Volan said:
Therumancer said:
Well, the thing to understand is that the US is the dominant world power, whether or not that will change remains to be seen, it has not happened yet. Right now US culture has done a really good job of starting to unify the world, it's been said we've have more success conquering the world with "The Big Mac", "Starbucks", and "Melrose Place" than anyone has ever acheived with military force. The world has this love/hate relationship with the US, wanting to be us, and being resentful because of it at the same time. this is one of the reasons why so many nations are interested in the whole "national firewall" thing... cultural preservation, due to fear of American ideas.
You are right....to a degree. But I won't get into the whole marxism, cultural industry, psuedo-individualism, colonization or culture-contact, or any other arguments that can prop up to your post here. We'd be at it forever, and in the end I don't mind America in the slightest. I just find it amusing that it's always the central location for world-wide disasters - even those that don't call for superior technology.
If being in New Zealand has taught me anything, it's that natural disasters are something that cannot be dominated - snow blizzards, Christchurch earthquake, etc.
Still, I meant my original post in a light-hearted way.
But thanks for your argument nonetheless.
Anytime, and your right I went a bit too far and we could argue about this forever.
Part of the point I was getting at though is not just about power and importance, but also perception and cultural knowlege and acceptance.
It's like this, what defines New Zealand to the world? Pretty much nothing. It's not that New Zealand doesn't have anything to recommend it, but your typical guy in say Sweden, Poland, Brazil, India, South Korea, or other nations all over the world probably knows nothing about New Zealand, it's people, culture, enviroment, or anything else. The kind of entertainment we're discussion, even when it comes to things like natural disasters,
requires a degree of connection to the people and location where things are happening. The global influance of the US and the spread of our culture means that pretty much everyone recognizes things like The White House, Capital Building, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, Empire State Building, Statue Of Liberty, Golden Gate Bridge, and similar things. Most people understand how New York City and the island of Manhatten are set up. The world
is so familiar with the US that they recognize, and understand the signifigance of such things, and the imagery of certain things in the US has an almost universal power. Pretty much everyone in the world is going to feel the negative impact of say The Statue Of Liberty getting demolished because whether people resent it or not, the USA really is that kind of a beacon/influance on the planet. Pretty much everyone can empathize with and understand America from one side of the globe to the other. Not so with most other nations. Sure a movie set in New Zealand could be seen as a sort of educational thing on some levels, but someone going to see a disaster movie or whatever isn't there to be educated about foreign cultures, they are there to be wowed and feel the emotional impact of mass destruction. Nothing is going to impact a person like seeing this happen to their own part of the world, BUT the US is the second best thing to that everywhere (and ideal in the biggest market, which is the US itself).
See, one of the reasons why people are critical about the US and it's alleged ignorance is that the entire world pretty much knows all about us, but in the US we generally focus on our own affairs and typically have not learned all that much about the other bajillion countries on the planet. Arguably we know more about them than other people in the world on average, but it's taken badly when say you run into a guy from another nation who knows pretty much everything about your nation, and follows your politics heavily (because they affect everyone) but you don't even know the capital of his country, style of goverment, or who
the highest ranking official(s) are. Hence the instance that Americans are morons, but at the same time, most people from outside the region in question would do worse than we do. I'd imagine your typical American probably knows more about Germany, Korea, or Venezuala (while admittedly fairly ignorant compared to the people in those regions) than say someone visiting from Quatar.
I mean yes, seeing a movie or game set in your home country is always nice, but at the same time if say someone decided to set a game full of major events in their home country chances are you'd be going "WTF". The guys from the producing nation would love it, but the rest of the world would be more or less ambigious or negative. The US in addition to everything else is very much the compromise country.
Now don't get me wrong, there are exceptions to anything. Speaking globally, you can get away with doing some things with London or Paris specifically because of the international recognition of Big Ben and The Eiffel Tower. People in those nations will sit down and say "well there is more than that here!" and rant about American movie makers, but in reality it's done because when the film goes international those are really the only things about these nations that the majority of people throughout the entire globe are going to recognize. One site is not much compared to the US and all the landmarks through New York (arguably the world's greatest harbour) and Washington DC, but it's pretty good when you consider nations that literally have nothing and thus more or less never get into movies unless they make them themselves (which then tend to also see very limited distribution due to a lack of general interest and identification).
Sorry, rambling on too seriously again, but I thought I'd clarify, and I'm arguably just repeting a lot of what I said before.
As far as dominating natural disasters... well, yes and no. The US is probably the best nation on the planet for that as well as military action, especially seeing as we go around cleaning up a lot of the world's problems when this kind of stuff happens. We're really critical of ourselves in the US when a disaster happens and how the reaction occurs, but if you look at things like Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans we pretty much handled that entire thing "in house" without needing foreign aid. We're critical of FEMA, but even it's "crappy response" with all the problems dealt with the disaster pretty efficiently. New Orleans isn't great, but it's snapped back better than pretty much anywhere else would, some places hit by things equiviolent to that are still more or less flattened a decade or so later even with our help. I think people get this, especially seeing as we're the ones who tend to show up to save the world's butts (even if they tend to forget it). A natural disaster that levels parts of the US and overwhelms our response abillity is that much more horrifying. You can't detach yourselves from it and go "well it wouldn't be that bad overall, because there are people far better equipped than we are". While it might not last forever, for the moment the US is the best overall when it comes to this kind of thing, and knowing that allows the power of a disaster to translate globally. If this would do what your seeing to the US, imagine what would happen to a nation witout that huge budget thrown into it's goverment services/military/national guard/technology base.
