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Why is it that one city can 'say' anything about America as a whole? People (this author included) seem to forget the vastness of America's size and the depth

Why is it that one city can 'say' anything about America as a whole? People (this author included) seem to forget the vastness of America's size and the depth of it's diversity. People and society in San Francisco are nothing like that of Birmingham Alabama or Fargo North Dakota. Seems to me like stereotypes and generalizations being leveraged for views/clicks.

jccalhoun 10y ago
Yes, it is kind of difficult to accurately use SF as representative of the USA as a whole. However, I think there are some things in SF that could happen, as Don King used to say, only in America.
gragas 10y ago
I completely agree. I recently moved to San Francisco from Iowa. The city itself is truly shocking. I find myself looking back on life in Iowa quite frequently, and I think of it very similarly to this Nabokov quote: a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside The smells, the noise, the mental deterioration. The shear amount of people that just resign to the world in big cities---and San Francisco in particular---is more than an order of magnitude greater than anything you'll find east of the Rockies and west of Chicago.
Normal_gaussian 10y ago
The USA is a lot more homogeneous than it is diverse. The comparisons the author makes are on a scale much larger than the diversity of the USA. If you cannot see this I cannot work out how to tell you, except perhaps to suggest that you and live and work on the other side of the world.
- withdavidli 10y ago
  if it's more homogeneous than diverse why pick a city which is one of the most diverse in the country as the example? don't understand your last sentence. been in china/hk, there's a lot less diversity there, at least racially. are you using diverse in economic terms? gender? age? consumer habits? religion?
  - Normal_gaussian 10y ago
    I'm saying that the diversity of the USA is not so large as to make irrelevant a comparison between a part of it and women somewhere else in the world. This does not require the destination to be diverse, simply very different from the USA.
- Implicated 10y ago
  > The USA is a lot more homogeneous than it is diverse. Have you travelled outside of the major cities, or even > 50 mi away from an international airport? I've been traveling the country for a living for the last 15 years and the diversity is staggering. If the USA is so homogeneous, what nation on this planet would you consider more diverse?
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    China seems pretty regionally diverse. They have whole regions with completely different languages and large variations in cultures.
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    Given the enormous size of the U.S. I think a comparison to western Europe is not inadequate. I know it's comparing a single country to multiple, but given the size different that seems fair. The only other countries that seem like fair comparisons in terms of size would be Russia, China and India. I don't know either of them very well, but understand at least India to be very diverse.

jccalhoun 10y ago

Yes, it is kind of difficult to accurately use SF as representative of the USA as a whole. However, I think there are some things in SF that could happen, as Don King used to say, only in America.

gragas 10y ago

I completely agree. I recently moved to San Francisco from Iowa. The city itself is truly shocking. I find myself looking back on life in Iowa quite frequently, and I think of it very similarly to this Nabokov quote: a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside The smells, the noise, the mental deterioration. The shear amount of people that just resign to the world in big cities---and San Francisco in particular---is more than an order of magnitude greater than anything you'll find east of the Rockies and west of Chicago.

Normal_gaussian 10y ago

The USA is a lot more homogeneous than it is diverse. The comparisons the author makes are on a scale much larger than the diversity of the USA. If you cannot see this I cannot work out how to tell you, except perhaps to suggest that you and live and work on the other side of the world.

withdavidli 10y ago
if it's more homogeneous than diverse why pick a city which is one of the most diverse in the country as the example? don't understand your last sentence. been in china/hk, there's a lot less diversity there, at least racially. are you using diverse in economic terms? gender? age? consumer habits? religion?
- Normal_gaussian 10y ago
  I'm saying that the diversity of the USA is not so large as to make irrelevant a comparison between a part of it and women somewhere else in the world. This does not require the destination to be diverse, simply very different from the USA.
Implicated 10y ago
> The USA is a lot more homogeneous than it is diverse. Have you travelled outside of the major cities, or even > 50 mi away from an international airport? I've been traveling the country for a living for the last 15 years and the diversity is staggering. If the USA is so homogeneous, what nation on this planet would you consider more diverse?
- kalleboo 10y ago
  China seems pretty regionally diverse. They have whole regions with completely different languages and large variations in cultures.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  Given the enormous size of the U.S. I think a comparison to western Europe is not inadequate. I know it's comparing a single country to multiple, but given the size different that seems fair. The only other countries that seem like fair comparisons in terms of size would be Russia, China and India. I don't know either of them very well, but understand at least India to be very diverse.