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Americans don't trust each other anymore

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Re: Americans don't trust each other anymore

#71
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust the reports, and I trust the data, but the trend has been pretty obvious, I'd wager, and predictable for some time now. People in the suburbs increasingly migrate to cul-de-sac communities, which isolate them from the rest of the world, to make them feel safer, depriving their children of the much-needed contact with a diverse population that builds trust. Beyond that, the news is more and more pervasive, and…

You seem to suggest those poor, sheltered suburbanites are al wrong. So should I have believed the guy at the bus stop when he told me he would sell a Rolex for $100 or the nice man at the gas station that asked for money for gas in his car with a long story, though he had no car in sight? It's nice and hip to just imply people are not worldly but it may be that their distrust is justified. You said some nice things…

I didn't suggest that they were wrong. I suggested that their environment isn't conducive to fostering trust of 'outsiders'. I don't know if that's good or bad, nor do I know especially if it's better or worse to trust someone who just happens to live near you.

My thought is that a healthy distrust is perhaps the way to go, but that's a judgement on values, and shouldn't be relied upon as advice.

Re: Americans don't trust each other anymore

#72
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a low brow dismissal, appealing to a HN meme doesn't save your position. :) A cul-de-sac is hardly an isolationist community. If anything you could probably go find data these people are more naive or trusting than the norm. Your position is just a rehash of the unquestioned assumptions of "suburbanites" that I think probably have a little but more to do, ironically, with "media conditioning" than even you…

My position doesn't apply to all, or even most suburbanites, nor is it entirely critical. I don't know why you're taking offense to it, especially offense that you haven't bothered to refute. Cul de sacs are insular, and that's considered a selling point of them. I'll grant that they're not quite as extreme as gated communities, but that they exist for the purposes of insulating one from traffic otherwise associated…

They are "insular" in a far less dramatic and hyperbolic sense.

Re: Americans don't trust each other anymore

#73

In my opinion, decades of corporatist conditioning and manufacturing consent are at least partially responsible for this situation. The corporate mass media has induced distrust in Americans with one another in many ways. One of which is all those articles portraying average Americans as extremely litigious and corrupt with bunk stories on hot McDonald's coffee, etc. http://boingboing.net/2013/10/21/the-true-story-ab…

I think it is more subtle than conspiracy theories.

How about you actually try to debunk the facts I present instead of inanely and pompously labeling them a "conspiracy theory"?
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