American hedonism closes its eyes to death, and has been
incapable of exorcising the destructive power of the moment
with a wisdom like that of the Epicureans of antiquity.

- Octavio Paz
Death is un-American, and an affront to every citizen's inalienable
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

- Arnold Toynbee
the_band_huge
the_band_huge
"As long as such self-serving hypocrisy
motivates America's response, Ukraine will
only sink further into needless bloodshed,
and that blood will be on America's head."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
the_band_huge
In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors,
since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors,
for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal
applies only upwards, not downwards.

― Bertrand Russell
Global Coke
Global Coke
"What those 'racists' are reflexively and rightly reacting
to is the soulless chill as the fire goes out beneath the
melting pot. Those who think America can thrive as a
'cultural mosaic' are worse than fools; they're Canadians."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
Global Coke
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe.
It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster,
in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe
have grown to appalling dimensions.

― Frantz Fanon
What the United States does best is understand itself.
What it does worst is understand others.

- Carlos Fuentes
Poor Mexico, so far from God
and so close to the United States.

- Porfirio Diaz
the_band_huge
the_band_huge
"Indeed, everything about the American southland was magical
and exotic to the young Canadian musicians, from the sights
and smells to the drawling manner of speech to, especially, the
central role that music played in people’s everyday lives."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
the_band_huge
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
- Sigmund Freud
America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.
- Auguste Bartholdi
chimerica
chimerica
"This is the tone of the China Century, a subtle
mix of Nazi/Soviet bravado and 'oriental'
cunning -- easily misunderstood, and
never
heard before, in a real enemy, by the West."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
chimerica
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
"And for the others who argued for English-only
patriotism, I note that there are more than
57 million Americans (about 20% of the nation)
whose first-language is not English...."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
predator-firing-missile4
predator-firing-missile4
"This is the behavior, and the fate, of paranoid
old-world tyrants like Hitler or Saddam, not liberal new-world democracies like America pretends to be."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
predator-firing-missile4
America is the only nation in history which
miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to
degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

- Georges Clemenceau
I found there a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce.
- Charles–Maurice Talleyrand
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle,
and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

- Edmund Burke
America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.
- Marshall McLuhan
"The removal of racist sports nicknames (and mascots) seems outrageously belated
-- why, exactly, has this civil rights cause
taken so long to gain momentum?"

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the
United States reactionaries use to scare people.
It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't.

- Mao Tse-tung
They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but
they kept only one; they promised to take our land, and they did.

- Red Cloud
In America sex is an obsession,
in other parts of the world it is a fact.

- Marlene Dietrich
I would rather have a nod from an American,
than a snuff-box from an emperor.

- Lord Byron
One day the United States discovered it was an empire.
But it didn’t know what an empire was.
It thought that an empire was merely the biggest of all corporations.

- Roberto Calasso
Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather
be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

- Alexis de Tocqueville
newtown
newtown
"No one, I thought, could watch those scenes, of young children slaughtered en masse, and so many parents grieving, without thinking that this, finally, would tip some kind of balance in the country."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
newtown
If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams
then you must still regard America today with the same naive
enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.

- Jean Baudrillard
I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.
- Samuel Johnson
America, thou half brother of the world;
With something good and bad of every land.

- Philip Bailey
"What can be more powerful than disinformation in the Information Age?"
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
- Sir Walter Besant
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by
posterity because he was the last to discover America.

- James Joyce
Now, from America, empty indifferent things
are pouring across, sham things, dummy life.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
If the United States is to recover fortitude and lucidity,
it must recover itself, and to recover itself it must
recover the "others"- the outcasts of the Western world.
- Octavio Paz
The youth of America is their oldest tradition.
It has been going on now for three hundred years.

- Oscar Wilde
"America really is, for most Americans, all things considered, a good place to be, and all they really want is for everyone to enjoy the same privilege and pleasure."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
When good Americans die they go to Paris;
when bad Americans die they go to America.

- Oscar Wilde
jobs drug dealer
jobs drug dealer
They're nothing more than traffickers; and as the smart traffickers'll tell you, you don't use the merchandise. They are just inoculating their kids with a tech-drug serum, to immunize them against the very merchandise that put the **** bowling alley in their basement.
jobs drug dealer
America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that
lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.

- Georg Friedrich Hegel
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room.
Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.

- Arnold Toynbee
Americans always try to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.
- Winston Churchill
The thing that impresses me most about Americans
is the way parents obey their children.

- Edward, Duke of Windsor
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering
what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

- John Maynard Keynes
Europe was created by history.
America was created by philosophy.

- Margaret Thatcher
America is God's crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of
Europe are melting and reforming!... The real American has not yet arrived.
He is only in the crucible, I tell you - he will be the fusion of all races.

- Israel Zangwill
American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those
who have seen America only in their dreams.

- Pico Iyer
America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
- Ringo Starr
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
It has never yet melted.

― D.H. Lawrence
I have two conflicting visions of America.
One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.

― Bono
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror
of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis,
the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.

― Roberto Bolaño

May 6, 2024

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Author Topic: "20 Weird Things About America That Americans Don`t Realize"


Lorna-
Stinson
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"20 Weird Things About America That Americans Don`t Realize"
on: April 16, 2014, 13:47

Many of these, particularly numbers 1, 2, and 16, struck me, an Englishwoman, as bizarre during a recent visit to New York State.

* The list comes from Tickld:
http://www.tickld.com/x/20-weird-things-about-america

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Andrew-
Frost
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Posts: 1
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Re: "20 Weird Things About America That Americans Dont Realize"
on: April 18, 2014, 11:50

#21. Every new acquaintance asking which church you attend. (This applies only to the MidWest, perhaps, where I spent a happy, but church-less year.)



Leo B
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Posts: 3
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Re: "20 Weird Things About America That Americans Don`t Realize"
on: April 22, 2014, 15:06

I will second the "Giant portion sizes."
In Texas I was served a steak that exceeded even my gigantic plate, along with two large potatoes of mutant dimensions and then, to finish the presentation, a whole loaf of bread as long as my forearm and twice as thick.
This nation knows how to consume!



Sebastijan-
Pogorevc
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Re: "20 Weird Things About America That Americans Don`t Realize"
on: May 27, 2014, 10:40

#1: Portion sizes
Indeed, food portions in Europe are usually smaller (although I've read a British journalist describing Central European portions as large once). This is true especially for fast food; you get smaller portions for the same money, so that in some countries McDonald's isn't even considered cheap! In combination with #6 (everything being designed around cars), this is surely one of the main reasons that Europeans are slimmer than Americans: lack of opportunity. Very few Europeans actually have an opportunity to just hop into a car, drive to a nearby store with a drive-through (and therefore not burn any calories with walking) and purchase large quantities of unhealthy food and drink for a reasonable price.
Recently, a couple of American students that visited our university (in Ljubljana, Slovenia) remarked that everybody is thin and that candy is strangely expensive (compared to the US). And I've read somewhere on the internet that some American parents often pacify their whining or unruly children with food (often candy). Of course, if candy is expensive, parents will think twice before doing that, and so the children won't develop a bad habit.

#2: Flags everywhere
It's true that Americans very likely love their country more than people elsewhere love theirs. But I think there's another factor at play here that also contributes to this difference. The fact is that in many countries around the world, and in almost all European countries (not counting pocket states) a flag does not just signify citizenship, it is also a symbol of an ethnic group. Likewise, European countries are generally understood to be ethnic nation states (or whichever term you prefer, the point is that the country in question is thought of as the homeland of a certain ethnic group; for example, the Czech Republic is understood to be a country of (belonging to) the Czechs, a more or less well defined ethnic group, and not of anyone else, even if they move there) while the US is understood to be a "proposition nation" (a nation that is not limited to any single ethnic group but is founded on some common principles or ideals, such as the Constitution).
One's citizenship in Europe (or in some other parts of the world, East and Southeast Asia spring to mind) is therefore more often than not strongly connected to one's ancestry and can be, as you can probably imagine, quite a volatile subject. And since blood ties are often stronger than ideals or ideologies, the US has always needed to encourage patriotism to unite their vastly diverse masses of people and keep them together in peace.
Whereas, to get back to the flag issue, the American flag signifies belief in certain ideas and pride in some common achievements, the flag of a European country signifies something far more deep-lying and exclusive. It is therefore considered bad taste by many Europeans to excessively display a national flag; to give you a comparison, it would be like a tall basketball player going around taunting short men about their height.
Long story short: it's not just because Americans are more proud or patriotic, it's also because their patriotism has a more uniting function and is therefore not considered controversial.ž

#16: Loud and friendly
The Americans on visit here were genuinely surprised when strangers in our city (pop. 272,000, with a fairly low population density) wouldn't talk to them. I think this plays well into the observations that Alexis de Tocqueville made about the high level of trust that Americans have towards their fellow citizens (even complete stranger). This was probably made possible by strong common morals and values, influenced by Protestantism. In some other parts of the world, people still don't trust anyone they're not related to, or are friends with, because they cannot be sure if they have good motives. (It's not so bad in Europe, but people still don't feel the need to be particularly friendly to strangers, or at least they don't feel the need to initiate any friendly contact with them.)



Mike-
Langston
Veteran Their American
Posts: 42
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Re: "20 Weird Things About America That Americans Don`t Realize"
on: June 2, 2014, 15:18

It's interesting to hear these observations from a European outsider, Sebastijan; thanks!
One of the things that always makes me laugh (as an American 'outsider') is that that those Americans who are most patriotic -- most likely to go on and on about America as the greatest country in the world -- are also the most likely to never have left the country (or even their own state). And when I've asked them what they are judging the country against, they typically invoke some sort of cinematic version of Russia or China (the actual conditions of which they know very little about). This is the weirdest part, for me, about American patriotism: it's almost pure fantasy, constructed against an 'Other' that can't be found in the real world.
To be clear: I do love many things about the United States, and I'm well aware that there are many many freedoms here that can't be enjoyed elsewhere. It's just that this enthusiasm should be balanced by a knowledge of what other countries are actually like, so that whatever judgments are made about one's nation are informed by a realistic sense of its strengths and weaknesses.



Ashley-
Wilson
Novice Their American
Posts: 5
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Re: "20 Weird Things About America That Americans Don`t Realize"
on: November 23, 2014, 22:42

Half of my family is from the US and honestly I find this post really untrue. 1) Portion sizes are only seen as being big because Americans are known as being the "obese" place. Not once have I ever gone to the states and said "oh wow, theres a lot on this plate" as opposed to Canada. 2) Flags are everywhere but most of them understand that. Whats wrong with being patriotic about where you're from? Maybe Canadians should be more loving of their home. 3) Canadians don't have tax included. 7) lack of quality? But yet, Canadians watch 99% of American television. 9) culture shock. Happens anywheres you go that involves a different culture, not just America. Also, i'm pretty sure they're not the only ones to use the statement "oh, really?" 15) Many fast food restaurants in Canada now have free refills for soft drinks, again, not just Americans. 18) Almost all Canadian banks use 'tap' for debit transactions. This consists of you just having to tap a card onto a machine, no pin.. nothing. I feel like Americans are being picked on for things that almost all other countries do as well. I mean, obviously language and cultures are going to be different but you have to expect that everywhere. Most of these don't just go for Americans. I think Americans should be cut some slack for the things listed here that don't really make much sense coming from a Canadian.



MitchellGu-
nn
Novice Their American
Posts: 5
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Re: "20 Weird Things About America That Americans Don`t Realize"
on: November 24, 2014, 15:45

Personally, I've always been a little bothered by the "flags everywhere" thing, as well as the extent to which other American symbols (e.g. the bald eagle) permeate throughout the culture. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being patriotic and loving one's country, but that much saturation in Americana seems to suggest a need to prove one's "Americanism."

Ashley-Wilson, I should note that, as a Canadian, I'm a little concerned by the implication that I'm not as "loving of [my] home" simply because I don't have a Canadian flag hanging prominently at my home, let alone a multitude of products adorned with maples leaves or beavers. I love Canada, but I don't feel like I need to loudly assert that fact to anyone who enters or even passes by my residence.



markcruz
Novice Their American
Posts: 5
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Re: "20 Weird Things About America That Americans Don`t Realize"
on: November 24, 2014, 16:10

This type of list looks like the fodder for Buzzfeed enthusiasts and (while humorous to some) seems to be mainly just pretty obvious (and unoriginal) generalizations about the United States. I am pretty sure that most Americans would probably be aware of the stereotypes presented in this list. The "Weird things" of this list aren't actually all that weird, rather, slightly passive aggressive jabs at the stereotypical patriotic, materialistic and all consuming "American." Also to the "flag concerns" above,^ I think that the flag is of much greater significance to American's and not "a need to prove ones 'Americanism.' America is a country founded upon rebellion, and the flag is essentially a symbol of their independence; it makes sense that it is a very visual symbol in the United States.



acormier2
Novice Their American
Posts: 5
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Re: "20 Weird Things About America That Americans Don`t Realize"
on: December 5, 2014, 11:29

I have to agree with Mitchell on this one. I've never been to America before, so all I know are what I see in the media and what my American friends tell me. I have a friend who lives in New York; she told me that there is an American flag in every single classroom in every single school, and that students who don't recite the Pledge of Allegiance get detention for it. To me, that seems absolutely ridiculous.

I'm all for patriotism. I love my country, and I'm glad that of all countries, I was born in Canada. But American patriotism is excessive to the point that it's obnoxious, at least for many people. Furthermore, I believe that patriotism should be voluntary, not forced. In Canada, we have the freedom to choose how we express love for our country, and that makes me respect Canada that much more.



jmlevesque
Novice Their American
Posts: 6
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Re: "20 Weird Things About America That Americans Don`t Realize"
on: December 6, 2014, 12:56

I'd agree with the argument that Mark made about this list containing some sweeping generalizations, which seem to make light of American culture, rather than celebrating its richness. (I think it's fine to go either way, but America is not as simple as a list of 20 habits). The very concept of something being "weird" is derived from an ignorance or unfamiliarity with a practice. While in some respect I think it should be dismissed as intending to be lighthearted and humorous, it also isn't much different in nature than the widespread and often harmful stereotypes of other countries which serve to homogenize an entire nation, undermining the complexity and richness of its population. As Mark mentioned, this list does also allude to Americans' overindulgence and materialism by positioning it against their marked patriotism.

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