Claude Fischer at Made in America offered some data speaking to the idea that Americans are especially patriotic. That they, in other words, are more likely than citizens of other nations to think that “We’re Number One!”
Fischer provides some evidence by Tom Smith at the International Social Science Programme (ISSP; Tom’s book). The ISSP, Fischer explains…
…involves survey research institutions in dozens of countries asking representative samples of their populations the same questions. A couple of times the ISSP has had its members ask questions designed to tap respondents’ pride in their countries… One set of questions asked respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with five statements such as “I would rather be a citizen of [my country] than of any other country in the world” and “Generally, speaking [my country] is a better country than most other countries.”
Smith put responses on a scale from 5 to 25, with 25 being the most patriotic. Here are the results from some of the affluent, western democracies (on a shortened scale of 5 to 20):
As Fischer says, “Americans were #1 in claiming to be #1.” Well, sort of. Americans were the most patriotic among this group. They turned out to be the second most patriotic of all countries. Venezuela beat us.
(In any case, what struck me wasn’t the fact that the U.S. is so patriotic, but that many other of these countries were very patriotic as well! The U.S. is certainly no outlier among this group. In fact, it looks like all of these countries fall between 14 and 18 on this 20-point scale. Statistically significant, perhaps, but how meaningful of a difference is it?)
Fischer goes on to ask what’s good and bad about pride and closes with the following concern for U.S. Americans:
We believe that we are #1 almost across the board, when in fact we are far below number one in many arenas – in health, K-12 education, working conditions, to mention just a few. Does our #1 pride then blind us to the possibility that we could learn a thing or two from other countries?
The VW Bug was introduced in 1938 for economical, powerful, fast, and sustained driving on the German Autobahn. Later it jumped shores and became an icon of the California surfer lifestyle:
Feminized products, however, don’t sell well with men (or some women) because femininity is stigmatizing. Accordingly, the Beetle is re-vamping its image; it’s getting a “sex change” for 2011. Brit S. pointed us to a story in the Anaheim Examiner detailing this surgery. Jim Cherry writes:
New Beetle is about to get a testosterone injection. A mean-looking chopped top, 200 H.P. motor, widened stance, and a larger interior will transform the quintessential chick car into a rock-hard rock star.
So being mean-looking, wider, and larger (with a Porsche engine) are all equated with masculinity, a characteristic that will supposedly improve the cars appeal to men (and non-girly women). Here’s what the new testosterone-injected Beetle will look like (in red, of course):
Mitchel Stein sent in a video a woman took of the “USA” section of the ethnic food aisle in a German grocery store. It’s an interesting look at what types of foods/brands are associated (at least in this store) with the U.S.:
I suspect that a lot of citizens of the U.S. wouldn’t necessarily think of those items if they tried to think of quintessentially American foods, much like foods defined as Chinese often aren’t found in China (e.g., the fortune cookie). It’s a good example of the social construction of national foods — that is, a set of food items become associated with a particular culture or nation, which may or may not align with the foods members of that culture most prefer or eat most frequently.
Also, apparently we in the U.S. are most associated with processed sweet/dessert items, and BBQ sauce.
Though I was super excited to see Head Country BBQ sauce, since it’s made in northern Oklahoma!
War is always an opportunity for someone, many someones, to make money. A recently closed ebay auction sold a pair of Converse shoes manufactured and sold during World War II. If I understand the description right, the shoes were sold to overseas servicemen who wanted to “stomp” on the Nazis; alternatively, they were sold to Nazis (I think the former).
The shoes:
And, the kicker, the soles:
UPDATE! In the comments Joe C. linked to a website, aryanwear.com, where you can buy these:
At BoingBoing, German professor Michael Shaughnessy offered his insights regarding how Americans and Germans see and talk about color differently. Among other things, he noted how few foods in the U.S. are described as blue. Blueberries, of course. And blue cheese, I suppose. (Or “bleu” cheese, as TheophileEscargot points out.) But little or nothing else.
In contrast, Shaughnessy suggested that many more foods are described as blue in southern Germany. Notably, blue onions, blue grapes, and blue cabbage (pictured):
In northern Germany, however, “Blaukraut” is “Rotkohl.” That is, the same color (“blau”) is described as red “(“rot”). He ponders whether “red onions [in the U.S.] are truly red.”
He continues, “Words, impacted by the visual, often vary at the crossroads between colors.” In other words, perception may be influenced by language and culture. Where does blue end and red begin?
German wikipedia tells me that the south/north naming difference results from the difference in prepararation of the food. in northern germany it is usually prepared with acidic substances like vinegar giving it a more reddisch color, thus “Rotkraut” (very good with apples), in southern germany sugar or natron is the ingredient of choice, which enhances the blue of the original purple color, hence “Blaukraut”.
To recap, jazz music was labeled “Neggernmusik.” Attributed (rightly) to blacks and Jews, it was considered pollution to German sensibilities. Jazz lovers, jazz musicians, and swing dancers were all sent to concentration camps.
Nevertheless, Undercover Black Man describes how Goebbels saw potential in the music and, so, “weaponized” it to “screw with British and American minds.”
Charlie and His Orchestra recorded jazz standards, but changed the lyrics to “anti-British, anti-American, anti-Communist or antisemitic messages.”
The songs were broadcast via medium-wave and short-wave radio to Great Britain and North America. It was all about taunting and demoralizing the Allies… and trash-talking Winston Churchill and F.D.R. by name.
In this clip, the Orchestra, covering Goody Goody, is accompanied by WWII photographs. The propaganda starts at 1:04:
Will Wilkinson posted the following two figures, both featuring data from the World Values Survey, and asked his readers to join him in speculating as to the difference.
This first figure shows that, across several industrialized countries, tolerance for homosexuality has been going up (or, more reflectively of the image, intolerance is going down) over time:
This suggests that countries are becoming more liberal and permissive. However, this second figure shows that tolerance for prostitution has progressed much less. The overall trend is towards more tolerance, but with significant backlashes and a much gentler slope downwards.
What gives?
Wilkinson offers five possible explanations:
(1) Being versus doing. People just are homosexual, and it’s not up to us if we are. Prostitution on the other hand is an activity we can more easily choose to avoid.
(2) The cash nexus. Some things just shouldn’t be sold, and sex is one of them. The problem is the money not the sex, and the law reflects that. Homosexuality, like sexuality generally, is mostly expressed outside the cash nexus.
(3) Related: Exploitative versus non-exploitative. Prostitution is a low-status line of work that people avoid if they have better alternatives. Taking advantage of the fact that people don’t have better alternatives is exploitative and demeaning.
(4) Sexist paternalism. Homosexuality is (wrongly) primarily conceived popularly as a man-on-man sort of thing. Prostitution is (rightly) primarily conceived popularly as a man-on-woman sort of thing. Men (and their virtue) don’t need protection from men, but women (and their virtue) need protection from men.
(5) Marketing. There has been an ongoing, effectively carried-out campaign to de-stigmatize/normalize homosexuality. There has been no similar effort to destigmatize/normalize sex work, so the reputation of prostitution continues to languish.
Reinhardt was a Roma jazz musician. During World War II both Roma and jazz musicians were targeted by the Nazi regime. Over a million Roma were exterminated for presumed racial inferiority and jazz was believed to combine the worst of Blacks and Jews (i.e., “musical race defilement”). Just listening to a jazz record could get you sent to a concentration camp.
Reinhardt, however, enjoyed the most lucrative period of his career during the war, while living and playing openly among Nazi soldiers.
The Germans used Paris basically as their rest-and-relaxation center, and when the soldiers came, they wanted wine and women and song. And to many of them, jazz was the popular music, and Django was the most famous jazz musician in Paris… And it was really a golden age of swing in Paris, with these [Romas] living kind of this grand irony.
Reinhardt, then, survived because the Nazis loved jazz music, even as Hitler censored the music and, on his orders, people who dared to listen to, dance to, or play it were encamped and members of the groups who invented it were murdered. Irony indeed.
For more on Reinhardt, jazz, and World War II, here is a clip from a documentary on Reinhardt’s remarkable talent, career, and luck:
How have adults and young people weathered the worldwide economic downturn? This two-minute 12-second video shows that young people have been harder hit by joblessness in almost all OECD countries:
I recently heard stories on two of my favorite podcasts, Radio Lab and Quirks and Quarks, that got me thinking about how inertia and reliance on technology can inhibit our ability to find easy, cheap solutions to problems.
Story One
The first story, at Radio Lab, was about a nursing home in Düsseldorf, Germany. As patients age, nursing homes risk that they will become disoriented and “escape” the nursing home. Often, they are trying to return to homes in which they lived previously, desperate that their children, partners, or even parents are worried and waiting for them.
When they catch the escapee in time, the patient is often extremely upset and an altercation ensues. If they don’t catch them in time, the patient often hops onto public transportation and is eventually discovered by police. The first outcome is, of course, traumatizing for everyone involved and the second outcome is very dangerous for the patient. Most nursing homes fix this problem by confining patients who’ve began to wander off to a locked ward and resigning themselves to physically or chemically restraining a desperate and emotionally-wrought patient.
An employee at the Benrath Senior Center came up with an alternative solution: a fake bus stop placed right outside of the front doors of the nursing home. Here it is:
The fake bus stop does two wonderful things:
(1) The first thing a potential escapee does when they decide to “go home” is find a bus stop. So, patients who take off usually get no further than the first bus stop that they see. ”Where did Mrs. Schmidt go?” “Oh, she’s at the bus stop.” In practice, it worked tremendously. This meant that many disoriented patients no longer needed to be kept in locked wards.
(2) The bus stop diffuses the sense of panic. If a delusional patient decided that she needed to go home immediately because her children were all alone and waiting for her, the attendant didn’t need to restrain her or talk her out of it, she simply said, “Oh, well… there’s the bus stop.” The patient would go sit and wait. Knowing that she was on her way home, she would relax and, given her diminished cognition, she would eventually forget why she was there. A little while later the attendant could go out and ask her if she wanted to come in for tea. And she would say, “Ok.”
Listening to this, I thought it was just about the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard.
Story Two
The second story, from Quirks and Quarks, was regarding whether it is true that dogs can smell cancer. It turns out that they can. It appears that dogs can smell lots of types of cancer, but people have been working specifically with training them to detect melanomas, or skin cancers. It turns out that a dog can be trained, in about three to six weeks, to detect melanomas (even some invisible to the naked eye) with an 80-90% accuracy rate. If we could build a machine that was able to detect the same chemical that dogs are reacting to (and we don’t know, at this time, what that is) it would have to be the size of a refrigerator to match the sensitivity of a dog’s nose. When it comes to detecting melanomas, dogs are better diagnosticians that our best humans and our most advanced machines.
This 2 1/2 minute video, from 60 minutes, is of a dog being trained to detect bladder cancer by sniffing urine samples:
But do you see dogs in our medical centers anytime soon? What would the malpractice and hospital insurers say!? Do you think people, even those not scared of dogs, would trust one? Is it because we fetishize “authority” and “technology” to the point where we feel more comfortable getting our diagnosis from a man or a machine, even if men and machines are inferior to the task and wildly expensive in comparison?
Please feel free to disagree with me in the comments, but I don’t see dogs in our medical centers anytime soon. I do think, however, that there is some really wonderful possibilities here to deliver low cost cancer detection to communities who may not have access to clinical care. A mobile cancer detection puppy bus? I’d go for a good sniffin’.
Ok, so we know that, in the U.S., full-time female workers make about 85 cents for every dollar made by full-time male workers. But how does the U.S. compare to other countries? This graph, sent in by Katrin from the OECD Fact Blog, shows that we do better than some, but worse than most developed countries:
We do as badly as Switzerland, Finland, and Portugal. We do better than the U.K., Canada, Germany and, especially, Japan and Korea. But we do significantly worse than 13 other countries… with Belgium, New Zealand, and Poland leading the way with the smallest wage gap (at 10% or smaller).
Katrin sent us a great figure comparing the rate of socioeconomic mobility across several OECD nations. Using educational attainment and income as measures, the value (between zero and one) indicates how strongly parental socioeconomic status predicts a child’s socioeconomic status (a 1 is a perfect correlation and a zero would be no correlation).
The figure shows that Great Britain, the U.S., and Italy have a near 50% correlation rate. So, in these countries, parents status predicts about 50% of the variance in children’s outcomes. In contrast, Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, and Canada have much lower correlations. People born in the countries on the left of this distribution, then, have higher socioeconomic mobility than people born in the countries on the right. Merit, presumably, plays a greater role in your educational and class attainment in these cases.
Emily D., Jeff S., and Dmitriy T.M. have all sent in links to a series of billboards, recently put up in Atlanta, that suggest that abortion is a form of genocide against African Americans:
The fact that abortion is highly politicized in the United States, deeply connected to feminism (but not race or class movements), and framed as a contest between “life” and “choice” seems natural to most Americans. Indeed, it’s hard for many Americans to imagine a world in which the procedure is less politicized or debated differently. But the politics of abortion in the U.S. is not the only kind of abortion politics that could exist. Myra Marx Ferree‘s award-winning book comparing abortion politics in the U.S. and Germany, Shaping Abortion Discourse, is a great example (with Gamson, Gerhards, and Rucht).
So, whether you agree or disagree with the claims in these billboards, they nicely jolt us out of our acceptance of abortion politics as is. How might thinking about abortion as a race issue or a class issue change the debate?
NEW! (Mar. ’10): Dmitriy T.M. let us know about this billboard in Poland, sponsored by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, that connects abortion to Hitler (found at Opposing Views). The text reads, “Abortion for Polish women introduced by Hitler on March 9, 1943.” It was put up in time for International Women’s Day on March 8th.
I’m putting it after the jump–it has images of bloody fetuses and might not be safe for some workplaces.
Below are three examples of the caricature of Jews promoted by Nazi Germany. I borrowed them from this collection, where you can find many more if you scroll to the bottom (thanks to Kat, monosonic, and Lisa for the translations!).
Like the segregation laws characteristic of Jim Crow, soon after Hitler came to power in the U.S. Germany (oops) he began establishing legal segregation of Jews from Aryan Germans. The writing on the bench in this photo, taken in 1934, reads: “For Jews Only”:
The source explains that benches were segregated, with others reading “For Germans Only.”
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