AMERICANS ARE LOUD AND OBNOXIOUS
One sterotype about Americans is that we are mostly ignorant about other countries. Willingly ignorant.
And we're either blindly patriotic or we complain bitterly about our country/government but have no better ideas. And that we don't really understand politics. And are generally wasteful.
I can't find a single thing about the above two posts to disagree with.
This is wild. Why on earth should Americans care about Sweden, Switzerland, and Sudan? For that matter, why should they care about France, unless it's to make fun of the French?
But I would not be so quick to say they can locate Canada and Mexico but don't care about them. From what I've seen, they care a great deal about Mexico as a country they love to hate because of illegal immigrants. They often seem to have a funny idea about Canada as being much farther north than it is, judging by all the comments I see about how it's supposedly winter here all year round. Way back in the '80s, somebody from the TV show "Dynasty" called the City of Calgary and asked if it was okay to use Calgary in one of their upcoming scripts. Since the script intended to reference oil production in Canada, they wanted to make sure they had the right place, and just wanted to confirm that "Calgary is in northern Canada, isn't it?"
...Dollars, guns and churches...
That's the impression I get from various forum communities I belong to and from American TV.
The kind of people you see on reality television. That's what people think Americans are actually like.
Some reality shows like Big Brother, Survivor, and The Amazing Race like to cast their shows to fill "niches." These shows were a lot better back when they had regular people on them -- people who don't scream "typical American (fill in the blank for almost any geographical or age-related stereotype) with every word and gesture they make.
Americans tend to complain less than other Anglophone cultures. They have the audacity to deal with their problems by coming up with solutions for them rather than just wallowing in their misery like the rest of us. Of course, their solutions are often a little misguided.
Let's see... some terrorists from Saudi Arabia murdered a few thousand people in New York and elsewhere in 2001. So Bush decides to get revenge by invading Afghanistan and then Iraq, which had nothing to do with September 11. And in all these years, there hasn't been a peep about dealing with the country where the terrorists actually came from, Saudia Arabia. Geographically misguided, indeed...
they complain less but demand a lot more
That depends on how you define "complain." If you take it to mean any expression of disapproval, I'd say the Americans complain quite a bit more than many other countries. I'm not sure which country in the world has the record for protest marches and picket lines, but the U.S. must surely be in the top three.
