I read a book a few years ago that made an interesting point about cultural exports like TV shows (the book was written pre-youtube and pre-netflix).

If you're a small country (with your own language, culture and traditions) and America has 30x the population of your country, films and TV shows made for the American market will have 30x the budget.

And yet, when that American show is selling broadcast rights in your country, no matter how far they have to drop the price, making a sale makes more money than not making the sale. So the price of the American show will never be out of reach of your broadcasters.

So when a broadcaster imports an American show instead of producing locally, they get a much flashier, more polished product - and it actually costs them less!

And so, for example, Belgian TV shows more scenes in American courtrooms than Belgian courtrooms. And if American TV shows include American politics, they can't help but shove it onto Belgian TV screens.

There's not a moustache-twirling Uncle Sam deliberately orchestrating this, of course. It's just a natural consequence of copyright, deregulation and free trade.

That’s not to say there’s no such thing as influence or persuasion. And those can be powerful. Ultimately we can all decide how we engage with our family, person to person, regardless of how the USA or anyone in the USA indicates.

It’s incredibly important to be aware of that and act accordingly. If mainstream media from another country can change your relationship with your sister, it seems to me that something is wrong. Negative external influences aren’t about to go away, so it’s on the individual to be cognizant and vigilant about responding appropriately.

You could easily argue that the "Conservative" party in Canada is equivalent or possibly even to the left of the mainstream Democratic party in the US. So yeah, it gets a bit weird when right-leaning people in Canada then also support Trumpian politics— sometimes it's hard to know if they're there after a considered review of the positions, or if it's just a knee jerk "pick the guy on the right" response.

The 2nd Amendment issue in the United States is something I don't expect a non-American to understand. The rest of the world tends to take the process of enumerating freedoms positively. The law says you have it or don't.

In the U.S. the culture was framed around the preservation of liberty and the enumeration of the boundaries, and limitations on the ability of government and regulation to encroach. The problem with that is it opens a can of worms constitutionally that increasingly have led to the torture of common language in order to attempt to change the meaning of already passed laws instead of passing new ones which seem to be growing increasingly difficult to do.

Further, you have an entire caste of people specifically trained to use language in unintuitive ways.

As far as "Assault rifles" go, most people can't even define what one is. The fact is, an AR-15 that has the "look-and-feel" of a military patterned rifle is functionally equivalent to more "traditional looking" stock rifles like a Mini-14.

They are the same fundamental device. Neither one is more or less capable of killing someone. To anyone with experience with firearms, the "common sense" espoused by gun control people amounts to hysterics. All it is is a bunch of people tryimg to legislate everyone else's rights without demonstrating any understanding of the subject matter at hand other than being a special interest mouthpiece.

But it's because of this misalignment across a variety of issues that it’s difficult to have a straight discussion of cross-border political alignments— you need to have at least some semblance of a picture of how the Canadian left and right differs from the US left and right. (Another key one, for example, is that the Liberals in Canada officially strive to be a centrist party; the "real" Canadian left is the NDP and Green party, neither of which have ever held power at the federal level, though the NDP have come close a few times.)

Not at all. You could say it's a "western" thing, but definitely not an USA thing (although they do tend to claim it for themselves like they invented it).

What's unique to the USA is the weird idea that personal responsibility is somehow a counter-argument to regulation. "Guns don't kill people, so everybody should be free to own them". At the same time, it's mostly the american left that argues against personal responsibility just because it's considered a right-wing belief.

To come to a conclusion: As so often, the USA is wrong, on both sides. The only "right" mentality, in my opinion, is one that acknowledges both personal responsibility and the option for society to step in.

They choose to cover it.