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Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking – It’s an Act of Political Resistance

39 points by etiam 11y ago

krylon 11y ago
"even if we had a 9/11 attack every year, we would still be losing more people to car accidents and heart disease, and we don’t see the same expenditure of resources to respond to those more significant threats." This has been bothering me for years, now. Once one realizes this apparent contradiction, it is one of those "how could I have missed that"-moments, but the media - who for better or worse lead or at least shape public discourse - never mention it. In Germany, more people die in car crashes every year than have been killed by terrorists in the ~70 years since the end of WWII. Yet everyone gets hysterical about the "terrorist threat" to a degree that makes public concern about car accidents look ... nonexistent. We never hear politicians declare the War on Cancer, even though that horrible disease brings immense suffering and far too often death to so many people. Is it because people know that you cannot simply declare war on a disease and make it go away? Is it because people know that reducing the number of car accidents would require them to drive more carefully (a desirable result, but kind of hard to enforce)? Are more afraid of terrorist attacks because it's just more people dying at the same time, the same place, in a common event, whereas car accidents happen one by one, scattered all over the country, all over the year? NB that I am not dismissing terrorist attacks as harmless, nor am I trying to belittle the suffering of the victims. But the actual threat to Western societies that terrorist attacks pose makes the resources we put into fighting them look way out of proportion, especially since any talk about that underlying causes for terrorist attacks is either ignored by the mainstream media or denounced as some kind of heresy. Not only are we "fighting" a minor target (in terms of deaths caused), we are also employing means that are not well-suited for this purpose. Kind of like the War on Drugs, now that I think of it.

39 points by etiam 11y ago

"even if we had a 9/11 attack every year, we would still be losing more people to car accidents and heart disease, and we don’t see the same expenditure of resources to respond to those more significant threats." This has been bothering me for years, now. Once one realizes this apparent contradiction, it is one of those "how could I have missed that"-moments, but the media - who for better or worse lead or at least shape public discourse - never mention it. In Germany, more people die in car crashes every year than have been killed by terrorists in the ~70 years since the end of WWII. Yet everyone gets hysterical about the "terrorist threat" to a degree that makes public concern about car accidents look ... nonexistent. We never hear politicians declare the War on Cancer, even though that horrible disease brings immense suffering and far too often death to so many people. Is it because people know that you cannot simply declare war on a disease and make it go away? Is it because people know that reducing the number of car accidents would require them to drive more carefully (a desirable result, but kind of hard to enforce)? Are more afraid of terrorist attacks because it's just more people dying at the same time, the same place, in a common event, whereas car accidents happen one by one, scattered all over the country, all over the year? NB that I am not dismissing terrorist attacks as harmless, nor am I trying to belittle the suffering of the victims. But the actual threat to Western societies that terrorist attacks pose makes the resources we put into fighting them look way out of proportion, especially since any talk about that underlying causes for terrorist attacks is either ignored by the mainstream media or denounced as some kind of heresy. Not only are we "fighting" a minor target (in terms of deaths caused), we are also employing means that are not well-suited for this purpose. Kind of like the War on Drugs, now that I think of it.