Canadians have a king and are way less fucked up than Americans are.

[evan@cosocial.ca]

Canadians have a king and are way less fucked up than Americans are.

Maybe instead of telling ourselves the same old stories, we Americans need to rethink our ideas about what matters.

[gelbphoenix@social.gelbphoenix.de]

@evan Don't think you can really compare the American and Canadian political systems.

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@gelbphoenix we are humans on this Earth. Of course you can compare them.

[stinerman@mastodon.social]

@evan I'm not sure what you mean here. I don't think having a hereditary head of state has anything to do with how fucked up a group of people are.

[evan@cosocial.ca]

Our standards of racial and gender equality date to the 1960s.

Our norms for clean government were set in the post-Watergate era in the 1970s.

Sodomy laws were struck down nationwide by the Supreme Court in 2003.

Our tradition of a clean government that guarantees human rights to everyone is brand new and imperfect. It doesn't date back to 1776; it barely dates to 1976.

[affekt@hachyderm.io]

@stinerman @evan Americans have a mythology of having the most perfect government by nature of rejecting a monarchy.

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@Affekt @stinerman thank you for saying it better than I did!

[mpjgregoire@cosocial.ca]

@evan It's not just about government. Americans in general are slow to realise that there are useful things they could learn from elsewhere in the world. In my own field, for instance, American engineers and contractors are aware of the state-of-the-art in California, but are mostly unaware of lessons from high speed rail in Catalonia.

The US has many virtues, but humility is not really one of them. We all have things we can learn from others.