Incredible displays of racism, holy shit.
most American liberals don’t realize that they are white supremacists so there is gonna be a lot of denialism like this as their century of humiliation accelerates
My dad, a Mexican, a democrat, and a Trump death fantasizer:
“These damn Mexicans need to learn how to drive and speak English or they can get the hell out”
Like, huh? I really think they’re just mad that Trump gets to say the things they don’t, or at least without consequence.
The US might even soon have The Copium Wars.
The west has no emotional connection to China’s past or history. The only history the west knows is kung fu, a monkey series, some people know three kingdoms vaguely from dynasty warriors and then there’s the century of humiliation.
The largest part that they actually know is the century of humiliation. This is in large part due to british influence.
They know nothing else, so anything they see just feels hollow because there’s no context for any of it. It doesn’t feel real.
Contrast this with what they do know - european history - and they have a completely different feeling about all art and culture because they can contextualise it in their knowledge of that history. It feels right, it feels real, and it doesn’t feel fantasy, because it is something they understand.
Contrast this again with Japan and you can see how Japanese culture, religion and art resonates with people in the west because they can contextualise it better as a result of far more engagement with and understanding of Japan.
This “feeling” issue is just vibes created by familiarity, with the history and the culture.
No thats impossible. My perspective is neutral, and my emotions and sentimental attachments are the correct ones.
Definitely deploying this at work.
yes, except that most westerners know barely more about european history than they do about chinese history. they know a narrative they’ve been fed that is somehow about ancient greece, handwave, then the roman empire, handwave, then some medieval shit, then liberal democracy emerges.
Each European country knows more about the most recent 300-500 years of their own country compared to the longer history, which is essentially just connected to the history of the church. You missed Vikings though too they love that shit.
Example, here in the UK we know a fuckload about monarchs because that shit is forced down our throats. Particularly the Victorian era as it’s tied to support and pride for the British empire, while the rest is tied to england coming into existence as a united entity and foundational to what it means to be “English”. Without that knowledge there basically is no English identity and the English could go back to being 20 different groups. The midlands, the South, Cornish, Northumberland etc etc, these are all unique identities without the indoctrination that schools provide to forge the idea of “England”, they are still unique identities to this day and I could very much see a scenario where they split off again in the face of a rejection of English-ness under the right sequence of events and conditions.
Some of the same shit I imagine also plays out in each European country. I can’t say for sure as I’ve not really dived into how they teach their history and maintain that identity, I assume similar reasons for what they teach but different history of course.
Each individual European country knows a good chunk of its history along with how that history connects to the christian church. This ties together euro cultural identities.
i forgot the vikings because they’re not relevant to our myth here in hungary :) which ties in neatly with what you said about each country building its own little myth.
Hungary has kalandozások instead of vikings.
that and mongols
I completely agree and last week I made a post about this cognitive hole. Real vs hollow is exactly my subjective experience of it. Despite ofc “knowing” that it is wrong and ignorant. Simply being aware doesn’t solve it.
Having even the most cursory familiarity with greeks > romans > christians > protestants > british > americans makes learning anything in that timeline 100x easier than anything outside it. And vikings too. Anyone else ever wonder how many converts fascism was delivered from the multiple streaming TV shows about vikings?
You know I see all this stuff about how “representation” of different identities is important in media so people who have been historically under-represented can “see themselves”. And that may be; but I also think a diverse representation of identities/experiences/collectivities benefits everyone. Because we can “see each other”.
I heard there is research (but haven’t looked into it) that the TV show Will & Grace had a big impact on turning americans away from hating gay people so much, especially those who “didn’t know” any gay people. It provided a “humanizing” opportunity. Even though Will & Grace has lots of critiques from gay side of things, ultimately that was not the direct target audience, although there as indirect benefit.
All this fighting over “DEI” and whatever, it is because these people recognize, in a different way and with different judgements, that all these casual exposures add up over a lifetime.
You’ve got it backwards. People learn about a culture’s history after being interested by the culture itself. The reason why Chinese culture doesn’t resonate with the west is because it was never fully subjugated in the same way India or Japan was.
People don’t get a history lesson on Japan and then get into anime. They get into anime and then get history lessons on Japanese history. US schools aren’t teaching yanks shit about Japan beyond WWII. The reason the why so many yanks is because the Japanese have a lot of practice selling GIs manga.
Similar relationship with India. If you’re a Brit maybe you got a proper history lesson on India but as a Yank I got jack shit. Way less than on China. I still know less about Indian history than Chinese. Yet Indian culture is way less foreign because of how many indians speak English. I wouldn’t be surprised if a French or German had zero grounding when it comes to Indian culture.
If you’re a Brit maybe you got a proper history lesson on India
Only thing that covers some of this are RE classes.
some people know three kingdoms vaguely from dynasty warriors
HEY, some of us know it from Capcom’s 1989 smash hit JRPG Destiny of an Emperor for the NES!
…
…No?
“not a racist, btw”
It’s sounds like they are implying a specific element that the intended reader of the comment should know, but I can’t, for the life of me, figure out what they mean by that. Chinese culture, from my very limited understanding of it as a very westernized ABC, certainly isn’t lacking in any fundamental aspect that I could even conceive an ignorant and racist person believing. Surely, even the most chavanistic Europeans of centuries past could see the incredible culture of one of the world’s oldest civilizations. Is this person somehow even more ignorant than them? Incredible
Surely, even the most chavanistic Europeans of centuries past could see the incredible culture of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.
Europeans well into the 18th century looked up to China. Go read up what people like Voltaire said about Confucius. It’s really the 19th century when Europeans thought that China ain’t shit.
Surely, even the most chavanistic Europeans of centuries past could see the incredible culture of one of the world’s oldest civilizations. Is this person somehow even more ignorant than them? Incredible
I think you can be so chauvinistic as to do that but I think the answer for lindyman specifically isn’t even that, he’s just a dunce. Walked through china, saw chinese culture and he can recognize it as such but crucially it’s mired and has its groundworks in very different cultural axioms and preferences, which makes the end result feel like 20% off. Then you just have to be chauvinistic enough to go “well this doesn’t speak to me, default type person” and voila
I think they might be talking about Jesus/Christianity. A lot of western civilization enjoyers think anything that isn’t based in their religion is doomed to fail.
Freedom
Yeah, crumbling for 5000 years now.
They’re never gonna come up with 3 hours of good guys punching robots, y’all. They’re cooked.
We need Chinese fighter jets flying over US cities so it’ll feel more familiar to American culture
I’m not really worried about him.
I think there is a dimension missing from his brain.
You notice it when you read his post.
And without this dimension he will eventually crumble.
suffering under capitalism puts exquisite nuance into art you would never understand.
They just insist upon themselves, you know?
The incredible thing is that this is literally what America looks like. I think most people who haven’t been to America probably imagine this is kind of a joke, like 99% of America can’t possibly look like this. But it does. I could walk from my current position for around 5 minutes and take a picture that looks exactly like this.
Every time I see this image I think “I’ve been here” and it’s true! I’ve been to a dozen places that look exactly like this.
My favorite bit of Americana are the cell towers disguised as trees.
I’ve seen these things in the middle of areas like that photo. Like the residents of the town got wind of a cell tower going up and demanded it not “ruin the rural character” so they made it look like the shittiest tree imaginable.
tbh that’s probably the least offensive thing we do
Sure but we also put these all over wooded mountainous areas:
5g mesh network towers. I don’t personally care but I do find it deeply funny that Americans will get beet fucking red about getting a cell tower in their suburban hellscape because they think it still has “rural character” and then also put up a mat black Obelisk of Verizon every mile and a half down ancient mountains so they can get any internet at all.
that’s in a parking lot why isn’t it a street light lmao
Its actually on highway 36 near Estes Park in CO. This one is near a lot but their all up and down that high way.
Why do I need internet on a narrow, twisting, mountain road?
that thing somehow reminds me of the huge random daggers stuck in the ground in riven all over the place:
and also those stick-type hand grenades.
“Hello, fellow trees”
i’m a bit further from the overpass and there are too many trees there, but any time i have the misfortune of driving i see that picture, three strip malls, and a religious “school”.
also that copy of it looks way oversaturated. green road signs aren’t that neon
imagine being a starry eyed idealistic 12 year old, going to america (they’re so cool, they got stuff, mcdonalds comes from there, they won ww2) and seeing this.
and then coming home and seeing how the outskirts of your city become more and more like this as the years go.
It’s so depressing when one learns that our car-centric “culture” (and most US “culture”) was manufactured by ad agencies. It didn’t HAVE to be like this.
and people act like its extremism to treat people in advertizing like the little hitlers they are
Every time I see this photo, I remember it was taken a couple miles from where I grew up
We all grew up a few miles from a place that looks like this. Just replace the trees for barren plains in my case
Yeah, I get the whole point of the image is that you can see something that looks pretty much exactly like this everywhere you go, it’s just funny to be from the area that was selected as the ur-example. I got to grow up just down the road from the Platonic ideal of the highway-centric commercial hellscape.
Oh wow you mean to tell me “do something” guy has another incredibly myopic and detached take. Wild.
Something essential is missing
Is it product placement?
it’s whiteness
Unfortunately China has a lot of that. Most jarring thing is they have like town criers but for stores and they are just shouting into a megaphone about good deals with another 100 town criers next to them
Incredibly annoying. DPRK seems way calmer
I know that private influence is a crushing problem there, too, but I would honestly have expected them to ban that practice on the basis of it being a public nuisance/unproductive, race-to-the-bottom noise pollution.
China is the world capital of noise pollution…
That’s easier to determine for individual cities, but depending on the source it looks like for countries overall it’s probably India. Shanghai on its own is definitely up there though.
Shanghai’s pretty quiet. They banned car horns and there are so many electric cars and busses you don’t really get engine noise either.
SEA or India makes China feel tranquil imo.
Yeh I was gunna say something similar. Yes China has some street level noise but the traffic noise is significantly reduced. I stayed in a hotel on xinzha rd in shanghai amd despite it being next to a raised highway (南北高架路on a Saturday morning all I could hear was the bird call from the park across the street
I had no idea that cities could ban car horns, that’s amazing. Some busy cities are completely intolerable due to overuse of honking.
No idea how they enforce it but it works.
I’ve lived in four Chinese cities and everybody is noisy all the time, everywhere. It’s one of the worst things about living in China
even on random videos you get the vibe that the chinese are just loud people that like to talk. contrast this with the weird funereal vibes that japanese often give off.
i’ve always felt that the shouting thing should make chinese culture more approachable for westerners (maybe i’m just projecting and it’s just my family that was shouty), yet due to imperial shenangians, it’s japanese culture they’re more familiar with.
As a westerner living in Asia, I much prefer a Japanese funeral train over a Chinese one where everyone is playing phone games without headphones
But westerners don’t like Japanese culture. They like icons of Japanese culture. Actually living there and navigating social situations can be very difficult compared to China. Korea too… Neoconfucianism is disgusting to me. Chinese people are way more welcoming, helpful, and easy to be friends with. Just also noisy 😆
love watching a chinese reality show when the hosts need to sip a box of Famous Greek Yogurt while the Famous Greek Yogurt logo dances around in the bottom of the screen
cut to the green room where the performer is getting ready whilst extolling the virtues of Famous Greek Yogurt holding a mic that has Famous Greek Yogurt logo clipped onto it
chinese tv shows can be very cyberpunk sometimes
they need to send some people to the little caesar’s sign twirling school instead.
This is only really in the particularly touristy areas. Just walking around the nieghborhoods here you never encounter it.
Or markets, or the carts collecting recyclable appliances, or trucks backing up
There’s noisy things outside the tourist areas but yeh igwym
trucks backing up
倒车请注意
倒车请注意
倒车请注意
Its probably the most obnoxious example, of course they have western style advertising too (sometimes worse when a whole skyscraper has an LCD ad on it, thats basically only reserved for NYC in the west, but in China there are many skyscrapers like this) in most of the cities, ads should be destroyed
Of course China has a lot of good things going for it but I find these things specifically jarring and terrible
I live in Chengdu and don’t find it to be particularly heinous here, but I have heard it’s different in places like Shanghai, Beijing, or Guangzhou.
