So I was reading the news, and came across these three stories:

polygamy/incest murders (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=718&e=4&u=/ap/20040315/ap_on_re_us/fresno_slayings)

child adopted after extreme abuse (http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/lifestyles/article/0,1299,DRMN_4336_2725829,00.html)

and

woman refuses c-section, tries to sell baby, twins die (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4509692/)

and I got to wondering...is the world getting worse, or am I just getting older and having a better understanding of the implications of these acts on those around the main characters?

Or do we just need a bigger handbasket for those taking a journey to hell?

(edited to make links work properly)

good god...i'm ill now

I can't believe those Fresno murders. :\

There's always been a lot of sick individuals throughout history though. We're not special except that nowadays they can get guns and take a lot more people with them.

My appologies Chenier, they made me ill too. Which is what made me start to wonder if I"m just more sensitive to it than I was when I was younger and more concerned with MTV (or Friday Night Videos) and parachute pants, or if the world really is becoming that much more heinous.

I refuse to even look at those stories after the reactions in this thread...

Anyway, I don't think the world is getting worse, I just think we have the potential to be better informed of the attrocities today then at any time in the past. Also, as population increases, even if the percentage of incidents per capita is the same, there will obviously be more of them to report.

I can't believe those Fresno murders. :\

There's always been a lot of sick individuals throughout history though. We're not special except that nowadays they can get guns and take a lot more people with them.

Bah, its alot harder to get ahold of guns today than it was 50 or a hundred years ago.

It has nothing to do with guns or their availability.

I'd suggest it has much more to do with a rising urbanization and growing population density. Plus the ever growing ability to quickly report news to an almost unlimited area, as well as a growing focus of the news on negative issues.

When the local Boy Scout troop raises $20,000 dollars for charity, its local news. When a Boy Scout troop removes a Scout Master for being gay, its national news.

/agree aidon

The irony is I came to this forum to get away from the negative crap in the EQ forum.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/040312/040312_rowland_vsml_12p.vsmall.jpg

rofl nice mug shot


Tils

Fenmarel, I'm sorry if you feel I'm being negative. It was an honest question. (If you want to get away from the negativity, you can also see my Happy Spring post, or the "Preen is your friend" post, which are significantly less emotionally charged)

I recently read Elizabeth I, and in comparison to her society we've come a long long ways in terms of respectable treatment of people.

But it does seem that either the world is getting kookier as I grow older, OR I'm becoming more aware of both how bad things can be AND the repercussions of the badness on more than just the victims. Being more empathetic than most people, there are times I have to turn the news off because I feel physically ill. The spain bombings still have me feeling depressed.

However, I think Aidon probably has it right, in combination with growing older and seeing a broader picture of the world. 20 years ago, I could have read those stories, thought 'that's not nice' and forgotten about it 15 minutes later. Now some of them haunt me for days.

Things are being reported faster and to a broader audience (which may be a good thing, the more people know, the more they can do about it). And I am also learning to see the bigger picture. For instance, my first thought on the Spain bombings was not the political side, or who was responsible for it, my first thought was "those poor families". With Easter coming up soon, and in a country which still celebrates Easter as a religious holiday, it would be like losing loved ones before Christmas here. The sheer number of living individuals affected by it was what really got to me.

The stories I linked above have many 'innocent bystander' victims as well.

Maybe the world isn't head to hell in the proverbial handbasket, but on days when all I read are stories like the ones linked above, it sure does make me wonder.

A lot of it is to do with much wider and more rapid mdeia dissemination of the information. Bad things have been done by bad people through out time. To argue that the ready availability of guns doesn't contribute to the ability of bad people to do certain bad things is just naive but a knife or a sword or a piece of 4x2 will do at a pinch.

Yes! Weeds are a much happier subject! /cry I feel like Sissiphus, rolling the boulder up my slope for all eternity.

In a world of billions.. even the rare stuff takes many lives. Its a sad fact, but true.

Look at AIDS. It kills far less people then heart disease and/or lung cancer, but there is about 10 times the funding for AIDS research then for those two diseases combined. All due to the huge marketing hysteria around it.

I agree with the others, it is all about the media and public sentiment.

I've never really been sure how much is new violence, and how much is new disclosure of violence.

Yes, as noted above the population of the world has grown, and so even a small percent of a very large number will be a larger number of horrible murders in absolute terms.

But the phenomenon of documention of daily life (even murder) is relatively new...a few hundred years old at best.

"Good taste" kept a lot of the most salacious stories out of the press, too. And current news is always better known than old news.

I just did a very quick check to look for the name of a turn of the century American serial killer I had vaguelly heard of once. I didn't see it but I did find a reference to a 19th century American serial killer that killed over 200 people. And he build a mansion full of lime vats, gas chambers and all sorts of horrible things. The same page had a reference to a 15th century baron in France who killed hundreds of small boys.

I think you are mostly seeing a mix of poor historical documenation, and the human propensity to forget the past making it seem like today's crimes are new, or unprecedented.

Here is one that is horrible, but not quite as lurid as some of the others....the number in parens is the number of people she supposedly killed...

Helene Jegado (23+) Born in Brittany, France, in 1803, Helene once complained, "Wherever I go, people died." Sure they did. Because she enjoyed poisoning them. As a teenager, as she started her career as a domestic, she also started experimenting with poison. Eventually she wiped out the family of seven for whom she was working. Most of her subsequent employers suffered the same fate. Curiously, no one suspected her of any wrongdoing because of her pious demeanor.
In 1831, after killing one too many familioes and fearing arrest, she joined a nunnery and took her vows. There she was suspected of offing several sisters before renouncing God and returning to her job as a domestic. As before, people started dying in her wake. Strangely she kept getting hired for new jobs.

She laid off the arsenic between 1841 to 1849 but then started dipping into it again. After two deaths in the household where she was working police started suspecting her after her overtly defensive manner during a routine questioning. Furthermore, traces of arsenic were found in the bodies of the most recent victims as well as many of her former employers. However, Helene never admitted her guilt, In 1851 she was guillotined just the same for her wave of terror.

I have to say that some of the worst serial murders are committed by governments and authorities. Compared to what any individual has done it just blows all the nut cases out of the water. Kind of puts things into a different perspective when you're talking about thousands or millions of people versus a few dozen.

For instance, I once read an account of a witch being put to death, it was in the 1700's. Absolutely horrible. But historically it was interesting because it was a very, very early journalistic effort.

Tils is finally more evil than I.

I was going to post that last night, but figured the resulting fits of vomit or nightmares was not worth it.



/boggle

She makes an excellent case study for re-instituting state sponsored sterilization. For her, it would not offend my Libertarian sensibilities one bit. Nope.

is the world getting worse, or am I just getting older and having a better understanding of the implications of these acts on those around the main characters?

Or do we just need a bigger handbasket for those taking a journey to hell?


I think it is more of the media attention. In the past 20 years crime rates have continued to drop, but the media continues to glorify any negative thing that happens in society. Now any stranger is going to run off with your kid, if you help a hitchhiker you're going to die, etc etc. When, actually, the world (or at least the USA) is safer than it used to be.

Bloody media hype.