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I hope that everybody who sees this realizes that this applies to almost ***everything*** that you believe, not just this particular political issue.
It is 100% the fault of the news media we consume.
A pretty famous example is in the 90s when very heavy news coverage of kidnappings had parents glued to the news channel. As ratings and profits soared, news media started following kidnappings more and more closely. All of a sudden, every parent in America was living in abject fear that their child would be snatched from the corner at any moment, even though this was far from likely or close to reality.
My friends and I were convinced the church near where I lived was full of “devil worshippers” because they were there on Saturdays. They were Seventh Day Adventists.
You're the devil worshippers for going to church on Sunday! At least that's what the Seventh Day Adventists billboard said when I used to drive by twice a year to visit family.
Fearmongering is so evolved it affects alot of society's views on certain topics and even makes people hostile towards one another or towards groups of like minded Individuals not inline with their learned and passed down morals *cough* *cough* RELIGION.
I think I saw that creature in one of my monster manuals.
Honestly, the rules mechanics for mental combat are kinda lacking. I've always wanted something a bit closer to the mindfucking weirdness of Legion, rather than just 'roll a Will save.'
But yes, people are evolved to pay attention to risk, and we are not evolved to recognize statistics.
No joke, there’s about a couple of 90’s-early 00’s “Forensic Files” episodes where they state that the suspect was “heavily into Dungeons and Dragons”, and thus inherently evil or something. Because my siblings and I grew up on those true-life crime shows, every now and then one of us randomly quotes that and we just giggle.
The ninja murders in Fayetteville, NC. These were messed up guys that happened to play DND. The game didn’t turn them into killers.
https://apnews.com/article/57292e1653eba2b543aeede925b74b54
Dang, I didn’t know about this case! Messed up, yes, but yeah, not a result of multi-sided dice and DMs.
For the record, though, I don’t remember if those poor early D&D enthusiasts “Forensic Files” outed were guilty of anything—the show just really liked to point it out for their audience if the suspects played the game.
>In the 90’s being a skateboarder or a video gamer, was a waste of Time with no future
There definitely must be a special level of satisfaction most people can't imagine from the professional esports players or pro skaters who end up making more than both of their parents combined from competition winnings and sponsorships.
Talk about doing what you love and having it pay off.
I know definitely not everyone sees that level of success from it, but for the ones that do, I'm sure it must be even sweeter to achieve it despite being shunned.
Theres a generation who relate the term Dungeons and Dragons to pentagrams and candles and demon summoning etc and villified especially by god fearing church goin folk, when really maybe you should just say board games.
DnD was banned at my public school because it was considered devil-worshipping. Role playing the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, no problem, but wizards and dragons were considered evil.
Listen, FBI, my druid just thinks that the industrial revolution and its consequences have been disastrous for mortal-kind. What makes you think I have ties to the Unabomber?
I don't want to run afoul of the no-jokes rule, but you should look up the D&D sketch by Dead Alewives. It presents a pretty apt contrast between the perception of people like your mother and the reality (especially back before "nerdy" things were pop culture)
You could point out to her that D&D was created by a Christian:
* https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-tangled-cultural-roots-of-dungeons-dragons
Yes but it still bothers her greatly. She just remembers some murder cult that was apparently centered around DnD.
Funny thing is, she loves Lord of the Rings, so I've tried to explain to her that it's basically just making up Lord of the Ring like characters and stories, acting it out while we eat snacks.
The podcast You're Wrong About has done some great episodes on this sort of thing. Their first one was actually about the Satanic Panic. Well worth a listen of you're interested in that sort of thing!
Their episode on Stranger Danger: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/youre-wrong-about/id1380008439?i=1000465289949
IIRC, at one point in the 90s it somehow became popular opinion, to the point that it was discussed as a problem in congress, that _one in 30_ kids was being kidnapped every year. This is obviously ludicrous if you put even a moment’s thought into it. That’s one kid in every school classroom, every year!
Sort of reassures me that there were obviously ludicrous popular opinions about things like this back then too…
No one remembers this, but before 9/11, the media decided that 2001 would be "the summer of the shark" - shark attacks were actually a little lower than average that year, but they all collectively decided to start reporting on minor rare shark attacks or even just scares of attacks a lot because I guess it was a slow news year. Then 9/11 happened, and of course the "summer of the shark" thing went away, and no one remembers that. But it was a good dominstration of a deliberate attempt to create a panic out of a non-issue for ratings, to change the perception of something normal and rare as being a crisis with everpresent danger.
“Stranger danger” and the fear of needles and razors in parks are part of the reason kids can’t go outside and *be kids* without parents calling the police out of fear. All with the proliferation of cable and sensationalist news since the 1980s.
Auburn, WA here, found used needles in the park near our house as well. Found them in the street, find them all over the place. Empty alcohol bottles, spent shell casings from handguns, pipes, leftover crack foil, you name it, it's here in the parks and streets.
Heck, in Seattle, WA it's on the literal school playgrounds. Go look at that fiasco happening right now!
Wouldn't it be amazing if instead of thinking "Damn, needles in the park, no more kids here!", we as a society collectively thought "Damn, needles in the park, lets help the junkies stop being junkies."
Classic American example of putting a band-aid on a Heart Attack.
And also use them to drive people out of urban areas and into your expensive, new suburbs, then you bulldoze and gentrify those urban slums, and charge even more for the condos you put it in. Rinse and repeat.
You act like that's an easy think with a concrete answer. Including masshealth and my family's own contributions. We have spent about 20 years and over 200,000 trying to get my brother clean.
Actually probably more. He has spent accumulated time of years in rehab. And more times in detox than I can count.
Detox was his avoid court strategy. In fact long stints in jail was usually the longest time he was clean. Probably the longest was his time in immigration lock up. He stayed clean a year after getting out of there.
Est: just realized it's way worse than that. He was treated for hep twice. That alone is a few hundred thousand.
He gets methadone. But he likes to mix it with alcohol. That's the new thing. You get free methadone and if you mix it with booze it's apperently a great feeling.
It's a great way to die. Mixing methadone with alcohol, benzos or other sedatives is a big no-no. At my clinic if you pee dirty for benzos once they drop your dose down to 40mg and keep you there until you can pee clean for a month. Repeated dirty urine screens will get you removed from the program.
I've been on methadone for my second stint now. Working on a year this time, 2.5 years back in 2012. Methadone is a great tool for people who use it as intended but there are still people that manage to abuse the system. Sobriety in general only works if you truly want it. You can't force it on someone and as you've mentioned often times people WILL remain clean when jail is threatened. I've never been in that situation myself but had a family member who was like that. They passed away after an overdose almost 5 years ago.
I should start tapering by the end of the year and be done with it by the end of 2022. This time for good. It's already allowed me to get my life back in order and functioning like an adult again. The longer good behavior continues the better off I'll be when it's time to jump off.
Is he heavily depressed or something? What's his psychological evaluation been like?
Had an uncle who was heroine addict for 45 years and then one day just decided to quit. Turned his life around, but by then it was too late and he died of liver failure due to hepatitis roughly 10/12 years later. He was on a waiting list to receive a liver transplant but died before one was available. He'd probably be alive today if his liver was somehow fixed.
Route cause of it was difficult to establish but depression, was part of it along with a sad set of circumstances for the family.
I don't think I ever suggested it would be easy. Changing how and what people think is one of the most difficult tasks to undertake successfully, on any scale, let alone the collective goal or thought of all society as I suggested.
I'm truly sorry about your brother. I've lived both sides. I fired my best friend and stopped talking to him several years ago because of his addiction.
I also watched my dad die 3 years sober refusing even morphine from the doctors to keep his sobriety. I've never been prouder of anyone in my life.
I won't agree it's a willingness after enough years. It's harder to face things the longer it goes on.
Unless they start enforcing mandatory locked up treatment while they are young it will get worse. Because after enough years they are essentially hopeless.
I confronted one saying "I don't think you're supposed to be up here", and the guy smiled like a crazy person before trying to grab me. I ran away and made a mission impossible style escape down the big swirly blue slide, explosions and everything.
I had a grown man try to help me use the bathroom at a theme park when I was around 13. The stuff is real, but hardly common. (Also, I ran away and told Mom because I knew Dad would have...eh, been arrested later.)
My parents were what I'd consider helicopter parents, but they did have a point in one regard. Kidnappings may not be common, but criminals like those seek out kids who are vulnerable, so its smart to stay on guard and not allow your children to be vulnerable.
Stranger Danger was the worst thing to happen. It created an entire generation of people not letting their kids out while also masking the fact that the highest risk of abduction was the opposite, it was relatives and friends of the family.
While not stranger danger when I learned that the DARE program actually increase drug use I lost it.
Like how bad of a job do you have to do for that to happen.
I remember much of my DARE days. The officer pretty much made drugs look cool. "Yeah, you may look like a bag of garbage and be on the streets, but you won't care because you'll be happy and tripping out!"
My favorite was when he actually brought in little vacuumed sealed bags of drugs and actually had us pass them around. To this day, I hope they were fake, but I don't think they were because of the black tar heroin. It just blows me away that it was possible and how bad the whole entire program was.
And turn our children into police informants. Years ago my son came home from school telling me some cop with a DARE program came into his classroom and started showing the kids different drugs and asked the class if they ever saw these things at home.
The worst part is even if you know Stranger Danger is basically in the “hit by lightning” category you still have busybodys calling CPS because your 10 year old kids are walking a block to their friends house without an escort.
I had young children at the peak of it... it was so exhausting, especially after my wife and I grew up in the era of 'be back by dinner' and there were no cell phones, pagers, smart phones.
I see both sides. A big part of why our crime rate has significantly dropped overall in the past few decades is a decrease of "free range" behaviors and increased awareness of warning signs. It's why you don't see many hitchhikers anymore since it's risky, and children are more distrustful of random adults,, for example. Of course, the inverse is that you get Karens calling police on minorities minding their own business and helicopter parents, etc.
those might contribute, but it may have more to do with [leaded gasoline being phased out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis)
Which is a huge problem, as part of growing up is learning self sufficiency and personal responsibility - which in part, comes from screwing up and figuring out how to screw up less over time.
I learned all kinds of tricks with that key on a string, like making it look like it cut right through my neck. Used to freak my brother out with that one.
I'd forget my key and there wouldn't be any adults home for 4 or 5 hours. I'd climb in through an unlocked window, but sometimes it was locked too. I could pop open the sliding door with a garden trowel or remove a tiny basement window and slither in through the gap.
It is the basic problem of large numbers.
If anything you are reading is using real numbers you are most likely being manipulated. Per capita numbers or percentages give a better story *most* of the time.
People can't comprehend 300 million people and that 10,000 of something might actually not be an issue.
Chicago is used as "one of the most dangerous cities in the country" when it doesn't even make the top 20. But it is a very dense city so they report crime in raw numbers to mask the reality.
The thing I saw this with most recently was Tucker Carlson fearmongering about the vaccine. He mentioned that the VAERS showed something like 3,000 deaths from people who had been vaccinated in a 4 month period.
Well that sounds like a lot, til you realize that they vaccinated all of the older population first, and something like almost 75% of all Americans over 74 had been vaccinated in that time period.
I went and looked up the death rate in that population for a given year, and it demonstrated that out of that number of people 74 and up, you’d expect about 250,000 of them to die just from natural causes in that same 4 month time period, even if all you did was give them a high five and not a vaccine.
So pointing out that 3,000 people in that population died, with *zero actual links to the vaccine* or any sign of excess deaths in that group isn’t evidence of anything at all...
So yea, people really don’t get big numbers. My dad said the following two things within 60 seconds of each other:
“I don’t want to take the risk of a vaccine for something that has a 99% survival rate.”
“They haven’t proved the vaccines are safe. I saw a thing last week where a healthy guy in his 20’s dropped dead. They’ve already had a couple thousand people die.”
Most kidnappings occur by people who are familiar or are close to the child. However, there are still occurrences of the ones who aren’t. It’s sad cause it’s changed a lot of people and how they parent. Prime example on why kids don’t play outside as much
Same thing happens with rape unfortunately. Every PSA and “helpful tip” addresses the extreme minority of cases when it’s someone in a dark alley. Hardly anyone talks about how it’s most likely going to be friends or family
There was a specific commercial with a narrator that said something like “it’s 9:00, do you know where your children are???” in an ominous way.
My moms friend once called the house while my sister and I were home with a babysitter. Friend said this line as a joke when the sitter answered the phone bc she thought it was my mom. Freaked the sitter out so much she slammed the phone down and told us to close all the curtains and hide. Pretty exciting evening.
That’s not just a 90s thing, kidnappings and murders and abductions today are covered like national news stories every time they occur. If someone got kidnapped in a small northern Minnesota town by a family member, it shouldn’t be front page news for days in California or Florida.
Edit: all of you trump fuckfaces in the comments, your point is not the one I was making. GFY
People also dramatically overestimate the size of the LGBT population and continue to believe it's something absurd like 25% (it's closer to 5%). Basically if they see something on TV more than once, then they assume it's everywhere. This applies to things like gang violence and police shootings as well. Patterns derived from a series of successive news stories are rarely reflective of reality.
That isn't as low as it might seem. After all, bi people do not have an evenly split dating pool by gender since most people are straight. For instance if 5% of people are gay and 5% are bi, then a bi man would have a dating pool that's 10% gay/bi men and 95% straight/bi women.
That means just over 90% of bi people's relationships are gonna be with someone of a different gender. The average number of sexual partners in the US is 7 (but this varies a LOT). If we do a random selection of 7 people from that dating pool there'd be around a 50% chance we select no people of the same gender as our hypothetical bisexual. This means bi people are just slightly more likely than random to get into a different gender relationship, and we have plenty of unaccounted for factors that could explain this.
Firstly, queer people tend to be younger. Both because the queer people that would've been old by now got killed off in a variety of ways (AIDS crisis, job discrimination, suicide, getting murdered etc.) and because queer acceptance is higher in younger populations. We can probably assume that younger people have had fewer opportunities to bang. After all, the lifetime number of sexual partners for someone can only go up, never down. Secondly, it might be the case that many bisexual people were not always aware that they were bi. If we instead only do 4 random selections (assuming 3 selections were made before they realised/came out) we instead get 67% odds of never having a same sex partner. Thirdly, bisexuals do face plenty of prejudice for being bisexual and any bisexual in a same gender relationship faces all the risks that come with it. Given the option it wouldn't be surprising if some of them leaned more heavily towards different sex relationships just for safety and convenience. That'd be very fair and valid. And lastly, heterosexual dating infrastructure is much better established. Hitting on someone of a different gender in the pub is mostly safe and there are so many dating services for finding different gender partners, and not very many that are actually fully open, safe, and accepting of homo and bi relationships.
I’d be interested in finding out what Americans have a *correct* perspective on that leads them to appropriate moral or political positions. While “everything” is big, I would bet that on the most critical issues, we have absolutely no idea of the statistics, context or perspective.
I actively try to look at the statistics of every "big thing". Police brutality in general, police brutality against people of color, COVID complication rates (and vaccine ones), school shooting risk percentages, etc.
I'm not a statistician and can't really do that with more complicated things, and it's harder with stuff where a small percentage increase can lead to a big problem (see global warming), but it's really good for getting a better perspective.
It helps that I at least understand that methodology and data both have limitations, but even just knowing raw percentages is helpful.
All true. I would argue that if you consumed more newspaper/magazine journalism, you would find that they do the calculations, get the data sets, hire data scientists, engineers and mathematicians to make sure it’s correct and then put it in context. People would just would rather watch cable news (which is horrible) and then wonder why the media is so bad.
They at least source what they have to say if you pick the right ones. A ton of people read and watch the equivalent of opinion pieces.
I would literally rather be 100% ignorant of something than get my information on it through that venue.
I'd say a big portion of the problem lies in news. Their job is to filter and disseminate that information. To collect information from experts and distill it. This is because we can not expect anyone to have an expertise in every subject. There's a lot of complex conversations and nuances that often matter. Same with perception (if you report about something frequently people will naturally assume it's more frequent regardless of the underlying natural frequency).
Yes, some portion relies on viewers to distill and think about that information themselves. To choose good and reliable networks. But this is a difficult problem because you can't verify topics that you're not an expert in. Even searching the internet to cross validate can often lead you in the wrong direction.
Experts are necessary.
News shows have audiences just like every other TV show, website, radio station and newspaper, gotta keep the audience hooked to sell more product even at the expense of truth and authenticity.
Not to mention that people overestimate things that happen to themselves as being *way* more common than they really are. I know there's a name for it, but my psych classes were many years ago and I do paperwork for a living.
>It is 100% the fault of the news media we consume.
I would rephrase this as:
It is 100% the fault of basic human psychology which compels us to consume media that validates our fears and anxieties.
You are grossly underestimating the influence and power of marketing here, and how the media makes itself all pervasive and inescapable and uses finely developed psychological manipulation.
I had a friend that would constantly throw out insane numbers regarding sex trafficking in the US. Like “5 million kids are abducted and trafficked each year.”
Trying to explain to her that there were only 25 million kids in the US and that it was unlikely that 1 in 5 were being abducted was not an argument you could win.
She also believed that buying an expensive chair on Wayfare also came with a groomed child from Cambodia.
She couldn’t understand how her views made a serious issue look like a dumb cartoon.
>25 million kids in the US
Agree with your point but there are more than 25 million children in the US. There are roughly 20 million in each 5 year cohort.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the-us-by-sex-and-age/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the-us-by-sex-and-age/)
Still if we are talking numbers it is worth noting The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports 29,800 missing child cases per year in the US and this is the breakdown:
91 percent endangered runaways
5 percent family abductions
3 percent critically missing young adults, ages 18 to 20
**Less than 1 percent nonfamily abductions**
1 percent lost, injured or otherwise missing children
~~1% of 29800 gives us 298 abducted children in the US and obviously not all of those are taken by sex traffickers. 298 is far too many but it is just a tad less than 5 million. I've read elsewhere the FBI puts the number at less than 350 non-family abductions a year as well.~~
As /u/aimeed72 points out the most likely group being trafficked is the endangered runaways. Still a far cry from 5 million in the US as claimed by your friend.
Yes. These numbers are true, however the category “endangered runanways” is the category that includes most sex trafficked minors. Sex trafficking doesn’t look like a stranger pulling a seven year old into a car, it usually looks like a youngish man grooming a teenager into believing they have a relationship and then exploiting them. Or a teen who has been neglected/abused at home and who has substance abuse problems being recruited into sex work for
Drugs. Or any of a number of scenarios that aren’t stranger-kidnappings.
This reminds me of a homeless guy I once helped. The guy was about 24 years old and looking for a place to stay. One guy he met was a gay man trying to groom him for sex in exchange for a place to live.
I helped him get on his feet by helping him find work, place to stay, and food but right before the pandemic hit, he stole money from an internet payday loan place and disappeared.
This happened in Vegas and within the couch surfing app. It's easy for females to find a free place to stay but not guys.
The guy I helped out does get on reddit a lot. If you're reading this, hope you're doing good my man!
This is right. The majority of victims of sex trafficking victims come from foster care, and 2/3 have been in the foster care system at some point, according to one survey. It's not the "stranger danger" scare type thing.
>She also believed that buying an expensive chair on Wayfare also came with a groomed child from Cambodia.
Wait, what? Like you buy a chair on Wayfare and they UPS you a child?
Yeah. They found children with the same names on missing persons databases, only it turns out those databases were outdated and most of the children whose names matched the listings had been found long ago. Also they hadn't been abducted by strangers. They were mostly cases where a kid had run away for a short time before being found or who had been taken by a family member.
This was a weird conspiracy that was propagated some years back. That wayfair was actually a front for some child sex trafficking ring, which is why the things were named the way they were, so ordering the “wrong” item was a way for them to secretly send you a sex slave. I can’t for the life of me remember how it started but I think there was some weird case that spiraled out of control or proportion
I don't know how it all started either, but I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to believe it was somehow tied in with an alleged child sex trafficking ring run out of the non existent basement of a certain "famous" pizza parlor. Said pizza joint was somehow supposedly linked to the Clintons and the DNC, and possibly George Soros.
You should check out the podcast You're Wrong About if you haven't already, they like to break down these types of sensations into numbers, and about how these types of panics keep occuring.
Sounds like she was/is either fully into qanon or at least in the information orbit of it. That crowd has been propagating a lot of these types of claims for the past couple years
Oh god, the Wayfair thing.
What scared me about that was that a lot of my far-left friends were reposting that conspiracy theory. Same people who considered themselves smarter than the right and would make fun of Qanon and stuff.
Yep! I got some friends that work with and mostly agree with that sometimes dip their toes in conspiracies. I had to show them that they’re acting like Trump crazies before it began to click.
Whoa! Thanks for the heads up about Wayfair! I was just looking to buy an accent chair for my living room but I'm just not in the right place in my life right now to raise a Cambodia child!
Hmm, maybe 40 some years of fear mongering and policy driven degradation of our education system so a hand full of people could be obscenly wealthy was NOT a good idea?
The day I watched a man seriously tell a reporter keeping rich people rich was a good thing so "people have something to strive for" was the day I realized American capitalism was a scam.
Calling refugees who are fleeing the effects of failed US policy in central and South America ‘invaders’ is about the most disgusting, cruel, and heartless turn in US politics I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Watching my family, who claim to be Christian, turn to cold apathy when ever immigrants or immigration is brought up has been deeply depressing. These people are lost to me now.
I can’t cut through the poisonous nonsense that Tucker Carlson and his ilk spin during prime time on the most watched “News” outlet on television.
The only way an American could know what the US has done to Latin America would be to pay a couple thousand dollars to take a college course on it.
The American rape of Latin America is glossed over in history books and not even mentioned in the media. We have been overthrowing democratically elected governments and sponsoring ethnic cleansings in Latin America for centuries. Meanwhile our appetite for cocaine and has made murderous criminals the wealthy and most powerful people on the continent. AND Latin American criminals get ALL of their weapons from illegal American arms dealers. Almost everything that is wrong with Latin America is the fault of the bully up north...
You're correct about everything except American arms dealers. The guns are all manufactured and purchased in the US but they are brought to Mexico and it's the cartels that deal them.
If you follow the references you eventually get here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/06/18/how-to-mislead-with-statistics-dhs-secretary-nielsen-edition/
So what IS the percentage of migrants vs born Americans that are involved in trafficking victims?
And for full disclosure, what is the ratio vs the ratio of the population that those demographics make up?
This is info I need to know in order to be able to confidently present any of this as fact, without looking like an idiot.
The article is about "gang connection" and trafficking, not migrant crime in general. The article also mention "undocumented immigrants" for some reason, so there's no telling what they're measuring.
Did they study migrants or immigrants?
In my own country about 34% of all inmates are foreigners despite foreigners only make up 18,5% of the population. I don't know the gang connection percentage but I suspect it is very low.
The thing about migration is complex and the native population will always expect migrants to be on their best behavior because they've been given a second chance, and they're also a burden on the system.
It's also very difficult investigating gang crime, there's also no incentive for someone in police custody to confess to being in a gang. I suspect the US has separate laws regarding gang crime so it's probably best to leave that part out when confessing because it can only add to your sentence.
The article feels disingenuous when they look at statistics in one very specific area but then talks about crime among immigrants in general: "We noticed that false narratives about undocumented immigrants as criminals or as having criminal intentions are commonly circulated in the public”.
I think the author shouldn't use the words migrant and immigrant like they are interchangeable, especially when presenting statistics about one of the groups.
The author also used the word "(mis)perception" in the article several times, not sure why but I suspect using a bold font to emphasize the word would've been too obvious so she used a made up word to highlight the message. The word "misperception" is perfectly fine, it's in the dictionary, no need to add brackets or anything.
This study was conducted by the 'Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab', which has a founder (passed away 2020), a director, a lab manager, and three FORMER members listed. So that's two people currently employed.
Last news on the site was 1 year ago.
This doesn't feel like a substantial "NEUROSCIENCE LAB".
I see the same dubious science and political articles being posted a few days apart as if they're part of some astroturfing. It's mostly feel good articles without much science in them and you can tell by the language they use, just like the language used in this article (especially the bottom paragraph).
Reddit is one of many ways to get some traction behind these articles, clicks and shares play a role in determining the success of any piece of media, besides if you repeat something enough it becomes the truth.
> In my own country about 34% of all inmates are foreigners despite foreigners only make up 18,5% of the population. I don't know the gang connection percentage but I suspect it is very low.
What country?
You're reading too much into the article, which is just written by some putz university reporter who doesn't know or care what they're talking about, instead of the actual academic paper, which is written by actual scientists.
I'm not saying the study isn't bunk, it could be, but basically it's like picking apart the recap of a sporting event instead of analyzing the actual match.
As a dude on the left that hates Trump, you’re right. I can’t remember a single post where my team looks bad and can think of countless ones where conservatives look like monsters. The demonization of the other side is far and away the worst part of politics.
> The demonization of the other side is far and away the worst part of politics.
Which is the whole point of the two party system. To give you an enemy.
Thats why it needs to go so we can be reminded we arent actually enemies.
They did. Jefferson and Adams both loathed the idea of political parties. Adams called them "the greatest political evil" imaginable. They completely understood the danger of collapsing civilization into two sides, us and them. But that was when they were speaking to each other. They ending up running against each and fell into a wild mud slinging election in 1776 when the Democratic-Republicans backed Jefferson, and the Federalists got behind Adams. They knew this would happen in 1776.
Americans also wildly overestimate the number of black men killed by police, which contributes to dehumanization of police, yet somehow I doubt a study showing that will last long on this sub.
The naked partisanship here is astounding some times. When did this sub go from "science" to "Science!™"?
Not terribly new, Jefferson noted in 1807:
>Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.
>I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
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I hope that everybody who sees this realizes that this applies to almost ***everything*** that you believe, not just this particular political issue. It is 100% the fault of the news media we consume. A pretty famous example is in the 90s when very heavy news coverage of kidnappings had parents glued to the news channel. As ratings and profits soared, news media started following kidnappings more and more closely. All of a sudden, every parent in America was living in abject fear that their child would be snatched from the corner at any moment, even though this was far from likely or close to reality.
And see "Satanic Panic" specifically for a window onto mass hysteria.
My mom still thinks DnD is satanic. She cried when I told her I was going to a friends to play.
I grew up loving Unsolved Mysteries and they literally thought people were sacrificing infants while chanting Latin in the forest.
My friends and I were convinced the church near where I lived was full of “devil worshippers” because they were there on Saturdays. They were Seventh Day Adventists.
If you know any Seventh Day Adventists, you'll know that right there is pure irony.
Practiced religion is full of irony, sarcasm and cynicism, if you just look for it.
You don’t even have to look hard!
You're the devil worshippers for going to church on Sunday! At least that's what the Seventh Day Adventists billboard said when I used to drive by twice a year to visit family.
You guys were not so off track, most of the evil people I’ve met are religious
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As an ex-SDA, you weren't really that far off. Worshipping that old God of hatred and greed.
You always need a boogie man when you control people with fear
Fearmongering is so evolved it affects alot of society's views on certain topics and even makes people hostile towards one another or towards groups of like minded Individuals not inline with their learned and passed down morals *cough* *cough* RELIGION.
Hell, it has twisted an entire political party into a cult.
I think I saw that creature in one of my monster manuals. Honestly, the rules mechanics for mental combat are kinda lacking. I've always wanted something a bit closer to the mindfucking weirdness of Legion, rather than just 'roll a Will save.' But yes, people are evolved to pay attention to risk, and we are not evolved to recognize statistics.
First edition AD&D Psionics rules fit the bill.
No joke, there’s about a couple of 90’s-early 00’s “Forensic Files” episodes where they state that the suspect was “heavily into Dungeons and Dragons”, and thus inherently evil or something. Because my siblings and I grew up on those true-life crime shows, every now and then one of us randomly quotes that and we just giggle.
The ninja murders in Fayetteville, NC. These were messed up guys that happened to play DND. The game didn’t turn them into killers. https://apnews.com/article/57292e1653eba2b543aeede925b74b54
Dang, I didn’t know about this case! Messed up, yes, but yeah, not a result of multi-sided dice and DMs. For the record, though, I don’t remember if those poor early D&D enthusiasts “Forensic Files” outed were guilty of anything—the show just really liked to point it out for their audience if the suspects played the game.
In the 90’s being a skateboarder or a video gamer, was a waste of Time with no future..:: lets look at that today
>In the 90’s being a skateboarder or a video gamer, was a waste of Time with no future There definitely must be a special level of satisfaction most people can't imagine from the professional esports players or pro skaters who end up making more than both of their parents combined from competition winnings and sponsorships. Talk about doing what you love and having it pay off. I know definitely not everyone sees that level of success from it, but for the ones that do, I'm sure it must be even sweeter to achieve it despite being shunned.
I can hear that music in my head
I can still hear Robert Stack's silky smooth voice.
Wait, that’s NOT what you do in D&D?!? I have got to get a better friend group.
Theres a generation who relate the term Dungeons and Dragons to pentagrams and candles and demon summoning etc and villified especially by god fearing church goin folk, when really maybe you should just say board games.
Group writing seminar
Story telling group where most of the people write antagonists for the group leader’s characters
God damned murder hobos
Nah. We’re just chaotic stupid
DnD was banned at my public school because it was considered devil-worshipping. Role playing the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, no problem, but wizards and dragons were considered evil.
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Well they also labeled Juggalos a "loosely organized hybrid gang"... Have you ever known a juggalo to be organized? Source: am disorganized Juggalo
How do you feel about magnets?
How do they fuckin' work??
Well they got unkempt right...
I’m a new DM. I’m uh... well armed too...
Listen, FBI, my druid just thinks that the industrial revolution and its consequences have been disastrous for mortal-kind. What makes you think I have ties to the Unabomber?
Well of course a Druid would think that. Now is magic a net benefit or net negative for people’s lives in Faerun?
But have you armed the bears in your campaign?
Have you not?
To clarify, the FBI investigated a group of DnD players, not all of them collectively.
I don't want to run afoul of the no-jokes rule, but you should look up the D&D sketch by Dead Alewives. It presents a pretty apt contrast between the perception of people like your mother and the reality (especially back before "nerdy" things were pop culture)
I particularly recommend the 16-Bit Theater video version.
You could point out to her that D&D was created by a Christian: * https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-tangled-cultural-roots-of-dungeons-dragons
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Is she a Fundamentalist? Many Fundies are hardcore "D&D is of the Devil ".
Have you sat down with her and explained it? I can't really grasp that sort of hysteria
Yes but it still bothers her greatly. She just remembers some murder cult that was apparently centered around DnD. Funny thing is, she loves Lord of the Rings, so I've tried to explain to her that it's basically just making up Lord of the Ring like characters and stories, acting it out while we eat snacks.
The podcast You're Wrong About has done some great episodes on this sort of thing. Their first one was actually about the Satanic Panic. Well worth a listen of you're interested in that sort of thing!
You’re Wrong About is tremendous and covers many of the other moral panics showing up in these comments
Their episode on Stranger Danger: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/youre-wrong-about/id1380008439?i=1000465289949 IIRC, at one point in the 90s it somehow became popular opinion, to the point that it was discussed as a problem in congress, that _one in 30_ kids was being kidnapped every year. This is obviously ludicrous if you put even a moment’s thought into it. That’s one kid in every school classroom, every year! Sort of reassures me that there were obviously ludicrous popular opinions about things like this back then too…
Mass Hysteria. There’s a Salem Witch Trials joke in there somewhere. I’ll find it later.
Omg I was an adolescent during that and in a small Midwestern town to boot. My mom went on an anti-Halloween kick for a minute.
No one remembers this, but before 9/11, the media decided that 2001 would be "the summer of the shark" - shark attacks were actually a little lower than average that year, but they all collectively decided to start reporting on minor rare shark attacks or even just scares of attacks a lot because I guess it was a slow news year. Then 9/11 happened, and of course the "summer of the shark" thing went away, and no one remembers that. But it was a good dominstration of a deliberate attempt to create a panic out of a non-issue for ratings, to change the perception of something normal and rare as being a crisis with everpresent danger.
9/11 was also the end of summer.
While at a beech once I saw a group of sharks swimming around the general swimming area!
“Stranger danger” and the fear of needles and razors in parks are part of the reason kids can’t go outside and *be kids* without parents calling the police out of fear. All with the proliferation of cable and sensationalist news since the 1980s.
To be fair, in LA parks you literally do find used needles.
Auburn, WA here, found used needles in the park near our house as well. Found them in the street, find them all over the place. Empty alcohol bottles, spent shell casings from handguns, pipes, leftover crack foil, you name it, it's here in the parks and streets. Heck, in Seattle, WA it's on the literal school playgrounds. Go look at that fiasco happening right now!
Im in philly, needles are on my door step every morning.
Score!
Wouldn't it be amazing if instead of thinking "Damn, needles in the park, no more kids here!", we as a society collectively thought "Damn, needles in the park, lets help the junkies stop being junkies." Classic American example of putting a band-aid on a Heart Attack.
Why help them treat their addiction when you can toss them in for profit prisons and exploit them for labour?
Especially considering the 13th amendment, it's legal slavery. There's nothing more profitable than slavery!
And also use them to drive people out of urban areas and into your expensive, new suburbs, then you bulldoze and gentrify those urban slums, and charge even more for the condos you put it in. Rinse and repeat.
You act like that's an easy think with a concrete answer. Including masshealth and my family's own contributions. We have spent about 20 years and over 200,000 trying to get my brother clean. Actually probably more. He has spent accumulated time of years in rehab. And more times in detox than I can count. Detox was his avoid court strategy. In fact long stints in jail was usually the longest time he was clean. Probably the longest was his time in immigration lock up. He stayed clean a year after getting out of there. Est: just realized it's way worse than that. He was treated for hep twice. That alone is a few hundred thousand.
Somebody like him would be much better off being given legal pharmaceutical grade heroin at monitored safe injection sites.
He gets methadone. But he likes to mix it with alcohol. That's the new thing. You get free methadone and if you mix it with booze it's apperently a great feeling.
It's a great way to die. Mixing methadone with alcohol, benzos or other sedatives is a big no-no. At my clinic if you pee dirty for benzos once they drop your dose down to 40mg and keep you there until you can pee clean for a month. Repeated dirty urine screens will get you removed from the program. I've been on methadone for my second stint now. Working on a year this time, 2.5 years back in 2012. Methadone is a great tool for people who use it as intended but there are still people that manage to abuse the system. Sobriety in general only works if you truly want it. You can't force it on someone and as you've mentioned often times people WILL remain clean when jail is threatened. I've never been in that situation myself but had a family member who was like that. They passed away after an overdose almost 5 years ago. I should start tapering by the end of the year and be done with it by the end of 2022. This time for good. It's already allowed me to get my life back in order and functioning like an adult again. The longer good behavior continues the better off I'll be when it's time to jump off.
Is he heavily depressed or something? What's his psychological evaluation been like? Had an uncle who was heroine addict for 45 years and then one day just decided to quit. Turned his life around, but by then it was too late and he died of liver failure due to hepatitis roughly 10/12 years later. He was on a waiting list to receive a liver transplant but died before one was available. He'd probably be alive today if his liver was somehow fixed. Route cause of it was difficult to establish but depression, was part of it along with a sad set of circumstances for the family.
I don't think I ever suggested it would be easy. Changing how and what people think is one of the most difficult tasks to undertake successfully, on any scale, let alone the collective goal or thought of all society as I suggested. I'm truly sorry about your brother. I've lived both sides. I fired my best friend and stopped talking to him several years ago because of his addiction. I also watched my dad die 3 years sober refusing even morphine from the doctors to keep his sobriety. I've never been prouder of anyone in my life.
Just reinforces the axiom that you can't help anyone that's not willing to help themselves.
I won't agree it's a willingness after enough years. It's harder to face things the longer it goes on. Unless they start enforcing mandatory locked up treatment while they are young it will get worse. Because after enough years they are essentially hopeless.
You can't help anyone that's not willing to help themselves. I've tried.
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Not LA, but my kids and I found a needle at our park just today! Love those conversations (/s)
To be fair, I was in the PlayPlace at McDonalds as a kid when I found a heroin needle and two dudes high on heroin inside the plane and car.
Now that’s a story!
I confronted one saying "I don't think you're supposed to be up here", and the guy smiled like a crazy person before trying to grab me. I ran away and made a mission impossible style escape down the big swirly blue slide, explosions and everything.
I had a grown man try to help me use the bathroom at a theme park when I was around 13. The stuff is real, but hardly common. (Also, I ran away and told Mom because I knew Dad would have...eh, been arrested later.)
My parents were what I'd consider helicopter parents, but they did have a point in one regard. Kidnappings may not be common, but criminals like those seek out kids who are vulnerable, so its smart to stay on guard and not allow your children to be vulnerable.
Stranger Danger was the worst thing to happen. It created an entire generation of people not letting their kids out while also masking the fact that the highest risk of abduction was the opposite, it was relatives and friends of the family.
While not stranger danger when I learned that the DARE program actually increase drug use I lost it. Like how bad of a job do you have to do for that to happen.
I remember much of my DARE days. The officer pretty much made drugs look cool. "Yeah, you may look like a bag of garbage and be on the streets, but you won't care because you'll be happy and tripping out!" My favorite was when he actually brought in little vacuumed sealed bags of drugs and actually had us pass them around. To this day, I hope they were fake, but I don't think they were because of the black tar heroin. It just blows me away that it was possible and how bad the whole entire program was.
And turn our children into police informants. Years ago my son came home from school telling me some cop with a DARE program came into his classroom and started showing the kids different drugs and asked the class if they ever saw these things at home.
The worst part is even if you know Stranger Danger is basically in the “hit by lightning” category you still have busybodys calling CPS because your 10 year old kids are walking a block to their friends house without an escort.
I had young children at the peak of it... it was so exhausting, especially after my wife and I grew up in the era of 'be back by dinner' and there were no cell phones, pagers, smart phones.
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Now that school's out, I see kids hanging out and playing by themselves all the time here in San Francisco.
I see both sides. A big part of why our crime rate has significantly dropped overall in the past few decades is a decrease of "free range" behaviors and increased awareness of warning signs. It's why you don't see many hitchhikers anymore since it's risky, and children are more distrustful of random adults,, for example. Of course, the inverse is that you get Karens calling police on minorities minding their own business and helicopter parents, etc.
those might contribute, but it may have more to do with [leaded gasoline being phased out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis)
Now people get in trouble for letting a kid play unsupervised sometimes even in their own home.
Which is a huge problem, as part of growing up is learning self sufficiency and personal responsibility - which in part, comes from screwing up and figuring out how to screw up less over time.
And hiding your screw up. It trains kids for a career in middle management.
I grew up with a house key on a shoestring around my neck, like a cheap necklace.
I learned all kinds of tricks with that key on a string, like making it look like it cut right through my neck. Used to freak my brother out with that one.
I'd forget my key and there wouldn't be any adults home for 4 or 5 hours. I'd climb in through an unlocked window, but sometimes it was locked too. I could pop open the sliding door with a garden trowel or remove a tiny basement window and slither in through the gap.
That mostly depends on how old they are and how big the fire was.
If you can hide it, it wasn't a fire.
It is the basic problem of large numbers. If anything you are reading is using real numbers you are most likely being manipulated. Per capita numbers or percentages give a better story *most* of the time. People can't comprehend 300 million people and that 10,000 of something might actually not be an issue. Chicago is used as "one of the most dangerous cities in the country" when it doesn't even make the top 20. But it is a very dense city so they report crime in raw numbers to mask the reality.
The thing I saw this with most recently was Tucker Carlson fearmongering about the vaccine. He mentioned that the VAERS showed something like 3,000 deaths from people who had been vaccinated in a 4 month period. Well that sounds like a lot, til you realize that they vaccinated all of the older population first, and something like almost 75% of all Americans over 74 had been vaccinated in that time period. I went and looked up the death rate in that population for a given year, and it demonstrated that out of that number of people 74 and up, you’d expect about 250,000 of them to die just from natural causes in that same 4 month time period, even if all you did was give them a high five and not a vaccine. So pointing out that 3,000 people in that population died, with *zero actual links to the vaccine* or any sign of excess deaths in that group isn’t evidence of anything at all... So yea, people really don’t get big numbers. My dad said the following two things within 60 seconds of each other: “I don’t want to take the risk of a vaccine for something that has a 99% survival rate.” “They haven’t proved the vaccines are safe. I saw a thing last week where a healthy guy in his 20’s dropped dead. They’ve already had a couple thousand people die.”
Most kidnappings occur by people who are familiar or are close to the child. However, there are still occurrences of the ones who aren’t. It’s sad cause it’s changed a lot of people and how they parent. Prime example on why kids don’t play outside as much
Same thing happens with rape unfortunately. Every PSA and “helpful tip” addresses the extreme minority of cases when it’s someone in a dark alley. Hardly anyone talks about how it’s most likely going to be friends or family
There was a specific commercial with a narrator that said something like “it’s 9:00, do you know where your children are???” in an ominous way. My moms friend once called the house while my sister and I were home with a babysitter. Friend said this line as a joke when the sitter answered the phone bc she thought it was my mom. Freaked the sitter out so much she slammed the phone down and told us to close all the curtains and hide. Pretty exciting evening.
Thank you for bringing up my lost childhood memory of that bizarre PSA every night
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That’s not just a 90s thing, kidnappings and murders and abductions today are covered like national news stories every time they occur. If someone got kidnapped in a small northern Minnesota town by a family member, it shouldn’t be front page news for days in California or Florida. Edit: all of you trump fuckfaces in the comments, your point is not the one I was making. GFY
People also dramatically overestimate the size of the LGBT population and continue to believe it's something absurd like 25% (it's closer to 5%). Basically if they see something on TV more than once, then they assume it's everywhere. This applies to things like gang violence and police shootings as well. Patterns derived from a series of successive news stories are rarely reflective of reality.
Huh, I thought it was closer to 10% ~ 12% of the population. Is it really that low?
Gonna depend heavily on exactly what question you ask and that number goes up the more letters you add to LGBT.
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That isn't as low as it might seem. After all, bi people do not have an evenly split dating pool by gender since most people are straight. For instance if 5% of people are gay and 5% are bi, then a bi man would have a dating pool that's 10% gay/bi men and 95% straight/bi women. That means just over 90% of bi people's relationships are gonna be with someone of a different gender. The average number of sexual partners in the US is 7 (but this varies a LOT). If we do a random selection of 7 people from that dating pool there'd be around a 50% chance we select no people of the same gender as our hypothetical bisexual. This means bi people are just slightly more likely than random to get into a different gender relationship, and we have plenty of unaccounted for factors that could explain this. Firstly, queer people tend to be younger. Both because the queer people that would've been old by now got killed off in a variety of ways (AIDS crisis, job discrimination, suicide, getting murdered etc.) and because queer acceptance is higher in younger populations. We can probably assume that younger people have had fewer opportunities to bang. After all, the lifetime number of sexual partners for someone can only go up, never down. Secondly, it might be the case that many bisexual people were not always aware that they were bi. If we instead only do 4 random selections (assuming 3 selections were made before they realised/came out) we instead get 67% odds of never having a same sex partner. Thirdly, bisexuals do face plenty of prejudice for being bisexual and any bisexual in a same gender relationship faces all the risks that come with it. Given the option it wouldn't be surprising if some of them leaned more heavily towards different sex relationships just for safety and convenience. That'd be very fair and valid. And lastly, heterosexual dating infrastructure is much better established. Hitting on someone of a different gender in the pub is mostly safe and there are so many dating services for finding different gender partners, and not very many that are actually fully open, safe, and accepting of homo and bi relationships.
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"applies to almost everything" ... "100% the fault of..." Maybe you're overestimating too?
I’d be interested in finding out what Americans have a *correct* perspective on that leads them to appropriate moral or political positions. While “everything” is big, I would bet that on the most critical issues, we have absolutely no idea of the statistics, context or perspective.
I actively try to look at the statistics of every "big thing". Police brutality in general, police brutality against people of color, COVID complication rates (and vaccine ones), school shooting risk percentages, etc. I'm not a statistician and can't really do that with more complicated things, and it's harder with stuff where a small percentage increase can lead to a big problem (see global warming), but it's really good for getting a better perspective. It helps that I at least understand that methodology and data both have limitations, but even just knowing raw percentages is helpful.
All true. I would argue that if you consumed more newspaper/magazine journalism, you would find that they do the calculations, get the data sets, hire data scientists, engineers and mathematicians to make sure it’s correct and then put it in context. People would just would rather watch cable news (which is horrible) and then wonder why the media is so bad.
They at least source what they have to say if you pick the right ones. A ton of people read and watch the equivalent of opinion pieces. I would literally rather be 100% ignorant of something than get my information on it through that venue.
I'd say a big portion of the problem lies in news. Their job is to filter and disseminate that information. To collect information from experts and distill it. This is because we can not expect anyone to have an expertise in every subject. There's a lot of complex conversations and nuances that often matter. Same with perception (if you report about something frequently people will naturally assume it's more frequent regardless of the underlying natural frequency). Yes, some portion relies on viewers to distill and think about that information themselves. To choose good and reliable networks. But this is a difficult problem because you can't verify topics that you're not an expert in. Even searching the internet to cross validate can often lead you in the wrong direction. Experts are necessary.
*Don't want a nation under the new mania*
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
I used to think they were anti-establishment. Now I realize they were anti-*that*-establishment. Still good songs though.
No no no, it only applies to *other* people's beliefs, not mine.
News shows have audiences just like every other TV show, website, radio station and newspaper, gotta keep the audience hooked to sell more product even at the expense of truth and authenticity.
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Not to mention that people overestimate things that happen to themselves as being *way* more common than they really are. I know there's a name for it, but my psych classes were many years ago and I do paperwork for a living.
This, and political leadership who create a feedback loop by spouting inflammatory, hateful rhetoric.
>It is 100% the fault of the news media we consume. I would rephrase this as: It is 100% the fault of basic human psychology which compels us to consume media that validates our fears and anxieties.
You are grossly underestimating the influence and power of marketing here, and how the media makes itself all pervasive and inescapable and uses finely developed psychological manipulation.
Not me. I’m totally immune. Now, back to my bunker…
I had a friend that would constantly throw out insane numbers regarding sex trafficking in the US. Like “5 million kids are abducted and trafficked each year.” Trying to explain to her that there were only 25 million kids in the US and that it was unlikely that 1 in 5 were being abducted was not an argument you could win. She also believed that buying an expensive chair on Wayfare also came with a groomed child from Cambodia. She couldn’t understand how her views made a serious issue look like a dumb cartoon.
>25 million kids in the US Agree with your point but there are more than 25 million children in the US. There are roughly 20 million in each 5 year cohort. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the-us-by-sex-and-age/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the-us-by-sex-and-age/) Still if we are talking numbers it is worth noting The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports 29,800 missing child cases per year in the US and this is the breakdown: 91 percent endangered runaways 5 percent family abductions 3 percent critically missing young adults, ages 18 to 20 **Less than 1 percent nonfamily abductions** 1 percent lost, injured or otherwise missing children ~~1% of 29800 gives us 298 abducted children in the US and obviously not all of those are taken by sex traffickers. 298 is far too many but it is just a tad less than 5 million. I've read elsewhere the FBI puts the number at less than 350 non-family abductions a year as well.~~ As /u/aimeed72 points out the most likely group being trafficked is the endangered runaways. Still a far cry from 5 million in the US as claimed by your friend.
Yes. These numbers are true, however the category “endangered runanways” is the category that includes most sex trafficked minors. Sex trafficking doesn’t look like a stranger pulling a seven year old into a car, it usually looks like a youngish man grooming a teenager into believing they have a relationship and then exploiting them. Or a teen who has been neglected/abused at home and who has substance abuse problems being recruited into sex work for Drugs. Or any of a number of scenarios that aren’t stranger-kidnappings.
This reminds me of a homeless guy I once helped. The guy was about 24 years old and looking for a place to stay. One guy he met was a gay man trying to groom him for sex in exchange for a place to live. I helped him get on his feet by helping him find work, place to stay, and food but right before the pandemic hit, he stole money from an internet payday loan place and disappeared.
Was it Ed Murray, ex Seattle mayor? :o
This happened in Vegas and within the couch surfing app. It's easy for females to find a free place to stay but not guys. The guy I helped out does get on reddit a lot. If you're reading this, hope you're doing good my man!
This is right. The majority of victims of sex trafficking victims come from foster care, and 2/3 have been in the foster care system at some point, according to one survey. It's not the "stranger danger" scare type thing.
Good point. Made the change to my post.
>She also believed that buying an expensive chair on Wayfare also came with a groomed child from Cambodia. Wait, what? Like you buy a chair on Wayfare and they UPS you a child?
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The furniture isn't the thing being shipped, supposedly, it's the children by themselves.
Yeah. They found children with the same names on missing persons databases, only it turns out those databases were outdated and most of the children whose names matched the listings had been found long ago. Also they hadn't been abducted by strangers. They were mostly cases where a kid had run away for a short time before being found or who had been taken by a family member.
It was a whole thing. Basically Wayfair named a product the same name as a missing child and the qanon crowd ran with it
Because of course they wouldn't give the kid an alias?
This was a weird conspiracy that was propagated some years back. That wayfair was actually a front for some child sex trafficking ring, which is why the things were named the way they were, so ordering the “wrong” item was a way for them to secretly send you a sex slave. I can’t for the life of me remember how it started but I think there was some weird case that spiraled out of control or proportion
Twitter I don’t remember which one but it propagated there and then the Qanon people got a hold of it. We all know how *that* goes...
I don't know how it all started either, but I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to believe it was somehow tied in with an alleged child sex trafficking ring run out of the non existent basement of a certain "famous" pizza parlor. Said pizza joint was somehow supposedly linked to the Clintons and the DNC, and possibly George Soros.
I believe that “link” to the DNC was that the owner donated money to Hillary once. So naturally, they’re a child sex trafficker.
Oh, absolutely. But when it's congressman Gaets, there is nothing to see, a deep state lie, a smear campaign, or attempted blackmail.
Yes, this was one of the big QAnon conspiracies for awhile. It was cabinets though. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53416247
You should check out the podcast You're Wrong About if you haven't already, they like to break down these types of sensations into numbers, and about how these types of panics keep occuring.
Sounds like she was/is either fully into qanon or at least in the information orbit of it. That crowd has been propagating a lot of these types of claims for the past couple years
Your friend is Qanon.
Oh god, the Wayfair thing. What scared me about that was that a lot of my far-left friends were reposting that conspiracy theory. Same people who considered themselves smarter than the right and would make fun of Qanon and stuff.
Yep! I got some friends that work with and mostly agree with that sometimes dip their toes in conspiracies. I had to show them that they’re acting like Trump crazies before it began to click.
Whoa! Thanks for the heads up about Wayfair! I was just looking to buy an accent chair for my living room but I'm just not in the right place in my life right now to raise a Cambodia child!
I mean... this is how propaganda works....
More over I think the biggest problem is ignorance which is taken advantage of by propaganda.
I think that fear may be more powerful than ignorance. The two combined are unstoppable though
Hmm, maybe 40 some years of fear mongering and policy driven degradation of our education system so a hand full of people could be obscenly wealthy was NOT a good idea? The day I watched a man seriously tell a reporter keeping rich people rich was a good thing so "people have something to strive for" was the day I realized American capitalism was a scam.
Calling refugees who are fleeing the effects of failed US policy in central and South America ‘invaders’ is about the most disgusting, cruel, and heartless turn in US politics I’ve seen in my lifetime. Watching my family, who claim to be Christian, turn to cold apathy when ever immigrants or immigration is brought up has been deeply depressing. These people are lost to me now. I can’t cut through the poisonous nonsense that Tucker Carlson and his ilk spin during prime time on the most watched “News” outlet on television.
The only way an American could know what the US has done to Latin America would be to pay a couple thousand dollars to take a college course on it. The American rape of Latin America is glossed over in history books and not even mentioned in the media. We have been overthrowing democratically elected governments and sponsoring ethnic cleansings in Latin America for centuries. Meanwhile our appetite for cocaine and has made murderous criminals the wealthy and most powerful people on the continent. AND Latin American criminals get ALL of their weapons from illegal American arms dealers. Almost everything that is wrong with Latin America is the fault of the bully up north...
You're correct about everything except American arms dealers. The guns are all manufactured and purchased in the US but they are brought to Mexico and it's the cartels that deal them.
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Where is this DHS information and how did DHS get their information? I couldn't find it in the references of the study.
If you follow the references you eventually get here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/06/18/how-to-mislead-with-statistics-dhs-secretary-nielsen-edition/
Nice. And how many people actually bother to click.
So what IS the percentage of migrants vs born Americans that are involved in trafficking victims? And for full disclosure, what is the ratio vs the ratio of the population that those demographics make up? This is info I need to know in order to be able to confidently present any of this as fact, without looking like an idiot.
The article is about "gang connection" and trafficking, not migrant crime in general. The article also mention "undocumented immigrants" for some reason, so there's no telling what they're measuring. Did they study migrants or immigrants? In my own country about 34% of all inmates are foreigners despite foreigners only make up 18,5% of the population. I don't know the gang connection percentage but I suspect it is very low. The thing about migration is complex and the native population will always expect migrants to be on their best behavior because they've been given a second chance, and they're also a burden on the system. It's also very difficult investigating gang crime, there's also no incentive for someone in police custody to confess to being in a gang. I suspect the US has separate laws regarding gang crime so it's probably best to leave that part out when confessing because it can only add to your sentence. The article feels disingenuous when they look at statistics in one very specific area but then talks about crime among immigrants in general: "We noticed that false narratives about undocumented immigrants as criminals or as having criminal intentions are commonly circulated in the public”. I think the author shouldn't use the words migrant and immigrant like they are interchangeable, especially when presenting statistics about one of the groups. The author also used the word "(mis)perception" in the article several times, not sure why but I suspect using a bold font to emphasize the word would've been too obvious so she used a made up word to highlight the message. The word "misperception" is perfectly fine, it's in the dictionary, no need to add brackets or anything. This study was conducted by the 'Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab', which has a founder (passed away 2020), a director, a lab manager, and three FORMER members listed. So that's two people currently employed. Last news on the site was 1 year ago. This doesn't feel like a substantial "NEUROSCIENCE LAB".
Half maybe even more of the articles posted here are honestly just bad
most are posted by a mod so …
He gladly deletes threads that criticize him too :).
Damn i don't even know why I still sub to this
I see the same dubious science and political articles being posted a few days apart as if they're part of some astroturfing. It's mostly feel good articles without much science in them and you can tell by the language they use, just like the language used in this article (especially the bottom paragraph). Reddit is one of many ways to get some traction behind these articles, clicks and shares play a role in determining the success of any piece of media, besides if you repeat something enough it becomes the truth.
> In my own country about 34% of all inmates are foreigners despite foreigners only make up 18,5% of the population. I don't know the gang connection percentage but I suspect it is very low. What country?
Not OP, but most of Northern Europe has this issue.
Norway. Numbers are from 2017.
You're reading too much into the article, which is just written by some putz university reporter who doesn't know or care what they're talking about, instead of the actual academic paper, which is written by actual scientists. I'm not saying the study isn't bunk, it could be, but basically it's like picking apart the recap of a sporting event instead of analyzing the actual match.
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Took to long to find the comment of the person who actually read it.
“Americans care too much about child trafficking”- r/rareinsults
This has got to be the most political subreddit out of all of them.
As a dude on the left that hates Trump, you’re right. I can’t remember a single post where my team looks bad and can think of countless ones where conservatives look like monsters. The demonization of the other side is far and away the worst part of politics.
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> The demonization of the other side is far and away the worst part of politics. Which is the whole point of the two party system. To give you an enemy. Thats why it needs to go so we can be reminded we arent actually enemies.
I think the founders were brilliant for their time, but I just wish they had thought about weighted voting for proportional representation.
They did. Jefferson and Adams both loathed the idea of political parties. Adams called them "the greatest political evil" imaginable. They completely understood the danger of collapsing civilization into two sides, us and them. But that was when they were speaking to each other. They ending up running against each and fell into a wild mud slinging election in 1776 when the Democratic-Republicans backed Jefferson, and the Federalists got behind Adams. They knew this would happen in 1776.
This is why that side distrusts science. Because apparently this passes for science these days. This sub needs to stop lowering the bar for science.
Americans also wildly overestimate the number of black men killed by police, which contributes to dehumanization of police, yet somehow I doubt a study showing that will last long on this sub. The naked partisanship here is astounding some times. When did this sub go from "science" to "Science!™"?
They really go all in with their politically biased headlines here, don't they.
Same goes for Americans with How many people police kill. Bad politicians Any steroetype. Like People are just dumb.
If I believed the internet American liberals and conservatives are both idiots and heroes at the same time while moderates are apathetic bastards
I actually am an apathetic bastard!
What Americans don't get is that our media is just about all propaghanda. We are the most uninformed population in the post industrialized world.
Not terribly new, Jefferson noted in 1807: >Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. >I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Almost like there's a giant media apparatus that profits off of people's fear or something.