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What I find reassuring in the midst of this tragic mayhem however, is how little actual damage the terrorists could do. They had explosives, weapons, the resol
by DoubleMalt 11y ago
What I find reassuring in the midst of this tragic mayhem however, is how little actual damage the terrorists could do.
They had explosives, weapons, the resolve to sacrifice themselves and tried their best to do as much damage as possible. And they managed to to kill less than 30 people (provisional count).
Of course every death that brought on by this fanatic mob is too much, but we should keep our perspective.
A bus accident in Spain last week left 11 exchange students dead, in the US alone every day more than 50 people die in road accidents.
Of course we should root out the people that try to bomb our freedom away. But don't let us be terrorized by something that doesn't make a statistically recognizable dent in our probability for survival.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rawTruthHurts 11y agoComparing terrorist attacks with traffic accidents is quite a display of originality.
- Zigurd 11y agoA million people worldwide die every year in collisions with cars, half of them pedestrians and cyclists. Millions more are injured. Compared with traffic regulation and enforcement, the response to terrorist events like this are vastly out of proportion, and well into the range of irrational response that the terrorists know is the only way to really damage a large powerful nation - by making it turn on its own people and put them in a security-state panopticon.
- rawTruthHurts 11y agoI see there is a real interest in sneaking a completely unrelated subject into the conversation.
- gotchange 11y agoThis is what I wrote in the aftermath of the Paris attacks with regard to the comparison of "road fatalities vs terrorism casualties" every time this topic is brought up after these tragic incidents. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10689118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10689118
- Thriptic 11y agoNot really. The point is that people are irrationally afraid of incredibly improbable / statistically insignificant events and the result is bad policy decisions / suboptimal use of resources by reactive governments. People should be much more afraid of dying in a car accident than dying at the hands of terrorists, yet few people are urgently pushing the government to enforce stronger safety standards in cars / on roads. Instead people demand better security to protect them against things they are unlikely to be involved in to begin with.
- Chathamization 11y agoGood point. If the United States, for instance, used the money for the "War on Terror" on things that were more likely to save American lives (anti-smoking, healthcare, traffic safety, etc.), we probably could have saved hundreds of thousands of American lives (or more, the CDC says that 480,000 Americans die each year from smoking).
- twoodfin 11y agoOn the other hand, a bus accident doesn't result in an international airport or a city's entire metro system shutting down for an extended period of time, nor frightfully disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I appreciate your point, and it is somewhat reassuring, but terrorists can cause damage beyond the raw numbers because their damage can be focused.
- falcolas 11y agoWhy do we let one incident shut down an entire metro system? Would we do the same if a bus overturned? I have no intention of belittling the incident, but I fail to see how shutting everything down is a proper response to any incident of less than catastrophic scale. I take that back, I can see a reason: CYA. Nobody would want to be the one who makes the decision to keep the metro system running and have a second attack occur. I'm still not convinced that CYA is a sufficient reason, however.
- dhimes 11y agoWhy do we let one incident shut down an entire metro system? If you don't shut down and an second and/or third incident then happens in a coordinated attack, it's very easy to say "Why didn't you shut down? Couldn't you see that we were under attack?"
- glastra 11y agoI had to look up what that acronym means ("cover your ass", for anyone interested). WTPOUAWYCJWOTFS? That's "what's the point of using acronyms when you can just write out the full sentence?"
- falcolas 11y ago<s> Well, you could ask the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency, or even consult with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perhaps you can send them JavaScript Object Notation using the Asynchronous Javscript and Extensible Markup Language standard over HyperText Transfer Protocol? </s> I use acronyms to reduce the cognitive overhead of reading, and (relevant to this discussion) make otherwise offensive terms acceptable in a broad range of environments (snafu, CYA, OMFG, WTF, etc). I'm sorry you haven't run across CYA before (though that might be a good thing), but it's not a terribly uncommon acronym either.
- rtpg 11y agoA major airport and the entire rail system of the city was shut down. A lot of damage was done. And, of course, a bunch of people died from something not many signed up for. Driving a car at least gives you the opportunity to reject taking on the risk. The fabric of society is based around us not shooting each other/ blowing up trains. Every event like this (or, say, some countries bombing out neighborhoods in other countries) makes it harder to rely on the idea that this sort of thing doesn't happen. Acknowledging that this happens because of conscious policy decisions by many people is also good. There's absolutely nothing inevitable about these kinds of attacks. We could bring this sort of event down to a number real close to 0. Not to mention that it's possible to worry about car crashes and terrorism at the same time
- ant6n 11y agoI don't drive a car, I cycle. I reject the risk of driving, but drivers put that risk on me anyway. Even more so than they do to themselves, because I'm more vulnerable than a person sitting in a moving steel cage, and because many drivers seem eager to put risk on me. In my life time, I'm much more likely to be murdered by a driver than a terrorist.
- SonicSoul 11y agowait. you cycle because driving is too risky? are you statistically less likely to get injured while cycling, or is it mainly about caring for not injuring others?
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoI read it as they don't drive, and thus don't consent to the risk of being in a car accident. Not that they cycle because of the risk; they didn't list why they cycle.
- realitygrill 11y agoCycling appears to be about an order of magnitude (~10x) times more dangerous, per mile travelled, than driving.
- grp 11y agoThey seek fear, not the maximum number of deaths. Victims are not the goal but a way.
- Bard7 11y agoThey seek a Bush type response.
- musha68k 11y agoUnfortunately I don't know much about Belgian politics but I do hope they won't go down the "Hollande" route. They should look up north, Norway is the shining beacon in terms of how a country can handle terrorism responsibly.
- 13thLetter 11y agoNope. You're making the mistake of mapping a foreign political force with its own motives and ideas onto Western political disputes.
- spriggan3 11y agoThey seek "the ends of times". Daesh is a death cult. Victims certainly is the goal here, to kill as many people as possible. There is no political goal, they made no political demands, they didn't make any in Paris either. The goal is to kill civilians.
- qb45 11y agoAccidents, which everybody strives to avoid, and intelligent agents actively seeking to kill you are two different classes of danger and people react differently. With accidents, you can kinda hope they won't be happening too often because nobody benefits from them. Not so much with violent conflicts, though.
- lowmagnet 11y agoIn the US, from 2013 data[1], I see an average of 89/day, which of course varies due to weather and 'drunken' holidays, I'm sure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
- dominotw 11y agoTerrorist attacks by definition aim for psychological effects over monetary/human cost. I think they have more than achieved their objective with this attack.
- blahblah3 11y agoI find it concerning that this much damage can be done by just a few individuals. You can't just look at the number of deaths. Saying that terrorist attacks barely impact P(death) trivializes them.
- glastra 11y agoWalk around a crowded square with a backpack. Now wonder, what if you had a bomb in there and were ready to blow yourself up? There you go. Killing 50+ people is absurdly easy. Hello, blacklists.
- joesmo 11y agoAnd the amount of damage done by legislators, governments, and other "opponents" of terrorism after the fact? Almost unlimited and pales in comparison with the violence itself.
- dharmach 11y agoMurder has motive while accident does not. Check why Law does not treat them equally.
- ryanmarsh 11y ago> And they managed to to kill less than 30 people (provisional count). It is almost trivial to be an effective terrorist if body count is what you're optimizing for. In Baghdad they blew a fuel tanker sky high, the blast rattled my windows so hard across the city that I thought we were the ones under attack. I have wondered (ever since it was my job to think like a guerrilla fighter) why terrorists don't do similar things in the US or other countries. How many fuel tankers are there in the US? How hard would it be to GTA one of them and drive it into a dense gathering of people? How hard would it be to re-enact the CoD MW2 airport scene? Perhaps it is symbolism not body counts they seek? After all the DC sniper effectively terrorized three states with a rifle. In the infantry nothing is scarier than land mines and snipers. All I know is surveillance can't stop every tanker or lone gunman. It's just too easy to do these kinds of things without the use of anything with a significant RF signature.
- Houshalter 11y agoGwern's fantastic essay, Terrorism is not Effective: http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective >No terrorist group has achieved a kill rate anywhere near a conventional military; and are vastly less than those death tolls for guerrilla organizations or dictators. Stalin or Mao could, in a bad day, exceed the deaths caused by all international terrorism over the last 2 centuries. 9/11, the crowning incident of terrorism in those centuries, was equaled by just 29 days of car accidents in the USA - and 9/11 was only accidentally that successful! 9/11 is also a sterling example of the availability bias: besides it, how many attacks could the best informed Western citizen name? Perhaps a score, on a good day, if they have a good memory; inasmuch as the MIPT database records >19,000 just 1968-2004, it’s clear that terrifyingly exceptional terrorist attacks are just that. Remarkably, it seems that it is unusual for terrorist attacks to injure even a single person; the MIPT database puts the number of such attacks at 35% of all attacks. Certainly the post-9/11 record would seem to indicate it was a fluke... Many terrorist organizations keep very detailed financial records (consider the troves of data seized from Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, from Bin Laden’s safehouse, or Al Qaeda’s insistence on receipts), with little trust of underlings, suggesting far less ideological devotion than commonly believed & serious principal-agent problems. Stories about terrorist incompetence are legion and the topic is now played for laughs (eg. the 2010 movie Four Lions), prompting columnists to tell us to ignore all the incompetence and continue to be afraid.