4 ms·

Europeans are very proud of the fact that they're a bunch of different countries, but besides the language thing, Europe is only somewhat more culturally divers

Europeans are very proud of the fact that they're a bunch of different countries, but besides the language thing, Europe is only somewhat more culturally diverse than the US. The differences in philosophy, social norms, and general life outlook between Hawaiians, Northern Californians, and New Yorkers and Georgians is only marginally less wide than the differences between the French, English, Germans, and Italians. In my experience, the former Soviet block countries are pretty significantly different from those on our side of the Iron Curtain, but when an American says Europe they're probably not referring to anything east of Germany anyway.

sph 3mo ago
Hawaiians, Northern Californians, and New Yorkers and Georgians speak the same language, go to the same schools and watch the same TV shows. And even just Western Europe is larger than Germany, France, Italy, England. European countries have distinct histories that span thousands of years. Did you know that Arabs ruled over part of the Spanish peninsula for 3 times as long than US has even existed? The ignorance at this point is frankly insulting. Somehow, of all people in the world, it is just Americans seeing everything as an imitation of their own country.
- OkayPhysicist 3mo ago
  They do not go to the same schools. The school system is controlled nigh-exclusively by the states, to rather infamously mixed results. That Northern Californian kid is getting a world-class education. The kid in Georgia is almost certainly not. Meanwhile, the US is wildly more diverse at the local level than Europe is, which leads to its own significant cultural differences. Up in Northern California, about a quarter of people are of Asian descent, predominantly Indian and Chinese. Another quarter is Latino. Southern California is half Latino. Jump across the country to the Midwest, you've got a lot more people of German descent, in the South you've got Black people making up a significant portion of the population. What the US lacks in local history, it makes up for in cultural admixture: all those diverse backgrounds end up stewing together in unique ways across the country, producing all sorts of unique cultures. Leads to some fantastic fusion foods: Spam wasubi, breakfast burritos, American pizza, soul food, Chinese-American cuisine. Sure we don't our own thousand years of rich fucks inbreeding over funny hats, but the wide spectrum of cultures across across the US draw from the histories of everywhere on the globe. Compare that with, say, Germany. Germany is 70% ethnically German. Most US states aren't even that 'White', never mind breaking that down by individual countries of origin.

sph 3mo ago

Hawaiians, Northern Californians, and New Yorkers and Georgians speak the same language, go to the same schools and watch the same TV shows. And even just Western Europe is larger than Germany, France, Italy, England. European countries have distinct histories that span thousands of years. Did you know that Arabs ruled over part of the Spanish peninsula for 3 times as long than US has even existed? The ignorance at this point is frankly insulting. Somehow, of all people in the world, it is just Americans seeing everything as an imitation of their own country.

OkayPhysicist 3mo ago
They do not go to the same schools. The school system is controlled nigh-exclusively by the states, to rather infamously mixed results. That Northern Californian kid is getting a world-class education. The kid in Georgia is almost certainly not. Meanwhile, the US is wildly more diverse at the local level than Europe is, which leads to its own significant cultural differences. Up in Northern California, about a quarter of people are of Asian descent, predominantly Indian and Chinese. Another quarter is Latino. Southern California is half Latino. Jump across the country to the Midwest, you've got a lot more people of German descent, in the South you've got Black people making up a significant portion of the population. What the US lacks in local history, it makes up for in cultural admixture: all those diverse backgrounds end up stewing together in unique ways across the country, producing all sorts of unique cultures. Leads to some fantastic fusion foods: Spam wasubi, breakfast burritos, American pizza, soul food, Chinese-American cuisine. Sure we don't our own thousand years of rich fucks inbreeding over funny hats, but the wide spectrum of cultures across across the US draw from the histories of everywhere on the globe. Compare that with, say, Germany. Germany is 70% ethnically German. Most US states aren't even that 'White', never mind breaking that down by individual countries of origin.