this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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To be fair, the US always seems to be the center of attention anywhere you go. Why that is exactly, I don't know. I mean for fuck's sake, I live all the way out in bumfuck Asia and somehow news about American pop culture makes it here better than my local news does most of the time.
I'm not belittling America's problems but sometimes I feel like people can benefit from being made aware that too much exposure to anything - like criticism of other countries - is detrimental to our world view. It's literally The Cultivation Theory at work.
How many people in your rural Asian town are talking to strangers in English on the Internet about how detrimental the English-speaking Internet is?
I'm sorry, I'm not sure if it's my lack of sleep or a reading comprehension issue on my end but I don't understand your question. Though to answer it literally, English is so influential in my country that our schools tend to speak, read, and write in English more often than our native languages. If you speak English well, it's likely that you'll be regarded as a high-class individual by a good chunk of people here.
Unfortunately, that has threatened our own identity - to our people's cultural detriment and annoyance - as you'll probably see via English public discourse on American social media interwebs... which is why I'm saying, hey, why don't we stop paying attention to what the US is doing every now and then? I mean, how's Ukraine been really? What's happening with their EU membership? Maybe if the US wasn't always on the world stage they can actually participate more authentically and we can stop defaulting to making fun of kids dying in schools as a counterpoint, you know? It's messed up wherever it happens.
Because it has the largest GDP, largest military, and largest entertainment industry, and is home to the world's largest companies. So it's kind of an important country that affects other countries directly and indirectly all the time.
Fair, I suppose because the US tends to be belittled so often online so I never made the connection to those sizable facts. It's a bit too much still though, don't you think? News about the US somehow always taking over headlines? The world always looks at the US. There's always something about Elon Musk or the American government even on Lemmy's "non-Reddit-exodus" instances. When Apple releases a new phone, people won't stop talking about it positively and negatively. Europe does a better job with most things yet it's less common to find them in the spotlight.
Europe isn't a country, it's a continent. I see individual countries in Europe discusses frequently, but none of them are even close to the US in size and influence. Even the entire3 EU combined has a lower GDP and smaller military than the US.
The US is the world superpower, annoying as that is, and until it is no longer the dominant superpower it's going to dominate the news.