http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/whos-afraid-of-terrorists/

50% of people are worried about being victims.

I would like to see a gender breakdown.

I would like to see a breakdown of those afraid of their kids becoming victims. And then have that broke down by gender.

I would like to see a breakdown by education level, and heck...it'd be interesting to see by proclaimed political party/affiliation.

You know, I remember back in the 80's and 90's that it was Republicans that always seemed to be the most afraid of communists. I heard a lot of the same rhetoric about communists that I currently hear from Republicans about terrorists and Arabs. It seems that that party thrives on exploiting people's fear, or developing new fears to be exploited. And that also get lots of money for military spending, which of course makes some people very happy.

It is a kind of McCarthism, it was fairly rampant through the country after world war 2 and more prominantly named in the 50's. I actually thought of that a few years ago, thinking about it. Communism was "dead" to us following the end of the Cold War. So, rather than be all peaceful and happy, we needed something else as motivation for public fears. Originally, I thought it was going to be the war on drugs, again, when Bush came into office, that seemed to drop off the agenda quite a bit.

But, yes, it is rather interesting with that party in particular, always spend, spend, spend, on something. I always thought it was funny with some of the reasoning with that particular party, at one time it was how politicians prided themselves, how many people we can get out of prison and be back to a productive lifestyle. Whereas now, how many people we put into prisons.

Case in point the sex offender madness, we certainly like to register as many sex offenders as possible, often for the dumbiest things possible, running naked through the streets, that is right buddy. Offender time! The ever popular, trench coat penis against the glass routine, sex offender time! Whoops, she didn't look 16, offender time. Getting caught masterbating in public would have been, haha, you idiot you deserve to be made fun of, nowadays, you guessed it, sex offender! All children run from the public masterbater and the naked guy taking a stroll down the street! They are sexual deviants!

Oh, The guys with the sheep, or substitute animals of your choice, busted, offender time. how about that kinky couple in Alabama after the sex toy ban and were busted with sex toys, in action, after the authorities served the warrant for a drug search next door to the drug house by mistake, yep, real deviants there. Not that that status isn't justified in alot of cases, the Justice Department has been swinging that allittle much.

I mean geez, I can not even walk down a dark alley in the middle of the night, filled with murderers, muggers, and drug addicts and somehow feel that 2 guys blowing each other in public, are somewhat out of place and are to be feared.

I guess I should make a point here somewhere, that people need to fear something in order to be controlled, to push an agenda.

Possibly genetic.

aybe we need a level of systemic fear to keep us happy.
We definitely need a level of systemic guilt to do that, why not fear.

Like Capt Kirk in that horrible Star Trek movie where they go to meet God..."I need my pain!" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098382/

Possibly genetic.

aybe we need a level of systemic fear to keep us happy.
We definitely need a level of systemic guilt to do that, why not fear.


I strongly hesitate to call it a genetic trait. After all there are plenty people and even entire countries where people are not, as a rule, afraid of something most of the time.

I would agree with people needing a certain degree of uncertainty to function (and taking unneccery risks if they feel their environment is too safe), but needing fear I do not think so.

It is more of a cultural phenomenon. And perhaps a political one. Scared people are easier to control and manipulate after all, and that is what any power hungry politician (or political party) aims at. Dealing with scared people is one-dimensional. As long as they are perceived adressing the cause of the fear then they do not have to deal with people as having a multitude of motivations.
The sad truth is that there are so many mechanisms in place in modern culture that promote this. Not just politicians, but many industries depend on it and media as well (scares sell newspapers and make people watch tv much better than happy news).


Eri

John Tierney is a wonderful science reporter and skeptic. Love him.

The politics of fear put me off almost as fast as device politics.

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd. - Bertrand Russell
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. - Edmund Burke


His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. - Bush? Nope: A report prepared during WWII by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler's psychological profile

Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it. - Douglas MacArthur
It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. - Douglas MacArthur
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. - Douglas MacArthur

OOh, can we get a Godwin judgement on this one? Does it technically work to invoke the law?