On Unintended Consequences
N.B. This was written in response to offline conversation, not to anything seen online. If you happen to have posted on some of these subjects -- so widely discussed this week -- pleeeease know I did NOT have your post in mind!93
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On the social safety net question, I'm in favour of paying lazy people not to work, simply because I'd rather not have them working with me. I've heard it argued that for the cost of the current benefit system, you could simply pay everyone a living wage, whether they worked or not. Not being an economist, I don't know if that's practical, but if it is, it would be great: people who can't work don't starve, people who don't want to work aren't hanging around workplaces wasting everyone's time, and people who do want to work don't resent paying taxes to support welfare checks because they're getting the welfare checks too.
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Pleasure to see you, sir! :)
As to the practicality of such a plan, search me -- but I love the sound of it.
Interestingly, for all the attention given to Thelema as Social Darwinist, Crowley's own most serious musings on the subject advocate a basic social wage (in Liber Aleph). OTOH, he objected to Shaw's suggested distribution of menial work throughout society (the notion that if we all pitched in, a few hours' work per day would leave us all with generous free time).
I suppose an ungenerous sort could see a pattern in (young, wealthy) AC's Social Darwinism, and (middle-aged, exhausted, broke) AC's sympathy for a baseline social wage. Then again, he was strongly affected by seeing a promising young relative in Florida whose promise was virtually crushed by circumstance, so he may have just rethought the issue as he went along.
Anyway, thanks so much for the comment! :D
93 93/93 -- AJ
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You make a number of interesting points, and I apologize in advance for responding to a somewhat tangential one. (It is my M.O., here and there!) It seems to me that, most often, direct imitations of ideas gleaned from entertainment are in the form of general jackassery -- people getting hurt imitating stunts and such -- rather than violent antisocial acts. Before Columbine, people "went postal." Before postal workers, people just "snapped."
If someone is already disturbed enough to be enthusiastically contemplating homicide, rape, lethal product tampering, or what have you, it is possible s/he could pick up ideas about target or setting from a media source, sure, I can buy that. There's no way I buy that anyone who isn't already that disturbed will think to him/herself, "Hmm, I never thought about it before, but it would be pretty easy to sabotage Tylenol and poison random strangers," or "Come to think of it, I hate Mondays too ( ... )
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I am always delighted to get replies (particularly yours) -- tangential or otherwise. :D As usual, you raise a very thoughtful point, which I'll proceed to split into three 'cause I think we're talking about three distinguishable phenomena, here.
1. "Bright ideas." My scrapped screenplay idea highlighted an unrecognized vulnerability, a target very difficult to "harden," and I wasn't willing to hand those already predisposed to be criminals a useful new way to hurt society. Not, of course, what you're talking about here.
2. "Art made me crazy!" Here we're in complete agreement -- no sane person ever flipped out because they saw a specific movie and it made them crazy; the folks who flip out have serious problems entirely separate from their entertainment choices. In that sense, the big question this week should be "Whatever happened to society making provision for its crazy people, other than jails?" For that matter, there's evidence for a cathartic effect in some forms of "dark" entertainment, like the highly moral, ( ... )
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Missed that ref the first time, and the question about the effect of news stories (great question, that).
Briefly, I'm with the shrink I heard discussing the VT shooter's little NBC "care package": the stuff that needed suppressing was the stuff that made him look "cool," with no informational content. The news value in Cho's tape was that it made it pretty clear that (a) He did it, and (b) Because he was crazy as a loon -- both things worth knowing, though not worth 24/7 coverage for a week, IMO. I see no news value whatsoever in letting the poor little dweeb have his glam shots posted everywhere on earth.*
Which is doubtless why so many media jumped right on the Scarrrry Killer photos, natch. :/
93 93/93 -- AJ
* Oh, and the shrink's other point: that every time we emphasize "worst in US history" (i.e. highest death toll), we're inspiring the next little nutbar to outdo it. Yipers!
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