Ryotknife said:
Ieyke said:
saintdane05 said:
Ieyke said:
Criticize Germany: YOU ARE STUPID ZOMG!
Criticize America: LOL SERVES DEM MORONS RIGHT!
Definitely learning the lessons of this thread...
I'm an American, dude. "DEM MORONS" are the people I live with every day.
I'm not being misinformed or stereotyping. That's just the facts of the world around me when I walk out my front door every day.
Davey Woo said:
Here in the UK we still have to deal with being called tea-drinking-crumpet-eaters. Tally Ho and all that.
That's not bad AT ALL, IMO.
Hell, I think that's actually something you can be proud of.
The entire "stiff upper lip" mindset (even if it doesn't apply to everyone) makes the Brits seem badass.
/facepalm
My god i hate it when people trip over their own rhetoric.
"stereotyping is bad! except for american stereotypes because those are true!"
derp de derp.
I NEVER said stereotypes are bad. I said the stereotype of Germans as Nazis is moronic because it's completely wrong.
Some stereotypes have legitimate reasons for existing.
For example, the stereotypes of Texans as people with a lot of guns, and a lot of ranchers/country folk has a lot of basis in reality.
A TON of people have guns. And some people have a TON of guns. Outside of the big cities, there's craptons of rural space, and it's filled with farmers, ranchers, cattle, crops, and miscellaneous other country folk.
Those stereotypes, as with all stereotypes, don't remotely apply to every Texan, but they're pretty reasonably grounded in reality as major cultural tendencies in Texas.
Plus, do people get offended by being complimented for ridiculous reasons? Not usually.
It's the inaccurate insulting stereotypes that are really the ones worth complaining about.
.
.
.
.
People stereotyping Americans as "fat, dumb and war-waging", or whatever, is only slightly annoying to me, because tons of us have none of those issues, BUT it also rings true, because those are three major issues America really DOES need to deal with.
We eat like morons. I don't just mean fast food. Even our regularly grocery store food is pretty messed up a lot of the time. When I came back from being in Germany for a month over the summer, I went to the grocery store....and I wandered back and forth through the place for the first time really considering how frequently we all eat various stuff, and how messed up that stuff is compared to the average stuff I'd eat in Germany. It actually GENUINELY had me a bit disgusted with our insane over-processed, over-modified, over-sized food and food habits.
Our public school system is COMPLETELY messed up. We have a LOT of dumb people. This is not at all helped by the fact that, FOR SOME REASON, whenever our government starts making budget cuts, educational funding is almost always one of the first things to take a hit...which means our Elementray/Middle/High Schools can't afford to buy all the proper materials they need for the students, teachers, and schools themselves....and teachers are horrifically underpaid....which means that a lot of times the intelligent folks, who would otherwise love to be teachers, very often seek some other far better paying form of employment, and their places in the educational system are instead taken by very barely (if at all) qualified folks who simply fancy themselves capable of teaching.
My mother is currently a English and German teacher in a public high school. Having first hand experience with the system and comparing notes with a couple of her friends who are high school teachers in other countries (Germany and...Sweden?), she can't fathom how ANYONE supposes that the current US system is supposed to work.
As for war-waging...yea, well, you all know about this crap. Do you realize that America's military budget over the last decade or so has been more than THE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED?
That's insane.
I mean REALLY, WHY?
.
.
.
So, yea...American stereotypes. They don't portray a lot of people accurately, so that's a little annoying, but on the whole it's really NOT an unreasonable assessment.
To me, that doesn't say "people should stop with that American stereotype". It says "They're kinda right. We should REALLY work to overcome this crap and, as completely as possible, invalidate that stereotype".
But maybe that's just me. I'd rather take valid criticism and try and use it to improve than waste my time getting all indignant that someone dare point it out.
