Inago ….

Now, don’t be a Fool. Not everyone knows the Arcana of baking, or can be a Magician in the kitchen. Although my grandma baked so well, she was practically an Empress.

Perhaps we should practice Temperance in these references, else The World wreak Judgement upon us and knock us from our (quarantine) Tower.

Cups, tablespoons, teaspoons are sensible if you just have measuring things and no scales. 1 cup of flour is easier then try to measure 136g of flour. You can also get metric and imperial cups too.

The US as a whole uses the Imperial (UK) system except in a few areas.

1 Fluid Ounce is just that a fluid ounce except the UK system is the amount of water at room temperature that weighs 1 ounce, the US system uses wine, which as is less dense then water means that the US Fl Oz is larger than the UK one… Then there is the Pint… In the UK it’s 20 Fl Oz and in the US its 16 Fl Oz, so the US one a pint weighs a pound (as long as you have wine…) the UK one weighs a pound and a quarter… The gallon is 8 pints, but as the pint is different the UK gallon is a lot more…

The US also use pounds, but in the UK, 14 pounds is a Stone, so for a persons weight, most scales are still marked in Stones rather than pounds… There are some measurements that are still used in the UK like Chains and Furlongs…

About weird jokes involving the Dutch…

If you check YouTube, you can find some British TV shows featuring Richard Ayoade and Matt Berry: Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (from 2004) and Man to Man with Dean Learner (from 2006).

The Darkplace show introduces the character of Garth Marenghi, a self-important idiot who writes horror novels and thinks he can act.

The Man to Man show is supposedly an interview show, and in an episode where Dean Learner interviews Garth Marenghi he shows a clip of a new horror movie he wrote, where giant wasps attack London. Marenghi explains that the wasps are an allegory for the Dutch. (When they show a clip from the movie, the giant wasps all have wooden shoes on all their feet.)

The first and second episodes of the Darkplace show make me laugh until tears come out of my eyes, every time I watch them. And they are on YouTube! Better watch them before some lawyer from the BBC notices and gets them taken down.

Here’s the URL of the first Darkplace episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EkN8WtFTpE

“There’s only two things I can’t stand in this world: people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures… and the Dutch.”
https://youtu.be/QJ882QYzr-M

How can you not like the Dutch, great beer, fabulous bread, and polite,.. they even speak English …sort of… in the way north.
I guess that joke fell platt.
Anyway windmills and tulips! Oh, I guess I kinda proved your point, hunh!

Hehe, thumbs up on having a proofreader! It’s a great solution to a puzzle and someone from a provincial town where I’m from would not necessarily come up with it as Reggie does. It just takes experience with other places and systems.

The comment is not even ethnicist against Europeans. At the core, it’s more the typical learner’s frustration with the complexity of the world and with the effort to adapt to it. Anything new is hated first in a veiled complaint due to mental laziness and myside bias. I grew up in this culture, so it makes total sense and is the greatest. If you are aware of that, it’s okay. I think Americans have gathered much more experience with this negotiation of difference than other cultures – and there’s at the very least an uneasiness about it. But then people will also overattribute traits to the source, the Dutch, the British are this and that by virtue of their history.

Sometimes it’s wrong, based on outsider stereotypes, like Bruce Campbell’s Man with Two Brains set in “Bulgaria”, which is epic for that in many ways, and sometimes it’s wrong based on a benevolent outsider understanding of the country’s own stereotypes about itself (the Expendables?), and sometimes it’s also right because the nation indeed chucklefucked things up along the way and should rightly be criticized for it.
I catch myself often being like Reggie about U.S. stuff, like date format, measurements, etc. (nationalism and exceptionalism is not a suitable approach to science) and deeply mistrustful of anything come out of the British corner – like English spelling (they got it from the French, duh!), French numbers and spelling, Russian tenses, German nouns and abstract nouns and random genders – impractical, adds to the confusion, takes up mental space, keeps society busy with nonsense, puts up barriers for outsiders, like overdue gender debates – be glad you got that mostly right in English… We probably use up years of education and clear thought by it and frustrated learners give up. (A friend dropped out of school because of foreign languages.)
It’s based on principles of who invented it first gets to keep it.
Most of language especially was inherited from dudes long dead, in an unplanned way, with the weirdest ideas about sexes, social order, the world, themselves, before science – it’s ‘old technology’s. We are past the mental frames in theory, but we like to stick to the language because it’s our first experience – and I have a goddamn right to feel entitled to talk how I want. Identity is a bitch.

But yeah as a global family if we want to come together, we gotta get past the differences. And that also means some will have to make changes that take learning effort. I just hope it happens and based on reason not power.
I take the relativism Indy approach to culture: Don’t let it fade into oblivion but much of it belongs into a museum. And yet so much popular culture gotten ‘right’, so much enjoyment based on these past imperfections – you wouldn’t want to miss it. I just try to do my best and remember I have a choice to be more practical even if it makes society uncomfortable, a modern-day blessing.

Americans are being required to know about the world though if nothing else by the audiences. If you vote you have to.
Take a look at goodcountryindex.
But that’s an old trope, it’s relaxing to take a break from self-improvement.

In Europe, there was this outcry about racist images in childrens books, like pippi longstocking, and this is true, and the counter outcry by middle aged guys especially feeling something is being taken away from them and ‘art is being censored’ for political correctness, and they did not think the racism was an important aspect of the story, so it didn’t affect them. It’s all true at the same time, and we might acknowledge that. but at the end of the day, when it comes to policy what should weigh most is the perspective of a black child having a right to a discrimination-free upbringing.

“…what should weigh most is the perspective of a black child having a right to a discrimination-free upbringing.”

This right here is what kind of makes me pause about the idea of censoring things. Don’t get me wrong, overt sexism, racism, and other prejudices can and should be called out, but it’s really easy to go too far in the other direction, as you outlined. Both sides can be right even if one is moreso than the other.

Take for example the idea of Pippi Longstocking. I can’t speak to experience there as I never grew up with it, but I DID grow up around other banned books, and the only thing that happened was that large groups of my peers wanted to see what the fuss was about and ended up getting ahold of them anyway. The Streisand Effect B.I. (Before Internet). Even worse, now it was an echo chamber of youth since adults were making a big deal about it. It made us not want to talk to them about it.

Trying to artificially limit the amount of discrimination in a child’s life, I feel, is similar to putting ourselves in bubbles out of fear of germs. At the end of the day, the germs are going to get to you regardless, and the only thing that will occur is that you’re less prepared for when it happens.

Rather than making a big deal about the book, like in Europe, I feel it’d be more productive to identify why it’s racist and prejudiced in the first place, and share that discussion with your child along with why it’s important to not be like that. In this way, the child learns to look more deeply at things and that it’s okay to talk to you about sensitive subjects and ethical quandaries.

Sorry for the counter rant, I found your perspective refreshing to read. Take care!

@FreakedFollower and @ENDG4MER, this also gave me pause to think about Reggies attitude. It comes later than applicable, but the ISO date format puts both the us and euro historical formats to bed, and is nicely self sorting. (not that biggest to smallest is better than smallest to biggest, it just fits with western mathematics conventions, is internally consistent and reads like an odometer or any other number.)

That aside, the deeper discussion about racism was well put and respectful, thank you. I was priviledged to not grow up as a minority suffering from racism, so disclosed. I have to agree though, that I don’t think the solution to racism in literature is censorship, but de-listing from required reading lists is meritous. Certainly not reading Pipi in the US has done nothing to allow any kids to grow up without racism. Not making anyone read it is moving in the right direction, but it almost feels like a token win, “you can have this one, but don’t start on ‘that other thing’.” Whatever that may be. Not forcing a kid to read it for school though, at least stops a systemic influence from perpetuating the problem. This does not mean racism shouldn’t be discussed in school, it most definitely should, and that can be handled by any number of texts that are self aware and present it as a ‘thing that happens’ to be understood and overcome, rather than by the book being racist. (i.e. a book can talk about people being hurtful, without using hurtful constructs that perpetuate the problem).

Again, thank you both for the thought provoking writing. It wasn’t what I was expecting this morning, but it was interesting.

And Reggie is the one who figured out the safe combination.

Points with Alex continue to increase at a dangerous pace.

I loved metalocalypse, it was such an awesome show. Too bad it got cancelled…

But on the dates things, I truly hate the month-day-year approach. Other than being confusing to non-english natives, it’s a horrible way to encode a date from a computer/mathematical point of view.
The two obvious ways to do it are either “big-endian” where things go from small to big (i.e. days-month-year) or “small-endian” where things go from big to small (i.e. year-month-day). Small-endian has the great property of being super easy to sort : the “bigger” numbers (say 2020 04 10) are later than the smaller numbers (say 1989 01 01).

I never could get the date thing right. That’s why I eventually adopted the military method: day-written month-year (for example “10 Apr 2020”. Easily understood and not very easily misunderstood (by people, anyway.) Computers may have difficulty with it, but then they serve me, not the other way around.

@Zaldan:
“small-endian” also allows you to extend this all the way down to the fractions of a second, if you need that level of precision.
EXAMPLE:
1)__with only 2_BYTES of computer-memory, you can store a time-stamp down to the month:
1A)__12_Binary_digits will handle any number from 1 A.D.-to-4095 A.D., inclusive
1B)__the remaining 4_binary_digits are for the 12 months (or 13, if you need to use the Jewish calendar)
2)__for the next 2_BYTES:
2A)__5_binary_digits can store 1-to-31 days
2B)__5_binary_digits can store 0-to-23 hours (AKA: “military clock”)
2C)__6_binary_digits can store 0-to-59 minutes
3)__for the final 2_BYTES:
3A)__6_binary_digits can store 0-to-59 seconds
3B)__7_binary_digits can store 0-to-99 100ths of a second
3C)__3_binary_digits can store the day-of-the-week, as: 0(Sunday)-thru-6(Saturday)

Even if you only need a month’s level of precision, starting from today, by the time your “time-stamp” needs a larger storage-space
(1_second after 4095/12/31_23:59.99_Sat),
…about 100 generations will have been born-&-died.

For the pros: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
Like, “2020-04-12T12:26:54Z”

Or you could use Unix epoch. The recent Linux 5.6 even fixed the Y2038 problem.

(Aaand you might find that you want to represent milli-, micro- and nanoseconds. Or, I guess, even shorter intervals if you’re into physics.)

That was how we wrote dates on every legal document I signed in the US Army too so guess we’re also Chucklefucks

as a random european chucklefk
i have heard 0 good argument for month before day and several for day before month
same with the metric system
also i totaly see reggie saying something like that XD

It’s probably more, “It’s Old World, so it must be better!”, some folks here in North America believe. And of that group, some of them are irritating as hell about it. Reggie may have just been unlucky enough to have to deal with them; possibly a family member. :)

Just found out I’m a jerk. Obvious in retrospect, and probably to everyone cursed with my presence. Well,”The More You Know”. Course, if that’s the case, I suspect I have compatriots somewhere. And again, standard bolts $3 a pound, metric bolts $3 apiece.

“The person who discovers that they are a fool, is only half of a fool.”

-From the 1988, Anime tv show- Dominion Tank Police.
:D

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