by Loki » Thu 17 Mar 2011, 17:43:02
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Novus', ' ')You won't see that here in America where there is no culture. It is all about the individual accumulating personal wealth and only bad things happen when you get caught.
What a foolish thing to say. It is an impossibility for a society to have "no culture." Ridiculous knee-jerk self-loathing anti-Americanism. As for the last sentence, I leave my home and truck unlocked, never had an issue---everyone around here leaves their homes and vehicles unlocked. Shoot, even when I lived in the city I had no problems with theft---accidentally left my apartment door wide open all day once, nothing happened.
As for the OP, culture and race are intertwined to such an extent that it's nearly impossible to isolate them. The subculture of certain segments of US society encourage the mindset that results in looting when they get the chance. One of these segments (poor blacks) is well represented in New Orleans, which has a
high general crime rate, particularly murder (7.54 times national average).
Certainly not all of US society is prone to such criminality, however. How much looting was there when there were those big floods in the Midwest a few years back? None.
As for the Japanese, CNN has a decent write up on the lack of looting, though they repeat some of the simple-minded, counterfactual leftist nonsense that Novus did in his post above regarding Americans' alleged hyperindividualism:
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')“Looting simply does not take place in Japan. I’m not even sure if there’s a word for it that is as clear in its implications as when we hear ‘looting,’" said Gregory Pflugfelder, director of the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University.
Japanese have “a sense of being first and foremost responsible to the community,” he said.
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/12/or ... ral-roots/