[volta83]

> Fine, but can we please stop pushing this cherry picked cliche narrative of "US bad because healthcare, shootings and tap water."?

Are you saying those aren't issues?

Because I've lived in the US, and know many Europeans that have lived there or traveled there on holidays, and pretty much all of them agree that:

- the first time in their lives they were afraid of getting ill was when they started living in the US

- they were all astonished at the amount of homeless people living in tents in the downtowns of all major cities (here if a major city has like ~10 people sleeping outside in winter, that's bad, but the US is just shockingly bad)

- the first time in their lives they were afraid of getting killed was in the US (e.g. interacting with the cops, walking through some neighborhoods) because people were carelessly carrying guns outside (there are guns in Europe, some countries like Switzerland have a ton of guns, but the way people manage guns in public, and that includes police, is radically different)

- they were all astonished and the amount of fat people, and how fat they were. What people consider "fat" in Europe would probably be "normal" or maybe even "thin" in the US. You don't find in Europe people that are so fat that don't fit through the door of a bus.

These are not narratives, these are facts that every European that lives or has lived in the US will happily tell you about.

The US style of living is great if you have money, but Europeans measure their style of living by how the poorest people in their country live, not the richest people.

By those measures, the US is an outrageous place for pretty much all European standards.

> That's like saying Europe suffers from mass terrorist attacks and sexual assaults on young women.

Do you think that's a made up narrative? Because everyone I know in Europe agrees that this is true, that these are horrible issues to have, and that these issues need fixing.

Your argument that "the US has no issues because Europe has issues" is typically known as "whataboutism".

Don't be a "whataboutist". It doesn't help fix neither Europe's nor USA's issues.

[pjc50]

Europe's "mass terrorist attacks" are so much less frequent than US mass shootings that they would barely register.

The sexual assault issue seems to have been a couple of big nasty incidents, which were heavily spun by media personalities whose main line of business was talking up the threat of Islam. How big a problem this really is is hard to tell, especially since nightlife has been cancelled for fourteen months.

[luckylion]

> The sexual assault issue seems to have been a couple of big nasty incidents, which were heavily spun by media personalities whose main line of business was talking up the threat of Islam.

Sorry, but that's nonsense. In Rotherham or Cologne, the opposite was true: the media was actively working on covering it up, not "heavily spinning it" to talk up some threat.

[jasonvorhe]

Citation needed.

[allendoerfer]

https://meedia.de/2016/01/06/koeln-und-die-verzoegerte-ueber...

He is actually right. They reported it 4 days late.

[volta83]

Just because they happen less frequently (which I don't know if this is the case) does not mean that they are not an issue.

I don't know how the situation is in the US about these things, but if these problems do not exist there at all, its normal for Americans coming here and seeing it happen "occasionally" to freak out about it.

[dmayle]

The GP is not saying they aren't issues, just that they don't add much value to the conversation. It's especially clear in how it triggered your response... and in how you've mostly overlooked those same problems in Europe (with the minor nod on violence). I'm an American and European (yes, two passports) who has lived in three different major cities in the US, two in Europe in separate countries, and I've traveled extensively in both areas. Let me offer some counterpoints:

On healthcare, I've had to sit for 2-3 hours in an emergency room in London with my throat mostly closed struggling to breath because I hadn't turned blue yet (no kidding), which put me behind the people with stab wounds. That's a normal ordering of priority when there aren't any doctors available, but it was mostly because I was on a six-month waiting list to see an allergy specialist and hadn't yet been diagnosed. At least in the US, your only fear about getting sick is because you're worried about the cost. I had a xenophobic doctor (said I was just coming to the UK for the healthcare, hah, even though I was working and paying taxes) prescribe me medication I was allergic to despite saying over the course of several visits that I was. Luckily I looked up the medication before taking it.

As to homeless people, sure, there may be less in the cities (though still there), but in exchange you have shanty towns and cities setup on the outskirts like with Cañada Real outside of Madrid, or Christiania in Copenhagen. I've seen smaller ones in France (Nice and Paris), though at least one of them was removed, and know of short-lived ones (on the order of months and years) in London. On both sides of the pond you have people trying to make things better, like Utah's experiments or those of Helsinki.

As to violence, Europe is a dangerous place. If the people you've spoken to were afraid for the first time in their lives, that's mostly because people grow accustomed to their own brands of violence. I was about an hour away from being blown to bits in the 2004 Madrid bombings, I was lucky enough to have decided not to bring my family to the Promenade des Anglais in Nice the day the terrorist decided to drive his truck through the crowds, and I've experienced the terror that is walking through the streets of London at night during an uptick in knifings (never attacked myself, though a colleague was and escaped).

We can talk about the abduction of children like Madeleine McCann, or the acid attacks on people like Katie Piper. We can talk about the shootings in Northern Ireland, or the annexation of Crimea, but instead you should just look at the Wikipedia page on European terrorism, even though it's only one type of the violence you can encounter.

As to obesity in Europe: Yes, the USA is on top, though there are variations by city (and people trying to fix it), but I have seen people too fat to board a bus (and no, not Americans) in both England and France, at the least. Don't believe me? Look for pictures of Virginie Grossat, French (!) model size 54 (though I've never seen her in public, just ordinary people).

But what about your claim that Europeans measure their style of living by how the poorest people in their country live? What does that say when you look how the Syrian refugees were treated in Europe? Maybe they're discounted because they weren't citizens? Well then, how about how the Polish are treated in the UK and Ireland, or ex-colonial immigrants in France? What about eastern Europeans in general, or the Romani people?

None of this is meant to say that America is just great, or Europe just sucks (I happen to be very fond of both). Why do you think so many people emigrate to the US? What the grandparent was trying to say is that when creating this caricatured version of the US (or any place that happens to be "other"), then you end up engaging in the very thing you're decrying, "whataboutism", and you actually blind yourself to the reality.

[volta83]

I don't know who downvoted you, but I don't disagree with you. As mentioned, there are homeless, fat people, and violence in Europe.

This is not about whether these things exist or don't exit at some place, they exist everywhere in the world.

The difference is just the quantity, how often, how many, how much fatter.

Everybody I know that grew up in Europe and has traveled to or lived in the US found the difference in quantity "shocking".

[ChuckNorris89]

>Your argument that "the US has no issues because Europe has issues" is typically known as "whataboutism".

Sorry, but wasn't grandparent's (u/allendoerfer) original post the one that started the whataboutism? I was just contradicting him with a mirrored whataboutism to prove why his way of thinking is wrong? Why are you only cherry picking mine?

The topic was regarding one of Germany's failure, and Grandparent (u/allendoerfer) posted something along the lines of "at least in Germany we have have breathable air and drinkable water unlike Americans who get shot instead".

What does that have to do with the Wirecard situation and how is that anything else but severe offtopic whataboutism?

>Europeans measure their style of living by how the poorest people in their country live, not the richest people.

No they don't, otherwise, the wealth-gap between rich and poor wouldn't be at an all-time high in Germany/Europe [1][2].

[1]https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/inherit...

[2]https://www.dw.com/en/study-shows-growing-wealth-inequality-...

[allendoerfer]

I wasn't even (only) refering to the US. I was trying to bring accross, that it's quite nice to live in Germany and that it does not need to be dominant or proud of anything as a nation. I was trying to list benefits Germans take as a given, but are actually not available everywhere in the world (which has almost 200 countries btw, not only US + Germany). As far as I know, US also has breathable air and is somewhat save in most places. It's just that the unsafest place in Germany is probably still safer than almost everywhere else in the world. The basics are okay in Germany and they matter, even if you don't think about them day to day. If you want more, go on and build it, nobody forbids you to do so. Society just provides a nice baseline and even tries to catch you, in case you fall.

[volta83]

> Sorry, but wasn't grandparent's original post the one that started the whataboutism? I was just contradicting him with a mirrored whataboutism to prove why his way of thinking is wrong? Why are you only cherry picking mine?

The OP is making a trade-offs. They are arguing that they prefer the value proposition of living in Europe than that of living in the US. They don't seem to weight the downs of Europe or the pro's of the US much, so they are not mentioning them, which is IMO fair.

We can argue about these pros and cons, whether they missed some, whether we weight them differently, etc.

What I don't think is very helpful is just a straight "whataboutism" answer.

You, me, and the OP are all different. What's a good value proposition for the OP might be bad for you and me. That's ok. It does not make the OP "wrong".