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Re:Is everything falling apart? by shadowgovt on Saturday April 30, 2022 @07:20AM (#31215119)
This makes a great deal of sense. Coupling it with the classic American entitlement thought in a peer thread, I think I can even see why it's only manifesting as a problem recently in the United States (I would say mostly within the past decade or so, whereas the technology to enable cheap long-distance cross-national cultural and economic flow is decades older)... Americans hadn't had this problem previously because the global metacultural phenomenon had been heavily America-biased. People were concerned about McDonald's crapping up in Russia, but concerns about other people's ideas blending with the American way of doing things were dismissed mostly, I think, because a lot of Americans just assumed their way was the best way so it would dominate.

But that was never going to happen, and the cross-national mixing has been passing the inflection point where things that seem anti-American to those disconnected from the rest of the world seem perfectly natural to those deeply plugged in.

Re:Is everything falling apart? by remarkEon on Saturday April 30, 2022 @03:48PM (#31218701)
The "global" vs "local" dynamic also maps pretty well to those other issues you referred to - class dynamics, cosmopolitanism, tech savviness ... all of these make a strong inference where, if you fall into the category where you are upper class and cosmopolitan and are optimistic about technology, you are very likely to be in favor of a more global approach to managing civilization. Hell, it even maps (though less cleanly) to things that at first glance you'd assume are completely unrelated, like thinking the pandemic originated in a lab in Wuhan.

It is worth noting, however, that there is strong push back in the broader west against the more aggressive American cosmopolitan ideas that half of the country here finds alien. Macron in particular seems to recognize this trend[1]. He seems like a genuine outlier, though, and his skepticism may be an artifact of the general weakness of the French left. This is to say, that while these ideas look and feel alien to ~50% or more of each country in question, they still did, in fact, emerge and gain prominence in America first and were then exported.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa...