CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@GinevraCat @otfrom

I mean, any country has unneven diversity. The Randstadt is extremely diverse, but like Den Bosch is much less so.

@draco But by the 90s, people buying very expensive chocolate, wine and olive oil (in California, near very high quality producers of all of those things) looked wistfully towards Europe.

@LeafyEricScott

I mean, to be fair the US's food safety laws, healthcare, and gun laws are all kind of shit, but you don't need to look all the way to the EU to find better examples. Canada or Cuba are much closer.

But, like, I've seen some traditional european food that really does not seem healthy...

White Americans want to imagine themselves as part of a European diaspora and therefore fantasise about Europe as a place that is simultaneously more 'advanced' than the US and also fixed in time at some nostalgic or idyllic moment.

These fantasies are also racist in that they erase the diverse communities who actually live in the counties and fetishise a projected whiteness into a cultural superiority. The simultaneous and contradictory freezing in time makes that country an eternal, fixed homeland, free of diversity or the same structural problems of capital that plague north america.

This becomes problematic at various junctures, most often in north america, but also in europe when the US's billionaire class pumps money into fascist political projects that share their racialised nostalgia.

The idea of countries being 'advanced' relative to each other is already highly sus.

European countries are multi ethnic and multiracial. Most are modern democracies who have experienced waves of migrations from different places at different times.

The assertion of European countries as mono-cultural, white ethnostates is a white supremacist fantasy, disturbingly popular in the US.