> while still being a terrible place in most other aspects. When I worked for a multinational company we had a lot of people from foreign offices visit the Uni

> while still being a terrible place in most other aspects. When I worked for a multinational company we had a lot of people from foreign offices visit the United States for the first time. It was really interesting for me to see how many of them, especially those who built their worldview from headlines and internet comment sections, were so surprised to discover that the US wasn’t the dystopian hellhole like they had come to believe. It was almost a rite of passage for us to dispel a bunch of myths over lunches and explain how the things they saw in a headline somewhere were not representative of typical American experiences. Don’t get me wrong, this country has a lot of things that need to improve. However, the internet comments version of the US has taken on a life of its own. I’m now old enough to have a lot of friends who either worked in foreign countries for extended periods of time or even emigrated abroad, only to come to realize that the rest of the world isn’t as picture-perfect as they though it would be according to the Internet. There’s a dynamic where no positive comments about the US are allowed, but negative comments about other countries are considered out of bounds, denied, or downvoted away. For example, the recent US reductions in COVID vaccine availability are something I vehemently oppose, but even the current US system makes it far easier to get a COVID vaccine than in the NHS. Every time I tell people this fact (which is easily verifiable by Googling it) I get shouted down or accused of making it up. Both online and in person.