@buh@hexbear.net coming out as actually being JT from Second Thought this whole time
I live in Europe and occasionally a gimmick store exactly like this one this pops up that sells only stuff imported from the US, usually chocolates, snacks, drinks etc and god damn it’s some of the most vile shit I’ve tasted, most of it tastes like the absolute cheapest bottom of the barrel shit you can get in Europe.
The only good stuff I’ve had from the US is Reese’s peanut butter cups, that shit is like crack.
the imported stuff is crazy expensive, too. i mean, everything is, at this point. but no way am i gonna buy mac n chiis in a box, when homemade is better & much more cost-effective. the whole thing actually pissed me off so much that i started making my own variations of mac n chiis like, semi-regularly… so thanks?
ps. pop-tarts were a mistake
Or some random Oreo flavor like Colgate and Gin.
Is this Second Thought?
I was gonna say, my first thought was “Is that JT?”
I think so, totally looks like him
I know Yugopnik posted in the last couple of days that he had just met JT and Hakim in person, so that would explain JT being outside the US at least lol
I thought he had flat hair?
nah he has the curliest mop
It’s curly flat
flatly curly
Did you know JT is short for Justin Timberlake?
Completely inauthentic. Where’s the undesirable being harassed by a rent-a-cop out front?
Exactly my reaction. And one flag? Have they even been to America?
I counted at least 15 US flags on my drive home from work today. I was just about to say I’m not sure why there’s all these goddamned flags all of a sudden but I just realized the alimpicks
There’s more Ukranian flags than Canadian ones up in my neighborhood even on the 1st
hope you get a bulk discount on
Canada has a LOT of Ukranian immigrant families from way back when being a Banderite got you in and now have a lot of extended family who fled the war/refugees without family here, our public busses have a Stand With Ukraine sign that flashes back and forth with the route number, less and less busses have it going, there’s also a Black Lives Matter option. It seems weird to have any political slogans on your public transit, but yeah, locally, people do be supporting the Ukraine
I haven’t seen flags for at least a year around here, but there are like stickers on traffic poles
I think a lot of the flags are just kinda still up cause they didn’t bother taking em down. Buuuuuuut also where I live has also had a huge influx of Ukranians since the war and well, they’re the people that left instead of joining a nazi battalion and fighting and so that does need to be considered and they did live there and where they were living is experiencing material damage and expecting a greater international understanding of events is a bit of hard thing to tell someone who’s home maybe got exploded. If you’re not an internationalist, you’re a nationalist and that’s most people. I can’t be holding every Ukranian immigrant under suspicion of nazism cause that would make me a racist, I’m certain some are and I’m certain even more may be just short of it and even more who might generally be more sympathetic under different circumstances could easily be more russophobic, nationalistic and NATO brained cause it’s a war the place theyre from is losing and most people do have a massive nationalistic streak unless it’s deprogrammed, so a lot are also just pretty normal ass apolitical workers taking the most obvious path and yknow being mad about all the explosions in their country.
We have one of these on my street, and the one thing it is genuinely good for is cookie cutters and sprinkles
Americans do be eating cereal
This is maybe a bit tangential, and I might’ve mentioned this before, but honestly I kinda miss being a little kid and telling my schoolyard friends that “when I was in America, I got to drink root beer” — and they’d be like, “wow, Americans are so weird and wild, letting children drink beer!”, before I’d reveal that root beer is actually a soft drink, and then we’d have a good laugh. Indeed, back in those days it felt like being an American gave me some sort of esoteric insider knowledge that my peers weren’t privy to — I even remember translating English-language place names in the United States into Norwegian for the sake of my peers who couldn’t yet understand English, not realizing that the English-language names I’d learned were originally translations of names in now-endangered Indigenous languages.
And I have memories of going to “American” stores like the one in this picture. I think that even when I was a kid, I had mixed feelings about them. How on the one hand it felt like it affirmed that feeling of having esoteric insider knowledge, to go to these cramped stores that clearly didn’t see much traffic and were sort of out of the way, and being presented with all of these names and labels unfamiliar to my peers… But on the other hand, so much of the American stores felt “plastic” for lack of a better term. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what exactly I wanted “American” to mean to me, but, like, Lucky Charms and Reese’s Puffs was certainly not it — stuff like that was just corporations preying on the health of children, right? It was a tasty treat, maybe, but there was nothing special or good about it. Whenever I was in the occupation zone I’d honestly look at my relatives and I’d think, “You people actually eat this poison outside of summertime?”
In any case, nowadays with globalization and cultural imperialism and social media and online streaming and online shopping etc, there’s just fewer uniquely American things. I can’t speak for the exact extent, since I would’ve noticed cultural imperialism less as a child, but it feels like even in the course of my fairly short life that the presence of Usonian shit in Norway has grown exponentially compared to when I was a kid. Nowadays there’s even Dollar Stores in Norway, literally called Dollar Store, in English, despite the fact that Norway doesn’t even use dollars as its currency.
Peculiarly, though, to my knowledge root beer still remains unpopular and comparatively difficult to get in Norway, and root beer is also incidentally one of the few* things that one could genuinely call “American culture” — as in, root beer isn’t a product of cultural appropriation, nor a part of the Anglo puritan core of whiteness, nor a product of consumerism for lack of a better term. Like, we literally do not know who wrote the first root beer recipe, all we know is that by the 1830s, recipes for root beer were being written down and passed around.
*I am being a bit hyperbolic, but I really do wonder how much “American culture” would be left if we got rid of everything that was stolen, puritan, patented or copyrighted, or invented to make a quick buck — or perhaps there are better criteria for separating the wheat from the chaff.
but I really do wonder how much “American culture” would be left if we got rid of everything that was stolen, puritan, patented or copyrighted
When you’re a settler colony with no actual history to fall back on like China, your culture just involves stealing
There’s nothing redeemable about Amerika lmao
There’s nothing redeemable about Amerika lmao
Well, except root beer. :P
I had written like three paragraphs of sincere response to this, too, but it’s best to be brief so I’ll summarize:
- I feel like “American culture” has the potential to become undeserving of scare quotes once it exists outside of the context of occupation and imperialism. I’ve been writing future fiction about one way that this might happen, based on my own experiences and understanding of theory.
- I feel like the USA actively makes my life as the child of a former settler kinda fucky, because settler-colonialism needs not only to attract new settlers, but also needs to prevent old settlers from fully escaping the paradigm. I’m “caught in the middle” so I get to experience this weird tension.
- I frankly cannot find any theory about the position of children of former Usonian settlers, nor any language with which to talk about my position. I guess this is because people like me are not yet very numerous, and seemingly not yet considered an object worthy of study.
There’d still be a ton of culture, but pretty much all the good stuff came from non-white people. Like the many genres of music pioneered by black people (country, rock & roll, blues, disco, rap, etc) or all the food from immigrants (texmex, Italian food, Chinese food as westerners know it)
Most of those things would not fit the criteria, though, not as far as I know their histories (which isn’t super well tbf)
Like, there’s a reason why people would mention Texmex, Italian-American, and Chinese-American cuisine, but would in all likelihood never even think to mention Ethiopian cuisine, despite the fact that there are plenty of Ethio restaurants throughout the United States. And that is because “American culture” implies general usage throughout American society, implies lowest common denominator, implies appealing to the tastes of mayos. And when the originators were non-white, this generally means that some form of cultural appropriation or at the very least profit-driven modification was at play, and then wrt things like music there’s also all the IP stuff to boot. So that’s between one and three criteria violated.
Now I’m sure if you look hard enough you’ll be able to find some bit of American culture that originated among non-white people, and passed into general usage among all Americans without anything to do with IP nor profit-driven modifications, and where this cultural exchange was favorable for everyone involved. But when the shaping of “American culture” is so clearly defined by an unequal relationship between different groups, I’d have to think that examples of such exchanges would be vanishingly few.
okay but hear me out reeses cereal with strawberry milk im in my 40s and ill never give this up
I might be prejudiced but I believe America is the country where they largest party of adult citizens’ diet is made up of things that has cartoon characters on the packaging.
That would probably be Japan
The 0.89$ box of baking soda is very enticing for Brits I’m sure. I recognize like 12 items that aren’t just indistinguishable jams. Nothing on the top row.
mmm, baking soda. just like mumsy used to make us for the Consummation of St. Turdly.
I once ate an entire box during the homily and mummy had me paddled, bare-bottomed by the vicar, also bare-bottomed.
