Yeah, if half of America thought like that . . . we'd probably be in such deep shit as would be unimaginable for anything better than an industrialized country. By which I mean, we probably would have gone through such social de-evolution so as to totally maim industry as it exist in the modern era.
And we wouldn't be an influential world power, either.
Well... From my point of view, the USA is in a pretty hefty downfall, in terms of global importance. Popular media (meaning lowest common denominator media) here used to kinda like you guys in the 90ies, hated you completely during the Iraq thing, but now don't even really mention you other than to laugh at your political processes. You're kinda like a modern Byzantine empire or something now, stagnating and crumbling under your own politics and infighting.
I am aware that this assertion is based on almost no proof and could probably be discredited by a drunken child, but for now I feel like I can post it and not feel completely ashamed of myself. Yet.
Well, contrary to LegoLord's shallow comments:
The United States is the financial center of the world. That's not going to change in the next twenty-five to fifty years; the European Union doesn't have the capacity or the long-term track record to be a serious consideration as a reserve currency and there are no other significant potential choices. So long as everybody thinks in dollars--and unless the U.S. Government's T-bills go into junk-bond status (which is an event that would make the recession of the last two fiscal years look like the Good Times), it will remain that way for some time. And if it
did go into junk-bond status, creditors would begin forgiving the bonds in a really neat way that allows for a recovery while hurting
everybody else way more if they tried to stop using the dollar for reserve, so nobody will do that. It's a slick setup--because the biggest creditors to the U.S. Government
are the U.S. Government.
Outside of finance--how about consumer-facing business? McDonald's? Disney? And the Internet boom happened in the United States for the most part.
Google. Amazon. PayPal and eBay. Facebook (and many of the smaller social networking sites that are traditionally group-related, i.e., HUEHUEHUE and the Google-owned Orkut). There are national and regional alternatives in most markets for sure, but the dominant force in market shaping is American.
Culturally? American movies are still The Export to more nations than not, although some international factors are making smallish inroads. American-pushed music has never been the dominant force American movies have been, but it is still a substantial international player despite putting out reams of absolute shit for decades.
The United States is an unparalleled military superpower. Nobody will surpass our air or naval capabilities in the next fifty years: our current fleet of Nimitz-class supercarriers--incidentially, we have
eleven supercarriers, the rest of the world has
zero; the
QE class the British Navy is developing is only slightly more than half the size of modern
Gerald R. Ford-class supercarriers and while is in the same size consideration as the
Kitty Hawk and the
Enterprise, the loadout is rather small for the size.
In the longer term, it's still unlikely that anyone will present a credible naval threat. This lack of a threat is in large part because the
Nimitz boats were built for a minimum service life of fifty years, with electronics and gear upgrades--we build ships well. The
Enterprise was built in 1961 and is still ticking along nicely in service; the
Kitty Hawk, despite being well known as the Shitty Kitty, was only decommissioned last year and still pulled decent service marks the whole way. As far as air combat goes, we're still the center of development for modern aviation--nobody's got anything, or the capability to build anything, on par with the F-22 and you'll notice that everybody who needs a first-line modern fighter is placing orders for the F-35 (both because the Raptor is expensive to operate and we probably wouldn't sell them any anyway--the projected kill effect of our current F-22 fleet is
obscene). There are no other fifth-generation fighters in production; the Russia Sukhoi T-50 is having problems and is, by most accounts, likely to be inferior-but-cheaper than the Lightning II, while the Shenyang is not even close to a maiden flight and there are serious concerns about their ability to actually
field the thing.
We lack boots-on-the-ground manpower, which is being exposed painfully in Iraq and Afghanistan, but competent foreign policy would allow leverage of the areas where nobody in the world is even in the conversation. We're working on that.
As alluded to above with regards to military technology--we're still the primary mover in countless sectors of scientific and technological advancement. The technology that powers your computer was either designed in the United States or under the purview of American companies working in other countries (Israel and Costa Rica being two of the biggest, for various reasons). Telecommunications technology is essentially an American business (if you're not using Cisco, you're immediately in question). Software? Every major operating system is either written directly by companies based in the U.S. (Microsoft, Apple, IBM, HP) or, in the case of open source OSes, are largely contributed to by American companies and organizations (Linux Foundation, Red Hat, Novell--don't say Canonical, folks, they don't do much dev). While we don't do a hell of a lot of manufacturing here anymore (unfortunately), a great deal of the technology and improvements in industrial gear originates here, too. And medical tech is dominated overwhelmingly by American interests;
five of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies in the world are headquartered in the United States, and at least three others (GSK, Bayer, and AstraZeneca) have massive American operations that greatly influence their business strategy.
Your assessment of media coverage regarding the United States reveals a problem in their coverage or your understanding of it that is not reflective of reality: "infighting" is in no way new to the United States--it's kind of how we've always worked. American politics are getting more publicized--I'd hesitate to say they're meaningfully worse, as Stupid Obstructionism is kind of a time-honored tactic. General agreement and polite reasoned politics are
not our thing. We have a nice president named Andrew Jackson and--oh--
a civil war that kind of indicate that. Your own country's coverage of America does not change America's status; it indicates the understanding your media possesses and/or wishes to present.
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Topic: Ignornce is Strenght (Read 41938 times)