h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, having realised that this is not in fact a *What is wrong with....* thread in fact, I hope you realise that I meant all threads *like* that, in fact this one....

Rather than feel it necessary to "atone" for your country, speak up when a wrong is committed, call a lie a lie, and (dare I say it?) a moron a moron.

I grew up in an era when young men stood up and said that the war in Vietnam was wrong. I knew some who were jailed for saying so. I knew some who were forced to leave the USA so they would not be contributing a wrong. I saw men and women die at Kent State because they chose to stand up and be counted.

Unfortunately, too many Americans simply sit back and say "Yes, I think it is wrong, but I can't say so because people won't like it".

I get tired of the the overused "you are tarring all the (fill in the blank) because of the actions of a few" because various evils are pointed out.

When a city's police force is riddled with corruption, people come out of the woodwork to say that one shouldn't talk about such things because it "wrongs the good cops". What "wrongs the good cops" is the corruption carried on around them, and the lack of action by themselves and their superiors to stop it.

When a political party has controversy after controversy because there are racists or homophobes (I am thinking of a certain Canadian political party) people whine that not everyone is racist or homophobic in the party. If one is a member of the party who does not stand up to racists and homophobes, THAT is what harms the party.

When a government and much of a country's population supports genocide, economic crimes against other countries, a "what's yours is mine and what's mine is my own" policy, and does everything in its power to undermine the legally supported powers of the UN, we have people complaining that "all" the citizens of a country are being slandered..... If you do not speak out against your government, if you do not vote them out of power, if you support "my country right or wrong", you are complicit.

Mudhooks:

I agree with your general statement, but I have a little bit of a disagreement with specific application:

It seems to be generally agreed that when George W. Bush was a relative unknown quantity, the majority of voting Americans voted against him. In this fact there may be an indictment of both the non-voting Americans and the shadowy elite that managed to have Bush sworn in, but not of the majority of those who voted. Now that Bush has shown his true nature, I agree that it would be heartening if there were more protesting and more risk taking by the opposition, but, even in the Vietnam era, it was not a huge proportion of the population that took to the streets (am I right?). The reality is that the American people are politically (I emphasise POLITICALLY) in the same boat as the Iraqi people under Saddam: They can vote in an election some day, knowing that the results may well be cooked and their vote pointless; they can rise up in protest or whatever and face the consequences, like the Shi'as of Iraq rose up against Saddam, and depend on the American Constitution and American Freedom to support them, like the Shi'as of Iraq depended on . . . . Really, the ordinary people are up a certain creek with a broken paddle. If there is a clear landslide against Bush in the next election and he steps down, the world will breathe a tentative sigh of relief. If there is a landslide and he steals it, the American people will have lost their paddle and the whole world will be in that canoe with them. If there's a landslide in his favour, then all the What's wrong with stuff will suddenly be valid (and we'll all be in that paddleless and filthy canoe anyway). Near as I can figure, the best case possible is a landslide against Bush followed by him actually giving up power. Until then, I think we should be diplomatic to Americans in general. If there's a landslide for Bush, however, we should stop being diplomatic, impose sanctions, and send in the inspectors backed by troops and heavy air support. I really find the man and his cronies that scary.

Sorry about the rambling.

The real problem seems to be that the prople using generalisations the most are the people that complain about them.

I have seen many times, poeple throwing accusations around concerning generalisations to avoid dealing with anything raised.

I was interupted in the middle of my last post (20 mins or more)

Good post mudhooks

And, Mudhooks, I really do agree with what you say in general, and most particularly with this:

"If you do not speak out against your government, if you do not vote them out of power, if you support "my country right or wrong", you are complicit"

And, Apparition, I really really agree with you that the generalized suggestions that generalizations are rampant are generally not really descriptive of the posts that are generally made by non-Americans on these threads. Generally, the "What's Wrong With" threads are filled with examples of very specific incidents which involve Americans -- usually government representatives or TV or film characters, but those are the Americans we in the rest of the world hear about the most. Rarely have I found posts that say "all Americans are lazy, etc." When I have found such phrases, it has often been in posts by Americans talking about the generalizations they're sick of hearing.

I'm certainly not going to make posts saying "all Americans are. . ." I have made posts that say "the following link describes an action of people acting in the name of the United States. It is actions such as this that get people pissed off at America." I don't bother to post much any more, except now and then with a link to a news story that I think some might miss (and except for tonight ) because I think that those in the U. S. who really want to learn why America has a bad reputation can read the backlog and their questions will be answered. I'm tired of piling it on. I'm not going to ramble any more tonight.

but it's only 4pm

I'm glad the first responce I got wasn't someone jumping on me publicly distancing themselves.

I shall refrain from rambling also. I think the General is getting tired.

It's always tonight somewhere.

What's a "prople"? And why are they using generalisations?


The problem with everybody everywhere is they always jump on the slightest little bit of misstyping and they always just keep bringing it up all the time and rubbing your nose in it and never let you forget, ever!

Oh, and I would like to publicly distance myself from Apparition: The width of the Pacific Ocean, British Columbia, and half of Alberta.

you missed "poeple" in the second paragraph

I'm going to now. I mean ! So all of you stop always bugging me. In general.

I believe that typos are a pox upon us all... I cannot tell you how many times I have drafted something checked it over and over, spell checked, and then replaced one word, only to find I have missspelled my name, the boss's name, or the name of a client....

I accidentally came up with a term for the syndrome.... Bug Fingers... In explaining why I had a propensity for making glaring typos (Big Fingers), the inevitable occurred and I typed "Bug Fingers" and it has stuck.

In case you are interested, the reason that your computer keyboard is laid out in the manner it is, goes back to the original keyboard... the typewriter. Back in the days when the typewriter was invented, every manufacturer had their own layout for the letters (and some very odd designs which looked less like typewriters and more like objets d'art).

Some had the letters laid out alphabetically, others consonants on one side and vowels on the other, others simply decided upon just to be different from the next guy's typewriter. Problem was that we tend to use certain keys more often than others. As a result, the typebars (the long bars which flip up and impress the letters onto the paper) would often get jammed, especially when the typist was very fast.

It was Christopher L. Sholes, a newspaperman and part-time inventor who came up with what is known as the QWERTY keyboard (look at your keyboard to see why it is called that) which is what we still use today, despite the fact that we don't have typebars to jam..... The Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer was also the first to be mass produced (and was the source of the now-universal name for the machine).

Another fact about typewriters is that until the advent of the Sholes and Glidden machine, the office secretary was male. When Sholes and Glidden introduced tha machine at a trade fair, they wanted to demonstrate its ease of use, they had a woman demonstrating the machine. The image of the woman typist stuck in the public's mind.

The machine sold well, but the buyers needed typists to go along with the machine, so Sholes and Glidden actaully set up schools to train women in type-writing so buyers would have typists ready-trained to use their machines.

Originally, the job of secretary was a fairly prestigious job (hence the terms Secretary of State, Secretary of the Interior whose jobs originally were more clerical than political). As with most jobs, once women were hired to do them, the job of office secretary lost prestige, and along with that came the reduction of wages for what was now "women's work".


http://xavier.xu.edu:8000/~polt/typewriters.html
http://www.typewritermuseum.org/index.html

That just reminded be, too...

When I worked at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, part of my job was to assemble and disassemble these huge shelving units for storing large and/or heavy objects such as totem poles, boats, and furniture in the collections.

The shelving had been designed by some guy who used to work at the museum and was a royal pain in the a$$ (both the shelving and its inventor, who also designed a forklift to lift very heavy objects which never worked, and actually lead to an industrial accident .. but I digress).

At one point while I was working there, my boss came up and told me that they were going to make a video about the shelving units and how easy they were to put together and take apart. In order to do that, they wanted two of the female Preparators (glorified movers) to demonstrate for the camera. After thinking about it for about 3 seconds I said "And are you going to find a mentally handicapped person, too, in order to show that not only are they so easy to put together that even a woman can do it, but a mentally handicapped person could, too????" and stomped off.

This was the same mentality that one day decided to have a photo taken of all the staff. One of the well-coiffed women from PR was standing by when we trooped out. She had a wheelchair and wanted one of us to sit in it to show how "the staff was so diverse".... Everyone, to their credit, flatly refused and that was the end of the photo shoot. She seriously could not understand why, if the one staff member (out of over 300) who WAS handicapped didn't want to be paraded to make the Museum look good, why no one would pretend to be handicapped.

Yes, an aspirin smiley would be a good idea!
TIME magazine is one of the problems - I can't stop reading it like poking a sore tooth, yet it gives the impression of all Americans being united under Bush! No dissent at all. I'll take your word, Lentilla, that they're WRONG!!!

I was listening to the radio yesterday, and a local station was talking about a renewed Al Gore capmaign. As if they thought their listeners had all been living in a cave since NOvember 2000, they defined Gore as the man who 'lost' to Dubya (debatable!) Then, I realised that in 2004, Dubya could *steal* it again! (Presumably, he's take a lesson from Zimbabwe and Uganda, and do it a tad less obviously! But even so - scary!

>>This was the same mentality that one day decided to have a photo taken of all the staff. One of the well-coiffed women from PR was standing by when we trooped out. She had a wheelchair and wanted one of us to sit in it to show how "the staff was so diverse".... Everyone, to their credit, flatly refused and that was the end of the photo shoot. She seriously could not understand why, if the one staff member (out of over 300) who WAS handicapped didn't want to be paraded to make the Museum look good, why no one would pretend to be handicapped.<<
Un-be-flipping-lievable! What crass insensitivity, and all round 'bad SRV' (social role valorisation, a concept I learned about when studying 'special education'. I can't believe people working in a museum (which seems to be devoted to anthropology, what's more, from wjat you say) could be so crass!
I get Bug Fingers too, great name for it!

I was very proud that, as one, we simply walked away from the "opportunity"....

you could have suggested a republican campaign pin to look like immigrant-mentally-challenged