[lbo-talk] cell phone hell

[Max Sawicky]

I'd take issue, in the following sense:  "perfect safety" is heavily
colored, including by ideology, by attitudes about different kinds of
risks.  Going by objective probabilities, we shouldn't care about
terrorism and we should care about smoking and driving.  I'd say the
left or liberals have their own phobias (fear of less gun control),
while the right has theirs (partial birth abortion).

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 7:15 PM, Eubulides <paraconsistent at comcast.net> wrote:
> On 1/12/2010 1:05 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>> Somehow a drive for perfect safety has become a fairly important part of
>> culture -- e.g., the insistence currently that no risk from terrorism is
>> acceptable. The War on Crime may have been the first move in developing
>> this obsession. Someone ought (if it hasn't bee done) do a study in
>> depth of its sources and development. I believe there has been science
>> fiction re worlds in which evryone crouches in their own nest. And isn't
>> the libertarian terror of government a related obsession?
>>
>> Carrol
>
> ===============
>
> The control freaks are being driven by the invisible hand.
>
> Anxieties have been thoroughly commodified in the US; I'm guessing it has
> some deep connectivity to the pessimism/optimism issue with the xtian
> religion as an emotional filter on large numbers of people living there.
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>