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#70 The Culture Of Fear
July 30, 2010 · 4 Comments
We’re joined by sociologist and author Barry Glassner. For ten years, his book The Culture Of Fear has shed light on the way that cultural anxiety is manufactured to drive media ratings and win votes for politicians. The book has recently been updated to cover the trends of the last decade, and Glassner will explain why we’re still afraid of all the wrong things.
And Greg Laden is back with Everything You Know is Sort of Wrong. This time, is it true that poor people have more babies than the wealthy?
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If you ever fly Southwest Airlines, you know that the flight attendants frequently tell jokes, threaten to throw noisy children out of the plane, or do silly things like sing some of the standard announcements. About a month after 9-11, a prominent national newspaper criticized SW for this practice. The author claimed that he had several friends die in the terror attack, and that SW was making flying unsafe. Have you seen this in other areas, and what are your comments?
by Naomi Baker · on July 27, 2010 at 7:46 am
It’s strange that there seems to be a cultural difference here. Do North Americans think that people have more children cos they are poor. I have always thought it was the other way around : People are poor cos they have too many children ..surely when you have 0 children and only one breadwinner then the family will almost certainly be poor ?
by Stew Green · on September 14, 2010 at 12:38 am
sorry typo .. 10 not 0
..surely when you have 10 children and only one breadwinner then the family will almost certainly be poor ?
by Stew Green · on September 14, 2010 at 12:40 am
Stew: Thanks for the question.
There certainly are cultural aspects to this. For instance, the zero baby + bread winner thing is strictly western. If you brought that up to most people in the world they would have a lot of questions. Which still applies despite your typo.
Anyway, yes, the falsehoods, generally, are caucaso-occidental-hetero-normative. Which does not mean that there are not falsehoods elsewhere, but does mean that they were conceived originally for a specific purpose:
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/08/the_falsehoods.php
by Greg Laden · on September 14, 2010 at 6:21 am