• NeilBrü@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I’m an American who moved to the Netherlands in July of '22. I spend a lot of time going back and forth. My then fiancé, now my wife, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during the pandemic. Given the obvious price difference for medication to treat the disease, I decided to move in with her instead of her coming to the US.

    I find it disheartening to see what the rest of the world thinks about Americans up close. I am competently multilingual enough to hold conversations. I have to admit now that I understand why other natively born Americans pretend that they’re from Canada outside of the U.S.

    Despite my embarrassment about the body politic and discourse from my country, I find that the the same authoritarian, isolationist, and anti-intellectual mind-viruses that permeate through society in the United States (especially in rural communities) have a beachhead here in Western Europe. Either that or they’ve always been here to begin with. To me, the difference is that the scale is much smaller.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      I find that the the same authoritarian, isolationist, and anti-intellectual mind-viruses that permeate through society in the United States (especially in rural communities) have a beachhead here in Western Europe

      America’s worst export.

      • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Bold to claim we had to export it. This is like someone saying “yeah, we’ve got black mold, but it obviously came from our neighbours, and has nothing to do with the raw sewage we’ve left in the basement for the last eighty years!”

        Literally none of those things first gained traction in the Americas. As a US citizen, I think we need to be doing a general strike with riots in the streets and shutting down interstate trade with our bodies marching on the highways.

        But you need to see to your own houses, because while the mold is running wild over here, it didn’t start with us.