Europe is not as different from the US as it likes to pretend, especially politically.
Racism is not a unique or exceptionally American phenomenon, and the things I’ve heard from otherwise progressive Europeans can fucking curdle milk equal or in excess to what people in my ultra-rural ultra-conservative home region of the US can say.
I’ve had good friends who were Europeans studying here, and they can definitely be very insensitive and racist. What makes the two flavors of racism different to me is American racism is typically very confrontational, tribalistic. White man calling a black man a slur, and there’s something cavalier about it, maybe even humorous on the part of the racist.
Europeans have a much more “it is the way it is” attitude. I’ve heard friends talk very disparagingly about interracial couples, or blacks in general, and the attitude is less “hate for hate’s sake” but instead “it is the wrong way to be and my way is correct”. Fascinatingly, when you point out the bigotry, my friends have typically refused to accept their bias (at best), and will deny they’re racist.
I’ve heard Europeans call Turks ‘filthy’ and ‘roaches’ and Africans ‘monkeys’. And don’t get me started on the things said about the Romani.
I don’t think there’s a difference in how tribalistic or vicious it is.
Weird. I haven’t.
Making sure I’m reading this right…I know a guy who claims he isn’t sexist but that it is OK to pay women less because they aren’t as good at some things as men. So in his mind, it isn’t sexist to pay women less or even claim they should be paid less - even though it is.
Is that similar to what you’re saying?
Not a bad way of comparing it tbh
Did you type ‘females’ instead of ‘women’ for the sake of the argument or did you get caught up in it as well?
Guess I got caught in it. Just looked it up and didn’t realize until now that female wasn’t an acceptable word to use. TIL. Thanks!
The easy way to understand and remember is that “female” is an adjective the vast majority of the time, and it’s usually misogynists and incels using it as a noun.
I think mysoginists just have a lot of spotlight on them, or are vocal. I hadn’t been aware of “female” being used as a slur before it was pointed out here on Lemmy. I think “female” as a noun is still used neutrally far more often than as a slur.
As an adult female human, I have never been called a “female” in a positive or neutral tone. The key point is that you basically never hear people calling men “males” anywhere outside of scientific discussion.
blacks
While we’re on the topic, I think “black people” is the preferred term (in general it’s adjectives over nouns, like “gay people” vs “gays”)
I’ve heard people of all types use the word ‘blacks’ I think it’s a regional thing.
It’s more likely a field thing. People who work in fields highly dedicated to equity (esp. those working in healthcare) are especially concerned with their language and so create style guides that people outside those fields have gleaned from.
Example:
Hey fair enough. I use whites so I tend to use the same kind of term in the other direction, too. I don’t mean anything insulting by it
Wow, you’ve really succinctly put it best! Being a European myself, this is how I constantly feel when I hear racist shit in my daily life (mainly from family).
It’s like, people here just can’t even fathom that what they’re saying is racist, that they’re racist, because to them what they’re saying is just a simple fact of life that everybody accepts. They don’t show open animosity towards minorities or throw racial slurs like you’d see more in America (though there is definitely some of that here too don’t get me wrong), but it’s a very casual, low-key form of racism where folks comment on X group of people all being one way and no one batting an eye for example.
And if you so much as suggest they’re racist, or the country they’re in has or had issues with racism and other issues of oppression, a lot will legit fight you tooth and nail over it because they can’t handle the notion of it.
It’s really freaking weird and took me a lot of time to be conscious of it myself, since I grew up surrounded by this sort of attitude.
And it’s not just right-leaning people doing this. Some minorities like the Romani are openly discriminated by just about everyone across the political spectrum, the degree just varies. And then based on the country you’ll typically see a lot of Xenophobia towards the bigger migrant groups.
And even then the European countries that feel they’re ahead of the rest tackling racism it’s usually only the urban university educated talking with their fingers in their ears ignoring the majority of the rest of their country.
The things I’ve heard far too many Europeans of various nationalities say about MENA, Desi, Turkish, and Romani folk just… makes my skin crawl.
America has a deep racism problem, and it is both right and necessary to acknowledge it. But those who pretend that Europe doesn’t have a deep racism problem are either not paying attention or in denial - especially considering recent political developments.
The things I’ve heard far too many Europeans of various nationalities say about MENA, Desi, Turkish, and Romani folk just… makes my skin crawl.
Very true
Just ask a Mexican person what it’s like to travel to Spain
Ask a Spanish or Portuguese person what it’s like to travel to France or Belgium. Italians used to face racism in other European countries a few generations ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Dogs_or_Italians_Allowed
I have been surprised by how racist many Brits are
sexist too.
Definitely agree on the “Europe is just racist in a different way.” Outside of the obvious ones (like Middle East & Africa), I’d also add racism/xenophobia against “Eastern” Europe (like Poland), which might surprise Americans because they’re still white.
yall need to get off the high horse and take a joke sometimes. you terrorized the entire world via colonization for hundreds of years through modern day, if people harmlessly stereotype the german or french, make fun of british people, or tease the dutch language, yall can handle it
for context, im american. we get bullied all the time, and while not all americans are fat and stupid, the combination of that many are and that we’ve terrorized the world plenty make me think a lil teasing is fair
Yes it’s perfectly fair and most of us don’t mind.
I think the issue, especially on Reddit, was the over-representation of US Americans compared to the other countries.
It gets old quite fast to get called a “surrender monkey” or a Nazi on a regular basis in a space where most of the audience is on the other side and I’m not even French or German.
On Lemmy it’s probably a bit more balanced.
I guess let’s see what happens with the Germany elections in February because that nazi line may start to ring true.
Does the Trump election gives everyone the right to call all US citizens convicted felons?
Certainly gives everyone the right to call us a country of idiots.
Sounds derogatory and xenophobic
It is not derogatory if it is true.
You guys elected a felon.
Just opened a thread on [email protected] about that, the polls look okay. The non far-right parties should be able to create a coalition.
Well you sound fat and stupid.
Based on the comments it looks like Europeans weren’t ready to hear some of these things. 😉 Let me pile on…
Innovation in Europe is stiffled due to a risk-averse culture, complex regulatory environments, fragmented markets across different countries, limited access to venture capital, and a tendency for established companies to be less receptive to new ideas from startups, making it harder for innovative companies to scale up (compared to the US).
regulatory environments
Regulations are written in the blood of the victims.
And other regulations are written by the lobbyists of big companies.
Here in Germany we have so many regulations that don’t help anyone, except big companies who can circumvent or deal with them.
I don’t want to reduce environmental or worker protection, but we need to simplify a lot of regulations so that the time to do the paperwork is reduced, one of the solutions should be good digitalisation.
Some are, sure. I think most on Lemmy support those kinds. While I enjoy the effects, USB-C mandates aren’t written in blood, and I suspect the majority of regulations are of that variety.
The USB-C mandate is a direct result of it being actively ignored by Apple. The way to universal chargers, first through micro USB and then USB C was also championed by the EU but only as a loose industry agreement or so. Definitely not enough to reign in Apple which is why it was now made mandatory.
The main motivation was to reduce electronic waste due to every device having a different charger and often not even standardising in the same company.
I support the mandate. Just pointing out that the whole “blood of victims” thing, while true of some very important regulations, is nonsense for most of them. There were no victims of lightning ports. There was no blood involved in generic Champagne being called Sparkling Wine.
Start-ups in the US benefit from an immediate market of 400 million people. The EU should be able to enjoy a similar benefit but you are right about the red tape. Obviously Brexit in the UK was a total anathema to that as well.
From what J can see innovation is happening just fine
Rather have stifled innovation than innovation running rampant like what the US is doing.
With stifled innovation you only get through if you have an actual good idea instead of just an idea that makes money.
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Ain’t no way you gonna put all of Europe into that statement. You do understand that each country have their own system, policies and regulatory laws?
The problem here is that what you’re saying is maybe true for a handful of countries while completely false and inaccurate for a handful of others.
We’re not one single entity. Your statement is just not accurate as a whole.
Yea my healthcare one quickly got down voted. Someone used GPT to try to disprove it. I’m even a big propilonent of public healthcare, but you can’t assume it is perfect.
Too many people smoke in Europe and it’s too widely accepted.
You guys should start bulking up your militaries. At best, the US will completely abandon you, and I really don’t want to think about worst-case scenario as I live in the US.
Already happening, keep up
The US has ever been a fickle bed fellow.
completely abandon you
You write “attack you for water/oil” weird. Or did I write the quiet-part worst case out loud?
i dont get this comment, at the hypothetical best case scenario wouldnt abandoning be “better” than attacked for oil? therefore attacked for oil not being the best case scenario?
Unlikely. The cost/benefit doesn’t work for an assault on the EU. Most countries in the EU have to import oil and gas (Norway being a notable exception), which is why cutting off gas from Russia has been such a big deal. The cost of invading wouldn’t be offset by the oil gains unless oil got really scarce. A smarter move–if we had a president that didn’t give a fuck about our European allies–would be abandoning NATO, stop selling arms to EU members, and then buy oil and gas from Russia at a discount while Russia invades EU countries. (If, say, China didn’t beat this entirely hypothetical US president to the punch.) As far as water goes, it would be cheaper to built massive desalination plants than it would be to move water by supertanker.
'Course, climate change is going to render most of this moot in 50 years or so.
Europe has very little in the way of oil reserves. Norway has the most at 7 billion barrels. Greenland has 18. Saudi Arabia 267 billion. Venezuela 300 billion. If I was Venezuelan I’d be sweating pretty hard right now.
Venezuelan oil is “dirty” IIRC. Apparently it’s good for bunker fuel (imagine the dirtiest sludge ever used for pushing giant ships around the ocean and you’ve got a good idea of bunker fuel), but requires significantly more refining than Saudi or US crude oil. So yay for Venezuela, but also the US would rather just replace the government with the help of that three-letter agency that shall not be named and deal with someone who went to an Ivy but is “Venezuelan enough”.
As someone who isn’t a European, most of these comments are yanks being loudly wrong about something and the saying “see the europeans weren’t ready to hear it” when someone points out how stupid the thing they said was.
I will say the Americans not ready to hear post was pretty much everything I complain about all the time. I don’t think these posts are good in any way. It’s just slinging shit for no reason with no productive conversation.
Specifics?
I thought America was racist until I saw a member of UK Parliament tweeting about a boat of migrants sinking with “Good riddance”.
How would people who live outside of Europe know what Europeans are not ready to hear? As someone who lives in the U.S. I know only a couple of people IRL who live in Europe.
The thing my European friend was not ready to hear was that all his complaining about the social programs in his home country and the high taxes and so on comes across as entitled and spoiled. Because he’s never lived without the benefits of a state that will provide healthcare and so on, he is free to complain about his privileges and glorify the U.S. as a place where individual citizens fill in the responsibilities that the government should fulfill. He sees this as an unmitigated good, because he thinks it means more civic engagement.
What he doesn’t understand is that this results in most people falling through the cracks, and until he falls through one of those cracks himself it won’t be real to him how bad it is to not be able to afford losing wages because you are sick or injured, or what it’s like when you can’t afford to see a doctor when you break a bone or get so sick you can’t leave your house.
That said, I’m not sure every European needs to hear this, or that they’re not ready to hear it - just this one person seemed to be a little delusional and to have idealized the U.S. as some kind of right-wing libertarian utopia.
How would people who live outside of Europe know what Europeans are not ready to hear?
-Goes on to do exactly that
Bröther
You take your lööps for granted, Eurøpeans. Your Sïster grows weary.
A Møøse once bit my sister…
does she prowl the forests fighting bandits with her newfound møøse powers?
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Just ignore he was talking about one specific european he knows, that was making out the states to be superior
Opinions differ from person to person, some people here really are a bit disconnected from reality
of course, I assume most Europeans are not like my friend :-)
Europe as a whole is swinging too far too the right. Y’all all are descending back into Fascism. The recent popularity of the AfD in Germany being a prime example. My own parents - who immigrated from Germany - are deeply disappointed in the direction the country is taking.
Smoking kills.
The numbers are a bit worse than I thought https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/smoking-rates-by-country.
As usual, Sweden is doing well. So are a lot of African countries.
Once years ago when I used to smoke, on was visiting Ghana and people were literally yelling at me for smoking in public. It’s illegal to smoke in public in a few African countries at this point IIRC.
Just came back from France it’s out of control there seemingly.
Most of us dislike it. But it’s also true that we have quite a lot of tobacco users. It’s just disgusting
Why wouldn’t Europeans be ready to hear that? Pretty sure we’ve been hearing it on a regular basis since the 70’s
It’s always jarring to go to an otherwise gorgeous and cosmopolitan EU city and see the kind of cigarette litter the US has 30 years ago. Where I live in the US, cops actually write tickets for throwing butts on the ground, and people will yell at you for it. In Lisbon or Paris, there are entire parts of the city which just smell like an ash tray because of all the cigarette litter.
Europeans are really fucking racist. Asians and Jews are cool and yet yall are really weird about them. and don’t get me started on how badly Islam is vilified…
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Asians are racist af even against other Asians
Also “Gypsies.” Europeans aren’t fans.
You seriously never met a racist Asian?
It’s true. I would extend this to the world, though. The world is generally fucking racist
Nobody is “weird” about Asians or Jews where I live, that I know of. I’m even half west-Asian myself. Nobody had been weird about it to me, ever. I was always met with positivity regarding my heritage. Surprised to see you say this, to be honest.
It really does feel like online communities get more relentlessly xenophobic when they have more Europeans. It just seems like a lot of you can’t get by without mentioning where someone’s from. Like, no, someone not seeing the value in retro computing doesn’t say anything about “the intelligence of the average Scot.” And if you can’t tell where they’re from, American by default.
Wow that’s exactly the kind of thing a Scot would complain about
Really wish @notruescotsman was here right now
States in the southern U.S. are often the butt of the joke too.
French food is wildly overrated, as is Paris.
The US is not a mono-culture and most of us (unfortunately not all of them voted) are against most of the things we as a country are ridiculed over.
I swear, replace “US” or “Americans” in some of the stuff Europeans are posting/commenting with any other country, and those would sound xenophobic AF. But somehow, because 'Murica, it gets a pass.
It’s kind of funny because if you go look at the reply about soccer, several people are like “that wasn’t the Europeans, that was the brits!”
It’s the same thing here with different states doing different crazy things … Not that we also don’t do some stuff nationally that’s crazy, like electing a certain felon, but ya know
If Europeans looked at states like countries it’d make more sense to them. Hell it almost is with the size of states vs counties, the amount of land and the fact that every freaking state still has its own set of laws that may differ.
True, but even then each state isn’t even a mono-culture. I’m as guilty as any when it comes to stereotyping states (particularly Florida via “Florida Man”) but I’m trying to get out of that mindset myself lol.
Wyoming is a monoculture. It’s too small of a population to be anything else.
/s
Even within States, there is a diversity of culture. Looking at Louisiana, the New Orleans area is highly influenced by French history resulting in Cajun culture, while the rest of the state is generally Southern. Florida is similar to Ancient Greece and its city-states in that the metropolitan areas have their own culture. But even within the southeast metro area, Miami and West Palm Beach are culturally quite different. Even more zoomed in, consider the Bay Area (Frisco). The Haight-Ashbury district is commonly considered the birthplace of the hippie movement, whereas across the bay is Oakland, birthplace of the Black Panthers. Both were quite progressive yet at odds with each other due to cultural differences stemming from race.
We can zoom out and look at cultural differences across the country within the same racial group. For example, there’s the famous East Coast vs West Coast rivalry in hip-hop that is so real, it resulted in the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. Even within the same coast, New York hip-hop, such as Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, and Wu-Tang, is noticeably different from Atalanta hip-hop, such as Outkast, Missy Elliot, and Ludacris. Even as static as race is, white rapper Eminem is often included in Black culture.
Within the White rural sphere, we can contrast Upper Peninsula Michiganders (Yoopers) with their major influence coming from long harsh winters to the Appalachians who are known for being culturally isolated, having a mistrust of outsiders and a history of conflict with mining companies. Then, we have rural white people from West Texas to Nevada that are influenced by the Wild West period and local native cultures. Even within that, Texans are much more conservative with social matters whereas Nevada has legal gambling and prostitution. They way I make sense of culture in the US is that it is an overlapping area of varying fields that interact with each other so that even direct lifelong neighbors can have have vastly different cultures.
I don’t think I have to explain that obviously, this is the case in Europe as well. E.g. Germany alone has 16 vastly different states, and each state has multiple subcultures. The main difference is, our subcultures are more than a thousand years old, and the US 250.
any other country
Hey hey, don’t forget about China lol. ‘Oh you’re Chinese? You must be brainwashed AF. Lemme teach you a few things about 4 June 1989.’
That soccer is boring. I’m european and love playing soccer but it’s boring to watch.
That’s pretty much all sports IMO
Can we get a sample of your username?
…a sample? Like, you want to whiff farts orrrr?
No, a little soundbite. What accent is it? French?
Aah, I see. Well, it varies based on what I’ve eaten. I ate maple sausage and scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese and chives for breakfast so I guess it’d be an American fart?
I’m afraid I don’t have one in the chamber though, so no farts to share.
There’s no soccer in Europe ;)
Only futbol.
I think that’s just sports in general. I enjoy playing almost all sportsball games. I’d sooner watch a Pong Livestream than watch 99% of sports.
Volleyball is pretty amazing to watch (and play too)
Sitting volleyball is kind of ok.
Soccer is fine. It’s the flopping which makes it unwatchable.
Bro you are a full grown fucking man in the prime of your life and you just spent the last minute rolling around on the turf screaming in agony but now you’re back at 100% for the next attack?
The game really needs a rule which requires any player who goes to the turf for longer than 10s to get a sub or serve a 60s penalty.
Soccer is at least barely enjoyable.
Not like those cycling races that take 5 hours with nothing happening in them.
OK now this one I agree with
