Thomas Friedman wrote an interesting article on Europe and the Europeans in the NY times recently (free subscription required) which touches on the refexive anti-american sentiment in much of Europe.

Wide sweeping generalizations are generally bad. But, having said that I have to say that the sweeping generlization of that article does seem to me to be reasonably accurate.

The chattering classes in Europe - i.e. the politicians, the media and the "intellectuals" are in fact depressingly reflexively anti-american and hypocritical. The reason for this is IMO a strong desire to not face reality because that would put them out of a job. The average European chatterer seems to hold the mutually contradictory views that a) all governments lie and cheat all the time and b) the government can and should fix everything. The result is that the USA which rejects the nanny state idea of b) is automatically tarred with a) whether or not there is any evidence for it.

GMOs are an excellent example this argument at "work":

A) GMOs are new therefore they are inherently dangerous
B) The scientists who fail to find harm in GMOs are clearly biased
C) Scientists that might find harm in GMOs are muzzled by the government and/or their evil capitalist lackeys
D) The "government" needs to fix this by banning GMOs until we can prove they are bad and then really banning them

Since the US government has not done D they must be doing C - evidence supported by the fact that the work done for B is often US based. Suggestions that the "harm" research parts of B&C could be caused by the fact that A is untrue are of course evidence that the suggestor is himself guilty of C.

the logical fallacies that abound in this sort of argument clearly escape the chatterers, presumably because their grasp of basic logic and statistics is somewhere below their grasp of quantum mechanics

DD