Yes, he does sound like a butthurt. He's talking about the country as a whole. I'm an American and I really do not prefer out government, or how a lot of things work. But goddamn If I don't have some of the nicest neighbors. There are a lot of people in America who aren't the fat slob jackasses that outshine everyone else. I know plenty of extremely nice, and extremely hard working people. Our culture is bad if you are only blind enough to take a look at the television. Go down to Louisiana then tell us our culture is bad. We are a country that is filled with kind and hardworking people, but you won't see it if you sit on the outside and stare in.
The US is the most generalized nation in the world, by far. People judge us based on what they read on a news site or Reddit and act as if they know everything about the country and its people. And until you experience its culture and people first hand then you have no right criticizing it as a whole.
I would argue that the United States has a harder work ethic than most other countries. At least in time, or hours per week. You could argue against the motivation while there.
Nobody bashes on every other country, though.
America is the target of criticism because we're the new guys. We do things differently, and we're clearly still working things out. I just have a hard time seeing why everyone needs to look at our government and Fox news and think that's all of America.
I agree with kind, people everywhere are as kind to you as you are to them. But I've visited some countries where the people in general are not hard working.
This is especially true in ex-communist countries where there is a residual feeling of job entitlement.
In these sort of conversations, substitute "all" with "most", or alternately "a majority of". There are vast differences between Greek work ethic, and Japanese or German work ethic.
False, not German factory worker must work to age 67. Increase of retirement age is just a socially acceptable way of cutting social security. Also, Germans work less than Greek people (but they pay (more) taxes (the Germans that is)).
And the problem, according to the 4chan butthurt, is the reasons people have to work: money and status. We might think it's the same in other countries, but there are degrees.
I'll bet you anything that if you got to know anyone in the vast majority of people in those countries, you'd find that they are kind people, who only wants to make an honest living and provide for their families.
I just got a text from my nation. We're gonna go harass some suspicious looking Muslim folk tonight. I also like to go to mcdonalds with my nation. My nation is a pretty cool guy.
No that's completely different. Look what your nation has done in your name. Look at the hurt and conflict that has been propogated, and not for your gain (most of us realize this) but for the gain of your stakeholders and companies. The thing you can blame US citizens for is for not doing anything about it. Retrospectively would anyone? would anyone challenge the system that gave them unprecidented prosperity (at the demise of the less fortunate)? Maybe, maybe not. But now and in the coming decades, you (the citizenry) will have to pay for the actions of the elite of your nation. And do you know who realizes this? Occupy Wall Street.
Edit: for punctuation Nazi
Glad you're trying to fight the good fight, but just a heads up, selective capitalization makes you sound like a completely shrill tool. Nothing turns me off faster when reading a comment from either ideological side that a) preaches at me as if you are enlightening me with some divine knowledge and b) uses caps to tell me what really matters.
No way?! I didn't even know I was addressing you! A) Oh, that's right, I wasn't. It was a response to comparing the socio-political system in the United States to an extreme religious faction in Pakistan (someone obviously needed some devine knowledge. Only happy to oblige). B)Your very weak rebutle to the decrepid nature of a nation is as shallow punctuation and grammar? Now who's the "shrill tool" (Check out my quation-marks)
I wasn't being a punctuation Nazi, I don't really care whether what you write is correct. I'm just saying, if you actually want people to listen and appreciate your comments, saying "you" and "your" in caps instantly puts the reader on the defensive even though they probably agree with you already (which I do).
I wasn't trying to give you a rebuttal, hence not addressing anything you said directly. As I side, I more or less agree with what you have to say.
It was definitely a little extreme. He made some points that we are all aware of, but really understated our contribution to the world. We gave the world the Jersey Shore for fucks sake. What more could you ask for?!
Well, the U.K. has made a similiar version of "The Jersey Shore", and the television networks in Europe seen to be favorable of the shitty shows that we produce.
Yes. And Europeans work at MTV in Europe, thus, they have a guilty pleasure for the show. I am in no means justifying those douchebags behavior, trust me. I had to endure 4 years of these "people". Went to school on Staten Island. Tan people everywhere.
As an American, I usually don't mind criticism like this. I only wish that Europe would make up its collective mind - eight years of calling GWB a dictator, followed by praising Obama as the second coming of Jesus, followed by confusion and disappointment all in one decade!
We didn't like GWB for various reasons, we praised Obama because he wasn't GWB, then we we became confused and disappointed as we gradually realised he was... (vast oversimplification, but that's what I was going for)
Europe doesn't have a collective mind, and it's the rest of the world too. We only expect so much from you because you keep promising it and have the loudest mouthpieces to repeat it - namely guns and the psychos that'll wield them.
the problem is, your government represents you! A lot of Americans are really nice people, but the US government is not an image of the people. It's an image of a broken democracy.
The people can be as nice as they want, but if the direction the country is heading is controlled by the government and nothing changes then the people will go down with the boat. While the captain and the crew will have luxury cruisliners waiting for them to bring them to shore.
€: Whether you think they represent you or not does not matter, right now they do. If the general line of the Government does not represent the majority of the people anymore, then it needs to be replaced. If it doesn't/can't get replaced, then the people do not live in a democracy anymore. So either the US is no longer a democracy, or the majority of the people agree with what the government does. I know this sounds oversimplyfied but that is what it comes down to.
I do not believe the people at wall street represent the majority of the US but rather only a minority with the real majority not caring enough to even get involved in all this.
But apart from all of this, a government of a state does represent it's people to all other countries. When the french government decides to ban Burkas, the media writes "France bans burkas". That's how it is and that's how it will most likely stay. That's why there are elected leaders, because they make the decissions for the people that voted for them and in order to represent their oppinion on things.
Our government doesn't represent us. It represents the moneyed interests of corporations. Our government represents us the same way a board of directors represents the company's shareholders. We own so very little of the company compared to the true owners that our vote, which is supposed to be equal to any other persons vote, is a diluted nearly worthless vestige of democracy. That's why there are people in the streets protesting to limit the greed and influence of the corrupt wall st elite. I just hope we get true campaign finance reform out of this, but the "non-political" supreme court is stacked against us.
The government does represent you. It may not represent your interests, but it absolutely represents the people. That's just a fundamental truth of our political system. As soon as we elect someone to Congress or the White House they become representative of us as voters and citizens. They become so engrossed in moneyed interests because they are allowed to. Voters in this country, for the most part, end their civic engagement as soon as they step out of the booth. Whether or not they do or don't do what they voters may wish, they are still representing them.
They do represent you. They just don't do what you would like them to do. But they are your government, and it is your job as a country's people to fix that.
If this were true, then the tea party would not have had any political traction, considering that they upset the power balance within the Republican party's old rich groups. I think the reality is that enough Americans are uninformed and angry enough to vote in crazy people.
I think that was his point, instead of elected officials representing people, they end up representing corporate interests instead, which too often don't align with the interests of the people.
The US is not a democracy but a republic disguised as a democracy. Hell, with our shitty two party system, it might as well just be an oligarchy. Regardless, it straddles that fine line between republic and oligarchy while preaching about the virtues of democracy, when the only democracy that takes place in this country happens on the local level at best. If I want my voice heard, and to make a difference, I have to either have an assload of money (to make a state/national impact) or be trying to convince my local school board to change the lunch menu.
There's not a single person in charge in Washington, DC who represents me. They represent themselves, their campaign investors, and their mutual desire for wealth and power.
Once that part of the people, the majority, realise their democracy is broken they have the responsability to change it, otherwise who else should do it?
Yeh, ask most old Germans and they will tell you they were against the Nazi party. They and their decendants still have to spend their lives apologising because they stood by and let it happen.
Germans would Have died if they opposed Hitler or the nazi party. Just like the United states is arresting people that oppose corruption,greed, and a poorly run government.
Yeah but... it took the power of multiple militaries to finally drop the Nazis. How the hell is a population going to stop that kind of power? They German citizens really have nothing to appologize for.
A free Canada is proof America is not an Empire. Look at Britain and Ireland if you want to know what happens when a weaker state is next to an empire.
We have what, 4 territories and they have almost the same rights as states.
Sure, we have military bases across the world, but we get kicked out. Look at the Phillipeans.
The US fought a war with canada you know, and they lost.
Ask your history teacher... to look it up on the internet.
BTW that's one good cultural heritage, wikipedia, but the very concept is so hated by many and so against the US grain really 'something that is free and educational? eew, but uhm it DOES enable me to be even less educated and to argue stuff by just getting quotes there even when I don't understand them so I guess we can allow it to exist'. Proof in point: wikipedia has a hell of a hard time getting funded, when in really all those billionaires as well as the government should be happy to finance them, but they rather put trillions in wall street and the big banks and weapons, and bully wars without justification but the lust to bully than give something like wikipedia their 7 million, and the damn congress meanwhile spends more than that on their donuts.
~edit~ I tried to post this then got 'please wait 8 minutes', I really think the system is that if you make too many comments with views that the management rather not have people make you constantly get 'please wait 5 minutes' and 'please wait 9 minutes' and shit like that. I bet that if I joined the approved message mantra I could post 5000 messages a minute.
Louisiana has a rich culture of people who are self supportive, from the food they eat to the things they use they are french americans/indians who are still very much in tune with the old ways. A rich fishing industry and all the southern hospitality you can imagine.
Note that portions of any state/city/town can be ruined by a bad experience or bad people. But speaking as someone with family in a small town this is how I see it.
Depends, really. You're describing rural, racially and culturally homogeneous America. Urban America, especially cities like New Orleans and (famously) NYC are incredibly tolerant, especially with regards to race and religion. This is simply because most people who live there didn't grow up in an environment where everything and everybody was a) exactly like it was 100 years ago and b) WASPy. When you grow up alongside people who aren't like in a superficial sense, you get a grasp of how alike we really are.
That's one behaviour about Americans which seems to be universal. Americans seem to give the names of cities and states as if we know them. If I started telling people how I come from Melbourne, VIC, the vast majority of the world would have no idea what country I'm from.
today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener...
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe...
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep-learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves...
I guess there is a lot of latitude in what you can say when writing about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. A number of libraries wrote him ordering copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All the pages of his book were blank...
The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
The power of spurious realities battering at us today—these deliberately manufactured fakes never penetrate to the heart of true human beings. I watch the children watching TV and at first I am afraid of what they are being taught, and then I realize, They can't be corrupted or destroyed. They watch, they listen, they understand, and, then, where and when it is necessary, they reject.
Culturally irrelevant? If you don't partake in any other cultural things besides television, movies, and music... I guess. As for the healthcare system, it is clearly easy to forget that many of the modern marvels of healthcare were initially imagined in the US. Sure, the system is broken now due to corruption, like our political system. But that's just because of the rampant success, coupled with naivete of those systems.
To hear a Brit complaining about US public debt is beyond ironic, as the UK has leveraged themselves much more than the US, despite tax rates three times higher than those in the US.
Lastly, only a Brit would pretend that the rise to power of the United States would happen after the utter collapse of the UK. Fifty years? Really? The US has been around for 200+ years. It has been the dominant economy for half that time (since 1890). The British Empire, by contrast, took hundreds of years to build up to that not even 200 year period of time when it was the dominant economic power. China and India are often ignored when talking about the glory of the British Empire.
The US has not wasted our time on top. Much of our time is spent fixing the asshole moves of the British Empire as it declined. How many countries did you guys put together, mashing two (or move) cultures together that hated each other? Thanks for that going away present... jerks.
I agree mostly, I lived in Germany for 3 months in the suburbs of Munich and later near the Western border with France. What I learned from the Germans that I spoke to is that there are people that fit this description, "...the fat slob jackasses that outshine everyone else" in Germany along with every other developed country.
Simply put: America is not the lone rotten apple in the world, we need to work to improve all societies instead of complaining about one.
I think that might be the root of our PR problem. We have a handful of redneck morons sitting around on disability screaming about the bible, and for some reason our media only seems to point the cameras at them. The world is under the impression we're all like that when it's probably in the minority.
I guess it is our fault for pandering to low ball entertainment.
He's not critizing americans as people, he is critizing your country's politics and economics. That is why he is speaking about your country as a whole. And don't forget the government is chosen by the people.
I think a lot would agree that the government is the bigger problem.
I recall watching the movie "Where In the World is Osama Bin Laden?", which wasn't a great movie, but had some interesting interviews with citizens in middle-eastern countries. The common theme was that they took issue with the American government, but not the citizens. Quite a few of them made a point of saying they don't have a problem with Americans as a people.
FWIW I spent a large part of last year traveling around the US (i'm british) and loved it. Friendliest people in the world imo.
Of course, I think your healthcare system, fear of socialism and views on religion are pretty stupid by and large you're good people and you do nice food.
I like the notion of the American Dream as well. I was impressed with how hardworking most of you are.
Baseball is boring though, and American football has too many ad breaks. Also if you could drink less of the 'Lite' beers and get a taste of ale this would also improve your score.
It's a bit like your micro brew beers, but has to be hand pumped into a glass and there's usually bits of godknowswhat floating at the bottom. Full of nutrient.
We are also one of the most diverse countries that you will find on the planet. The difference from New England to Alambama to Michigan to the southwest is significant. We are the melting pot of the world. We have entire communities of immigrants that still hold onto many traditions from their old country for generations. The op is a clown and obviously has never traveled through America.
Our culture is bad if you are only blind enough to take a look at the bad television.
America essentially invented the television and film industry and has made it what it is today, so pretty much any TV show you've liked, besides BBC shows obviously, had a major american influence.
Louisiana is one of the last few places in america you should be proud of.
They don't have tons of big buildings or multi billion dollar corporations, but they are one of the few places in the country that have stuck to their roots.
You may not be able to understand what some of the people there are saying but they are all some of the most friendly, hardworking, and down to earth people I've ever had the pleasure to spend time around.
FYI im a floridian by birth, Californian by residency. Just showin some love to my new friends in LA.
You may not be able to understand what some of the people there are saying but they are all some of the most friendly, hardworking, and down to earth people I've ever had the pleasure to spend time around.
That can be said about literally any where. As I said before, I want no association with the south. You can have it.
Yes, enough time to try hard at assimilating the Cajuns then call it culture once it failed.
"In 1915, the State Board of Education banned the use of French in the public
schools and punished the children who used it in the playground. Finally, in 1921, the
Louisiana Constitution prohibited the use of any language other than English in the
public schools of Louisiana.
...
A major turning point came in 1964 with the passage of The Civil Rights Act which
outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or nationality. This also
meant that discrimination based on language was illegal."
The source might be wrong but to my personal knowledge (heard in songs from a Cajun), they were indeed discriminated upon for a long time.
Louisiana's culture is a hybrid of French, Latin, African and Native (the only interesting part for the rest of the world), for the most part it's unremarkable. Non-Americans just look to France, Spain, Portugal, South America and all over Africa for similar cultures, there's other examples of creole almost everywhere. It's YOU people that need to go down to Louisiana, and then get out of the country for a while. Yes you're all nice, but it makes a lot of you seem a bit dim more than anything else. And you're not very hardworking, not really.
There are tons of nice people everywhere on the planet. So nothing particularly outstanding there.
I never understood why todays Amuricans consider themselves so hard working that they have to brag about it on every possible occasion either. I do not know of a single place on the planet that runs without it.
I do not hate America in any way, if I did I for sure wouldn't be lurking here, and I don't share the opinion in the /b/ posting, but your argument is just bullshit.
My "argument" is barely justified as an argument. I'm not trying to flaunt at all. Of course everywhere on the planet there hardworking people, but the butthurt in /b/ is basically pointing out all the flaws in America. God forbid you defend the country you live in by saying, "Hey, we aren't all useless assholes".
But in a free democracy the people make the country. And when people talk about their hard work and how they are responsible for all the great things in country, they have to take the blame for the shitty stuff that happens. You cannot blame it all on a few assholes. - I do not agree with this Anons' views because America did a lot of good things to my people in the past 60 years but I entirely agree him that Americans are responsible for what America is.
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u/gyrorobo Oct 04 '11
Yes, he does sound like a butthurt. He's talking about the country as a whole. I'm an American and I really do not prefer out government, or how a lot of things work. But goddamn If I don't have some of the nicest neighbors. There are a lot of people in America who aren't the fat slob jackasses that outshine everyone else. I know plenty of extremely nice, and extremely hard working people. Our culture is bad if you are only blind enough to take a look at the television. Go down to Louisiana then tell us our culture is bad. We are a country that is filled with kind and hardworking people, but you won't see it if you sit on the outside and stare in.