I recently read a book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser, and by the end I was thinking she was making exactly this kind of error. Her thesis is that - in simple/broad terms - pollution, particularly lead-based pollution, was the reason we saw such a huge spike in serial killers during the period of the '60s to the ‘80s. She looked at serial killers’ lives, where they grew up, and in the cases she focused on (I would assume the much larger cohort of such killers she didn’t mention simply didn’t grow up near lead-farting factories and so didn’t fit the thesis) she was able to find that they were likely exposed to these pollutants during their development. She doesn’t explain, or even mention, how the proven psychological effects of such pollution (uncontrollable anger and violent outbursts) could translate into the highly specific and often extremely meticulous and well-planned modus operandi typical of serial killing. She lists the symptoms of the kind of lead toxicity that affects people, which are all things like anger, delusions, depression, personality changes, etc., but never shows an example of such a person being a serial killer. They might well kill someone, but it’ll be in a fit of rage or the grips of a delusion, and they’ll be caught immediately because they don’t have the wherewithal to plan or cover up the killing, because they’re fucking brain damaged.
She doesn’t mention that serial killing as a concept is relatively recent, and that our detection of serial killings has therefore improved immeasurably over the decades, leading to more identifications of them during the Ted Bundy era (kinda the same thing as “there was no autism when I was a kid, but now everyone has it, must be all the vaccines”). And the final straw for me was when she tried to link the existence of the Bloods and the Crips gangs to the same kind of pollution 🤦 She makes it seem that there’s no violence possible in human nature without toxic chemicals damaging people’s brains first.
Would have been a much more useful and interesting book without the serial killers even being mentioned, to be honest. The criminality of factory owners she discusses, and their knowing disregard for the lives and safety of their workers and local citizens, is grotesque enough on its own, arguably worse - or at least as bad as - Ted Bundy’s crimes. And they’re crimes far less discussed than those of someone like Bundy. Oh well.
Here is a website that finds them at random:
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
I recently read a book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser, and by the end I was thinking she was making exactly this kind of error. Her thesis is that - in simple/broad terms - pollution, particularly lead-based pollution, was the reason we saw such a huge spike in serial killers during the period of the '60s to the ‘80s. She looked at serial killers’ lives, where they grew up, and in the cases she focused on (I would assume the much larger cohort of such killers she didn’t mention simply didn’t grow up near lead-farting factories and so didn’t fit the thesis) she was able to find that they were likely exposed to these pollutants during their development. She doesn’t explain, or even mention, how the proven psychological effects of such pollution (uncontrollable anger and violent outbursts) could translate into the highly specific and often extremely meticulous and well-planned modus operandi typical of serial killing. She lists the symptoms of the kind of lead toxicity that affects people, which are all things like anger, delusions, depression, personality changes, etc., but never shows an example of such a person being a serial killer. They might well kill someone, but it’ll be in a fit of rage or the grips of a delusion, and they’ll be caught immediately because they don’t have the wherewithal to plan or cover up the killing, because they’re fucking brain damaged.
She doesn’t mention that serial killing as a concept is relatively recent, and that our detection of serial killings has therefore improved immeasurably over the decades, leading to more identifications of them during the Ted Bundy era (kinda the same thing as “there was no autism when I was a kid, but now everyone has it, must be all the vaccines”). And the final straw for me was when she tried to link the existence of the Bloods and the Crips gangs to the same kind of pollution 🤦 She makes it seem that there’s no violence possible in human nature without toxic chemicals damaging people’s brains first.
Would have been a much more useful and interesting book without the serial killers even being mentioned, to be honest. The criminality of factory owners she discusses, and their knowing disregard for the lives and safety of their workers and local citizens, is grotesque enough on its own, arguably worse - or at least as bad as - Ted Bundy’s crimes. And they’re crimes far less discussed than those of someone like Bundy. Oh well.