> Europeans seem to have no trouble loudly voicing their opinion on American law, and I don't see Americans getting thin skin about it.
That's not my experience. Try arguing in favor of European hate speech laws, healthcare, consumer protection regulations, rent control, social democracy or anything else at odds with libertarianism and you'll get heavily downvoted both here and on US-centric subreddits.
If there is one thing very common among Americans, it is the belief of "American exceptionalism" despite more than enough evidence that whatever Americans are doing is just outright Not Working At F...ing All.
Sure, plenty of Americans will downvote your bad ideas on HN, but you won’t generally find them discussing how bad they think xyz thing in Europe on a weekly basis. If they mention Europe at all, it will probably be in the context of a vacation someone took or is planning.
The thing is most Americans just don’t think much about Europe at all. Outside of the UK, I saw far more films from Hong Kong or Japan in normal movie theaters while growing up than all of Europe combined. It might be different for someone on the east coast but for most Americans, the EU just doesn’t have much impact culturally or in business either.
> The thing is most Americans just don’t think much about Europe at all.
Well they don't even know what's out there. 40% of Americans never left the US, 11% never even the state they were born in [1]. And even if you travel to another state, culturally it will be pretty similar to where you came from - same language, same TV/radio stations, same car dependence, same politics.
In contrast, in Europe... pretty much anywhere outside of Russia only needs about two to three hours worth of car drive and you're in a country where you don't know anything, in the Balkans you won't even be able to read because Serbs write in Cyrillic, and on the eastern border you can even play warzone tourist if you don't mind the risk of getting arrested or shot (or you can sign up for a combat tour with the Foreign Legion). Every one of our countries does stuff differently and you have so many opportunities of learning, it is mind blowing sometimes.
And yet, as a kid, I was able to go to Sakura Square in Denver on weekends and see several blocks where everything was Japanese, including a mini mall, a grocery store, book stores, music stores, etc. It's been there for generations and even has plaques written back when Japanese used katakana instead of hiragana to conjugate verbs. Another area in the suburbs was mostly Cantonese for a few blocks. Somewhere around 10-15% of my classmates spoke Spanish at home. And Denver is over a thousand miles from either border and only had a population of one and a half million at the time!
America is a huge country, but don't underestimate its cultural or linguistic diversity. It's had large immigrant populations from far flung places around the world for a very long time, whereas most of Europe has only become like this in the past generation or two.
In any case, your comment is missing the point. However little you believe Americans understand about the world, we get more media, cultural influence and business influence from places outside of Europe. Half the cartoons I grew up watching were from Japan, my family had Japanese cars and video games, popular business books talked about Japan and a lot of people saw it as almost a futuristic place. Hong Kong exported quite a bit of its culture through movies in the 90s and early 2000, and in recent years, Korea has become a major cultural force as well, while China has become the the key market to understand in terms of business opportunities.
That's not my experience. Try arguing in favor of European hate speech laws, healthcare, consumer protection regulations, rent control, social democracy or anything else at odds with libertarianism and you'll get heavily downvoted both here and on US-centric subreddits.
If there is one thing very common among Americans, it is the belief of "American exceptionalism" despite more than enough evidence that whatever Americans are doing is just outright Not Working At F...ing All.