As a rule, I read the opinions posted by the readers of news articles posted on the Web, especially the BBC (which is moderated). The reason for doing that is to have some glimpse into what people actually think in their own words - sort of a focus group on the cheap.
Although I do not keep any formal tallies of who says what, I noticed a certain regularity - if the post is arogant, self-righteous, disparaging of others, and jingoistic, the chances are it has been written by someone with a US address.
A similar exercise on the Yahoo-featured Reuters news which has an unmoderated list is even more revealing - it basically a constant barrage of self-righteous bile and insults with the rational argument contents close to nil. If there is any rationally argued posting there, the chances are it was written by someone with a Canada address.
These are unsolicited opinions voluntarily supplied by readers, so they can be viewed as a valid indication of what the authors actually think. There might be some sample representativeness issues that may affect the distribution by a few percentage points, but the fact remains that the US-sers tend to present themselves to the world as vile, arrogant, self-righteous, jingoistic and dogmatic assholes - much more so than any other English speaking nation. Is it in the water or in the gene pool, or what? Any explanations?
Wojtek