In fairness, it's probably a psychological defence mechanism put in place to prevent the mention of St*ckport causing emotional damage.

USA-Defaultism is one hell of a drug, very popular due to the opioid epidemic.

You can just ignore that bit and focus on the part that sticks it to those damn Stopfordians!

Well, amongst the English-speaking World the US does have more population than all of the others combined (even including South Africa's 60 million people) so it's kinda undertandable that in an English-language forum sooner or later an American will come and start talking about the stuff within their own life experience.

That said, having lived in Britain for over a decade, I for one loved the joke :)

Honestly, I dont think this is truly stupidity, at least beyond what is typical of everyone else, because intelligence is not the same thing as knowing facts. I dont think being uninformed is really the best word for it either, because if someone tells you something is true that conflicts with what you already think is true, just accepting this isnt really the intelligent thing to do, verifying it would be, and as most people do not have the expertise to verify most things, the best one can usually do is look to those one trusts as a source of information, and if the people that back up this new information are unknown to you but the people you already trust assure you that what you already believe to be true, is true, you dont really have a good reason to abandon that. What I think this is then is that a huge fraction of the population puts their trust in the wrong people, partly due to self perpetuating bad luck (one's parents and family are likely to be the first people one trusts, and thus whoever they trust is likely to seem trustworthy to you as well, and if you are unlucky with what group you are born into and they trust the wrong sources of information, there's therefore a decent likelihood that you will as well), and partly due to the fact that those that wish to intentionally deceive for their own ends are likely to know all kinds of psychological tricks to make themselves seem more trustworthy, and probably will be more willing to use them to manipulate public opinion to their own ends than an expert that just wants to share what they know.

or for a TLDR: I dont think counterproductive political opinions like this are a result of mass-stupidity, I think they're proof that propaganda works, and that under the right set of circumstances, you or I or anyone could be made to fall for them.