The French Socialist Party) (which is not socialist, but social-democratic) is the main left-wing party in France, and holds primaries sort of like in the US. Registering as a member of a party is independent from registering as a voter, and indeed fewer people do it, so the primary is much smaller.
Cheerleading is much less intense and developed here, but there's a cheerleading club in e.g. every major engineering school. It's not nearly as competitive, though.
Our conceptions of what the words "primary" mean are so varied that I still disagree with you right now. My disagreement would decrease if registering to vote in the socialist "primary" did not require paying membership dues. To my knowledge all of the UK and Irish political parties require candidates to be selected by the local committee of the constituency in which they wish to stand. I do not consider this a primary.
I stand behind my careful cavilling/weaselling on cheerleaders though; when I think of cheerleading I think of American Football not Bring It On
Recently, I have noticed a cultural bias for the United States running through LW threads. It is perhaps to be expected of an English-language website, but for one that is about, among other things, overcoming bias, it is important to recognize one's own.
Aspects of the bias I have observed include:
I'm not the first to raise such concerns, either.
By comparison, e.g. the English Wikipedia strikes me as an example of an international English-language project that's relatively successful at recognizing and fighting systemic bias, and a whole set of template messages to mark articles with identified problems.
To quote Wikipedia itself:
The reason I haven't mentioned other obvious biases, such as gender, age, education, or First World biases, is because those (in my experience) tend to be more subtle here on LW and because I'm myself subject to some of them. However, I might cook something up on them later.