this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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It's exhausting having Europeans assume that because I live here I A) endorse everything about it with every fiber of my being and B) have no ability to conceptualize any other way of living at all, much less a better one than my current American lifestyle.
It's true we don't have a quaint medieval village on an island, but we never had invading Huns or something force us to live on a postage stamp of land and make a quaint little village there.
You and I'll even risk most of your close circle of friends and acquaintences might understand the teasing that comes with such a picture but would that be true to the average american?
This is the picture of a high density populated area, where there are no roads for vehicles nor wide spaces. Streets are narrow and do not form straight angles. Construction is also very old.
If I'm to try and emulate the level of idiocy I often encountered on the days of Reddit, the average american will spout "that's a fire hazard, with no room for parking or moving around in your car and the roads don't make any sense".
It's good people like you exist. Now you only need 1000x those numbers to make a dent in the idiocy running that country.
You're literally asking for the 'average' of a country containing everything from desert to tundra to a variety of types of forest and just about every biome in between. We've got political situations ranging from state endorsed persecution and torture of minorities on the one hand to policies that are at times to the left of the European mainstream on the other.
You might as well compare Norway and Turkey as Massachusetts and Texas. In the latter case they share a federal government, but both also ignore that government when it suits them. Like, look at the confusing legal situation around marijuana in the US. It's legal in more and more states, but it's federally illegal. So like, technically it's federally illegal in states where it's legal, but we just ignore that for most purposes. It does mean that dispensaries largely have to operate with cash, though.
In Massachusetts it's even weirder. We have a ballot initiative process, so the people can make new laws by making a big enough petition and putting it on the next election ballot. That's how we passed decriminalization, then medical, then legalization. No Massachusetts politician really took up the issue and endorsed it, we just voted it in. Which forced our state law makers to basically ignore the federal prohibition.
You could also expect to see this happen in Massachusetts if, for example, abortion were federally criminalized. We already ignore other states' laws about things like family planning and immigration.
The US really isn't a monolith legally or culturally.
I'm pretty sure you can find all those things just in the state of California. Meanwhile Croatia, where this photo was taken, has about the same land area as West Virginia.
God, can you imagine this in West Virginia?