#americentrism

[autisticautonomy]

If the world was a just and rational place there would be outrage that the Yankees planted their flag on Earth's moon. There would be outrage that the Americans seemingly claimed the fucking moon for themselves. That the moon which has held such significance across countries, across continents, across time- now has the American flag on it. Could you imagine if the Soviets got there? I mean we'd be (rightfully) pissed. But the USA gets to put their eyesore of a flag on a celestial object without objection. Why did we as a planet let them get away with that???

[hilacopter]

"I'm so scared WW3 is literally happening 😭😭😭🥀🥀🥀 I don't want to get bombed I don't want to get drafted-" does your house or immediate area have a bomb shelter? ever been woken up at 4AM by a missile alarm? no? then shut the fuck up.

[milkywayan]

it always gives me a small feeling of frustration when I see posts on here, casually assuming that everyone on this website is american

this ranges from responses to posts, law stuff, 'tips', cultural things etc

where 'depends on what state youre in' is the biggest degree of consideration

[furinadefontaine22]

i’m sorry to sound whiny but the next time an american person says the uk isn’t experiencing a heatwave and is actually just experiencing regular american weather i kill myself

[angelshizuka]

"Dhorks pulling the "we're from the (American) goverment" card while in Mexico is bad writing."

Or maybe that's the entire point, because Dhorks are supposed to represent the kind of Americans who think the entire world resolves around the USA and are so high up their own horse they think pulling that card works outside of the USA, too.

Like, you're delusional as hell if you dare claim Americans like that don't exist in real life, so how is it suddenly "bad writing" if characters like that are portrayed in fiction?

There's literally a term for it; Americentrism/US-centrism.

[singinginthecar]

the "america is the greatest country in the world" rhetoric needs to die because... how are people still believing that and unironically saying that? american exceptionalism is a myth. america has never been great. it's okay to have a healthy amount of pride for your country. most people in the world do. i'm not poking at that. but to say america is the "greatest"? that implies you think your country is better than every other country in the world. maybe interrogate why you think that? your country has a looooong history of perpetually standing on the necks of others. is that your definition of "great"? is that what makes your country better than everyone else's? and why exactly is that a source of pride for you?

[awwkie]

I have to admit, this isn't really my typical post. I'm just really frustrated and want to vent that frustration somewhere. I just hope someone from the US ends up seeing this and rethinks things.

I've started using Tiktok as a consequence of the new hate speech regulations on Meta platforms.

Today, I got this video on my FYP:

It's a video of an anti-fascism protest in Germany. Specifically, it's a protest against AfD, a German far-right party.

So far so good.

What really bothered me is what I saw in the comments:

These are all comments from people from the US (I checked their profiles before taking the screenshots). They constituted the majority of top comments under that video.

As a European, this is incredibly frustrating. Why do so many Americans think everything is about them? A quick Google search would have told them that the protest is against the German far-right, not president Trump. It's absurd to assume that a protest in a foreign country (that you know nothing about by the way!!) is about your elections. Anyone familiar with German politics would have known that the AfD has unfortunately gained a lot of support in the country. Protests like that have happened before, but the majority of people from the US care about it only when they think it's about them.

Another comment really bothered me:

I know it's an innocent comment. But the reason you are not seeing this on US platforms has nothing to do with censorship. The truth is, when do you *ever* see in-depth coverage of foreign politics on US platforms? Mainstream US news are not reporting this because this is about German politics, and the US as a whole does not care about what's going on over here in Europe.

If you're from the US, I encourage you to research Americentrism. A lot of USamericans live in a sort of bubble and fail to consider not everything exists in relation to their country. This leads to a lot of frustration from people from other nations like me.

English is used as an international language. For most of us it's the only way to interact with people from other countries. It's already hard to find content online that isn't made from a US perspective. But even when we do find it, it often gets co-opted by USamericans, even when the original post was not about them.

[evilvampire]

I always thought it was weird that Americans seem like a deeply uncurious people who are adverse to learning new things, but I remember I ordered a DNA test kit a couple of years ago from a US company and their instructional video made me realize “oh, American companies literally treat their userbase like idiots…. Got it.” It presented like it was made for a child, as if they didn’t expect me to understand what a gene is.

Everything is dumbed down for US audiences BY DESIGN. Authors from commonwealth countries have a very difficult time getting published with US firms unless they conform to US spelling because god forbid their poor yankee brains have to decipher the word “colour”. Canadian authors are constantly told that they have to set their stories in the US because US audiences won’t “relate” to us talking about our own experiences growing up in a country that’s literally right next to them, and then they read these localized stories, see they’re from a Canadian author, and have the takeaway that Canada’s basically the same as the US, which FURTHER justifies their expansionist propaganda campaign that’s only been ramping up against Canada in the last year or so.

Authors and filmmakers from other countries are often told to change their ending to make it “happy” for their US release (A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder and The Descent are two very famous examples of this). As if their audience didn’t pick up a mystery series and horror movie, respectively, like… they knew what they were getting into, I’d assume.

Americans are constantly being infantilized by their own corporations, like… fuck, man, is it any wonder the rest of the world stereotypes them as dumb? I firmly believe the onus is still on them to go out and educate themselves about the rest of the world, and expose themselves to something outside of their very loud, expansive, US bubble, but they’re rarely given an incentive to. Their capital pushes the rest of the world to cater to them, edit themselves into something palatable for them. I’m so fucking sick of it.