On a recent trip to bing.com, this article popped up. So I read it. Pretty cut and dry: two twenty-something girls go to Rome, try to carve their initials into the Colosseum, get busted. Not really that exciting.
What is interesting is the torrent of outrage in the comments. And I don't just mean vanilla outrage like "idiots, how could they!". The comments went way further. By my approximate assessments, here are the major categories:
Throw them in jail!
In this category were variants including jail times up to 2 years, fines up to $10k in addition to restitution costs, months of community service cleaning Rome, and banishment from Italy. While mostly excessive, at least these are in the realm of feasibility. However, a non-trivial number of commenters piled it on with options like:
These kids these days!
A giant portion of comments bemoaned the state of America's youth. Additional variants branched into "California", "libtard", "sense of entitlement", etc commentary. However, the article itself calls out that per 6 million visitors over the course of the last year, only 5 similar incidents occurred (1 each were by American, Canadian, Brazilian, Russian and Australian). So not only is this exclusively an American problem, it's pretty easy to argue that it's not a problem at all. If only about 1 in a million people does something that, in the end, amounts to just poor judgment (in the sense that it's not, for example, blatantly hurting another person), we're doing pretty well.
No respect!
This is similar to the kids these days set, really, but I'm focusing it more on the idea that kids are raised badly by their parents.
Permanent black mark!
These include, in no particular order: revoking passports, marking passports as "defacers of other cultures", marking all social media with "I'm a defacer" and so on.
What is particularly fun ("sad") for me to see is how all the self-proclaimed wise/enlightened elders a) advocate for grossly disproportionate or downright non-sensical punishments, b) complain about the sad state of affairs that leads to the absolutely vast majority of visitors doing no wrong, and c) then cast the stone at, ultimately, their peers. And of course, I suspect if any of these people were assigned such a permanent black mark they'd be outraged at the violation of their personal liberties.
This behavior is understandable in that most people believe the world is getting worse.
Lucky for us, that's just not true.
What is interesting is the torrent of outrage in the comments. And I don't just mean vanilla outrage like "idiots, how could they!". The comments went way further. By my approximate assessments, here are the major categories:
Throw them in jail!
In this category were variants including jail times up to 2 years, fines up to $10k in addition to restitution costs, months of community service cleaning Rome, and banishment from Italy. While mostly excessive, at least these are in the realm of feasibility. However, a non-trivial number of commenters piled it on with options like:
- send them to Singapore for a caning
- send them to a Turkish prison
- permanently revoke their passports
These kids these days!
A giant portion of comments bemoaned the state of America's youth. Additional variants branched into "California", "libtard", "sense of entitlement", etc commentary. However, the article itself calls out that per 6 million visitors over the course of the last year, only 5 similar incidents occurred (1 each were by American, Canadian, Brazilian, Russian and Australian). So not only is this exclusively an American problem, it's pretty easy to argue that it's not a problem at all. If only about 1 in a million people does something that, in the end, amounts to just poor judgment (in the sense that it's not, for example, blatantly hurting another person), we're doing pretty well.
No respect!
This is similar to the kids these days set, really, but I'm focusing it more on the idea that kids are raised badly by their parents.
Permanent black mark!
These include, in no particular order: revoking passports, marking passports as "defacers of other cultures", marking all social media with "I'm a defacer" and so on.
What is particularly fun ("sad") for me to see is how all the self-proclaimed wise/enlightened elders a) advocate for grossly disproportionate or downright non-sensical punishments, b) complain about the sad state of affairs that leads to the absolutely vast majority of visitors doing no wrong, and c) then cast the stone at, ultimately, their peers. And of course, I suspect if any of these people were assigned such a permanent black mark they'd be outraged at the violation of their personal liberties.
This behavior is understandable in that most people believe the world is getting worse.
Lucky for us, that's just not true.
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