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Screenshot of a Tumblr post by txttletale:
there are two countries. USA, and Europe. and everyine who says anything about the USA, that isb ad, is a Europeman. you use Celsius? congratulations. youre from Europe (the country)(European). you dont .ike Eat Delicious Jimmy’s Regional Hamburger Chain? okay Europe guy. youre not Joe Biden president? well then youre Privileged to have EuropePresident (the president of Europe) (Boris Johnson? ithink) so shut up about our American politics you ()Europe) (the only other place in the world) would never undrestanding, rthat in America, we have regional subdivisions and local dialects(you dont have those in Europe)(the other coutnry there is)(iuts just one coutnry basically and america is like 50 countries in a trenchoat did you know that?). and so. Youre not allowed to be mean to me or hamburger every again :/


It’s a common refrain that the United States geographically is one of the most heterogeneous places in the world, but we way we build our cities and towns and how we choose to operate as an overall society is super homogenous.
Although I disagree with the notion that there isn’t diversity within the US (some states may be less diverse than others however), there is a degree of truth that we tend to have the same people doing the same things from Alaska to Florida. That’s not to say there aren’t tweaks to the system depending on what the populations want (Compare California’s government policies to North Dakotas for example), but we have sort of accepted a homogeneous lifestyle as the way to do things, for better or worse.
Great video from Wendover Productions explaining this
There are 3 major places in the US. Cities, Suburbia and the countryside. Possible 4th is small towns/college towns, though suburbia is always trying to absorb them if there are jobs to be had (or at least real estate value to be extracted).
Gentrification is also how suburbia tries to take over cities it’s not afraid of, or that it can’t ignore the all that value it wants to extract.
Suburbia is what most people see most of America as. Right wing media see it that way too and cast anything else as dangerous, especially cities that haven’t largely gentrified. They
My point is that you are stating differences between states, when your states are country sized. We have differences between regions in the country itself, wilder differences that yo have in your whole ass country.
There ought to be some differences in a country the size of 5 countries. What shocks us is how little differences there are.
Well, the US is about 250 years old as a society. How old is your country bud?
I mean, then don’t go saying that it’s very diverse? Idk.
Spain is about a thousands older, my region even more.
Do me a favor and look up the Diversity Index of the US, France, and Spain. It’s literally a measure of how diverse a group is. Tell me which scores higher - the highest score would be the ‘most diverse’ by definition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level
Funny enough, Spain and the US are both almost 0.5 by the looks of that chart. Most of Europe are way less diverse. Holland, Greece, and Switzerland not withstanding, though I bet if you use income diversity, Switzerland turns navy blue.
Less than 200 years old. And we have 3 languages, a huge cultural divide between the north and south, and more diversity in our provinces than in between us states.
What country?
Belgium. The current country was founded in 1830. We have Wallonia and Flanders who speak different languages, each province has or had its own dialect but it has merged mainly into french and dutch, with a bit of German in the east. The country itself is probably smaller than any us state, but I don’t know all the sizes of them.
Funnily enough, there is a small town in the US with Belgian immigrants that still speak older dialects of Walloon.
Didn’t realize Belgium was that diverse - according to the data it is slightly more diverse than the US with a diversity index of 0.55 compared to the US’S diversity index of 0.49. both of which are SIGNIFICANTLY more diverse than France (0.17) and more diverse Spain (0.42) according to this statistic. Many European countries that tut about diversity and varied culture fall pretty low on that list.
Also your point about the US community that speaks Walloon sort of illustrates my point. Almost every other culture in the world has a community or cultural center somewhere inside the US
It got a bit more homogeneous after Walloon and dutch dialects were removed in favor of Paris french (while Flemish stayed a bit more different than Dutch but officially it’s NL Dutch).
For the sub-cultures hub in the USA yeah, there’s a lot of them, a direct result of the colonisation of the continent. But I think what most Europeans compare against is the exported American culture (from movies, music and whatever fads start there), which is pretty homogeneous (ie, mostly capitalist and individualist) but doesn’t really reflect the variety you can find “on the ground”.
Tbf, the Walloon settlement in the US (Namur, Wisconsin) is pretty small, I couldn’t find exact numbers but seems to have a population of a thousand, and the Walloon language is disappearing
To be fair people have been living in the area that is currently Belgium a hell of a lot longer than the US has existed
And I actually looked up how big Belgium was compared to US states out of curiosity, and apparently it’s bigger than 7 states. Granted, they are all small east coast ones. Belgium is slightly (3k km^2) bigger than Massachusetts. It is only 0.3% the size of the entire US though, just goes to show the size disparity in US states.
Weren’t there native tribes living on the continent before the us was created?
But yeah, the land here has been inhabited for a long time. There’s a major Paleolithic site near where I live.
Seems Europe as a whole also has a distribution of small and large countries, even though the us has more of them and more land
True, there were, I think I was more thinking along the lines of like the current culture/society being there probably, because unfortunately very little of native culture is present in the modern day US