Similarly, there is no average American culture, as inter-state differences in attitude are large. America is as polarized as it's ever been, which is another way of saying the same thing.

american culture is almost homogeneous. ask a european visitor

Oh no, Peruvian culture and Canadian culture, for example, are very distinctly different, at least to my Belgian eyes.

This isn't what they meant, but I suspect you know that.

and so are Italian and Finnish cultures. But inter-USA cultures are as differnt as local cultures are within a single european country.

Would be interesting to have a distance metric for cultures , however

Yeah, the Navajo and Lakota are very noticably culturally distinct from each other, maybe even more so than people from Swabia and people from North Frisia.

The Navajo and Lakota are nations.

> The US is basically our common cultural base now

This is wishful thinking. People pay a lot of attention to the US due to its cultural output and importance in geo-politics but when they open the door they still pay attention to their own locality which has its own context.

> At least 4 of those issues are american , not european.

I'm sorry, how are those issues not European? Do you think Europeans aren't human or something? They're social issues and its harmful to think the US has any sort of monopoly on them. I could easily pull concrete examples where those issues are relevant to European events that I might suggest you are unaware of.

> While these are interesting issues, they are nowhere near the top of the mind of average european.

I would argue that for an average European elector, privacy is a much greater expectation than it is for an American.

> how are those issues not European?

because they are not contested in europe, only in the US

> privacy is a much greater

It's nowhere near as important as housing or employment i think. Strict privacy was mainly championed by German Greens, not a pan-european issue

Sorry, but that's bullshit. Does US discourse have impact on these topics in Europe: sure. But they are not solved topics that wouldn't be contentious otherwise.

> because they are not contested in europe, only in the US

every single one of those issues gets discussed in Europe. The US does not have a monopoly on social issues, I fear you are just showing the limits of your perspective.

i dont think anyone seriously debates whether abortion should be outlawed in western europe. It's just not a political topic in almost all of europe. Some very conservative parties use the US hype to rally their own supporters but it's just not working as an issue, abortion is to a very large degree culturally acceptable.

Abortion in Poland is legal only in cases when the pregnancy is a result of a criminal act or when the woman's life or health is in danger.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Poland#Legal_sta...

Abortion ebbs and flows. As someone else mentioned, currently Poland has placed severe restrictions on it and Ireland only legalised it something like 20 years ago, N.Ireland only decriminalised it about 5 years ago.

I would also suggest that considering the miserable failure of the mid-terms that the US has a similar strong average relatively set against limiting access to abortion too. Although I do appreciate that some areas of the US are more traditionally religious areas and more similar to the conservatives in Poland.

Abortion was only legalized in Ireland in 2018.

Abortion is one of the few cultural topics which doesn't tend towards borad consensus. E.g. acceptance of gay rights has a tipping point and then drifts towards the 90s+%, but abortion does not.

It's still very limited in Ireland and it took the death of a pregnant woman to make this happen.

Her husband begged the doctors to terminate her pregnancy in order to save her life but he was told "this is a Catholic country".

I marched myself on this dark day in Galway but Ireland still has a long way to go to become truly independent from its Catholic stranglehold. That caused so much pain especially to the youth.

But they are on their way yes, I was especially happy when the gay marriage made it through.

You don't think Ireland is part of western Europe? You don't think Poland counts as part of Europe and the EU?

It would be interesting to setup a sort of “quiz” about the US for Europeans and vice versa for Americans, I bet both would get those political points vastly wrong (eg, they’d think abortion laws way stricter or lax than they actually are, same with guns, etc). Most of what you know about other places comes from the media depicting it.

>There's no 'average european culture

Where do you live? Are you not aware that there is a very active and ongoing war in Europe which was triggered by the desire of a certain country to be more "European", and opposition to that desire.

ukraine was and is a european country. it wanted to be allied to the west and nato though

Indeed, it recognised that being "European" was more than a geographical concept.

Note that in 2014 it was "Euro-maiden" not NATO-maiden, or West-maiden.

> Nobody went out on the streets because they wanted cookie prompts. We are just letting bureaucrats run the show and tell us we should like it

Umm I do advocate for privacy. And I know many people that do. Feelings about GDPR are generally very positive.

But nobody wanted cookie prompts. They are the result of a shortsighted compromise.

What the EU should have done is simply forbid user tracking or make the user take action if they want to be tracked, no not tracking should be the default. Pop-up questions should have been explicitly forbidden.

However the industry knows that nobody wants to be tracked. And feared a loss of income. So they campaigned to weaken the law. The EU officials in their stupidity agreed. Stupid yes because now the industry blames them for the abundant cookie walls.

Not stupid, sadly - corrupt. I bet most of the MEPs that voted on that directive are now retired with a fat pension, made even fatter by some "consulting gig" from the folks that wanted that law weakened.

Unfortunately this is nothing new. Democracy has its problems.