part 353 whalers on the moon

[aphanon_meme]

We've been here over a year now! I can hardly believe it! Dreamwidth's been pretty good, I'd say, with almost no downtime to speak of and all that! Anyway... how is your spring going? Or I guess it's almost summer, isn't it? Hopefully it's been well! I've been catching up on work and new movies, all very exciting stuff, I'm sure.

Enjoy part 353!

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Comments

Re: Unpopular opinions

[romanon]

North Americans are weird as heckie. I don't mean it as an insult, I promise, I like weird people, it's just that, you hear so much stuff about, say, Japanese people being weird, or even Europeans, but North Americans to me are just...so much weirder.

Re: Unpopular opinions

[quandtuniverse]

Speaking as someone who is both North and South American.... North Americans are really weird.

Actually, I read a science journal a while back that showed something really cool. Because most psychological research is done in the United States, the USA social psychology results are considered "normal" and applied universally to other humans. But, this group of researchers expanded to research other countries and discovered that on a global scale, Americans are actually the outliers! This actually throws into question decades of research since it was assumed that USA results were good enough. They then concluded that they should use diverse international sample sizes from then on.

So every time you hear some sort of behavioural study and think "that's totally bullshit!" it's pretty likely the sample only accounted for Americans, and Americans are weird. Internationally speaking.

Re: Unpopular opinions

[(Anonymous)]

:/

Re: Unpopular opinions

[(Anonymous)]

Truuuuu

Re: Unpopular opinions

[romanon]

It's something I've come to notice only recently because I grew up around a lot of North American-imported stuff and I was too much into it to notice when I was younger, but, yeah.

That's actually very interesting! It makes...a surprising amount of sense.

Re: Unpopular opinions

[quandtuniverse]

Yeah, I was raised in a pretty American environment even though I grew up in Brazil, I had a lot of books and movies and my parents spoke English to me frequently. But it wasn't until I actually moved to the USA that I realized just how different the culture actually is. Even now, I tend to have more in common with my European/Asian/Latin@ friends, than I do with born-and-raised-American friends.

I'll try and look for that article again, it was really fascinating!

Re: Unpopular opinions

[(Anonymous)]

How are we weird?

Re: Unpopular opinions

[romanon]

...it's difficult to explain, that's why it took me forever to answer. It's also all very sparse personal observations and it's highly possible they're all wrong.

The first thing that stuck out to me was, you're all very self-referential, to the point that you seem to forget that the rest of the world exists, at times. Granted, everybody has their own in-jokes, but you expect everybody to know what you're talking about and it's kind of confusing at times. Doubly so for political discussions because your political categories are unlike anything else I've met.

You are very...evangelical. If an European meets somebody they disagree with, they go "meh, what a dick" and move on. Americans instead want to convert that person. This is especially obvious in religious and political discourse. Europeans rarely talk about religion, and rarely the conversation gets heated. It's considered a highly personal thing and proselitying to random people, whatever your idea, is frowned up. Americans instead seem always ready to start a flame war.

You also are much more emotional than what I thought you would be. You speak with an open heart, you overshare, you get angry at the drop of a hat (I do that a lot too, but I'm an outlier where I am), you tend to answer to rational argument (I'm against Law X because Y) with emotional ones (I'm pro Law X because IT WILL AFFECT ME PERSONALLY AND ITS RESULT WOULD MAKE ME UNHAPPY DO YOU WANT TO MAKE ME UNHAPPY DO YOU DO YOU) (I AM NOT SAYING YOU ARE STUPID OR INCAPABLE OF THINKING RATIONALLY. It's just something I've noticed you do a lot).

I realized those are all sorta kinda not entirely positive, which is stupid because I find most of the weirdness nice actually. Like, Americans are enthusiast. Europeans lost the ability to feel enthusiasm at some point in '900, Americans never did. You really feel like you can do things! If you go out there! You can change the world! You really can! Europeans...let's just say we don't. This is like something that always sticks out ot me too, and it's very uplifting.

There's more stuff, but it's very late where I live.

[(Anonymous)]

Aye and have so many unusual things and act like the rest of the world is weird for not having them

http://www.fascinatingpics.com/7-more-ways-why-america-is-the-biggest-weirdo-on-the-entire-planet-part-2/
http://www.fascinatingpics.com/8-ways-america-is-the-biggest-weirdo-on-the-entire-planet/

[(Anonymous)]

The second link has "number of cities larger than their capital" is it really that weird to have another city larger than the country's capital?

[(Anonymous)]

AMERICA IS SO WEIRD. IT HAS BIG CITIES!!

[(Anonymous)]

Normally countries' capitals are the ones with the largest amount of people.

/diff

[(Anonymous)]

It's unusual for the largest city in a country to not be the capital, but I wouldn't say it's particularly weird.

Other examples include Canada (Toronto largest, Ottawa capital), Australia (Sydney largest, Canberra capital), China (Shanghai largest, Beijing capital), Brazil (Sao Paulo largest, Brasilia capital), and Nigeria (Lagos largest, Abuja capital). There are plenty more, although they're definitely a minority.

Europe is pretty much all largest-city-is-capital though, so maybe from a European perspective it's weird (European exceptions include Liechtenstein and Malta).

Re: /diff

[quandtuniverse]

Brazil and the United States have in common that both their Capitals were planned cities. In Brazil's case, it moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro, and then to Brasília because they wanted the capital to be at the center of the country.

As a kid, this did lead me to believe that every country had their capital in the center, and then was very confused to discover D.C. was located close to the east coast, and that many countries have their capitals near water if possible. Of course that makes perfect sense to me now...

Re: /diff

[(Anonymous)]

Well to be honest at the time of D.C.'s conception, the United States consisted of just the east coast and was considered the "middle" between the southern states and the northern ones.

So I guess that would have counted as the center of the country?

(Urban planning in America is weird, mainly because it's mostly "build as you go, fix the mistakes later")

Re: /diff

[quandtuniverse]

That is true! I had forgotten about that. Although to be fair, I only learned about the American expansion when I was 14 or so. And I moved to D.C. when I was 12, so things were a little weird/confusing for a while.

Re: Unpopular opinions

[(Anonymous)]

hdu you're only allowed to call Japan weird around here

Re: Unpopular opinions

[(Anonymous)]

/holds up a mirror

Re: Unpopular opinions

[romanon]

Oh, I know Italians are plenty weird, lol.

+1

[(Anonymous)]

Americans are weird but in a cute way.

Re: Unpopular opinions

[(Anonymous)]

i figure everyone naturally thinks those from outside their country/culture are weird.

but i do think in america we tend to forget that we don't count for quite that much of the world population. i'm an immigrant and have lived in america most of my life, and one thing that i've noticed is that in america, there isn't quite as much awareness of other countries than other countries have of america (mind, not that the awareness of america is accurate facts about america, but rather that other countries seem more generally aware somewhere-ish of american cultural norms as seen in movies/tv/music/games from america).

Re: Unpopular opinions

[romanon]

Yeah, this is a big part of it.

A good thing about being born in Europe specifically is also that you're very aware your country isn't the only one in general from a very young age. My generation at least had the whole "unity in difference" thing really ingrained into our brain. We're used to the idea that we're not the default.