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tjic

> most people in the world don’t really think about us or care about us

French newspaper has a front page article about Obamacare http://www.lemonde.fr/

German newspaper has a front page article about the US election http://www.spiegel.de/

UK paper has videolink of Romney on front page http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Italian newspaper has Romney and Obama on front page http://www.repubblica.it/

For better or worse, the US has a commanding place in the politics, technology, and economics of the planet.

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I can report that there are a large portion of people in the UK at least who do obsess about america, its culture and its politics.

I mean, it's hard not to at times. Not wishing to be rude, but there is often something of the car crash about it, especially magnified through the media/internet lens.

Well our media did obsess over Kate Middleton's "fairy tale" wedding, and she still pops up on tabloids, so you can say the feeling is mutual.

While that is true, people still don't factor the states into their everyday thoughts and calculations.

Also, note that most of the author's examples weren't from west Europe, but rather more remote places and especially "third world" countries. Basically, places that Americans tend to assume people either hate them or love them(see: china, or east asia in general, or the middle east, etc, etc)

Your post just proves that Americans cannot take any criticism of their country without fighting against it somehow. It's built into your nature, like an automatic response.

Great, a few European newspapers did stories on US politics. They also did stories on the rest of the world too which is something you don't see much in US newspapers.

Don't get me wrong, I love America (and live here, originally from UK) but the country has some serious issues.

In addition to this: staying informed is not the same as caring (being emotional involved) about somebody.

Europeans just want to know about the rest of the world because the world is connected. What happens all over the world has consequences for Europeans too.

You can very well want to know what's going on in America without caring (feeling sorry) if they're going into the shitter.

My model of human beings is that we are usually much quicker to get emotionally involved in something than to become informed about it.

That might be true at the micro level, but I don't think it might be necessarily true at the macro level.

I don't see how the post proves that at all. They're making an assertion about matters of fact, not a value judgement.

Many of us Americans express the desire for the end of the American Empire, yet the world's hegemon America remains.

Yeah...that doesn't really "prove" anything. I'll thank you to have some better evidence before claiming things about my true "nature".

I remember traveling in France the summer before the 2008 presidential election. Every newspaper and tabloid on the stands had Obama's face on it.

I'm not saying that a mild preoccupation with American politics is a good thing for the world to have, but to say that it doesn't exist doesn't seem...accurate.

When a US president can cause significant economic problems because you refuse to join in war with them, it tends to make them a bit more important. All the rhetoric spewed by the US executive about 'with us or against us' created the 'freedom fries' debacle and lots of open hostility of anything French by many Americans.

The US is an important country and always will be, but the article is saying that there's weird things about the country that he recognises, not that it's a banana republic that doesn't know it yet.

Refuting "most people in the world don’t really think about us or care about us" is not refuting a criticism of America.

> Your post just proves that Americans cannot take any criticism of their country without fighting against it somehow.

This is a rhetorical fallacy.

Person A: "You're always defensive"

Person B: "I don't think I am."

Person A: "SEEE!!!"

Look, if you make a statement that is IMPOSSIBLE to disagree with, you've just said something non-falsifiable.

In other words, your statement is so poorly formed that it's Not Even Wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

The US is a political gorilla, sure, but that doesn't invalidate what the article is talking about.

It's funny how large news organizations have a "world news" section, eh?

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