(Alberta and Texas are central plains / central prairies / “midwest” – calling Texas western is a bit of a misnomer, the US decided that anything west of the Mississippi is the “Great West”)
Coastal BC west of the cascades is very similar to Puget Sound region and Portland. Anywhere east of Whistler and Chilliwack is much more rural religious and conservative, similar to central and eastern Washington. Another cultural oddity about inland BC - Kelowna and Kamloops have some of the most violent and active Hells Angels chapters.
So here’s the thing. The whole west coast of NA, including california, oregon, washington, and BC are considered to be super liberal areas. This is true by a majority of the population, but all of these regions are still filled with people who are as conservative as any other rural area in the US. It’s just that in those regions, more people populate the large cities than the rural areas.
Really, conservatism reigns in poorer, less educated, and more isolated regions with low population and without diversity, where tribalism can run rampant; it’s easy to be a racist shitbag if you barely meet anyone with a different skin color than you. Liberalism thrives in regions with diverse populations where in order to live we have to cooperate with others.
I live in Portland, Oregon. People tend to think oregon is a blue state wonderland (except during covid and the floyd protests. then apparently the whole city was on fire and in a state of complete anarchy; spoiler— it totally wasn’t). That’s not the case. We just have enough people in large cities to outnumber the racist cuntballoons in the rural areas. And that’s what the whole west coast is like (and basically every “blue state” in the US)
Western Canada is a lot like western USA. Filled with shart-gargling racists/homophobes/transphobes, but outnumbered by people who aren’t pieces of shit.
west coast (and especially PNW) culture is just “we kinda outnumber them slightly”, but the overall issue comes down to: in rural/conservative areas, it’s easy to be racist/homophobic/transphobic/other-religions-phobic, because you never have to consider anyone’s feelings that hurt your worldview because you don’t know them personally and do not consider them to be human on the same level as you.
This guy is visiting many places all over the US, month after month, spending his time (often for days) talking to the natives and really digs into that diversity.
Yes, so much diversity in your culture of strip malls and and suburbs.
inb4 someone names one of five cities with unique architecture in America.
Also, I’m Canadian so this is self-deprecating. We gutted our cities 80 years ago and turned them into boring asphalt wastelands. I can see that at an intersection not too far from my apartment, where one tall, beautiful building from 100 years ago still remains, but on every other corner is a gas station, a car dealership, and a parking lot. And the streets that were once walkable and pleasant are now stroads with ridiculous traffic patterns that were widened to make way for more car traffic. I know this because an old photograph of the same area is painted on the side of an electrical box near that intersection.
What a horrible take - you clearly haven’t traveled much, abroad or even in your own country. Diversity and culture is more than architecture. Do you believe that Toronto is similar to Ontario? There’s definitely a percieved lack of “culture” in America but to believe it’s ubiquitous is just hilarious
My dude, I hate to say it, but your inexperience with the US is showing. People from Kentucky are a COMPLETELY different animal than people from Cali. Hell, Cali is so big the northern part of the state is just SO crazy different from from southern areas. Some guy from Chicago is going to be so utterly different from someone from UP Michigan it’s hard to believe they’re from the same country.
I’m so tired of hearing Americans yap on like this. So, so tired. Does anyone else notice this? How they defend their different cultures found in each state by pretending they’re as dissimilar as European countries are from each other?
Especially when I’m talking about architecture and cities. Bleh.
You can almost literally drive from Paris to Moscow and back in the same distance as it takes to get from Los Angeles to New York. You think it’s impossible for a country as large as the United States to have unique subcultures?
European cultures had time to develop before travel was easy, so in practice they were much further apart in terms of culture spread. The territorial size argument here doesn’t work.
Of course you’re right, because the US was entirely vacant before a single unified culture simultaneously migrated to all corners of its borders. Weirdly enough, that happened after the advent of trains, cars, planes, the internet, etc. so there was no opportunity for pockets of subculture to develop.
Totally negates my point! I should have thought of that. Embarrassing.
What, pray tell, is your definition of culture? Are local cuisine and regional delicacies a part of it? How about accents, speech patterns, and slang/dialects? You mention architecture and cities, so do layouts of cities, differences in urban planning ideologies, planned vs organic growth, or style of buildings get accepted as culture?
If you’re going to dismiss any social differences between cities, then what is the difference or culture between any two modern cities in Amwrica, Europe, Asia, or anywhere else, other than the language they speak?
“If you ignore the culture, this city has no culture!”
Everyone knows the only definition of culture is what year your city was founded and therefore how many old buildings it has. Oh and If you need to leave city center to see the ruins of the structures Europeans destroyed during colonization it doesn’t count. Only old buildings you can see from a tour bus counts as culture, duh.
Depends on where you are. Canada is like Portland in Vancouver. Really Canada is pretty similar to whatever region is across the border. The West coast is very Oregon, California like. The prairies are very mid west Montana. Winnipeg and Ontario are Minnesota and Michigan except the Toronto area which is a cross of New York City and Chicago. The Maritimes are Maine and New Hampshire. Quebec is a little harder to pin down.
Assassins Fateuils Rolents (“Wheelchair Assassins” in English). The most violent and feared anti-O.N.A.N. terrorist organization, comprised of Quebecois miners’ sons who lost their legs through playing a game called La Culte du Prochain Train (“The Cult of the Next Train”).
For the record, I don’t know what half of that quoted text even means and I’m afraid to go down that rabbit hole. I hope my imagination is worse than reality.
Are you telling me everywhere in Canada aside from Alberta and Quebec have amazing food? Because that's what I associate with Portland. Also what might be the world's greatest bookstore.
Somewhere in Time, which someone already mentioned. I wish I liked it more, but it gets credit because the Jack Finney book Time and Again, which it is very loosely inspired by, is one of the best time travel stories ever.
And Continuum. Not because it’s the greatest, but no one had mentioned it yet, and this thread could be a great reference for anyone in the future. No pun intended.
I really love Duluth Trading Company pants, especially the ones with their flex firehose material. I wear them almost every day and think they are great.
Am Canadian. From what I gather they’re pretty similar. We have the same scenario of lots of land, cheap energy, (relatively) young cities that could change to be car dependant as they grew. So lots of big houses, big stores, etc.
The differences: I don’t think our inner cities hollowed out with white flight, don’t have as much segregation (it’s actually quite the melting pot), while we have plenty of car dependency I don’t think it’s quite as bad as the US.
We have more progressive things like universal healthcare, decent public education. The US really seems intent on not having those because, as I see it, they don’t want black people to have it.
We have more progressive things like universal healthcare, decent public education. The US really seems intent on not having those because, as I see it, they don’t want black people to have it.
The American k-12 education system is varied in quality based on the municipality.
woa Mexico has those things too of course!! It’s interesting, I guess the country in the middle (USA) is really different, and all of those things must be universal, otherwise most people will have their lives shorten drastically which is very bad!!
I would say our car dependency is the same or worse compared to America. In America they have the population to support small towns that are dense and walkable. These are rare enough that every single one of them is a tourist destination… but we don’t even have one. All the Canadian small towns have a highway, a Walmart, a Boston pizza, and maybe a strip mall.
Toronto, canadas biggest city, is fully dependent on the car. There are multiple highways running through it, cutting neighborhoods off and decreasing walkability. The transit system is somehow even less developed than the already meagre American alternatives, with two short subway lines servicing a city of like 3 mill.
Look at pictures of the freeways of most US cities, it’s far, far beyond what we have.
With the exception of certain cities like NYC, from what I hear US transit barely exists or exists in a token form that’s not really usable. We can complain ours isn’t good enough but it’s certainly there. It’s hard to tell because the complaining sounds the same, but I’ve come to conclude the US transit is far worse.
Eh I don’t know. I’m from Canada and I live in the USA right now. Most places in Canada that I’ve experienced are completely car dependent, and there’s only a few cities with big transit systems? Where I live now has incredible transit compared to where I was in Canada and people here complain far more about transit than they did in Canada (probably in part because people actually use it). The cities that I’ve lived in definitely give a bit of a biased perspective, though.
It’s hard to say which is really more car dependent. There are more larger cities in the US and more with decent transit infrastructure compared to Canada, but maybe per capita or per city Canada would win because there’s a lot of Midwest and the US has a higher population? If I was picking a place to live and transit was the only consideration, though, I would probably pick the USA over Canada because there’s more cities to choose from and more rail.
I mean it really depends on what you’re measuring to compare car dependence. Is it number of people who have to drive every day? Number of cities where most of the population has to drive every day? Are you comparing transit infrastructure on equivalently sized cities (and then is the size by population, or do you compare cities of the same density…). If you’re looking at how many people across the country need a car, NYC is very relevant. Realistically this is something that mostly makes sense to compare by city rather than by country (obviously the country has influence over transit, but that’s not really the point).
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