of course it’s joking for you, but for us it’s racism, incitation to/for hate, certainly not relevant from freedom of speech like you often recomand yourself, I bet none community in US would have let your people insult them like you did for us ! and sometimes still do, difficult to remove what has been hammered in your docile brains since a decade.

But it’s an old and original habit in your country, like !Washington, who already passed us under the bus, it’s not a moral dilemn for you to remake it anytime it’s convenient for your elite, and bonjour la machine de propagande, I have seen quite a few times that Goebel had good imitators

As you say, there’s little point debating this further, you clearly have your view and you’re going to stick to it whatever. Equally I am content that my position is perfectly justifiable.

But as a parting note, here is the study I was talking about, hardly self-serving as it’s from a UK organisation dedicated to studying social mobility issues which regularly criticises the record of the UK on the subject.

http://www.suttontrust.com/reports/IntergenerationalMobility.pdf

If you don’t believe anything that Europeans write however because we are all lying communists, there are other studies from US universities which come to similar conclusions.

http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/data/

If you still think that social mobility is objectively unmeasurable, it does beg the question of how you are so sure that it is worse all over Europe.

As for cherry picking individual countries, I actually went to the trouble of putting in EU averages for those figures I listed, home ownership and types of dwelling. I also pointed out the variance in home ownership between US states. I really don’t think I can be accused of cherry picking more than either the original article or the many other comments which pick out say tax evasion in Greece and extrapolate that to the whole of Europe.

I’ve lost count of the number of times i’ve read in the US press how a small riot in provincial France or slow economic growth in southern Italy shows the inevitable and imminent doom of an entire continent.

If you want distortions and propaganda about Europe from mainstream sources such as the NY Post, Washington Post, IBD, WSJ, Fox, the blogosphere, republican officials and representatives etc in addition to the plethora of small-time crackpots then I will be happy to point you in the right direction but i’m sure you can find them yourself if you actually look with a critical mind.

“Check out websites like f**kfrance.com entirely devoted to the demonisation of a European country by the general American public, no such vitriolic equivalent exists in France.”

Oh well, there’s not much point in this. I point an example of a major German “news” magazine (aka Time or something in the US) which is largely similiar to almost all the rest wth similar circulation and mass exposure in Europe, and you cite some obscure website and a crazy preacher on some cable channel. I doubt 99+% of Americans have ever seen or heard of either, so not sure how this compares to magazine and newspapers that practically every person in Europe see every day. (not to mention TV, which I’m sure you’ll claim is just expressing dissent for US foreign policy) As I said, apple orchards vs an orange pip, in your examples the pip is buried in a dumpster somewhere.

“A recent study found that social mobility among the countries studied was actually greatest in Scandinavia, Germany and benelux with Italy, France, the UK and the US coming out quite badly as parental incomes in those countries were a generally good predictor of the income levels of their children.”

An impossible study to actually produce, since there is no way to determine this empirically. The only possible method is to poll people and ask how they think they are doing financially compared to their parents. A purely subjective opinion that cannot be quantified in any real way. (Census data?Nope. Filled out the census and no information there about how much money my father made-I wouldn’t even know) Basically rubbish, probably concocted by Euro left-wingers trying to come up with yet another bogus statistic to glorify themselves.

They ought to be focusing on the increasing emigration of skilled professionals from Europe vs wallowing in slef-serving “studies”. Maybe they’re including all those people fleeing from Holland in their social mobility numbers?

Time to move on. But, one final point. If you want to talk about the US as a whole, you have to stop the cherry picking of small population countries and take the whole EU. Otherwise we can easily do the same by comparing, say Vermont or many other places, to Sweden or Norway by itself.