Entries by Old Longhair

Fear is a powerful tool. I wrote about it a while back, but I failed to provide an antidote other than to be aware of the motives and to think critically when faced with an attempt to scare us into unnecessarily giving up our freedoms in exchange for a promise of security and safety.

Time passed, and I have a better suggestion.

Fear is an emotional response - and while often justified, often it is not. When faced with an emotion we want to control, our only options are faith or facts. Faith is often controlled by emotion and it is hard to maintain the faith in the face of fear, so it is not always the best ally in the fight against fear (although it often works). Facts, on the other hand, are not influenced by the emotions and are great as a reality check.

The important thing to keep in mind is that the facts presented by those trying to scare us may not be complete, or even accurate. Partial statistics, or numbers without relevant baselines, or misleading graphics are often used to make things look worse than they are. For example, if I told you that 80 people were killed in city X this week, accompanied by an emotional story about one of them, and followed up by another story on another victim next week, and next - soon you will be under the impression that you, too, are in danger. What if it turned out that city X is one of the largest cities in the world and 80 murders a week means it is the safest large city in the world? The thing is, this second fact is not going to just "turn out" - you would need to discover it for yourself.

And that is the antidote. If something looks scary, look for the facts - besides the scary news story. Thanks to the Internet, research is pretty easy. The governments publish statistics, trustworthy most of the time. Numbers of deaths from each cause are available. You can always compare your chances of being affected by whatever is supposed to scare you against other things that you know are pretty rare, and against other things that you know are fairly common. For example, compare your chances of dying from an unprovoked attack by a dog (pick your breed) against your chances of dying from a fall down the stairs - ideally, before deciding on embarking on an anti-dog or anti-breed campaign in your community. Or look at the real numbers of child injuries or deaths caused by the now-recalled cribs against those same falls down the stairs. In many cases, you will see that the issue trumpeted as the huge killer of adults and children alike is really a non-issue, statistically insignificant although unquestionably tragic in each particular instance.

And then, stop waisting time, effort and emotion on fearing the things which have negligible odds. Lightning strikes, terror attacks, mass murderers, most other front-page news fall into that category. In vast majority of those cases, you (or your loved one) are more likely to intentionally kill yourself than to fall victim to one of those real but extremely unlikely causes of death. Which makes those fears more akin to phobias, irrational and not supported by any logical evidence. We all have enough true phobias (mine is a fear of heights, for example) - no need to add imagined ones to them.

Oh, what the heck - ban poodles, too.

Another public and media frenzy: the pit bulls. This time, it is a good story: a dog is kept chained up outside. Then, the owner takes it off the chain and lets it into the house - and the dog bites a child. Quite honestly, any dog that is kept out on a chain is likely to be poorly socialized and unpredictable in unfamiliar environment - but this one just happened to be a pit bull.

Continue reading "Ban all dogs except poodles!"

"Every country has the government it deserves" - we hear it every day. What a load of judgemental crap. Every country has the government it chooses is more accurate, be that government a democracy or not - there are ways to choose other than an election (history, revolutions). Who decided that democracy is the perfect, universal form of government? Who said that having democratic elections is the best way to ensure that the country moves in a direction that is best for it as a whole? And more importantly, who said that a democratic government has the right to "help" countries who chose a different form of government "see the light" of democracy?
Continue reading "Democracy - is it always the best?"