Personally I feel like it’s our role as “world police” so to speak. I’ve often heard other people talk about the US meddling in other countries business which I admit, we’ve made quite a few questionable choices on use of our military but it’s also the US’s global presence that’s kept a ton of bad actors in check and probably the only thing keeping Russia from using nukes in Ukraine (if I’m wrong feel free to correct me)
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Literally everything. Lol.
World police.
Healthcare.
Too many guns.
Too much “hate speech.”
Americans not leaving the country.
Not enough PTO.
No paid maternity leave.
Too much fast food.
Houses built of wood.
Shall I continue? Lol
The way we use our ample space. I keep seeing how the European city all wadded up with everyone packed right he fuck on top of each other is some superior system.
It looks fucking awful, and personally I never want to share a wall with some other family ever again.
I don’t think Europeans really understand how expansive and sparse the central plains of the US really are, nor do they understand what the extremes of continental weather are like.
How much time do yo have?
Food.
Our “cookie cutter” suburbs. I’ve been all over Europe and literally every country has millions of houses that all look the same in their suburbs and cities too.
One thing I’ve seen a lot on Reddit is our food. Usually the formula is American [insert huge, diverse food type] is terrible. The US has almost every type of food imaginable and it’s really annoying seeing a random off brand cheese, mainline beer, or McDonalds being held up as the sum total of American food. If you do the barest bit of research you can find amazing cheese, beer, restaurants, etc.
American Cheese. No, it isn’t as tasty and it’s very artificial, but it is the world’s most versatile _melting cheese_ and it deserves some points for that
IMO… We get slammed for:
1)Being anti-immigrant/xenophobic/racist while other Countries vehemently protect their borders.
2) Spending too much on our military until a hot spot breaks out somewhere in the world and they want us to “help” because we have a huge military.
3) Being anti-choice and hating women when a lot of EU countries have pretty restrictive abortion laws.
4) Not having passports or ever leaving the Country. This place is huge.
>Personally I feel like it’s our role as “world police” so to speak.
Definitely agree with this. People complain about the few times where our militaries involvement does harm a situation yet ignore the amount of humanitarian air America gives to other countries. America has the largest rate of help to other countries usually helping with food aid, natural disaster recovery and helping with refugee displacement and rehabilitation. But no one ever wants to talk about that.
It’s amazing how much hate people have for America ignoring that the American government and troops have likely helped their own country several times over the last century.
For having “no culture”. What an odd statement to make but we hear it a lot from foreigners. They say this while they listen to our music, what our movies, view our news, go to our colleges, use our slang, use our technology (iPhones, Xbox, our social media sites), etc. etc. Yet we have no culture while you indulge in our culture frequently.
How anyone can think any country has no culture is beyond me but that’s what some people think.
Public transport. Cars rule for suburban and even semi-urban areas. I live in one of the larger metropolitan areas on the east coast that isn’t NYC; getting anywhere by bus takes 2-3x as long as driving. Just no.
And no, we aren’t going to tear down and rebuild our cities and force people to move into ghettos to make it practical. Even with the problems that do exist for suburbs, they can’t be magically solved by pouring money into more busses or whatnot; things being spread out means that without a ground-up reset, you *will* have the problem of “can’t get there from here” routing and having to walk half a mile on one or both ends of the route.
I agree on the “world police” thing as well. Turns out *somebody* has to do it, and much like with regular police, everyone else hates the de-facto authority. For all the fuckups, the world would be a much worse place without the US patrolling the seaways and preventing another world war from breaking out. The time since WWII has been the most peaceful time in recorded history.
The world police one is hilarious because 98% of the time we take action anywhere we are being BEGGED to do it, by one party in the conflict or by the international community. Then if we don’t intervene they accuse us being selfish and uncaring or for being pro(insert bad guys).
Then once we do what they demand we do, they accuse us of doing it wrong, and say we should have kept out of it. The international community is a shithole. Not that each place is individually, just the collective. Primarily the UN. The body that never does anything to address anything, and mostly is a very expensive appeasement mechanism for despotic monsters. They went to Ethiopia last year and reported back thousands and thousands of war crimes, but then said they couldn’t be sure who was responsible so just said “someone around here is committing war crimes, sadge” more or less.
The idea that we only have “mass culture” or make tons of stupid movies and tv shows and media, in general, for idiots. As though a) people in other places don’t love this shit too or b) we have no (purely e.g.) opera or ballet or theater, or the TV/movies we do make is not innovative or worthwhile. I think too many people reflexively think American culture is just Beavis and Butthead and Marvel movies.
Similarly, America gets criticized for “pushing” this culture on the rest of the world when really it sure seems like the rest of the world can’t get enough of it.
1) For getting involved in world affairs. 2) For not getting involved in world affairs.
Racism for sure. Yes, there is unfortunately lots of racism in the US, but so many non-Americans, especially online, talk as if it is a uniquely American thing, while turning a blind eye to racism that is as bad in their own countries, if not worse. For example, some European Redditors talk about treatment of non-white people in the US, about how it is despicable, but turn around and spew absolutely venomous vitriol about Gypsies, justifying it in all sorts of ways (i.e. “If you lived next to Gypsies, you would hate them too”).
Our food. It’s not like every restaurant in Europe is a Michelin starred restaurant and their comfort foods are just as generic as ours.
Our racism is bad and totally unjustified, but their tyrades over romani are completely justified because they “don’t fit in,” “don’t assimilate,” and “commit disproportionate amounts of crime.” Also the balkans exist
Immigration and cultural acceptance of foreign people. I think we need to do way better at giving asylum seekers the help they need especially when they are so close to home at the southern border.
But that being said, I think we receive a lot of flak when most other countries are harder to immigrate to legally and generally treat migrants and asylum seekers worse than we do.
I don’t want to hear Europeans say we are xenophobic when France continues to uphold a burqa ban for no other reason than Islamaphobia and then complain that people aren’t “assimilating” into their culture. Of course they won’t jump head first into your culture when you treat migrants like second class citizens.
I see this kind of stuff a lot in Asian culture too. For example, there is an American born activist in Japan named David Arudou. He tried to take legal action against several bath houses in Japan that advertised their business as Japanese only. It went to the supreme court over there in the early 2000s but was shot down. From my understanding these “Japanese only” businesses are still quite pervasive.
Can you imagine if a shop here had a “whites only” sign or “Americans only” sign hanging on the front door? The place would be all over the news and promptly be shut down.
You name it, we were even criticized for painting our own walls.
I recently saw a thread where a Brit was upset that the US celebrates holidays that the rest of the world does not. Every other country has a couple holidays specific to their culture and history, but they were upset that they had to see pictures of Americans having a good time on the 4th of July.
Everything. There’s basically 2 topics anytime someone outside the U.S. criticizes something.
There’s the actual topic in context, and then there’s also, “But the U.S. does……”
Oh. And ignorance.
“I saw these stupid Americans on TV don’t know geography. I’m so smart.”
Except it’s pretty easy to target stupid folks for funny video clips. And the U.S. is a prime target.
Racism. Yes, it is a huge issue in the U.S, but at least we talk about it and try to do something about it, which is more than a lot of other countries can say.
People say the U.S. has no culture or only borrowed culture because they know zero about what culture is.
Green money. Seriously, we have numbers on our bills, we do not need to color code our cash.
And what is the bizarre Canadian obsession of Americans not taking off our shoes in homes. Most do, some don’t, you aren’t invited anyway, so why do you care?
The second amendment is an amazing thing and everyone tries to use it to portray us as backwards idiots. The right to protect and arm yourself is something you don’t appreciate until you don’t have it as an option.
Racism. I have lived, traveled, and worked abroad quite a bit and I have never been to another country/culture that doesn’t live in equally large (if not larger) glass houses. We just happen to be very vocal about racism (fighting it, highlighting it, pulling it out from under the rug kicking and screaming) AND every time we sneeze it gets reported on by the international media, so a lot of people from other countries love to lecture us/judge us on our issues with racism when they really should be worrying about their own country and society’s problems with racism and inequality.
Our beer.
We have the best and most diverse beer market in the world.
Europeans just think “Busch light” like it was thirty or forty years ago.
So many things, but what has really gotten me when speaking to Europeans is our heritage. They don’t really grasp how America is a nation of immigrants and no one living in this country is genetically American unless they are indigenous. Most Americans aren’t going to sit and spell out their entire genetic make up saying “I’m Italian-American, Scottish-American, Irish American, Polish-American..” nah, we’re gonna dumb it down to “I’m Italian, Irish, Polish, etc”.
Adding onto this Non-Americans don’t realize how our heritage in many cases plays an important role in our immediate culture in our communities. While we as American recognize, our Irish-American culture isn’t like being full blood Irish growing up in County Cork for our lives, we work with what our immigrant ancestors taught us and those lessons are brought down generation by generation. This is why we get a lot of criticism. When immigrants came here from their home countries, a lot of the time, they had to water their culture down in order to fit in with American culture of the time period. When my great great grandparents moved here from Ireland, the Irish were discriminated against so they had to adapt. What we are left with today is a very watered down appreciation of what our grandparents when through.
I see a lot of non-Americans gatekeeping cultures because of this. They get angry at us for discussing our heritage, which is an important role in American culture, because we “don’t know about it and are ignorant to it” but they, in the same breath, won’t allow us to meaningfully learn or participate or else it is cultural appropriation. We cannot win with non-Americans on this front because they are too stubborn to concede or learn about what heritage means to us as an American society throughout our very young history.
I have simply learned to ignore them and call them idiots behind their backs.