A third of Americans don't trust the gov't report on the "North Dakota Crash." What say you?

Poll - Total Votes: 26

They are correct to distrust the government

The government has no reason to lie about it

There is no "North Dakota Crash" that I'm aware of

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You can only vote on one answer.

This is about a 2016 survey conducted by Chapman University:

In Chapman University's latest Survey on American Fears, pollsters asked about 10 alleged cover-ups. In the most striking result, 25 percent of the respondents agreed—and another 7.5 percent strongly agreed—that the "government is concealing what they [sic] know about the North Dakota Crash."

What's striking about that? Just that the pollsters had never actually heard any conspiracy theories about a "North Dakota Crash"; they threw that in to see how people would respond to a vaguely ominous-sounding episode that they invented.

That's right, there is no "North Dakota Crash" nor government report about it. But the knee-jerk response of 1/3 of Americans is that the government isn't being forthcoming. What does that say about us??

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robb65 · 56-60, M

Once upon a time I worked with a guy named Tracy. You know the joke about how you know when a lawyer is lying? That was Tracy. Not that he was a lawyer, although I can't rule out the possibility that he may have claimed to be at some point in his life.
Tracy was the kind of person that if he walked in and claimed it was raining, and I heard water hitting the roof, and I saw it dripping off the edge of the roof I'd still want to be sure one of his buddies weren't up on the roof taking a piss before I agreed it was raining. There was no question about whether or not Tracy would lie, the question was what was he going to lie about on that particular day and why.

Has the American government lied? Have they been involved in coverups? Assassinations, or at the least attempted assassinations? Intentionally released misleading information? Diversions? Am I supposed to believe those things didn't happen just because some percentage of the American people are slow enough to fall for a trick question?

ElwoodBlues · M

@robb65 Good story! For me, the key question is how often does the government lie? Are 1% of gov't statements knowingly false? 2%? Do different branches lie more? Does CDC have a history of telling more lies than, say, the FBI?

Our government is a veritable firehose of statistics, financial, health, educational, agricultural, etc. When is it valid to assume a gov't stat is a lie? do we need an alternate source of stats?

Because, if you're going to assume, based on a 1% lie rate, that everything the gov't rells you is false, I'd say that's a lousy assumption, wrong 99% of the time. And It gets really tricky when we only assume the government is lying about inconvenient things. Then we can easily get into the realm of self deception.

robb65 · 56-60, M

@ElwoodBlues Just to be clear about something, the CDC isn't a government agency.

ElwoodBlues · M

@robb65 They seem to have a different view.

Because CDC is a federal agency, all scientific findings resulting from CDC research are available to the public and open to the broader scientific community for review.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/about/business/cdcfoun.htm (last paragraph)

robb65 · 56-60, M

@ElwoodBlues Looks like I misspoke. There's a "CDC Foundation" that is a separate entity from the CDC and someone confused the two.

Digging a little deeper I can see how that confusion came about since the "CDC Foundation" was created by Congress and has ties to the CDC.