Wednesday, 13th December, 2006

Well, how clever am I? I've managed to add two links to my blog, over on the right there, and they both work - yippee! The first is Anxiety Culture which contains reassuring information to offset the general atmosphere of fear being created by governments, aided and abetted by the scare-mongering mainstream media. There are useful articles on how to avoid responsibilities, why work is bad for us, why it is one's duty to phone in sick and to eat five bars of chocolate a day and how to think bad things and be unreasonably happy. Great stuff.

There is also a nice description of the Misleading Vividness fallacy:

"Politicians and media seem hypnotised by the Misleading Vividness fallacy – the belief that the occurrence of a particularly vivid event (eg a terrorist bombing) makes such events more likely, despite statistical evidence indicating otherwise".

This immediately reminded me of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, after which the Australian government took the opportunity to disarm the population and spent half a billion dollars buying back hundreds of thousands of guns from the general public. Ten years on, a study in October reported that this had had no effect at all on gun homicide deaths, which had been on the decline before 1996 anyway. Who'd have thought?

Everything they told you is wrong. Browse Anxiety Culture and be comforted.

The Apostrophe Protection Society simply gives clear instructions on when and when not to use an apostrophe. Best not to put anything in the Comments section until you've studied it - you know what a pedant I am.

..........

P.S. Well, what a coincidence - just read this headline in the Sydney Morning Herald: "Gun deaths in rapid decline since buyback" followed by a first paragraph: "The risk of dying by gunshot has dropped dramatically since the gun buyback scheme was introduced after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, a new report says". This seemed in stark contrast to the October report until one reads on to discover that it is suicides by gunshot which have dropped, not homicides, and in fact neither report found any significant difference in the rate of decline in gun homicide before and after the gun buyback.

I did a quick google and discovered that suicides in young men by gunshot had been in decline since 1988 anyway and hanging had taken precedence as the preferred form of suicide. But notice how the newspaper's headline would lead us to believe that we were all safer from being killed by gunshot because of the government's speedy action. [ROTFLMAO]