Canada

This is the part that pisses me off the most. The cancer that is American politics is infecting our country. Now we got dumb fucks like Danielle Smith and PP crying about the "woke" agenda and other imported republican bullshit. Even worse, it's working extremely well on the dumbest of our population and spreading like wildfire.

Fuck America and their sports team politics. People need to realize it should be working class VS the rich, but they keep us distracted and divided with this dumb fucking culture war and the morons are lapping it up.

PP, Ford, Smith, RW municipal politicians are grinding away at Canadian democracy as we speak.

Let's just say civilized then.

The US is no longer a civilized nation.

AfD still convinced Trump will save Germany ಠ_ಠ

Have you been to Alabama? You could shoot those "adopt an African" commercials there.

One of the common data points used by organizations to rate a country as "third world" or not is the state of its infrastructure. In that department, the US is certainly closer to third world countries than we are to our European brethren. It's been ignored and underfunded for so long that there are many places where it's quite literally falling apart, and that's not even getting into the state of public transit (or lack thereof) or how the single family suburb sprawl is slowly bleeding cities dry of their capital.

There are other horrible things like parts of the US that have never had plumbing (Appalachia comes to mind) or things like the Flint, Michigan crisis (do they have drinkable water? I think as of last year they still didn't. They might be able to take showers again, though, without causing permanent health issues for their kids). We have higher rates of women who die during childbirth than some third world countries. The quality of healthcare here is ranked the worst out of the first world nations while also being the most expensive. The wealthy go to Canada for prescriptions and surgery, or Mexico for dental work - Mexico apparently has better dentists than the US from what I've heard. We are #1 in number of incarcerated citizens per capita. The wealth disparity in the US today is supposedly worse than it was in France in the years just before the French Revolution, where the price of a loaf of bread was more than a day's pay for the average worker. Upward class mobility (being born into a poor family and being able to become wealthy) is the lowest it's been, I think, since the country was founded. A year or two before COVID happened, I was looking into starting a side business and found studies saying that a new business was more likely to fail today than in the Great Depression. If I remember the stats right, it was something like 40% of businesses fail in their first year, another 20% in their second year, and by year 4, 80% of new businesses have gone under.

I've heard the US described as "a third world country in a Prada belt," and I think it's an apt description. Policy-wise, we're closer to third world countries than we'd like to admit. We've just been living off the postwar economic boom from WW2 that centered the US as the world's largest economy and wealthiest nation to ever exist. The sheer amount of money circulating in our economy has kept the nation chugging along through whatever stupid things the corporations and the politicians have done over the years.

It's a meaningless term that is mostly used as a libel and only muddies discussions.

I just moved to BC and have no medical/dental insurance yet. Last week I had to pay out-of-pocket to see a dentist and got a prescription for antibiotics. I paid less than I ever did in the US where I did have insurance. Less than CA$100 to see a dentist, get an xray and the prescription. Mindblowing.

PP gets in, all bets are off.

Imagine our surprise watching that from over here then our Education minister saying "I want some of that."

Sparsely populated agricultural areas and shitholes like Bakersfield aren't common tourist destinations. You don't need to tell someone to avoid them. So yeah they're "deep red" in the sense that half a dozen yokels that live there are idiots, but they're very, very much in the minority.

And honestly, having traveled a bit, even California Conservatives aren't as Conservative as they think they are; a fact which becomes extremely apparent when they leave the state and then get slapped in the face with actual out and proud racism and they get othered for being from California.

It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

Still, you get 10 min outside of a city in Oregon and you start seeing Trump signs

This is urban vs rural more than anything and not state vs state. Because I'm sure there's some dudes from Laramie Wyoming who would take offense that you didn't lump them in with all the other bigots.

Should a gay couple load up there family and move to Garfield Georgia? No probably not but what about Birmingham Alabama? Yeah that'd be fine.