Eh, not my impression at all
Huh? Americans are like the most willing to admit their country is shit of like anywhere of the Lemmy audience… America fucking sucks, sign American. I had some dude from Pakistan super mad at me for saying women are second class citizens there the other day. Apparently they treat women super well, according to that angry guy anyway. I’m still pretty sure they don’t.
Instead of “thinking something is true about an other country” why don’t you research the topic? Laws are easy to find.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_related_laws_in_Pakistan
While yes, there were some Sharia laws back in the 1980’s, many recent laws in the last 20 years have been giving more rights to women.
And that is the problem with many of you Americans, you read something online once about an other country or hear it on one of your news stations, and you instantly believe it without ever checking if it is factual or not.
The same type of people exist in other countries of course, but the blatant ignorance of Americans about other countries is staggering.
XD ah yes, legally it’s the same, so that’s how it shakes out on the ground for sure!
As always, these things can’t be generalised. Every country has people that talk about their own problems, and every country has “patriots” that will deny anything is happening. There are just a lot of Americans on the internet, so people notice those who relentlessly praise America more.
After all, few countries literally ingrain “[country] exceptionalism” into their population in their school system. Many Americans, while thinking they are pointing out problems, still say “but it’s still better than almost any other country at X”.
Romania doesn’t ingrain Romanian exceptionalism, but it does keep a lot of the REALLY horrible things Romanians have done out of the history classes.
Starting soon, the Romanian holocaust and communist period are going to be taught in high school history classes. AUR (basically our Republican party) is completely flipping their lid right now. They’re a small party, but very loud and aggressively ignorant.
Sounds like 'murica
Stay strong, my friend
This is the case for every country. You just see it with the US a lot more since it of course has the biggest footprint on the English-language side of the internet.
I think other countries are a lot more open to self deprecation as part of their humour / culture. Not saying there aren’t some examples of this in America, it just doesn’t seem to be as prevalent as in British comedy for example.
Not even close. Also doesn’t help that 'muricans have a very distorted view on how their country is perceived
I think most of us on the internet hear about it constantly and it’s pretty hard not to understand how we are perceived.
Ok, can you tell us then how the other countries in the world perceive the US?
Pushy, ignorant, reactionary, racist, isolationist, nationalist. Stick our noses into the matters of other countries where we don’t belong. Assume everything is centered around us. War/military happy. Arrogant. Loud.
Not sure if I’m missing any, but these are the prevailing things I see when people are talking about the US and the people who live here.
What is hard is that there are of course people (many people, even) that match one or multiple of those descriptions. But the same as it is silly to generalize all of Europe (or even any one European country), it is silly to generalize all Americans.
According to one source, the only media that for a long time made it into the states is media that the US government approves of. I could go into detail about it, but it shows up quite prominently in this video.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Lol, what? You can make fun of us. We’re pretty fucking funny… But like, in a sad, defeated kind of way… Like, we’re sleeping in the gutter and pretending we’re fine, but at least we are looking at all those stars.
We don’t need to move. This is fine. We’re fine. Fuck off, we’re fine. You can’t help us, anyway.
Yeah, we’re damn fine!
A good analogy to this is the emperor of America. He was just some homeless crazy dude in San Francisco in the 1860s. He attempted to price gouge the Chinese during their rice famine but shortly found himself under water on his rice contracts. This left him homeless and bitter so he named himself emperor of the United States. He somehow started printing his own money and some places feeling bad for him took it.
That’s how the world sees America. Oh, the crazy folk are just down on their luck. They’ll likely either die or end the world in a few years but at least they’re making record profits.
All hail Emporer Norton!
Look at you trying to stir the pot. How cute. <3
Americans do a lot of stupid things, but they are most likely to be self critical in this space. I think this meme should talk about Western Europe instead, because they have many problems, but they are so often never willing to accept criticism. They’re quick to call the US racist, but in my experience, Europe has so much racism it’s crazy it’s viewed as this anti racist place.
I (a US citizen) literally didn’t get a job in Germany because one member on the team objected because I didn’t speak German yet. The company is “English first” and I worked in the US division previously. So yeah, Europeans are certainly as capable of being racist. And they didn’t even try to hide it!
Ah yes, the English language speaking race
I see you deal in absolutes. The person wanted a fluent German speaker despite being an English first company. Put it together in your head.
Yeah, it’s racist to hire another more qualified candidate that can speak multiple languages in a setting that would benefit from that skill…
Idk about OP, but from my experience, you can speak German perfectly correctly, but have an accent, and that will make your job search many times harder, because they know you’re not “German”. I highly doubt this is about skill.
Clearly you must have all the details about where I worked and applied already. What an amazing ability!
Is that racism?
Easily could be, since race is a social contruct. See the Irish not being “white.” Probably just nationalism though.
Ask any “America is so racist” European about their thoughts on the Roma people
Or turks. Or Moroccans. Or Africans.
Or other Europeans. Damn Europeans, they ruined Europe!
I’m not sure what are you talking about. I’m Spanish and the first people to criticize Spain is Spanish people. Probably you’ve never even heard of all the problems our country has. Unemployment, corruption, house okupation, lots of small crime, mafia related crime for all the drugs trying to enter Europe, lots of immigration as Spain is one of the doors to Europe… I can go on. For all of these there’s a lot of debate and not much being done so far…
Bueno momento para visitar España?
More or less, just keep a good eye on your wallet and it should be fine.
As a european, this applies to both sides lol
as a southamerican I remind you that there are more than two sides.
As a southafrican I remind you that reddit is bad and your pfp should not contain a reddit character
Ah yeah of course
National boundaries just divide workers to obscure the fact that they have more in common with each other than with the ruling classes.
No disagreement from me comrade.
The real struggle from the start
That’s exactly what happens to me when I tell them America is a continent. Like, WTF?
We’ll just one-up the crazy: ‘Murica is the ONLY continent.
So is America one or two continents? Our US schools call them North America and South America despite being connected as a single land mass.
The other fun one to spring on we United States of America citizens if that the full and proper name of Mexico is “The United Mexican States”. Having Mexico have a name and a similar idea of states forming a union, but not bring the USA doing it really bugs people here.
I was taught that North and South America formed one large continent called the Americas.
This makes complete sense. But let’s not act like Europe isn’t just a peninsula of Asia.
If we go by plate tectonics, NA and SA are distinct continents, as they are on different plates. Europe and Asia are definitely one Eurasian continent though, as they are on the same plate.
Whether it’s one continent or two, the point is that it’s bigger than the United States. At least I’ve always studied that Americans are people who live in America, either from Canada, United States, Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Argentina… Then you can divide them between North Americans and South Americans.
Yes, it is much bigger than the United States, though not for our lack of trying. We had quite a century or so where we tried to conquer, buy, or steal every bit of land we could.
Today, American is still much bigger then the United States, but we US Citizens don’t even really have good vocabulary for just US vs the rest of the Americas.
But English, being a de facto universal language, has good creativity to invent new words, either from native speakers or from foreign influences. For example, the word “D’oh” didn’t exist until Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta) popularized it. And I think the word “meme” didn’t exist either 40 or 50 years ago.
I think a good way to know that is to read newspapers from 100 years ago or older, and see how people from US were called.
I mean, that’s fine, but no one world-wide is going to hear “American” and think anything but “a citizen of The United States of America”. So, what’s the point of trying to push it as such? For all the hate American citizens get, you’d think you’d want to separate yourself as much as possible from the title. Canadians certainly won’t like being called Americans, that’s for sure.
Well, they’re separated by the Panama canal, so by the same token that Africa and Asia aren’t the same land mass, neither are the Americas.
The more important part of what defines continents is tectonic plates and plate movement, though the definitions used are fairly arbitrary. It’s also interesting how different regions in the world define continent in different ways.
The following bit is entirely in humor:
Before the Suez and Panama canals were dug they should have been treated as a single continents? Europe and Asia need to figure out how to dig from the Black Sea to the North Sea so they get some clarity too.
Oh! And while the Evergreen ship was stuck sideways in the Suez, did that make Asia and Africa a single continent for a bit?
America is indeed two continents, North and South. Continents aren’t just connected land masses, they are the major tectonic plates that the earths crust is divided into. North America is on the North American plate, South America on the South American plate.
There ARE some interesting facts on this though. Unlike NA and SA, which ARE distinct continents, Europe and Asia genuinely are NOT separate continents; both are contained on the absolutely massive Eurasian tectonic plate(NA plate is technically bigger, but a lot of it’s in the ocean). Another fun fact is that the absolute most north-eastern part of Siberia is technically part of North America.
It usually doesn’t bother me unless it’s something like this
American- criticizes something foreign
Every single reply to that comment- “School shootings!! Hahaha!! Dead kids!!! Hehehehe!!”
We have other things you can criticize! Like the fact people will give you unsweetened tea with ice then say you can have some sugar packets!
Scourge of the North! Sugar Tea Soup!
Or when they extropolate from America the country being shit, to every individual American being shit for having the audacity to have been born here.
Most of us would also rather it wasn’t like this, but our families, friends, and livelihoods are here, so generally speaking it’s not practical to just up and leave. And our political system is to broken for us to really fix via voting
Trash on the country all you want, I’ll join in with you - but don’t blame the folks who are just trying to live the best we can in this fucked up country
This recently
- French people rude. Haha yeah.
- Greek people cheap. Okay you got us.
- Americans so fucking stupid. Hah wait. That’s it? That’s the joke?
This I don’t understand. Where is this coming from and who honestly would be okay with being called a big dumb dildo and laugh along like it’s such a well known fact about their country? We’re a lot of things, act like we own the world and everyone owes us money and gratitude, eat like shit while letting everyone know how to be healthy, use little creamer cups instead of cream. We’re not idiots.
Kinda like how the entirety of France isn’t rude and not all Greek people are cheap
Exactly, the problem is the first panel, not the second. But there’s no monopoly on participation there.
We are pretty dumb though. On the whole. We’ve had a lot of our higher education people emigrate.
I call BS. I feel it’s more popular than ever to dunk on the US. Like, there’s still a sect of 'MURICAN PATURYOTS that get big mad, but most of us are well aware of reality.
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Well to be quite fair, it’s better to judge a country by it’s progress and current state of affairs than by its past actions. Because if we judged every country by their actions in the past, not many countries would have clean hands.
From 2016-2021, I was ready to move away. I was quite disillusioned by everything. What changed? Soccer 💀. Soccer made me comically nationalist for our national teams.
Honestly being in that environment of being able to be innocently prideful of my home without thinking about the past helped put things in perspective.
I’m now prideful to be American, and proud that my home heavily invests in NATO. I’m an adult now, and I’ve been working to push for some more improvements in things like infrastructure. I don’t cringe at 4th of July celebrations anymore, and I feel great that I’m making an impact.
You probably won’t see me putting a flag outside my home, but I have a lovely high quality flag.
Our national park system is the best in the world, our ecosystem, nature, and geography are spectacular and diverse. And NASA is phenomenal.
Don’t allow yourself to wallow in this cynical disillusionment. It’s not good for your mental health to focus on the terrible parts of America without having the ability to change those parts.
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You need to be grateful! I am sorry, I know things are bad out there, but things are worse out of the US. I know this doesn’t work, but I feel like learning to be grateful for the things we have is way too important. I am grateful even for the small things in life that we all take for granted.
Don’t be cynical. It’s not good for you either. Your country despite it’s imperfections has been THE shining beacon of hope for many immigrants. The separation between the church and state is no small thing, it’s a revolution. Free speech is precious. Idk, don’t let the media fool you, despite it’s imperfections, USA is a great country :(
I would have loved to have been born there, received an education which I now only can dream of.
This isn’t true and how dare you suggest otherwise! 🌼
Where’s the bit about Americans making fun of America and talking shit about it?
Uh, what? I live here and I shit on it all the time.
Yeah. as an American I shit on America more than anyone. I got no idea what Op is talking abot.
It’s very much more of a
American criticises America: crickets
Non-American criticises America: hooooo boy here comes the nationalism
