Pickleball was invented in Washington too. Probably another side effect of lead exposure and breathing in leaded gasoline fumes. Or at least, that's what tennis players like to believe :)
Very much so, and even though the article answers its own question with a no, they know many people will read the headline and only remember the link, and rumour will spread.
I can’t believe we’re _still_ allowing headlines like this in this day and age. I might even report it, because even though technically speaking the article content doesn’t spread misinformation, the title does.
Do you think semi-legal weed made the conspiracy / "it's 4d chess" / bitcoin (don't trust the financial system) demographic larger? A lot of this is stuff people who smoked a lot would talk about back in college and it's interesting it went mainstream as the position on those drugs changed. You'd also expect opioid to create a more depressed lethargic population. Would be cool to see a study of substance use change vs political change...
Tetraethyllead was introduced into gasoline in 1922, and lasted about 70 years. The effect would have been greater after WW2 due to there were more cars and a larger population with greater desire for mobility and closer proximity to cars.
During the Depression there were fewer cars for economic reasons, and during WW2 fewer for reasons of rationing and recycling, raw material went to the war effort.
Lead may not have had as strong of an effect on adults as it did on developing brains. Post-war timelines fit for baby boomers, as they would be in young adulthood at the peak of these crimes.
I can't remember the last time I went out of my way to look at who authored something because I disliked it on a visceral level.
The writing here goes from too much punctuation to grad students book review to quasi political rant. And the criticism might be valid but I simply can't get past the horrid delivery.
Prelapsarian... yay I learned a new word. It did not help with the delivery of the conclusion.
Perhaps but I would argue that the most likely reason is genetics plus traumatic childhood. Manson had traumatic childhood; living on the streets, committing crime and spending half of his life in prison and in state institutions. When you add drugs and hippie flower power music scene to that you get Manson.
Bundy also had traumatic childhood not knowing who his real father is and believing his mother is his older sister while being raised by his grandparents. He was violent sex addict always craving for more and more. Imo his genetics played the key part in his deviant violent behavior.
I'd be careful about associating a genetic cause with high-level behaviors. I don't have a good argument either way, but it seems to come close to a political third rail where you can ascribe patterns of behavior to genetically defined(-ish) groups like "race".
I’ve watched movies on and read about countless serial killers. Almost always they came from horrible families, with abuse, neglect, different types of punishment. Also it seems there never is any type of psychological follow up of them as kids when they started to act “weird”. So most are just forgotten people who were never looked at mentally. At least I the 70s, I don’t know today.
I think there a couple cases where that’s not true but rare exceptions.
Did you read the article or are you just responding to the headline? The article argues that no lead probably didn’t matter. I agree that the headline is terrible because - as you’ve shown - the headline gets taken as the fact despite the question mark at the end… but we should still be better than this.
I saw a court case where a mom testified against her adult child and said she drank while she was pregnant, resulting in undermining all of the child defendants decision making process resulting in the defendant’s conviction
To be honest this felt like one of those “too poor for appeal’s court” things
But a ridiculous way of treating a defendant
Imagine if we could tell someone had a mental alteration
I think it’s safe to say the boomers were exposed to lead the most out of anyone especially if they grew up in heavy traffic areas. That said, that’s no excuse since the Romans were probably exposed at a significantly higher rate and they churned out some ingenious projects. Or was lead introduced to Rome toward tail end?
Ancient Rome wasn’t exactly known to be a land of peaceful tranquility. We also don’t necessarily know alot about daily life.
Also, Romans were aware of the toxicity of lead, and we don’t really know if or how that knowledge was applied. Lead pipes aren’t necessarily a problem depending on the water chemistry. The Flint issue was a direct result of criminally negligent action.
I'd love to believe that, because it means that population will be dying out. But I'm afraid there's a lot more broad support than just boomers. The manosphere certainly seems to breed a lot of angry young men, convinced that the root of their problems is liberalism.
I’d be careful reducing complex sociopolitical movements to a single environmental factor like lead.
Movements like that (MAGA) come from a mix of things. The fact that younger people are picking it up too shows it is still alive and being fed by other forces (and not lead)
It could be (and IMHO likely is) multi-causal, with several contributing factors, including lack of social welfare (leading to people with rough childhoods), gun availability and also lead exposure in childhood.
The question at hand is how to weight the last factor. IMHO it's not zero, but I don't know enough to say just how much.
Why are you even arguing like the article made a point about lead? The headline might sound that way but the article came to the conclusion that lead wasn’t likely.
Wasn't a substantial amount of lead used to solder tinned food for like 150 years? That's like two generations where lead leeched into foods. Was there a bump in serial killers from 1810's onward?
The clincher is that competing hypotheses are almost exclusively concerned with phenomena in the U.S. and fall apart as explanations for the same cresting and subsidence of the crime wave in other countries, or even simply in other cities in the U.S. One city does broken-windows policing. Another doesn't. Both experience the same decline in the murder rate.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 46.8 ms ] threadI can’t believe we’re _still_ allowing headlines like this in this day and age. I might even report it, because even though technically speaking the article content doesn’t spread misinformation, the title does.
During the Depression there were fewer cars for economic reasons, and during WW2 fewer for reasons of rationing and recycling, raw material went to the war effort.
The writing here goes from too much punctuation to grad students book review to quasi political rant. And the criticism might be valid but I simply can't get past the horrid delivery.
Prelapsarian... yay I learned a new word. It did not help with the delivery of the conclusion.
I thought you were joking. ... After a while, I started expecting a comma after each and every word.
Crime has been dropping for a long time, and it isn’t because of increased professionalism and effectiveness of police or better governance.
Bundy also had traumatic childhood not knowing who his real father is and believing his mother is his older sister while being raised by his grandparents. He was violent sex addict always craving for more and more. Imo his genetics played the key part in his deviant violent behavior.
I think there a couple cases where that’s not true but rare exceptions.
To be honest this felt like one of those “too poor for appeal’s court” things
But a ridiculous way of treating a defendant
Imagine if we could tell someone had a mental alteration
How could that even be relevant to a criminal case?
https://salemwitchmuseum.com/2023/05/17/debunking-the-moldy-...
Also, Romans were aware of the toxicity of lead, and we don’t really know if or how that knowledge was applied. Lead pipes aren’t necessarily a problem depending on the water chemistry. The Flint issue was a direct result of criminally negligent action.
Maybe lead and social media.
Movements like that (MAGA) come from a mix of things. The fact that younger people are picking it up too shows it is still alive and being fed by other forces (and not lead)
We do not have the serial killers of the US level by far.
I think culture is key.
It could be (and IMHO likely is) multi-causal, with several contributing factors, including lack of social welfare (leading to people with rough childhoods), gun availability and also lead exposure in childhood.
The question at hand is how to weight the last factor. IMHO it's not zero, but I don't know enough to say just how much.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/02/violent-crime...
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
And, addressing the meta-analysis the New Yorker author places so much weight on:
https://jabberwocking.com/yet-another-look-at-that-lead-crim...
The clincher is that competing hypotheses are almost exclusively concerned with phenomena in the U.S. and fall apart as explanations for the same cresting and subsidence of the crime wave in other countries, or even simply in other cities in the U.S. One city does broken-windows policing. Another doesn't. Both experience the same decline in the murder rate.