4 ms·

Comparing terrorist attacks with traffic accidents is quite a display of originality.

Zigurd 11y ago
A 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 ago
  I see there is a real interest in sneaking a completely unrelated subject into the conversation.
- gotchange 11y ago
  This 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 ago
Not 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 ago
  Good 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).

A 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 ago
I see there is a real interest in sneaking a completely unrelated subject into the conversation.
gotchange 11y ago
This 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 ago

Not 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 ago
Good 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).