The US takes over the world

One Brazillian man from Skypeland said he had a very bad impression of the US before he went there to visit for a year. He had thought that the United States wanted to take over the world. He said that people from around the world see it in a bad way. They feel that the United States is cut off from the rest of the world. One major reason he gave for hatred of the US is that it has its own form of football and does not participate seriously in soccer like other countries do. He stated that Brazillians object to Americans thinking the US is the best country in the world. The bragging of Americans annoys them. He said that the US only makes war on other countries to take their money and their oil...

The Brazillian man was shocked when he realized it was nothing like this and very surprised he had a positive experience in the United States. Well, imagine that.

However, as we talked, things became more negative. He attacked me because no chemical weapons were ever found in Iraq. I tried to tell him that the UN weapons inspectors had found some, but he claimed they never did. He then changed his opinion, and claimed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but they were the chemical and biological weapons given to Sadam by the United States. I asked for evidence and he became belligerent, and of course could not produce any. He claimed that the fact that no WMD were found after the start of the last invasion was because Bush was lying.

He said that no country ever helped another just to be nice, or for humanitarian reasons, or because of an international treaty, or because of internal political pressure of its population. I brought up the example of the US intervening to stop the killing in the former Yugoslavia. He first disagreed that this had happened. I said that the European allies of the US had begged the US to intervene for 2 or 3 years before the US decided to help. He disagreed that this had happened. I said I had paid attention to the news while this went on, and the debate in the US that culminated in the US helping. He said this was only to get some benefit for the US. I said the benefit was to help our friends so they continued being our friends, and to satisfy treaty obligations. He dismissed this.

He switched tactics, and said that the US is unfair because there are American factories in the Third World, including Brazil. He then mentioned how bad the jobs at Taco Bell in the US were (what does this have to do with factories overseas? And I think most of those factories are owned by foreign entrepreneurs, who only sell to the US and the industrialized world...). I tried to disagree and inject some information, like pointing out there is a value to providing employment and revenues to foreign populations, and he did not want to hear it. He started lecturing me about how awful it is to come home and have no food in your house and how bad it is to be hungry. At this point, I decided he was not worth talking to any longer. And I left...