Jo

Those of us who like math are usually very good at it, and really like it; but liking math is rarer than it is here. We have wars less, but we fund R&D more because our cultures usually valorize SCIENCE!. The end result is that in most areas our tech is behind yours, but in some areas we’re ahead. For example, we do have a colony on the Moon, even though we never had a Space Race, but we haven’t figured out nuclear energy. 

(...We did spare some war criminals to work on our space program, just like you did. We’re big on clemency, and we’re big on extracting resources, so. Most of us are actually pretty proud of it: we frame it as taking people who were making the world worse, and using them to make the world better.)

Your American politics are so boring. We have the Morningstars, who believe that action is ethically different from inaction, and so argue to abolish taxes; the Mordecais, who say that no one has the right to own a means of production; the Aaronids, who say that the only correct laws were revealed in Midian by the national god of Israel; the Hobbesians, who say that the state should have ultimate power; the Sons of Matthew, who say that there should be certain rules that citizens can break but the state can’t; the Gilwells, who are a lot like what you would call virtue ethicists, but who tend to see loyalty and compassion as the highest virtues; the Terminals, who actively worship the abstract concept of Good and change their positions on every issue the moment one of them wins a partywide ethical argument over the other; the Tomatoes (a derogatory name they reclaimed) who believe in both the value of hard work and the inherent compensation due thereof; the Trionfis, who say that true understanding of Good is outside human reach, and as a result make all decisions by lot; the Aesthetes, who believe that art is the highest end of anything and everyone (including humanity); the Advocates of Doom, who believe that humanity should be sterilized (exactly how consensual this process should be varies between members); and of course the Paulites, the Johannines, the Papists, the Marcans, and the Lucans. A lot of the policy proposals, and the moral feelings, are here in America, but everyone here is so unprincipled, and your system is only democratic in that the totally uneducated public elect politicians in line with their own unexamined prejudices! 

You guys also have really weird history. In my world, burning books or modifying records is generally seen as a crime on par with rape or slavery. Even in countries (most of them in the past) where the king had almost absolute power, an attempt to corrupt records kept by the priesthood or a noble family would often be met by rebellion. Today, every civilized country has its own dedicated department of history and archiving, and the Priests of Truth who join the Order of Historiography are protected by international treaty just like the Red Crystal. (Similar to your Geneva Conventions, violating the provisions of the Universal Treaty of Minimum Ethics is generally met with, for example, being publicly executed even if you’ve surrendered. We do make the executions quick and painless, though, to provide an incentive for surrender.) Even regular citizens who keep diaries are asked to bequeath them to the libraries under a hundred-year seal. 

I think part of it is due to your weird dislike for rules. In my world, one of the war criminals whose death sentence got commuted in exchange for lifetime servitude came up with this way to classify human psychology. He said that for reasons unknown there is a group of traits that tend to increase or decrease with each other in degree between humans. Every human exists at a point on this gradient. (Later this was demonstrated thoroughly to be a dramatic oversimplification, but this is just the basic idea.) People who are far along this spectrum are essentially what we would consider unnervingly human: they might have an obsession with rules, or with ordinary hand movements, or find annoying lights and textures to be overwhelmingly so. People who are far behind on this spectrum are what we had to name after the discoverer, since we didn’t already have a word for them. Such people see no problem with breaking rules all the time, make strange hand movements and have unusual tics, have a strange fixation with eye contact, and may have odd sensory preferences. Interestingly, many of them are savants, in that they often have an extraordinary ability to recognize faces and read from facial expressions and bodily mannerisms what people are thinking. (They’re also really good at memorizing people’s names.) They also tend to have strong willpower, which is hypothesized to be a sort of compensation for the fact that they aren’t guaranteed to do something just because it’s on the schedule. I think that most people on Earth have that condition. It makes me a bit more of a fish out of water, as one might guess.

Sex is ridiculous here. You people consider cuddling to be a sex act always and only when at least one of the participants is male, half the population refuses to date members of the same sex(!), romantic relationships are automatically prioritized over friendships(!!), and you guys romanticize not clearly communicating that you want sex(!!!). What in heaven’s name went wrong with your culture?!

Also, I get that you guys have your prejudices - we have lots of prejudices too, we’re only human - but for some reason a bunch of you think that trying to overcome them is evil? Just because you think that being principled is evil? I still don’t understand that. Like, sure, it’s one thing to oppose principles, but why on Humus do you have elected officials who openly admit on tv that just because you legalize same-sex marriage under the Equal Protection Clause doesn’t mean that you are therefore obligated to legalize polygamous marriage?!

The United States also has what we would consider to be appallingly and dangerously vague customs of speech, but I get that it’s a totally valid adaptation to the near-universal Asperger’s here. On Evelynworld, we have a special hand gesture to use when you’re flirting, and a certain designated movement to do when you’re being sarcastic, and all sorts of tenses to make it clear how counterfactual a world you’re talking about, and a kind of snapping motion you make to communicate that you want advice versus simple commiseration; and everyone has a piece of jewelry they wear to communicate how much and under what circumstances they lie (and all of that stuff has equivalents for the blind and/or limbless). You guys can just wing it. Though I strongly suspect that you are worse off for your reluctance to ask personal questions.