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People pitching "we're safer now than ever" do so to allay cable news and talk radio induced fears of crime rates and immigration. There's an entirely differen
by L_Rahman 10y ago
People pitching "we're safer now than ever" do so to allay cable news and talk radio induced fears of crime rates and immigration.
There's an entirely different discussion to be had about existential threats to humanity, but
1. the majority of the populace is pre-occupied with fighting the cable news fear battle
2. the existential threats from antibiotic resistance, bioweapons and climate change require people to understand large numbers and dispersed threats. Humans tend to be bad at this on average.
- Bartweiss 10y agoTrue enough. A lot of the most popular fears are either unsupported or provably untrue; most of my friends grew up being warned that (effectively nonexistent) childsnatchers and murderers lurked behind every corner. The cable news fixation on lurid crimes by people who don't look like us is absurd and alarming. I guess I'm reacting more to the neoliberal insistence that things are getting better, and so we should all stay on this trajectory and not raise too many objections. It's a bait-and-switch where you rebut a popular fear ("crime is rising!") and pretend you've proven the broader point that there's nothing serious to fear. This sort of thing: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-guest-edits-wired-essay https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-guest-edits-wi.... We're deeply wired to not appreciate low probability risk, but I think that there's also a popular technocratic-left narrative that actively minimizes those risks. (I also think that a lot of our ostensibly political gains amount to credit-taking for a handful of good outcomes in environmentalism and technology, but that's another matter.)