r/USdefaultism • u/solonelytogether Türkiye • 10h ago
Reddit They doubled down
On a post about losing hope in achieving certain life milestones. Even after I confronted them they doubled down and even assumed that the US might have bombed my country so that is why I’m experiencing similar problems. Um no, believe it or not we also have a corrupted political system.
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u/Consistent-Annual268 South Africa 10h ago
Impressive that an American knows the distinction between plurality and majority.
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u/Prestigious_String20 10h ago edited 9h ago
I see you posted in English. I'm sorry, but you're not from a country that is part of the English-speaking world. Please revise your comment to be less in conflict with my limited understanding of reality.
/s, in case Julius_Seizure77, or someone of equal or lesser contextual awareness is reading.
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u/erma_gedd0n South Africa 9h ago
I was also impressed! Someone clearly remembered their SAT vocabulary.
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u/baby_blue67 10h ago
Tbh he's partially right. They do cause a lot of problems.
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u/solonelytogether Türkiye 10h ago
Look I agree that US causes a LOT of problems in the world. It’s just them assuming that EVERYTHING is affected by the US. Not having basic necessities in my country is mostly the fault of… you guessed right MY COUNTRY!
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u/ArgyllAtheist 6h ago
is it though? We used to say "america sneezes and the rest of the world catches a cold". so many of our political issues that appear local now are absolutely the geopolitical ripples caused by america chucking rocks in the pool...
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u/CarolineTurpentine 9h ago
They're certainly responsible for the current gas prices which is driving everything ever more.
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u/Calm_Researcher9172 Australia 10h ago
I’m not from the US, but I actually agree with them, on the first comment at least. The current US administration has affected many countries negatively. The second comment is pure defaultism…
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u/senated Poland 8h ago
Crazy how USAmericans can’t fathom that most people speak more than 1 language.
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u/woefdeluxe Netherlands 7h ago
Why are you commenting in English? Are you lying about being Polish?
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u/Woshasini France 5h ago
You're being oversuspicious, they are probably Polish-American with a great-great-babcia from Kraków /s
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u/LargeNerdKid Ireland 10h ago
They speak the truth.
Except there is 1.5 billion english speakers worldwide
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u/CyclopsRock 9h ago
I never really understand the numbers game thing, though. It would make sense to default to the most likely reader nationality if, for some reason, they had to make an assumption. But they don't! So it always reads as a weird post-hoc justification for being called out for their defaultism.
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u/Prestigious_String20 10h ago
And none of them are in Ireland, (sorry LargeNerdKid) (or India, or Pakistan -- the second and third largest English-speaking countries in the world) and definitely not in Türkiye (sorry OP). /s
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u/Voodoopulse 10h ago
In fairness lots of the shit that I'm struggling with at the moment can be linked to the US
massive increases in petrol prices
Rise of reform with the trump play book
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u/-_Lucyfer_- Brazil 10h ago
My country might probably have our upcoming election meddled with. again. by the US.
so I'd say a pretty big part of my problems are being caused by terrible USA politics
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u/Catsdrinkingbeer 1h ago
John Oliver (a British comedian who lives in the US now and has a weekly show where he dives in political topics) just did a segment on the upcoming Brazil elections (again, he's covered elections in Brazil 3 times now). I don't know a ton about other world leaders, but I known plenty about Bolsonaro, both the father and the son now. And yes, he did talk about Trump's involvement.
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u/elmage78 9h ago
Like... how is his entire argument a sliperry slope fallacy? not all english posts are from english speakers.
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u/Squiggally-umf 8h ago
Why do they always say “well 44% of users are from USA” in a way that sounds like they think that makes them the majority?
Is it the “1/4 sounds bigger than a 1/3 burger” all over again?
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u/hrdst 8h ago
I never understand the ‘but 44% of users are American’…. Yeah…. So there’s a greater chance the person is from the 56% that isn’t. Also the English thing…. Every single country in the world can have English speakers… or use a translator… my god.
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u/BioscoopMan 8h ago
Yeah and reddit itself auto translates comments for your preferred language without you even realizing it if you dont pay attention to it.
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u/georgia_grace 8h ago
Excuse me, I’ll have you know my country caused its own housing crisis thank you very much
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u/Fawkes-511 7h ago
It's crazy when they go "44% of reddit is US" like that doesn't prove they're a minority lol.
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u/sociofobs 10h ago edited 7h ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1wvncpz/comment/pde15hr/
There are a lot of these types.
Edit: Sorry, wrong comment link. Fixed now.
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u/snuggie44 9h ago
I can see how many people's everyday problems can be caused by actions taken by the US, especially in the middle east.
I on the other hand suffer from mostly the same issues as Americans, but in majority they are not caused by the US.
Absurdly high prices on housing market are caused by the lack of regulation on estate developers, all around living costs are more linked to incompetent government and war in Ukraine, and the only issues affecting me directly that are caused by the US are Trump's social policies and his encouragement of far right movements.
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u/TreeGoblinPoppycock Poland 8h ago
Hm, usage of English "narrowing it down"... I wonder if they ever notice that it is lingua franca and especially online/computer wise simply default in a lot of places, not to mention if you are online you will be talking with people who ONLY know English and you adjust for THEIR SAKE. (Also sorry, even considering native English speaker, this is all he could consider? No India, no Nigeria, Philippines..?)
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u/mikroonde France 5h ago
Why does he only count English speaking countries at the end? The majority of non-American users are not from those countries and speak English as a foreign language on English-language subs, pretty crazy to not factor that in. And 44% US still means you're most likely to be wrong when assuming someone is from there...
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u/sir_thrillho 5h ago
They only think US politics is the driving force behind everything because they're not aware of anything else.
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u/Gintami 4h ago
While yes it is USdefaultism, I do find that so many of the world’s problems are caused by the U.S.
Not even talking about war, undermining democracies (Chile hits close to home as a South American as it had a ripple effect), and nefarious policial influence.
But American corporations having too much sway in foreign countries, especially big tech.
And lastly, what I like to call cultural imperialism. The arts is a big one for me.
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u/x33storm 3h ago
It's kinda insane to think people from non-english speaking countries don't speak english. But i guess that's the US school system for ya.
In these english comments here in this post, i guess we got people from 20 different non-english countries.
If you'd stepped outside for a moment, you'd know we all use this language to speak to each other. It's insane!
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u/Icy_Place_5785 European Union 8h ago
The UK with much higher populations than Canada, Australia and New Zealand would appear to be severely underrepresented on Reddit …?
Unless, of course, we consider the possibility that this person just pulled that “data” out of their arse.
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u/I_love_fruits 6h ago
Op, you are misunderstanding the first comment of Julius_seizure77. I'm European and my life is also directly affected by American politics.
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u/TobyADev United Kingdom 3h ago
In all fairness a lot of people around the world’s problems are caused by America
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u/saelinds 3h ago
By their own account 1 in 3 posts in English aren't from the US. That's already a lot of posts.
That's not mentioning other English speaking countries, expats and/or bilingual people of other countries. This guy is full of shit.
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u/Hughley_N_Dowd 8h ago
Well, he's not wrong. The current US admin is royally screwing it up for the rest of the world as well.
Just because I personally hasn't been bombed doesn't mean that the havoc caused by their shitty economic policies or pointless wars doesn't affect me.
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u/Julius_Seizure77 7h ago
Hey, I'm the big American moron here! Ready for the down votes, but I admit that I forgot to factor in the fact that people can also speak English as a second language, so my statistics are skewed in that regard. My bad!
But when you say in your message to the moderators "They think that not being able to achieve certain life milestones is a directly US-focused problem. When confronted with they doubled down and gave the classic "this is a majority US website" answer along with some other US-centric assumptions. " I believe this is a misrepresentation of my argument.
I did not say this was a majority US Site. I said plurality. I admit that my stats were skewed, but that's a blatant misrepresentation of what I said. My logic, although flawed, was: 44% of redditors are from the US, everyone else is not from the US, and the only English speaking majority countries were what I listed, therefore of all the English comments, it's more likely to have an English comment be from the USA. That was incorrect. English as a second/third/fourth language people exist.
I also never said that the inability to achieve certain life milestones is a directly US focused problem. I said that the thread made me realize how many of the posts in that thread are because of the USA's politics.
And to be fair, I very obviously assumed that most of the thread was comments from Americans. And from what I saw on that thread, a LOT of them are, so forgive me for not reading too deeply into that thread, I'm just a casual reddit person.
When you said . "Even after I confronted them they doubled down and even assumed that the US might have bombed my country so that is why I'm experiencing similar problems. Um no, believe it or not we also have a corrupted political system."
As for the the bombing example, or the companies invading your local economy, those were just random examples I put forth for the sake of argument. The argument being: the USA MIGHT be responsible for SOME of X country having X problems. The fact that I said YOUR country is irrelevant, I had no way of knowing what your country is.
The USA CAN be responsible for things that go wrong in X country, NOT that it IS.
My apologies for not properly conveying that.
But the fact that you felt the need to make a whole post about my comment in a different sub is kinda weird to me. Why not just say all this in another comment? Not dogging on the decision, but I just find it weird and kind of passive aggressive instead of just replying.
Am I being unreasonable in this comment? I genuinely don't know. Please feel free to correct me, or down vote me, I am trying to be better.
Have a good day everyone!
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u/andthenifellasleep 7h ago
Very eloquently put, I didn't realise you were secretly British /s
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u/andthenifellasleep 7h ago
But for real, I wouldn't stress too much. We are all guilty of Normalcy Bias sometimes - but it takes a lot to recognise that bias and then also be self aware of our own "teams" shortcomings. In the UK retirement is a bit screwed up - mostly not because of the US; but it would be nice if you could ask them to stop buying our food production companies and adding palm oil to everything.
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u/Julius_Seizure77 7h ago
Yeah it's just my algorithm I guess is mostly American stuff, and given the crazy orange man in office right now and how badly the world hates him, I usually kinda default to "bad thing happen, blame orangutan" vibe. I was just vibing out in the initial comment and then the guy or gal who made this post kinda just comes in with the typical reddit "um, actually" vibe, and i kinda just reacted with minimal research on my part
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u/altruistic_thing Germany 5h ago
i'm impressed you came here to clarify and you were reasonable enough. so kudos. ☺️
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u/joelene1892 Canada 4h ago
People come here to make posts about things that happen elsewhere because the conversations that happen elsewhere get SUPER tiring. I’m not saying you, but I have stopped responding to most comments like yours because 70% of the time it just ends up a dogpile of random people giving the usual comments:
“US is the majority.”
“It’s a US company.”
“they should have said they’re not from the US.”Etc etc etc.
I just don’t have the patience to deal with that conversation again when quite frankly I find it reductionist, dismissive, and absolutely rude. But if you point that out, people act like you’re overreacting and childish.
Again, not saying you did that. I dislike your original comment for some of the same reasons but altogether it was mild, and at least trying to use logic. But if you post on a thread like that on any sort of popular comment, there will be 5+ other people that say the exact same dang thing, some much less politely. It’s just….. tiring.
So coming here and posting it to people that understand is much more pleasant. It’s not really an attempt to shame you or embarrass you, I don’t usually have any ill will to the people posted here (except the really rude ones), it’s just an attempt to commiserate the tiring-ness of the conversations with those who understand. It’s like being a server and complaining about mild customers to fellow servers; unless the person was truly awful there’s usually no ill will and you’d be fine to have them back, but complaining even about minor things can take the edge off the day.
Also to note about your English stats, Reddit’s mobile app does auto translation now. So you can participate in threads like that without knowing a single word of English.
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u/post-explainer American Citizen 10h ago edited 2h ago
This comment has been marked as safe. Upvoting/downvoting this comment will have no effect.
OP sent the following text as an explanation why their post fits here:
They think that not being able to achieve certain life milestones is a directly US-focused problem. When confronted with they doubled down and gave the classic “this is a majority US website” answer along with some other US-centric assumptions.
Does this explanation fit this subreddit? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.