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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Not necessarily. Consider the following since 1900. Music - who invented Jazz (in it's many-splendored variants), Country and Western, Blues, and Rock N Roll (which has bounced back and forth across the Atlantic). The visual arts - (if you want to call them art). Say what you will about Hollywood and it's US cousins, they've had a bit of an impact on the rest of the world. Written word? With a serious tip of the hat to Wells and Verne, look what the US love of outlier has done to Science Fiction, an outlier literature if there ever was one. Shall I go on?
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Hollywood? Anyway, SF: I'll give you that. Jazz/blues too. But the other examples hardly seem like they're designed to rock the boat (well, RnR & sexuality perhaps, but I find it a bit hard to argue that this wasn't a societally accepted phenomenon. It's pretty hard to argue that hippies were ostracized.
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I concede the US is sexually hung-up, it always has been. I guess that's an artifact of wanting to get to the top of the heap, instead on top of each other...
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Curious. As Michel Foucault pointed out, those who talk about a topic most are those most obsessed with trying to control it (and are in turn controlled by it), and this goes especially the discourse on sexuality. Looking at strange (internet) phenomena like "Girls gone wild" and "spring break", pregnancy figures, as well as the world's largest porn industry, I'd say we're hardly the ones obsessed with getting on top of each other...
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Hmmm. Which system has created more breakthough technologies. Which system has an embedded system (greed driven!) to take new research and ideas and produce marketable products with them.
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Even if we might not be on top of the heap when it comes to engineering, a quick look at the list of
nobel laureates by country suggest we're not really all that much worse on the theoretical front; further, consider the fact that most of the world's biggest pharma companies are either german or the american wings of german pharmaceutical companies that were annexed by the US Govt during WWII. Sure, the phone might've been invented by an american, but the WWW was a CERN (or really an academic) inititiative.