How America Sees Other Cultures

Honestly, most of the world hates you guys.
We love the things you make, but we hate your nation and your people.
Americans have a reputation of being obnoxious, ignorant and intolerant - and the way your tourists act abroad really solidifies that in the eyes of others (that being said most tourists are fucking awful, people just single out Americans due to confirmation bias).
People still want to go to America because it's this huge iconic landmass we hear about in all of the media. We want to see New York, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Disneyland, etc. However, there's little sense of respect, just curiosity and novelty.

On a personal level, I've been to America a few times and know that it's not one big homogenous culture, but really more like 4 or 5 smaller ones depending on region and upbringing. It has its good and bad points like any other country.
However, the one thing that pisses me off the most is young Americans - late teens to early twenties. Your college system is a complete joke and is basically just an extension of high school. Nearly every American I've met in that age bracket has been ridiculously immature, and your ridiculous 21 year old drinking age just serves to fetishise it for young people so that when they finally can drink in public they're as obnoxious as they can be.
Again, this is just personal opinion. I'm Australian, and we're arguably just as bad, if not worse, when it comes to behaviour around foreigners.

Thats kind of fucking hypocritical, don't you think?

But don't you think there is some hope in that optimism? Looking at other cultures as being bright and energetic and seeing their ideology and way of life in a whole new way, isn't there something good that can come of that? I mean sure, its embaressing, but isn't it also a little flattering?

Take the worst stereotypes of hysterical and hypocritcal liberals and leftists, then add to that all the negative stereotypes about right wingers, rednecks, teabaggers, and filthy rich 1% rich people living in ivory towers far away from reality. Also you're all fat and stupid, keep starting retarded wars and screwing around in other people's backyards and still don't understand why people don't like you. And your food culture sucks and you can't drink for shit.

We will sit and think this while listening to American music, drinking Coca Cola and watching an American movie. Although, the prevalence of American music around the world is drastically overrated by Americans.

A setting based on how America views the world could be pretty fun though.

Also, Red Heat is based.

Speaking as a guy working nights in a 7Eleven in the part of town full of hotels. American tourists are actually in the nice end. In fact they're so nice I can remember the exact two that pissed me off. One guy looking at me like a retard while I was being polite only to tell me that he wasn't gonna tip me, in a country that doesn't tip and to a guy not even allowed to take tips. Apparently professional courtesy is alien to clappers. The other guy tried to steal a snickers, but he was just a dumb teenager so whatever.

Fucking Swedes make me so fucking irrationally angry though. I am Danish, so that's genetic.

>And your food culture sucks and you can't drink for shit.

This is literally the only thing I contest of this. American food culture is great when you leave the burger joints and Arbys behind and get into the down-home traditional cooking.

America is full of fucking amazing food, and it's varied as fuck, it's like every town or even part of town has it's own thing going on, but for some fucking reason so many of you seem to just stuff your face with shit. You're way to fond of pre processed food.

Fuck, you're making me wanna go visit again.

>You're way to fond of pre processed food.

This is basically for two reasons:

1) It's cheap
2) There's a lot of low-income folks here to whom cheap food is a godsend.

>You ever think that the way Americans, especially American children, see other peoples cultures, makes them seem more interesting than they really are?
I think that's true in general. The exaggerated way other cultures seem to see America is more entertaining to me than actual American culture.

>The exaggerated way other cultures seem to see America is more entertaining to me than actual American culture.
Fucking this. Holy hell you want some real entertainment listen to an Asian or a Eurofag try to explain American culture for their respective countrymen.

youtube.com/watch?v=Yz90LWzKsHo

>How do you think kids from other countries see america?

People will usually treat you like you'd expect it in casual contact, but in the long run, you'll learn all about their negative opinions about your country.

It's nothing personnell though. You're just going to serve as their stand-in for the folks who abduct people in airports, gas vietnamese children, kill the bees, shoot nonwhites or whatever else that particular nation's media can sell them as salt.

in my experience as a fellow australian, people seem to really like us as tourists
I legitimately had people in poland react coldly towards me for speaking english until they found out I was australian.

>Edward Said's Orientalism have a take on how the West (first world metropolis) sees the other half of the world veiled by his own ideologies put over the real deal.
Any argument invoking the word "ideology" to explain the American love of ninjas is surely straining the definition of the term to its breaking point. The coolness of ninjas transcends such earthly trifles.

>Looking at other cultures as being bright and energetic and seeing their ideology and way of life in a whole new way, isn't there something good that can come of that?
Well, that's the thing, isn't it? These visions we have of other cultures—and they of ours—as exotic and exciting and wonderful are all wrong. Other places are complex, shabby, boring, and terrible, in the same way that everywhere is complex, shabby, boring, and terrible; nowhere is actually cool enough to contain Mystic Chinamancers, or their local equivalents. (There are lots of people who'd say that reality is just as exciting and wonderful as fiction is, but I think they're probably lying to themselves; either that, or the only fiction they like is character-driven realistic literature.) There is undeniably a good case for chucking the exoticism and embracing dreary reality, insofar as accurately perceiving other people is a prerequisite to treating them fairly, but doing so involves acknowledging a relatively dull, dreary reality.

Maybe that's why I'm so delighted by mangled Americana? Why I enjoy it when people from somewhere else get us wildly wrong? I adore the things that arise from such misinterpretations.

It reminds of Mr. Smith here, who is clearly headed to an America far superior to the one I live in. Godspeed, Mr. Smith! May Nickelodeon welcome you with open arms!

But in other countries, people people can each shit that isn't overly processed.

Relevant
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome

Sometimes I wonder how the health situation would be in this country if processed food wasn't so cheap.

Speaking in sweeping generalities of tourists, from my own observations of living in a non-native english speaking country that gets a lot of tourists from all over:

Australian tourists are stupid, but delightfully stupid. They tend to be a curious lot at the very least and most willing to try "strange" and new things.

American tourists are stupid, more often than not frustratingly stupid. A lot of them lean more toward the Australian side of the spectrum but are far more adverse to the unfamiliar.

Brit tourists are the worst of the English speaking world. It's like they go out of their way to be rude assholes critical of anything and everything that is even slightly different from their own culture. It's amazing they bother to even leave their country given how much they despise everything that's unfamiliar to them and how loudly they make it known.
For all the stereotypes there are about bigots in America, I've never met anyone more bigoted than a british tourist.

Canadians are like Australians, but markedly less stupid. Good on you, Canada.

New Zealanders are just Australians who get mad when you call them Australians.

And the Irish are delightfully stupid as well, but for reasons different from Australians. And they own their stupidity, adding to their charm.

>Canadians are like Australians, but markedly less stupid. Good on you, Canada.

With one exception. Canadian tourists in Spain have a worse reputation than American ones.

When I was ten or so, my mom decided to actually learn how to cook, as in cooking something where she knew everything she put into it.
The difference isn't even funny. Even the gap between mac and cheese is Olympic swimming pool levels. As someone who eats a lot of processed foods as a matter of being a college student, my family's red sauce blows Ragu out of the fucking water. I can't stand Ragu any more because of how comparatively soupy it is- like someone poured some spices into Campbell and let it simmer a bit.

>between home mac and cheese and packaged mac and cheese
Fuck, need to go to bed.

Wrong board?

It's not about how cheap processed food is, it's about how poor many Americans are, and how you refuse to solve any of the issues keeping people economically oppressed because you have a bunch of old baby boomers who think anything that could possibly benefit someone else is akin to turning america communist still running the country.

Making processed food more expensive isn't going to help anyone, making it so they can afford real food will.

Yeah, I'd say American tourists have a 50/50 reputation - half being big tippers who are kind of earnest and to whom everything is quaint (a little annoying, but you know they mean well), the other half being obnoxious

But Brits generally make much worse tourists.
Though the being critical of everything is basically second nature to a Brit, so that's mostly not them being rude. Everything else is though.

That's only part of it. The other is scale--large country, larger number of people affected by every economic fuckup, more people who need cheap eats.

Though still, if shitty food wasn't the cheapest option, I still think you'd see benefit if you actually replaced it with something that was less nutritionally garbage. But then I guess that's the kind of thinking that leads to Soylent Green and Matrix slop.

>a bunch of old baby boomers who think anything that could possibly benefit someone else is akin to turning america communist
It's more that they're the ones directly benefiting from the economic oppression and keep it going by tricking everyone into thinking that any fixes will turn America communist.

Not OP but it doesn't really matter now does it? Discussion's pretty solid here as well.
You don't even need the other boards or something like that

This is rather true. As a yuro it's a 50/50 really. One part it's "America the big fat stupid loud obnoxious libtard redneck who shoot first and tell everyone to fuck off later, while at the same time crying over having guns in the first place"

That's just generalizing the negative views about you. tl;dr the people who see americans negatively see them as fucking retarded, and for the past 10 years at least: Also as a threat to the health of the whole fucking world.

Now then there's all the positive views as well, which pretty much boil down to the "not all yanks are fucking retarded" -argument which is pretty solid. It's just that americans are rarely seen as nice.

As for tourists? Good american tourists are the ones that tell you they're american if you ask them where they're from. The flag waving obnoxious cunts are already hated as a preset by the negative views on 'muricans (being a bunch of retarded loud obnoxious fucks)

>Though still, if shitty food wasn't the cheapest option, I still think you'd see benefit
No, you wouldn't. That's just not how things work, and there's way, WAY more to the issue than simply price.

>Would anybody even watch something like this nowadays?
I mean It's got Arnie in it so I'm sold
also who doesn't love the over the top theatrics of communist Russia
youtube.com/watch?v=fMCx7UcdVP4

>it's not one big homogenous culture, but really more like 4 or 5 smaller ones depending on region and upbringing
Oh it's far, far more than that. You can easily break American cultures down not only by State, but by COUNTY (the next administrative sub-division below State), and still find remarkable differences. Trust me, if you were in New York and started at Montauk Point in Long Island and traveled East to Nassau and Queens, then went north up through NYC, White Plains, then up to Albany, then back eastward towards Utica, Rochester, and Buffalo, then spun back around and go north-westward through the Adirondacks until you hit Champlain, you'd think you were in a completely different State every time you crossed a city line.

>No, you wouldn't

If people had better choices at that price point? You absolutely would. It's not the only issue, but it's a major part of it and theoretically one that could be addressed.

Good god, this.

Real food is cheap, you just have to avoid white people supermarkets. The issue for most poor Americans is time, because real food requires much more time to prep than just heating some canned beans/vegetables and cooking rice. Pretty much all the poor people I've talked to are working paycheck to paycheck on multiple jobs.

When you get charged $200 by a traffic camera posted in your neighborhood that wants you to make a double stop on a curbside red light right turn, then your hard-earned savings go straight down the drain. My ticket eventually got refunded 4 years later after the law was struck down as unconstitutional, but in those neighborhoods the overzealous cops will probably pull you over for some other bullshit like not making a full stop at a stopsign or driving 1 MPH over the 30 MPH speed limit (on a street that easily should be 40-45 MPH).

You really, really should read up on the poverty and processed food relationship.

Price is only a tiny piece of the larger issue, especially since when you actually do the math processed food is, in reality, ALREADY NOT CHEAPER THAN FRESH FOODS.

Convenience, perishability, and the illusion that processed food is in any way cheaper (when in reality it's not) created by supermarket marketing play a FAR larger factor than the price point.

Farmer's markets are the fucking shit, this is beyond contestation.

What matters is how much you pay at the register. For that, processed food does tend to be cheaper. Which is also PART OF convenience.

I'd rather america just stop existing, desu. Better than having them jerk off over our TV shows and then turn around and bash our culture and cuisine.

No, you're still wrong, even when you try redefining the already implied context of convenience.

>and cuisine.

Y'know, honestly? I don't think this happens that much with the exception of particularly unusual types of food that don't feature familiar ingredients. Most people here hold up foreign cuisines as something extra special. Leastways in my experience.

Think that poster is British. In which case British food is fine, but rather unremarkable

>No, you're still wrong

Then why do I always see the processed shit at the local stores costing a lot less than the stuff worth eating? I can only talk about the shit I see with my own eyes, senpai.

Maybe I should head out to the boonies and track down a country market or something.

People from other big countries have no issue understanding this. You could do the same thing in China or India. Hell, Beijing alone has wildly different subcultures within its 7 looping highways, and that's before you discover it's part of the Jingjinji supercluster (which has 9 cities, 8 of which are larger than LA and 4 larger than NYC).

>You could do the same thing in China

No matter how much the government wants you to forget anybody but Han live there...

Even Han Chinese have numerous regional subcultures, I would imagine.

>People from other big countries have no issue understanding this
People from other big countries have no issue understanding this about their own country, but I've never met someone from China or India that could comprehend this was also a thing in America.

They earnestly believe that their countries are rich and varied but America couldn't possibly be.

Fair.

Not the same user, but seriously go to an Asian/Latino supermarket for groceries. I can usually get green onions for 1/3~1/2 the price and they are much fresher and much less waxed. Farmers markets are also excellent alternatives. Standard white supermarkets are for retard consumers who can't be bothered to glance at the market for alternatives.

China "han" are way more diverse than people think, even after years of gomunism trying to destroy the culture (specially regional).

>Your college system is a complete joke and is basically just an extension of high school
This meme needs to fucking die. American colleges are consistently the best in the world. 8 of the top 10. And you need to keep going pretty far down the list before you find more than a handful that aren't American. This is why there are so many foreigners coming to our colleges but very few Americans going to foreign colleges. Because if you're American, unless you're going to one of the best universities in another country you're probably going to be better of going to a state school.

>Then why do I always see the processed shit at the local stores costing a lot less than the stuff worth eating?
Because you failed to do the math so you fell for the aforementioned marketing illusion that frozen meals are any cheaper oz for oz, ingredient for ingredient.

Compare a weeks worth of frozen meals cost to a week's worth of the same ingredients, in the same proportions.

American McDonalds recently got the Grand Mac, an upsized Big Mac with 1/3 a pound of beef. I am so jealous of the their delicious McDonalds restaurants with large, juicy burgers topped with their exclusive Big Mac sauce at a low low price.

Everyone acts this way, to some degree. Intellectually I may know that China isn't a homogeneous mass of same-faced Asian clones, but on a pratical level in my day to day life, I don't really need to know much about China beyond its general, basic cultural traits.

I've got a friend from Norway who mentioned once after a trip over here that one thing that weirded him out about America was how *new* a lot of the buildings in the cities were. How there was relatively few things that had a properly timeworn look.

Japan had the Grad Mac months prior to the American promotion, and even had the monstrosity known as the Giga Mac alongside it.

My local japdonalds even has the Mega Mac, which is a normal big mac but with four patties, as part of their regular menu.

Japanese McDonalds has America beat by a mile, every month is a new promotion of wildly different stuff that's actually GOOD. It's kind of amazing.

Jee-zus. Y'know, when I do eat fast food I've never actually cared for the multi-decker oversized burgers. Always preferred the regular ol' singles.

Han Chinese is pretty much equivalent to saying "white/European" in the US. There are very strong, engrained stereotypes of Northern Chinese vs Southern Chinese that actually carry a lot of truth behind them, yet both are considered Han Chinese. Honestly the designation is a misnomer; it literally means all people who claim to be descendants of the Han dynasty heritage. If you said the same thing about "Roman" then you can see how stupidly diverse that population could be.

It's usually because America is so much smaller in comparison. I've met plenty that thought otherwise, but then again you can say the same about Americans (many will think big countries elsewhere are homogenous, and many will think otherwise).

This is another bullshit meme. Their flag literally has stars to represent the 5 big ethnic groups despite the fact Han make up 95% of the population (though they do get the biggest star)

I am so sick of ignorant people trying to act like they are experts on other countries when they don't know shit about dick

>gigamac
Tell me more, oh blessed japanon.

NY style cities in the north and Texas style ranchs in the south

>This is another bullshit meme

Right, so how many languages are recognized in China as official besides Mandarin again?

Mandarin was designed to be a national language, though. It developed from the speech of the ruling classing of the Ming Dynasty.

And non-Mandarin speakers such as the Cantonese are still ethnically Han (some of them, anyway)

Non-American fast food chains tend to be really awesome. Pizza Hut in China is a $30-100 sit down restaurant with multiple courses and an informal dress code. KFC has a menu about x5 the size of the US one. McDonalds fucking delivers your food within 5 seconds of ordering it - you don't even get a chance to count your change before you get your food.

Apparently the British government is trying to trick us into believing that only English people live there because English is their only official language too.

The languages on the currency. Uighur, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Zhuang.

Yeah, but still, you've got a lot of other ethnic tongues in China that are kind of slowly losing native speakers.

And the British government is racist because all the (native) non English languages are losing speakers!

So you know how the Grand Mac is an upsized Big Mac?

Well upsize it again, by about the same percentage.

And don't just stop there, give it four beef patties IN ADDITION.

I ate one one day, it was a saturday, I decided to have it for lunch because the promotion was so limited that each McD's restaurant was actually limited to the number of Giga Mac burgers they could sell per day. Like not limited per person, no no, but limited in the number of Giga Macs they would sell, in total, per day. So I wanted to get there early to actually get one and so I could spend the rest of the day burning off the calories.

Now I've eaten bigger burgers in my lifetime. Huge monsters with a pound or more of beef on them before adding in toppings and the bun. But this was so heavy on my stomach that I honestly felt full for the rest of the day. I needed a nap after eating it, I was pouring with sweat that reeked of grease and special sauce by the time I had finished it. I legitimately didn't eat anything else until Sunday morning because I just felt that continually full.

It was amazing, user. Just absolutely magical.

>The languages on the currency. Uighur, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Zhuang.

None of those are counted as official though; they're just sort of symbols, like the stars on the PRC flag. Mandarin is pretty much it except for Hong Kong (Cantonese also official) and Macau (Cantonese and Portuguese also official)

Same happens all over the world. Regional languages and cultures die out in favor of dominant ones. Dozens if not hundreds of native languages have gone extinct in America in the last hundred years or so.

>Dozens if not hundreds of native languages have gone extinct in America in the last hundred years or so.

Yeah, and tu quoque aside, it's equally terrible that it's happening in China right now.

Holy shit, dude. Just admit you're wrong as refrain from acting like an expert on topics that you know nothing about in the future

English is also official in Hong Kong.

I'm not arguing whether its good or bad. Just how it is. Strong cultures live, weak cultures die. To attach values to fleeting things is silly

>if I cite a fallacy maybe I won't look like a total fucking moron

gov.cn/english/laws/2005-09/19/content_64906.htm

If you want to see some old as fuck buildings head to a fort pr the country side
I have to say, its interestong seeing how other countries feel about america
I like it better when its not some guy's angerly waving their dicks around because their country got invaded that one time

Except that you see in some country counter reaction from the regions that want to conserve the particularity.
Don't know if it really works among the youngs though.

>you did a bad thing, therefore you can't comment on bad things other people do because...well you just can't

Well, if that's what you believe. It just bugs me. Bugs me about America, bugs me about China.

Im not sure if i should be disgusted or jealous

There are plenty of old Native American elders who want to maintain their indigenous languages alongside English, but young people often aren't interested.

Which is kind of my point. If your own children aren't even interested in your language or culture, hiw worthwhile can it really be?

Both. Both is perfectly acceptable.

They're officially supported where applicable (in their respective regions and on official documentation). Of course Mandarin is the main, official language, largely because the capitol was moved to Beijing/Yanjing a long time ago. That's the whole point behind Chinese standardization - the capitol/center of power calls the shots. It's also why Lu cuisine became so dominant.

Did you even read it? Because if you'd even bothered to read the first two sections you would have noticed that they a) acknowledge other nations of people inside of China and b) acknowledge that the reason for this is to standardize a specific type of Chinese language and even a specific dialect of Mandarin for ease of communication

>Well, if that's what you believe. It just bugs me. Bugs me about America, bugs me about China.

Then go out, and study / help conserve those languages.

Oh, it doesn't bug you enough? Well, it didn't bug those whose languages they originally were either. So they stopped using it.

>They're officially supported where applicable (in their respective regions and on official documentation).

Been moves recently to phase them out in favor of Mandarin, though. Haven't been especially successful.

I think most state-funded education centers also have to do all their teaching in Mandarin, too?

That's not what anyone said. They were just pointing out that it's happened before all over the place and it's not a big deal.

>Then go out, and study / help conserve those languages.

I do, honestly, I love linguistics in general.

Fair I suppose, I'm just really used to a lot of whataboutism when it comes to pointing out flaws in the PRC.

>for ease of communication

ahahahahahahaha

Okay let me address this by pointing you to Chinese clothing through the ages. Unlike isolated cultures that weren't influential, Chinese culture was always in flux. It was the trendsetter. And with that, everyone understood that as trends are, they come and go. Sure your thing may be alive and well for the next 400 years, but there's absolutely no guarantee that it will hold out for eternity. In fact, it would be absurd to assume that any given cultural artifact would last. That's why "Chinese clothing" is such a vacuous statement - no one knows what you're actually talking about, since everything has a distinct lifespan. The same thing holds true for languages and cultures within China.

Middle Chinese is not intelligible today. Ancient Chinese wasn't even a tonal language. Yet no one is crying over these because they weren't worth preserving. The only thing that really matters is the written language, because we wanted to record shit so that we could be remembered. And so far it's worked out quite nicely, even though the bone script was certainly pronounced without tones.

If it survives, it's worthwhile. If it doesn't, then it's just a fad, a trend that's meant to die out.

>Maybe if I ignore his point and post ahahahaha then it will look like I'm not some belligerent little shit who pretends to be an expert on China and got called out on the fact that I'm dumb as shit

And I know that you're going to make some snide comment about how Mandarin is a pretty difficult language to communicate with even for natives. But it's obviously easier for two people who speak the Beijing dialect of Mandarin to communicate than for two people who speak two totally different languages