What I'm personally annoyed about is the "but what about..." conversations. To me these are quite annoying and derail the conversation. There are proper ways to bring up comparisons. For example "I wonder if other countries have similarly low passport rates?" There's also the aspect that a lot of conversations end up being particularly Americentric. But let's remember that America doesn't have to be brought into every conversation. It isn't helpful. In particular here it just seemed like you wanted to shit on America. There's plenty of reasons to do so, but this was just out of the blue. It is common, but that doesn't mean it is acceptable behavior.