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Comment by alright_scowl | Hacker News Reader

Forgive me for not taking their opinion about an economic block that they don't seem to understand and that their country doesn't belong to very seriously.

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if I was suggesting that they're right to criticise the EU, I would have said that. what I was suggesting was that "America number 1, everyone else turds" is an extremely normal and expected attitude for a lot of Americans, and not something that I would describe as "odd". you seem to have read it differently

I guess the question is, is that level of response what one would expect or hope for in a forum like HN? Maybe we could aspire to a better level of discourse?

Funny cause Europeans always think their opinions of the US should be taken very seriously, and they have a lot of them

Funny, do they? I don't participate in threads about the US and its policies, so I wouldn't be able to tell.

Well, as someone who has lived in various parts of the U.S (mainly Utah, Oregon and Northern California), as well as Germany, Denmark, and is married to an Italian: Germans, Danes, and Italians often have a lot of cursorily formed opinions of the U.S, while in the U.S if people have strong opinions about the EU (and not actual familiarity) they are often not just wrong or stupid but also just as often completely unhinged from reality.

I'm guessing this is due to stupidity manifesting in different ways in their respective regions.

> completely unhinged from reality

Like apparently the UK bring a knife-ridden crime epicentre, when the knife-crime rate is, while unacceptably high, actually rather lower than the US, and that's before you consider guns which are about 10 times more on top of that.

(And let's please at least pretend that the UK is still in the EU for argument's sake :)

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