zlacker

>>obilgi+(OP)
A friend lives in Seattle and texted me today about his visit last night:

> I was there last night and it's such a cool pseudo utopian place

> The media coverage of it is WILD

> People on the internet are convinced it's protected by armed guards and people are dying of hunger and instead its...like a music festival campground

> There are speakers, musicians, art walls. I took a group pic for a bunch of black guys last night and they were so proud of what was built because they felt like they fought for it, which in a sense, they did.

>>conroy+fz1
Seattle has 600,000 people. In a given year there are 30 murders and 300 rapes. One can collect 175,200,000 amateur camera footage of 'an hour in the life of the average Seattle-ite' until one encounters an hour with a murder, or 17,520,0000 such peaceful one hour videos until one captures a rape on camera.

Does the presence of overwhelmingly peaceful footage of average people going by their average days make Seattle at large an Utopia with no crime? Is that footage in itself sufficient evidence to abolish the police and the court system, because, look, there are 17,520,000 hours of peaceful footage before something terrible happens to someone?

It is incredibly difficult to build an accurate image of a large scale group of people judging by a few hours of direct experience. 1000 harder if through footage selected by people with their own agendas. Media coverage, especially audio-visual coverage, is wild because media coverage is simply an inappropriate way to depict such phenomena.