4/25/2006: Girl scouts harmless in 1976

[Elspode]

That's the position I usually take. I think life has *always* been scary. We've just gotten more efficient at gathering and reporting the scary parts.

I think children have always been molested, but that we now have more systems in place to discover and report it, and our society has evolved to the point that we are less likely to look the other way. I think that there have always been horrible, senseless crimes, but we now have more free time to hear about them and ponder the horror.

I also think that the news media presents the most provocative, ghastly things it can so that we will watch them, their ratings will rise, and they can charge more for their advertising. It is a handy byproduct for them that they can then point proudly to themselves and profess that they are "revealing the truth". I'm not suggesting that such horrors should not be reported, but I'm pretty damn certain that the incidents themselves, horrible though they are, are being used as a sort of perverse entertainment to help stimulate profits.

[axlrosen]

Originally Posted by Elspode

That's the position I usually take. I think life has *always* been scary. We've just gotten more efficient at gathering and reporting the scary parts.

Or the flip-side way of looking at is, life has always been not so dangerous. Who knows if the odds of getting kidnapped etc. have gone up or down since the "good old days". But the odds of *hearing* about a terrible crime have gone way, way up.

We're evolved to take news as evidence. 1000 years ago, you only heard about events that happened in your village. If you heard about one kidnapping a month, things really were VERY unsafe. But now if you hear about one kidnapping a month, that's one kidnapping in the entire U.S. But yet it still feels like the same evidence of danger, so we don't let our kids play outside, etc.