Zig Dishing the Dirt

I would never pay money for a redbox. if you ask politely and are very very persistent (i.e. annoying) they will let you take it away

here's my dad and i taking it away

luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).

the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.

there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.

if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.

So, some idiot posted this shit:

Most prominent terrorist attacks since 1970 and their religion:

1. Munich Olympics massacre (1972) - Islam

2. Beirut barracks bombing (1983) - Islam

3. TWA Flight 847 (1985) - Islam

4. Rome & Vienna airport attacks (1985) - Islam

5. Pan Am Flight 103 (1988) - Islam

6. World Trade Center bombing (1993) - Islam

7. Paris Metro bombings (1998) - Islam

8. US Embassy bombings Kenya & Tanzania (1998) - Islam

9. USS Cole bombing (2000) - Islam

10. 9/11 attacks (2001) - Islam

11. Bali bombings (2002) - Islam

12. Istanbul bombings (2003) - Islam

13. Madrid train bombings (2004) - Islam

14. London 7/7 bombings (2005) - Islam

15. Fort Hood shooting (2009) - Islam

16. Toulouse/Montauban shootings (2012) - Islam

17. Boston Marathon bombing (2013) - Islam

18. Brussels Jewish Museum shooting (2014) - Islam

19. Ottawa Parliament attack (2014) - Islam

20. Charlie Hebdo / Hyper Cacher attacks (2015) - Islam

21. Paris November attacks (2015) - Islam

22. San Bernardino shooting (2015) - Islam

23. Brussels airport/metro bombings (2016) - Islam

24. Nice truck attack (2016) - Islam

25. Berlin Christmas Market attack (2016) - Islam

26. Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting (2016) - Islam

27. Westminster Bridge attack (2017) - Islam

28. Manchester Arena bombing (2017) - Islam

29. London Bridge/Borough Market attack (2017) - Islam

30. Barcelona/Cambrils attacks (2017) - Islam

31. Strasbourg Christmas market attack (2018) - Islam

32. London Bridge stabbing (2019) - Islam

33. Samuel apart beheading (2020) - Islam

34. Vienna shooting (2020) - Islam

35. October 7 Hamas-led attacks (2023) - Islam

36. Arras school stabbing (2023) - Islam

37. Solingen knife attack (2024) - Islam

38. New Orleans Bourbon Street attack (2025) - Islam

39. Bondi Beach Hanukkah attack (2025) - Islam

40. Winterthur train-station stabbing (2026) - Islam

I couldn’t list them all, obviously, but let’s put it into perspective.

Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide since 1979:

1979–April 2024: 66,872 attacks

By period:

1979–2000: 2,194 attacks

2001–2012: 8,265 attacks

2013–April 2024: 56,413 attacks

Total Deaths: at least 249,941

"Now, who is the biggest threat to the world, again?"

I feel I must respond to this one, despite my having been looking forward to simply fucking off and relaxing this Sunday afternoon. It's been a while since I wrote a "Cuppa Joe" sermon, so let's do this...

First off-

Wow. Just... wow...

Now don't get me wrong, but I'm as anti-religion as I can be but just...

If ever there was a stone-throwing fest inside of a massive glass house before this post, I can't recall it.

First off, let's address the major elephant's ass in the room that someone's got their head up. It begins with a question: WHY?

Why did those terrorist attacks even happen in the first place? This idiot post is couched to portray a group of people who were apparently just bored and wanted something to do in the name of some religion.

While we're at it, let's skip all of the atrocities that the Christians have done in the name of Jesus, from the burning of the Library of Alexandria right up to the right wing violence happening in the US TODAY. Another "religion of peace", isn't it?

We're going to skip the history of the Jewish culture from their egress of Egypt and their bloody conquest of the Palestine region? We're going to not even gloss over the atrocities going on there TODAY?

The Crusades? Just ignore that. The KKK? A "Christian" organization. Let's skip over that. The Nazis? Another "Christian" group but we'll not so much as skim over that. The conquest of the Americas by "Christian" Europeans and the mass genocides, murder, rape, theft and pillaging that came along with them? Not so much as a word.

The Christians and all of their factions have as much if not more blood on their hands, historically speaking, than the Islamic faith. What really pisses me off here is that I feel forced, from a historical perspective, to even defend this point.

To answer the question of "Why?" did those attacks happen means having to look deeper into things. The answer is almost always the same, so I'll sum it all up for you.

Humans are stupid, murderous, callous creatures who are too lazy to think, rather like the insipid author of the original post. It's that simple. The whole principle of "let he without sin cast the first stone" is the shining beacon of Western hypocrisy.

Let's put things into a clear context that can be used in almost every situation regarding human atrocities, shall we?

Some rich guy (almost always a man, by the way; just as a side note) is pissed at some other rich guy of another nation and covets what that guy has. So, he implements a tactic as old as time- use religion and nationalism to build an army of cheaply bought idiots to go to that other guys country and kill, rape and destroy, all in the promise of fortune and glory and a place in Heaven. I'm not talking just the average Joe who loves his home and wants to serve honorably. I've served with them, but those with critical thinking skills have often asked ourselves "How did my Freedom end up in Iraq or Afghanistan and why are we going there to fight and die for it?"

No, I'm talking about the base-born morons who are poorly educated because their (local) governments keep them that way. They're all fed on religion and taught that intellectuals (smart people) are evil. They're maga, through and through.

People like that guzzle the kool-aid by the gallon. They’re too lazy to think and too disinterested to ask questions. They think their holy texts are enough, even though the text themselves are outdated and not allowed to be changed with the times. They’re ancient. Also, while predicated in peace, the texts of the Abrahamic religions are often edited in a way that the words from them that are in fact preached are far too often used to convince chuckle-fucks that the core values of the teachings are inconvenient and that going to war to help rich people get richer is the way to go. This is why trumplefuckstick’s followers are all “USA! Support the troops!” while he calls soldiers “suckers and losers” while he, himself, paid to get out of the draft several times during the Viet Nam conflict.

When you hear the term “Nation’s Interests Overseas” come out of a politician’s face to explain why a nation is going to war, let me explain what that means in layman’s terms: it means “Rich People’s Investments and Assets”. It doesn’t mean to protect their people abroad. It doesn’t mean there’s a threat to their own nation except in the bank accounts of the rich. It means that they’re willing to throw their own people, armed to the teeth, into harm’s way because their own standing military is cheaper than hiring mercenaries. It means that our kids, kept struggling in a shit economy with a failing, self-sabotaged education system and bleak futures have less and less opportunity for a better life and that military service will at least offer some security, education, and skills that might, might, be useful in their increasingly hopeless futures. To console them, religion is thrown at them so they might find some solace in the words that are preached at them but are seldom practiced at best.

This is every nation. This is every brand of government from democratic to socialism to communism to outright fascism. The song is the same even if the lyrics are different.

This is every religion. This is every branch of Christianity, Islam or Judaism and even Hindi and Sikh and so on. Again, the song remains the same even if the lyrics are different. I mean shit; you’d be amazed at how many ‘Muricans have no idea that in Islam, Jesus is accepted and revered as a Prophet and that they worship the same fucking god as the Christians which is the same god of the Jews. “Allah” is the Arabic word for “God” just like “Dios” is the Spanish word and “Dieu” is French.

So pick up a fucking history book some time and cover all your bases before you go blaming a particular group for something. Then ask yourself “Why did/do they do this horrible thing?” and start reading. It’s been a slap contest that goes back centuries, and it’s nothing more than Rich People Games where the poor and undereducated are sacrificed for their gain and enrichment. It’s every corporation screwing their employees out of fair wages and safe working conditions. It’s every robber baron around the world who buys all the factories but shares none of the wealth and prosperity with the people he employs. It’s every selfish cunt with too much money buying politicians and having them look the other way while the Epstein class commits horrible atrocities against children while eating caviar and drinking expensive booze. It’s every one of those assholes who hire shifty lawyers who are experts and finding loopholes to keep them in charge and hiring judges and lawmakers to keep them exempt from the true definitions of justice while hammering the working class and the poor.

Every goddamn one of them wraps themselves in their nation’s flag and uses all the popular, bumper sticker catch phrases to con people into thinking that he/she is one of their own. Every goddamn one of them wields a ‘holy book’ instead of a school textbook because they need the stupidest people in order to bolster support. This is nothing new. Kings and Emperors of olde going back before recorded history have done this time and again, and you want to know the real sick part?

IT WORKS EVERY FUCKING TIME.

It’s working right now. It’s the original shit-poster here in this re-post who thinks he’s holier-than-thou and pure of heart and soul enough to throw condemnation towards another culture that does the same shit he’s doing back at him, and the maddening thing is that despite the good work at accumulating a comprehensive list of horrible happenings, it’s being used as a tool for hate rather than one of self reflection.

During the American Revolution, the people fighting against the British were, from the British point of view, traitors and terrorists. They were insurrectionists and rebels. But what got the states to finally turn against the crown wasn’t the promise of a bright, new country, it was the promise that they could keep their cash instead of paying taxes to Britain. The aforementioned promise of a bright, new country was used to raise an army. Then again, Jesus never did say anything about freeing slaves and he never lifted a finger to save or free the ones in Palestine when he was allegedly alive.

So spare me the rhetoric. Stick your jingosims up your ass and see if it pops your head back out so you can breathe and perhaps you’ll have an actual, critical thought.

Religion is the tool of the rich to get the poor to kill for them so they’ll get richer. It’s never about faith. It’s never about truth or philosophy or learning. It’s about religion as an identity marker. It’s about training you to be able to hate people you’ve never met who have never done anything to you. It’s about being able to wear a gold cross on a chain around your neck while you smile into the cameras and lie, straight-faced, about all of the child abuse and crime to your base while taking the cash to do so.

That is what religion does. It doesn’t get you into Heaven. It gets you a seat at the bottom of the table legs to fight for scraps dropped from the rich onto the floor. Religion gets you a front row seat under the draped tablecloth where you can sniff the farts and crotches of the rich and powerful and if you really want some advancement and possibly move up in the world you can take a risk and bury your face in one of the crotches down under there and see who spreads their legs for you to service them.

That is what religion is for.

~Joe

I have southern relatives who say it’s their culture. I informed them that their parents came here illegally in the 1960’s and 70’s and that they are actually anchor babies. Occasionally on Facebook I’ll ask them if anyone has reported them to ICE yet.

When some of them get loud I’ll remind the gay ones and the ones with inter-racial children about the times they were harassed by the Klan. And I never miss an opportunity to remind the evangelical ones that they are not Christians because they refuse to acknowledge the New Testament and Socialist Jesus.

I have no place in my life for MAGAts. Their lack of self awareness is incredible. They just follow along like sheep and aren’t even aware of all the family members who died fighting Nazis and fighting for unions on the home front.

I keep hearing that one of America’s biggest problems is we’re “divided and polarized.” For example, New York Times columnist David French: “We’ve known for a long time that America is deeply polarized, and we’ve known the problem is only getting worse.”

This is bullsh*t. The problem is not that we’re divided and polarized.

The problem is that a significant portion of America is buying Trump’s violent, hateful, lawless crap. Some of those buying it are white supremacists. Others are conservative fundamentalist Christians. Others are xenophobic nationalists.

I feel compassion for those who’ve been seduced into supporting Trump after being brutalized and mistreated for years by employers, big corporations, Wall Street, and America’s oligarchs. As I warned 32 years ago, widening inequalities of wealth, income, and opportunity would eventually persuade some on the losing side to support a demagogue.

But an explanation for why some of Trump’s followers have bought into his neofascism isn’t a justification for them to do so. And it’s certainly no reason for us to put aside our differences and compromise with them.

As you undoubtedly know, Trump has created a violent police state inside America. He is conducting an illegal war abroad. He has usurped the powers of Congress and defied court orders. He is taking bribes. He’s criminally prosecuting his enemies and pardoning his criminal supporters (he has even set up a slush fund to compensate them). He has gotten his Justice Department to immunize him and his family from any future tax audits. He is silencing critics. He is fomenting racism and bigotry.

None of us should fall for the false equivalency between this, and opposition to it. The contest today is not between “right” and “left,” as the two sides have traditionally been understood in America. It’s not even between “Republicans” and “Democrats,” as we’ve defined the two major parties over most of the past century.

No, the contest today is between democracy and authoritarianism. It’s between tolerance and bigotry. Between a multiracial, secular, inclusive society and one that believes in white Christian nationalism. Between the rule of law and neofascism.

The two sides in this contest do not merit equal weight. If we are going to have a decent society, the nation must come down on the former side.

As long as Trump has followers who support his bigotry, racism, corruption, and violence, the nation will remain divided and polarized. That is necessary and proper.

We shouldn’t “reach out, or “meet halfway,” or “find middle ground,” or “split the difference,” or any other of today’s hackneyed expressions for putting aside what divides us and agreeing.

Generations of Americans fought and died for the ideals of democracy, freedom, social justice, the rule of law, and equal opportunity. We have never fully achieved them, but they remain our ideals. Tomorrow we celebrate Memorial Day to honor those ideals and the memories of those who died for them.

There cannot be, must not be, any compromise with neofascism.

An excellent article (although the pointy fingers in the drawing look a little like dick & balls 😅), but my only counterpoint is a simple question:

At what point in the history of the US was it NOT a fight between two sides where one is good and one is evil? Surely not at the inception of the country all the way up through the Civil War and beyond to Jim Crow? But then, those same ideals and descendants of KKK members are the current party of fascism.

I postulate that in a healthy democracy, polarization is unhealthy and destructive. But that's a HEALTHY democracy. That has never been the US.

In an unhealthy democracy, polarization is the only way to actually achieve anything meaningful. You don't try to compromise with the influenza virus when you're infected and sick right? You hate the virus and try to destroy it, while it actively tries to destroy you from the inside, and if you succeed and triumph over the sickness, you're better off for it, don't look back after it's wiped out from your system entirely, and move on to bigger and better things.

The education system has intentionally been made awful by the right (conservatives) BECAUSE it allows stupid shit like this to be reality.

What exactly does 3.5 million pages and 17,000 pounds of evidence look like? Samantha Bee finds out during her visit to The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room.

Find out more information at TrumpEpsteinReadingRoom.com

Video produced, directed, and edited by Miles Kahn.

Follow Samantha Bee:

Instagram/Threads:    / realsambee  ​

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When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

In my younger years I worked at a medical office that managed both mental health and addiction recovery. The company had purchased an empty lot down the road from the building we rented to build a better facility with larger capacity. The CEO worked for months with the architect, and just as they were finalizing everything they happened to let me - who was the receptionist at that time - take a gander at the blueprints. It took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out at me.

“The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout.” I said. “It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall.”

“Is that important?” They asked.

“Do you want me to be able to keep track of the patients who are waiting?” I asked.

“Isn’t that what the sign-in sheet is for?” They asked me.

“Not everyone who comes here is signing in for an appointment, some are coming to check in, some people are here for the group therapy and need to be directed to the other side of the building, some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach.” I explain.

“How often does that even happen?” They asked.

“Every day.” I explain.

“Bullshit.” They said.

“I’m not joking at all. Also, where is the chart room?” I asked.

“Oh, over here.” They said, pointing to a tiny closet on the far side of the building from the receptionist and check out desks. It was tucked neatly beside the CEO’s office. To get there the secretaries would have to go through two sets of security doors and it would be a five minute walk each way.

“Why isn’t it next to the front office, since that’s where the people who use it are?” I asked.

“We had concerns about people just going into the chart room to goof off and not do their work. It takes them away from their desks too much. You should only go in the chart room twice a day - once in the morning to pull the charts for the day, and once in the evening to put way the charts. It would remain locked and the CEO would have the key and let you in to supervise.” They said.

“We pull charts the day before so everything is ready to go and we can alert staff if a patient with additional needs is coming in. We have to go in the chart room every time a patient calls in that’s having a problem with their meds or is in crisis or otherwise has a question for the nurse. We have to go in there every time someone cancels and we are able to fit a waitlisted patient in. We go in there 20 - 30 times a day for legitimate reasons. The only reason any of us has ever gone in there to take a minute was when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time.”

They stared at me.

“Sit with me for an hour and see what happens up here.” I said.

They took the blueprints away from me before I could keep looking at them, but they took me up on sitting with me. They didn’t last an hour. They changed the blueprints to fix both things I’d pointed out.

Unfortunately, they didn’t let me keep looking at it and they never asked the janitor what he thought, so no one caught the final fatal flaw in the design.

There were no closets in the entire building. Nowhere to put our supplies. And I’m not talking just a place for stationary and pens. I mean no janitorial closet. Nowhere to put paper towels and toilet paper or cleaning products. Nowhere to put holiday decorations or anything at all. They completely forgot about storage of any kind and immediately started eyeballing my hard-won chart room for it.

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I don’t mean Australians are a “stick it to the man, fight back against those in power” kind of people – we’re generally not. And I don’t mean we have a “we’re going to do the status thing but pretend we don’t and pretend to all be equal in mixed company” thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say is ‘above’ you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; it’s saying “I’m forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I don’t see you as a person and won’t grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equal”. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)

This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians as “friendly, but very rude”. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldn’t believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and we’d only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.

The reason I’ve been thinking of this lately is because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of countries have like… a special respect for their country’s leaders? I don’t just mean “yeah, that guy makes the rules”, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but I’ve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, it’s just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like he’s automatically the life worth saving over the others, and they’d just give up their chance in favour of him? And that’s so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided, “this guy happens to be the leader of the country” wouldn’t be a factor. 

When Americans don’t like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how he’s “not my president”, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way he’s theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, I’ve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that they’re invested in whether he’s Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick who’s been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing in “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!”, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).

I remember in school we were always taught to treat others how you wanted to be treated. You were no better or worse than anyone else. You want to be treated equal to everyone else and that meant being polite and showing decency and helping each other out. It’s true we only use titles for teachers or elders (indigenous Australians use “Aunty” and “Uncle” as a show of respect to their elders) but outside of that if someone calls you Miss y/n or sir or whatever it’s just uncomfortable. In hospitality and retail some of us will still use sir/ma'am mainly because we don’t know customers names but even then that’s rare and usually applied only to elderly. We personally don’t want to be addressed by titles or even surnames (unless it’s a nickname which I’ll get to) so we don’t use the titles or surnames for other people. With surnames often we use them as a nickname if we dont/can’t shorten their names. Getting a nickname (a good one, not one that is intentionally meant to bully you ofc. E.g. ScoMo is the nickname for our PM but he’s a piece of shit and ScoMo sounds a lot like Scum-mo) is the biggest show of respect in Australia. Usually it’s simply just adding a vowel or changing it up a little. I.e. John = johnno, Darren = Dazza, etc. If we can’t do it to your first name we do it to your last name. If we can’t do it to your last name it’s either a feature or behaviour and we put it in a good light. You ever notice that Australians like to make fun of each other and “insult” each other? There’s a very subtle difference when it’s truly meant to be insulting but that’s our way of being affectionate for each other. We will point out your flaws and make fun of you (and stop if you say no) and we will give you a nickname and it’s all in good humour. It’s one of the things I find foreigners get really upset about because they dont understand why we are so rude to each other. You build up a hard skin in this country and forget hat sometimes that stuff IS a bit insulting.

I'm super curious how Australians handle calling call centers in other places. In the US, in most call center settings, if you don't refer to the caller as "Mr. X" or "Miss Y" or "Ma'am" or "Sir" when you address them, you'll actually get a write-up and potentially get fired. (In the Philippines they just call everyone "Ma'amSir" all the time, too.)

If Aussies call and get that type of treatment when they call in somewhere, is that also an issue for y'all?

Lincoln was part of the "Republican" Party at the time, but that's simply a label. Ideologically the Republican Party back then was the progressive party, and the Democratic Party was the Conservative Party.

The US's horrendous two-party system was made significantly worse by the ideological reversal starting around the 60s, which is why Republican=conservative and Democrat=progressive today.