"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years: Mr. Luce's mag does satanism, porn, crack, Pokemon, and more! (from inimitable Reason Magazine)
"Since the British sociologist Stanley Cohen defined the moral panic phenomenon in the early 1970s as hysterical overreactions to imagined threats to social order, no publication has done a better (by which we mean worse) job of scaring the crap out of post-baby boomer America than Time...
Time was right about the increase in production and availability of pornography in the 1970s, it was just wrong about the effects. Two years after this cover appeared, the number of reported rapes in the U.S. began a 30-year free-fall, a period over which pornography became increasingly easier to obtain. Today, porn is more abundant and ubiquitous than ever, while incidence of rape in the U.S. is at its lowest rate since the government started keeping statistics...
A vanishingly small number of people actually die of cocaine overdoses (just 563 in 1983, out of tens of millions of users), yet still refers to the drug as a "taker of lives."...
As Reason's Jacob Sullum explains in his book Saying Yes, studies show that the vast majority of crack users never went on to become addicts. One 1994 survey, for example, showed that 93 percent of respondents who had admitted to trying crack weren't using the allegedly instantaneously addictive drug as much as once a month when the survey was taken. Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman even theorzied in the Wall Street Journal that it's actually the prohibition of cocaine that gave us drugs like crack, likening the intoxicant to the bathtub gin that soaked the black market during alcohol prohibition...
Citing gangsta rap and heavy metal lyrics, raunchy comedians, and radio shock jocks, Time worries that American pop culture has grown too vulgar... a woman who says that after sitting through a comedy routine by Andrew "Dice" Clay, "she felt like a Jew at the 1934 Nuremberg rally."...
Since the Time article ran in 1990, nearly every measurable social indicator has been moving in the right direction, from youth crime to sex crime to teen pregnancy. America has largely grown more tolerant, too, even as ethnic, sexist, and homophobic jokes are widely available on iTunes, the Internet, and basic cable...
"At any moment, the same kids listening to...'Baby One More Time' are just a few keystrokes away from Pandora's hard drive—from the appalling filth, unspeakable hatred and frightening prescriptions for homicidal mayhem" that plague the Internet...
The “principal researcher” for the study that inspired Time's cover was actually an undergraduate, and experts began picking the study apart the moment the issue hit newsstands...
The creepy-but-wired pedophile who substitutes Internet chat rooms for the van and a puppy is largely a myth. Moreover, most kids who download pornography online, the study notes, aren't innocently typing otherwise-innocuous phrases into search engines... Nor does giving out personal information online seem to make kids any more susceptible to predation...
Documenting the Pokemon “controversy,” or Pokemania, this Time cover story breathlessly warns that children are printing counterfeit cards, cheating friends and classmates, and even stabbing one another over Pokemon trading disputes. Time doesn’t dwell too long on any substantive data (there isn't any) that might show what sort of sustained violence and mayhem would make Pokemon an “addiction" (Time's word). Instead, it quickly cuts to what the authors see as the real dark heart of the Pokemon phenomenon: crass capitalism! Time works up a lather over the over-saturation of cuddly consumerism, calling Pokemon a “pestilential Ponzi scheme—complete with a fold-out graphic explaining why."...
Near the end of the U.S. craze—and at the beginning of the U.K.’s—the BBC ran a slightly tongue-in-cheek article about Pokemon that found the fad to be a good lesson in economics, teaching children the theories of speculation, supply and demand, exchange rates, and bubble bursting. But one man's good lesson in economics is apparently another's lesson in predatory cunning and capitalist thuggery...
Time's short, two-page story [on the "Columbine Effect"] is almost incoherent... “for students aged 12 to 18, overall school crime…decreased by nearly a third to 101 school-related crimes per 1,000 students in 1998, compared to 144 crimes per 1,000 in 1992... Thanks in part to scare stories like this one, dim-witted legislatures and school boards across the country enacted "zero tolerance" policies that led to kids getting arrested and suspended for drawing pictures, or for writing creative fiction about zombies...
While Americans have been getting fatter for 25 years, we still set new life expectancy records each year, and deaths from heart disease, cancer, and stroke have all fallen dramatically over that period. This is of course mostly due to advances in medical science. But obesity isn't exactly bringing on a public health calamity, either. As for medical costs, a 2008 Dutch study suggests what would seem to be intuitive: People who live longer tend to incur more lifetime medical expenses. Meaning that if obesity does modestly shorten lifespans, it does so at a savings to taxpayer-funded programs like Medicare and Medicaid."
