Saturday 30 August 2014

How Angry Do News Stories Really Make Us?



The news in Britain at the moment is full of a big scandal about white girls in northern towns being abused by gangs of Pakistani men.  The details are extremely unpleasant.  This comes hot on the heels of similar scandals about a politician and a rather large group of light entertainers.  I don't think any one has any statistics,  but at first glance given the relative sizes of those groups the numbers of culprits might well be in roughly the same proportion.  So it looks like there are a small but significant number of abusive men in any large enough grouping.  Politicians, performers and Pakistanis are sufficiently different to each other in culture that it looks like this is a feature of men in general rather than any particular type of man.