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I don't understand why this is getting down voted. It's a perfectly sensible comment. If a moral panic is being propagated and promoted by an organised group with an agenda against something innocuous, who is responsible for the panic?

I don't really mind the title, nobody's demanding that it be revised and it's clear what is meant, but I think it's reasonable to point out where the responsibility lies.




> who is responsible for the panic?

Definitely the overreacting organised group, but also a large amount of blame falls on the media helping them promote their overreactions to the masses


You really need the media to have a moral panic, because without them you can't get the feedback loop going. I deliberately draw analogy to the audio phenomenon here. No matter how much I scream and yell, even in front of a crowd of people, I can't create a feedback loop without a microphone.

The reason why the moral panics in the last couple of years have not been from the religious right isn't so much because they've particularly changed, but because the media isn't willing to push those anymore, and the media on the right just isn't large enough right now to sustain their own. (Give it another three or four years at current pace, though.)


HN doesn't really seem to appreciate humor or sarcasm very much.


My reply was intended to be perfectly serious. It really was not Dungeons and Dragons triggering anything, and the headline is just wrong.


I think your point is valid and the way you phrased it amusing. I would never downvote it.

That said, the position is not wholly different from "laws are the leading cause of crime" or "the ebola outbreak did not cause people to panic - it was their desire to live and be healthy".


> "laws are the leading cause of crime"

But that's an interesting analogy. Why are people who take certain drugs "criminals"? Because we passed laws against it.

Some laws have a legitimate moral basis, others don't -- and I guess the same is true about moral panics.


How about "Sexy clothes incite rape"?


Interesting. I don't think it's quite the same thing.

The first three statements all roughly take the form "if only you would stop regarding X as Y, then you would stop observing Y when X happens".

"Just stop regarding the content of D&D as morally corrupting, and then you will not need to panic when you find your children playing it."

"Just stop considering robbery to be illegal, and then crime rates will plummet."

"Just stop wanting to be healthy and then you won't mind the ebola outbreaks when they occur."

By contrast, "Stop dressing so sexy and then noone will rape you anymore" is not a suggestion that you can make a problem go away simply by ceasing to regard it as a problem. It may be an absurd attempt to transfer blame by stripping the rapists of their moral agency, but it proposes to solve a problem in the world by taking a physical action in the world.


Which I appreciate mostly, it can be distracting and is often puerile, but if you're also making a valid point I think humour is fine.




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