Two party system. They can’t possibly represent everyone’s interests. Feels more like religion to me .
They don’t represent anyone’s interests except their own.
More precisely: The reason for the two party system: FPTP voting. The Brits do the same shit, and have the same problems.
The way it feels now (more cult-like than political and representing the populace) automatically and unavoidably stems from this FPTP issue. It automatically reduces the whole field to a reduced number of options, and while each reduction step takes longer than the last, this will ultimativley lead to a one-party state. It’s not a question of IF, it’s a question of WHEN and the REP program for 2025 to basically turn the government upside down to get unbeatable is trying to achieve this very single party state.
We do do the same and we do have the same problems, but it’s not so bad. We have at least 4 parties in parliament who have a voice and a number of others who are at least represented. It’s not good, but you have it worse
Basically because we were early adopters to modern republic systems. We tried something new because parliament was a bit too kingy for our tastes. But due to its simplicity it became really easy for two parties to wipe the floor with everyone else. And basically the only times they’ve changed was at the start and again shortly before our civil war. Neither party has ever had good reason to change the system, which would require massive agreement to change our constitution. So nobody does.
For example, politically I’m a syndicalist, but the democrats are pro union, pro environment, pro woman, and pro lgbt, all of which with a big asterisk but still I consistently vote for them because the greens didn’t win with Nader so they’re definitely going to lose now. So I dutifully vote Democrat because the only other party that has a chance is the republicans and they hate me and everything I believe in.
If we could do it again we’d do it better but in our defense we didn’t really have anyone to model off of
It’s an inevitable conclusion of our winner take all voting system. “The man with the most votes wins.” If 4 candidates run, and they get 22% 22% 16% and 40% of the vote, the man with 40% of the vote wins the race, and 60% of the population didn’t get the candidate they voted for.
Now imagine you’ve got a red, orange, green and blue party. Orange voters get together and decide "You know, the Red party’s platform is pretty similar to ours, what if we didn’t run a candidate next time and instead encouraged our voters to vote for the Red candidate instead? The blue candidate won with 40% of the vote, but our two parties put together would have 44%.
In the next election with three candidates, the red candidate wins 44% to 40%, prompting a similar conversation at the Green party headquarters. Soon enough there are two parties.
We’re one of if not the oldest representative democracy in the world today; our constitution is 250 years old, there’s some old bugs still in the code base.
As an American, I find it amazing that countries can have more than two active parties but also have a plurality voting system.
First Past the Post voting makes it more likely: https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo?si=X-8oz1K6iYxKhBeB
Tipping
Also, losing their shit over nudity
Puritans for the latter.
Bribery / slavery for the former.
We have tipping in Europe, but that’s mostly only done if you have a very good experience, not because you are expected to. Just pay your employees.
The whole Guns thing
What about it? Going to go bang, explosions are fun. Shooting people bad. What else did you want to know?
-signed Bleeding heart lefty with a gun
American lefty, which means you’d be at best centre right in any country with a healthcare system.
Why do you say that?
Oh I didn’t mean you specifically, it’s just a general comment on how policies of the European centre right parties are labelled in the American media. The Overton window is shifted to the left in Europe.
I was surprised to find out that abortion pre Rove versus Wade decision in the United States abortion was much more accessible than it was in the European Union.
Generally shifted to the left the overton window but not always.
For example, abortion.
Fair point.
I’m not familiar with RvW, but I’d suspect that in Europe it’s largely member state competency, and the more religious societies might have stricter rules. I know Poland is very prohibitive, and so was Ireland until very recently when a highly publicised human tragedy turned people against the rigid rules of the Church.
The short version is that USA was more left than all EU members states on abortion -
Sadly that WAS true. However I live in California and it still is true.
Left here in California AKA me is actually left for the European Union too. That’s why your original comment struck me as weird it’s because for me and my state which is bigger than many European countries in both size and economic might is as left as the European Union.
I do not believe the overton window shift applies to California only the USA
They will say of themselves as being Irish/Italian/other-european-nationality because their great-grandfather or great-grandmother came from there.
Okay let’s play a game. Let’s pretend you’re Italian, you said Italian, we’ll go with that. You speak Italian, you’re used to traditional Italian food, you believe in traditional Italian values. Things are done a certain way in Italy, and you’re used to it that way. Then one day, for whatever reason be it economic prospects, famine, war, whatever, you decide to leave Italy forever and board a ship bound for America. New Life in the New World and all that jazz.
What do you do when you step off the boat at Ellis Island? Do you:
A. Continue to speak your native language at least at home, become part of a community of fellow Italian emigrants, continue to cook and eat your traditional dishes…as best as you can with the ingredients available in this new hemisphere at any rate, do things the way you’re used to doing them, retaining your traditional values…or
B. Delete all that tedious “back in the old country” nonsense and instantly become an English speakin’ cheeseburger eatin’ stetson wearin’ rootin’ tootin’ howdy y’all.
Going with option A, huh? How original. We’ve run this experiment on real hardware literally hundreds of millions of times over the last 250 years and not a single immigrant has gone with Option B.
Okay so…now you’re an American. You’re still an Italian though. It’s who and what you are. You get married and have children. How do you raise those children? Do you…
A. Speak Italian to them at home, take them to the same church you were raised in, feed them the foods you were raised eating, teach them the same values you believe in, tell them the tales of your home country’s folklore as bedtime stories…or
B. Speak to them only in English, send them to the First Baptist Church, feed them apple sauce and happy meals, and raise them on Sesame Street and Marvel comics.
Going with option A again? Daring today, aren’t we? Your children are required to go to American public school. They’re formally taught to read, write, speak and understand English, and invariably put in the role of translating for their parents during doctors visits and the like. They’re taught American legends like the first thanksgiving with the pilgrims and Indians, of George Washington and that cherry tree. They grow up eating the food their parents invented out of necessity, like spaghetti and meatballs, or chicken parmesan.
One day, well into their adulthood, someone asks your children a question. It might be “Where are you from?” or some similar phraseology. How do your bilingual spaghetti-eating children answer this question?
“We’re Italian.”
Now that we’ve been on that journey, I want you to imagine logging onto the internet to find some dumb fuck who never left the Old Country, who has never been to a place where “What is your current nationality” and “What is your personal heritage” are different questions with different answers and thus has no grasp at all on the concept of diaspora says “No you’re not.”
There are several problems there:
- Stereotypically, the Americans doing this are way further removed from their ancestry than the second-generation immigrants you describe (in fact it’s completely normal and accepted for second-gen immigrants to identify as their parent’s nationality as well in Europe);
- “I’m Italian” and “I have Italian ancestry” are NOT the same sentence. You seem to realize that, but many Americans don’t, and the comment you replied to complained about the former, and the difference is fundamental;
- Europeans are generally not on board with the whole “ethnic identity” stuff that Americans do, for a variety of reasons that one could simplify down to “last time we did that, nazism happened”. The mainstream progressive view is humanist and intentionally colorblind, and it is therefore profoundly shocking to see Americans derive a sense of self-worth from their blood, because these are the talking points we normally only hear in documentaries about Mussolini…
Now I have spent enough time reading about how American view their complicated relationship to race, ethnicity, and ancestry, to understand where you’re coming from, but this is fundamentally at odds to the humanist approach of “we’re all the same and who your great-grandparents were does not define who you are in any way”. (Which is obviously idealist, and does tend to “whitewash” some struggles, but it is nonetheless the prevailing approach).
I don’t agree with your third point at all.
I don’t think I’ve met any Americans that use their ancestry as a sense of “self worth” in any meaningful amount. For the vast majority of people it’s just a interesting quirk people like to share about their ancestry. Taking that and criticizing it because “last time we did it, nazism happened” is quite a stretch.
Mate, I’ve seen long-term immigrants not just of my own nation but other nations who returned and was even myself an immigrant of my own nation for over 2 decades abroad, and after 2 or 3 decades people living abroad are already culturally and even in values different from their countrymen, due to a mix of partially absorbing the values and way of being in life and society of were they live, and because their own country kept on changing over time generally in a different way in which they themselves change (it’s quite funny how they have ideas about how their own country of birth is that don’t really match the reality and look silly and outdated to the people actually living there).
This is a mere 2 or 3 decades for people who actually grew up in their nation of origin.
People 2 or 3 generations away from said nation are not only descendants of immigrants with a deviating cultural framework as describe above, but they have grown up in a different nation (and from all my observations living in a couple of countries, people culturally tend to be closer to the country they grew up in more than the country of their parents) and at least their parents and possibly their grandparents were already people who grew up in a different nation and only knew about the nation of their ancestors via 2nd or 3rd hand accounts.
Whatever “culture” and “value” they have from their ancestors’ nation of origin is a thin slice, deeply degraded (often charicaturally so - note the mention of spaghetti eating to mean “culturally italian”, something which would make me Italian and my Italian ancestors if any came over during the Roman Empire) and severelly outdated (a century or more) version of the culture and values of the nation of origin of their ancestors.
The difference for example between an American of Italian ancestry and one of Irish ancestry is token if that much compared to the difference between an actual modern Italian and an Irish: American-Italian, American-Irish and so on are but sub-cultures of the United States of America culture and draw most of their ways and values from that one, not from the cultures of the countries of origin of their great-grandparents.
As long as you speak the language, it’s fine by me. Once you stop speaking Italian at home (in this example) it’s over, you can’t call yourself Italian anymore.
According to the Codex Wiesonius.
TIL most people born in Ireland are not Irish.
When your country is so young, nearly everybody is an immigrant. So it’s hard to take pride in a family lineage that is at most 4 generations of being American. Plus, we don’t really have a unified national identity. “American” could literally mean every type of person.
funny that you say that, not all Europeans are stuck in the same nationality for 10 or 30 generations back, maybe not even majority.
My great-grandmother was German, never learned the language of what is now my nationality. My grandmother and her child (my parent) didn’t speak German and have never subscribed to German nationality, neither do I (but I speak a little bit German though becouse of school not because of family). Maybe it’s because the identity of the place I live in is as strong as Germany’s so it’s a simple choice. But for a country, whose entire schtick is “'Murica fokk yea” I am sometimes baffled how much this ancestral identity matters among people who are supposed to benefit from the whole thing (white middle/upper classes).
I suspect that’s because Europe is hugelly varied whilst the United States are, in what’s actually almost twice area, much less varied in terms of culture and values (for example, the whole of North American has all of 3 main languages - with English clearly dominant - whilst Europe has over 20 main ones plus another 80 or so minor ones).
Living in Europe it’s very likely that you’ll actually cross paths with and even know well people from the country of your ancestors (plus from lots of other quite different countries) and lose all illusions that you’re culturally the same, whilst in the US one can live in blissfull ignorance thinking eating spaghetti and having an Italian great-grandfather makes them a lot like Italians, never actually having met and gotten to know well an actual modern italian.
It’s actually funny: people within a specific cultural environment have a tendency to spot in great detail everybody’s slight differences, which for outsiders are pretty closed to unremarkeable, and it’s only when you go live elsewhere do you notice all those “great differences” were nothing at all compared to the differences in people between countries, at least in Europe. It’s actually funny how for example my keen spotting of regional differences in my home nation of Portugal (which is tiny yet even that one has such things) suddenly became silly when I moved to The Netherlands, by comparisson with the great differences in people between the two countries, and ditto when I moved to England, and then as I lived longer and longer in those countries I started spotting the regional difference in people within those countries (and in the special case of Britain, the differences between people from the various nations also became sharper in my eyes).
I suppose things like an Italian-American subculture come from that keen spotting of what for outsiders are quite small differences and then that mixed with profound ignorance on the subject matter makes many confuse being “an American with a drizzle of Italian” with being part Italian.
Mind you, it’s all valid. It’s just that for me who have lived in a couple of countries in Europe, been to quite a few more, can speak several european languages and know people who actually grew in various countries in Europe, that kind of identification with the nation of one’s ancestors in the US looks quite ill-informed.
are they claiming nationality or ethnic heritage?
Culture persists in some way for generations, you know. An immigrant’s grandchildren probably won’t fit in in their home country, but they’re still distinct from mainstream American culture.
yes. But where my ancestors does not change. So when I saw I am Irish, I am just making a claim about where they came from.
City zoning.
Oh, i have to drive from single family zone to commercial district to pick up a loaf of bread. Then drive to education district to drop kids at kindergarten, and finally to business district to work. At the end of the day i hang out at bar/entertainment district with the guys from work to have a beer, but there’s no public transport so I have to drink alcohol free so I can drive back home. That’s only 120 miles in a day!
Oddly enough it’s worse when American cities don’t have zoning laws. Houston TX has no zoning laws and it’s a nightmare
Your description isn’t how it works in most places really. The “districts” aren’t usually that far apart. It would be common to find single family homes close by a school, or an apartment building right next to an office building.
Zoning is useful in scenarios like industrial vs residential buildings. You wouldn’t want to have an apartment building next to a railroad hub for example. The railroad would be very loud/dirty, and industrial business would benefit more from being closer to the rail hub.
I know i exaggerated it for comedic effect. Most of my knowledge of zoning is limited to these two youtube videos
Your houses seem to be made out of paper. Then you complain about strong winds…
The benefit of stick frame houses is that they can be built quickly, comparatively cheaply, and actually perform much better than other types in hurricane and tornados. The US also has plenty of domestic wood production, so it’s the cheapest material to build with. During the housing boom and suburban sprawl of the 50s (where modern American culture started), where everyone wanted their own house and plot of land in rhe “safe suburbs,” these were all desirable.
As for the “why don’t you build out of brick and stone,” it’s not like someone would be better off with a stone house in the event of a natural disaster or fire. Even if the structure was still standing, the damage to the foundation would condemn the house under US building code. And now not only does your insurance have to pay to build a new house, it has to pay to have the old one tore down.
Where does this come from. All Euro houses made out of harden steel and concrete?
they have an insane amount of gun and gun related deaths They don’t have Universal Healthcare they don’t have a federal payed leave law they don’t have a maternal/paternal leave law they don’t have tuition free universities they don’t have decent mass transportation The use of the imperial system
It just doesn’t make sense and baffles my mind for the richest country in the world to treat it’s citizens like this
Restaurant tipping instead of decent wages; somehow the blame is on the “stingy” customer
Lack of history.
In LA I’ve been told that old buildings are demolished to build new ones.
Something 50 years old is an historic landmark there.
While we don’t have nearly as cool old architecture like other continents, buildings/houses from the 70s are all over. I think most historic buildings tend to be closer to 100+ years old, which is almost half the age of the country.
When I first moved here I read that if you’re over 32 years of age you’re older than 50% of the buildings. It was something like that but I don’t have the source handy to so don’t take my word for it.
As an American it’s always been really cool and humbling to travel and see still-standing structures older than my country
LA buildings were all built like crap and were damaged in earthquakes, honestly after living here a while not sure anything is worth saving lol
Grocery baggers. I’m German - we pack our own bags over here and most customers do NOT like others to fondle their groceries. We literally do not have any “baggers” in any supermarket, and if a cashier packs a customer’s bags without being specifically asked to do so (basically never happens) the customer will take that as an insult - as if you’re trying to say they don’t get out of your sight fast enough / that you want to speed up their departure to get rid of them, or that you don’t think they’re capable of that super basic, simple task. It’s considered rude and condescending.
A cashier is expected to scan the stuff the customer wants to buy, take payment, hand over the receipt and change, and then leave the customer and their groceries alone.
The bagger is presented as a courtesy, someone to do the work for you. In reality you’re exactly right: it’s to keep a brisk pace for the transaction. And if it takes too long to finish the transaction the manager can also yell at someone to speed it up.
Hear hear! Why is this so hard to understand in this damn country?! (US)
Some popular supermarkets will have grocery baggers here in Norway on super busy days before long holidays, for efficiency to keep the lines moving. Maybe two or three days a year.
Okay now I’m stretching the OPs idea a little bit, but America is big.
How people live in South America never needing to learn other language than Spanish and plausibly never interacting with a foreign language outside movies. I spent some time in Chile, the place I lived in had a nice janitor. He did not speak English, I only knew a few loose words in Spanish so communication was… peculiar. Only after 2 months of awkward interactions he realised, that I probably am not Spanish native speaker and it hit me.
When your entire life in a continent where everyone speaks flavours of Spanish or Portugese, you can have successful, international career only in Spanish, participate in all kinds of rich culture only in Spanish and all signs and labels are only in Spanish, huge majority of tourists speak Spanish… it is not immediately obvious, that people may not speak Spanish.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not dunking on “dumb spanish speakers”. There are ton of places in Europe where people disregard English, where it’s famously hard to communicate in anything other than the local language, but the fact, that other languages exist is apparent to everyone once they learn to read. Awareness that people actually speak these languages is the most natural knowledge from ground school as we learn that “Germany speaks German. Italy speaks Italian” etc. A perspective which does not involve being in constant proximity to numerous foreign languages felt like something that made no sense to me in the past until I actually came into contact with it.
Religion.
Anti Vax.
Militarised police.
Racism.
Political corruption.
Foreign wars.
Mass shootings.
Healthcare.
Public transit.
Abortion.
UFO.
Capitalism.
Two weeks holiday.
Maternity leave.
I don’t get two weeks holiday yet. 5 days this year and I had none my first year.
Yep. You’re fortunate if you get 2 weeks in the US as a general rule.
My experience is from Canada, but Canada is in America so it should count:
- insane amounts of empty space. It’s one thing to know that in America several hours drive doesn’t count as “far away”, another to experience it.
- guns. Not like in “them americans only shoot themselves”, but like in “any hardware store carries full gamut of weapon-adjacent accessories and it’s normal” wtf mates, you can’t keep your murder machines confined to murder machine shops? We manage to do it with porn and sex toys in Europe (at least my part of it), sure you can too with guns?
- malls. We do have malls in Europe. I still don’t get them, but it is a choice to go there. Where I lived in Canada it was the only shopping option. Why not corner shops? These suburbs waste a ton of space, no one has ever thought in a capitalist brain “hey let’s put a shop closer to the people and charge them more because they burn less fuel and waste less time to get here”?
- And a very specific nitpick: calling places “european” like a point of pride while in fact they are rather not. Quebec City and Montreal I think both pride themselves on being “the most europe-like cities in north america” and… they’re not europe-like? Like, ok, the old town is nice, but that’s it.
Corner shops used to exist in small towns, but they were killed by malls, big box stores, and online shopping.
And car-centric infrastructure. It’s dumb to drive somewhere for a single shop, so people wanted an excuse to drive their expensive cars. Hence the one stop mega mall, where you can find everything you could want to load your car up with.
Tipping and calculating your own taxes
Saying “could care less” when that’s not what they mean.
This has bothered me. It is supposed to be “couldn’t” yet the consistenly degrading language has caused this I believe.
I found David Mitchell’s lemmy account
I’ve decided to subvert the error. I could care less, but it would take the ratification of a constitutional amendment.
answer sarcasm
