Originally Posted by
I-Like-To-Bike
Yes. The hysterical bicycling=death message campaign has had the same overall negative effect as the hysterical children missing milk carton campaign: scant benefit, big loss on healthy childhood and raising independent children.
Uh oh. Isn't you and me agreeing on something one of the signs of the apocalypse?
The hysterical approach is a great way to raise money and fire up a few highly-committed supporters, so it often gets adopted by activists in all sorts of policy areas with little thought as to what the side effects of it are.
Until this decade, there were several groups that could reliably make tons of money screaming about the impending "catastrophe" of same-sex marriage. Sort of the flip-side of this, their "catastrophe" came true, but when the world didn't end (literally), they lost their ability to raise a panic and money from their target donors.