backwoodsnotes

Saturday, April 16, 2022

Credit and blame

On the upside, ministers of police get to champion Police successes (despite having little little influence on their occurrence or outcome). A large drug bust, a successful operation. ‘Yay team!’

But that is a scant reward for getting blamed for any ‘failures’. With a typically bonkers understanding of cause and effect, the public (and MPs) often equate the existence of crime with police failure, which is like blaming heart attacks on cardiologists. But we are human and apophenia is what we do. There is always plenty of crime and so always plenty of blame.

This constant underlying public desire to place blame for crime is one reason that ‘crime’, ‘justice’, ‘law and order’, ‘victim’s rights’, ‘harsher sentencing’ and similar are regular political themes.

Misattributing the causes of crime is akin to blaming epidemics on governments or physicians trying to avert them. We most look for someone to blame for the things that scare us. The scarier the thing, the more powerful we presume the cause.

its the kiwi way mate!

Poto Williams is doing a great job but nationals mp mark mitchell with the collusion of the meedja are trying to do a hatchet job on Poto.

no dice.

Apophenia: In psychology, the perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things. Apophenia can be a normal phenomenon or an abnormal one, as in paranoid schizophrenia when the patient sees ominous patterns where there are none.

the3 meedja and mitchell are trying every trick in the book