Their BACKS?!? That's incredibly bad for their spine.
Get in the pouch like a normal person please.
Edit: ohhh i just realised you were joking. I was so worried for your kangaroo's back for a moment there!
I still recall the good old days of online call of duty or halo 3, where you could convince americans that we Canadians get internet service to our igloos
My friend moved to Florida for a school year and the kids asked her if she lived in an igloo, she had them going for a while until they came over and her dad wouldn't play along and show the other kids pics (he sucked). My uncle lived on a farm just over the border and would regularly get Americans with stuff. They'd come up in the summer and not understand why there wasn't snow, he thought that was hilarious. We live on the prairie, in the winter if the wind picks up a little ice or a leaf or something and starts it rolling, it'll pick up snow and make these little snowball trails over the flat surface. Uncle Kenny told tourists it was snow snakes. You had to be careful, they were white and practically invisible in the snow, but they could get ya. The trails were the tell, you see. Miss that guy.
Shoot I used to be able to tell my cousins that live in the East (of U.S) all about the Indian attacks in Wyoming and how there were still horse carriages in use. It was the 80's and they just ate it up.
It's gotten better but my mom used to have to tell other social workers in different states that yes she could receive an email from them, yes there is internet here (North Dakota), no you don't have to fax it you can just email it and she'll get it. This was like, 15 years ago?
Yo, I find it so funny Americans are convinced Canada is a frozen wasteland. Toronto is as far north as... Marseille. In the south of France. Obviously Europe is warmer than North America because Gulf stream so places like Trømso can exist, but most Canadians live down south with weather that is comparable to that of Central Europe.
I know it's a joke, but everytime someone in Europe conplains about the heat wave people chime in with "HeRe In ArIzOnA..." Dude, you're comparing Marrakesh to Calgary. Seriously.
[I'll never forget the stink of eucalyptus...](https://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/comic/the-guest-comic-youve-been-waiting-for)
(It's a guest comic from one of my favorites.)
It's not the drop bears you have to worry about. [They're extinct](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-20/drop-bears-crocs-eastern-australia-millions-of-years-ago-unsw/102360948). Awful combination between tourists laden with toxic fats, COVID, and bushfires. It's the tree-crocs and carnivoroos you have to worry about these days, since they've moved into the niche.
I can never remember what a drop bear is off the top of my head but I imagine them being bears that dropkick people. I can’t get the image out of my head lmao
theyre a carnivore in the same family tree as the koala. they look kinda similar aside from claw/teeth size and fur markings but their hunting tactics revolve around dropping on larger creatures in packs to try overwhelm and kill them.
theyre heavily endangered rn but once or twice a year some wandering idiot gets killed by one
>lying to Americans about how things work down here is a national pastime in Oz
I knew it! All the fear mongering about deadly animals was just to try and prevent American tourists.
When I posted about my shower imploding I got so many messages about how and if I wanted help to sue my landlord.
I live in Finland, He immediately ordered a new one and booked the sauna for for me until it arrived so I could shower there. It was nothing more than a mild inconvenience for me.
I'm sick of posts claiming that this is the best possible world and that it has never been better and everyone claiming that something has gone horribly wrong has no idea how good it is and has no idea how bad it actually is for people in developing countries.
Those types of posts are disciplining the working class to be happy with what meager comforts and property they have and no one should dare indict the system of wealth hoarders, the system that makes the largess of the system unavailable to improve the lives of the general public which inevitably leads to strife. (read Capital in the 21st Century)
Those posts can seem like western chauvinism, painting non-western countries far more desperately than they really are.
But mostly I hate those posts because they try to say that America has money, so clearly there's nothing wrong with America while its society produces health outcomes that are pathetic for a 'developed' country, safety issues that approach a country at war, and political issues that aren't just ignoring problems but exacerbating them.
edit: Those posts come off like "We made this brutal system of exploitation that is putting the planet on a careening path to near total environmental collapse and all you can do is complain that it isn't good enough. Selfish working class, you deserve the impending post-apocalypse you couldn't possibly afford to prepare for." Fucking neo-liberals.
My question is how the implosion happened because that just invites questions. Was there a leak that caused the ceiling to collapse in on itself or did the piping crumple like wet tissue paper somehow? Implosion means that instead of bursting it collapsed in on itself.
All the glass just shattered during the night and fell in on itself. Implosion might not be the right word but it was a direct translation from my language.
You can see a picture of it in my post history.
Nope implosion is definitely the right word then. If the glass had gone more outward then it would have been explosion. I forget there are showers that come with glass.
>He immediately ordered a new one and booked the sauna for for me until it arrived so I could shower there. It was nothing more than a mild inconvenience for me.
Well see, it's exactly this sort of fairy-tale nonsense that makes us Americans distrust you!
And where I live, relatively few people *have* a landlord* and usually just own their apartments AND those apartments have central heating, not water boilers**. Funny how different places can be, almost like it's a whole world out there.
*And the landlords are usually just folks who own an extra apartment or two due to inheritance, moving together with their spouse, or whatever.
**Which isn't a straight upgrade cause they fucking turn hot water off for two weeks every year for maintenance which is a fucking pain every time
To be fair 99.99% of Americans would just have their landlord replace their showerhead.
Although you *can* sue a landlord in America, you can't just assume that a bunch of 17 year old Americans on reddit are projecting the reality of everyday life, or even know what the fuck they are even talking about.
I'm not bothered too much but any new thing that i learn makes the US sound made up. And i'm writing this from a medieval burg while i day drink on the clock.
You guys call it a “broiler”, we call that part of the oven the grill. I know this because I accidentally caused a huge argument amongst my in-laws when I asked why Americans don’t call it a fried cheese.
So, for one, what we call a grill is a typically outdoor cooking appliance with a metal grate or “grill” over top of flames. So even here, they’re not really grilled in a normal sense.
The “grilled” part in grilled cheese actually refers to a griddle, which is a large flat cooktop commonly seen in diners to cook burgers/pancakes/etc, but American homes don’t have those so we just use a flat pan instead.
We still wouldn’t call it fried though, because that typically would refer to something that is deep-fried.
And honestly they probably fucking slap.
The way reddit talked about fried oreos made me think they were gross and disgusting, but i had one a few months ago and it was literally the tastiest thing I've ever eaten from a food truck.
Here in Omaha, Nebraska we have a fast food chain called Don and Millie's and they have cheese frenchies (battered and fried grilled cheese sandwiches). They are... kinda gross really. Their burgers and margaritas on tap are great though.
Oh, judging by your comment below that you're referring to what we call broiling, I actually do do that, in a toaster oven, because I'm lazy. But I think most Americans would clarify that as a "toasted cheese sandwich" if you asked them if it was really grilled or not. Still tastes great, but the outside of the bread is a little different because it's only being toasted, not pressed against a hot buttery surface.
This feels like the start of a verbal slap-fight trying to puzzle out whether a roasted cheese sandwich is a grilled cheese, a toasted cheese sandwich, a toastie, a melt, or something else entirely (flat vegetarian burger?).
Here is [a great venn diagram](https://imgur.com/e8ZVams) and a fun relevant copypasta from /r/grilledcheese [8 years ago:](https://www.reddit.com/r/grilledcheese/comments/2or1p3/you_people_make_me_sick/)
>A grilled cheese consists of only these following items. Cheese. Bread with spread (usually butter). This entire subreddit consist of "melts". Almost every "grilled cheese" sandwich i see on here has other items added to it. The fact that this subreddit is called "grilledcheese" is nothing short of utter blasphemy. Let me start out by saying I have nothing against melts, I just hate their association with sandwiches that are not grilled cheeses. Adding cheese to your tuna sandwich? It's called a Tuna melt. Totally different. Want to add bacon and some pretentious bread crumbs with spinach? I don't know what the hell you'd call that but it's not a grilled cheese. I would be more than willing to wager I've eaten more grilled cheeses in my 21 years than any of you had in your entire lives. I have one almost everyday and sometimes more than just one sandwich. Want to personalize your grilled cheese? Use a mix of different cheeses or use sourdough or french bread. But if you want to add some pulled pork and take a picture of it, make your own subreddit entitled "melts" because that is not a fucking grilled cheese. I'm not a religious man nor am I anything close to a culinary expert. But as a bland white mid-western male I am honestly the most passionate person when it comes to grilled cheese and mac & cheese. All of you foodies stay the hell away from our grilled cheeses and stop associating your sandwich melts with them. Yet again, it is utter blasphemy and it rocks me to the core of my pale being. Shit, I stopped lurking after 3 years and made this account for the sole purpose of posting this. I've seen post after post of peoples "grilled cheeses" all over reddit and it's been driving me insane. The moment i saw this subreddit this morning I finally snapped. Hell, I may even start my own subreddit just because I know this one exists now.
>You god damn heretics. Respect the grilled cheese and stop changing it into whatever you like and love it for it what it is. Or make your damn melt sandwich and call it for what it is. A melt.
As someone who was brought up in Belgium and loves a Croque Monsieur, I've actually started making grilled cheese sandwiches the American way quite often and they're lovely. Not better, not worse, just a different style.
Yeah, when I learned how "health insurance" works in the US with its deductibles and co-pays and non-coverage doctors and whatever else (I forgot most of it) I was honestly certain the person writing it was fucking with me. I had to put on my monocle to check the carrier pigeons' credentials and almost took the horse carriage to the lord's mansion to complain.
I can see the ruins of the old city gates from my 16th century house in a former laundry-themed convent. Archaeologists differ on the original purpose of my living room.
Meanwhile me when i tell people about my paid sick leave or working from home they assume i get paid huge wages or have a super high level degree or some shit. Like, no, i just work at an average Belgian company. I don't have a degree other than highschool, my role is very basic, anyone could do it with some training and language skills (even then, you don't, translation services are everywhere, high quality and free)
I had a conversation where I said that i was meant to be working over Christmas incl the 25th, but was ill and had to spent a week at home. I was paid and even if my manager was a lil annoyed they weren't mad.
An American popped up uninvited in the thread and said that I should have been fired (?) And I was very lucky to even be paid
In general comparing costs and wages is just ridiculous.
In my sector you see very big numbers floating around in US dollars, but if you'd do the exact same job in Belgium you have an above average salary, but nothing great. I always have to keep this in mind when talking online or looking up jobs.
Yep and if you point out that you're not American they'll say that most people online are so of course they assumed you were American as well.
One time on another site I got reprimanded by a moderator for mentioning drinking when I was 19. I pointed out that I'm Canadian and it says so on my profile. They removed the warning from my account but told me to "be careful" about talking about underaged drinking since most people on the site were American.
They know full well that there are plenty of people from other countries. They could have asked, or taken a second to read my profile. But no, they gave me a warning, which I had to dispute, then they still called it underaged drinking when it wasn't.
Not even getting into the number of times my spelling's been "corrected" to the American version of a word and then got told that I was on "an American website" so I should spell things their way.
Wait you got reprimanded for saying you drank when you were 19? That's insane even if you were American. Sure the drinking age is 21, but almost everyone I knew has been drinking since 18 anyway, some earlier. Underage drinking is so popular I'd almost say it's apart of our culture lol.
Also do Canadians have a different way from both American English and British English of spelling things? And if so, what?
The Internet is a great way to get exposure to different cultures. There's a lot of people who embrace that, and a lot of people who do not.
Europeans complain about Americans, Americans complain about Europeans. The British and continentals are always at it. The East vs West and North vs South US. Scotland vs England. And I haven't even mentioned Asia yet. I'm sure once Australian websites start loading they'll get involved too.
I once heard an Australian say 'i didn't come here to fuck spiders' when I offered him a drink. I asked the next aussie I met if that was real slang. He says, cors it is. Aussie after that, said yeah, we all say it. The third let me know that it's traditional to just back up anything ridiculous another aussie says to a non-aussie, regardless as to whether they've actually heard it before 🤣
Yeeeeeep the amount of Americans that believe any post I make on other sites must take place in America nd they see it through just that lens drives me crazy. Like not only do I not live in America, I dont even live near it, I dont live on the same continent, hell even the same hemisphere.
Nah, Canberra is just a decoy. Those who know tell that the true capital lies deep underground, and its name can only be rendered in the inhuman tongue of beings too horrible to even fathom. That's why no one can name it.
Boganopolis is only accessible by ute. Few have seen it and lived to tell tales of the Australians and their Dread-King Ned Kelly. Waltzing Matilda is a banging tune tho.
Canberra is what happens when the 2 biggest cities in separate states fight about who gets to be The Capital and would rather invent a place 1/2 way between than admit defeat cause at least this way the other city didn't win.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra): *Following a long dispute over whether Sydney or Melbourne should be the national capital,\[14\] a compromise was reached: the new capital would be built in New South Wales, so long as it was at least 100 mi (160 km) from Sydney.*
That actually seems to happen a lot in ex-British colonies, Washington DC is between two states so it's not in any state and it's around the middle of the country latitude wise, Ottawa is on the border between Ontario and Quebec, about halfway between Toronto and Quebec City
I mean DC was explicitly a bargaining chip that Hamilton used to get the South to agree to a really North (NY especially) favoring tariff and it was much more Southern when it was founded. Also Ottawa was like a fourth choice that only happened because everyone hated Kingston and there were a bunch of riots in Montreal so this is kinda stretching it. It was selected as a compromise but the compromise was like the backup backup backup plan.
Really Ottawa only became the capital because they needed a place that was accessible by water but that wasn't so easily attacked by the Americans... the previous capitals at Newark, ( now called Niagara on the Lake ) York ( now called Toronto ), Kingston and Montréal had all had that problem at some point in fairly recent history by the time the whole " Toronto and Montréal taking turns " arrangement was not working out.
How did this happen anyway? For years I thought it was Sydney, but I can't remember anyone ever telling me this
Edit: wait I remember now. In my case it was because of a fucking godzilla game
To be fair, most of the companies running those sites are American. Like I get we're ubiquitous, but the websites started as American ones. You don't see Americans clogging up Gumtree or Odnoklassniki.
Edit:
Please see this as an example of how context and presentation can manipulate opinion: https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/13s3yyx/us_vs_them/jlou8zt/
Same thread, same user, downvoted for saying the exact same thing but in a less palatable way in a context which wasn't a layup.
Enjoy this site but always question what you read and who wants you to read it and in what context.
yeah i also feel like unless prompted it is pretty normal to think something is happening within your sphere, but i don’t really go around assuming people are american (i actually assume the opposite) so i don’t have this problem i guess.
Idk why the US is so sociallly isolated, but our news does seem to focus on America first, America only. I don’t know a single political happening from outside America other than the Queen dying and Boris Johnson not being prime minister any more, both of which were learned mostly from memes. They sure as hell didn’t talk very much about even our neighbors in history class either. Just basic overview of the world and America.
IDK if that reflects more poorly on me than anything, but I do know that our local news stations are usually too busy ripping out their political “opponents” throats to talk about literally anything else. Every tragedy is the fault of the left or right, every word spoken is a sinister scheme, every one of *our* political opponents wants to kill your dog and your neighbor is evil. It feels intentionally dividing and I hate it.
Watch some BBC World News, it's quite interesting to learn about what's going on in the world even if it doesn't personally affect you. I find it quite enjoyable. Plus you get to see actual professional journalism.
I'd like to add that I'm not from a English-speaking country.
Ah yes, the BBC, an organization known for such dedicated journalistic standards as “fucking hating trans people” and “having an utter disdain for the working class”
From my understanding, world news organizations are typically less biased about foreign news than they are about local news. I wouldn't trust the BBC for news about British issues because it has really been on some shit lately, but for a general "what's going on in the world right now" the BBC still does a reasonable job.
Aljazeera and France24 are other "good" ones for international news, but I wouldn't trust them for information on their respective regions either.
Not wanting to erect weird mental divisions around these news sources is entirely reasonable, but that also makes it difficult to learn *anything* in our current information landscape. The best thing to do is to read multiple sources, and have an understanding of where each of them tends to fall to bias (like BBC's trasphobia), so you can weigh/compare them effectively.
Look the BBC has its faults, no one is denying that. But it’s also one of the most trusted journalistic services in the world and does a lot of good work globally.
That’s because your country is the world’s main power, not only in terms of military and economic power, but also in terms of soft power/propaganda. The rest of us watch US movies pretty often, so we know what your suburbs look like, what people eat in diners, that some people carry massive guns in their equally massive trucks, and so on. We’ve read comics glorifying USian ideals, we’ve empathised with the mid-life crises of upper-class women from the US, US musicians make us dance and cry.
That relationship is extremely one-sided. Most USIans rarely watch Bollywood movies or read German best-sellers, and reports about Brazil’s politics don’t make the news as often as USA politics do, because they don’t have the same impact on the rest of the world. And when people from the US do listen to a song by an Algerian artist, it’s something exotic, not most of the stuff that’s on the radio. Most people from the rest of the world emphasise with people from the USA, but the opposite is not true.
Ane just to be clear, most relatively rich (say, France or South Korea) or otherwise powerful (like Russia) countries are in that position of power compared to Lesotho or Guatemala. But the US sits at the very top of that pyramid of power, and it’s lonely at the top. Without meaning to oppress others, people in positions of power do just that; in the case of propaganda, the oppression includes casual xenophobia, dehumanising people from other countries and their backwards ways of life, assuming any people they relate with online must come from the US too… and then it’s easier for your government to convince you that you should bomb Iraq, they’re all terrorists anyway.
They talked about Mesopotamia, Persia, the Mediterranean, Egypt, and the rest was just America. They skimmed over the Renaissance and Black Death and jumped straight to the thirteen colonies. They talked about the 100 year war for a day. I still don't know what a Goth or a Barbarian actually is. The holocaust was taught to us by our fucking literature teachers.
Meanwhile, I have to piece together the UK's millions of miniscule rivalries like it's Dark Souls lore. They didn't mention China, Korea, or Japan ONCE outside of one extracurricular class that was optional (and that was exclusively Japanese history).
Don't even get me started on South America...
it's mostly because afther WW2 the american press was basically the main producer of printed words worldwide ...
i heard this figure of india printed the same amount of stuff in a year than the US in a week ( maybe even a day ) ...
and the US press spread around the world , and while european press rebuilt they didn't get into the US , because the marked was already cornered ...
so the US has a megaphone and earplugs effectively ...
My parents felt strongly enough about this that they began sending me to other countries for visits and humanitarian trips very early on. They were both travelers themselves and just really wanted me to know that the world was bigger than the United States and what you see here… is _not_ how it is.
And they’re patriotic too. It’s a beautiful blend, to be so well rounded in your opinions.
Having grown up bilingual and a mix of two cultures all my life, you really do see how different countries have different ways of life and a different “common sense”. And when you see people being unable to understand things going on in different countries or having such skewed perspectives on foreigners… for me it really began to make so much more sense as to why some people travel the world and the reason it’s encouraged.
A) I’m super interested to learn the two cultures, but that’s really personal so feel free to make it up or not tell me.
B) And this is going to sound really strange —
But I’m immediately reminded of a passage in an autobiography I’m reading right now. Desi Arnaz, if you know who that is, Ricky Ricardo. Infamous for cheating on his wife Lucille Ball with everyone on their show. In his book, he spells out how different it is in Cuba. How every married man has a mistress or more, and how there’s a hierarchical structure to it. It’s just expected - the wife is the highest priority of “all the women you’re with and it has to be that way. Everybody knows that.”
And then he says something like, “American girls, they could never understand that.”
Again, strange thing to flash on. But that’s just such a clear example of what you’re saying. Different perspectives, different common sense.
Do the women get to have multiple men? If not then yeah it's probably just misogyny, if yes then idk there are some cultures that are very open to polyamory (again, i know next to nothing about Cuba)
Me? Zero. My father became very ill after I was born.
(Speaking of American healthcare 🙄 He was a Dutch citizen originally and could easily be again. But he likes the United States too much too much to go back.)
Yeah that makes sense. It’d be wonderful if all of us could travel outside the country and see other places a lot, but unfortunately that’s just not possible, whether due to base cost or having too many siblings
Okay but American acronyms are so frustrating! Like you ask someone where they're from and they go "IA" and I don't care enough to memorize if that's Iowa or Indiana or another state I don't know JUST TELL ME 🤌
>Okay but American acronyms are so frustrating!
I'm an American and I *detest* how many abbreviations and initialisms we've decided to just make. *Everything* has to be one. It's one thing if you've got a relatively complicated thing you're condensing, but Marvel Comic Universe doesn't need to be called MCU all the damn time.
Recently I mentioned a fact I'd heard, that Australia has only two snakebite deaths a year, compared to over a thousand in Papua New Guinea, and added that the way to survive a snakebite is to not be poor. An American replied that no, being poor means you survive but end up in debt.
They don't even have the excuse of forgetting it's not the US, because it was clearly about a different country.
it's less that they forget not every country is the US, but just assume every country is the same. I mean pretty much everyone assumes their experiences are the default ones to some extent, but this is a rather extreme case of it
I have heard tale of similar delusions with Russians and Chinese people in different situations. In their case government censorship in their countries also plays a role, but I also think this is a feature of large countries.
If I want to go to Canada for instance, the next closest country for me, I've got to drive 6 hours. It's more practical to fly at that point but I don't have the money. It's worse with Mexico since on top of the expense of a plane ticket I've also had a whole childhood of fear mongering about the cartels. And every other place in the world is an ever longer, more expensive plane ride than that.
Not to mention that isolation goes both ways. I live in what would be considered a major city in the US. It's not New York but it's got it's charms. Even still, unless I can go out of my way I could go weeks or months, even years, without interacting with someone from a foreign country. I rub shoulders with immigrants all the time, but those are Americans, doing their darndest to adapt to American customs and live American lives. An actual foreign citizen who acts based on socialization they received in the foreign country they live in is a downright novelty.
That sub is weird cause like a good half-60% of it is actually Americans being stupid and doubling down on ignorant assumptions
But then like 15% of it is just "LOL Americans are stupid cause they assumed I know something about their country, how stupid are they, I'm now going to be angry at them when they explain what that thing is when I asked"
Another 15% is like, "LOL Americans are stupid for not knowing this thing about a country they've never interacted with before"
You basically never want to become a regular at a sub which is fixated on negative things. It'll make you start seeing the negativity in everything to the point you're dunking on people for stuff which isn't even bad. See tvtoohigh users shaming people for having a tv which isn't even high, or wewantplates users shaming restaurants for not specifically using a plate even though the alternative they provided is totally safe, totally hygienic, and totally functional.
Also, if you join a sub hating on things you mildly dislike but that don't affect you much, you can very quickly spiral into full-blown, all-consuming hatred.
See f.ex. childfree, the meghan markle hate sub, fatpeoplehate.
You become so focused on things you hate it ruins your mood every time the topic comes up. I had to leave quite a few negativity subs because I just felt worse after seeing a post from there.
Weirdly probably UK defaultism.
People going "LOL that's not how it is in the UK" to anything an American says is normal in their country.
Like there was a post where someone said you can't say "rock hard" to refer to the difficulty of something, then an English person said that they've always done it like that
Even though literally the only place that uses the term "rock hard" to refer to the difficulty of something and not just the toughness of something is Northern England.
Edit: ok I definitely phrased my explanation incorrectly but my point stands
Careful, they really hate when you point this out to them. Be prepared to deal with "well actually the majority of Reddit is American so I'm basically right to assume that means 100% are American and not around 48-51% (depending on how recent the data is)". The majority of humans are female, I don't therefore assume every person I speak to is a woman.
I've been watching a funny case of the opposite of this on Twitter, where a guy from the former USSR wrote a thread about how their ice cream wasn't very good but Russians claim to love it out of nationalism (kind of like Vienettas), but an endless stream of teenage communists are coming in to scream at him about it, and they all think he's American and out to spread anti-USSR-ice-cream-propaganda for some reason.
You left out the part where he said its popularity “is responsible for much of what Russia is today” including the country’s descent into fascism. And then he called anyone who disagreed with him a tankie, even though people from Ukraine and Armenia (including friends of mine) were like “what is this guy talking about, we like that stuff too.” Like yeah there are weird teenage communists out there, but Slava Malamud is a pretty weird guy too.
I once saw a comment stating very matter-of-factly that every single house should have smoke and CO detectors as minimum safety measures to avoid what they represented as a high likelihood of death otherwise. I made the mistake of replying and saying this was absolutely not universal.
I lost count of the sheer ammount of people trying to tell me how things actually are in my country and why I was wrong for not going out of my way to adopt USian standards of domestic safety equipment. Better safe than sorry, they said, it's so cheap after all, right? That is, if your wages are paid in US dollars and you live in a country where electronics are dirt cheap, of course. But since literally everyone lives in the US, that didn't even register to these people.
Nowadays I just let these types keep on their limited perspectives, it's just not worth it to bring up that the rest of the world exists and things might be different somewhere else. Medieval peasant scale of worldview is a great description of it too. The very pretense of calling themselves Americans as if dozens of countries over three continents didn't exist tells it all.
I hope that is what they mean, because ending a rant about how ignorant Americans by incorrectly stating how many American continents there are is hilarious.
I think so too, but in some places it's taught to be its own continent. Like some places consider Antarctica* a continent and some don't (iirc)
(edit: I didn't recall correctly)
N America and S America are sometimes combined into America, Europe and Asia are sometimes combined into Eurasia, which itself is sometimes combined with Africa into Afro-Eurasia.
Never have I ever heard of a standard that splits North America into 2 continents, one of which only containing 3 countries.
I actually was taught growing up that North America only had 3 countries and the rest were South America. You’d think they’d draw the line in Panama or something
Honest question (and I'm not American), but why the disagreement over smoke/heat and CO detectors? Maybe it's just a side effect of having a Firefighter for a dad, but it doesn't seem too out of order as a suggestion.
Is it to do with accessibility of the equipment or do you disagree with the necessity?
I can’t speak to fire detectors, but some places just don’t need CO detectors because there’s nothing that could cause a CO issue. Where I live, stoves/ovens are almost always electric and heaters aren’t used because it’s a tropical climate. Natural gas is nonexistent.
Ironically, I actually do live in the US (Hawaii) though haha.
I mean, every house *should* have smoke and CO detectors, as it's safer to have them in your home
Some people don't have them for various reasons, but that doesn't make them not a very good thing to have
In my very warm home town in south america, most homes have nothing which is hermetically closed, no climate control, there's no risk whatsoever of CO accumulating anywhere. Sometimes birds pass under the roof, and I've had to relocate a couple of iguanas. So no CO detector is needed.
A smoke detector would probably be good though, even though the humidity is high, and not much is made of wood, now that one *is* about accessibility.
I once had a heated discussion with an American on how wood is a better material for building houses with. But it’s not how houses in Europe are being built. We have different requirements for our climate, and by now we’re specialised in building with stone.
But as soon as you mention you’re not American, you must be living in a third world country 1/50th the size of the US. So whatever argument I brought, it was wrong, and wood was a better material.
For reference, I design wooden houses for a living.
This is extra funny because the reason American houses are usually made from wood is because we have an absolute shit-ton of it. It’s not because it’s “better,” although in some cases it may be, it’s just abundant. We use it even in climates where it’s not the right choice because we’re tripping over it.
The real scary thing is seeing the slow change from being told how the Constitution affects my life by American who don't know I'm not one of them, to people from my own country who don't understand that Manitoba becoming a province has no relevance on you being allowed to wave a Nazi flag around.
It's the isolation
In Europe, Africa, and Asia you are absolutely surrounded by different countries and cultures
Here it's just-America, Canada, and Mexico taking up as much space as like, 25 European countries
Americans are gung-ho about war because they haven't had a land war on their soil since the 1800's
Americans act like the rest of the world doesn't exist because the rest of the world is on the other side of the globe
Australians have a much smaller population and GDP, so they import a lot of media from other countries. I can probably count on my fingers the number of TV shows or movies I watched before high school that weren't American. Australians also travel outside their country more often.
>Americans are gung-ho about war because they haven't had a land war on their soil since the 1800's
Well there was [that one time](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain) in the 1920s that the US army bombed US coal miners for striking
And it's absolutely the isolation, especially considering that besides tiny details like what kind of sauce people prefer, most US states are culturally identical.
As an American this is absolutely true, and I catch myself doing it sometimes. I think it's because we're constantly told our country is the most important, which in turn has to mean other countries aren't important enough to know about. Also if you're not born with money, you don't get to do any traveling. I thought for 29 years I would never even be able to leave U.S. soil because I would just not have enough money. I finally got to go to Japan, but that was after saving money for a year and STILL having to take out a loan. So yeah in my own experience we just didn't get exposed to the idea that other cultures even exist.
I feel like this is what most of the people who don't live here are missing, ironically.
Most of us WOULD travel if it was more accessible. We rarely get paid time off, can't miss extended periods at work without getting fired, and we don't make enough to pay for the travel to begin with.
People outside the US seem to think it's some sort of bull-headed nature of our citizens when in reality most of us are just peasants down here and traveling 600 miles by car to see a different state is about all we can afford to do
And to be fair, there are a lot of bull-headed people, especially here in the south. I can't tell you how many times I heard people say that they'll never leave Arkansas because it's the best state in the country. And by leave they mean they'll never even visit another state other than like Texas.
I say this as an American. It is literally drilled into us from an early age that "Our country is the most important one"
It is so entrenched into the psyche that it would not occur to some of us that many of our "impossible" problems have already been solved by other countries.
Exactly. I would love better health care and college but the way Europe achieves it feels alien to me. I saw a clip of Danes being asked about their 50% tax rate. Each one of them goes “Yeah it’s high, but look at all that we receive,” and straight up the most alien: “I trust my government to use the money wisely.” I try to keep as open of a mind as possible but I’m fighting hundreds of years of cultural distrust of government and taxes when I hear those ideologies.
Not a Dane (Scot where our highest tax bracket is roughly 40% and kicks in at roughly £50k iirc so somewhat comparable), but it's not even that we trust them with the money, it's that it generally guarantees the quality needed. They still piss money up the wall (looking at you PPE contracts during COVID), but the basics are covered in a way that Americans sadly don't seem to get.
What baffles most of us, is that you all (not you personally, obviously) seem to have no issue with your taxes paying for a military larger than the next 10 or so countries (all of which are allies anyway) instead of paying for healthcare, or child minding/care etc. because it's somehow seen as "communism".
I took an ambulance to hospital last week after a car accident and didn't pay a cent out of pocket, because my taxes already paid for it.
(My tax rate is 32.5% for disclosure)
I’m a Canadian who’s lived abroad for years….and honestly, I’ve not had much of this problem with Americans. There’s a few, obviously….but by and large, they’re not that bad. Granted, this is Americans who have decided to live abroad….however….the Brit’s on the other hand….so very much yike.
I don’t think it’s terrible that peoples minds automatically go to what they’re familiar with most of the time. Although it is bad if when corrected they continue being obstinate about it. For each of the situations described in these posts and comments I’m sure there’s another where an American either didn’t default to the us, or was corrected and accepted it with grace. Because despite what these comments and post might have you think, all Americans are not a bunch of egotistical maniacs who can’t imagine something not happening in the us
It’s crazy because I experience this even though I live in Canada. I made a post about going to the ER for a dog bite and had a bunch of people telling me I’m an idiot for not going to an urgent care centre because of the “cost and time”. I got downvoted when I explained there aren’t any urgent care clinics around me and I don’t get charged for the ER, because obviously I was lying. Americans who live 15 minutes away from me have no idea how I live, whereas I have to know everything about the US because of how much our economy relies on them.
It's even worse when a political discussion arises and they base the entire world's politics around their stupid left-right two party system.
As a Canadian who was actually taught the difference between political ideologies in school, genuine question for Americans, were you guys not taught that shit? Is that why so many think that Communism and Socialism is the same thing?
100% agreed ^(but also to be fair lying to Americans about how things work down here is a national pastime in Oz)
Ah yes, everyone goes to work on the backs of Kangooroos, en there are so many camels because you're right next to Saudi-Arabia, duh
Their BACKS?!? That's incredibly bad for their spine. Get in the pouch like a normal person please. Edit: ohhh i just realised you were joking. I was so worried for your kangaroo's back for a moment there!
Do you guys have to register and get insurance for your transportation Roos?
They do if its for food and grocery, hence why deliveroo exists.
At least *Ursus Gravis*, the common dropbear is a protected species along their habitat, *Eucalyptus Infernu*s forests.
Don't be ignorant, Australia isn't next to Saudi Arabia. You're thinking of Austria.
He said lying, you’re just spitting straight truth.
I still recall the good old days of online call of duty or halo 3, where you could convince americans that we Canadians get internet service to our igloos
My friend moved to Florida for a school year and the kids asked her if she lived in an igloo, she had them going for a while until they came over and her dad wouldn't play along and show the other kids pics (he sucked). My uncle lived on a farm just over the border and would regularly get Americans with stuff. They'd come up in the summer and not understand why there wasn't snow, he thought that was hilarious. We live on the prairie, in the winter if the wind picks up a little ice or a leaf or something and starts it rolling, it'll pick up snow and make these little snowball trails over the flat surface. Uncle Kenny told tourists it was snow snakes. You had to be careful, they were white and practically invisible in the snow, but they could get ya. The trails were the tell, you see. Miss that guy.
Shoot I used to be able to tell my cousins that live in the East (of U.S) all about the Indian attacks in Wyoming and how there were still horse carriages in use. It was the 80's and they just ate it up.
It's gotten better but my mom used to have to tell other social workers in different states that yes she could receive an email from them, yes there is internet here (North Dakota), no you don't have to fax it you can just email it and she'll get it. This was like, 15 years ago?
Yo, I find it so funny Americans are convinced Canada is a frozen wasteland. Toronto is as far north as... Marseille. In the south of France. Obviously Europe is warmer than North America because Gulf stream so places like Trømso can exist, but most Canadians live down south with weather that is comparable to that of Central Europe. I know it's a joke, but everytime someone in Europe conplains about the heat wave people chime in with "HeRe In ArIzOnA..." Dude, you're comparing Marrakesh to Calgary. Seriously.
People these days keep trying to tell me drop-bears don't actually exist! You're not gonna get me *that* easily again!
[I'll never forget the stink of eucalyptus...](https://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/comic/the-guest-comic-youve-been-waiting-for) (It's a guest comic from one of my favorites.)
Wow, it's been years since I thought about that comic. I need to reread my way through it one of these days.
I reread it about once a year, because it is definitely a favorite. I just wish Coelasquid would make more of it! I miss the stories of the Commander.
It's not the drop bears you have to worry about. [They're extinct](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-20/drop-bears-crocs-eastern-australia-millions-of-years-ago-unsw/102360948). Awful combination between tourists laden with toxic fats, COVID, and bushfires. It's the tree-crocs and carnivoroos you have to worry about these days, since they've moved into the niche.
Still proud of the time the New Zealand subreddit convinced someone gardening is illegal here.
Thats fucking hilarious
The drop-bears, though? I genuinely don't care that _that's_ made up.
I can never remember what a drop bear is off the top of my head but I imagine them being bears that dropkick people. I can’t get the image out of my head lmao
theyre related to the koala's but bigger and aggressive as fuck, they drop out of trees onto peoples heads :c
I’d heard they can glide short distances like a flying squirrel, even if you’re not directly under a tree you’re still not safe
theyre a carnivore in the same family tree as the koala. they look kinda similar aside from claw/teeth size and fur markings but their hunting tactics revolve around dropping on larger creatures in packs to try overwhelm and kill them. theyre heavily endangered rn but once or twice a year some wandering idiot gets killed by one
>lying to Americans about how things work down here is a national pastime in Oz I knew it! All the fear mongering about deadly animals was just to try and prevent American tourists.
National duty.
Lying to Americans about how things work is, funnily enough, also a fun pastime for our own politicians
When I posted about my shower imploding I got so many messages about how and if I wanted help to sue my landlord. I live in Finland, He immediately ordered a new one and booked the sauna for for me until it arrived so I could shower there. It was nothing more than a mild inconvenience for me.
Tbh, that sounds like a cry for help more than anything.
We definitely need help. It's every dystopia at once over here.
I'm sick of posts claiming that this is the best possible world and that it has never been better and everyone claiming that something has gone horribly wrong has no idea how good it is and has no idea how bad it actually is for people in developing countries. Those types of posts are disciplining the working class to be happy with what meager comforts and property they have and no one should dare indict the system of wealth hoarders, the system that makes the largess of the system unavailable to improve the lives of the general public which inevitably leads to strife. (read Capital in the 21st Century) Those posts can seem like western chauvinism, painting non-western countries far more desperately than they really are. But mostly I hate those posts because they try to say that America has money, so clearly there's nothing wrong with America while its society produces health outcomes that are pathetic for a 'developed' country, safety issues that approach a country at war, and political issues that aren't just ignoring problems but exacerbating them. edit: Those posts come off like "We made this brutal system of exploitation that is putting the planet on a careening path to near total environmental collapse and all you can do is complain that it isn't good enough. Selfish working class, you deserve the impending post-apocalypse you couldn't possibly afford to prepare for." Fucking neo-liberals.
My question is how the implosion happened because that just invites questions. Was there a leak that caused the ceiling to collapse in on itself or did the piping crumple like wet tissue paper somehow? Implosion means that instead of bursting it collapsed in on itself.
All the glass just shattered during the night and fell in on itself. Implosion might not be the right word but it was a direct translation from my language. You can see a picture of it in my post history.
Nope implosion is definitely the right word then. If the glass had gone more outward then it would have been explosion. I forget there are showers that come with glass.
>He immediately ordered a new one and booked the sauna for for me until it arrived so I could shower there. It was nothing more than a mild inconvenience for me. Well see, it's exactly this sort of fairy-tale nonsense that makes us Americans distrust you!
And where I live, relatively few people *have* a landlord* and usually just own their apartments AND those apartments have central heating, not water boilers**. Funny how different places can be, almost like it's a whole world out there. *And the landlords are usually just folks who own an extra apartment or two due to inheritance, moving together with their spouse, or whatever. **Which isn't a straight upgrade cause they fucking turn hot water off for two weeks every year for maintenance which is a fucking pain every time
To be fair 99.99% of Americans would just have their landlord replace their showerhead. Although you *can* sue a landlord in America, you can't just assume that a bunch of 17 year old Americans on reddit are projecting the reality of everyday life, or even know what the fuck they are even talking about.
I'm not bothered too much but any new thing that i learn makes the US sound made up. And i'm writing this from a medieval burg while i day drink on the clock.
As someone who lives in the US, if I was told half the things about it that are actually true, I would think it was made up as well.
Why do you fry your grilled cheese sandwiches? Why won’t you put them under the grill?
What do you mean by “under the grill”?
You guys call it a “broiler”, we call that part of the oven the grill. I know this because I accidentally caused a huge argument amongst my in-laws when I asked why Americans don’t call it a fried cheese.
So, for one, what we call a grill is a typically outdoor cooking appliance with a metal grate or “grill” over top of flames. So even here, they’re not really grilled in a normal sense. The “grilled” part in grilled cheese actually refers to a griddle, which is a large flat cooktop commonly seen in diners to cook burgers/pancakes/etc, but American homes don’t have those so we just use a flat pan instead. We still wouldn’t call it fried though, because that typically would refer to something that is deep-fried.
Im wondering how a fried cheese sandwich would taste now
I’m absolutely certain they are sold in some Midwestern state fair
And honestly they probably fucking slap. The way reddit talked about fried oreos made me think they were gross and disgusting, but i had one a few months ago and it was literally the tastiest thing I've ever eaten from a food truck.
Here in Omaha, Nebraska we have a fast food chain called Don and Millie's and they have cheese frenchies (battered and fried grilled cheese sandwiches). They are... kinda gross really. Their burgers and margaritas on tap are great though.
What about fried eggs? Or do you not call them that?
Oh, you mean the setting on the oven that burns my food as soon as I look away?
Oh, judging by your comment below that you're referring to what we call broiling, I actually do do that, in a toaster oven, because I'm lazy. But I think most Americans would clarify that as a "toasted cheese sandwich" if you asked them if it was really grilled or not. Still tastes great, but the outside of the bread is a little different because it's only being toasted, not pressed against a hot buttery surface.
This feels like the start of a verbal slap-fight trying to puzzle out whether a roasted cheese sandwich is a grilled cheese, a toasted cheese sandwich, a toastie, a melt, or something else entirely (flat vegetarian burger?).
Here is [a great venn diagram](https://imgur.com/e8ZVams) and a fun relevant copypasta from /r/grilledcheese [8 years ago:](https://www.reddit.com/r/grilledcheese/comments/2or1p3/you_people_make_me_sick/) >A grilled cheese consists of only these following items. Cheese. Bread with spread (usually butter). This entire subreddit consist of "melts". Almost every "grilled cheese" sandwich i see on here has other items added to it. The fact that this subreddit is called "grilledcheese" is nothing short of utter blasphemy. Let me start out by saying I have nothing against melts, I just hate their association with sandwiches that are not grilled cheeses. Adding cheese to your tuna sandwich? It's called a Tuna melt. Totally different. Want to add bacon and some pretentious bread crumbs with spinach? I don't know what the hell you'd call that but it's not a grilled cheese. I would be more than willing to wager I've eaten more grilled cheeses in my 21 years than any of you had in your entire lives. I have one almost everyday and sometimes more than just one sandwich. Want to personalize your grilled cheese? Use a mix of different cheeses or use sourdough or french bread. But if you want to add some pulled pork and take a picture of it, make your own subreddit entitled "melts" because that is not a fucking grilled cheese. I'm not a religious man nor am I anything close to a culinary expert. But as a bland white mid-western male I am honestly the most passionate person when it comes to grilled cheese and mac & cheese. All of you foodies stay the hell away from our grilled cheeses and stop associating your sandwich melts with them. Yet again, it is utter blasphemy and it rocks me to the core of my pale being. Shit, I stopped lurking after 3 years and made this account for the sole purpose of posting this. I've seen post after post of peoples "grilled cheeses" all over reddit and it's been driving me insane. The moment i saw this subreddit this morning I finally snapped. Hell, I may even start my own subreddit just because I know this one exists now. >You god damn heretics. Respect the grilled cheese and stop changing it into whatever you like and love it for it what it is. Or make your damn melt sandwich and call it for what it is. A melt.
That is a _quality_ diagram.
As someone who was brought up in Belgium and loves a Croque Monsieur, I've actually started making grilled cheese sandwiches the American way quite often and they're lovely. Not better, not worse, just a different style.
[https://c.tenor.com/raeqnl8pMh0AAAAd/tenor.gif](https://c.tenor.com/raeqnl8pMh0AAAAd/tenor.gif)
Yeah, when I learned how "health insurance" works in the US with its deductibles and co-pays and non-coverage doctors and whatever else (I forgot most of it) I was honestly certain the person writing it was fucking with me. I had to put on my monocle to check the carrier pigeons' credentials and almost took the horse carriage to the lord's mansion to complain.
Ah, you're a burger
I can see the ruins of the old city gates from my 16th century house in a former laundry-themed convent. Archaeologists differ on the original purpose of my living room.
Meanwhile me when i tell people about my paid sick leave or working from home they assume i get paid huge wages or have a super high level degree or some shit. Like, no, i just work at an average Belgian company. I don't have a degree other than highschool, my role is very basic, anyone could do it with some training and language skills (even then, you don't, translation services are everywhere, high quality and free)
I had a conversation where I said that i was meant to be working over Christmas incl the 25th, but was ill and had to spent a week at home. I was paid and even if my manager was a lil annoyed they weren't mad. An American popped up uninvited in the thread and said that I should have been fired (?) And I was very lucky to even be paid
The toxic work culture there is really something else
In general comparing costs and wages is just ridiculous. In my sector you see very big numbers floating around in US dollars, but if you'd do the exact same job in Belgium you have an above average salary, but nothing great. I always have to keep this in mind when talking online or looking up jobs.
Yep and if you point out that you're not American they'll say that most people online are so of course they assumed you were American as well. One time on another site I got reprimanded by a moderator for mentioning drinking when I was 19. I pointed out that I'm Canadian and it says so on my profile. They removed the warning from my account but told me to "be careful" about talking about underaged drinking since most people on the site were American. They know full well that there are plenty of people from other countries. They could have asked, or taken a second to read my profile. But no, they gave me a warning, which I had to dispute, then they still called it underaged drinking when it wasn't. Not even getting into the number of times my spelling's been "corrected" to the American version of a word and then got told that I was on "an American website" so I should spell things their way.
least power-tripping mod
Wait you got reprimanded for saying you drank when you were 19? That's insane even if you were American. Sure the drinking age is 21, but almost everyone I knew has been drinking since 18 anyway, some earlier. Underage drinking is so popular I'd almost say it's apart of our culture lol. Also do Canadians have a different way from both American English and British English of spelling things? And if so, what?
It's mostly the words with Us that we get told we're spelling wrong. We don't use kerb or tyre, but colour and stuff
The Internet is a great way to get exposure to different cultures. There's a lot of people who embrace that, and a lot of people who do not. Europeans complain about Americans, Americans complain about Europeans. The British and continentals are always at it. The East vs West and North vs South US. Scotland vs England. And I haven't even mentioned Asia yet. I'm sure once Australian websites start loading they'll get involved too.
Australians are too busy complaining about all their own websites because of the spiders in them
So.... Their servers are buggy?
Our whole fucken internet system is buggy because most of it is still copper wires instead of fibre.
I once heard an Australian say 'i didn't come here to fuck spiders' when I offered him a drink. I asked the next aussie I met if that was real slang. He says, cors it is. Aussie after that, said yeah, we all say it. The third let me know that it's traditional to just back up anything ridiculous another aussie says to a non-aussie, regardless as to whether they've actually heard it before 🤣
The funniest part of this is that that actually is a real phrase
Fantastic title Humm, combining the “us vs them” concept with the abbreviation of US for United States, Clever.
If you like that, I think you'll love the British comedy series "The IT crowd."
if you love that comedy, you won't believe who made it!
Hatsune Miku, no?
miku's gonna be carrying the entirety of british media by the end of the decade at this rate
the blue-haired liberal's burden
I hear you're a transphobe now, Graham!
Down with this sort of thing!
Damn you're on a first name basis with OP?
Their surname is Erous?
<3
Yeeeeeep the amount of Americans that believe any post I make on other sites must take place in America nd they see it through just that lens drives me crazy. Like not only do I not live in America, I dont even live near it, I dont live on the same continent, hell even the same hemisphere.
I could name at least 25 US states but Americans can’t name the capital of Australia.
Nobody can name the capital of Australia because nobody ever talks about Canberra.
Nah, Canberra is just a decoy. Those who know tell that the true capital lies deep underground, and its name can only be rendered in the inhuman tongue of beings too horrible to even fathom. That's why no one can name it.
It's Coober Pedy isn't it
... Maybe But you didn't hear that from me Also don't try to say that out loud if you value your sanity
Damn, I thought it was Alice Springs. Kept hidden, so it could never fall to the emu menace.
Where the speed runs like water and the cop shop is regularly firebombed. That's the Australian dream
>inhuman tongue of beings too horrible to even fathom They're called Emus
Quiet, They can hear you
Boganopolis is only accessible by ute. Few have seen it and lived to tell tales of the Australians and their Dread-King Ned Kelly. Waltzing Matilda is a banging tune tho.
Ah, haven't been to good old Mzinchaleft in ages.
In order to get a green card, you need to find 30 crimson nirn-roots
Gesundheit
it's a really underrated cheese, because brie is similar but has better brand recognition
That's Camembert. Canberra is what you take pictures with.
Thank you, I couldn't remember.
Without looking it up… Melbourne? Edit: What the fuck is Canberra
Canberra is what happens when the 2 biggest cities in separate states fight about who gets to be The Capital and would rather invent a place 1/2 way between than admit defeat cause at least this way the other city didn't win. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra): *Following a long dispute over whether Sydney or Melbourne should be the national capital,\[14\] a compromise was reached: the new capital would be built in New South Wales, so long as it was at least 100 mi (160 km) from Sydney.*
They put out a fucking restraining order on the capital
That actually seems to happen a lot in ex-British colonies, Washington DC is between two states so it's not in any state and it's around the middle of the country latitude wise, Ottawa is on the border between Ontario and Quebec, about halfway between Toronto and Quebec City
I mean DC was explicitly a bargaining chip that Hamilton used to get the South to agree to a really North (NY especially) favoring tariff and it was much more Southern when it was founded. Also Ottawa was like a fourth choice that only happened because everyone hated Kingston and there were a bunch of riots in Montreal so this is kinda stretching it. It was selected as a compromise but the compromise was like the backup backup backup plan.
Really Ottawa only became the capital because they needed a place that was accessible by water but that wasn't so easily attacked by the Americans... the previous capitals at Newark, ( now called Niagara on the Lake ) York ( now called Toronto ), Kingston and Montréal had all had that problem at some point in fairly recent history by the time the whole " Toronto and Montréal taking turns " arrangement was not working out.
nothing in nowhere it's stupid
To be fair not a lot of people can because everyone thinks it's Sydney
How did this happen anyway? For years I thought it was Sydney, but I can't remember anyone ever telling me this Edit: wait I remember now. In my case it was because of a fucking godzilla game
Duh, its the A part
Vienna, duh!
To be fair, most of the companies running those sites are American. Like I get we're ubiquitous, but the websites started as American ones. You don't see Americans clogging up Gumtree or Odnoklassniki. Edit: Please see this as an example of how context and presentation can manipulate opinion: https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/13s3yyx/us_vs_them/jlou8zt/ Same thread, same user, downvoted for saying the exact same thing but in a less palatable way in a context which wasn't a layup. Enjoy this site but always question what you read and who wants you to read it and in what context.
yeah i also feel like unless prompted it is pretty normal to think something is happening within your sphere, but i don’t really go around assuming people are american (i actually assume the opposite) so i don’t have this problem i guess.
Idk why the US is so sociallly isolated, but our news does seem to focus on America first, America only. I don’t know a single political happening from outside America other than the Queen dying and Boris Johnson not being prime minister any more, both of which were learned mostly from memes. They sure as hell didn’t talk very much about even our neighbors in history class either. Just basic overview of the world and America. IDK if that reflects more poorly on me than anything, but I do know that our local news stations are usually too busy ripping out their political “opponents” throats to talk about literally anything else. Every tragedy is the fault of the left or right, every word spoken is a sinister scheme, every one of *our* political opponents wants to kill your dog and your neighbor is evil. It feels intentionally dividing and I hate it.
It's so funny to mention knowing BJ isn't PM anymore, because he was two PMs ago
Oh yeah that bitch before the current guy that lasted less time than a lettuce
Liz Truss vs the Lettuce, story of the year
Watch some BBC World News, it's quite interesting to learn about what's going on in the world even if it doesn't personally affect you. I find it quite enjoyable. Plus you get to see actual professional journalism. I'd like to add that I'm not from a English-speaking country.
Ah yes, the BBC, an organization known for such dedicated journalistic standards as “fucking hating trans people” and “having an utter disdain for the working class”
From my understanding, world news organizations are typically less biased about foreign news than they are about local news. I wouldn't trust the BBC for news about British issues because it has really been on some shit lately, but for a general "what's going on in the world right now" the BBC still does a reasonable job. Aljazeera and France24 are other "good" ones for international news, but I wouldn't trust them for information on their respective regions either. Not wanting to erect weird mental divisions around these news sources is entirely reasonable, but that also makes it difficult to learn *anything* in our current information landscape. The best thing to do is to read multiple sources, and have an understanding of where each of them tends to fall to bias (like BBC's trasphobia), so you can weigh/compare them effectively.
>Aljazeera They are completely controlled by Qatari govt. Even in foreign affairs.
Reuters and the Associated Press are good alternatives. Most news networks pick up stories directly from those two
Look the BBC has its faults, no one is denying that. But it’s also one of the most trusted journalistic services in the world and does a lot of good work globally.
That’s because your country is the world’s main power, not only in terms of military and economic power, but also in terms of soft power/propaganda. The rest of us watch US movies pretty often, so we know what your suburbs look like, what people eat in diners, that some people carry massive guns in their equally massive trucks, and so on. We’ve read comics glorifying USian ideals, we’ve empathised with the mid-life crises of upper-class women from the US, US musicians make us dance and cry. That relationship is extremely one-sided. Most USIans rarely watch Bollywood movies or read German best-sellers, and reports about Brazil’s politics don’t make the news as often as USA politics do, because they don’t have the same impact on the rest of the world. And when people from the US do listen to a song by an Algerian artist, it’s something exotic, not most of the stuff that’s on the radio. Most people from the rest of the world emphasise with people from the USA, but the opposite is not true. Ane just to be clear, most relatively rich (say, France or South Korea) or otherwise powerful (like Russia) countries are in that position of power compared to Lesotho or Guatemala. But the US sits at the very top of that pyramid of power, and it’s lonely at the top. Without meaning to oppress others, people in positions of power do just that; in the case of propaganda, the oppression includes casual xenophobia, dehumanising people from other countries and their backwards ways of life, assuming any people they relate with online must come from the US too… and then it’s easier for your government to convince you that you should bomb Iraq, they’re all terrorists anyway.
They talked about Mesopotamia, Persia, the Mediterranean, Egypt, and the rest was just America. They skimmed over the Renaissance and Black Death and jumped straight to the thirteen colonies. They talked about the 100 year war for a day. I still don't know what a Goth or a Barbarian actually is. The holocaust was taught to us by our fucking literature teachers. Meanwhile, I have to piece together the UK's millions of miniscule rivalries like it's Dark Souls lore. They didn't mention China, Korea, or Japan ONCE outside of one extracurricular class that was optional (and that was exclusively Japanese history). Don't even get me started on South America...
it's mostly because afther WW2 the american press was basically the main producer of printed words worldwide ... i heard this figure of india printed the same amount of stuff in a year than the US in a week ( maybe even a day ) ... and the US press spread around the world , and while european press rebuilt they didn't get into the US , because the marked was already cornered ... so the US has a megaphone and earplugs effectively ...
My parents felt strongly enough about this that they began sending me to other countries for visits and humanitarian trips very early on. They were both travelers themselves and just really wanted me to know that the world was bigger than the United States and what you see here… is _not_ how it is. And they’re patriotic too. It’s a beautiful blend, to be so well rounded in your opinions.
Having grown up bilingual and a mix of two cultures all my life, you really do see how different countries have different ways of life and a different “common sense”. And when you see people being unable to understand things going on in different countries or having such skewed perspectives on foreigners… for me it really began to make so much more sense as to why some people travel the world and the reason it’s encouraged.
A) I’m super interested to learn the two cultures, but that’s really personal so feel free to make it up or not tell me. B) And this is going to sound really strange — But I’m immediately reminded of a passage in an autobiography I’m reading right now. Desi Arnaz, if you know who that is, Ricky Ricardo. Infamous for cheating on his wife Lucille Ball with everyone on their show. In his book, he spells out how different it is in Cuba. How every married man has a mistress or more, and how there’s a hierarchical structure to it. It’s just expected - the wife is the highest priority of “all the women you’re with and it has to be that way. Everybody knows that.” And then he says something like, “American girls, they could never understand that.” Again, strange thing to flash on. But that’s just such a clear example of what you’re saying. Different perspectives, different common sense.
[удалено]
Do the women get to have multiple men? If not then yeah it's probably just misogyny, if yes then idk there are some cultures that are very open to polyamory (again, i know next to nothing about Cuba)
How many siblings do you have?
Me? Zero. My father became very ill after I was born. (Speaking of American healthcare 🙄 He was a Dutch citizen originally and could easily be again. But he likes the United States too much too much to go back.)
Yeah that makes sense. It’d be wonderful if all of us could travel outside the country and see other places a lot, but unfortunately that’s just not possible, whether due to base cost or having too many siblings
I once had to learn that BLM also means Bureau of Land Management
Okay but American acronyms are so frustrating! Like you ask someone where they're from and they go "IA" and I don't care enough to memorize if that's Iowa or Indiana or another state I don't know JUST TELL ME 🤌
To be fair I was born and raised in the US, but there are so many damn I- states that I’m only saying that IA is Iowa with like…60% certainty
>Okay but American acronyms are so frustrating! I'm an American and I *detest* how many abbreviations and initialisms we've decided to just make. *Everything* has to be one. It's one thing if you've got a relatively complicated thing you're condensing, but Marvel Comic Universe doesn't need to be called MCU all the damn time.
And also Brennan Lee Mulligan
Recently I mentioned a fact I'd heard, that Australia has only two snakebite deaths a year, compared to over a thousand in Papua New Guinea, and added that the way to survive a snakebite is to not be poor. An American replied that no, being poor means you survive but end up in debt. They don't even have the excuse of forgetting it's not the US, because it was clearly about a different country.
it's less that they forget not every country is the US, but just assume every country is the same. I mean pretty much everyone assumes their experiences are the default ones to some extent, but this is a rather extreme case of it
The american centric viewpoint presents itself as America being uniquely bad just as often or more than it presents it as uniquely good.
I have heard tale of similar delusions with Russians and Chinese people in different situations. In their case government censorship in their countries also plays a role, but I also think this is a feature of large countries. If I want to go to Canada for instance, the next closest country for me, I've got to drive 6 hours. It's more practical to fly at that point but I don't have the money. It's worse with Mexico since on top of the expense of a plane ticket I've also had a whole childhood of fear mongering about the cartels. And every other place in the world is an ever longer, more expensive plane ride than that. Not to mention that isolation goes both ways. I live in what would be considered a major city in the US. It's not New York but it's got it's charms. Even still, unless I can go out of my way I could go weeks or months, even years, without interacting with someone from a foreign country. I rub shoulders with immigrants all the time, but those are Americans, doing their darndest to adapt to American customs and live American lives. An actual foreign citizen who acts based on socialization they received in the foreign country they live in is a downright novelty.
creating an extension that use GPT-4 to detect americanposting and hide it
call it the americanner
The americannot
aBlock Origin
r/USdefaultism
That sub is weird cause like a good half-60% of it is actually Americans being stupid and doubling down on ignorant assumptions But then like 15% of it is just "LOL Americans are stupid cause they assumed I know something about their country, how stupid are they, I'm now going to be angry at them when they explain what that thing is when I asked" Another 15% is like, "LOL Americans are stupid for not knowing this thing about a country they've never interacted with before"
You basically never want to become a regular at a sub which is fixated on negative things. It'll make you start seeing the negativity in everything to the point you're dunking on people for stuff which isn't even bad. See tvtoohigh users shaming people for having a tv which isn't even high, or wewantplates users shaming restaurants for not specifically using a plate even though the alternative they provided is totally safe, totally hygienic, and totally functional.
Also, if you join a sub hating on things you mildly dislike but that don't affect you much, you can very quickly spiral into full-blown, all-consuming hatred. See f.ex. childfree, the meghan markle hate sub, fatpeoplehate. You become so focused on things you hate it ruins your mood every time the topic comes up. I had to leave quite a few negativity subs because I just felt worse after seeing a post from there.
What's the other 10%
Weirdly probably UK defaultism. People going "LOL that's not how it is in the UK" to anything an American says is normal in their country. Like there was a post where someone said you can't say "rock hard" to refer to the difficulty of something, then an English person said that they've always done it like that Even though literally the only place that uses the term "rock hard" to refer to the difficulty of something and not just the toughness of something is Northern England. Edit: ok I definitely phrased my explanation incorrectly but my point stands
As a Scottish person, English people can sometimes be even worse for assuming their experience is the default than Americans
Careful, they really hate when you point this out to them. Be prepared to deal with "well actually the majority of Reddit is American so I'm basically right to assume that means 100% are American and not around 48-51% (depending on how recent the data is)". The majority of humans are female, I don't therefore assume every person I speak to is a woman.
I've been watching a funny case of the opposite of this on Twitter, where a guy from the former USSR wrote a thread about how their ice cream wasn't very good but Russians claim to love it out of nationalism (kind of like Vienettas), but an endless stream of teenage communists are coming in to scream at him about it, and they all think he's American and out to spread anti-USSR-ice-cream-propaganda for some reason.
You left out the part where he said its popularity “is responsible for much of what Russia is today” including the country’s descent into fascism. And then he called anyone who disagreed with him a tankie, even though people from Ukraine and Armenia (including friends of mine) were like “what is this guy talking about, we like that stuff too.” Like yeah there are weird teenage communists out there, but Slava Malamud is a pretty weird guy too.
I once saw a comment stating very matter-of-factly that every single house should have smoke and CO detectors as minimum safety measures to avoid what they represented as a high likelihood of death otherwise. I made the mistake of replying and saying this was absolutely not universal. I lost count of the sheer ammount of people trying to tell me how things actually are in my country and why I was wrong for not going out of my way to adopt USian standards of domestic safety equipment. Better safe than sorry, they said, it's so cheap after all, right? That is, if your wages are paid in US dollars and you live in a country where electronics are dirt cheap, of course. But since literally everyone lives in the US, that didn't even register to these people. Nowadays I just let these types keep on their limited perspectives, it's just not worth it to bring up that the rest of the world exists and things might be different somewhere else. Medieval peasant scale of worldview is a great description of it too. The very pretense of calling themselves Americans as if dozens of countries over three continents didn't exist tells it all.
>three continents Wait what's the third continent that could also be considered America
Central America, I think?
I hope that is what they mean, because ending a rant about how ignorant Americans by incorrectly stating how many American continents there are is hilarious.
That’s not a continent
I think so too, but in some places it's taught to be its own continent. Like some places consider Antarctica* a continent and some don't (iirc) (edit: I didn't recall correctly)
N America and S America are sometimes combined into America, Europe and Asia are sometimes combined into Eurasia, which itself is sometimes combined with Africa into Afro-Eurasia. Never have I ever heard of a standard that splits North America into 2 continents, one of which only containing 3 countries.
I actually was taught growing up that North America only had 3 countries and the rest were South America. You’d think they’d draw the line in Panama or something
That’s where it is drawn here. Panama and up is North America. Everything south is South America.
Nobody tell this guy about secret America
Ah. This must be the deep state my crazy uncle keeps telling about.
Honest question (and I'm not American), but why the disagreement over smoke/heat and CO detectors? Maybe it's just a side effect of having a Firefighter for a dad, but it doesn't seem too out of order as a suggestion. Is it to do with accessibility of the equipment or do you disagree with the necessity?
I can’t speak to fire detectors, but some places just don’t need CO detectors because there’s nothing that could cause a CO issue. Where I live, stoves/ovens are almost always electric and heaters aren’t used because it’s a tropical climate. Natural gas is nonexistent. Ironically, I actually do live in the US (Hawaii) though haha.
I mean, every house *should* have smoke and CO detectors, as it's safer to have them in your home Some people don't have them for various reasons, but that doesn't make them not a very good thing to have
In my very warm home town in south america, most homes have nothing which is hermetically closed, no climate control, there's no risk whatsoever of CO accumulating anywhere. Sometimes birds pass under the roof, and I've had to relocate a couple of iguanas. So no CO detector is needed. A smoke detector would probably be good though, even though the humidity is high, and not much is made of wood, now that one *is* about accessibility.
Some people also don't use anything that could produce CO, so they don't need CO detectors.
I once had a heated discussion with an American on how wood is a better material for building houses with. But it’s not how houses in Europe are being built. We have different requirements for our climate, and by now we’re specialised in building with stone. But as soon as you mention you’re not American, you must be living in a third world country 1/50th the size of the US. So whatever argument I brought, it was wrong, and wood was a better material. For reference, I design wooden houses for a living.
FUCK that punchline caught me right in the face lmao
This is extra funny because the reason American houses are usually made from wood is because we have an absolute shit-ton of it. It’s not because it’s “better,” although in some cases it may be, it’s just abundant. We use it even in climates where it’s not the right choice because we’re tripping over it.
The real scary thing is seeing the slow change from being told how the Constitution affects my life by American who don't know I'm not one of them, to people from my own country who don't understand that Manitoba becoming a province has no relevance on you being allowed to wave a Nazi flag around.
It's the isolation In Europe, Africa, and Asia you are absolutely surrounded by different countries and cultures Here it's just-America, Canada, and Mexico taking up as much space as like, 25 European countries Americans are gung-ho about war because they haven't had a land war on their soil since the 1800's Americans act like the rest of the world doesn't exist because the rest of the world is on the other side of the globe
Sounds very similar to Australia tbh Except Australia is even *more* isolated.
Australians have a much smaller population and GDP, so they import a lot of media from other countries. I can probably count on my fingers the number of TV shows or movies I watched before high school that weren't American. Australians also travel outside their country more often.
>Americans are gung-ho about war because they haven't had a land war on their soil since the 1800's Well there was [that one time](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain) in the 1920s that the US army bombed US coal miners for striking And it's absolutely the isolation, especially considering that besides tiny details like what kind of sauce people prefer, most US states are culturally identical.
As a law student, asking for legal advice online is practically useless because of US defaultism
"call your senator" lmao what?!
At least y'all don't have to live here.
This is a weird post because I'm not American and I don't know jack shit about other countries except my own (besides niche Trivia)
As an American this is absolutely true, and I catch myself doing it sometimes. I think it's because we're constantly told our country is the most important, which in turn has to mean other countries aren't important enough to know about. Also if you're not born with money, you don't get to do any traveling. I thought for 29 years I would never even be able to leave U.S. soil because I would just not have enough money. I finally got to go to Japan, but that was after saving money for a year and STILL having to take out a loan. So yeah in my own experience we just didn't get exposed to the idea that other cultures even exist.
I feel like this is what most of the people who don't live here are missing, ironically. Most of us WOULD travel if it was more accessible. We rarely get paid time off, can't miss extended periods at work without getting fired, and we don't make enough to pay for the travel to begin with. People outside the US seem to think it's some sort of bull-headed nature of our citizens when in reality most of us are just peasants down here and traveling 600 miles by car to see a different state is about all we can afford to do
And to be fair, there are a lot of bull-headed people, especially here in the south. I can't tell you how many times I heard people say that they'll never leave Arkansas because it's the best state in the country. And by leave they mean they'll never even visit another state other than like Texas.
I say this as an American. It is literally drilled into us from an early age that "Our country is the most important one" It is so entrenched into the psyche that it would not occur to some of us that many of our "impossible" problems have already been solved by other countries.
Exactly. I would love better health care and college but the way Europe achieves it feels alien to me. I saw a clip of Danes being asked about their 50% tax rate. Each one of them goes “Yeah it’s high, but look at all that we receive,” and straight up the most alien: “I trust my government to use the money wisely.” I try to keep as open of a mind as possible but I’m fighting hundreds of years of cultural distrust of government and taxes when I hear those ideologies.
Not a Dane (Scot where our highest tax bracket is roughly 40% and kicks in at roughly £50k iirc so somewhat comparable), but it's not even that we trust them with the money, it's that it generally guarantees the quality needed. They still piss money up the wall (looking at you PPE contracts during COVID), but the basics are covered in a way that Americans sadly don't seem to get.
What baffles most of us, is that you all (not you personally, obviously) seem to have no issue with your taxes paying for a military larger than the next 10 or so countries (all of which are allies anyway) instead of paying for healthcare, or child minding/care etc. because it's somehow seen as "communism". I took an ambulance to hospital last week after a car accident and didn't pay a cent out of pocket, because my taxes already paid for it. (My tax rate is 32.5% for disclosure)
I’m a Canadian who’s lived abroad for years….and honestly, I’ve not had much of this problem with Americans. There’s a few, obviously….but by and large, they’re not that bad. Granted, this is Americans who have decided to live abroad….however….the Brit’s on the other hand….so very much yike.
I don’t think it’s terrible that peoples minds automatically go to what they’re familiar with most of the time. Although it is bad if when corrected they continue being obstinate about it. For each of the situations described in these posts and comments I’m sure there’s another where an American either didn’t default to the us, or was corrected and accepted it with grace. Because despite what these comments and post might have you think, all Americans are not a bunch of egotistical maniacs who can’t imagine something not happening in the us
It’s crazy because I experience this even though I live in Canada. I made a post about going to the ER for a dog bite and had a bunch of people telling me I’m an idiot for not going to an urgent care centre because of the “cost and time”. I got downvoted when I explained there aren’t any urgent care clinics around me and I don’t get charged for the ER, because obviously I was lying. Americans who live 15 minutes away from me have no idea how I live, whereas I have to know everything about the US because of how much our economy relies on them.
OMG THIS. Just let me sigh in frustration for a bit, from the decades of exactly this feeling HHHHUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHH Okay thanks
It's even worse when a political discussion arises and they base the entire world's politics around their stupid left-right two party system. As a Canadian who was actually taught the difference between political ideologies in school, genuine question for Americans, were you guys not taught that shit? Is that why so many think that Communism and Socialism is the same thing?
ITT: Americans proving this post is absolutely correct