LogFAQs > #965164922

Revelation34 posted...

Florida Man.

Florida Man is actually an argument in favor of the idea that people unfairly shit on Florida.

You don't hear all those crazy stories because they happen more often in Florida (they don't - crazy shit is constantly happening in every state and in most other countries), it's just that most states don't talk about it. But Florida actually has a law that makes it mandatory for them to publicly publish all court cases, so you hear about every crazy in Florida.

In other words, the only reason Florida winds up looking like they have so many crazy people is they're essentially the only ones not covering up cases or lying about them. For all you know, you've got a few "Florida Men" right around the corner from where you live, but you'll never know about it because your local government is deliberately hiding it from you.

Sort of like how the Spanish Flu only became known as the Spanish Flu because the Spanish were pretty much the only nation on Earth that wasn't lying about their casualty numbers. Everyone else was involved in WWI and had a vested interest in hiding just how bad things were to keep morale up, but Spain was a neutral nation so they made the mistake of reporting accurate data. So in spite of literally having lower numbers than nearly every other major developed nation, the perception was that they had a disproportionately high casualty rate.