Well, it's important to understand that The British Empire was the dominant world power for a long time, and was replaced by the USA. Even with the US waning as a power to some extent, we're more powerful culturally than we've ever been before. As many people have pointed out the US has been doing a better job of conquering the world with things like "The Big Mac", movies, and TV shows, than anyone has ever acehived with military or economic means. The language referred to as "English" is actually evolving into "American" (all jokes aside) since we've been the one spreading it into a league of it's own. Just as English itself evolved in the hands of the Brits, it's evolving new slang and short hand from our use that they have nothing to do with. Given that the US influances the language globally due to the sheer magnitude of our cultural impact, it means we're changing the way the culture that developed the language uses it, rather than vice versa.Fbuh said:
I think a lot of it is also that the US is spreading globalization, we're in a position where everyone on the planet wants to be us, while at the same time resenting us for it. This is not entirely unexpected. One of the big reasons for all these national firewalls, and limitations on media imports that we're seeing all over the place is to try and reduce the influance of American culture and for nations to preserve their own. Basically, I think we're to the point where most people understand on some level that the entire planet needs to unify under one central goverment/authority, shared culture, and a universal language, but at the same time there is resentment to seeing another culture dominating to the point of having chance to do it. Everyone wants their culture to be the one that unifies the world, and their principles to dominate, but in the end there can only be one "winner" for something like that. It's a slow process, perhaps too slow to save humanity, but little things like the change of a language in it's parent culture are signs of it happening. The US has spread English to the four corners of the earth, and we're also the ones defining how it's spoken and used.
That's my thoughts at any rate.
It's similar to how when you look at a lot of international politics, there are nations, many supposedly allied with the USA, who look gleefully at the US slipping economically. These same nations however view the fact that the US still maintains massive military spending and technological development, and huge stockpiles of WMD, not to mention the development of "X Weapons" which tend to be absolutly frightening. "X weapons" are simply "unknown weapons", game changers out of context with how most people view the rest of technology. The US is infamous for showing off things like missle interception technology, drones, guidance systems, and other things that violate treaties (such as missle interception tech upsetting the Russians given the collapse of the USSR and the treaty dying), or cause the world to have to play "catch up" when we unveil how far we've come with something. Basically, for all the giant "Bill Clinton" security failures, nobody really knows what the US can do militarily except for our highest echelons, and simply put our morality and desire for "antiseptic wars" is the only thing holding us back. We for example have missles that are capable of penetrating into the lower infrastructure (sewers, catacombs)before exploding of a city like Baghdad and could literally cause it to fall in upon itself, other nations have similar things, but not quite on the same level. The thing is, we simply refuse to use the weapons we developed and erase cities and cause millions of deaths. Most nations that have similar tech aren't as good at is as we are.
The point is that a lot of the "lulz, US military gets into police actions and can't win wars" covers the simple fact that the world is scared of us. Our economic failures and so on lose a certain degree of weight when you consider the other options we technically have, but won't use. As a result, the laughing is oftentimes counterbalanced by requests/demands for the US to disarm, lower it's military stockpiles, and similar things. After all if the US collapses like a lot of people predict, we decided we don't like it, and decide "F@ck morality" we have the firepower to decimate the entire globe 10x over, and everyone knows
it. A country like North Korea is scary because they might develop massive technology, the US is scary because if we become as angry and desperate as North Korea, we already have the tech where we can fire a missle from Idaho and take out a major world leader on the other side of the world (the presician and range of our missles is part of what makes us so scary).
