Re: Bicycle outing with happy ending

On 5/22/2025 12:17 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

On 5/21/2025 9:21 PM, AMuzi wrote:

On 5/21/2025 6:12 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

On 5/21/2025 4:41 PM, AMuzi wrote:

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But the public reaction to several well publicized instances of institutional abuse of mentally ill spurred politicians to act, which was widely supported at the time.  Those were horrible, and real, but not representative.
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The unintended consequences now punish the citizenry generally more than the inmates before 1963.

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And that should be a lesson in why general public policy should not be driven by extreme outlier cases.
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OK, what's an outlier and what's not?
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Emmett Till?

 The murder of Emmett Till was not an outlier, which was the main point of the publicity it generated.
 Emmett Till's murder was an example, bringing to public consciousness a widespread practice of lynchings and general oppression of black people in the deep south.
 Sometimes one incident can call attention to a big problem, but that doesn't make the incident an outlier, except perhaps in its press-worthiness.
 

Not  unique, but the total is much less than most people think:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1175147/lynching-by-race-state-and-race/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/map-shows-over-a-century-of-documented-lynchings-in-united-states-180961877/
Roughly 86 per year.
Ohio, for example 10 white, 16 black.
Emmet Till's murder was significant in many ways and an oultier in the sense that most received no publicity whatsoever.
There's nothing good to say about that, but Emmett Till's death was a significant event toward passage of Mr Eisenhower's 1957 Civil Rights Act.
As always, one man's crucial incident is another's meaningless trivia.
p.s. The first USA lynching was of a group of Italians in New Orleans. No one talked about 'civil rights' in that context, and yet they did die at the end of a rope.
--
Andrew Muzi
am@yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971