[00000066]

[rnismatch]

my camel straight up told me "man i am not carrying another fucking straw" like wtf asshole its just one straw whats your fucking issue

[holedyke]

obsessed with this pic from the wiki for kneading (cats)...eternal sweetness....

[charl0ttan]

smoking the shit that turned the clock wise

[joshpeck]

just truly bonkers how much i love lying down..........like being horizontal? unparalleled

[comixextra]

[martiaries]

leslie in the making of farewell, my concubine

[pjharvey]

im american and i knew that like in kindergarten so i think some of you are just stupid sorry

[decadent-hag]

"US curriculums don't talk about-" ok? And? Are you guys not absorbing literally any information from the outside world? Tv, movies, books, people talking around you? Hello????

[athena-cat-wizard-official]

I'm sorry do people need to be taught that other countries have metropolitan cities in school or is that information you can kinda infer from like. existing in real life

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Absurd that people will just say shit like this with their whole chest. If I had somehow gotten through life to age 21 believing that my country had cities but my silly primitive sepia-toned neighbours didn't then when contrary information came up I'd keep my mouth shut and head right to wikipedia. I'd take that misconception to the fucking grave.

[darkenedyeastextract]

For USAmericans who care to listen; the issue here is not that you were never taught or exposed to facts about the world but rather that ignorance is used as a shield for criticism. This is considered a dick move as you're basically saying you know you're ignorant, you're saying you don't want to learn.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

If you're older than fifteen and not currently trapped in or recently escaped from a very overbearing cult then "I wasn't taught that at school" isn't an excuse for beliefs that reveal that you fundamentally don't think of other places as real or important. "It wouldn't occur to me to put 'USA' on my address for international shipping because I just expect everyone in other countries to know where my state is even though I don't know theirs" "I just assumed that other countries on my continent wouldn't have cities for some reason" "naturally I just assume that having states is a US thing and other countries either don't have them or they don't mean anything, other places don't have regional differences like we do, we're so varied and everywhere else is a Country Of Hats" THIS IS A YOU PROBLEM. We all have shitty education systems, yours isn't special. We all have racist governments and nationalist propoganda machines, yours isn't special. Your American exceptionalism isn't suddenly cute and humble if you try to make it about your country being extra bad instead of extra good. You just learned you made a stupid assumption due to inherent racist or nationalist or whatever beliefs? Now you have better information. Maybe think QUIETLY TO YOURSELF about what other dumb assumptions you have because of that and spend some time on wikipedia or watching foreign movies or something instead of crying to the internet that it's your fourth grade teacher's fault for not making you memorise a list of foreign cities.

We all believe dumb shit and don't know anything. You think I know anything about your states? I don't. When people from non-English-speaking countries started buying my books online I couldn't understand the address formats to post them; I had to learn. I don't automatically know which countries in the world are larger than mine, I look up the info if I need it. Sometimes I say make a bad assumption and dumb shit and people are like "Derin what you said is wrong actually" and tell me otherwise and then I learn that. This is not an issue of having information. Everyone can be wrong about stuff, but your "uphill in the snow both ways" ranting about how nobody should expect better from you because Your Uniquely Bad Culture And Schooling is at fault for every problem is getting old.

[thedragonrabbit]

Y'all don't seem to understand that, for a lot of Americans, the first time they experience truly global thinking is University. That's why Universities are so dangerous to certain political factions. It's not rocket science, but education is IMPORTANT and not all educations are created the same. I would encourage you to try to understand that an alarming % of the USA is illiterate or has a very low level of education. That's not necessarily their fault. Be kind. Understand that the world SUCKS and some people need a little help seeing that the world is this huge, complicated, interconnected machine that runs BETTER with kindness.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

What Americans leaving comments like this think they sound like:

What they actually sound like:

[buttonsgoblin]

It is true that, since this is such a widespread phenomenon among USAmericans, there has to be some non-individual factor that causes it. But that isn’t the education system not teaching that other countries have real people in them, it’s the degree to which American exceptionalism is ingrained in US culture— and I suspect that “progressive” USAmericans often can’t recognize that this isn’t just an education system problem because they don’t want to admit that they could have actual deeply rooted biases, and would rather just imagine that this isn’t all a simple educational blind spot. If that’s all it was, then you would just look it up and move on.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

You're not wrong but think more than that the answer is a little bit simpler: Americans, as citizens of the world's foremost cultural and economic hegemon, have no material incentive to learn about the rest of the world. They simply don't *need* to. Everywhere else in the world you kinda need to have a baseline level of knowledge about the USA and other first-world countries, but in the USA you don't need to have a baseline level of knowledge about anywhere else in the world, so most people never learn it.

Which honestly by itself would be fine with me, can't blame them for responding to the material incentives present in their society.

But what I *can* and *do* blame them for on a cultural level is that, when confronted with this fact, the vast majority of americans construct this weird narrative wherein lacking that baseline level of knowledge about the world is a sign of them being uniquely disadvantaged (worse educated, more propagandized, more overworked and underpaid, more unable to travel, more affected my a culture that discourages learning and intellectual curiosity) compared to the rest of the world, instead of facing the reality that it's a sign of them being uniquely privileged in the sense that they can get through their entire life without *needing* to know any of this stuff.

[localcryptideli]

Okay I am going to be mean for a second.

"But you see! America is so illiterate! We cannot help ourselves, we are just illiterate, it's a huge issue! You would never understand!"

Oh, cry me a fucking river

Straight for Wikipedia: World map of countries shaded according to the literacy rate for all people aged 15 and over.

Please note where the US is on the list.

And now look at the rest of the world, where people somehow don't react to being corrected online by claiming that the reason they never assumed other countries have cities is because they have such huge rates of illiteracy that the rest of the world could never understand their struggle.

My grandma has only four years of primary school and SOMEHOW she knows other countries have cities. It's nearly as if formal education is not the only possible source of information.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

A symptom of this I often see is that a great many Americans also feel the need to highlight to the entire world around them when something they encounter is Other, or outside of their wheelhouse, and this applies even to the most mundane of things. I have two examples of this:

First, back in 2020, a lost walrus visited the Welsh town of Tenby for many weeks and menaced its lifeboats by sleeping on the slipway. I wrote a lengthy post about this, and included the fact that the good folks of West Wales named the walrus Wally, after the children's book franchise Where's Wally.

I was inundated with Americans reacting with everything from astonishment to derision that the character is not called Waldo outside of America. It was constant. Everything from "Wait you guys call him Wally??? Not Waldo???" all the way to "Are you guys fucking stupid his name is Waldo omg"

Which is very interesting, because Where's Wally is a British franchise. He was called 'Wally' first. His name was translated into over 30 other languages, including Charlie and Jonas, depending on region. Nonetheless, I did not get one single solitary note about the name from anyone else; it was exclusively Americans, unable to keep their amazement to themselves, unable to not highlight and point out that SOMETHING IS DIFFERENT FROM US.

Second, I once wrote a post in which I, a speaker of British English, used the word 'gaol' - the BE spelling of 'jail'. Again, I was flooded with comments, asks, messages, etc from Americans who simply could not fathom why I had done so. Four of them very literally sent me asks that asked why I had done it (I mean this literally - "Why did you spell jail like that?" was word for word one of the asks), so unable were they to work out on their own that spellings differ between dialects. I responded to one, saying that I was baffled by it, and suggesting that maybe the polite thing would be to google these sorts of things for yourself rather than requesting to have your hand held through the process of learning that other places have different words and spellings than you're used to. I said I did understand, but that this was something I myself fetched up against all the time with American media, and had since I was a child - but I simply used context clues to work out meaning, or google when I couldn't, because I get that American English is a different language.

And then two things happened: the first was that a non-trivial number of Americans lost their entire shit at the very suggestion that there was anything at all rude about this (again, I really don't know what answer they wanted to that beyond "Because that's how it's spelled in my language", information readily available with a single google search), and the second was that I was then inundated with non-Americans sharing stories of how they love writing fanfic but they had to start doing it in American English because when they used their own, they would get flooded with comments from Americans trying to 'correct' them, and it just wasn't worth the hassle.

And it's ultimately a 'dominant culture' sickness, I think. When everything is constantly catering to your understandings and cultural expectations, anything outside of it feels Other, and Must Be Commented Upon. I'm Welsh, and I find absolutely any mention of anything Welsh around most English people gets the same reaction; they absolutely have to comment on the Thing They Think Is Weird. Just last week I was discussing a fieldtrip for my students with an English colleague of mine, and I said I was taking them to the Bannau Brycheiniog. He didn't interrupt, to his credit; but he got the stupid grin that I knew meant he was going to comment. He waited until I finished asking for his risk assessment input, and then rather than answering, his first response was "The Bah Bah Bluh Bluh?"

If I'd said an Anglicised or English name, he'd have just continued the conversation. But he didn't recognise the name Bannau Brycheiniog. So We Must All Flag Up That It's Weird.

And that's dialled up to 11 for a great many Americans.

(Though not all, by a long shot. I do want to stress that. In both examples I've given, I had far more Americans who agreed with me than not. But it is a common behaviour, unfortunately.)

[anthropologist-on-the-loose]

My unnecessary 2 or more cents on an already long post:

It is also wild how the way people learn this knowledge affects the way they respond. If I, as a US American, tell someone here, "In [other country/culture] they have [basic element of modern society, perhaps in a slightly different form]," the response is usually along the lines of, "Interesting. That makes sense, I just never thought about it before."

But if they learn about something through context clues without it prefaced with, "Fun fact!" that's when they react with shock and the need to confirm that yes, the world is in fact different than they assumed.

I think it happens less in person than online, because on some level people realize it makes them look rude and stupid to make their own ignorance the focus of the conversation.

Also, education does not necessarily equate worldliness, as evidenced by my coworker who graduated with a 4 year degree from the same university as me. I know high school dropouts who are more aware of the wider world outside the US than he is.

(If you say you're aware our education system and cultural isolation is really that bad, then why are you so shocked and defensive when you're told that what you know is wrong?)

[chrisstopherle]

took the train to la the other day

[scentedpedalsworld]

Sim ad

[hyyhhope]

cr. namuspromised

[warmclimate]

[brushie-photo]

Cinestill 50D

[victusinveritas]

“On this day 1949 - The 26 county Irish state officially became the Republic of Ireland and also formally left the British Commonwealth (Empire). The photo shows crowds celebrating on O'Connell St.” Credit: Nial Smiley Oman.

[firstfullmoon]

Etel Adnan, from “Beirut 1982,” in We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon

[sailermoon]

I love days where I feel like this image

[mumintroll]

u survive literally every single event in your life & still every time a new event happens you feel like this is the event that will kill you and that you will never move on from but actually you will continue to survive like you always have bc u have a 100% win rate of surviving events. btw

[0rb-it-deactivated20231206]

‘Obscure Landscapes’ (Origami paper, National Geographic and Ink) by Heidi Prescott, 2015