very good response :ermm: I mean everything changes, the world, countries - but a fact is that DR has not changed to the better since I have been here. I do not know about ten years since I have only been here 8.
My last post got deleted, maybe I got a little upset when there is a poll about "DR1 Paranoia" 1 day after a man got killed and his wife raped in Procab Cabarete - a "gated" community. What do you think we talk about, that actually live here? Is that paranoia?
DR - still more pros than cons.
Perception and
reality are not always mutually inclusive.
You have to know what
some people are actually saying to understand them.
Has things gotten worst in the past 8 years? No, not really.
Do people perceive it to be getting worst? Yes.
Why? Fallacious reasonings.
How were things in 1998? Peachy. Really, it was peachy. No bars on windows, few worries. People used to talk about why the DR, with such inequality, was so safe. It didn't made sense.
How were things in 2000? Peachy still, but there were tale tale signs that something was not right.
How were things in the 2001-2005 period? Not good at all. Crime skyrokected to levels never seen before, everyone feared for their life, and the perception the newspaper created actually
coincided with the data.
How have things been since 2006? Many people are still caught in that perception created in the crime bubble in the early part of this decade, however crime has gone down significantly all over the country. Newspapers are still creating the same perception as before, but it doesn't coincide with the data; which means that they simply found a new way of circulating greater numbers of papers. What business is going to kill (no pun) a money making tactic?
Is crime today as it was in 1998? No, today its still much more dangerous than in 1998.
Was crime in 2005 as it was in 1998? No, crime was a lot worst.
Is crime today as it was in 2005? No, its actually a lot better.
Now, if you know that tiny bit of information, you will know what some people are saying and what others are attempting to say.
All the appeals to fallacious reasoning (ie. appealing to authority, appealing to belief, hasty generalizations, poisoning the well, misleading vividness, so on and so forth) not withstanding.
It goes without saying that the people that lived when the DR has almost no serious crime, to them the DR is still a very dangerous place. The comparisons between now and then are too great and obvious. But, some people know how to reason well and know that everything is relative and while things may still be worst than they were 20 years ago, in the last few years things have improved a lot. So much so that its better than 4 years ago.
That some people still have their feathers ruffed at the five or six incidents the papers write about everyday (how low does crime has to be in a country of 10 million people for newspapers to have a hard time finding five or six crimes?); that's a personal problem, not societal.
Capice?
-NALs
aranoid::ermm::tired:
