Been seeing a lot about how the government passes shitty laws, lot of mass shootings and expensive asf health care. I come from a developing nation and we were always told how America is great and whatnot. Are all states is America bad ?
America is a country with over 300 million people and it’s bigger than Western Europe. There’s going to be a lot of variance. Someone growing up wealthy in San Fransisco is going to live in a different America than someone growing up with a single waitress mother in Louisiana.
The average homicide rate in the US is 5 per 100,000. The town of Boca Raton, FL has a homicide rate of 1 (less than half of the European average of 2.5) and Baltimore / St Louis / New Orleans can sometimes reach 30+ on bad years (worse than some Brazilian and Mexican cities).
When you ask about the shitty laws, we have to remember that the US is almost like 50 different countries in one. Every single state you will have a different experience as well. In Illinois school districts kids in elementary school may take home school laptops free of charge. In Panhandle Florida the kids aren’t getting that.
In Florida you can go to a one of the many kava bars or smoke shops and purchase a kilogram of kratom. If you drive through Louisiana with that kratom you can get charged with a felony comparable to being caught with heroin.
Do you get what I’m saying? There are many different Americas - even in the same geographical area. In SE Florida there are a wild mix of different ethnicities and cultures. There are Haitians, Jews, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Brazilians, Vietnamese, Jamaicans…
You can live in the same city but have a totally different experience. The Brazilians may hang out with mainly other Brazilians and go to the Brazilian restaraunts / clubs / grocery stores and not ever go to the Jewish deli that all the Jews love as a staple of the town. It’s like you walk around the same area and depending on the cultural lens you put on, you experience a different reality.
HAVING SAID ALL THAT
I think America is a good country to live in. Why? Because it’s better than the vast majority of the world. You earn more money. You are safer. You have more opportunities and there’s better infrastructure, healthcare, etc than in vast majority of the world.
Yes, there are serious problems. Wealth inequality is splitting the country in two. Healthcare is expensive. There’s an opioid epidemic. We have high rates of gun violence. Etc etc
But having come from a relatively well-off third world country, I’ve seen the difference in QOL first hand and it’s massive. America is a good place to live.
US is almost like 50 different countries in one.
While this is obviously true, it’s important to note that the US certainly isn’t unique in this regard. Non-Americans often underestimate how diverse the US is. Americans often underestimate how diverse other countries are.
Of course variance in terms of culture, demographics, and industry in even small countries can be massive. My home city in Southern Brazil of almost 1 milliom population has less than 1% black population. Last time I visited for 2 weeks I didn’t see a single black person. This surprises some people because of the perception of Brazil and the fact they imported more slaves than any other country in the America’s.
So yes, I’m not claiming US is uniquely diverse. It’s just unusually large so it has large amounts of diversity due to geographic distance and total population + historic & current immigration.
However what I was trying to say by 50 different countries is that the laws can vary wildly from state to state. It is something that isn’t common in other countries. Of course there are other counties with strong federated systems where the provincial-level governments have strong autonomy (Germany and Switzerland come to mind) I think these types of countries are uncommon.
For example in Brazil no state regulates specific substances. That’s a power for the federal government. So if you buy a substance that’s legal in one state, you can safely bring it anywhere in Brazil. However in US this is not the case. I have the example of kratom, but Marijuana is another one.
This is what I was trying to say by 50 different countries. They aren’t actually countries but in some ways they have just as much if not more autonomy than countries, besides of course foreign policy decisions. But look at California for example. It’s economy is bigger than most countries in the world.
Off the top of my head and IRC:
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Belgium (different languages, laws, educational systems, public broadcasters per language region, taxation, etc.)
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UK (different laws in Scotland, different laws in Northern Ireland, education policy, etc.)
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Spain (autonomous regions with their own languages, seperate civil law in Catalunya, tax collection in the Basque country, etc.)
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Canada (IRC Quebec has a Napoleonic inspired civil law system, whereas the rest of Canada uses common law similar to that found in the US and UK. TLDR one legal system uses precedent, the other doesn’t. )
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China (the unofficial city tier system, Xinjiang, Tibet, etc.)
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Russia (autonomous regions in the far east, Kadyrov/Chechnya: strict alcohol prohibition and possibly years in jail, etc.)
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India (IRC autonomous administrative divisions can make their own laws, tribe/caste based laws/tribunals, Jammu and Kashmir which until quite recently had its own seperate consitution and for example Indians from other regions weren’t allowed to buy land or property there.)
The problem is that as a foreigner, you’re usually ignorant about all these things. Whether it’s a Brit who thinks all Americans are Yankees, an American who thinks all Brits are English, a Scotsman who thinks Spanish and Castellano are synonymous, or a Spaniard who goes to Belgium expecting to speak French everywhere.
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This, y’all. One of the things I think a lot of younger travelers fail to realize is that the US is not a meme. It’s huge and full of people with thoughts, hopes, regrets etc. just like everyone else.
Maybe there are better places to live or visit, but the US is pretty easy and most folks I’ve met are genuinely nice when they realize you might need help.
Edit: try to avoid police and if you encounter them play that foreign visitor thing up or make your English really bad. A lot of them are former soldiers that served in the middle east. They default to a pretty aggressive demeanor because that’s what we did to them. Your safety won’t be a concern, but they can waste lot of your time.
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I think the main thing is that people often hear bad things about the US because they’re comparing it to other developed countries. Like I wouldn’t want to live there because I live in a different developed country, but I would take living in the US over a good 80% of other countries.
You have more opportunities and there’s better infrastructure, healthcare, etc than in vast majority of the world.
Umm…
It varies from person to person and place to place. But generally, I would say that America is a pretty good place, but not perfect and has a lot of room for improvement.
Yes, healthcare is expensive, but we have some government programs to provide cheaper care for certain groups, like the very poor, the elderly, and veterans.
Violence varies from place to place, but I feel like I live in a safe area, and I have never seen or heard a gun fired at someone in a public place.
A lot of the bad laws typically involve disenfranchising certain minority groups. I am lucky enough to not be affected by most of this, and a lot of people are fighting back against it by trying to vote in better politicians.
I have never seen or heard a gun fired at someone in a public place
Feels weird you have to specify “at someone” and “in a public place”. I’ve never heard a gun fired outside of firing ranges (EU)
Live in a suburban area. Several of my neighbors have 5+ acres of land. One of them has a makeshift range, so I hear someone shooting all the time, sometimes for hours on end day after day. I’m not thrilled by it.
This would cover things like hunting and/or target practice at a home or private property, so not entirely that weird.
American here. Lived in California most of my life just outside LA in suburbs. Ventura as well. Lived in Tennessee for 2 years and Idaho 2. I’ve seen people open carry a few times. I own a gun and I’ve never seen or heard a gun fired outside of a gun range. I’m 40 btw. It’s not that bad here. It’s big and there are a lot of people so the news has tons of opportunities to present the worst of humanity which makes up a small percentage.
There’s also the fact that US media wants to show this bad stuff because it helps keep people afraid of the world around them and makes them easier to manipulate.
I live in a small city about an hour away from a major city. I’m also an hour away from what I would call the boonies – rural, remote areas where owning guns and open carrying is normal. In fact, I’ve seen open carry around here, in the city, quite a bit. It’s pretty normal around here.
I heard a shooting happen in the suburbs near my house when I was a kid. It’s what’s considered the “nice” part of town. An old woman walking her dog was killed. I heard the shot through my bedroom window. Only til I moved into the inner part of the city did I witness guns being shot in the city more often. Most of the times you hear pops, it’s fireworks. A couple times, it’s been guns. Those couple times are pretty freaky.
Every once in awhile I’ll walk past a crime scene downtown, usually something happened like a stabbing the night before. One day I scrolled through reddit and saw a video – a point-blank execution had occured outside the club down the road. That one was disturbing. I think the kid is going to jail for a long time.
The inner part of this particular city is not as safe as the suburbs, but for the most part you should be okay, as long as you’re not looking to start trouble. When I’m walking around town, especially the immediate area I live, my eyes are open. At night, they’re wide open.
America is harder to live in the poorer you are, and it’s on a steeper scale than in other industrialized nations because there are fewer and less robust social services, especially health and child care, and declines in union membership have paired with a rapid increase in wealth inequality that is forcing the shrinking middle class downward and stomping on the poor even harder.
You can live a comfortable life (for now…) if you are firmly middle class and up. Your higher salary than your counterparts in Europe is eaten away at by higher costs, and you deal with risks that they don’t in the form of transportation being car dominated (more accidents and less walking exercise) easy access to guns (the most dangerous being the one in your own home, to you) and less strict food safety laws. Compared to those in Eastern Europe, however, your likelihood of suffering from a foreign attack is drastically lower, not that it was ever very high to begin with.
One thing that Americans take pride in (and rightly, mind you) and full advantage of is our First Amendment right to not have our speech be curtailed, so a large amount of the bitching about America, and especially in English, is Americans bitching about America(ns). So there’s a cultural element to it that may or may not exceed the truth.
a large amount of the bitching about America, and especially in English, is Americans bitching about America(ns).
Absolutely.
J.J. McCullough did a really good video about this fact, I’d definitely recommend it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCVQKD3jH2M&ab_channel=J.J.McCullough
Fantastic video. J.J. completely nails it on multiple topics.
I would also add that the capitalist class loves to promote the idea if America as the greatest nation on earth because that storyline benefits them. They’ve already won the game and are benefiting from our current system. They don’t want it to change.
If we admit we have shortcomings–large gap in wealth equality, lack of accessible and affordible health services, piss poor public transportation, unaffordable child care paired with living costs so large 2 incomes are required, poor school funding, pervasive gun violence, and Policing that emphasizes violence, just to name a few-- then we are also acknowedging that we have to change things. Why would those who greatly benefit from our current system want change?
Why are there “removed” words in your comment?
I have heard lemmy.ml blocks curse words. My account is on lemmy.world and I see no removeds.
Quite ironic.
Poetic really. A meme is born.
You can’t be serious. I am using lemmy.ml.
Can you see the word “bitch”?
If you’re saying “the B word,” then no, I can’t.
The lemmy.ml server even rejected a post I attempted that addressed this:
I can’t upload another photo, because Connect says that the image service is “down,” but it rejects with “error: slurs”
Anyway, this is my last post here. It’s been fun, lemmy.ml.
Not removed for me.
Maybe you have a potty mouth blocking Greasemonkey script or something.
Oh right, I had heard about that: there’s a filter. I’m not sure what instance it’s on and what words it filters, though.
I was using the verb version of a word for a female dog.
This is why Trump should get elected so he can Make America Great Again, right guys?
But in all seriousness, I imagine it’s a case of that America is nowhere near as good as some Americans make it out to be, but it’s also not as terrible as the media make it out to be either. You can probably apply this to most of the Western World, really.
A lot of the ones that make it out to be greater than it is are just wishfully thinking. They imagine a place where they don’t need to make any changes while everything else must conform to their ideals and bend for them. They imagine trump is the answer to this. They typically have the simplest of beliefs and solutions that would fail even the slightest scrutiny.
The US is also extremely huge geographically. Towns are different from each other, and states and just general locations can be different from each other. There is no one place you can say “is America”. Hell, you can have a peaceful family friendly neighborhood, and the next street over could be a drugs and violence.
I agree the media absolutely makes it seem worse than it is. Especially with all the 24/7 news and fear mongering to grab attention.
You got me at first!! Hovering over that down arrow hahaha
I have very mixed feelings about Trump. Obviously, he really isn’t good for any country, so I hope he doesn’t get re-elected. Just throw him in the jail already. Unfortunately, I can’t deny the fact that on some sick and twisted schadenfreude way I also enjoyed watching the first four seasons of the Shitshow. Oh, what a rollercoaster that was.
The US healthcare system is actually even worse than people think. Employers use it to hold power over us all, and even if you have insurance the prices of everything are extremely inflated (my dad went in for back surgery and the total was $47k usd, but get this, one of the items was a single bag of saline solution----$270!), and many people including myself can’t afford health insurance at all so I’m 1 accident or illness away from total financial ruin.
I genuinely love America and the place where I live. There is a lot to like and there are many places where life is much harder, but the US health system is one of those things that is embarrassingly bad and honestly just scary.
That’s because American health insurance is not really insurance it’s a discount plan. Any of you remember being forced to sell those overpriced coupon books as fundraisers in school? That’s what American health insurance is. It’s a shitty discount plan/coupon book that you are forced into buying from your employer and the plan itself makes sure you pay as much out of pocket as they can legally get away with.
At least the coupon book is for products with real prices. Healthcare is a total scam with prices based on who is paying. The entire system is corrupt from top to bottom. The US problem is extreme systemic corruption. It is not individual corruption outside of the billionaire supreme court judges level, it is corporate sponsored corruption on a much larger scale.
The USA has a tenth of the laws and protections of any other western country. We have had nearly 50 years of a political denial of service attack from a right wing campaign of misdirection and distraction politics. No one can institute reasonable laws and protections when they are constantly battling whatever stupid inflammatory nonsense the hits the congressional floor. This is why the nonsense keeps happening. It is because it controls the conversation. The only purpose is to keep as many loopholes as possible open for the parasitic worthless billionaires that are funding it. The only fix is to force out the billionaires. The only way to accrue billions of dollars is by exploitation and criminal activity. There are no exceptions to this rule. Every billionaire is a criminal evading prosecution.
Yes and no. More than half the country is wanting to move in the direction of other modern nations. The trouble is we have the electoral college which was instituted as a compromise for slave holding states at the foundation of our country and which gives conservatives outsized power which has resulted in a long-term deadlock.
It’s likely that as demographics shift over the next decade, this deadlock will be broken and we’ll probably enter a period of rapid progress, but that’s only if we make it that long. With the degree to which Republicans are either brainwashed or willfully ignoring reality for the sake of trying to gain power, it remains to be seen whether we can.
The history of the Electoral College is a lot more complex than just slavery. Slavery became involved later during the 3/5th compromise which was used to determine census counts of the slave states (which determined the numbers the of representatives they were appointed).
The electors were supposed to be elected by the people and serve as an independent committee whose sole purpose was to choose the President/VP. They were to make an independent decision using the best information possible to vote for the candidate that would most faithfully be able to carry out the administration of the laws passed by Congress. The Presidency was supposed to be a boring, somewhat administrative role.
What the Founders failed to account for is the rise of political parties. The Presidency was never meant to be an office you ran for. It was supposed to be an appointment. That concept basically fell apart after Washington when the role political parties began to rise and coordinated campaigning truly started.
In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned that the rise of political parties would lead to absolute chaos as the elected officials would be less focused on their jobs and become more interested in gaining power over their rivals or enacting revenge. He was right.
Good insight. Washington was correct it seems.
Another interesting tidbit: one of the questions on the USA Naturalization Test is “What are the two political parties in the USA?”
That should be apportant to every American. Not the fact that the question is included (it’s viral knowledge to know if you want to live here), but the fact that we’ve allowed ourselves to be trapped in this hellish system where we’re being held hostage by two overly powerful political parties. In what “free” country are we only (realistically) allowed to choose between two options?
I imagine we’ll continue on this death-spiral until one party finally manages to “defeat” the other and we unofficially become a one-party state.
I disagree that it was just “slave holding states”. This is obvious to us, maybe, but when presenting the issue to non Americans I think it’s important to be accurate on this. It was meant to give states (slave holding or not) with lower populations a larger voice. It still does that. Our system of government was never meant to be a pure democracy. The president wouldn’t have to care about the priorities of smaller population states at all without the electoral college. They would just have to trust that he’ll keep them in mind.
With all that said though, with how homogenous the county is culturally and with communication and travel barriers between states and between the state and federal governments pretty much non existent, at this point I think it has outlived its usefulness and should be abolished. Also the difference between the most and least populated states are, percentage wise way bigger than they were when the county was founded. Also, if my voice as a populated state dweller is smaller because of this system, it feels less like the president is “my” president because I had less of a say in picking him. At the end of the day the president is everyone’s president equally so the election of the president should be a purely democratic process.
You’re missing another important piece. The “winner-take-all” system per state wasn’t intended that way. It was supposed to be proportionate to the votes cast, e.g., you take 50% of Ohio, you get 50% of Ohio’s EC. Unfortunately, states realized “winner-take-all” gets them more attention, and of course once one state does it, you pretty much have to go for it as well.
One of the founders wanted to fix that but died before they could see it through (I think Madison).
Not an American here, so please correct me if my take is completely wrong. My understanding is that while the highs are possibly higher than in a lot of places, the lows are also much lower and possibly easier to reach. You could be doing perfectly fine one day, and then you get hit by a hospital bill ruining your life. It’s surely a great place to be a billionaire or even just plainly well off. Except far too many people aren’t and they would fare much better elsewhere.
I’ll jump in and clarify a point as an American, the states vary greatly and the healthcare issue, while undeniably more expensive, general doesn’t leave you destitute if you’re in a blue state. California pushes for universal coverage and if you’re poor enough (which isn’t actual that poor) you can get insurance pretty cheaply, covering those crazy bills. Plus emergency rooms here can be paid by state under some circumstances.
For instance, my wife’s labor and subsequent baby hospitalization for jaundice cost us 200 for two trips and several nights stay, but the bill was 30k. Emplorers of a certain size (iirc 15 full time) are also compelled by law to cover insurance.
There’s also some safety net for free food, unemployment payments, welfare, and even transportation subsidies, although even good government here is like playing hard mode in a sim, so it’s not always as effective as a country like Finland. Some people simply don’t get aid and end up homeless, etc. Still miles above an underdeveloped country though.
Its a philanthropists playground. Just dont get caught being poor.
America is a decent place if you put your blinders on and worry about yourself… and don’t get sick. In America, you get sick and you go bankrupt. Some places in the world you get sick and you die. 🤷♂️ People in the US are pissed off because the problems we have are obvious, easy to fix, and the people in charge make blatantly shitty decisions because they stand to profit off of them. Unchecked capitalism has corrupted every branch of the government. And since the leaders are the ones that have to regulate it and they profit off of it, they won’t change it. The elections are actually lies. And there are people that try to say we are an elite, premier example of democracy and the best country in the world. We are not that. The upper half of this country is broken and it’s squeezing the middle and lower class until we pop, for profit.
The decision making people in this country are selfish twats. They would be voted out but gerrymandering and electoral colleges (that they control) prevent the people from actually making the decision. Our elections are a farce.
But if you don’t pay attention to those things and you decide to just keep your head down, work, pay rent, consume like they want you too, it’s OK. Keep your head out of the news or you just get pissed off and ashamed.
It depends on who you are, really.
If you’re a poor, black woman living in Louisiana where the only work you can find is at a chemical plant, your life is going to fucking suck.
If you’re upper-middle class living in a city, you’re probably going to have a pretty good life.
There are some systems that are just awful by developed standards though. Education, medicine, policing, and politics come to mind. They’re not likely to change, so you just have to cope with them. Basically just don’t ever get sick or interact with the police. You’ll probably die if you do either.
I agree with you. I’ll also add that if you are a poor Black woman in California, New York, Massachusetts, and a number of other states you will may have access to great public schools, where you can be guided into (public or private) college and grad school and programs for certification where you can actually claw your way into the Middle Class. It really depends on where you grow up in the US.
I come from a developing nation and we were always told how America is great and whatnot.
It’s called soft power. Hollywood and US military and fiscal aid makes it seem that the US is friendly to your country and a prosperous land of freedom, when it’s anything but.
Soft power is also why people think of Korea and Japan as more favourable and less conservative than countries with similar views on women, LGBT rights , etc that do not have the same level of soft power due to cultural and technological exports .
It’s not, but people love to be outraged and will find any reason to be. We have extremely comprehensive media coverage, so anything that can possibly go wrong will definitely be covered in the media, whereas in other countries, you just don’t hear about most bad things happening. The media will always twist anything and everything to be as polarizing as possible, as that generates clicks/views. Most of the time when you see things on the internet that make you rage (including here on lemmy), if you look into it deeper, there quite a bit of nuance, and you can see where they were coming from when they did such a thing. But to many people who are perpetually online, they don’t care about nuance. Everything is black and white to many people on the internet. Either it makes you happy or it makes you rage, and there is no in-between.
Things that actually do suck:
The mass shootings are absolutely awful and should be taken more seriously.
Healthcare is expensive if you don’t have insurance. But most people have decent enough insurance that it isn’t a huge deal. For example, my insurance plan has a $2000 out of pocket maximum, so no matter what happens, the most I can ever pay per year is $2000 for my entire family. Plus, most people rarely see a doctor, so it isn’t something that affects their daily lives. Kind of an “out of mind” type of thing.
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At no point did I say this was an exhaustive list.
Consider it a teenage country. It has growing pains and likes to think it knows better. It’s hard to look at it knowing the luxuries other countries have and still believe the rhetoric that is suggested in a lot of media glfron earlier in life
Overall, no. In most places things are peaceful and nice. In some places there is a lot of crime and squalor. A lot depends on your location, perspective, and luck.
It’s not just America. It’s the whole world right now.
Well, I have free healthcare here in my country and no guns.
But we do have stupid cunts as politicians enacting stupid fucking laws (like the online safety act)
So eh, kind of.
I feel this in my bones. Same access to healthcare, same lack of guns, different laws, different stupid shit, equally stupid politicians.
