What's weirdest thing about American culture?
What's weirdest thing about American culture?
199 comments
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The apparent obsession with money. Some people claim to be religious but it's clear the Almighty Dollar is their God. I know we make jokes about needing a "profit motive", but there is a grounding in reality. It's truly bizarre, from an outside perspective, just what lengths and depths people will sink to in order to increase profit. I'm not saying this is an American Only thing, but it's VERY apparent in the USA just how far people will go.
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I stopped talking politics with my FIL when I realized money was his singular driving force. He really believes, and IDK where he got this, that capitalism is itself a perfect system, and that any regulation on it breaks the system. Basically laissez faire libertarianism, wrapped in a flag and wearing a cross. Considering it's a well understood concept, in the rest of the world (and US history) that capitalism requires regulation to work safely, it's maddening to argue anything when we can't agree on basics.
All people with money = inherently good. All brown people = inherently bad. This is the driving socioeconomic philosophy among conservatives.
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I started listening to AM radio and Fox News (their stream) to understand them. These people arent even the worst strain of propaganda consumer. But they get it from one of the two schools of austrian economics.
But even morally bankrupt people still believe in the truth. Like no matter how capitalist someone is, the Epstein connection to Trump is not going away. The money itself is not proof that someone doesn't diddle children
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Milton Friedman is where he got it and it's pretty common piece of propaganda pushed by wealthy interests.
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Flags. Americans are obsessed with the American flag.
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Mine is that every 20 years or so, America picks a country or region to decimate, colonize, pillage and take over. They treat the people in that country like refuse. Then 20 years later they move on to the next country. Throughout all this they moralize to you and police the world and try to tell other countries to stop their wars, while they enjoy the benefits of their own invasions.
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We have a quota in america for weapons manufacturing. If noone needs weapons then make a new conflict. Its not super complicated but it is absurdly morally bankrupt.
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That we dont want to be trailer trash, but a good 95 percent of us are.
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Excuse you
I'm a double-wide recyclable
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American exceptionalism, especially lately.
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And then get weirdly surprised and entitled about it when someone does do something about it.
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For me, it’s the American belief that their laws apply in other sovereign countries. Calling Julian Assange a traitor when he’s Australian and never held American citizenship for example. Demanding his extradition and strong-arming other countries when he’s not beholden to American laws nor constitution as a non-citizen, and believing that it’s their right to do so.
And that’s from speaking with countless American who believe that this is totally justified and above-board.
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Flag heilling
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that they have no culture
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They do have culture: it's poor taste.
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I notice American's habitually cannot mind their own business.
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From my outside perspective, it's the pledge of allegiance.
Do you really have your kids stand up every morning and swear an oath to your flag? That's some real cult shit.
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And then berate them for thinking that the ideals espoused in that pledge are real in any way.
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Nothing could be more American than that pledge: it was something that was first propagated by a flag company that was trying to sell more flags.
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Don't forget the accompanying salute
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"In 1891, Daniel Sharp Ford, the owner of the Youth's Companion, hired Bellamy to work with Ford's nephew James B. Upham in the magazine's premium department. In 1888, the Youth's Companion had begun a campaign to sell US flags to public schools as a premium to solicit subscriptions. For Upham and Bellamy, the flag promotion was more than merely a business move; under their influence, the Youth's Companion became a fervent supporter of the schoolhouse flag movement, which aimed to place a flag above every school in the nation. Four years later, by 1892, the magazine had sold US flags to approximately 26,000 schools. By this time the market was slowing for flags but was not yet saturated."
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First thing that comes to mind for me is the huge number of people who are religious fanatics here, which is unusual for a Western country. This is also a big part of what led us to the fascist government we have today.
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I think you’ve kinda missed the lede - religious fanatics. We’ve got plenty of those. Other western countries have quite a few religious people, but they aren’t often in-your-face cross wearing, “I’m a Christian”, openly judgy Karens like they are here.
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I specified religious fanatics because they're the problem, not religious people in general.
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in Europe, someone tells me their are Christian or are wearing a cross, it's no big deal.
in the US, it's a massive red flag
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Look at the nutjobs that were the backbone of what became America. Basically a bunch of puritan nutjobs who didn't like how laissez faire England was becoming so they hopped on the boat to America so they could make their puritanical paradise.
Y'all are just noticing it now which is a failure of the education system. Then again we already know this.
Thoughts and prayers to America 🙏🏾
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Fuck you, Jerry Falwell. Fuck you.
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You’re right, they misspelled fuckheads.
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What am I gonna do about it?
Listen here you bastard: Nothing, that's what!
Oh wait, that's probably why they keep doing it.
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As a German I don't understand why the USA basically do have two political parties. I know there are technically other parties but they have no impact.
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- Because first past the post electoral systems always result in a 2 party system due to defensive voting.
- Because Americans didn't listen to George Washington, when during his farewell address he strongly cautioned against "alternate domination" of a 2 party system.
- Because Americans are woefully uneducated, dis-interested, and preoccupied.
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Most countries have FPTP but manage to have many parties in their parliaments/congress/diet. And I don't think the US is any more disinterested than most countries.
The main difference is the US has an insane amount of money at the top level, to the extent that it's basically impossible to participate in national level politics without both (a) a few billionaires backing you, and (b) the rest of the billionaires not objecting too hard.
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And because now that it's entrenched, the two parties will collude even past the death of the country to keep it that way
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There’s some structural reasons (the senate, primarily) that American politics will almost inevitably devolve into two parties.
If I could do one thing to fix American politics it would be to abolish the senate, which gives low population states an insanely unbalanced level of influence over national politics.
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Because first past the post electoral systems always result in a 2 party system due to defensive voting.
Nope. FPTP is the norm worldwide and two party systems very much the exception. Even in the US, it's only been the last third or so of the country's history that two have managed to become so all-conquering in spite of being so unrepresentative.
George Washington, when during his farewell address he strongly cautioned against "alternate domination" of a 2 party system.
Pretty sure he was very much against the concept of political parties in general, rather than having any preference as to how many.
But yeah, the two major parties HAVE pretty much embodied all his worries and more..
Because Americans are woefully uneducated, dis-interested, and preoccupied.
That's a big part of the problem, sure, but the issues of regulatory capture and the two parties themselves being in charge of how the entire system works (including the barriers to entry for everyone else) is MUCH more critical.
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Didn't Jackson warn about point 2 as well? Or was it Jefferson? Someone did, and it also went unheeded (or used as a blueprint.)
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It is actually 2 flavors of the same party. The USA is a one-party state, controlled by the capitalist party.
EDIT: lol you can downvote me while you decide whether you want to vote for the Israel-defending-capitalist-that-ran-on-"securing"-the-border or the other Israel-defending-capitalist-that-ran-on-"securing"-the-border 🤪
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two the two people who downvoted this person, it's true though. any two party system is a one party system where all government decisions are made long before we find out about them as the politicians form coalitions within their parties. the republicans didn't become MAGA in 2016. they became MAGA in 2014 and 2015. 2016 was just them announcing their coalition
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Because they don't do proportional voting like you Germans or we Austrians do, most of their elections (and all federal ones) have one winning candidate in a state or congressional district.
And there is mostly not even a requirement for 50% of the vote, but the candidate with most votes wins. That creates the two party system.
The parties in the US are much broader than in our countries, it's very common for different members of the same party to vote against each other.
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Exactly, what that means is that we have a tactical concern where the more voters represented by an elected official and the more disparate they are the worse of an idea it is for you specifically to split a vote. That's actually why Abraham Lincoln (the guy who was president during our civil war and oversaw the abolition of chattel slavery) won his election.
This creates the irony of it being somewhat common to have a lot of differing meaningful political choices for city council, third parties being not rare in state government, third parties being very rare in the national congress (though some independents will happen, notably from weird states like Vermont, which is a very rebellious in a cool way state), and third parties only win the presidency in times of calamatous upheaval. For context the last time a third party won the presidency is the election I linked earlier in this comment, half the country went to literal war over that result.
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"Winner takes it all" makes it inherent to the system. They really really need to change that. But that is hard, when it keeps the only two relevant partys in power.
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Google "Gerrymandering". It'll all come together.
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They have no impact for several reasons, but one weird thing about us Americans is that we're never happy. The Clinton years were peace and prosperity. Nope! Not having any more of that, in comes Bush. We did well enough with Obama. Nope! In comes Trump.
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I don't know about Bush, but the people who voted for Trump decidedly did not do well enough with Obama. Radical wealth redistribution is necessary to fix American society and Obama was not that.
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Oh man, I'm not sure how to condense this much context.
- Since the days when the USA was economically reliant on slavery for land development and market growth, the US population has been split over the issue of race and ethnicity. Even before that, the USA was founded by religious conservatives fleeing the church reforms in Europe. "Freedom of Religion" was put into the constitution not to separate church and state but to protect church from state. Because of these very strong and very harmful ideologies, naturally the people split into two camps: for ethnonationalism or against.
- The US Constitution is very old. The USA as a country is very young, but it's still one of the oldest democratic systems of government still in use today. It is very flawed: utilizing the electoral college, capping the seats in the house, each state with wildly different population getting two senators, the senate confirming judges, and worst of all "first past the post" ballots. In hindsight a lot of this is terrible for a functioning democracy, but the ethnonationalist party doesn't really like democracy anyways so it's going to take a supermajority to fix it, if you even believed the opposition party were motivated to fix it.
It's kind of like how the Weimar Republic was before the Nazis took over. There is a united hard right party and then theres the SPD. You COULD split the SPD's influence into farther left and communist parties, but then if they don't individually have enough seats they fail to form a government the Nazis have opportunity to become majority in the face of continued inaction from the government.
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but the ethnonationalist party doesn’t really like democracy anyways so it’s going to take a supermajority to fix it, if you even believed the opposition party were motivated to fix it.
In other words literally never going to happen. The electorate has been hand picked by legalized gerrymandering that getting a supermajority is less likely to happen than getting bitten by a shark that's getting struck by lightning as you're winning the lottery :(
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Don't you only have like 3 who are usually I'm the running?
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That's 50% more parties!
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We have first past the post voting, not ranked choice or star voting
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for me it's the whole "don't tread on me" and gun culture rhetoric. Americans seem to be "don't push me" but when they actually get pushed they're all "uWu please more daddy" it's odd.
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Yes, that whole thing went from defending guns in schools to nothing burger in a matter of seconds.
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Guns cannot defend you from Fox News.
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I can explain this one. Growing up in America, you're constantly told that you're a patriot simply because you were born here—like just existing in the same country where Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington lived 250 years ago somehow makes you part of their legacy. It's pushed on you so early and so hard that you don't even question it. You just go to school, and the first thing you do is stand and pledge allegiance to the state—together, as a group. It’s ritualistic. It functions like a cult mechanism. That’s how it gets ingrained.
Most Americans do not have an understanding that they are being tread on.
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And I'm proud to be and American where at least I know I'm freeeeee
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I don't think being patriotic is such a bad thing. It's not unique to the US either.
But looking back so uncritically definitely is.
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doesn’t explain the whole gun thing though. Like it’s the one country that seems wildly out of control from gun violence all because of that one thing regularly and seriously defended in that constitution of your’s all while never arriving to the exact reason it’s in the constitution in the first place..
Until now when that exact thing happens and then suddenly the entire constitution means fuck all and gets trashed and it’s like y’all collectively got quiet about them guns and the constitution.
Not to say I’m like let’s get all violent and blood thirsty, just saying this explicit logic sequence about guns and violence is what makes America extra weird.
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ah got you. so it's like "you're supposed to behave this way" it's ingrained in you as a child that this is the proper thing to do but like most kids you just have no idea why it is and you just go along with it. like being dragged to church as a kid.
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MKULTA and COINTELPRO were pretty wild. Operation Northwoods as well. And the FBI basically admitted to assassinating Dr King. By the 1990s they learned to eliminate the paper trails, so probably no telling who actually knew what regarding 9/11 or the 20 trillion dollars that vanished into thin air during Iraq and Afghanistan
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don't forget the CONTA scandal, illegally financing violent drug cartels to flood black streets with drugs, to sell missiles to Iran and fill private prisons with black people for slave labour.
it sounds like made up BS.
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I've always maintained that we let 9/11 happen to drum up public support to spin up the war machine and further the conservative plot to take over the country. I don't think we orchestrated it, but I do think we knew and looked the other way.
We did it with Pearl Harbor, so it's 100% within the realm of possibility that we did it with 9/11.
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Operation Northwoods
One thing that's often missed about this in the hero-worship of JFK is that Kennedy's administration desperately wanted to intervene in Cuba militarily - just because Castro was a Communist - and they had been pressuring the CIA hard to find something to justify an invasion. This was the context in which the CIA finally said "well, we can't find anything, so how about we fake attacks on US citizens and blame it on Cuba?" It wasn't like the CIA came up with this plan on its own out of the blue and presented it to Kennedy for approval.
To their discredit, the CIA would certainly have done this happily if Kennedy had given the go-ahead, but he said "uh, that's a little too far."
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- Gun culture
- Making houses out of wood. To me, someone from a country where houses are made of brick, this is like living in a shed. Also, the USA is the hotspot of tornadoes, so it makes even less sense
- One of the richest countries in the world, and universal healthcare isn't a thing
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Houses of woods aren't really bad or the problem, but houses of wood that are held together by osb and cardboard is odd.
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Traditional Dutch houses (the ones on the canals) are wooden frames with a brick facade. The brick is fastened to the wooden beams with elaborate wrought iron wall anchors.
Most new construction is reinforced concrete, but those suckers have been standing for 400 years.
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Brick houses aren't going to survive a tornado any better than wood ones. Hell, the really big ones will pull the top off of storm shelters. Wood houses are used because they're cheaper to build. So it's easier to rebuild after a disaster.
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Making houses out of wood.
This is fine. Lumber was historically plentiful in North America, and lumber houses last just as long as stone or brick.
Lumber has several advantages over stone/concrete/brick:
- Less CO2 impact from construction activities. Concrete production is a huge contributor to atmospheric CO2.
- Greater sustainability in general. Concrete is approaching a global sand shortage, because most sand in the world doesn't have the right qualities to be included in concrete.
- Better energy efficiency and insulation properties. Brick homes need double walls in order to compete with the insulation properties of a wood framed house that naturally has voids that can be filled with insulation.
- Better resilience against seismic events and vibrations (including nearby construction). The west coast has frequent earthquakes, and complying with seismic building code with stone/masonry requires it to be reinforced with steel. The state of Utah, where trees and lumber are not as plentiful as most other parts of North America, and where seismic activity happens, has been replacing unreinforced masonry for 50+ years now.
- Easier repair. If a concrete foundation cracks, that's easier to contain and mitigate in a wood-framed house than a building with load-bearing concrete or masonry.
Some Northern European and North American builders are developing large scale timber buildings, including timber skyscrapers. The structural engineers and safety engineers have mostly figured out how to engineer those buildings to be safe against fire and tornadoes.
It's not inherently better or worse. It's just different.
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You should know that this is the most batshit insane, america-centric, absolutely wrong thing I've ever seen someone pull off in a context like this.
and lumber houses last just as long as stone or brick.
Just because you say it like it's true doesn't mean it's true! That must be hard for you to understand, though. Do you think other countries are just casting their houses wholesale out of concrete? I love this way you see the world, it's super simple and avoids learning anything useful.
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A brick home wouldn’t withstand a tornado either. Like if a tree hits a brick house it would do significant damage to the house. And most brick houses still have a timber roof under the roof tiles so even a small tornado could lift the roof off the house.
Here is a brick house hit by a small tornado in England
Reinforced concrete is a much better material for a hurricane and tornado resistant building. Also shape of the house is important. A dome would be the best.
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Living here, I will tell you that the insistence on building houses in a neo-colonial style in tornado alley, hurricane prone areas, or in a middle of a yearly flood plane, baffles me. We should have completely different architectural styles adpated to withstand the elements at this point. You know, what housing is supposed to be for in the first place? /rant
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A wood-framed house isn't necessarily weaker than a brick house.
Wood is pliable and doesn't suddenly crumble and collapse when it's stressed. And it weighs WAY less when it does fail.
If you're in a tornado or earthquake, would you rather be trapped beneath 120 pounds of sheetrock, insulation, and shingles or a 2 tons of broken, jagged rock?
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I've heard ICF (insulated concrete foam) construction is pretty durable.
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World Champions in sports that only the US participates in. I am not a fan of football, both the "footy" version or the "NFL" but it's always been odd to me that winners of the Super Bowl, or equivalent event, are often declared "World Champions" of their own league in an event exclusively hosted in the US.
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Where I live almost everyone assumes you are a right wing Christian. They don't even take into consideration that you're not and if they figure out you aren't they stop talking to you in most cases. I've never had anyone straight up call me an idiot but I've had good friends freeze up when they found out and then start avoiding me afterwards. You get looked at like a lizard in human skin.
To add to this, I've heard the talk that gets passed around before they found out that I wasnt. If you are a woman they will straught up call you a witch
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I’m a passing trans guy, and where I live is like this.
It’s just fucked walking around and know that if they knew, I would essentially lose all humanity to them. It happened with my divorce lawyer, it happens with doctors. I’m like an alien hiding in the place I was born.
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Christianity (and all religions imo) are a fucking stain on humanity, they bring so much more harm than good upon us.
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...christians are so overwhelmingly evil that i constantly have to stop and remind myself that some tiny minority of all the crosses and flags i see brandished about may actually be fostered in good faith, lest i judge too soon...
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That is so strange. Where i live if someone under the age of 70 tells you that they are actual christian, the reaction is usually: "wait what? Really now?
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You live in a more honest place. It really is like this outside cities in large parts of USA.
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...You think Appalachia isn't right-wing christian?
It's called Pennsyltucky for a reason.
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Weirdest thing? It's the guns. Definitely the prevalence of guns in the hands of civilians.
Oh. And also how they eat as if their healthcare was affordable.
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the prevalence of guns in the hands of civilians.
We have a lot of guns in the hands of civilians here as well (Finland), but the difference is that they're mostly hunting weapons and we have strict gun control laws - how you can get them, how they have to be stored, what types you can even have, and all that. What's crazy about US is the amount and type of guns, how easily you can get them, the ways they're kept so loosely, and the craziest to me; in some places even carried openly. To an outsider the lack of proper gun control seems to have lead into some GTA type of insanity
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I just checked wikipedia. Finland's murder rate is 0.982 per 100k. Europe as a whole is 2.1 per 100k. US is 5.763 per 100k. So we are over 5 times as likely to be killed. Who would have guessed that rampant inequality paired with having more guns than people was a bad idea.
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Criticizing how we eat is like criticizing how the pigs in the farm eat.
We're not here to be healthy. We're livestock. Our health only matters insofar as it affects the bottom line.
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CIA needs to be abolished, and everyone in the CIA who did anything illegal or incredibly unethical needs to be prosecuted for it (if they did illegal stuff in allied nations then extradited).
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Unfortunately, running on this as a campaign promise would get you killed. What you need to do is promise amnesty on the grounds of "healing the nation" and then revoke that amnesty once you're in power. As Sun Tzu wrote, never surround your enemy on all four sides.
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yhea, if the CIA doesn't want you dead, are you really doing anything with your life?
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That they live in the 18th century with 21st century things. Religious fanatics all referring to the devil in him and Jesus saved him - separation of church and state but there's references to god everywhere and politicians don't get elected until they're reciting lumps of the Bible in every speech.
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That it spreads globally even though everybody else looks down on it and calls Americans dumb. It makes sense considering that it's the most consumer oriented but it's still weird.
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Sigh. Where to start...?
and I'm American
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....better to never surface hard truths. Ought to keep them buried like authoritarian regines. /s
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Yeah, that was my first thought, too. The US Citizens have the right to know, once it's no longer a matter of national security to be concealed.
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Statutes of limitations rule.
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As opposed to the rest of the world, where we simply never release a thing, at all.
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Operation Northwoods
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all their culture about being lovable good guys who do a goof and like their music
IRL they are the most joyless, dispassionate people who inflict nothing but misery on the world and each other
i say dispassionate but they do love
- caging people
- abandoning their sick and elderly
- poisoning their own children
- bombing hospitals
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Yes and I'm sure you're exactly the same as the worst people in your country.
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I do see a lot of people around me that are joyless and dispassionate.
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The real crazy part is the elderly voted to be abandoned
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Crabs in a bucket
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You are mistaking the American government for the American people.
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So the tens of millions of Trump supporters, and the tens of millions of useless centrists, and the tens of millions who don’t even show up…ya know I think that they’re onto something, actually.
The US is a shithole and there are far fewer good people there than shitty or even barely acceptable people. I feel sorry for the good people who live there, really I do, but in general the place can get right fucked.
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Who do you think vote for, and form the government?
In a democratic country, the government is a reflection of the people.
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Are there no powerful, evil people where you live?
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Nothing but facts
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We'd rather have lots of things to whine about on the Internet so long as we don't throw their vote away. Same shit. Every time.
Well. That sucked. Let's do it again!
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Sure, but just because some conspiracies are true, does not mean all of them are.
The vast majority are false and will never get a declassified file.
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Probably the greatest thing the CIA ever did; make "conspiracy" synonymous with "bullshit that didn't happen".
After WWII when amateur radios became popular sharing information also grew. Even if the government was now having a harder time getting away with bullshit, all they needed to do was invent 9 bullshit stories for every 1 correct one out there and then everyone would conclude (rightly) that "vast majority are false". And then when they do encounter a real one, again, they rightly think "most are bullshit" but that implies "so this one is probably as well", for all of them, always.
"Conspiracy" means nothing more than something illegal being purposefully orchestrated by two or more people.
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The point was that no one cares to hold the horrific shit accountable.
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That.... Wasn't the point at all?
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199 comments
Not the weirdest, but I didn't realize this until it was pointed out.
The fascination with work, and how one's employment or career is tied to personal identity. It's a basic conversation starter, "What do you do for work?" Not "What do you enjoy doing?" or "Do you have any hobbies?" or "Where do you go to relax?" Nope.
What to you do for work.
It's a weird question that is tied up in judgement and classism. And it's so normal here
Trevor Noah has a section about this in a recent standup. Something likei if you ask a European what they do they answer with hobbies, americans answer with their job title.
Just my experience from germany but when people ask what you do, you usually say what Job you have and where the Company is.
Why are you typing comments when you should be earning money for your boss?
My boss is a real asshole. I can't stand him and he doesn't pay me enough.
I'm self-employed
I've found this only to be true in white collar professions. Hanging out with blue collar people, your job rarely comes up, but it's one of the first questions with white collar people.
It's definitely true with blue collar workers in Alberta, or at least it was when I still socialized (guess when I stopped)
I grew up blue collar and am still a tradesman. I technically live in the Midwest, but lots of Appalachian people. Of course my social circles include a vast swathe of socio-economic levels so you might still be right.
I'll have to watch closer to see if there's a pattern
I'd say your definitely correct when it comes to people with "low skill" or high turnover type jobs. If they work at dollar general or McDicks they don't talk about work much. Also, there's no such thing as a low skill job, and we all know who was essential and who could stay home for a few months
Good god, yes. This is something I had to break myself from. It is so insidious and pervasive in our culture that I don’t think most of us realize it’s even a thing.
I’ve been to a lot of outdoor birthday parties this summer, and there are so many boring dads who I will hear strike up a conversation about what’s going on at work. I usually make sure to wander in the opposite direction.
And I like my job! But the “talk about work” is usually less about interesting projects or creations and more about what has been going on with that individual’s status. Like yeah Kevin I want you to do well at work and enjoy it, but if it’s all the same to you I’m going to go get chased by kids with squirt guns instead of pretending I care about how your manager is impressed by your team’s metrics.
kids sure know how to have fun. we have a lot to learn from them
AmErIcAnS DoN't hAvE A CuLtUrE
lol j/k
Yeah pervasive is right. I'd rather talk about the campaign I'm running and what my players did in our last game, but it's taken a lot of retraining my brain to allow myself to talk about what is fun instead of what I'm "supposed" to do.