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EA-3167yesterday at 8:10 PM1 replyview on HN

Mad stuff, especially when he reached the “top problems in school” graphic. Does the author really think that kids weren’t doing terrible things back then? It just wasn’t dealt with, victims were blamed, problems ignored.

It’s like racism around the world, the countries that least acknowledge it as a problem are the biggest offenders.


Replies

SpecialistKyesterday at 8:30 PM

I'm pretty sure the point of the graphic was literally "look, people said the same thing a generation ago about the generation before!"

In fact, the sentences around the graphic reinforce this reading:

> in the 80s, people were complaining that things had gone to hell. Here’s a popular list (the facts are totally fabricated, by the way) distributed at the time

> None of this means that the worriers are mistaken or that we are in the grip of a moral panic (though I might make this argument in another post). But it does suggest that the popularity of despair can’t be taken as good evidence that this despair is warranted.