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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_American_(pejorative) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_American_(pejorative) Whenever I see this kinda stuff, I can't help

by werber 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_American_(pejorative) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_American_(pejorative) Whenever I see this kinda stuff, I can't help but think of the "Ugly American" trope and how it seems like it's an insanely (and desperate to be) visible minority of the whole world now

smacktoward 7y ago
Neal Stephenson saw this coming nearly 20 years ago, in his essay In the Beginning... Was the Command Line (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_...) From the section titled “The Interface Culture”: We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence. A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people’s minds. Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando’s civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while. To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were.
- jnbiche 7y ago
  > To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. Interesting that he wrote this prior to 9/11 (but then again, after the original WTC attack, and the African Embassy attacks).
- Arn_Thor 7y ago
  > Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Uh, certainly also maybe perhaps because written words were the only medium at the time? I imagine video and audio recordings will be just as important for future historians as writings have been to our time's historians
fortran77 7y ago
For photography abuse, I don't see Americans singled out by anyone--not even the author at Petapixel--as being better or worse than any other group of people.
- werber 7y ago
  No, I was just saying the behavior is typified by that stereotype. The trope is American in name but the practice now is everywhere

by werber 7y ago

smacktoward 7y ago

Neal Stephenson saw this coming nearly 20 years ago, in his essay In the Beginning... Was the Command Line (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_...) From the section titled “The Interface Culture”: We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence. A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people’s minds. Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando’s civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while. To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were.

jnbiche 7y ago
> To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. Interesting that he wrote this prior to 9/11 (but then again, after the original WTC attack, and the African Embassy attacks).
Arn_Thor 7y ago
> Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Uh, certainly also maybe perhaps because written words were the only medium at the time? I imagine video and audio recordings will be just as important for future historians as writings have been to our time's historians

fortran77 7y ago

For photography abuse, I don't see Americans singled out by anyone--not even the author at Petapixel--as being better or worse than any other group of people.

werber 7y ago
No, I was just saying the behavior is typified by that stereotype. The trope is American in name but the practice now is everywhere