Don’t you just hate it when socio-cultural stereotypes are true
You hang about forums like SDMB patiently refuting another post that kangaroos prowl the streets of Australian cities or that every life form on our continent is out to kill you (yes, they all can kill you, but they aren’t all out to kill you). It’s the lot of a furriner on a merkin forum. As Will McAvoy would say “Progress is slow, but I’m in it for the long haul”
We also hear the stereotypes that the Canadians are unfailingly, universally, friendly, polite, decent …. it must be over-egging the pudding, right? As Robin Williams would say if you are living in “a really nice apartment over a meth lab”, that mere proximity alone would justify the national psychic going postal on a regular basis.
Back in December 2016, yes that’s over 15 months ago, the SDMB had a cordial discussion about ERII and the successionhttps://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=814722.
It covered the topic in detail and context, drifting though constitutional conventions of the UK, Canada and Australia. 125 posts and nearly 13k views. We must have educated somebody.
In the thread Northern Piper made a series of posts I thought were considered and erudite. Nothing unusual in that. It is my quaint habit to send PMs to Dopers acknowledging posed stuff I find insightful, interesting or amusing, which I did in this case. No biggie. Just expressing civility on the internet. Thought no more about it.
Last night I received a PM for NP thanking me for the message and apologising for being slow to respond.
Peter Gzowski, a well-known Canadian radio commentator, used to hold a celebrity golf tournament in Saskatchewan to raise funds for literacy programmes.
He told the story that at one of the tournies, one of the players ran over another player’s foot with his golf cart.
Who apologised? Why, the fellow whose foot got run over, of course. Clearly, it was his fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and not getting out of the way.
In his review of a film called Last Night, which is about what people do on the day the world is to end at midnight, one character, played by Sandra Oh, goes into a grocery story to get a bottle of wine for dinner that evening. Ebert quotes someone who explains how you can tell it’s a Canadian movie, “The store has been looted, but she finds two bottles still on the shelf. She takes them down, evaluates them, chooses one, and puts the other one politely back on the shelf. That’s how you know it’s a Canadian film.”
Well, of course. If you only need one bottle of wine, you take the one you want and leave the other one for the next looter. It’s just common courtesy!
Socio-cultural stereotypes ARE true. Whether or not they are widely accepted, predominantly recognized, used in bad ways, or merely faint recollections from bygone days, they all started somewhere.
I hate the stereotype of Canadian politeness, if you ever argued with one online you’ll find they have gigantic egos and refuse to admit when they or their country are wrong. And don’t say “Well Americans are the same way” because you’ll find American Liberals and Conservatives will admit to different wrongs if pushed but Canadians are one giant hive mind of nationalism barely hidden by a knowing veneer of national politeness. So many Canadians on this board keep parroting WELL YOU KNOW WE BURNED DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE argument despite the fact you can easily prove they didn’t, but then they pretend to never have read that and then later post in a different place that exact same argument.
Then you go to Canadian Reddit and see them say Americans are racist but then openly complain about the Natives.
Part of me wonders if the whole stereotype that ‘asians are terrible drivers’ is because east Asia industrialized so rapidly, and a bunch of adults all got their drivers licenses at the same time.
Imagine a world where a bunch of teenagers all entered the road at the same time.
I have an extremely un-PC theory that academic strength and motor skill/athletic skill are often in conflict or on opposite ends of the cognitive spectrum, such that people who excel at academics are typically bad at motor/athletic skills and vice versa. Hence, Asians are good at academics but terrible at driving and sports, and black people excel at motor and athletic pursuits but underachieve academically.
Jews have high levels of cognitive abilities (there are only 10 million ashkenazi jews on earth but they produce far more productive people than a sampling of 100 million non jews picked at random) but I’ve never heard Jews be derided as bad at driving.
However the stereotype of Jews being terrible at sports has been around for a long time.
Will Ferguson tells a story in one of his books, about a car going off a hillside road in California. Highway patrol found a women wandering injured, no recollection of who she was or what had happened. She was very polite however and one suggested checking if any Canadians were currently missing, and sure enough, she’d been unconscious over 24hrs, and had been reported as missing!
Will’s point was, how deeply conditioned are we if after a bump on the head sufficient to render one unable to recall their own name, yet still remember their manners!
