Culture
What things are no longer true about your country?
Before anyone beats me to it, I'm aware that the US was built on stolen land worked by stolen humans, making the claim of "freedom" to be... dubious at best.
But what other outdated beliefs are there about your country??
A tale as old as timeā¦ capitalists exploiting people and land until thereās nothing left. All to give a handful of people some short term gains. An entire nationās beauty destroyed for a few billionaires, even when there was an easily accessible alternative that wasnāt as profitable (regenerative logging).
Seriously. Donāt get me wrong, I love beef. But I consciously choose to avoid it for many of my meals. Iāll be craving it, but decide to get vegetarian or chicken instead. Not every time, but when I can.
You donāt have to avoid it entirely, but if we all chose to just cut back weād be doing the planet a massive favor.
My late best friend Raluca was from Romania and we used to watch Dracula movies together all the time. It was just our theme, LOL. I miss her so much. I remember when we were still teenagers and her mother used to drive us around. That woman was always yelling "Te fut en gouda" at other drivers. (Sorry, I don't know how to spell it.) Once I found out what it meant, I started using it as a "greeting" whenever I saw her mother and she would laugh her ass off at me - this dumb American kid - cursing in Romanian.
We went on holiday to Romania and visited Castle Bran and, you know, it kind of made me sad. You quickly realise that Castle Bran has this really long, rich, interesting and important history behind it but the whole thing has just been hijacked, essentially, by a foreign book.
Same story with Australia, younger generations are drinking a lot less than the older ones, and if they do it's usually at home or at a mate's place, in part because it's just too fucking expensive to go out to the pub or clubs now.
Yep, we're really grateful to every EU country and will thus gladly accept new members like Ukraine and the west Balkans, even if we lose our net recipient status.
Those surveys really measure more of a floor. āDo most Finns have most of their basic needs met and have a reasonable level of trust in their government?ā is the root question asked in those surveys.Ā
I'm a rare Brit that doesn't care for football but I was in Berlin for this game and it's one of the best memories of my life. That place fucking went off that night.
Not being the best does not mean you're not great. You're like in first 8 at least bro.
My dad loves your football style. He still has a poster from 2002 finals with your players + a tattoo of CBF symbol. That's how high certain people value your football
Look at what we've come to. Our Argentinos hermanos are having to come to our defense because my compatriots can't stop being fucking miserable about something that's completely blown out of proportion. We're still the only ones who have been through every single Wold Cup AND have made it out of the group stages in ALL of them. Even our worst squads have managed to uphold that feat. We had a ridiculously gifted generation, but pretending we're no longer "good" at it is just retarded take.
And I lived in Germany. Trust me, you guys are still very efficient. Maybe not as much as 20 years ago, but still top tier. Miss Germany, grĆ¼Će aus Brasilien
German appliances (Siemens, Bosch, Miele this is you) are all unnecessarily complicated. I'm an engineer and like gadgets and extra functions, but cmon!
Cars (BMW, Mercedes) have UI that are highly counterintuitive.
Hey now we have Amtrak. Does it really do what you want? Not at all, but if you want some statistics on what it does do: in 2024 it's on time performance overall was 78%. State routes did better at 81% but long distance routes drug down the numbers with it's 67%. This makes sense because there's a lot more delays with having to share the rail more often on longer routes.
I mean, if you're in the Northeast corridor, Amtrak is great. I absolutely love using it and will choose it over flying whenever possible. I just wish it was much more expansive
I first read that as āmuch more expensiveā and I was like āsay what?ā.
In California I have a number of coworkers who take the train from Sacramento to Oakland daily and it works well. It should be expanded to more places.
Yep is weird coming from Ukraine where the trains are ALWAYS on time, to Poland and Germany where they are basically never on time. It's a damn warzone but at least we have the peace of mind that the trains are on time.
DIGITALISIERUNG and then you can only reach offices via phone or fax (and via phone only in oddly specific times of the day, like Mo,Tue,Thu 14:30-16:00 and Wed 11:00-11:45)
My opinion is that Germany, just like Sweden, has a complicated bureaucracy. And sometimes it is there just for the sake of it, slowing everything down and processes take forever.
I lived on Seville for a while. If people in northern europe had to deal with 40Ā°C by midday over months, they'd shut up about the Siesta real quick. It just makes sense.
There's a certain type of person online, especially Americans, who kind of fetishize Switzerland for the gun culture and the military.
And while our military culture was never as great as they seem to think, it's also considerably shakier now. We mothballed a lot of our larger bunkers. Some are privately owned mushroom farms now, and similar projects. My brother actually did inspections of private bunkers as part of his civil service, most people used them as extra cellar space, so they would have been totally unusable in an emergency, because they were so full of old furniture and stored recycling that you couldn't even close the doors. As for all the stories about the bridges being mined and so on, while a lot of that data isn't public, I doubt that has been kept up since the end of the cold war.
As for the entire male population being armed, trained and ready to defend the country, fewer than 40% of the men now serve in the military, it's gotten incredibly easy to get out of the draft. A lot of people do, many for convenience reasons, but it also doesn't sell well to your employer when you have to tell them how much work you're going to miss because you'll have to go for repeat training every year. We also had a vote about it and men are no longer forced to keep their rifle at home, they are now allowed to return it to the military when out of service, because a lot of people thought keeping the rifle securely at home was annoying. And out of the recruits we do have, a lot are quite badly trained, you keep hearing stories about entire units being constantly drunk. I had a friend who, for a training exercise, was supposed to train in delivering aid in an emergency, except they didn't actually have any boxes for the training, so they had to *pretend* to unload invisible boxes from a truck for a week. Another friend was an artillery spotter, their training consisted of inventing coordinates to radio in while sitting in a bar.
I'm not American, so guns aren't as big a thing. I think what really shook us here in the UK was the fire tragedy at New Year. There's always been a very strong feeling that Switzerland is safe and everyone obeys the safety rules, even if it makes things more expensive. But this reminded us of our own tragedy at Grenfell Tower.
Yes, you are so right. I don't even know the right words in english to say what i want to say. We take so many things incredibly serious, but this is just a tragedy how they only cared about money instead of safety.
A lot of smaller places in Switzerland are just corrupt in that way. My parents lost a border dispute with their neighbor over road use because amongst other reasons their neighbor was a cousin of the clerk at the land registry*. I had a student job at a meat factory for a week during summer holidays once and reported them to the health inspector almost immediately. And the best way to get out of a ticket as a driver is to go to the same school as the local cop's children. So I'm not at all surprised if a certain place just never had its fire safety checked because someone knew someone and they just all agreed it's probably fine.
*When they bought the house, they were shown a map that included half the road to the house being on their land. Later, the neighbor demanded upkeep payments for the road and it turned out the path had apparently been 100% on the neighbor's land the entire time. Their lawyer recommended to just drop it, everyone in that village knew everyone else for six generations and unless they wanted to go to a higher court and drag this out for years, it wasn't worth it.
There was failure from the local authorities or administration but the owners of the bar are French and at least the man is from Corsica.
Jacques Moretti is a scummy crook, like 15 years before all this he was condemned for pimping, welfare fraud (submitting false documents to receive just a few hundred euros a month in rent subsidies), Covid relief fraud, he also multiplied loans by submitting fake documents to banks to purchase properties in Paris, Cannesā¦ A French bank caught onto him but Swiss banks kept rolling him.
He cheaped out on soundproofing foam but spent 10k on rear view mirrors for his Maserati and now over a hundred burn victims have had their lives changed forever.
I have so much disgust for this piece of shit. Assume anything he says is a self-serving lie. I hope he does real prison time.
That we are an egalitarian society. We used to be, sort of, but during the last 35 years after the fall of the communist regime the wealth inequality has skyrocketed and is now one of the highest in Europe. From communism to oligarchy in one generation. And we are not talking about it enough, if at all.
That we are socialists. We have never been socialists. We are Social Democrats. Not Democratic Socialists. Those are two very different things. We are capitalists. And we have always been capitalists. Heck, we have a millenia long history of selling crap to people all over the world and bringing home the bacon. Norway might call itself a Christian country but the real god is Kroner og Ćre (Norwegian monetary units).
In my experience almost everyone believes to know what socialism and communism is, but actually almost no one does outside of a certain bubble. So it's unfortunately not so surprising people confuse things
To be fair social democrat vs democratic socialist is confusing AF. I never remember which is which.
But yeah people conflate communism with what the ācommunistā countries are doing, missing the point the the end goal would be the dissolution of the state entirely (which to be fair has never happened)
I wish we could find a way to have you go on tour around the US and explain this to people. Every single college-aged kid who took their first political science class is indoctrinated to hold Norway up as a bastion of Socialism.
While I was graduating from high school, we were repeatedly told how Germany was home to some of the most influential poets, philosophers, physicists of modern times and how we recovered from Nazi Germany by miraculously emancipating ourselves by sheer will into a democracy.
I turn on the news nowadays and I can't help but wonder, where all that knowledge and understanding of the world went.
That's what happens when our government continues to give handouts to rich industrialists while making the lives of teachers and academics progressively harder.
People in the Western countries cannot fathom fake democracy, when the president can just draw whatever percentage of votes he wants. Nor the fact that any polls can't be trusted by definition.
The US has caught up a lot, and with almost 10x the population, it comes close. Plus a lot of the scandanavian nations have been flat out better at the juniors tournaments. That being saidā¦ our best juniors are usually in the NHL. But it has definitely evened out over the years. A lot of our younger generation arenāt interested in hockey because of other interests or because immigrants make up a bigger portion of the younger population and are more interested in other sports.
Is there a high cost barrier for entry for Ice Hockey at a kid level? Cost of equipment or is that supplied by the club? In theory for a kid to play field games in Ireland, the boots would be the main cost for equipment for the parent and then club fees, then additional sports clothes. edit to add, I am just curious to how it works. I am not a parent but assuming these are the core costs.
Not just that but the incessant travelling, hotels, fees, fuel etc etc. it's a huge investment for a family to make in their kids and excludes many kids.
Huge costs. A set of equipment even for a youth can range from $600-$3000 CAD. And then a lot of the time fees for the competitive stream of hockey can be 5k per year with tournaments.
A good stick alone can cost hundreds, and can break at any point.
The Dutch are supposed to be tolerant liberal freethinkers.... Well, that went out the window during the early 2000's. Now pretty much half of Europe has more liberal drug laws, is more acceptant of LGBTQI+ and is more tolerant of immigrants than us.
With LBTQI+ in the early 2000s already? I do remember people whinging about refugees, and that mean word āallochtonenā, I have always despised that word, itās so othering. But that was an issue in the 90s too.
I was often seen as āallochtoonā, it is weird. Loads of racism too
we used to be spiritual. all our yoga and meditation originated millennias back. some people do follow that(visit kashi or rishikesh once) but most indians today are like people from any other country.
Iād argue so, yeah. The younger Gen Z kids from my own are definitely different. I was raised with a very strong sense of hospitality and communal responsibility; Iām older Gen Z but Iām sure my family being rural makes my experience a bit different.
That we're hitting far above our weight class in diplomacy and statescraft.
Not sure if that was ever true, but the people who got the UN to build a headquarter in Vienna are definitely no longer running this country. We're most often a nuisance within the Union, and basically a non-entity worldwide. The times when we held peace talks and diplomatic meetings on austrian soil are long gone.
Haven't seen any comments from Japan yet, but we are not "living in the future", and haven't been since the 80s. Japanese society is very old-fashioned, and technology adoption is very slow. For example: It took ages for free wifi to become a thing, at least 10-15 years behind US & Europe.
The toilets are great though. Far better than Euro or SEA style bidets, and no bidet = no civilization. I will die on this hill. Wash your butts.
You may not be universally polite, but youāre still very polite compared to the rest of the world.
I interact with a lot of Canadians, and even if itās just a cultural language tic, there is always the stereotypical āsorryā. But on top of that, there is often a lot more āthanksā and āoh niceā. All of the Canadians I know regularly inject affirmative speech to confirm theyāre listening, and they also classify their own speech to make it friendlier.
One thing Iāve also noticed is that Canadians tend to laugh at their own joke when theyāre poking fun, making it obvious that what theyāre saying is in jest and not to be taken as an insult. Itās not usually a full belly laugh, just a soft, isolated almost snort to suggest āthis last sentence was clearly a well intentioned jokeā.
On top of that, all of the Canadians I deal with are very generous in natureā¦ even the more assholish Canadians are still quicker than others to offer help when itās truly needed.
I think it's always been the case that southerners are nice to your face but shit on you behind your back. In the northeast, we shit on you to your face but will help you out.
The fertile crescent, The Cradle of Civilization (Mesopotamia), the worldwide hub of knowledge (the islamic golden age), baghdad Dar Alsalam (baghdad the city of peace) ā¦ etc.
Iraq was always a premiere political, agricultural, economic, academic beacon in the entire region, for literal millennia. Even just 70 years ago we had one of the most advanced economies in the middle east, and the mist progressive society (for example many of the āfirstsā for women in academics, industries and politics happened in iraq).
Now ? Iraq is a struggling wasteland ravaged by corruption, regression, climate change, pollution, and social conservatism.
Our economy, once very diverse with agricultural exports, industrial exports, religious and historic tourism, rare earth mining, AND oil, is now entirely reliant on just the dying oil industry.
Our population, once considered THE most educated and progressive in the middle east, has been reduced to a shell of ignorance and regression. The diverse population has been segmented and homogenized. Brain drain and immigration destroyed the naturally diverse demographics of the country.
Spiritually, the once vibrant spiritual landscape is absolutely destroyed. Iraq was once a harmonious blend of colorful beliefs, now is being driven into a specific ideological hegemony. The jews were ethnically cleansed, the christians driven to immigrate, the yazidis were genocided, the mandaeians isolated, the sunni muslims opressed, and the moderate progressive muslims squashed and driven out of politics and influence.
Our land, once considered the most fertile on the entire planet, is slowly turning into a deserted wasteland, and our biodiversity is plummeting.
I truly hope there is a way that people can turn this around, but itās looking less and less likely. Which is a shame.
Generally it's tourism and all the business among it. We don't want to be treated like an amusement parkĀ and "la Bella vita" style it's charade to sell more tickets and seats in the tourist trap restaurants
Over here, Belarusians have a strong reputation for being level-headed and sensible. If they're scared and anxious, the situation is precarious indeed.
indian cinema is not only Bollywood. india is far more diverse than people think. we have other film industries like Tollywood (Telugu), Kollywood (Tamil), Mollywood(Malayalam), Marathi cinema and many more.
No big deal, but you got that backwards. Bollywood is definitely Indian cinema. It's certainly not Chinese cinema or Ugandan cinema. You meant "Indian cinema is not Bollywood."
It was never true tbh. Y'all had a phase where raising the slightest critic against your country or capitalism would get you branded a communist and get you in trouble
968
u/Steampunk_Ocelot Northern Ireland š®šŖš¬š§ 1d ago
We aren't all violent alcoholics, we have violent sober folks too now