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You’re the worst at everything when you’re the only one measuring it. There are parts of the world where vegetables are grown next to where factories dump toxic waste. Pretty sure no one is measuring that.

As a non-American, that mostly is a reaction to rabid US jingoism, as in the US claiming themselves as "Numba 1" in everything, when usually, they are in the 10s or 20s at best.

And to many Americans this is even worse: If you are not best™ or worst™ ... you are unremarkable, 'E pluribus unum'.

I attribute a lot of it to the principle of "punching up".

Agreed. Nobody really talks about most other countries, while the US is pretty much top of the list of nearly every topic. So we're constantly a target.

> while the US is pretty much top of the list of nearly every topic

s/is/was

The US is trying really hard to lower its position on these lists. The US has not been near the top of reading/writing/arithmetic in a long time. The US is undoing a lot of federal regulations by eliminating/reducing agencies meant to regulate things like EPA, FDA, Dept of Education.