You can support my shenanigans for a mere $2/mo.

This week’s question comes to us from Milly Schmidt:

Some people have friends with very different politics and they keep them very separate to avoid conflict. Obviously there are benefits of having diverse friends, even politically. Do you think all your friends should be able to be invited to a party or have a meal together?

I love everybody that loves everybody.

I also think that hanging out with people who agree on everything is boring. It’s also close to impossible, thankfully, because you’ll ultimately find something you disagree about. And that tends to become when hanging out gets interesting. For example, this weekend friends will get together and someone will say they’re enjoying the new Taylor Swift. Someone else will say it’s an album for cop wives. And suddenly, that becomes an interesting hangout.

Spending my childhood summers in Portugal, I spent a lot of time in cafés where people would argue about anything and everything. Finding the minor disagreement that would spark the argument was the goal of being at that café. Someone unfamiliar with that kind of environment would walk in and assume a fight was gonna break out. But this was just people communicating. This was people enjoying their evening by having spirited conversations with their friends. Which, counter-intuitively, ends up bringing people together. Because if I enjoy a lively discussion—and I do—the person willing to go toe-to-toe with me is going to be someone I end up treasuring as a friend. As long as everyone understands the rules of discussion. We are arguing about minor things. We’re making argumentative mountains out of molehills. This isn’t conflict, it’s sport.

I also remember one particular evening in one particular café when someone loudly commented about how the previous regime did a lot of good for the country. Mind you, this was fairly soon after the revolution that knocked the fascists out of power. The café got stone cold silent. Every argument stopped. Every conversation came to a close. I have a vivid memory of hearing a spoon slowly stirring an espresso. And I watched as everyone’s head turned towards the man that had just said something positive about fascism. The silence held. And held. Until he quickly downed his coffee and politely excused himself as he walked out the door. Within seconds the café went back to its usual argumentative din.

There are welcome arguments between friends, and there are arguments that end friendships. It’s important to know where that line is for you. While I appreciate having friends with different points-of-view, or even different politics (as you phrased it) I will not be friends with people who want my daughter dead. I will not be friends with people who want, or even tolerate, my neighbors being kidnapped. I will not be friends with people who believe some of us are somehow entitled to more rights than others. And I will not be friends with people who believe if we keep our heads down, as others around us suffer, we’ll save ourselves.

We can argue about sports teams, we can argue about zoning, we can argue about the cost of goods, but we cannot argue about the civil rights of other human beings. We cannot argue about the right for people to live in peace. We cannot argue about the right for other people to love who they love. This is the line where argument turns from sport to a relationship-ending event.

Personally, if I’m having a gathering in my home I want my friends to feel welcome. Not just by me, but by everyone else there. And I need my friends to know that me, my guests, and my house are a safe place. Not just for this particular event, but always.

Think of it this way: if you invite someone from a marginalized community into your home and they ask if there’s going to be someone there that wants them dead, or doesn’t feel like they’re entitled to full personhood, and you tell them that you’re having a separate party for those folks the next night, how do you think that person would feel? You can’t claim to care about someone while also caring for the people who would bring them harm. You really don’t care about your friend in that situation. You’ve made a decision that speaks more to your standing in the social order than their safety. And that’s fucked up.

If you had dinner with a trans friend on Tuesday, and dinner with fascists on Thursday, your trans friend had dinner with a fascist on Tuesday.

Which of course brings us to Thanksgiving. My parents, being immigrants, didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. But in time, my brothers and I wore them down. We wanted to celebrate the same holiday that our friends were celebrating, which makes sense. We were kids. We wanted to belong. We also wanted pie, which was understandable. Pie is great! And, while I’m not overlooking the atrocious origins of the holiday, the idea that sitting down with the people you love and giving thanks is a genuinely nice idea. One that should actually be extended to all our meals. We sit down with the people we love and we share a meal together. The problem with Thanksgiving is that we’re not sitting down with the people we love, a lot of us are sitting down with the people we feel obligated to be sharing a meal with, even when some of those people want your friends dead.

After my brothers and I had grown apart and eventually moved out of my parents’ house and into our own apartments, we still made an effort to come together for Thanksgiving. Mostly because it seemed to make our mother happy, and despite our disagreement on mostly everything else, we understood that this was important. Still, these were not what I would call enjoyable events. The tone was tense. The possibility of my father’s mood going sideways was always in the air. And we were guaranteed to speedrun from a conversation to an argument to a fight fairly quickly, which my father used as justification for getting up, grabbing his keys, and bolting out the door. Which was how Thanksgiving dinners ended.

After a few of these, my mother started pulling me aside before my brothers got there and asking me “not to rile them up.” Which a few people reading this will understand translates to “don’t tell them there’s racism coming out of their mouths.” My brothers were free to use the N-word during Thanksgiving, the problem was that I wasn’t ok hearing it. The problem wasn’t that my brothers were racist, it was that I was pointing it out. At one point I asked her if she’d ever had one of these asides with either of them. Had she ever asked my brothers not to spew racist bile at the table? It was a needless question, because I knew she hadn’t. Growing up in their house racism was the default. That was the last time I spent Thanksgiving at their house.

Let me say this plainly, for folks wrestling with whether they should spend Thanksgiving with relatives that want their friends dead: Don’t.

In the end, we are defined not just by our actions, but by the actions we tolerate.

If you insist on spending Thanksgiving with your racist relatives, go to fight. Call Uncle Bob on his Jim Crow bullshit. Make sure that the first person who brings up “men playing women’s sports” is met with a face full of mashed potatoes. When Aunt Mary starts reciting FOX News talking points on eugenics start screaming at the top of your lungs. When your brother-in-law starts yapping about the “criminal element” in the city, slap him with a ham. When your dad brings up what a terrible idea it is to have Bad Bunny do the SuperBowl halftime show, pick up the turkey and slam it across the wall. Become ungovernable. Bring airhorns. Bring whistles. Bring the chaos. Making a meal enjoyable for racists is never the goal. There are no medals to be won for sitting silently while a table that is meant for giving thanks is taken over by hatred. There are no medals to be won for being tolerant of people who want your friends dead. If you’re not willing to fight, then you’re just having a meal with racists.

Telling someone they need to be on their “best” behavior is only an issue when their real behavior is intolerable.

A better idea may be to spend the day with people who love and support you. People you actually give thanks for. The friends who have your back. The friends who love you at your fullest, loudest and truest. People only complain about the turkey being dry when the company is terrible. There is never enough gravy to make regret feel like anything but your soul leaving your body. When we are surrounded by people who deserve and cherish our company the meal is always amazing.

Family is a choice. And those whose blood you share had first dibs at making a choice, and trust that they did. I will be honest with you, when my friends tell me that they’re off to spend Thanksgiving with family it fills me with sadness. Not because I’m not happy for them—I am! But because a part of me will always wonder what that is like. We are born ready to love those closest to us. Our parents and siblings had first dibs on our love! I was always ready to love my parents, and there is a part of me that always will, but there is a bigger part of me that refuses to become the person I need to become for them to love me back. They made a choice, and in return I made one too.

I love everybody who loves everybody.

When I invite my friends into my house it’s with the understanding that there is both love and nourishment there for them. There will also be music, which we may argue about. And we might argue about the best way to make brussels sprouts. Or whether pie goes best with ice cream or cheese. (The answer is two slices of pie, one with each.) We might argue about something happening in local politics. We will definitely argue about the new Taylor Swift. But we will never argue about whether one of us belongs there or not. We will never argue about whether anyone there should feel welcome or not. We will never argue about whether someone should’ve brought their significant other, or others. (A heads-up is nice, if only to make sure we have enough pie.) We will never argue about whether someone should have autonomy over their own body. We will never argue about whether Palestine deserves to be free. We will never argue about whether we should look out for our neighbors.

We might argue about the best ways to do these things, and those arguments will get lively. They’ll get loud. Even within our core agreements, there is enough to argue about. There is love in those arguments, and in the end, they tend to bring us closer together.

I love everybody who loves everybody. I hope that includes you.

🙋 Got a question? Ask it here! I might just give you the rambling answer you weren’t looking for.

💀 You like zines? Me too. You hate AI? Me too. I’ve turned an old essay, How to not build the Torment Nexus, into a fun zine that can be yours for $5 cheap! Buy it here!

📣 If you get nervous/anxious/etc when you have to talk about your work, please consider taking my Presenting w/Confidence workshop. It really helps! There’s one next week. Get a ticket!

🍉 Please donate to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. Shit is worse than ever.

🏳️‍⚧️ Please donate to Trans Lifeline. Reward the bravery it takes to live your realest life.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels, all featuring the same three characters. Charlie, a white man in a suit and tie. Ezra, a white man in more casual clothing. And Reader, a Latina wearing shorts and a black tank.

PANEL 1

Charlie and Ezra are walking together. Nearby, Reader sits at the base of a tree, reading a book, and overhears.

CHARLIE: We need Nuremberg-style trials for tranny-affirming clinic doctors.

EZRA: As a liberal centrist, I can’t agree with that. But what matters is that we’re talking.

PANEL 2

The woman looks annoyed.

CHARLIE: Democrats want Mexicans to overrun us because they hate America and wanna see it become less white and collapse!

EZRA: That’s not true. But again, we’re talking! Thank you for practicing politics the right way!

PANEL 3

The woman stands up, yelling angrily at the two men.

CHARLIE: You know what happens in the cities? Blacks prowl around attacking white people for fun! Haitians rape your women and hunt you!

EZRA: Again, I can’t agree. But I–

READER: Fuck that racist bullcrap!

PANEL 4

Ezra and Charlie walk on, not speaking to the woman, who watches them leave with an annoyed expression.

EZRA: Tsk! So uncivil! That’s the kind of intolerance that’s ruining America.

CHARLIE: They should deport her!

CHICKEN FAT WATCH

“Chicken fat” is forgotten cartoonist lingo for unimportant but hopefully amusing stuff in the art.

PANEL 1: A notice taped to the tree says “DON’T don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t forget about me baby,” a reference to a song by Simple Minds made famous in The Breakfast Club.

PANEL 4: A heart carved into the tree trunk says “N.L. + S.T.” Another heart says “J.T. + J.B.,” but has been crossed out. A third heart says “A.H. + J.B.” All of these hearts refer to one of my favorite musicals, Sweeney Todd.
Beaker from The Muppets is sticking his head out a hole in the ground.
A rat is walking on the street next to the sidewalk, looking distressed as it reads something on its phone. It’s wearing a shirt with a hearts pattern.
A piece of litter on the ground says “REPENT. Panel 4 is upon us!”

Doin’ Discourse With Ezra and Charlie | Patreon

I’m in the process of rewriting a talk I gave a few weeks ago in order to record it and publish it online. When I mentioned that to a friend who’s a filmmaker and knows how lighting and all that works he offered to help me doing it “right” so it doesn’t look like shit. Which – if we are honest – my recording totally might.

I didn’t go for his help. Not because I do not know that his expertise would have helped but because I wanted to see what I could do myself, even if it’s a bit shit. Which is maybe not smart and totally goes against how “the market” works.

It has never been easier and cheaper to produce stuff – especially media – of massively high production value. Even smartphone cameras are good enough to record very impressive videos – given a bit of lighting. Microphones are cheap. Very good cameras and a lot of information on how to use them and edit the photos are affordable. Even open source content management systems (like the WordPress thingy I have going here) come with very sleek and professionally looking themes/appearances. It’s almost hard to produce something truly shitty-looking today.

This abundance of cheap tools could be seen as almost utopian. Tech-influencers and -executives will call this “democratization”. And even for people already making things this is very alluring: Your things could be so much better if you just did a few things, used a few tools.

And many of us are profiting off of this every day. My favorite type of media (the long-form video essay) for example has been in sort of a golden age for a few years with the production value of these films going up every year. But I keep wondering if that is always a good thing. Like why didn’t I accept my friend’s help in making my recording good? (Well aside from all the usual bullshit and insecurities in my head, but let’s ignore all that.)

I think the level of quality that everything has these days, every image, every website, every song, every video also has downsides. It defining the “norm”, the expectation we have from one another has two main issues that keep irritating me.

The Second Job

Getting cheap tools of high quality is one thing but tools don’t work by themselves. They still need a lot of experience to use them properly, to get the results these tools are advertised with. Yeah, you can build a small home studio to record yourself for a small 4 digit EUR budget, but can you actually use those things? So now you have to dig into all kinds of other things, into manuals and howtos.

Don’t get me wrong, nobody loves a rabbithole as much as I do, but did you really need another extra hobby/job? What did you want to do when you started? Say you wanted a website to publish your writing. Now you are diving into the specificities of your chosen CMS and try to bend it to something you saw somewhere and it doesn’t want to budge. But you wanted to write, right? How’s that working out for you?

We are inventing extra jobs for ourselves and put them in between us doing the thing we wanted to do. Because professionalism.

This also leads to us having a harder time to be happy about our work because it’s harder to determine what’s “not good enough”. Are you unhappy with your writing or the way it looks? Would the writing have been better of you hadn’t dicked around making sharepics for Instagram (because that’s how you run a website!)?

In the end all the extra work can make it so much harder to get people to do the things they actually wanted. Because they wanted a professional thing and not some janky 90ies looking site. But why not? Maybe it’s not your business to run a perfect publication and maybe it doesn’t need to be. What did you want to do before professionalism clouded your mind? Why not just do that?

Too Weird

Professionalism not only derives from tools of course. Especially in algorithmically driven platforms (think Youtube or Instagram) – but also in others – there’s a sort of grammar to learn based on the properties of the platform, what it “rewards” and what its users expect. There’s a reason everything on Instagram looks like advertising. Because it is.

So say you want to make videos and have them on youtube. You quickly learn the lengths that work on that platform, you learn how the images are supposed to look so people click them, how to do the greeting/introduction. Every platform establishes very narrow, very rigid rules for the content that is successful there.

But it’s mostly documented, right? There’s so many howtos there telling you how to do it, maybe even some “AI” to help you! Cool.

But now that the thing that you wanted to make has been reshuffled and reshaped into something platformy, is it still what you wanted it to be? Is it still you? Does it make you happy? Well maybe the success makes you happy, fair.

Professionalism has a strong normative quality: That is the reason that professionals have standard processes and workflows (which enable working together easier and help ensure quality) but that’s also the reason why you cannot really distinguish individual bankers or tech-bros from one another: They all look and talk the same way.

Professionalism tries to limit the “weird”, the “unruliness”.

Of course: It’s capitalism

All this of course comes from capitalism. The push for professionalism comes – to a large degree – from the thought that if you put time into it, you maybe can make some money off of it! Maybe it can be your job! Everything needs to be a business or a proto-business.

But it shouldn’t.

If you are trying to make a living off of your writing or drawing or video-making or crocheting or whatever, that’s cool. I am rooting for you.

But not everything needs to be. Not everything needs to do the professional things. The growth hacks and the pro tools. Some things can also be just a person doing a thing and putting it … somewhere. Doesn’t matter if the platform or the form ain’t all that. It’s just a thing someone did and wanted to share. In all its potential jankiness.

So yeah, I’ll probably record my talk on my own. And this has totally not been a very long-winded way for me to legitimize my bad orthography.

If an Iranian taxi driver waves away your payment, saying, "Be my guest this time," accepting their offer would be a cultural disaster. They expect you to insist on paying—probably three times—before they'll take your money. This dance of refusal and counter-refusal, called taarof, governs countless daily interactions in Persian culture. And AI models are terrible at it.

New research released earlier this month titled "We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof" shows that mainstream AI language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta fail to absorb these Persian social rituals, correctly navigating taarof situations only 34 to 42 percent of the time. Native Persian speakers, by contrast, get it right 82 percent of the time. This performance gap persists across large language models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Haiku, Llama 3, DeepSeek V3, and Dorna, a Persian-tuned variant of Llama 3.

A study led by Nikta Gohari Sadr of Brock University, along with researchers from Emory University and other institutions, introduces "TAAROFBENCH," the first benchmark for measuring how well AI systems reproduce this intricate cultural practice. The researchers' findings show how recent AI models default to Western-style directness, completely missing the cultural cues that govern everyday interactions for millions of Persian speakers worldwide.

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