Believe it or not, you're the one being racist now - by painting all of the US and all Americans with the same brush.
You don't hear about all the people that are perfectly fine folks and all the places that aren't insane because that makes boring news. So the only news you hear about are the whackjobs and bottom-feeders like this.
Don't make the same mistake of judging an entire country by a partial set of facts because that puts your feet on the first steps of the same path the people in this article walked.
I get you but then you'd never go anywhere, I've recently come back from the states and it was a great trip - all the roads near where I was staying were lined with beautiful trees, houses had great front gardens many growing vegetables, there were lots of vegan and vegetarian restaurants, endless pride flags well into July, lots of friendly cultural events, I felt welcome whenever I went and mixed with a diverse community in various settings. Weed is legal and sold at very reasonable prices.. It was a lot more progressive and interesting than most places in my own European country or others I've visited, certainly on par with even the cool sections of Berlin, Barcelona, Bristol. It would be crazy missing out on visiting Baltimore just because you heard there are some especially shitty racists in the country it's part of.
Perhaps American police agencies should start investigating themselves more and the papers should 100% just believe all their findings. That way you can just conveniently ignore it until the next time an American has to point it out to you.
Remember kids! If you just pretend the racism doesn't exist in your country, it doesn't!
This would be nationalist if anything, or generalized prejudice, as "American" isn't a race. Though, to be fair, all racism is a misnomer, as our race is human, but still.
Prejudiced yes. Racist? No, American is not a race. And yes, I agree that to really know the USA, you need to visit many of its states, but the current state of the country doesn't invite many of them to visit.
The problem, as Cody suggests, isn't visiting them, it's visiting them and treating them like shit. Littering everywhere, disturbing habitats, going off trails... That's the problem. If you stick to the path to the waterfall that's already well-worn, that's different.
I also like his point that we act like those were pristine and untouched lands when actually huge numbers of people lived and maintained them before Europeans arrived. They just knew how to keep the land in balance with nature when they exploited the resources.
Yeah, maybe? Humans do tend to do dumb things because other people are doing it. Mob mentality is one version of it. I’m sure seeing other people downvoted could trigger others to see the negative first, therefore downvote.
Not to mention sheer numbers. Like, the higher EU user numbers are, the more people you might find that would defend EU & see USA more critically than Americans would. Just like in an American user heavy server, you might expect to find more users that would start defending USA & lashing out at other countries.
It can't It would have had to have been true in the first place to be any less true. Being false you cannot be any less true no matter how bad the falsehood was.