Etiology of Social Dementia - 14

Obola Newsroom #61

In the previous post of this series I wrote: "This series began years ago on 9/18/09, and has covered a lot of ground since (Etiology of Social Dementia, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)" (Etiology of Social Dementia - 13).

We saw some of the social dementia at work in the recent, yet long forgotten, Obola chronicles of the Ebola nothingness (Obola: Art Thou Dying Properly?).

Now, the Obola nothingness people (McTell News) and those they infect, are wrongfully disparaging refugees who suffer only from demented warmonger activities conducted against their nations and peoples in the middle east.

Those maligned refugees are suspected of having Obola it would seem.

At the same time the same media Presstitutes are making such a big deal out of the horrible warmongering that they love to talk up, so long as it is small enough to fill their minds (In the Fog of The Presstitutes, 2, 3, 4).

Yet we hear only crickets when we point out to them that they are missing the big picture of what is really dangerous, and a threat to society:

In today's post we will see that Americans are more likely to be killed or harmed by multitudes of dangers far greater than any danger posed by terrorists.

First off, let's take a look at a scientific study of neoCon right-wing fear mongering, conducted by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, which looked into the cost-benefit ratios of that fear mongering on the economy:

The cumulative increase in expenditures on US domestic homeland security over the decade since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars. It is clearly time to examine these massive expenditures applying risk assessment and cost-benefit approaches that have been standard for decades. Thus far, officials do not seem to have done so and have engaged in various forms of probability neglect by focusing on worst case scenarios; adding, rather than multiplying, the probabilities; assessing relative, rather than absolute, risk; and inflating terrorist capacities and the importance of potential terrorist targets. We find that enhanced expenditures have been excessive: to be deemed cost-effective in analyses that substantially bias the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 otherwise successful Times-Square type attacks per year, or more than four per day. Although there are emotional and political pressures on the terrorism issue, this does not relieve politicians and bureaucrats of the fundamental responsibility of informing the public of the limited risk that terrorism presents and of seeking to expend funds wisely. Moreover, political concerns may be over-wrought: restrained reaction has often proved to be entirely acceptable politically.

(Terror, Security, and Money, PDF, emphasis added). The neglectful thinking which the perverted propagandists use is based in paranoia:

There's a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of terrorism.

(Worst-Case Thinking Makes Us Nuts, Not Safe). Clearly, officials seek to institutionalize a type of social paranoia, which actually is a mental disorder:

It is common to have suspicious thoughts or worries about other people from time to time. These fears are described as paranoid when they are exaggerated and not based in fact. There are three key features of paranoid thoughts:

• you fear that something bad will happen
• you think that others are responsible
• your belief is exaggerated or unfounded.

(Understanding Paranoia, emphasis added). Again, worst-case thinking is a sign of paranoid thinking, which is made plain by the fact that we are more likely to die from being struck by lightning than by a terrorist:

• You are 35,079 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist
• You are 33,842 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist
• obesity is 5,882 to 23,528 times more likely to kill you than a terrorist
• you are 5,882 times more likely to die from medical error than terrorism
• you’re 4,706 times more likely to drink yourself to death than die from terrorism
• you are 1,904 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist
• your meds are thousands of times more likely to kill you than Al Qaeda
• you’re 2,059 times more likely to kill yourself than die at the hand of a terrorist
• you’re 452 times more likely to die from risky sexual behavior than terrorism
• you’re 353 times more likely to fall to your death ... than die in a terrorist attack
• you are 271 times more likely to die from a workplace accident than terrorism
• you are 187 times more likely to starve to death in America than be killed by terrorism
• you’re about 22 times more likely to die from a brain-eating zombie parasite than a terrorist
• you were more than 9 times more likely to be killed by a law enforcement officer than by a terrorist
• [being] “crushed to death by ... [TV] or furniture” [as likely as] being killed by terrorist
• Americans are 110 times more likely to die from contaminated food than terrorism
• you are more likely to be killed by a toddler than a terrorist
• you [are] four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist

(More Likely To Be Killed By Lightning Than Terrorists). To show how naked the emperor is without the propaganda clothing, note that we are far, far more likely to die from Oil-Qaeda than al-Qaeda:

More than 100 million people will die ... by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday.
...
It calculated that five million deaths occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies, and that toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue.
...
"A combined climate-carbon crisis is estimated to claim 100 million lives between now and the end of the next decade," the report said.

(Oil-Qaeda - The Indictment, see also IPCC Report #5). Regular readers will remember the Dredd Blog series Etiology of Social Dementia, 9/18/09, through Etiology of Social Dementia - 10, 9/5/13, wherein we isolate significant social dementia to government and business propaganda sources.

(Terrorism We Can Believe In? - 3). It is like the Presstitutes of McTell News freak out forever if a hundred or so are killed, but when millions are killed it is merely a statistic.

The terrorists and everybody else are well aware of this, and have been well aware of it since before dirt.

Take Stalin's observation in context for example:

This is another case that gives credence to the observational ability of the dark hearted one, who said:

"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."

(Joseph Stalin). That statement is beyond the grasp of many because there is a dearth of understanding about our animal / mammalian subconscious dynamics:

That's what Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin allegedly once said to U.S. ambassador Averill Harriman. And Stalin was an expert on the topic since his regime killed as many 43 million people. It turns out that the mustachioed murderer may have been expressing an acute insight into human psychology. Earlier this week, the Washington Post's always interesting Department of Human Behavior columnist Shankar Vedantam reported on the research of University of Oregon professor Paul Slovic who looked at how people respond to humanitarian tragedies. As Vedantam explains:

In a rational world, we should care twice as much about a tragedy affecting 100 people as about one affecting 50. We ought to care 80,000 times as much when a tragedy involves 4 million lives rather than 50. But Slovic has proved in experiments that this is not how the mind works.

When a tragedy claims many lives, we often care less than if a tragedy claims only a few lives. When there are many victims, we find it easier to look the other way.
...
Slovic has also shown that the amount of compassion humans feel can diminish as the number of victims increases: In an experiment in Israel, Slovic asked volunteers whether they would help raise $300,000 to save eight children who were dying of cancer. Those in another group were told only about one child with cancer and asked how much they were willing to donate to save the life of that child. Slovic found that people were willing to give more money to save one life than to save eight.

"When we trust our feelings in these cases, we are led down the path of turning our backs on the suffering of many people," Slovic said. "Even though we don't think of ourselves as uncaring, if we trust our moral intuition, it is not designed by evolution to respond accurately to these types of situations of mass tragedy."

(Reason, emphasis added). Another application of the concept is the reaction to the death of one lion, Cecil, compared with the relative indifference to the extinction of all lions currently being brought on by the use of fossil fuels.

(Greenland & Antarctica Invade The United States - 4). I guess the only thing to do is stay safe, don't catch Obola (Alzheimer's is ok though).

Being lost in space is a drag (You Are Here).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.