Banned from r/Leica for a Photo of John Abernathy being Arrested/Assaulted and tossing his M10 to a Fellow Photographer

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Retro-Grouch said:
Good to know! From now on, "scheiss" will be my preferred term. Long live the victory of the proletariat! 😉
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In what seems like another lifetime decades ago, I worked in a department store. One day, a middle aged man wandered about, and I approached him like a good sales attendant and asked him if he needed help. His eyes widened and he gestured helplessly, indicating that he didnt speak English. We ascertained that he was from Austria, so I said in my garbled German, 'Ach, Sie sind aus die Oesterreich gekommen?' Horribly butchered, I know 😂 But his eyes widened even more and we had a super time 'talking' loudly in German swear words in the midst of the printers and phones. He shushed me nervously when I exclaimed Schiesse! while I explained in German that no one speaks it here, so it didnt matter what we said. 😁

We exchanged email addresses and I thought nothing of it, but he emailed me a month later from Austria. His name was Winni. I wonder how he's doing, if he weathered the pandemic and if he is still around. 🙏
 
Coldkennels said:
There's a German philosopher called Theodor Adorno who seems relevant here; he wrote a lot about the difference between "high culture" and "low culture" in the 1960s, and is generally talked about as if he absolutely despised popular culture, but it's worth pointing out his earlier works dealt more with the method of delivery than an elitist stratification of culture itself. There's a quote referenced in his Wikipedia page that says it well: "The meaning of a Beethoven symphony heard while the listener is walking around or lying in bed is very likely to differ from its effect in a concert hall where people sit as if they were in church."

I think that's both the root of the TV and Internet issues here. Regardless of their socio-economic background, it seems that the less effort people have to put in, the less they value the result (or the thing they consume). That's what's really fuelling the "race to the bottom".

Someone else mentioned Usenet; I've been thinking a lot lately about "eternal September", or the changing of Usenet's culture when Usenet access was bundled in with AOL accounts, flooding the service with non-techy users. That basically defines the entire internet for me: while Web 2.0 et al. claimed to be democratising the internet, reducing the barriers to entry (or, more accurately, creation) just flooded the entire web with low-effort, poorly-thought-through noise with no curation. And people saw this as a get-rich-quick scheme, monetising it through one idea or the other (YouTube ad revenue, paid influencers, crypto, etc.) while simultaneously trying to find ways of doing it faster and faster with less effort (leading to the GenAI-created slop that is overwhelming every space on the internet now).

Same thing's happened with news: people don't read any more. They don't study. They don't take time to understand. They just want it fast and easily consumable. And companies and corporations want to give them that, because it's quicker and costs less for them to make while bringing in more money.

I don't know how to undo that rot, but making the whole thing more difficult again might be a start.
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Yet another example of why I love RFF, the quality of content here both photographic and philosophical is unique and high.

The democratization of the Internet lead in part to the rise of early social media like MySpace, but even earlier were Geocities personal sites, Xanga sites, then Wordpress blogs and YouTube vlogs. You're absolutely right about the low barrier of entry leading to the web being flooded with noise. At the same time, it was a wonderful period where you could read the personal thoughts of people just living their lives without concern for popularity, clicks, or ad revenue. One of my cousins built a personal website filled with things that she liked, including music, actors, TV shows and the like. Specialist forums appeared, like car-centric Ford or Toyota sites, which became unofficial clearinghouses and repositories of knowledge and experience. It was a fun time to browse the internet.

This desire for personal expression is still there, but artificially shortened attention spans make it more difficult for longer form and indepth content to flourish. This is the fault of social media and the endless doomscrolling that popular apps that literally train the brain to lose decision making capabilities.

An approach for combatting this is raising the social value of acquired intelligence. Make it cool to be smart in as many ways as possible. Raise awareness of the deleterious effects of social media apps on the brain and behaviour. Encourage clear thinking as was taught in schools in the 60s, 70s and 80s as an adjunct to mainstream media analysis and as a basic life skill. Push for the three R's and set decent baseline standards that students must meet at all levels of education.
 
Coldkennels said:
Yeah, there's a fundamental disconnect here - the internet, as @chuckroast points out, was a military development with tightly closed (and regulated) access.

Berners-Lee's addition of the World Wide Web - which most people somewhat erroneously refer to as "the internet" - on top of that was a much more utopian and "free" idea. The ideology and rhetoric of folks like Berners-Lee is very, very different to what ARPA et. al. intended for their technology.

Seeing this uncomfortable dichotomy, it should perhaps be no surprise that the web was so thoroughly weaponised against the general populace (see: Cambridge Analytica, Internet Research Agency, the NRA, and so on).
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There, you went and covered what was in my head a lot better than my (less than)half-remembered fuzzy thinking.
 
santino said:
You can combine both - Scheissdreck 😉
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Allow me one last digressional word: "Scheissdreck" is at the bottom, a very rude word, expressing the utmost contempt towards something/something somebody has done. It may be used in a heated argument as a marker short before the end of the fuse- go on like this, and the whole thing will explode!
It also may be used in private discussions about governmental politics. And that´s about it. The use in public is prohibitive.
 
Retro-Grouch said:
Good to know! From now on, "scheiss" will be my preferred term. Long live the victory of the proletariat! 😉
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If you want to do it really right as an expletive, "Sheiss mit Reis." Like you really needed to know that. I should have forgotten more German, obviously.
Harry the K said:
Allow me one last digressional word: "Scheissdreck" is at the bottom, a very rude word, expressing the utmost contempt towards something/something somebody has done. It may be used in a heated argument as a marker short before the end of the fuse- go on like this, and the whole thing will explode!
It also may be used in private discussions about governmental politics. And that´s about it. The use in public is prohibitive.
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Swearing in languages other than our own. My mother and two aunts were bi-lingual German-English when younger. and as "younger" they thought it fun to swear in German. It didn't sound so bad, to them. My Grosstante (Great Aunt) Frieda was visiting from Germany and quite horrified by the girls use of German. When she could stand it no more she used a very prim and proper family, friends of my grandparents, as an example. Here is what she came out with in English. "Suppose I go to the Snow's house for a visit and Mr. Snow comes to the door? I say, 'Hello, Mr. Snow, you bastard. How is your bitch wife? May I come in and shit on your living room floor?'" Swearing in German stopped instantly.

I know how to swear in German and can say some of the foulest things, way beyond this. But I choose not to. That is from a different period in my life. Scheiss mit Reis is common, or was, for a real mess as was Poopendreck. German can be quite beautiful, too, as in Goethe and Zauberfloete. And from classes long ago, "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten dass Ich so traurig bin, aber die Nacht ist kuhl und luftig und schleict mein Herz im Sinn, . . . "

Pardon my meandering but German is a big affect in my life.
 
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boojum said:
...... My Grosstante (Great Aunt) Frieda was visiting from Germany and quite horrified by the girls use of German. When she could stand it no more she used a very prim and proper family, friends of my grandparents, as an example. Here is what she came out with in English. "Suppose I go to the Snow's house for a visit and Mr. Snow comes to the door? I say, 'Hello, Mr. Snow, you bastard. How is your bitch wife? May I come in and shit on your living room floor?'" Swearing in German stopped instantly.

......
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Yes, nicely done GAF!

But the question of the day is, was she?
 
BillBingham2 said:
Yes, nicely done GAF!

But the question of the day is, was she?
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The family that Tante Frieda included in her comments were a lovely, quiet, circumspect and decent family. This was in Upstate NY, Rochester. They have and expression there and on the Niagara Peninsula about super polite people, "They wouldn't say "shit" with a mouthful of it." That was the Snows. Just really, really nice folks.

She picked them deliberately as they were kind of almost revered for decency and therefore acting the way Tante Frieda envisioned her visit was just a horrendous thought. Yeah, you bet that swearing in German was all over when she finished speaking, at the dinner table that night. Tante Frieda was a dear, a single woman all her life, well read, learned Russian to read Tolstoy and Japanese to read The Tale of the Genji. She was no ordinary person and just a darling. We all loved her, she was Oma's sister.

She'd be a little embarrassed to be remembered this way but also proud of her stand. She was a darling.
 
CMur12 said:
What boojum said, but for me it's Portuguese (Brazilian and Continental), South American Spanish, rusty German, and a tiny bit of Farsi/Persian!

- Murray
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For me it's Italian. Growing up in a working-class Italian family, I learned all the good cusses, and since the state I lived in (RI) had such a huge Italian population, everyone (Italian or not) new what those phrases meant, and used them! Now, in NM, Italian speakers are few and far between, but a few years ago I was at an outdoor event and overheard a fellow use one of my most favorite, and most foul, cusses delivered with a definite Sicilian inflection. I instinctively spun around to see who it was; he knew by my face that I had understood what he said. We bonded instantly! And of course, he was a goombah from South Boston...
 
chuckroast said:
After extensive travel, I have determined that the only three phrases needed anywhere in the world are:

Where is the bathroom?

May I have another beer please?

Is your daughter 18?

(My wife hates this joke.)
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I knew a guy when I was about 18 who said that you only needed to know the phrase, 'I have a long snake in my pants', and he was determined to learn it in as many languages as possible. He asked a Chinese girl to translate this for him, and she just wouldn't, saying that it was a very bad thing to say.
 
Archiver said:
I knew a guy when I was about 18 who said that you only needed to know the phrase, 'I have a long snake in my pants', and he was determined to learn it in as many languages as possible. He asked a Chinese girl to translate this for him, and she just wouldn't, saying that it was a very bad thing to say.
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She was right. The guy sounds like a real pig.
 
boojum said:
The family that Tante Frieda included in her comments were a lovely, quiet, circumspect and decent family. This was in Upstate NY, Rochester. They have and expression there and on the Niagara Peninsula about super polite people, "They wouldn't say "shit" with a mouthful of it." That was the Snows. Just really, really nice folks.

......
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Rochester was an amazing place full of an international melting pot of great people. My father grew up at 23 Trafalgar just down the road from Wilson HS. EKC and Xerox were but two of the companies that brought many of the best and brightest to live there. I grew up in Greece (a northwestern suburb) that was more working class engineering. While I took advantage of a few aspects of what Rochester had to offer back in the 70's, looking back I missed out on a lot.
 
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