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i saw a post on twitter by a european saying americans are fake for their random compliments to strangers and their general cheery demeanor and like no. no no no you don’t understand. if you get a random compliment from an american on the street about your outfit or whatever, that is 100% genuine. we mean it. we aren’t lying we are making a small but fleeting connection with you because our lives are shitty but the human condition is enduring. oh god i’m clutching my chest
If you get a compliment from a random American on the street, know that they tried their best to keep from saying a peep to you but they literally could not hold it in. They HAD to say something.
The other day a tiny gay man in a hurry bumped me on the Metro escalator and said “Sorry, great dress by the way” and then he stopped at the top of the escalator and turned around and said “AND a great hat. THAT is how we do summer!” and SPRINTED for his bus and I coasted on that for the rest of the day.
Love this post!
When I first moved to Prague I had a colleague who had such great style, and I always complimented her because I thought she was hot and cool. Years later when we were friends, she told me that she always suspected me of trying to manipulate her somehow because that is not how Czechs roll, and it was really inconceivable to her that I was simply complimenting her with no ulterior motive, but that’s culturally normal to me?
Also, I am married to a British person, and his mother is an artist – she’s a collograph print-maker, and she told me that whenever she wants a pick me up, she sends photos of her latest prints to me, because I can be counted upon to say something nice. What can I say? I love her work? Her prints are beautiful, so…not faking?
Americans have a lot of blind spots and issues, but saying the nice thing in their brains to other people is fine? Like? A little more kindness and connection isn’t hurting anyone?
There was a post on r/askanamerican just the other day, by a guy living in Eastern Europe who has a fun backpack (it looks like a reeses cup package with a bite taken out of it!) and said he constantly got compliments on it from American tourists
And he was like…are all of you like that? You say nice things to total strangers as if you’re life-long friends??
And the entire comment section was like: Yup. Absolutely. This is 100% a thing we do.
And someone looked up a picture of the backpack and shared it and we were all like OMG THAT IS AN AMAZING BACKPACK yeah if I saw someone in any city on earth wearing that thing I would in fact say something.
Sometimes posts on that subreddit are a trash fire, but we were all so happy to talk about times we’ve told strangers compliments or been complimented by strangers.
And genuinely, it’s one of the few things that makes me proud to be American. Like. We have a reputation for telling total strangers when we like something they’re wearing/doing. And we mean it, every single time!
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Americans have a lot of blind spots and issues, but saying the nice thing in their brains to other people is fine? Like? A little more kindness and connection isn’t hurting anyone?
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[Decoupling parking from development is a great idea.]
In January, I wrote about how too many Americans need a car and how the mammoth size of those cars is killing us. There are some signs of progress, however. In the Culdesac Tempe rental complex, in Arizona, hundreds of families are living without cars. It’s a start.
[This is wrong on so many levels.]
99.999% of the time, there’s no monsters in the streets. But not 100% of the time. On Tuesday evening, federal authorities abducted Tufts PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk off the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. A neighbor’s security camera caught it on video, and it’s horrifying.1 Sickening though it is, I urge you to watch it (with audio), because we should all bear witness to this disgrace.
It’s chilling to witness six people without uniforms descend upon a lone student, pulling masks over their faces as they seize her.2 Ozturk must have feared this was a kidnapping rather than an arrest. An unidentified voice certainly does, stating that those involved don’t look like the police and repeatedly asking why they’re hiding their faces. As Ozturk is eventually handcuffed and loaded into an unmarked SUV, she is rightly terrified.
We all should be. This shouldn’t happen anywhere, but it certainly shouldn’t happen on an American street. This atrocity has hit especially close to home for me. I went to college at Tufts University and I’ve lived in Somerville. In fact, I spent a good deal of time in a house no more than 100 feet from the spot where Ozturk was snatched up. Knowing I’ve walked down the very same sidewalk is especially devastating.
A Boston Globe piece (unfortunately paywalled) extensively quotes a neighbor named Joe Ferraro:
“I don’t care what she was doing,” Ferraro continued. “You can’t just nab people off the sidewalk and throw them in a car and take them away, and expect anyone who’s seen it to be alright afterwards.”
The sudden arrest has shattered the sense of calm on the residential street. After seeing the footage of plainclothes ICE agents emerging from their unmarked cars, Ferraro said he is now on edge for anyone loitering in the area.
I share Ferraro’s dismay. As to what Ozturk was doing, thus far, her arrest appears to have been as unwarranted as it was cruel. The government stated that they cancelled her student visa, but they have provided no concrete reasons as to why. When asked about it, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke vaguely and irrelevantly about “lunatics” who “create a ruckus”. That does not apply to Ozturk.
As best as anyone can tell, Ozturk was targeted because she co-authored an op-ed that criticized Tufts University’s response to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Masked and non-uniformed federal agents snatched a doctoral student off the street and tossed her in an unmarked vehicle for something she wrote in a college newspaper a year earlier. That’s a despicable attack on the freedom of speech within America.
Things in this country are bad and they’re getting worse. I’m dismayed by what has happened in recent months and truly frightened about what will follow. But I am also heartened by the groundswell of support for Ozturk, from the aforementioned unidentified voice of resistance to protests thousands strong which quickly sprang up around Boston.
While I don’t know exactly how we can combat this wrong, I am certain that speaking up, and speaking out, is the right move for everyone. Back to Joe Ferraro:
“Part of me is afraid to talk about it,” [Ferraro] said. “But come pluck me off the sidewalk then, if that’s what you get for talking about it.”
Come pluck me off the sidewalk then, too.
Footnotes:
That video is archived here. ↩︎
These agents work for the same administration that is demanding a ban on mask-wearing by peaceful protestors. ↩︎
The people who hate DEI really hate it when you say they’re racist. They claim their motivations aren’t racist at all — they’re just trying to be fair. They’re concerned that minorities are getting an edge over white people. It’s the same attitude that fueled Reagan’s comments about “welfare queens”: the idea that DEI means minorities are getting a free ride from the government because of their skin color.
It’s a lie. It’s about a visceral, racist revulsion against people who don’t look like them.
We can see the true motivation in action by examining what’s going on in the Department of Defense. They’re busy expunging minorities from the historical record.
The entry for Army Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers, the highest-ranking Black servicemember to receive the Medal of Honor, was briefly deleted from the list of Medal of Honor recipient, until the news media noticed. They deleted it in such a clumsy and revealing way, too: they changed the name of Rogers’ page to hide it from their search engine. They stuck a “dei” prefix on the file name.
After the DOD profile on Rogers was taken down, its URL returned a “404 – Page Not Found” message — and as noted by social media users like Brandon Friedman, an Army veteran and former Obama administration official, the page’s URL in the Medal of Honor Monday series was modified to add “dei” to part of its URL: “deimedal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-charles-calvin-rogers.” Attempts to load the original page redirected to that “dei” link instead, with the 404 message.
I guess he was awarded the medal because he was black, not because of his heroic actions.
Hours before dawn on Nov. 1, 1968, a heavy bombardment of mortars, rockets and rocket-propelled grenades hit the 1st Battalion forward fire support base positioned near a North Vietnamese supply route in South Vietnam, the citation states.
Rogers braved North Vietnamese Army fire to direct his men’s howitzers to target the enemy — and despite being knocked off his feet and wounded by an exploding round, he led a counterattack to repel attackers who breached the defensive perimeter, according to his medal citation. Rogers was wounded again, but as more attacks followed, he reinforced defensive positions. He was later seriously wounded after joining a howitzer crew whose members had been hit by mortar fire.
That’s DEI? Give us more DEI, then.
That’s not all, though. They’re erasing mention of the Nisei battalions that fought in WWII. It’s not enough that we threw families of Japanese descent into concentration camps, but also now we’re trying to delete the memory of the Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight for the country that treated them with such contempt.
They also removed the <a href=”https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2025/03/17/navajo-code-talkers-trump-dei-military-websites-wwii>Native American Code Talkers.
Articles about the renowned Native American Code Talkers have disappeared from some military websites, with several broken URLs now labeled “DEI.”
…
The Defense department’s URLs were amended with the letters DEI, suggesting they were removed following President Trump’s executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Here’s a photo of a gang of DEI hires coasting through WWII.
The iconic photograph from 1945 by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press of U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, sat for years on a Pentagon web page honoring the contributions of Native Americans who served in World War II.
One of the six Marines in the photo was Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian. The page is now gone, targeted in the Trump purge of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which has also removed other pages focused on the contributions of other Native Americans, women, Black Americans, LGBTQ service members and others.
At this point, I think you can have a clear conscience when accusing the anti-DEI warriors (you know who they are) of being fucking racists.