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Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

I think people in Europe underestimate just what a CRAZY place the US is. It's basically a third-world country with a first-world economy. You feel unsafe on the streets, and you have to be alert all the time. A lot of people in the US are just plain nuts, just look at who they voted for. Obviously, its positive sides are also crazy good. Before Trump, they voted for Obama. I guess it is a place for young people and gamblers.

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We've had to warn you before about nationalistic flamebait on HN. Accounts that do that eventually get banned, so please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's not flame bait, but (I think it's) true. If you want to ban me, go ahead.

On some further introspection, this is probably a good moment for a break from HN for me. There is just too much crap out there, and I need to focus all of my time on creating something much better instead of writing HN comments of questionable value.

Calling another country crazy, etc., is obviously flamebait in the sense of being a provocation that frequently leads to flamewar.

That's independent of whether you think it's true. Nearly all flamebait has the latter property.

I've lived in several major US cities and have never felt unsafe in any way. Feels pretty similar to Canada, main difference is that the news is more toxic, and the west coast has more visible tents than what I'm used to.

As an european, I often picture myself US like a mix between european culture and japanese culture. The brand and flavor is european, but everything is pushed to the extreme (from an european point of view) like in Japan.

U.S. culture, at least its inception, is best viewed through a lens of reacting to European culture. Especially in an intellectually-driven anti-aristocratic way. Not the populist anti-aristocratic way of the French Revolution that followed the American Revolution.

That pattern seems to repeat itself as an anti-globalist revolution in the present, and one closer to the French Revolution in some aspects.

US culture is driven by lack of social interaction. People in rural areas have few interactions with others and don't like rules that limit their own immediate freedoms (to not wear masks, to discriminate, etc.) to keep society safe and in harmony. Due to this effect, older big cities are more "European," newer cities are less "European," and outside of cities, you'll see a lot more people range from "but my freedoms" to actively antisocial.

Here, I'm using "European" in the "Western European" sense like you presumably are. Eastern Europeans have an anti-Communist bent that resembles rural Americans' behavior.

Depends on how you're slicing "interactions", especially considering the internet.

Evangelicals are highly into their churches, which tend to fly below the analytic radar.

And surprise the "experts" at election time.

Hmm, I will have to keep this in mind.

Maybe they are both extreme, but I believe they are extreme in very different ways.

How did you get your impression of what the US is?

Maybe I got that impression when I was walking from my flat to Pittsburgh university on one of the main roads with plenty of shops left and right, a car stopped and a naked black woman was thrown out of the car and landed 10 meters in front of me on the pavement. Maybe I got that impression when at the same corner my San Francisco dorm flat was, somebody got shot and bled out right there. Maybe I got that impression when I was crossing the street and the driver who was clearly seeing me accelerated and I saved myself by jumping to the side.

Meanwhile in France: https://www.vice.com/en/article/epddna/turkey-france-armenia....

There is a difference between suffering from terrorist attacks, and letting it change your way of life so that the NSA can snoop on your citizens in an unprecedented way, and you are starting to build a wall somewhere at the Mexican border.

Maybe it is not so much the NSA, but German secret services do pretty much snoop everything they can get their noses into. The only reason that they couldn't collect as much as the NSA was inferior technical capability, not a lack of will or legal options. Everything that happened after Snowden and associated scandals was that the formerly "maybe-legal" status quo was written into law as definitely legal...

Europe is currently building walls along the southern (Ceuta, Mellila) and southeastern (Greece-Turkey, Hungary) borders, and relying on the mediterranean to act as such. It may not be a concerted effort, European politics is very much split up over the refugee situation. But even in the most pro-refugee countries, enforcing some boundaries and borders is still accepted by a majority.

In the US, that domestic surveillance was shut down and later ruled illegal. In France, it was formally allowed by law. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/world/europe/french-legis...

As far as international policy, the French were colonialists in French Indochina, while the US was just red-baited in, so the intentions of the US (though indicative of blundering stupidity) were not as bad.

And don't forget we have concentration camps. That's prisons for non-citizens, we also have lots of citizens in prison too. More prisoners per capita than any other country. We are the world's police.

Well regarding illegal immigration, Europe is straight up fascism. We dump refugees to open prisons on islands. There's not a single country that is so relaxed view on illegal immigration like USA, keeping borders is common sense in the rest of the world, not even a discussion. The immigration crisis was a temporary thing, because there were just too many people coming at once.

> terrorist attacks,

They're not terrorist attacks, it's civil war.

This is the paradox of tolerance (which to me should be what Popper is reminded for)

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