4 ms·

Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this. Also, most states defund mental health institutions. Finally, the 24/7 news

by didip 4y ago

Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this. Also, most states defund mental health institutions. Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more. Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever?

vkou 4y ago
The 24/7 news cycle is problematic, not because of copycats, but because of paranoia about traumatic, but very low-frequency events. If we had the kind of gruesome, 24/7 news coverage that is usually reserved for crimes, but for car crashes (lethal and otherwise), instead, maybe that would shift the needle some.
Barrin92 4y ago
Sort of? I've been at an Israeli wedding once and we literally had to shelter for fifteen minutes because some Gaza rocket was flying over the venue, people just shrugged it off. There's people in the thread here saying American roads in suburbs are too unsafe, I don't think these folks have seen traffic in Jakarta, and yet kids still walk to school there. Most people on earth would kill for American suburb levels of safety. America's paranoia is grounded in something else. The country has had bouts of hysteria over anything for many decades now.
- lmz 4y ago
  > I don't think these folks have seen traffic in Jakarta, and yet kids still walk to school there. You can't compare the two. Traffic in Jakarta is often barely moving while the suburbs have the opposite problem.
  - oaiey 4y ago
    Maybe. But we all agree that American suburbs are peaceful, heaven-like places compared to many places in the world. In Australia it is poisoness animals, in many countries it is the availability of drugs, in some crime, kidnapping and rapist. And God forbid you live in a war zone. Most parents would love their kids growing up in a safe place like in the US, the EU or Japan. But they are not and are faster independent and aware of their environment. And that is okay. Was like that for thousands of years.
    - fwlr 4y ago
      Minor quibble: Australians generally aren’t afraid of our poisonous animals, and it generally doesn’t factor into whether we let our kids play outside.
      - oaiey 4y ago
        Absolutely. I fully expect Australian kids tell their parents at diner how they made a Instagram story of them and the poisonous snake ;)
sakopov 4y ago
US is in immense mental illness epidemic crisis. That's it. Everything else is a side effect stemming from this.
Alupis 4y ago
> Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this This can't possibly be the cause. The US has been filled to the brim with cars for decades - yet this is a modern phenomenon. Similarly, bad guy have had loads of guns in the US since even before the US was a thing... yet again, this is a modern phenomenon. > Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more. I'm in complete agreement here. The media goes wall-to-wall with every mass shooter every time, turning them into some sort of sick idol for all the other mentally unstable wannabe's. Sometimes the media even reads these people's manifestos on air... it's just insane behavior. > Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever? Paranoid, but also mentally diseased. We've constructed a society where it's totally acceptable to be mentally ill and entirely on your own. Today, even small cities have homeless camps filled to the brim with mentally ill that desperately need help - yet our policies give them free needles to enable them to continue doing drugs and ruin their lives. It's horror disguised as compassion - compassion that ends up killing people.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  I don't think any of this is new, it's a continuation of a trend. I'm intending to have children soon (admittedly later than normal), and it was only in my parent's day that the interstate highway system came into being. The world has changed quite a bit in not the last few generations. We're in the process of developing new social norms to deal with these changes, so we've got overreactions and underreactions.
- cafard 4y ago
  > The US has been filled to the brim with cars for decades In the 1970s, I lived in one of the western suburbs of Denver, about a mile from I-70. At night when things were quiet, I could hear individual cars. In the 1990s when I was back for visits, I-70 had the steady hum of continual traffic. There are definitely more cars per household than there were fifty and sixty years ago.
- danaris 4y ago
  > The US has been filled to the brim with cars for decades - yet this is a modern phenomenon. I think you may underestimate the degree to which US infrastructure has failed to keep up with increasing use of cars. The interstate highway system was built in the post-WWII years. It was designed to cope with the amount of traffic that existed then, plus a reasonable buffer for growth. It actually did a pretty good job of keeping up for at least a few decades. Anecdotally, growing up in NYS in the '80s and '90s, I-90 (aka the NYS Thruway) was a perfectly reasonable road to drive along. As the 2000s came, it was already starting to get crowded. These days, I always have to weigh the extra speed and directness of the Thruway against the stress of driving among so many cars—and, especially, so many tractor trailers, including many double-length trailers. Other roads may not get quite the same concentration of additional traffic as interstates, but as car ownership in general has trended up, more and more places have filled up with them. As for guns...yes, lots of people have had lots of guns for centuries. But in 1999, the Columbine shooting showed that disaffected young people could get massive media attention if they shot up a school and then killed themselves. It has been fairly well proven by now that the media attention given to these events is a significant driver of more such. You even comment on this, but don't appear connect it to the rise of mass shootings in the modern era. —— There's also a second phenomenon at work here. There's been a very strong streak of sensationalism in the media about children in danger that, from what I've seen, mostly started in the early '90s. There was a prominent disappearance in the Upstate NY area around that time (the Sarah Ann Wood case) that stayed in headlines for years; the JonBenét Ramsey case was also in the mid-'90s, and much more nationally sensationalized. In general, there was an increase in pushing the "stranger danger" idea during that time, and...guess who are the parents now? The people who were young and impressionable growing up during that era.
cypress66 4y ago
> Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this. The US has been car centric and gun centric for more than 70 years. Unsupervised kids bring frowned upon is a much more recent development.
nullc 4y ago
> Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more. Yet that is entirely refuted by crime stats. What the 24/7 news cycle does is runs out of real news 30 minutes into the 24 hour cycle and then fills the public head with deceptive and disproportional hysteria. The kind of stuff that makes them say that Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture are something remotely new. :)
herbst 4y ago
Swiss here. We also have a lot of guns and cars. Yet we have swarms of children going alone to school and playing alone in nature.

by didip 4y ago

vkou 4y ago

The 24/7 news cycle is problematic, not because of copycats, but because of paranoia about traumatic, but very low-frequency events. If we had the kind of gruesome, 24/7 news coverage that is usually reserved for crimes, but for car crashes (lethal and otherwise), instead, maybe that would shift the needle some.

Barrin92 4y ago

Sort of? I've been at an Israeli wedding once and we literally had to shelter for fifteen minutes because some Gaza rocket was flying over the venue, people just shrugged it off. There's people in the thread here saying American roads in suburbs are too unsafe, I don't think these folks have seen traffic in Jakarta, and yet kids still walk to school there. Most people on earth would kill for American suburb levels of safety. America's paranoia is grounded in something else. The country has had bouts of hysteria over anything for many decades now.

lmz 4y ago
> I don't think these folks have seen traffic in Jakarta, and yet kids still walk to school there. You can't compare the two. Traffic in Jakarta is often barely moving while the suburbs have the opposite problem.
- oaiey 4y ago
  Maybe. But we all agree that American suburbs are peaceful, heaven-like places compared to many places in the world. In Australia it is poisoness animals, in many countries it is the availability of drugs, in some crime, kidnapping and rapist. And God forbid you live in a war zone. Most parents would love their kids growing up in a safe place like in the US, the EU or Japan. But they are not and are faster independent and aware of their environment. And that is okay. Was like that for thousands of years.
  - fwlr 4y ago
    Minor quibble: Australians generally aren’t afraid of our poisonous animals, and it generally doesn’t factor into whether we let our kids play outside.
    - oaiey 4y ago
      Absolutely. I fully expect Australian kids tell their parents at diner how they made a Instagram story of them and the poisonous snake ;)

sakopov 4y ago

US is in immense mental illness epidemic crisis. That's it. Everything else is a side effect stemming from this.

Alupis 4y ago

> Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this This can't possibly be the cause. The US has been filled to the brim with cars for decades - yet this is a modern phenomenon. Similarly, bad guy have had loads of guns in the US since even before the US was a thing... yet again, this is a modern phenomenon. > Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more. I'm in complete agreement here. The media goes wall-to-wall with every mass shooter every time, turning them into some sort of sick idol for all the other mentally unstable wannabe's. Sometimes the media even reads these people's manifestos on air... it's just insane behavior. > Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever? Paranoid, but also mentally diseased. We've constructed a society where it's totally acceptable to be mentally ill and entirely on your own. Today, even small cities have homeless camps filled to the brim with mentally ill that desperately need help - yet our policies give them free needles to enable them to continue doing drugs and ruin their lives. It's horror disguised as compassion - compassion that ends up killing people.

jrumbut 4y ago
I don't think any of this is new, it's a continuation of a trend. I'm intending to have children soon (admittedly later than normal), and it was only in my parent's day that the interstate highway system came into being. The world has changed quite a bit in not the last few generations. We're in the process of developing new social norms to deal with these changes, so we've got overreactions and underreactions.
cafard 4y ago
> The US has been filled to the brim with cars for decades In the 1970s, I lived in one of the western suburbs of Denver, about a mile from I-70. At night when things were quiet, I could hear individual cars. In the 1990s when I was back for visits, I-70 had the steady hum of continual traffic. There are definitely more cars per household than there were fifty and sixty years ago.
danaris 4y ago
> The US has been filled to the brim with cars for decades - yet this is a modern phenomenon. I think you may underestimate the degree to which US infrastructure has failed to keep up with increasing use of cars. The interstate highway system was built in the post-WWII years. It was designed to cope with the amount of traffic that existed then, plus a reasonable buffer for growth. It actually did a pretty good job of keeping up for at least a few decades. Anecdotally, growing up in NYS in the '80s and '90s, I-90 (aka the NYS Thruway) was a perfectly reasonable road to drive along. As the 2000s came, it was already starting to get crowded. These days, I always have to weigh the extra speed and directness of the Thruway against the stress of driving among so many cars—and, especially, so many tractor trailers, including many double-length trailers. Other roads may not get quite the same concentration of additional traffic as interstates, but as car ownership in general has trended up, more and more places have filled up with them. As for guns...yes, lots of people have had lots of guns for centuries. But in 1999, the Columbine shooting showed that disaffected young people could get massive media attention if they shot up a school and then killed themselves. It has been fairly well proven by now that the media attention given to these events is a significant driver of more such. You even comment on this, but don't appear connect it to the rise of mass shootings in the modern era. —— There's also a second phenomenon at work here. There's been a very strong streak of sensationalism in the media about children in danger that, from what I've seen, mostly started in the early '90s. There was a prominent disappearance in the Upstate NY area around that time (the Sarah Ann Wood case) that stayed in headlines for years; the JonBenét Ramsey case was also in the mid-'90s, and much more nationally sensationalized. In general, there was an increase in pushing the "stranger danger" idea during that time, and...guess who are the parents now? The people who were young and impressionable growing up during that era.

cypress66 4y ago

> Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this. The US has been car centric and gun centric for more than 70 years. Unsupervised kids bring frowned upon is a much more recent development.

nullc 4y ago

> Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more. Yet that is entirely refuted by crime stats. What the 24/7 news cycle does is runs out of real news 30 minutes into the 24 hour cycle and then fills the public head with deceptive and disproportional hysteria. The kind of stuff that makes them say that Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture are something remotely new. :)

herbst 4y ago

Swiss here. We also have a lot of guns and cars. Yet we have swarms of children going alone to school and playing alone in nature.