Absolutely true. The problem is that lends itself to non Americans acting at times as if they know more about America than Americans do and that their opinions about our country outweigh ours.
I've experienced kind of a mini version of this in terms of being an outsider who was exposed to a lot of info about some place via various media. I grew up in Georgia and most American films and the like come of out California and New York.
I have long felt it was problematic for those two places to have such an outsized impact on the perception of "life in America" because what they portray is often not accurate for places outside of New York and California.
Both places are far more urban than is typical for the US. I found it actively harmful to be exposed to a lot of ideas about what was "normal for the US" when it was really more like "normal for a very urban and wealthy subset of the US that lives in certain limited areas."
I'm guilty of having opinions these days about what California is doing wrong, but those opinions are informed by having lived there for a good chunk of my life. Like upwards of ten years total. (Maybe twelve-ish?)
Living in California after seeing it depicted in films so regularly helped me makes sense of some things. I got to recontectualize those movies as being "about California" rather than as being "about America" and I got to see some of the landscapes and experience some of weather and culture and what not depicted therein.
Having spent my early years seeing a place depicted and then having moved there, I will suggest that it does tend to give one an inaccurate impression of a place. What gets shown in books and movies remains a very narrow slice that leaves out a lot of pertinent details, never mind how compelling and rich the portrait may feel while viewing it.
It's completely reasonable for non Americans to be interested in what goes on here because America is very influential on the world stage. I don't discourage non Americans from expressing said interest.
I do take some umbrage with being told at times that non Americans know more about my country than I do because they have visited it and read about it. I realize you aren't actually saying that, but I have had roughly that said to me on HN and your comment veers uncomfortably close to repeating the sentiment.
And I don't really want this to turn into a fight. I'm still not sleeping enough and I'm currently running a fever. Feel free to chalk it up to "pet peeve" if you feel I've really gone off on some wild hair here.
Have a great day. I hope to step away from this conversation at this point in time.
Let me be clear I wasn't in any way implying you were saying things about the police in general or about Argentina in particular. I understand you're very careful in saying only things you've experienced yourself, which is why I -- and many others here, it would seem -- appreciate your comments. I understand you're talking about the police force(s) in the communities you know.
That said, surely you can see the asymmetry here: you don't know much about Argentina, because I presume aside our cyclic economic meltdowns we seldom make the news. But we in Argentina and the rest of the world know a lot about the US. Maybe it's not all accurate and we lack the "local" vision, maybe a lot is exaggerated or fake news or excessively influenced by pop culture, but our news, politics and culture are permeated by everything they say and do in the US. In a very real sense we know more about you than you do about us. I have read books about the police in the US (one such book: "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces"), but I bet few Americans here have read any of the many exposés about corruption in Argentina's police force or their collaboration with our past dictatorship. Knowledge is not symmetrical :)