Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkphilip | Hacker News Reader

You should travel more and ask people outside the US what they actually think about US military policy. Note, some people do distinguish between what the US establishment does and what ordinary American civilians do but that is not always the case.

View on HN

Ordinary Americans are quite nationalistic and rarely leave their country. World knowledge is very poor amongst the mid and low class American citizens.

Please keep nationalistic provocations off this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The US military has made plenty of mistakes but it is easily the fighting force that has done the most to ensure the rise in standard of living across the globe via protection of shipping lanes and maintaining global order

On multiple occasions in my life I've needed to order extra pages for my passport because it was full of stamps. I've been to every continent except for Antarctica and 50 plus countries and have literally never had a negative interaction because of my nationality.

Maybe you need to travel more? You hear "Americans are hated" by.... Americans mostly. And, I would guess, Americans of a certain political bent that say it more as a badge of their identity rather than it being an honest belief in the truth(literally "America's #1!!!", but for liberals). It's a grade school level understanding of the world(as is "America #1") and I find it a fair indicator of stereotype-oriented thought patterns when I hear it.

Have you actually had a conversation with anyone outside the US about what they think about US govt/military policy? Most people are too polite to say these things unless specifically asked.

By the way, I am not an American and I don't live in the US. So I have a perspective on this which you probably don't have.

OP is speaking about Americans, not the American military.

Those are correlated. If your military is killing civilians en masse and over half the country is still celebrating the military, putting up flags everywhere, shouting F YEAH MURICA at every turn, then those people are ignoring the truth. Here in Germany there really is a growing blanket hate of American military policy and by extension American mainstream populace.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com