You do understand, it's Craigslist's fault, right?
No, you can't blame the murdering sociopath who killed that girl in Savage, MN who was looking for a babysitting job that did not exist. He was not to blame for the fact that his intent was to lie to get sex. Why he killed her? Irrelevant. it's Craigslist's fault for allowing him to be able to do this.
Then the second shoe dropped. We are a more psychotic as a culture. There are more and more crazies out there every day that want to be the next H.H. Holmes or Jeffrey Dahmer, and we must make sure to spot them before they can even intend to do the rest of us sane citizens harm. Therefore, we must shut down Craigslist and other information exchange systems in the public venue. They just are not able to handle themselves safely and must be protected.
Yes and no.
Yes, there are more crazies out there. This is just a natural aspect of a larger population. I doubt highly the proportion of crazy to sane has dramatically increased. We know of such things because of two things: We are more aware thanks to technology and it is easier to do crazy things because we have become enabled by technology to do more with our lives. Productivity has reached the nutty dangerous fringe.
Imagine if you will, Charles Manson with a blog in which to spread his diseased dogma. Frightening, isn't it? Marshall Applewhite and the Heaven's Gate Cult had a website trying to convert those out there to join them behind the Schumaker-Levy comet where the UFO was going to take them away. It is fortunate that less than 100 died with that cult. Without a webpage, would the Heavens Gate cult have even existed or would it have just become like the manson family of only a dozen or so real actors in the insanity that followed? The bar was lowered for crazy evangelism between the 1970's and the 1990's, and even moreso nearly ten years later.
Convenience and productivity has enabled people to do things for good or evil much easier than they had been able to in the past. Cellphones, the Internet, Blackberries, Digital TV and LED Billboards have all paved the way to a higher quality of life and information consumption leading to better choices and options. This does not make these tools evil, it makes the people using them to do horrible things all the worse and prolific in their acts.
Evil sometimes is casual because we do not have a personal connection and is created out of ignorance or blatant stupidity. Lacking relationships to even the idea of a shared reality is incredibly dangerous. We don't see the other person as even real. We don't consider their families, there right to exist or the consequences of the events.
Often the excuse for evil is it was an accident or they had different intentions. We, as a culture, have created a whole industry of soft sciences and even softer hearts and minds to forgive and understand why evil is as evil does. Ultimate, all this does is grease the skids for evil to continue on it's way. It is touted that we must understand why evil does things. No. This is not required to fight evil. What needs to be done, is recognize what is not right and act against it. Understand after victory.
You may have heard this quote:
"All evil needs to succeed is for good men to sit back and do nothing."It may even sound silly in it's simplicity, but it's amazing how every day, we all sit back and do nothing with casual evil. It may be due to apathy, or fear, or the training society foisted on us to stand by and do nothing till it directly affects us. By then, usually, it's too late. Things have spun out of control or have escalated to unstoppable proportions and now the only course of action is damage control. As a society, we need to wake up to the fact that evil has been assaulting good for years unchallenged. It is time to realize that evil will not stop till it is made to stop. And it has grown cunning too.
Yes, evil now has justifications based in twisted logic and manipulative emotion. It has counsellors, lawyers, treatment programs, arbiters, 401c political action committees, lobbyists and politicians lined up to protect it when the right thing needs to be done to stop it. Now those trying to do the right thing are being made the aggressor. The concept of doing the right thing has been turned on it's head and good is evil and evil is good. Once evil has become ensconsed as authority, it can operate with the respectability of being right, even when it is not, and use the oppressive tools that should have been used against it years before, but were not thanks to it's chief defenses of pity and unwise mercy.
How does this relate to lowering the bar? It is easier to do things, even bad things. Intellectual theft is incredibly easy in the information age. You have Identity fraud as well that is bilking millions of people out of billions of dollars. Cyber terrorism takes only a flaw in a program's code and someone's idle willingness to exploit it for fun and profit. A child molestor can troll for under aged children to prey upon, and that sexually frustrated loner who never quite had people skills to function in society can lure a woman to her death based on the premise of a job that doesn't exist. These people would have been hard pressed to do many of these crimes 20 years ago because the level of conveinence wasn't there, thanks to technology and the internet. They may never have committed those crimes either because the bar was too high, making the risk too great or even the technology did not exist.
But the desire was in their heart unsated... till the bar was lowered.
mdb
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