2147 Luggage.

Hehe, thumbs up on having a proofreader! It’s a great solution to a puzzle and someone from a provincial town where I’m from would not necessarily come up with it as Reggie does. It just takes experience with other places and systems.

The comment is not even ethnicist against Europeans. At the core, it’s more the typical learner’s frustration with the complexity of the world and with the effort to adapt to it. Anything new is hated first in a veiled complaint due to mental laziness and myside bias. I grew up in this culture, so it makes total sense and is the greatest. If you are aware of that, it’s okay. I think Americans have gathered much more experience with this negotiation of difference than other cultures – and there’s at the very least an uneasiness about it. But then people will also overattribute traits to the source, the Dutch, the British are this and that by virtue of their history.

Sometimes it’s wrong, based on outsider stereotypes, like Bruce Campbell’s Man with Two Brains set in “Bulgaria”, which is epic for that in many ways, and sometimes it’s wrong based on a benevolent outsider understanding of the country’s own stereotypes about itself (the Expendables?), and sometimes it’s also right because the nation indeed chucklefucked things up along the way and should rightly be criticized for it.
I catch myself often being like Reggie about U.S. stuff, like date format, measurements, etc. (nationalism and exceptionalism is not a suitable approach to science) and deeply mistrustful of anything come out of the British corner – like English spelling (they got it from the French, duh!), French numbers and spelling, Russian tenses, German nouns and abstract nouns and random genders – impractical, adds to the confusion, takes up mental space, keeps society busy with nonsense, puts up barriers for outsiders, like overdue gender debates – be glad you got that mostly right in English… We probably use up years of education and clear thought by it and frustrated learners give up. (A friend dropped out of school because of foreign languages.)
It’s based on principles of who invented it first gets to keep it.
Most of language especially was inherited from dudes long dead, in an unplanned way, with the weirdest ideas about sexes, social order, the world, themselves, before science – it’s ‘old technology’s. We are past the mental frames in theory, but we like to stick to the language because it’s our first experience – and I have a goddamn right to feel entitled to talk how I want. Identity is a bitch.

But yeah as a global family if we want to come together, we gotta get past the differences. And that also means some will have to make changes that take learning effort. I just hope it happens and based on reason not power.
I take the relativism Indy approach to culture: Don’t let it fade into oblivion but much of it belongs into a museum. And yet so much popular culture gotten ‘right’, so much enjoyment based on these past imperfections – you wouldn’t want to miss it. I just try to do my best and remember I have a choice to be more practical even if it makes society uncomfortable, a modern-day blessing.

Americans are being required to know about the world though if nothing else by the audiences. If you vote you have to.
Take a look at goodcountryindex.
But that’s an old trope, it’s relaxing to take a break from self-improvement.

In Europe, there was this outcry about racist images in childrens books, like pippi longstocking, and this is true, and the counter outcry by middle aged guys especially feeling something is being taken away from them and ‘art is being censored’ for political correctness, and they did not think the racism was an important aspect of the story, so it didn’t affect them. It’s all true at the same time, and we might acknowledge that. but at the end of the day, when it comes to policy what should weigh most is the perspective of a black child having a right to a discrimination-free upbringing.

Friday cliffhanger. I knew it. :D