Yea, most of the ignorance I've seen personally hasn't been too malicious, although some of it has. But I've seen enough of it to know that way too large of a percentage of it is. The fact is that we are animals, and ignorance creates bias which creates malice. Also the US is a bit different from other countries. Other countries are inherently prone to bias because the population tends to be homogeneous. I know I've had to admonish or correct my parents on a few stereotypes they've engaged in about other people since they grew up in our country in Africa. Not because they wanted to be malicious, but because based on where and who they grew up with they didn't know any better, and they are educated people. The US has a mixed population except in states that are largely rural or poor so I feel like if you choose to segregate yourself here and engage in ignorance that's a reflection on you. But in the US conservative media does purposefully gin up hatred against non-western European cultures, and the media (annoyingly so sometimes children's media as well) promotes certain stereotypes.
It's not just the right-wing media that pulls shit like that. Both sides have their own propagandistic view of events and tell them according to that. Where you see them showing other cultures negatively is with cultures that actively cause harm to US people and US interests, at least from my experience looking at them with a historical point of view, (Muslim and North Korean, currently), and there they just showcase negative events that involves that culture, so it does at least make sense in that manner. Left-wing media does the same thing, too, though you more often see a guilt by association trip from them rather than the right-wing stuff. Still, when they tend to screw up it tends to be really, really bad (remember the "sexbox" bullshit on Fox?), so it makes it seem that they're only a caricature of themselves when that shit's all you hear about, to be fair. Far-axis alternative media (right and left) does the same, though with different targets, but also is way more willing to twist the truth rather than just have their own biases (which is sad enough; I miss objectivity in news media), so I wouldn't trust them, either.
If you had to correct your parents on stereotypes, then they weren't stereotypes but caricatures, no? Because while a stereotype may be overly simplistic, they're not inherently wrong, either; just a generalization based on commonly shared characteristics within a population, like Jewish noses, or Canadians and pronouncing it "aboot" instead of "about", and many other similar things. On the other hand are caricatures, propaganda-created false stereotypes then shown in various media, to engender negative feelings about a group, usually for purposes of war. An example of such would be like the WWII posters featuring people with hyper-exaggerated Japanese features in a overly negative light, as if any Japanese person would act like that, when it was far from the truth.
You say "If you choose to segregate yourself here..." as if they have a choice, my friend. Most people do not, in fact, have a choice, because they're too poor to do so, even if they want to. That's even before you take into account lack of wage increases and rising cost of living that pressure them even further to remain within their local communities. This happens even within cities, where people live their lives within just a few dozen blocks connected by public transit, if they're lucky, or walking distance, if they aren't. It happens most especially with those people that have family they need to take care of and help support, just like they were taken care of and supported by them when their situation was even worse. Even those who leave home to strike out on their own basically do the same thing wherever it is that they end up, just with a looser network of friends rather than a network of family. It's really only the coastal elite in politics and big business that can afford to travel further, the same ones who just call rural states "flyover country" with a sneer, ignoring the economic reasons for it being in such a place in the first place.
Lastly, rural and poor areas may be less demographically diverse, coming in at 22% vs. 36% NWD for cities, but consider what that's saying- that these people are so poor that refugee immigrants are treated better than they are. It's not hard to see why they'd be bitter about that, either.
Anyways, as the conversation has gotten off from discussing Jillgates' game specifically and more towards politics in general, if we want to continue this conversation we should do so in a separate thread, or over PMs.
