“The US should do X and they suck because they don’t!” Each state has it’s own laws on education. Some places suck, some do not. It’s not a monolith.
“The US has shitty beer lol” We have some of the best beer in the world but it’s local/state/region only and never exported unlike fancy Euro beer.
The US for better or worse is a, hmmm 🤔 a unity of government states under a federation called America. It’s very hard to get federal laws and bills passed, especially for education. The states want the power to chooses for themselves what they do, and the federal government hangs above them, sometimes intervening.
We are a huge country that has a relatively unique circumstance of government, population, and young brutal history. I’m a Californian and I live in the Bay Area which almost literally a different country than most of America, especially the South and Midwest.
I’m so sick of people, especially smug Europeans, talking like they know Americans and America but they don’t really know shit about us except the movies and going to NYC and Miami.
Yes I am having a bad day.
To be honest I love Europe and have friends there that I miss dearly! I’ve been many times. But dumbassery is dumbassery.
EDIT: You people are an exhausting swarm of pecking ravens and I’ve spent all the “toxic” energy I want arguing with half you because you just hear what you want to hear and fit the stereotype I loathe I think you only commented out of trained reflex and a few of you are just unsophisticated haters. Whatever, fuck you, and all that jazz.
Like it or not, you’re a superpower.
What you do, and how you do it matters to the rest of the planet.
We have no choice but to watch, and what we see isn’t encouraging.
The US is really like the EU both in scale and differences between individual states. National laws are generally just high level and very broad, with the laws most people directly interact with being state, county, city, and other local levels.
The EU is more diverse than the US. There’s literally a language barrier everywhere you go. E.g., a Hawaiian and a Texan are more alike than, say, a Finn is to a Cypriot.
I went to Georgia recently, and they’re definitely speaking a different language down there. I could not understand a word
Is there? No matter where I go in Europe, it doesn’t seem to be a big issue to find English speakers. It feels like the urban parts are settling on a second language now that trade and travel borders have vanished.
If the EU sticks around for a generation, I wouldn’t be surprised if you start seeing European nations reflecting the same demographic oddities that you see in the US regarding age of residents.
Yeah but tell that to the Texans.
Maybe the issue is just that you don’t realize how much we hate each other? Like America is dysfunctionally divisive at this point, there would probably be some offense at the idea that the two are alike. Republican-led states definitely don’t want to be compared to Democrat-led ones, and vice-versa. Maybe I just dunno how much you hate each other on the continent, but I’d bet a Finn would be nicer to a Cypriot than a Texan would be to a Hawaiian.
The US is really like the EU both in scale and differences between individual states
Bwahahahahhaha! No.
Americans always love to think this is true, but it’s nowhere remotely true. The US has an actual federal government. The EU does not, all EU members are sovereign states.
Secondly, difference between individual states? Rofl-fucking-mao.
No your slight change in accent (not in dialect), and slightly different local delicacies are nowhere near comparable to Europe.
The US has a few hundred years of history and most come from the same dozen or less groups from Europe.
The difference between just the top of my country and the bottom of my country is larger than aany state differences in the US. Well, except for, idk, state laws. But language, customs, cuisine. The modern European states have formed all from several distinct groups. The modern nation-state only started being a thing a bit more than a century ago.
All modern European states are made up hundreds and hundreds of previous, hundreds of years old groups.
No offense, but the comparison is pretty ridiculous on most levels.
The EU isn’t a federation. (Yet.)
I’m talking about laws. Differences like being able to freely open carry in some states while others barely allow anyone to even possess a gun. Or how some states have universal state healthcare and other do not. Or how drugs are handled, with many states ignoring the federal prohibition.
Sure, we share a lot of language and a generic background identity of being ‘American’, but the legal differences are massively varied from state to state.
I’m talking about laws.
I can promise you that the sovereign European states which have their own constitutional laws and practices differ more from each other than US states do.
You have state laws, sure, but you also have federal laws. We don’t. There are EU regulations, and through those regulations, the sovereign states synchronise their own laws if it suits the situation.
Do you think the laws for guns are the same for us Finns as they are for the Greeks or Spaniards or Swiss?
Do you think the healthcare systems are federated in Europe? That everyone has the same system? The systems often vary from state to state within the member states. (I could tell you horror stores of our country trying to integralize our systems.)
Th EU decided everyone should have universal healthcare, because it’s objectively just good. So it was agreed and then they make the regulations on what it should achieve. Not how it should be done or anything.
So each sovereign state gets to find their own way into the solution.
The U.K. has the National Health Service (NHS), a government-operated system. One also finds public systems in Italy and Spain, while France has a public/private system. But the system in Switzerland is a privatized system, with subsidized insurance. The Swiss system is, in some respects, comparable to the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, but with much stricter regulations and much more comprehensive coverage. Obamacare pales in comparison to the Swiss system, although it’s much better than the “let the sick, lowly peasants die in the streets” approach of the Republican Party.
Uhm, about drugs? Cannabis is still schedule 1 federally, but it hasn’t stopped the states from doing their own de facto thing. I wonder… A few years before the first state legalised recreational marijuana, if you wanted to have a holiday in a place you could smoke weed, where’d you go?
Aaaahmm… Aaaaaaammmm… Amsterdam. Or Prague.
The drug practices vary wildly by country.
but the legal differences are massively varied from state to state.
Sure, but I think you might agree that actually from country to country it might vary even more, seeing as your states all started from the same common law system and history of the system a few hundred years ago. Whereas there’s hanging rocks and churches older than the US on my way to the city.
The point being that while we regulate our international unions systems and try to synchronize them despite most having been apart and developed into their own (from roman systems, over the course of two millenia), you have a federated system and want to set your own systems.
It’s like. The opposites.
I may be on an ambiem or two currently. But it was a fascinating thought.
You’re being very Eurocentric about who America is which is another classic smug and quasi-racist thing to do. You’re ignoring that we have populations, heavier in some areas than others, of Native Americans, Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese and other East/South-East Asian nations. Then there’s South Asian, Pacific Island, Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African, sub-Saharan African, and last but not least, Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. We have all those plus your so-called “several same” European countries, which is horseshit unless you’re talking about the first 100 years before America was even created. Then we have the rest of Europe. The entire planet lives in America, literally every nation is represented here. Some more than others, of course. And there are dialects between states and counties as well as accents especially if you want to include ethnic dialects then we have countless amounts.
Ignorant. Smug.
So does Europe, which I gather you’ve never visited.
- “several same” European countries"
No, you really don’t. The majority of the American population is of white, Anglo-Saxon / German/Dutch descent.
That’s a fact.
You have barely a few hundred years of history.
I need only go 100 km inland in my country, and the genetic diversity between me and an average person will be greater than that of an average white New Yorker vs an average Floridan.
But you wouldn’t know shit about that, because you are ignorant.
Do yourself a favour and actually go abroad some day, my friend. Learn a language. How many do you know? Because I knew three before the age of 10.
AAVE, that’s barely a dialect, if you look at the difference of language between std American English and AAVE. The distinction is so huge in the Nordic countries, with Scandinavian languages and Finnish, that there’s an actual concept called “book language”. Look it up, see what it means. If you’re not… ignorant of it. ;)
Say what you want and cry how much you want, the US is not nearly as distinct as Europe. Sorry.
As usual, the answer is “It’s more complicated than that.”
Except the one government at the top is the one that interacts with every other nation on the planet and is usually the one making policies and taking actions that piss everyone else. And like it or not, these policies and actions are decided by the congress and the president, which everyone in the U.S. is responsible for electing the people there. And when you look at that federal governmnt, well let me tell ya that it doesn’t reflect very well on Americans.
If you want to go on foreign policy, sure. The federal government is usually the lead. However, there are a lot of things handled at the state and local level that Europeans love to extrapolate to all the USA when it doesn’t go that far.
Outside of Vermont, New York, Colorado and California, there really aren’t a lot of places in the US that seem normal to the rest of the world. And if you go at the county level, it gets worse it seems.
Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Maine. And then large parts of most other states. You do realize more than 50% of America is very in line with most of western Europe… right?
I find it hard to believe that Vermont Colorado and California even fit in with Western European standards considering the absolute lack of any useful public transportation in any of those states. Even NY only resembles Europe in NYC, upstate NY is some of the worst parts of the US to live in.
I thiught you guys are united or something. It’s in the name
That’s kind of like saying “I thought the EU was a Union”.
OP’s point is that the federal government mainly exists to regulate interstate issues and foreign affairs, but what occurs within the confines of a single state isn’t in the purview of their authority most of the time.
