Like, that meme was astroturfed right? People in Europe don't talk like that or act like that.
And we also had foreigners from all around the world (Japanese, Korean, etc. etc.) come and be all Costco is amazing or other tidbits of pro-Americanism.
I dunno, something just felt off by it. There's clearly something going on and it doesn't feel completely natural.
It's fine to like America and be patriotic and all. But for it all to strike at the same time with extremely similar messaging? Even memes had more diverse concepts than what happened.
We are IMO in the age of AI boosted memes where people are trying to form large scale reality distortion fields.
The air conditioning, Costco, sports complexes. even things like a gun show, or a silly Texas parade, are very often what tourists *individually talk about when they visit the US for the first time.
[1] https://philippdubach.com/posts/us-europe-productivity-worki...
That being said, this is largely European cope. Europeans are falling into the toilet. But the Brits they're arguing with are British elites who spend most of their time online pretending to be American Britishly (which amounts to being rude while using US slang), and the Americans they are arguing with are dimwitted xenophobes in debt up to their eyeballs and just pretending to have money. American elites (i.e. people with assets who only work as a hobby) are also doing very, very well, but they don't care about arguing with Europeans online. They think of Europe as fancy and fashion, and avoid most direct contact with Europeans (except expats and when they're on vacation) in order not to ruin that image.
But I have to repeat that Europeans are absolutely delusional. The future is looking terrible for them, and their elites feel like their only hope is war with Russia. They feel like they can regulate and judge things that the world is accomplishing around and without them. They've been coddled (by US arms and political meddling) into an unearned sense of superiority over a generation or two that is leading them into disaster. They have beautiful infrastructure and a big healthy, educated population, and they're losing simply because they let themselves be ruled by venal morons and will believe the dumbest neoliberal fairy stories.
Instead of propping them up to create the image of an international consensus, a failing US has just decided to treat Europe as a resource to be drained. Its only interest is to keep Europe alienated from China, who would also use them just as a resource to be drained. Somehow, Europe has even lost Russia's energy supplies to China and India, and cultivated such hate in Russia that this relationship might be harder to repair than the US-Russia relationship, which is insane. Somehow, the US has been able to fob off its ongoing (virtually hot) war against Russia onto Europe, and is successfully pushing them to pay for it (like Trump used to say about the border wall and Mexico.)
I have to agree that it reflects on American insecurity. Americans feel like they're living in a failing state heading into civil war and they're all going to die. Then they look at Europe, and they see a state born from war that failed to come together at all, and is somehow getting worse. It makes them feel better about themselves for a second, until they see the price of hamburgers and get depressed again.
Twitter, as they say, is not real life. It's just a broken clock that might be right twice a day by happenstance.
Similarly, the alpha-beta-matrix-pills and adjacent nonsense was all over /b/ in the early 2010s.
gr8 b8 m8
How does the median plumber fair between them? The median factory worker? How much time off do most Europeans get compared to most Americans? Everyone likes to compare CEO pay or even software pay here, but those are a tiny fraction of the actual population and clearly the exception to the norm.
Anyone who thinks Europeans in general are poor and Americans in general are rich has got their head so deep in the dirt it is hard to imagine them ever pulling it out to look around.
Because of the K shape economy. Only the rich and maybe the very upper middle class is getting any benefit the current boom. The middle class is struggling and has been for decades. The poor ranks are growing and have even a harder time if that is possible.
>see AI slop image
>close tab
As a German, I find this very unfair. Most people in European countries are not delusional, but know very well how deep in the shit they and the countries in which they live are.
And, by the way: hardly any German person would tell how great things in Germany are. Many Germans are far too cynic to utter this kind of argument. These posts, in my experience, nearly always come from people from other countries.
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> Americans feel like they're living in a failing state heading into civil war and they're all going to die.
Except for "heading into civil war" and "we're all going to die", this is also how many Germans feel about their country.
In my feeling, the difference is rather that US-Americans are afraid to die because of this, while quite some Germans wouldn't really care if they all had to die in consideration of the mess everything is in.
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> Instead of propping them up to create the image of an international consensus, a failing US has just decided to treat Europe as a resource to be drained. Its only interest is to keep Europe alienated from China, who would also use them just as a resource to be drained.
This is exactly how a socially significant portion (though very far from the majority) of people in Germany feel about the USA and China.
asdfasgasdgasdg•1h ago
snowpid•1h ago
bigstrat2003•40m ago
It goes both ways. I can't tell you how many comments sections I've seen where someone goes out of his way to diss the US, even though that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. I agree that it's nasty behavior when Americans do it in the other direction too, I just wanted to point out that there's hate-slinging all around.
ifwinterco•56m ago
I agree Europe has real issues that Europeans should acknowledge and don't, but americans' quantity brains are funny - to americans if it can't be measured, it doesn't exist.
Really sad way to live, unfortunately it's infecting Europe and especially the UK as well
mns•54m ago
Besides all of this, I’d rather be poor in Europe than in the US.
stormking•22m ago