7 ms·

> One of the hardest things for me to adapt to is how "liberal" America has become. It's not an objectively bad thing One wonders, if the rest of the world is

by wtbob 10y ago

> One of the hardest things for me to adapt to is how "liberal" America has become. It's not an objectively bad thing One wonders, if the rest of the world is more cautious about this sort of thing, if maybe it's America that's in the wrong. Maybe other cultures deal with these things more sensitively or more rationally or just better. My experience travelling abroad is that people seem more comfortable in their skins, which is sad given that America is supposed to be the place where anyone can make it.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
astrodust 10y ago
> My experience travelling abroad... Try doing that with a disability, being a visible minority, being a woman, etc. America is far from perfect, but it's at least accommodating. In other countries they don't hesitate to throw people to the curb. It's the little things: The wheelchair accessible stores and streets, the effort made to deal with vision impairments, institutions that are fighting for women's rights and so on. There are some places in the world where people with disabilities do not seem to exist, they're always hidden away.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  America should not be comparing itself to developing nations, but other developed nations. In that they fall short in many things.
  - herbst 10y ago
    From a outside perspective America seems like a developing nation in many perspectives. So I think both should be done. The amount of homeless, jobless, bad education, a meme president and all that is nothing you find in 'your usual developed nation'
    - briandear 10y ago
      More jobless in America? [citation needed]
      - herbst 10y ago
        Sort by %: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemployment_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemploym... given there are several developed countries with worse conditions
        astrodust 10y ago
        One day you'll wake up and realize that employment in America is always unusually high. During the depths of the last recession it barely crested 10%. What makes it seem worse than it is has been the way these unemployed people are highly clustered today. There's counties with 50-60% unemployment, but they're low-population so they don't skew the national rate all that much. It certainly sucks to be in one of those affected areas, and I know people who are stuck there, but the big picture is a different thing. America is far from a homogeneous thing, but it's also full of opportunity if you're able, willing and prepared to move to them.
        herbst 10y ago
        I am honestly not that interested in America to wake up at some point and have crazy realizations about it. Its significant worse than where i am from (in every single metric), or the third world countries i just spend months in, and as stated above i was surprised myself how many other countries seem much worse than i expected.
  - ido 10y ago
    I've lived in Austria for (almost) 8 years and Germany for a bit over 3 - I really like both for many reasons and neither could really be accused of being a developing nation. Wheelchair accessibility is simply not a thing here, not even in Vienna and Berlin (let alone small towns or rural areas). E.g. you will often find the bathrooms in restaurants or cafes to not be accessible without going up or down a bunch of stairs. Another example: get out of the big cities (and sometimes even just get out of the central areas of the big city!) and try to get vegetarian or vegan food in a restaurant. Sometimes the waiters won't even know what that means (when speaking in German, so not due to a language issue).
    - literallycancer 10y ago
      I suspect this is because most European cities are extremely old by American standards, pretty much any street is going to have 100 years old buildings, some have the cultural heritage status, so if you want to make any changes, you need to get a permit, and sometimes making the building wheelchair accessible would cost more than to tear it down and build it again.
      - amyjess 10y ago
        That's one thing about old cities that people often forget about. A lot of people treat the age of their city's buildings as a point of pride. Old architecture is pretty, and there's so much heritage and historical significance. But the downside is that they're not nearly as livable as new construction. Disability access is one. Nobody's going to install a wheelchair ramp in a 500-year-old building. Here's another: air conditioning. I'm from Dallas and still live here, but my family is from New York City. I visit my ancestral home every few years, and what really jumps out at me every time I visit is the lack of central air conditioning. In any residential part of Manhattan, all you have to do is look up, and you'll see hundreds of room air conditioners hanging out of every building. The house in Westchester my aunt and uncle lived in when I was a kid had neither central AC nor heating; I have memories of staying in the guest room with this ratty old radiator grill that was encrusted with unidentifiable gunk. Actually, that whole house just felt ancient. Visiting my aunt and uncle felt like walking into a time machine because of how old their house looked and felt. You don't see places like that in Dallas. Dallas is a pretty new city; the city proper didn't reach its current borders until 1977, and the suburbs were mostly farmland until the '80s and '90s. The northern part of Dallas where I grew up was built out in the late '70s and '80s, after central AC had become standard. The suburb where I work wasn't built up until the '90s and the '00s, and there are places not too far north of here that were built this decade. Everyone has central AC and heating here. The idea of going without is ludicrous, because all our construction is new enough that central AC and heating were incorporated in the design from the start. Now, yeah, the sweltering climate has something to do with it; state law requires landlords to provide AC at all times, and it's actually a crime for them to fail to resolve complaints about a broken AC within a certain amount of time. But a lot of it is just because Dallas is mostly newer construction.
- point78 10y ago
  America is way behind a lot of countries in every point you mentioned
  - amyjess 10y ago
    America is way ahead of almost all of Europe in terms of access to transgender healthcare. In most of Europe, it's not uncommon for trans women to be forced to crossdress in public in order to get hormones. It's not uncommon for trans women to be denied hormones for a number of stupid things: if you're attracted to women (you have to be 100% straight to get hormones in most of Europe), because the outfit they wore to the doctor isn't feminine enough (you have to be wearing a dress), because you have no interest in bottom surgery, because you don't specifically hate your penis, because you didn't play with dolls as a kid, because you've had any sexual thoughts about being a woman. You have to go out of your way to prove to the shrinks there that you're trans enough, and their standards are so ridiculous that they'd tell 90% of cis women they're not really women. It varies by country. Denmark and Finland are the absolute worst about this. Denmark in particular has been condemned by Amnesty International for this [0]. Norway is pretty bad, but I've heard stories of people who found a sympathetic GP who's willing to go around the law (in Norway, it's illegal to prescribe estrogen for transition outside the gender clinic system, but a doctor can prescribe estrogen for other reasons, and doctors don't have to report their prescriptions to anyone). I've heard Spain is one of the least-worst countries, actually, so much that trans people from other European countries actually go to Spain for treatment. Same goes for parts of Eastern Europe (estrogen might even be OTC in some Balkan countries). The UK used to be horrible, but they've gotten better in the last 2-3 years or so, which is entirely thanks to a single private doctor (Dr. Webberly). In Germany and France, it depends on exactly where you live. In the US, I can just walk into any informed consent clinic or in some cases the offices of certain GPs, sign a paper that says I know what I'm getting into, get my blood taken, and walk out with a prescription for estrogen once the bloodwork comes back. Oh, and in some European countries, you can't even legally change your name unless you've had surgery. I know this is the case in the Czech Republic (you can take a gender-neutral name, but you cannot take a female name if you have testicles). It's sad, because access to hormones is better in the Czech Republic than in most of Europe. [0] News article about it in English: https://www.thelocal.dk/20170303/amnesty-slams-denmark-for-discriminating-transgender-people https://www.thelocal.dk/20170303/amnesty-slams-denmark-for-d... -- Amnesty International's actual report, in Danish: http://amnesty.dk/media/2263/amnesty-transkoennedes-adgang-til-sundhed.pdf http://amnesty.dk/media/2263/amnesty-transkoennedes-adgang-t...
TorKlingberg 10y ago
The rest of the world is not a homogeneous place. 55555 specifically mentioned living in a "conservative" culture. Living as an American in a country like Bangladesh can be quite nice, but you really don't want to be a persecuted minority, or gay or similar there. That is NOT something America should learn from. A lot of countries are simply less developed, both economically and socially. There is no need to glamorize it. That said development is not a simple linear scale. Each culture has good things others could learn from, but it's wrong to see low development level as some kind of purity.
- wtbob 10y ago
  I wasn't thinking of countries like Bangladesh — I was thinking of countries like France or Germany!

by wtbob 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

astrodust 10y ago

> My experience travelling abroad... Try doing that with a disability, being a visible minority, being a woman, etc. America is far from perfect, but it's at least accommodating. In other countries they don't hesitate to throw people to the curb. It's the little things: The wheelchair accessible stores and streets, the effort made to deal with vision impairments, institutions that are fighting for women's rights and so on. There are some places in the world where people with disabilities do not seem to exist, they're always hidden away.

mahyarm 10y ago
America should not be comparing itself to developing nations, but other developed nations. In that they fall short in many things.
- herbst 10y ago
  From a outside perspective America seems like a developing nation in many perspectives. So I think both should be done. The amount of homeless, jobless, bad education, a meme president and all that is nothing you find in 'your usual developed nation'
  - briandear 10y ago
    More jobless in America? [citation needed]
    - herbst 10y ago
      Sort by %: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemployment_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemploym... given there are several developed countries with worse conditions
      - astrodust 10y ago
        One day you'll wake up and realize that employment in America is always unusually high. During the depths of the last recession it barely crested 10%. What makes it seem worse than it is has been the way these unemployed people are highly clustered today. There's counties with 50-60% unemployment, but they're low-population so they don't skew the national rate all that much. It certainly sucks to be in one of those affected areas, and I know people who are stuck there, but the big picture is a different thing. America is far from a homogeneous thing, but it's also full of opportunity if you're able, willing and prepared to move to them.
        herbst 10y ago
        I am honestly not that interested in America to wake up at some point and have crazy realizations about it. Its significant worse than where i am from (in every single metric), or the third world countries i just spend months in, and as stated above i was surprised myself how many other countries seem much worse than i expected.
- ido 10y ago
  I've lived in Austria for (almost) 8 years and Germany for a bit over 3 - I really like both for many reasons and neither could really be accused of being a developing nation. Wheelchair accessibility is simply not a thing here, not even in Vienna and Berlin (let alone small towns or rural areas). E.g. you will often find the bathrooms in restaurants or cafes to not be accessible without going up or down a bunch of stairs. Another example: get out of the big cities (and sometimes even just get out of the central areas of the big city!) and try to get vegetarian or vegan food in a restaurant. Sometimes the waiters won't even know what that means (when speaking in German, so not due to a language issue).
  - literallycancer 10y ago
    I suspect this is because most European cities are extremely old by American standards, pretty much any street is going to have 100 years old buildings, some have the cultural heritage status, so if you want to make any changes, you need to get a permit, and sometimes making the building wheelchair accessible would cost more than to tear it down and build it again.
    - amyjess 10y ago
      That's one thing about old cities that people often forget about. A lot of people treat the age of their city's buildings as a point of pride. Old architecture is pretty, and there's so much heritage and historical significance. But the downside is that they're not nearly as livable as new construction. Disability access is one. Nobody's going to install a wheelchair ramp in a 500-year-old building. Here's another: air conditioning. I'm from Dallas and still live here, but my family is from New York City. I visit my ancestral home every few years, and what really jumps out at me every time I visit is the lack of central air conditioning. In any residential part of Manhattan, all you have to do is look up, and you'll see hundreds of room air conditioners hanging out of every building. The house in Westchester my aunt and uncle lived in when I was a kid had neither central AC nor heating; I have memories of staying in the guest room with this ratty old radiator grill that was encrusted with unidentifiable gunk. Actually, that whole house just felt ancient. Visiting my aunt and uncle felt like walking into a time machine because of how old their house looked and felt. You don't see places like that in Dallas. Dallas is a pretty new city; the city proper didn't reach its current borders until 1977, and the suburbs were mostly farmland until the '80s and '90s. The northern part of Dallas where I grew up was built out in the late '70s and '80s, after central AC had become standard. The suburb where I work wasn't built up until the '90s and the '00s, and there are places not too far north of here that were built this decade. Everyone has central AC and heating here. The idea of going without is ludicrous, because all our construction is new enough that central AC and heating were incorporated in the design from the start. Now, yeah, the sweltering climate has something to do with it; state law requires landlords to provide AC at all times, and it's actually a crime for them to fail to resolve complaints about a broken AC within a certain amount of time. But a lot of it is just because Dallas is mostly newer construction.
point78 10y ago
America is way behind a lot of countries in every point you mentioned
- amyjess 10y ago
  America is way ahead of almost all of Europe in terms of access to transgender healthcare. In most of Europe, it's not uncommon for trans women to be forced to crossdress in public in order to get hormones. It's not uncommon for trans women to be denied hormones for a number of stupid things: if you're attracted to women (you have to be 100% straight to get hormones in most of Europe), because the outfit they wore to the doctor isn't feminine enough (you have to be wearing a dress), because you have no interest in bottom surgery, because you don't specifically hate your penis, because you didn't play with dolls as a kid, because you've had any sexual thoughts about being a woman. You have to go out of your way to prove to the shrinks there that you're trans enough, and their standards are so ridiculous that they'd tell 90% of cis women they're not really women. It varies by country. Denmark and Finland are the absolute worst about this. Denmark in particular has been condemned by Amnesty International for this [0]. Norway is pretty bad, but I've heard stories of people who found a sympathetic GP who's willing to go around the law (in Norway, it's illegal to prescribe estrogen for transition outside the gender clinic system, but a doctor can prescribe estrogen for other reasons, and doctors don't have to report their prescriptions to anyone). I've heard Spain is one of the least-worst countries, actually, so much that trans people from other European countries actually go to Spain for treatment. Same goes for parts of Eastern Europe (estrogen might even be OTC in some Balkan countries). The UK used to be horrible, but they've gotten better in the last 2-3 years or so, which is entirely thanks to a single private doctor (Dr. Webberly). In Germany and France, it depends on exactly where you live. In the US, I can just walk into any informed consent clinic or in some cases the offices of certain GPs, sign a paper that says I know what I'm getting into, get my blood taken, and walk out with a prescription for estrogen once the bloodwork comes back. Oh, and in some European countries, you can't even legally change your name unless you've had surgery. I know this is the case in the Czech Republic (you can take a gender-neutral name, but you cannot take a female name if you have testicles). It's sad, because access to hormones is better in the Czech Republic than in most of Europe. [0] News article about it in English: https://www.thelocal.dk/20170303/amnesty-slams-denmark-for-discriminating-transgender-people https://www.thelocal.dk/20170303/amnesty-slams-denmark-for-d... -- Amnesty International's actual report, in Danish: http://amnesty.dk/media/2263/amnesty-transkoennedes-adgang-til-sundhed.pdf http://amnesty.dk/media/2263/amnesty-transkoennedes-adgang-t...

TorKlingberg 10y ago

The rest of the world is not a homogeneous place. 55555 specifically mentioned living in a "conservative" culture. Living as an American in a country like Bangladesh can be quite nice, but you really don't want to be a persecuted minority, or gay or similar there. That is NOT something America should learn from. A lot of countries are simply less developed, both economically and socially. There is no need to glamorize it. That said development is not a simple linear scale. Each culture has good things others could learn from, but it's wrong to see low development level as some kind of purity.

wtbob 10y ago
I wasn't thinking of countries like Bangladesh — I was thinking of countries like France or Germany!