Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Unknown Target on June 25, 2010, 08:15:56 pm
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As I am traveling in the United Kingdom, I have realized the full extent of the US's influence on the world- as an American, isolated from the rest of the world, it is difficult to fathom how much we penetrate the every day lives of everyone else in the world, and honestly, we take it for granted. What are your thoughts on this?
Also, I am completely ****faced from drinking at pubs, so I may not remember this thread in the morning. I can only type with one eye closed because if I have both open my brain doesn't mix the two inputs; it ends up just viewing each eye temperately.
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Freedom Fries, Coca-Cola, The Simpsons and Baseball.
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You get quite philosophical when you're plastered. :p
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Stupidity.
PS: And obesity.
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hey now, we didn't force mcdonalds on anyone. they welcomed it with open arms.
i do, however, wholeheartedly apologize for reality TV.
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I can only type with one eye closed because if I have both open my brain doesn't mix the two inputs; it ends up just viewing each eye temperately.
You suddenly become sober with both eyes open?
I can see how that would be disorienting.
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You gotta watch how much you drink in the U.K.; I think their pints are 20 fluid oz.
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i do, however, wholeheartedly apologize for reality TV.
That's dutch. :p
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but we have american idol. there's just no excuse for that.
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It all started with Big Brother afaicr, and that was Dutch
edit: Just remembered that American Idol grew out of Pop Idol, which started in the UK I believe.
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i don't know which one was first, but they both need to die. Daughtry has the fastest selling rock album ever ONLY because of that show. it's not even a very good album.
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it started with the real world.
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Brits and Yanks share a lot of culture, both ways, depends on where you visit as to how much you see the influence from over the pond, but honestly, it's not that systemically important even for british culture.
It's simply that the american companies have rather a lot more money simply due to scale, and that gives them a fairly big advantage in a country where they are in an almost-domestic market.
It's not so much that America has permeated the UKs every day, but more that the two nations are extremely similar.
You will however NEVER see people calling a politician a nazi for backing/boosting the National Health Service.
Quite the opposite in fact.
We're also far less religious, thankfully.
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There are far to few conservatives over here to make me believe that the US has a big influence on us :P.
But anyway, we all know the US has a big influence on the wordl economics, bassicly because the are so big. However, the cultural influence is greatly overrated. I think one of the major fails in US's foreign policy is that they appear to think that all the stuf that works for them works for everybody. But then again, everyone appears to do so. I hear a lot of dutch people saying that the US should do things more like we (The dutch) do, but I am quite sure that would not work out either.
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Every country could do with looking at how both Sweden and The Netherlands run their nations. :P
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A myriad of movies.
You can't browse a DVD shelf without finding that the great majority of them are American.
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That's just economics again though really.
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One observation: When I went back to Singapore recently, most of the sexy lingerie ads had Caucasian models.
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That's what happens when you're on top, others want to emulate you to some degree or another.
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Well, I personally speak English because of the amount of American-made video-games and TV I used to watch.
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Guns?
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Guns?
No
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Rifle_AK-47.jpg)
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Actually the US is the top arms exporting country....... :nervous:
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....That's just legal arms, and mostly talking military stuff like fighters and radar systems and stuff.
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Aside from possibly the Colt Single Action Army what US made firearm comes even close to the cultural impact of the AK? I don't see any nations sporting the M-16 on their coat of arms.
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Winchester 30-30 and the tommy gun, and probably a few others. It's true the AK has had a bigger effect in recent times because it's ease of construction and reliability made it easy to clone in 3rd world countries, unlike the m16. Each time period has a gun with a major impact, like the tommy gun in the 20's and 30's. Sooner or later something will come to replace the AK.
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So....argument shot to pieces(hurhur), you hide in history from a century ago?
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Doesn't change the validity of my statement.
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Two things come to mind:
First of all, We're all living in Amerika (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yydlX7c8HbY)
And secondly: America, F*** Yeah1 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWS-FoXbjVI)
1- Warning: not safe for work or minors- language.
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The only reason your country exports so many death machines is because;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
you waste more than most of the rest of the world combined on your armed forces.
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i see this moving rather rapidly toward an america bashing thread.
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i see this moving rather rapidly toward an america bashing thread.
The Americans started it so i dont see much problem with that :D
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Yes well unfortunately we certainly have done our best to make it easy. :P
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I think it's easy to overestimate America's influence on other cultures when you're looking from the outside...I remember my first week in London, I was walking down the street and saw something like three KFC knockoffs on a single block. Had a definite WTF moment there, but over time I got the impression that people were well aware of America's influences (and those of consumer culture in general) and were not terribly concerned that it was going to destroy their way of life or something. Sure there's people who are like "We'll be overrun!" when anything seen as being in competition with something traditional gains any popularity, but there's always whiners like that in every country and somehow life goes on.
The only area I can think of where America exerts a truly dominant influence on the world is in music. For whatever reason (probably because it's awesome), America's original blend of African and European elements hit some sort of enormous global jackpot, to the point where really every type of music that has become huge over the past half century+ has been in some way derived from that lineage. It's not that there aren't traditionalist holdouts (various classical and folk musics, etc), but the American sound has been the wellspring for so long that it really permeates the fabric of what people think of as music. And Chuck Berry is still alive! :yes:
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metal discussion relocated (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=70113.0)
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i think the music influence thing is due in VERY large part to the fact that america is just a physically HUGE market for english music.