ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
2d ago
In my experience second generation immigrants don't pick up certain regional accents because they have strong negative connotations among elite circles e.g. Southern or Boston, but they are more likely to when people don't feel as strongly about them e.g. Chicago. New York is also full of people with strange half-regional and half-foreign accents.
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
The normalization of "partner" also extends to heterosexual couples now, at least among my peers, which I find rather irritating.
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
Minneapolis really had no reputation in my mind, I wouldn’t have imagined it was any woker than any other semi-large American city, and probably comparable to Oklahoma City or St. Louis or something.
Minnesota was settled by Scandinavians who brought along their particular political tendencies, which included a strong labor movement and a certain brand of pathological altruism (cf. Swedish immigration policies). I'd say Minneapolis is about as distant culturally from Oklahoma City as any two cities in America could possibly be, nor is St. Louis much like either of them.
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
The Iranian population is much more secular and pro-western than their neighbors, even those that are American allies on paper, and has the human capital needed to support a first world economy, so the fact that they have been languishing under an Islamist theocracy for decades instead of achieving their full potential is a tragedy of similar proportions to Eastern Europe being stuck behind the iron curtain during the Cold War.
This latest round of protests was also sparked by economic problems such as rampant inflation and Tehran running out of water, and not the sorts of purely cultural issues that some here would pattern-match to foreign interference, such as the 2022 protests over the hijab law. Democracy is not what most are asking for; many of the protest chants I've heard are some variation of "Bring back the Shah."
ResoluteRaven
20d ago
That would require a level of industrialization in Latin America that seems unlikely, barring direct American conquest and economic administration (and good luck with that).
ResoluteRaven
20d ago
And I think with a truly "worthy foe", most Americans would set aside political tribalism pretty quickly, and band together against that foe. The problem is, we haven't had anything close to a worthy foe since the Cold War.
Economically, the Chinese are far ahead of where the Soviets were relative to the US during the Cold War, and the last time there was a hot war they chased the Eighth Army halfway down the Korean peninsula while at a severe technological disadvantage, so they seem plenty worthy to me.
ResoluteRaven
20d ago
My impression is that in recent years the relative status of top American and Chinese universities has flipped in elite Chinese circles, such that someone who went to Harvard is seen as a slacker who ran away because they didn't do well enough on the Gaokao to make it to Tsinghua.
ResoluteRaven
22d ago
I was given three choices: novocaine, laughing gas, and general anesthesia. When I tell foreigners this they usually make some remark about Americans being a bunch of wimps who need to be knocked out to have their teeth pulled. I assume this is downstream of the more widespread overuse of painkillers by doctors at that time.
Europeans are more likely to say "America has no culture," while American liberals will specify "white people have no culture," but I've heard both IRL many times, though it was more common in the late 2010s.
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