(Part 2) Top products from r/ShitAmericansSay

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We found 20 product mentions on r/ShitAmericansSay. We ranked the 90 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.

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Top comments that mention products on r/ShitAmericansSay:

u/antonivs · 6 pointsr/ShitAmericansSay

> Can you disagree?

Of course, because your position is false, not to mention ridiculous. The claim that the US has "yet to develop much of its own culture" is simple ignorance. I can only assume that you're merely doing what this sub criticizes Americans for doing, talking about something of which you have no direct experience or education.

> My point is that American refusal to just describe themselves as American, without all these ridiculous qualifiers, is part of why America continues to lack a distinct culture.

Your point is invalid in both premise and conclusion. You're taking anecdotes about silly behavior from a circlejerk sub, ignorantly extrapolating that to encompass an entire population of 320 million people consisting of probably hundreds of diverse cultures, to reach a conclusion that's every bit as silly as the silliest things Americans are made fun of for in this sub. Hence my original comment, this is just shityuropoorsay - you're the precise equivalent of what you're mocking.

There are many different cultures in the US, varying significantly by region. The book American Nations identifies 11 regional cultures in North America, and those are just broad regional divisions - there's significant variation within each of those. An example of an area where there's a great deal of local cultural variation is Louisiana, but there are many other similar regions throughout the US. The local culture in particular areas is often a variation of a larger regional culture, for example the Culture of Georgia is a variation of Southern US culture.

The US attitudes about ancestry and ethnicity have perfectly reasonable roots in the fact that many people in the US are in families that immigrated quite recently, often in living memory. For those families, their X-American identity is a real feeling that has to do with where they or their parents or grandparents came from, and the culture they brought with them and passed on, to some extent, to their children. It's not some sort of attempt to make themselves feel special, it's who they are.

Yes, you then also get people who try to turn their distant ancestry which is no longer actually remembered in the above sense into some sort of claim on the culture and identity of countries they've never visited. That's quite rightly made fun of here, because it's silly. But drawing broad conclusions from such behavior, while simultaneously lacking any real knowledge of what you're drawing conclusions about, leads to nonsense.

If you study cultures in the US, you'll find that the history of migration in a given area has a strong influence on the culture - the Louisiana example above is a good one. But the fact that these cultures are strongly influenced from the culture of earlier immigrants doesn't mean there's no unique local culture. Quite the opposite. When people live in a place for centuries, they develop a culture - that's just how human societies work. Your ignorance of those cultures doesn't mean they don't exist.

u/Icef34r · 9 pointsr/ShitAmericansSay

> Thanks for the link about the Solutrean Hypothesis. It's not very convincing, but it's interesting to speculate about alternate histories.

It's an interesting hypotesis but has almost no basis. It is fundamented on some similarities between Solutrean and Clovis lithic assemblages. It particularly relies on a specific flaking thechnique called overshot flaking which is present in both Solutrean and Clovis and almost nowhere else. It is a very weak connection because while it is a very rare technique, it is perfecly possible that it developed independently. On the other hand, it has two strong flaws: one is that there is a gap of 4.000 years between one culture and the other, and the other is that genetic evidence points towards East Asia as the most probable origin of the American first settlers.

The theory itself has almost no basis, but the scientific debate is interesting. And the book written by its two main supporters (Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford) is one of the best books about Clovis culture and Clovis lithic technology ever written: Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America's Clovis Culture

u/TheSciences · 12 pointsr/ShitAmericansSay

> yet when it comes to music, suddenly popularity becomes a marker of quality.

It's a bit of a tangent – and you might be completely across this anyway – but plenty has been written and spoken about the collapse of traditional "low" and "high" cultural distinctions, with instead a focus on popularity as the indicator of worth, validity, etc. I really enjoyed this book on the subject.

u/Chive · 1 pointr/ShitAmericansSay

I've used Rick Stein's court bouillon recipe for poaching skate and I would highly recommend it- bonus is you can use the liquid as the base for a stew after you've poached fish in it.

I've found his book English Seafood Cookery helped me a great deal when trying to work out what the hell to do with fish.

u/Bentonitelite · 3 pointsr/ShitAmericansSay

I read it awhile ago in a book about the region. I'm pretty sure it was either City of Gold or Inside The Kingdom

u/narrenburg · 9 pointsr/ShitAmericansSay

> Rich people aren't being represented obviously!

This book, outlined in this article and summarized in this video says otherwise. It is an inevitability of liberal democracy.

^^I'm ^^agreeing ^^with ^^you, ^^btw.

u/best_of_badgers · 18 pointsr/ShitAmericansSay

Christian here!

The basic principle of our faith is that Christ is God and became man to (somehow) defeat sin and death through his execution and resurrection. Ethics are secondary to that.

Some varieties of Christians don't think ethics should have any role in the faith (as they'd be "law" and not "grace"), so will mostly pick up their ethics from secular sources. The teachings of Christ are interpreted as unachievable goals that are genuinely good, but are intended to make you see that you can't free yourself from the effects of sin by your own efforts. This was a mostly unintended side effect of the more hardcore parts of the Reformation.

Other varieties think that's all mostly wrong. It's one of those "Eh I can see what they're saying, but no" types of things. However, they still generally will take a prudent approach to the teachings of Christ, which often demand a sort of vague perfection. It's not the teachings that are confusing, it's how to reliably translate them into reality. Even in the Bible, St Paul gave different advice to different churches. And how do you translate Jesus's apparent pacifism when it's the Army general who becomes a Christian? How do you navigate real life situations where both options result in bad outcomes? Do you violate the Ten Commandments and lie to Nazis if it saves Jews? That sort of thing.

Roman Catholics have (mostly) adopted a mashup of Jesus's teachings, the Ten Commandments, and Aristotle's classical virtue ethics in their attempt at it. They still have a several hundred page document (the Catechism) that goes over the basics.

And but so, there's never been a Christian ethic that all Christians have adopted. Charity to the poor and oppressed approaches that, though, being probably the oldest Christian ethic. Most Christians today still think that's very important, if not primary.

Conservative American Christians still think they're being good to the poor. They do give a lot to charities, and they really do believe that laissez-faire capitalism really is the best shot the poor have to improve their lives in the long term.

ETA: Oxford's Very Short Introductions series, which I love, has a great volume on Christian Ethics. Like most of the VSIs, it's rather dense and doesn't shy away from using technical terms after introducing them once, but it's a great overview of what exactly might constitute "Christian ethics". It's written partly in response to claims by Sam Harris that Christianity is inherently unethical.

u/The-Adjudicator · 8 pointsr/ShitAmericansSay

>Once routine settles in, people become lazy, and laziness leads to accidents…

Exactly. This happens pretty much everywhere. Hospitals, airplanes, etc etc.

There is an interesting book regarding this called "The checklist manifesto"

u/tydestra · 1 pointr/ShitAmericansSay

Blacks in Europe were free before and after the start of the slave trade and it is only the boom of the slave trade which enslaved people with black skin into slavery forever. As the slave trade was in it zenith, there is documentation of free slaves arriving from the Americas to settle in European cities and took up trades. Some became musicians, writers, painters, scholars.

While some worked in houses and the like, they weren't slaves in the way one would think of slaves in the Americas. They were servants, seen as people, although inferior/subservient, and not slaves/farm equipment/beasts.

If you want to read more on this, you can start with this book and work your way from there.

Or you can go here, I just found this and am editing in the link:
http://afroeurope.blogspot.com/2010/08/history-of-black-people-in-europe.html

u/Brace_For_Impact · 11 pointsr/ShitAmericansSay

Nazi Germany actually sent lawyers to the United States to learn about the racist legal system in the US to help them create their own. When they returned other Nazis didn't believe some of the laws could be so racist like anti miscegenation laws.

https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505057658&sr=8-1&keywords=hitler%27s+american+model

u/HoorayInternetDrama · -13 pointsr/ShitAmericansSay

> Okay, but how much Irish?

Sorry to rain on your parade here, but you can test yourself. I had my DNA analysed by 23andme for funsies and this is my genetic makeup.

There's a book on this subject called "Blood of the Isles" which talks about how a professor make a genetic map of the British isles.

u/Hungpowshrimp · 1 pointr/ShitAmericansSay

There is a fantastic book on that very subject. No one ever talks about the political climate and what the government was actually on about during the war.


Worth the read, and the author did an AMA years ago which was quite interesting as well.

u/carkur · 1 pointr/ShitAmericansSay

I completely understand that! I’m trying to focus my masters on it, but I’m not sure how “in vogue” the theory is right now. My focus would be on the relationship between civil religion and American evangelicals.

One book I expect would be fairly related but I’ve yet to dive into completely is [American Covenant](American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691147671/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_tCYIBb6H87ZES).

I imagine scholarship on the relationship between civil religion and the trump administration specifically will be rolling out in the next few years.

u/Ater_Deus · 12 pointsr/ShitAmericansSay

Do people really believe that the destroying both Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the only way to get the Japanese emperor to surrender?

The Japanese recognized that defeat was inevitable. By summer 1945 Japanese Navy was unable to conduct major operations, oil supplies were running short, Japanese factories were struggling or unable to keep up with military demands.

Japan was provably ready and willing to surrender.

Nothing can excuse the deaths of so many civilians.

Further info for those interested. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam by Gar Alperovitz.