"Shockingly, a University of Pennsylvania study says the number of young people addicted to gambling - largely due to increased exposure to the Internet and Internet gambling - grew by an alarming 20 percent between 2004 and 2005 alone"
About this Quote
Bachus opens with a feigned jolt - "Shockingly" - as if the statistic itself is the headline, not the policy agenda riding shotgun. It is a politician's oldest move: borrow the lab coat of a "University of Pennsylvania study", then immediately translate its authority into moral urgency. The sentence is engineered to make disagreement feel reckless. If you contest the proposed response, you're not debating regulation; you're shrugging at an "alarming" epidemic.
The timeframe does a lot of quiet work. A 20 percent jump "between 2004 and 2005 alone" compresses social change into a single, panic-ready unit. It invites the reader to imagine a runaway trend, even though one year of growth can be noisy, local, or tied to measurement changes. "Young people" is deliberately broad - it blurs college students, teenagers, and young adults into one vulnerable bloc, primed for protection and, therefore, paternalistic governance.
Then comes the assigned culprit: "largely due to increased exposure to the Internet and Internet gambling". The repetition isn't stylistic clutter; it's an accusation with an address. Bachus isn't just worried about addiction. He's framing the Internet as a delivery system for vice, a technology that dissolves the old friction points (age checks, physical distance, social stigma). In the mid-2000s, with online poker booming and regulators debating how to treat digital commerce, that framing mattered. This isn't neutral concern; it's a bid to define the Internet as a public-health threat that government must police, rather than a marketplace that consumers can navigate.
The timeframe does a lot of quiet work. A 20 percent jump "between 2004 and 2005 alone" compresses social change into a single, panic-ready unit. It invites the reader to imagine a runaway trend, even though one year of growth can be noisy, local, or tied to measurement changes. "Young people" is deliberately broad - it blurs college students, teenagers, and young adults into one vulnerable bloc, primed for protection and, therefore, paternalistic governance.
Then comes the assigned culprit: "largely due to increased exposure to the Internet and Internet gambling". The repetition isn't stylistic clutter; it's an accusation with an address. Bachus isn't just worried about addiction. He's framing the Internet as a delivery system for vice, a technology that dissolves the old friction points (age checks, physical distance, social stigma). In the mid-2000s, with online poker booming and regulators debating how to treat digital commerce, that framing mattered. This isn't neutral concern; it's a bid to define the Internet as a public-health threat that government must police, rather than a marketplace that consumers can navigate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
|---|
More Quotes by Spencer
Add to List
