To be fair, there are a lot more of us who dont’ question the fact at all. Cultural differences exists not only between the US and the rest of the world, but also within the US as well.
It is when those who can’t understand why someone would want to own a handgun, and then attempt to enact legislation to diminish that right for the rest of us, that many (including myself) get quite upset.
My understanding is that in many places, it’s illegal to post a sales-tax-inclusive price. I suspect it’s partly to reduce fraud - sales tax collection is notoriously dodgy, and you don’t want to give retail businesses the chance to indulge in even more obfuscation - and partly as an anti-tax measure. The concept is that if people know what tax they’re paying, and they feel it every time they make a purchase, they’ll resist increasing the tax by much. And AFAIK the highest sales tax in the country is here in New York City, at 8.75% on certain items, whereas VATs in many places are much higher.
Guns.
Guns.
Guns.
Having virtually NO knowledge of the world outside the good ol’ US of A. Name the heads of the governments in the two countries bordering you? Name any European leaders? Where’s Taiwan? Where’s Luxembourg? Where’s Suriname?
Having virtually NO knowledge of world history (I met an American in Ireland who insisted that several placenames in Ireland were named in honour of their US counterparts, the west Cork town of Baltimore being the case in point. “It’s because of all the aid America gave Ireland during the war” - er, what??)
A strange partiality to hanging American flags wherever they end up living outside the US; other nations don’t do this. If they do, then it’s never as ostentatious.
Guns.
Complete lack of understanding in matters of “US vs Other Cultures”. No, we don’t have 7/11s here. No, it’s not a dumb way to run a country. Yes, I speak Irish. It’s not a language we made up to piss off the English. Amazingly, yes, I speak Irish too. No, we don’t have a king. Neither does the UK, at the moment, but they’re just our neighbours now. Yes, I know what the internet is, you fool.
Fox.
Guns.
HUGE, inefficient vehicles and digging up Alaska/ invading Iraq to fuel them because the oil companies make too much of a profit from gas guzzling giganto-cars to even think about researching clean fuels or making them more efficient.
Can. Open. Worms literally all over the place.
Nope. Figuratively. 
Scipio_africanus, about the only thing you guessed correctly there is “guns”. I might be willing to squeak in “huge inefficient vehicles”, but I suspect that desire to own such things is also not uniquely American. America has no monopoly on historical/geographical ignorance, biased news programming, complaining about how others have such a “stupid way of running a country” (a brief survey of my foriegn-born friends confirms that we’re idiots for doing so many things the American way), or whinging about other countries. I think “guns” have already been pretty well discused, do you have anything to add, O scourge of Hannibal?
So he got five out of ten right. 
And I think he’s probably right when he says that Americans are unique in hanging the American flag when living overseas.
Actually, his post was unnecessarily inflammatory and is probably best ignored.
Actually, he’s not. In our neighborhood (which is the opposite of “cosmopolitan”), there’s a Norwegian family that flies their flag on a flagpole attached to their house. There is also a small contingent of British people who fly their flags and have those front license plates in the style of British flags. We also had a little controversy going on in our community because a Mexican grocery store had the audacity (gasp!) to fly a Mexican flag out front. :rolleyes: The complainers had their stupid argument squashed pretty quickly in the local Letters to the Editor.
This is actually something my husband and I argue about all the time. He, an Australian, finds it completely offensive that people come to the U.S. and dare to display the flags of their native countries. He says it’s obnoxious. I couldn’t care less and actually think it’s kind of cool. I mean, how many Norwegian flags do I get to see on a regular basis?
But they do not fly the American flag. I was choosing to interpret his statement very literally.
I would assume he meant that only an ignorant would believe that an irish city would be named after an american one, which, in all likehood, has been founded much later than its european counterpart.
Yes, you’re right, then.
Actually, not even that – if Michael Moore is to be believed, there are more guns per capita in Canada than there are in the US; which makes gun ownership not a distinctly unique Americanism.
It’s just that Canadians don’t point them at each other quite so much.
Really? I guess I must have hallucinated all the tricolours I’ve seen in the homes/businesses/communities of Irish expats in America, Britain and Spain.
Plenty of Mexican and Salvadoran flags in the barrios of the American cities I’ve lived in too.
I weep for the ignorance of my countrymen. And apologize for letting them out of the country.
I assume you meant to say you speak English too, by the way…
This points up something that may be the flip side of distinct americanisms (distinct europeanisms?)–bilingual-ness. You’re 100x more likely to find a European who speaks English than an American who speaks a European language (one of the benefits of running the world – everybody learns your language) 
To give a somewhat serious reply to a flippant question, in the US, the class system is weaker, and wait staff are not generally regarded as inferiors who must be given non-verbal signals.
One of those “only in America” things that really strikes me as odd is talking about distances in terms of time. For instance, around here we’ll say that it’s 2 and a half hours from Lafayette, Indiana to Chicago. And 14 hours from Lafayette to Philadelphia.
The unspoken assumption is that everyone knows you mean it takes that long when you are driving in a private vechicle on highways at about 65 mph.
If it turns out everyone does this in all parts of the world - Ooops
Interesting, Capri. 30-odd years ago, when I went off to college and first started meeting people from elsewhere, this was a shibboleth that differentiated Northern Californians from Southern Californians (southrons tending to use time as a unit of distance). It sounds like LA has taken over the country (or northern CA was always out of step).
65 MPH? I think you misunderstand why we give distances in hours. For example, I live an hour away from work, but that’s only 27 miles away.
Don’t know whether this is “uniquely American” or just an American/British difference. But then this whole thread is more IMHO than GQ, IMHO.
One cultural thing I’ve noticed, and I kind of admire it - Americans seem to be more inclined to measure and quantify things than other nationalities. The most obvious example is in sports coverage. There’s baseball of course, which is a statistician’s wet dream, but we get a lot of other US sports on TV here, and they all seem to bombard you with stats. European TV companies have copied this approach in recent years, with breakdowns of ‘assists’, corners, possession percentages and so on in their football (soccer) coverage, but it doesn’t seem to have caught the fans’ imagination. Who needs all that irrelevant detail? To us, the only stat you need is the score (usually 0-0 ;)).
But it’s not just sports - on these very boards you see Americans talking about SATs, Neilsens, tax dollars, everything is quantified. Whatever the subject, the informed American has the stats to hand. This just does not happen in Britain, at least not to anything like the same extent. Another example - on Jay Leno’s show a few weeks ago he was bantering with a guest and somebody mentioned cholesterol. Jay casually asks the guest what his cholesterol levels are, like it’s something that anybody would know, and the guest actually does know! 151, he says (or whatever - I have no idea what a typical level is, but then I’m British), Jay says Wow, that’s low!, the guy in the house band chips in with his LDL levels or something, and everyone has a good laugh. That conversation just would not take place on a chat show here, because who the fuck has their cholesterol levels to hand?