Comments by "Sam Aronow" (@SamAronow) on "BritMonkey" channel.

I think it's worth noting that a major reason only 40% of Americans have passports is because no US state has paid vacation time and some even lack unpaid vacation time. Even then, the time usually allowed is no more than two weeks. "But what about the gap year?" You may ask. Well, no such thing exists in the US as all university degrees require four years of study, including 50% general and elective studies outside one's major, instead of the three years required in the UK. And that's not even factoring in the lack of increase in real wages that's been plaguing the median American worker for the last twenty years. Finally, there's the proximity issue. The US is big and far away; the distance between New York and Los Angeles is equal to that between London and Baghdad; I'd be curious to see figures for the percentage of Europeans who have traveled that distance from their own homes in their lifetimes. And given the financial and time burdens I've already mentioned, most Americans don't even see that much of the US itself. I've visited 30 US states plus DC, and I'd venture a guess that that's more than most of my countrymen. tl;dr most Americans have neither the time nor the proximity nor the disposable income to be able to travel for leisure.
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Re: cinema: You've actually gotten it the wrong way round. European films were so much more popular in the US during the 1950s and 1960s than they are now, and it's precisely because of the Hays Code. After World War II, the Code had become much more of a set of guidelines than strict rules; A film professor of mine once said it was hard to find a successful film from Hollywood's Golden Age that didn't violate the code in at least one way or another. The original intent of the Hays Code was to disincentivize cinemas from showing films that didn't follow the code. But by the 1950s cinema owners didn't care about the Code anymore, so they showed European films that allowed far more violence and sexuality, and it was a big hit.
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Clinton actually did implement a fair number of new social policies in his first two years, but for the remaining six had to deal with a Republican-controlled Congress who wouldn't allow such policies to move forward. The tactic then was to call their bluff by proposing ideas based on their own insincere policy proposals, which they themselves would never have actually tried doing, and daring them to vote against it.
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There isn't even "an education system" in the US. Each state has its own.
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@elseggs6504 Where do so many people get the impression that Americans are discouraged from traveling abroad? I lived there the first 28 years of my life and there's a universal sense that everyone should want to do that. Of course there's an equal pull to try exploring the US as well (and I think that's justified as well), but they're not presented as mutually exclusive. Domestic and international travel are both promoted and idealized.
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@jakeoutrider7644 Lucky you, you have a good job, either in the public sector or for a company that does that to attract and keep workers. I never did. In most of the developed world, that's a mandatory provision.
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@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 Yes. Many other countries.
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@jakehix8132 The Hays Code had nothing to do with the Red Scare and everything to do with socially-conservative Catholics organizing to apply severe industry pressure in the 1930s.
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The Last Samurai to me represents the dark side of overcompensating for Americentrism. There's a troubling pattern of well-intentioned American liberals to misinterpret far-right ultranationalist tropes as benign expressions of "cultural authenticity," especially in Japan, India, and Mexico. We can at least take heart that that's far less common in media now than it was 20 years ago.
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@raifthemad There was a weird period in the early '70s where Soviet movies briefly went mainstream and you could see them in American cinemas. At the very least there was a brief time when the artistry (Tarkovsky) and production value (Waterloo) was on par with American blockbusters. Of course the USSR exerted actual government censorship that made that way harder, but some stuff did slip through.
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@Davey-Boyd I once proposed to my friend that we take a road trip to Argentina. Turns out that's way harder than it should be.
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@nouua6513 The US is a Great Power and there is a perceived social contract there to use that power to enforce international law (the Iraq War being a notable exception) rather than sit it out and smugly ignore the rest of the world's problems like we did in the 1920s and 1930s. Asking a random middle schooler from Fresno to find Algeria on a map doesn't really change that.
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And period-appropriate!
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@dingo1547 3/4 of the states.
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@_blank-_ Imagine a movie set in the French Revolution that's all about why the feudal aristocrats are the real victims. That's what The Last Samurai does for Meiji-era Japan. It treats people as persecuted keepers of a noble tradition when in reality most Samurai who refused to modernize were little more than gangsters who terrorized the country in defense of the privileges to live off taxpayer money and legally commit murder.
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It's more like Baseball but there are only two bases. I often find British people assume that you score a point for each base reached instead of each run.
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8:59 Is that...a Spanish flag on New Netherland?
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