> When people who haven’t been to America talk about it, they get their ideas from the distorted cliches of the media. A land of gun nuts and COVID deniers, rif

> When people who haven’t been to America talk about it, they get their ideas from the distorted cliches of the media. A land of gun nuts and COVID deniers, rife with racism and obesity! This annoys me. I’ve lived in the US and have family there. I know these views are absurdly one-sided. People who’ve lived in Africa get a similar twinge when the clichés come out: “Africa, land of rape and lions”, as the Wronging Rights blog puts it. Not going abroad makes people parochial. Their experience is limited, and what they know of other countries is refracted through the biases of the local media Public relations was invented in US and the whole establishment of the United States is rooted in manipulation of the public opinion. The African examples are not a distraction of real issues but some real issues while in the US there is, I think, much less actual issues than thought. For example there are probably no major racial issues in the US today; localized racism exists but everyone can vote and has roghts. Poverty on other hand is an issue. Of course you can say you have evidence against this point, but note that it's probably just confirmations of the narrative, not a relative comparison of societal challenges. This would imply there exists a confusion between issues per public opinion and issues per literature. We can further deduce this is probably caused by the lack of separation of these in context of foreign talk about Americans; others satirisize Americans for being fools to falll into focusing on issues of public opinion and others only recognize the social hotness of the issue per public opinion without recognizing they are a distraction.