[trasz]

The “baseline” was established by ignoring points of view that didn’t align with the ruling class. It’s still largely the case, for example crime stories are popular, except for crimes committed by law enforcement, which - in some cases, like theft - is actually the majority of all cases in US, just not reported that way.

[kenjackson]

Now we have a world where there is no baseline to even start a discussion. Depending on your perspective, either crime is worse than ever before and the criminal are running crazy. Or the only criminals are the system and those in power. You can literally find non-trivial populations in the US who believe that we need to build more prisons and others who think we need to free all prisoners. There's no place to even stand to begin to have a conversation.

[trasz]

Again, this was always the case. It’s just that most of us never noticed it, because the opposing views were hard to find.