Silent3
Silent3's JournalAny solid statistical analysis of the apparent huge increase in people acting like dicks?
I'm pretty certain that it's a real phenomena at some level, and that a big part of it is that Trump gave an awful lot of somewhat quietly reserved but inwardly nasty people the feeling of freedom they craved to let their asshole flags fly high and proud.
Some specific things, like unruly airline passengers, are well-documented. 2021 had a 600% increase in incidents over the previous year.
I'm not sure how well other things are tracked, on the whole spectrum from adults throwing loud and childish temper tantrums all the way up to unhinged, violent assaults triggered by petty annoyances like a fast-food employee forgetting to put pickles on a burger. It would be interesting to further to separate out non-COVID-related dickishness from the maskholes and the belligerent anti-vaxxers.
As a non-COVID example, a video someone posted earlier today on DU, where a woman was freaking out because there weren't any yachts available for her to rent. (Talk about zero-eth world problems.)
The ubiquity of cellphones both captures a lot of this bullshit, but distorts how much there is at the same time. We can all be sure, for instance, that police abuse of power has had a long and inglorious history going well back before video cameras, and then cellphones, helped reveal what had long been hiding in the shadows.
So where are we really at? 10% more dickishness? 50%, 300% more? I really have no idea. My almost certainly distorted media impression feels like 1000-1500% more. For what I encounter in real life personally, it's more like the 10% range. The truth is probably somewhere in that wide swath of uncertainty in between.
If I were caught with a couple of kilos of cocaine, the police wouldn't simply confiscate...
...the drugs and get back to me some time a year or so later after pondering long and hard about what charges, if any, to bring against me. I'd immediately be going on a little ride down to the police station -- either that, or possibly a ride to a hospital or the morgue if, you know, I twitched slightly the wrong way after the police bashed down my door, shooting first and asking questions later.
So why doesn't it work that way when you're in illegal possession of stolen government documents, some of which are apparently classified?
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Gender: MaleHometown: New Hampshire
Home country: USA
Member since: Sun Oct 3, 2004, 04:16 PM
Number of posts: 15,178
