« Foreigners Follow American News Stories Like Their Own, Listen To American Pop Music, And Watch Copious

« Foreigners follow American news stories like their own, listen to American pop music, and watch copious amounts of American television and film. […] Americans, too, stick to the U.S. The list of the 500 highest-grossing films of all time in the U.S., for example, doesn’t contain a single foreign film (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes in at 505th, slightly higher than Bee Movie but about a hundred below Paul Blart: Mall Cop). […]

How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path? And why is the U.S.—that globe-bestriding colossus with more than 700 overseas bases—so strangely isolated?

[…W]hen 600 or so journalists, media magnates, and diplomats arrived in Geneva in 1948 to draft the press freedom clauses for […] the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights […], definitional difficulties abounded. Between what the U.S. meant by “freedom of information” and what the rest of the world needed lay a vast expanse. For the American delegates, the question belonged to the higher plane of moral principle. But representatives of other states had more earthly concerns.

The war had tilted the planet’s communications infrastructure to America’s advantage. In the late 1940s, for example, the U.S. consumed 63% of the world’s newsprint supply; to put it more starkly, the country consumed as much newsprint in a single day as India did over the course of a year. A materials shortage would hamper newspaper production across much of the world into at least the 1950s. The war had also laid low foreign news agencies—Germany’s Wolff and France’s Havas had disappeared entirely—and not a single news agency called the global south home. At the same time, America’s Associated Press and United Press International both had plans for global expansion, leading The Economist to note wryly that the executive director of the AP emitted “a peculiar moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage.”

Back in Geneva, delegates from the global south pointed out these immense inequalities. […] But the American delegates refused the idea that global inequality itself was a barrier to the flow of information across borders. Besides, they argued, redistributive measures violated the sanctity of the press. The U.S. was able to strong-arm its notion of press freedom—a hybrid combining the American Constitution’s First Amendment and a consumer right to receive information across borders—at the conference, but the U.N.’s efforts to define and ensure the freedom of information ended in a stalemate.

The failure to redistribute resources, the lack of multilateral investment in producing more balanced international flows of information, and the might of the American culture industry at the end of the war—all of this amounted to a guarantee of the American right to spread information and culture across the globe.

The postwar expansion of American news agencies, Hollywood studios, and rock and roll bore this out. […] Meanwhile, the State Department and the American film industry worked together to dismantle other countries’ quota walls for foreign films, a move that consolidated Hollywood’s already dominant position.

[…A]s the U.S. exported its culture in astonishing amounts, it imported very little. In other words, just as the U.S. took command as the planetary superpower, it remained surprisingly cut off from the rest of the world. A parochial empire, but with a global reach. [And] American culture[’s] inward-looking tendencies [precede] the 1940s.

The media ecosystem in particular, Lebovic writes, [already] constituted an “Americanist echo chamber.” Few of the films shown in American cinemas were foreign (largely a result of the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry began imposing on itself in 1934; code authorities prudishly disapproved of the sexual mores of European films). Few television programs came from abroad […]. Few newspapers subscribed to foreign news agencies. Even fewer had foreign correspondents. And very few pages in those papers were devoted to foreign affairs. An echo chamber indeed, [… which] reduced the flow of information and culture from much of the rest of the world to a trickle. […]

Today is not the 1950s. [… But] America’s culture industry has not stopped its mercantilist pursuits. And Web 2.0 has corralled a lot of the world’s online activities onto the platforms of a handful of American companies. America’s geopolitical preeminence may slip away in the not-so-distant future, but it’s not clear if Americans will change the channel. »

— “How American Culture Ate the World”, a review of Sam Lebovic’s book A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization

Creation of the Superman

By Raymond W. Bernard

Menstruation Is Not Normal

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hushpuppy5-blog

1 year ago

One of the weapons abusive parents use against children is disgust. They might make comments on your appearance, weight, physical characteristics in a way that makes you ashamed to exist. They might look at you as if you’re the most repulsive thing they’ve ever seen. They might criticize your scent, your clothes, your hair, your state of dissaray, as if it’s something you deserve to be shamed for. They might bestow disgust over your actions, or expressions of pain. It’s possible for them to act the most repulsed and grossed out by you when you’re in pain, shaking, or crying. As if you’re so awful in every single way, that no human being should ever be around you or touch you except to hurt you.

But think about it, have you ever seen a kid that was disgusting to look at or be close to? They’re kids, they’re smaller, undeveloped, inexperienced, in a body that is not even fully grown to be criticized. Only human impulse is to protect and keep safe.

So were they really disgusted? If they still want you to obey them and to give them physical affection, unlikely. They know you’re just a child and there’s nothing wrong with you. The reasons for their ‘disgust’ run deeper.

Possibly they need to convince you that your body is disgusting so you’d feel too ashamed of it and cover it up. And hide the injuries they caused to it. Possibly they need an excuse to hurt or violate a child’s body; calling it disgusting is a very pathetic and transparent victim blaming technique. It’s also possible they want to control your body via shame – disgust hurts. Seeing others look at you like you’re the plague, when you’re just a child, hurts! They want you to ask 'what can I do so you’d stop hurting me? What do I need to do to stop being disgusting to you? So you wouldn’t hate me anymore?’ and this is what they use as leverage for control. Your pain and fear of being dehumanized.

And of course, they don’t want to see expressions of pain because it’s a consequence of their actions. They want to hurt a child but never experience themselves as the perpetrator who is now guilty for a child’s vocal suffering. And they want to neglect their responsibility to comfort and calm you. To reassure you and bring you back to feeling safe. So in the midst of causing pain to their kid, being responsible for suffering, being called to de-escalate the situation and comfort their pained child, what do they do? Pretend they’re busy being disgusted. Pretend their 'disgust’ is priority over everything they’ve done to you. Use disgust to hurt you one more time. Because you being hurt twice is better than them acknowledging they hurt you.

This type of abuse can alienate you from your body. Once it’s cemented in your mind that your body, you appearance, or your pain is the actual reason you’re being so despised, you will start to despise it too. You can become disgusted with your own body, or your actions and emotions, even your pain. But none of that is right. None of that was ever the fault of your body.

You were never disgusting. Nothing about your body, or your pain, was ever wrong or repulsive or worth doing damage to you. You were always okay just as you are. Your body did nothing wrong. Your pain was only ever human. We’re all the same, our bodies are human and warm and nothing about them is worth violating or hurting. We all long for affection and acceptance just the same. Nobody is disgusting, especially not children. There was never a reason to look at you that way, or to hurt you for the projected image of disgust that was never a part of who you are. You’re meant to be free of that shame. You’re okay as you are.

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hushpuppy5-blog

1 year ago

"Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can't we be honest about them? Especially moms. They're the most romanticized of anyone.

Moms are saints, angels by merely existing. NO ONE could possibly understand what it's like to be a mom. Men will never understand. Women with no children will never understand. No one but moms know the hardship of motherhood, and we non-moms must heap nothing but praise upon moms because we lowly, pitiful non-moms are mere peasants compared to the goddesses we call mothers.

Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

This book is difficult to read, but it has so many gems like this one. Of course, there are people still saying that she shouldn't talk like this about her mother, as if the person who abused her in more ways than one is owed that level of grace in death. If her mother was still alive, she still wouldn't be free to talk about her experiences without judgement. Mothers are deified just for popping out a few kids, even if they turn out to be severely maladjusted. Jeanette has already made it clear that she doesn't intend on having kids in the near future, which many people seem to have an issue with. They think having kids means that she has healed from her trauma, which is a sinister mode of thought. Her refusing to do so already make her more sensible in my eyes compared to the women who will still have kids and wind up continuing that cycle of abuse, rather than healing from it and staying childfree.

And it's funny how mothers and fathers can come online and complain about their kids and even outright say that they hate them just for being born (TikTok is a breeding ground for these attention-seekers). However, when their kids call them out on how terrible they were as parents (or will even cut them off completely) they aren't given that same freedom to do so without the backlash of being "ungrateful".

And people are wondering why the number of parricide cases have been sky-rocketing lately...

Andrea Dworkin complete works

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hushpuppy5-blog

3 years ago

Trans projection

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1 year ago

Claudia Bueno is an artist born in Venezuela, now based in the USA, whose light art installations will tease and tantalise all your senses. Bueno works with circuits and motors to create ethereal installations which play with light, sound and touch, creating immersive art which is psychedelic and magical in nature.