procrastination station

the concept of jaywalking. just crossing the road, americas weird for trying to ban it.

literally anything about guns in america almost certainly doesn't apply to most other countries. in aotearoa and many other nations we do not have the right to own firearms, nor do people even really want to. we don't have a reason to have them and people usually treat them like a bomb that has to be locked up at all times. they are all registered here and some types are entirely illegal.

the idea of cops having guns is so ridiculous and unhinged its the subject of mockery to a lot of people. batons and tasers are more common but still not all cops just run around with them.

the word "republican" means something different in different countries. in america its a political party, overseas its typically referring to the idea of separating from or abolishing monarchy.

places outside america have different political systems. the 2 party system is not universal. even if labour and national usually win the prime minister role, kiwis still actively vote for parties like the greens and te pati māori, which get seats in parliament as a result while another party is in the main role.

race dynamics are different in different countries, even within the limitation of just western countries. people keep failing to understand this in concept and practice so ill just say this: according to the new zealand census infomation publicly available one of the largest racial minorities is māori. the census has usually listed a joined option for latinos, black africans (a lot of africans here are white), and people from the middle east (which is incredibly vague). if i remember correctly last census these 3 groups were collectively 1% of the population.

a city having a population of 7 million or something is absolutely nuts, theres countries smaller than that.

there are thousands of languages and asia has a lot of them.

because of american homogeneity everyone has to learn english anyway to read half the fucking internet.

because of american homogeneity other english dialects are losing our slang and our accents. these things are part of our culture, and in certain dialects like nz english local indigenous languages are closely intertwined in the vocabulary.

that one particularly saddens me personally. commonwealth english has a fascinating history with dialects so diverse there are variations between towns in some areas. southern hemisphere english has loanwords from local languages and collectively shared features that northern hemisphere english doesn't have (the monotone accent especially). there is a particular dialect group encompassing aotearoa, australia, many pacific islands, and more recently antarctica.

cultural things are lost when american english takes over. it doesn't have words for certain things we have (is there an american word for bogan? or in the uk? redneck is not quite the same). going bush is a whole thing people regularly do and ive never heard a word for it in any northern hemisphere dialect.