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There's a whole industry of "reassuring Americans that America is number one" self-help literature, immensely popular with upper-middle-class Americans, They're
by saithound 3y ago
There's a whole industry of "reassuring Americans that America is number one" self-help literature, immensely popular with upper-middle-class Americans, They're one of the groups who have lots of disposable income to spend on Substack subscriptions and coastal online newspapers.
The usual article in this genre goes as follows. Pick a topic that Americans are predisposed to feel embarrassed about, and start with a thesis contradicting it:
- USPS is actually the best postal system in the world (my personap favorite, the post that couldn't deliver to AUS/NZ mid-pandemic, even though freaking Serbian post managed to do it just fine)
- Amtrak works better than Japanese rail
- US healthcare actually bankrupts fewer families than UK healthcare,
- the US has higher-quality food than the rest of the world, etc.
Then, latch onto an aspect (the US is bigger than Germany, Japan is a lot denser, the US has more food diversity, the US has better survival outcomes) that's at best significantly different from the common sense meaning of the original controversial claim, at worst completely orthogonal to it. Finally, support this modified thesis with a bunch of cherry-picked evidence from dubious economics journals, while ignoring obvious counterexamples or statistical errors (e.g. that one is comparing rural France to inner SF on food diversity, or anything at all happening in Australia, or any accounting for GDP differences, the one comparable vendor having <2% market share etc.)
There you go, the template for your hip article that will surely get quoted in the next Twitter war. I hear ChatGPT is pretty good at generating them these days, so you don't even have to be creative or have amazing writing skills to get your own.
- andrewbutts 3y agoGreat observation. If you feed your examples into chatgpt and ask it for more essay topics like those, the result reads like a hilarious sarcastic roast of the US :D
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- GuardianCaveman 3y agoThis is literally anything for any place. There are surely articles in Japan by Japanese people that criticize a certain aspect of their culture and then reassuring contrarians that cherry pick things to tell people what they want to hear because it sells newspapers gets ratings etc. But yeah, jump on the F america bandwagon on hacker news and act like we're unique in these things. This is literally all humans.
- saithound 3y agoThe "Japan is number one" literature is presumably its own genre, with it's own unique tropes. I don't know (but I can guess: I can read Serbian and Hungarian, and I know that the jingo articles targeted to Serbians don't usually extoll the virtues of infrastructure, public services, etc. and have a rather different tone). And in any case ehat Japanese articles claim is unlikely to come up in an article on French vs US food, and doesn't provide context on the Twitter war in question. However, if you've read enough of a foreign analogue of this genre, to be able to list its common tropes, I encourage you to make a similar post under a relevant article. It'll help people consume it with the appropriate amount of salt.
- meowtimemania 3y agoOvergeneralizing a but here, but from my POV conservatives tend to consume literature about America being number 1 while liberals consume literature about America being the worst. The reality is somewhere in the middle.
- xtracto 3y agoNuance is a dead art these days. It's either I'm right and you are wrong. Its sad that discussion over the internet in general have devolved into this. And politics go this way as well . American food is OK. I can consider an in'n'out (which I had when I visited the USA) a fabulous meal for some scenario, and a 5 course Italian meal (which I had in Palermo) as well , for different reasons. Both are culture , just different culture. And both have good things. Societies would be happier if we re-learned to talk with nuance.
- ido 3y agoBut the actual article above is not at all like that? In fact it says the opposite (that the US isn't good at something).
- saithound 3y agoI know. This was written to provide context to the Twitter war mentioned in the article.
- keiferski 3y agoI have never seen anyone tout Amtrak or the USPS. What universe do you live in?