No Stupid Questions

Depends on the socioeconomic status of the city. I live in a city where it's odd to not hear gunshots every night...

It depends. I'm a Canadian who frequently crosses the border.

The cities close by the border seem perfectly cromulent, everyone's super nice and accepting. The gas is definitely cheaper, and there is a wider variety of products on offer than in Canada.

There are certainly areas of the US that I'd want to avoid (Florida comes to mind, I would get hate-murdered the very millisecond I stepped there), but the good areas are good. Like someone else said, just don't get caught being poor or with medical issues.

There's a lot of opportunities here. There's a lot of money here. We also have a lot of racism and greed.

It's not, but people love to be outraged and will find any reason to be. We have extremely comprehensive media coverage, so anything that can possibly go wrong will definitely be covered in the media, whereas in other countries, you just don't hear about most bad things happening. The media will always twist anything and everything to be as polarizing as possible, as that generates clicks/views. Most of the time when you see things on the internet that make you rage (including here on lemmy), if you look into it deeper, there quite a bit of nuance, and you can see where they were coming from when they did such a thing. But to many people who are perpetually online, they don't care about nuance. Everything is black and white to many people on the internet. Either it makes you happy or it makes you rage, and there is no in-between.

Things that actually do suck:

The mass shootings are absolutely awful and should be taken more seriously.

Healthcare is expensive if you don't have insurance. But most people have decent enough insurance that it isn't a huge deal. For example, my insurance plan has a $2000 out of pocket maximum, so no matter what happens, the most I can ever pay per year is $2000 for my entire family. Plus, most people rarely see a doctor, so it isn't something that affects their daily lives. Kind of an "out of mind" type of thing.

Every state has its good and bad. We are out of control with the gun thing. There is a higher chance you will get shot and killed while minding your own business in America than most other countries. We are selfish and not much unity unless you are on one side or there and even then, we have become stupid and gullible. We are violent. We are much more violent in general than anyone I have ever encountered in other countries. Maybe England, but even there, it is not the same. Americans have no problem straight up killing each other. We are getting worse.

Is America great? Depends on who you ask. Is America a place where you still have some opportunities to make a better life for yourself. Sure. But it is not the same as that the pamphlet sold to everyone else. We are far from perfect and in many cases, other countries do things better.

Having said that, it is cool. Just keep your eyes open and pay attention.

America definitely has its issues, but I think we have historically been good about surfacing problems and making sure they're at least talked about publicly, even if they're not fixed. This probably makes it look worse than it is. I feel like even in countries with reasonable free speech, there can be social taboos against talking about certain things.

When doing world rankings, to me it’s a better visual to compare each US region/state to countries as the size of the US is a big factor. Each region has its own distinction. I live in the Pacific Northwest which is (I believe) comparable to most developed countries. If you’re in the southeast, the rankings drop and your probably better off in Eastern Europe. The Northeast US (I.e. New England) is also comparable to most developed countries but the Midwest is moving more towards a theocratic style of localized governance. The US isn’t in a position I’m any region to compete with Norway, Finland, Denmark, etc but that’s why they are ranked at the top.

America is very nice if you do not really care about how your life negatively affects others.

We’re very vocal when we see a wrong. We’re also a big country, with different priorities in different places. Most importantly, media tends to publish most outrageous stories, for the shock value in attracting attention

My state has the fewest shootings, helped by the strictest gun laws until recently. We’re generally tops in education, near universal health insurance, and quality of life indexes on par with the best in the world. We are generally a safe place for various cultures and preferences, and we’re first in the US to embrace gay marriage We have a strong, innovation-based economy with among the highest pay. We even have a pretty good (for the US) transit system, walkable town centers, an emphasis on sustainability and renewable energy.

We don’t make the news as much because that’s not outrageous: it’s what we want. However I’m sure others may find it expensive, oppressive, or offend their sensibilities

In 2015 I was in Niger doing NGO work and the founder of the NGO said to me that the most important thing about America is the peaceful transition of power. That next year that transition of power came under direct attack and then again in 2020.

From my travels and the people I talk to, we have been under attack since at least 2008. From domestic terrorists working with foreign governments. Factions in spy agencies actively engaged in domestic espionage to help elites take more power. Cultist religious mega churches spreading misinformation and conspiracies in rural areas for decades priming for a “revolution”.

Billionaires that you hear about daily are also in on it.

You better fight for your democracy by showing up to every town meeting you can America because you will absolutely lose everything. Support unions and delete that extreme individualism in your programming that capitalist America wants to instill in each person so you never organize against them.

This is the time to get out in front of 2024 and fight for your rights and a reasonable society not this psycho bullshit we are stuck in right now.

Mass shootings, although there are indeed many, are a small percentage of the gun deaths in the US. Most are suicide, next most common are arguments outside bars. Most common weapon in gun homicides is a handgun.

Research shows that income inequality causes crime and you can see that more unequal nations (Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Israel) have more violence.

The problem with the US is it's a sanctuary for capitalists, capital and capitalism. Worse than anything that the US does or allows to happen to its own people, is what our government/corporations do to "developing nations". Invasions, supporting coups, fighting to suppress labor rights and wages, extracting natural resources with little compensation, overthrowing governments that try to stop any of that, supporting genocide, committing genocide, chemical warfare, biological warfare, nuclear warfare. Any socialist country they can't overthrow they'll try to starve through embargoes.

Anyway, the worst states are ones where abortion is outlawed, lawmakers fight access to public health care or any public resources that don't go to the wealthy. Usually these states are controlled by the wealthy, like coal bosses running West Virginia into the ground. Capitalists have been using evangelical christianity in north and south America to scare voters into voting right-wing on culture war issues like abortion and transphobia. They use reactionary tendencies like hatred of foreigners, hatred of gun control, hatred of schools teaching the history of how our country treated black people, etc, to keep people voting for the right-wingers who also happen to be the friendliest to business.

Both major political parties are right-wing pro-capitalist parties. Some states do have some social safety nets for health care and welfare but being poor is a horrible experience in every state. 50,000 people die yearly from lack of health care access, not including COVID deaths. There's really no state you can live or party you can vote for to get away from it.

I've lived in a few less right-wing states. A friend of a friend was killed by police while he was suspected of shoplifting, trying to run away. Some kid killed himself in my high school while i was there. I live in a town where there's lots of homeless people and syringes all over the place. 3 people in my family died of COVID.

Basically the US is a fascist country. Fascism is when the wealthy consolidate their power over government, in the face of growing violence and instability from growing inequality. The point of fascism is to protect capitalism from these growing threats by creating a police state, deflecting blame for hardship onto minorities, and handing off chunks of the government to the wealthy through privatization. The wealthy and the government essentially merge, they become the same people with the same goals.

8'd say it's only bad by the standards of the first world. Not counting foreign policy here, mind you.

Overall, no. In most places things are peaceful and nice. In some places there is a lot of crime and squalor. A lot depends on your location, perspective, and luck.

Shit country, great pay in a few fields.

If you're skilled labour and not a software engineer, just move to Canada tbh.

It’s all relative, but no, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not.

The issue, whether it’s conscious or not, is what we were sold (work hard, be nice, and you can have everything you ever wanted) not matching up with reality for most of us. My parents are squarely in the dead middle of the boomer generation. My step father is a construction worker, and my mother hasn’t worked since I was in high school. So they are one income, and it’s probably not an exceptional lot good income. They own their own home, in a very nice area, have retirement options, the world wasn’t literally on fire, they didn’t have to go through multiple once in a lifetime collapses, etc. In contrast, I’ll probably never be able to afford a home (run down houses on tiny properties are easily 800k here) and husband and I are dual income, I’ll likely never retire, my money is worth far less than theirs was, the world is burning, etc.

I’m also the last generation that didn’t have to worry about school shootings. I was graduating the year columbine happened. Not a single thing has been done in over 20 years since. I’d actually say access has gotten so much worse. Plus the “gun culture”. It’s insanity. The worship is crazy.

Then watching government fall into the farce it is, that’s bought and paid for. With little help coming to those that need it. And being a woman, watching my rights slip further and further away across the country.

No, but because it's the 4th largest country by landmass of course you're going to have more craziness, it's par for the course.

It's a lot safer then it used to be though, it just seems bad because we don't censor things here compared to other countries, so everyone sees the good and the bad as opposed to just the good

Every government everywhere passes bad laws l, Canada past laws requiring exposure on online media to be a certain percentage Canadian, but then didn't give a way for "small" online creators ( non company run) to join the system. The UK is straight up attempting to ban encryption. The French President told the people of the country "no fuck you" after they protested for months about a law to increase pension age. No country is perfect, every nation has active issues. Anyone saying America is the worst, is on aware of what is going on elsewhere in other countries.