7 ms·

Hurricane Maria Killed as Many American Citizens as 9/11 Did

56 points by vinnyglennon 8y ago

umanwizard 8y ago
Smoking kills 50-100 times more Americans every year than 9/11 did. There are a few obvious reasons why the response was much less: (1) Natural disasters are more common, more expected, and less psychologically dramatic than terrorist attacks. (2) Americans intuitively view Puerto Ricans as foreigners regardless of whether they legally have US citizenship. (Due to different culture, language and religion)
- sanbor 8y ago
  Mass shootings are also psychologically dramatic but policies are still not changed in USA.
  - throwaway8879 8y ago
    Perhaps it is useful to the policy-making folks to not change these policies? There is very few morality-based decision-making in the upper ranks of power.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Yes they are. Maryland for example has gone through several rounds of taking away peoples’ gun rights in the last decade.
    - cuboidGoat 8y ago
      In Maryland, did they actually take away any guns particularly?
      - craftyguy 8y ago
        No, GP is just echoing rhetoric they heard.
        harryh 8y ago
        On April 4, 2013, the Maryland General Assembly approved legislation imposing significant new restrictions on gun ownership. The bills ban the sale of certain semi-automatic firearms that they define as assault weapons, limit magazine capacity to ten rounds, require that handgun purchasers be fingerprinted and pass a training class in order to obtain a handgun license, and bar persons who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health institution from possessing firearms. Martin O'Malley Governor at the time, signed the legislation into law on May 16, 2013.[14] Regarding ten round magazine limits for rifles purchased in Maryland, 'standard' 30 round magazines may be purchased outside Maryland and brought into the state for personal use. Those standard magazines may not be transferred, given, sold or manufactured inside Maryland.[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Maryland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Maryland
        craftyguy 8y ago
        The GP comment is still wrong. They didn't take away firearms from anyone. Limiting sale != taking away what is already owned.
        rayiner 8y ago
        I didn’t say they took away guns, I said they took away gun rights. Restricting the kinds of guns you can buy, or ability to sell ir transfer existing proprty, is taking away part of your rights.
        craftyguy 8y ago
        Meh. It's more of a clarification of rights. When the second amendment was written, firearms were quite rudimentary by today's standards. I'm curious how the conversation will turn when we have 'laser guns', hand-held railguns and other weapons in the future that we cannot even comprehend today. Will folks complain about the government taking away their rights to owning an automatic railgun? Probably. Did the writers of the second amendment mean for it to apply to massively overpowered weapons? Probably not. If you believe it did, then why aren't you complaining about the government not letting you own ICBMs?
maxxxxx 8y ago
I sometimes wonder how much of an impact 9-11 would have made if the planes had killed 3000 people in poor neighborhoods in Louisiana or Alabama. Same for Maria. If it had devastated Manhattan I think there would have been much more of an effort to help.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Or if it had hit mar-a-lago
sneakware 8y ago
That's weird, they do not mention the water and food left to rot on governmental parking lots and airport runways. I guess they just completely forgot about it..
- vuln 8y ago
  That doesn't help push the narrative that it's all Trump's fault. Do you expect them to blame the victim?
HillaryBriss 8y ago
I don't disagree with the author's basic idea, but there's this other analysis of death from all causes in the case of 9/11 which puts the death toll higher. One analyst ascribed an additional 1595 deaths to 9/11 because of increased car traffic in the year after 9/11. So, the numerical comparison does not result in such a close match. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/05/september-11-road-deaths https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/05/september-11-r...
- Retric 8y ago
  Those deaths where not caused by 9/11, they where caused by people’s responces to 9/11. By that token the moon landing or any major event caused deaths by changing people’s behaviors, but saying the moon landing killed people seems more obviously wrong. By comparison some people had heath issues directly caused by 9/11 and you could reasonably add those deaths to the 9/11 death toll.
  - nyolfen 8y ago
    the 3000 number for maria comes from taking the total death rate in puerto rico in the 6(?) months following the hurricane and subtracting the average death rate for that period in previous years. it's an nonstandard way of calculating disaster fatalities, chosen specifically because it gives a big number that is useful for relief lobbying purposes (it's like 9/11!), and if you calculated 9/11 casualties the same way you would surely come up with a significantly higher number. the number of people killed directly by the hurricane, during the course of the hurricane, was under 100.
    - cuboidGoat 8y ago
      I thought they ended up doing that because the bodies were piling up uncounted and the governor admitted that that the civilian infrastructure required to keep track of the dead had itself failed and so asked for outside help from academics on the mainland. They didn't go with the highest academic figure either. If they were actually trying for high figures, as you suggest, why not go with the Harvard study placing it at around 4600 dead?
roenxi 8y ago
9/11 was tragic, but consider the damage caused by the response in the last 15 years [1]. The number of Afghani civilian deaths alone is an order of magnitude more destruction than 9/11 and it seems unlikely that even a plurality of them cared about America or really understood why they were dying. Assuming that nobody thought to mention this or take a deep breath and think while mobilising the army is only barely plausible to me. It seems much more likely that the absolute damage done was never an issue, and hence it isn't a powerful comparison. There are so many things worse than 9/11, including even _the immediate response to_ 9/11, that the raw damage just isn't important. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present)#Civilian_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  There are always side effects to geopolitical powerplay. The lives of the "them" are never as valuable in an "Us vs Them" scenario especially when the players and their motives are complex. The modern hegemony is the same as those of the ancient world. We just have better projectile weapons.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  >It seems much more likely that the absolute damage done was never an issue, and hence it isn't a powerful comparison. The comparison is not meant to argue that one event was worse than the other, but to put into perspective how much damage has been done and and how are we addressing the damage. Why were/are we willing to indefinitely spend $50 billion a year to kill thousands of Afghani civilians, yet are unwilling to spend $50 billion over four years to repair the damage caused and be better prepared for future hurricanes.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ulldma 8y ago
I don't like this comparison of death toll numbers. At the same time I think the death toll of 9/11 is unfortunately much higher as an alarmingly big number of first responders were diagnosed with cancer and many of them died already.
wruza 8y ago
While I'm sure that in reality terrorism is rather a great political leverage than a biggest threat, it also has one specific property that HN should be familiar with: scalability. Hurricane, shooters and road/cancer deaths are not scalable, i.e. they cannot be over-produced because it's just weather, psychopathy* and other statistical accidents. Terrorism though can be scaled by orders of magnitude by pretty simple means. * terrorists can be viewed psychopats, but let's leave that question open, since it is more military than civil.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I agree about hurricanes, but about the rest - how so? Does history record any case of terrorism scaling up? Meanwhile, both road and cancer deaths scale up directly with the growth of modern civilization - more people = more cancer deaths; more roads & cars = more car deaths.
  - wruza 8y ago
    But, same people = same cancer deaths; same roads & cars = same car deaths. You cannot increase it from outside and claim that it was your revenge. >Does history record any case of terrorism scaling up? Do you mean that if after first acts of terror no one would bring up a defense against it, then there would be no more acts than it is? By "first" I mean the time since our world got good enough life to see it as outstanding event -- burning village was obviously a regular thing at earlier periods.
- cuboidGoat 8y ago
  Deaths through weather and other natural disasters can scale perfectly fine, due to the scaling up of interlinked dependencies that are then run with minimum overhead. Puerto Rico was a Wexelblat disaster, through and through.
UncleEntity 8y ago
> Certainly, there were major logistical challenges to moving materials on an island a thousand miles away from the U.S. mainland. Yet such obstacles did not prevent the deployment of the 82nd Airborne Division across the 7,000 miles from Fort Bragg, South Carolina to Saudi Arabia in August 1990... Ok, first off, Fort Bragg is in North Carolina. Secondly, the 82nd Airborne Division's job was/is to be ready to deploy halfway around the world on a moments (OK, two hours) notice and I can say that we weren't ready to do much of anything once we landed in Saudi Arabia other than be "speed bumps in the sand". Also, as was seen in Haiti (I believe), it isn't such a good idea to send combat troops off on missions like this since they are war makers and not peace keepers -- bad things happen because up to that point you are trained to fight the enemy and not much else. So, yeah, they could've had the 82nd on the ground pretty quickly but doing so wouldn't have been a very good idea unless the Cubans were invading or something.
stevew20 8y ago
War on Weather!

56 points by vinnyglennon 8y ago

Smoking kills 50-100 times more Americans every year than 9/11 did. There are a few obvious reasons why the response was much less: (1) Natural disasters are more common, more expected, and less psychologically dramatic than terrorist attacks. (2) Americans intuitively view Puerto Ricans as foreigners regardless of whether they legally have US citizenship. (Due to different culture, language and religion)

sanbor 8y ago
Mass shootings are also psychologically dramatic but policies are still not changed in USA.
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  Perhaps it is useful to the policy-making folks to not change these policies? There is very few morality-based decision-making in the upper ranks of power.
- rayiner 8y ago
  Yes they are. Maryland for example has gone through several rounds of taking away peoples’ gun rights in the last decade.
  - cuboidGoat 8y ago
    In Maryland, did they actually take away any guns particularly?
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      No, GP is just echoing rhetoric they heard.
      - harryh 8y ago
        On April 4, 2013, the Maryland General Assembly approved legislation imposing significant new restrictions on gun ownership. The bills ban the sale of certain semi-automatic firearms that they define as assault weapons, limit magazine capacity to ten rounds, require that handgun purchasers be fingerprinted and pass a training class in order to obtain a handgun license, and bar persons who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health institution from possessing firearms. Martin O'Malley Governor at the time, signed the legislation into law on May 16, 2013.[14] Regarding ten round magazine limits for rifles purchased in Maryland, 'standard' 30 round magazines may be purchased outside Maryland and brought into the state for personal use. Those standard magazines may not be transferred, given, sold or manufactured inside Maryland.[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Maryland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Maryland
        craftyguy 8y ago
        The GP comment is still wrong. They didn't take away firearms from anyone. Limiting sale != taking away what is already owned.
        rayiner 8y ago
        I didn’t say they took away guns, I said they took away gun rights. Restricting the kinds of guns you can buy, or ability to sell ir transfer existing proprty, is taking away part of your rights.
        craftyguy 8y ago
        Meh. It's more of a clarification of rights. When the second amendment was written, firearms were quite rudimentary by today's standards. I'm curious how the conversation will turn when we have 'laser guns', hand-held railguns and other weapons in the future that we cannot even comprehend today. Will folks complain about the government taking away their rights to owning an automatic railgun? Probably. Did the writers of the second amendment mean for it to apply to massively overpowered weapons? Probably not. If you believe it did, then why aren't you complaining about the government not letting you own ICBMs?

maxxxxx 8y ago

I sometimes wonder how much of an impact 9-11 would have made if the planes had killed 3000 people in poor neighborhoods in Louisiana or Alabama. Same for Maria. If it had devastated Manhattan I think there would have been much more of an effort to help.

craftyguy 8y ago
Or if it had hit mar-a-lago

sneakware 8y ago

That's weird, they do not mention the water and food left to rot on governmental parking lots and airport runways. I guess they just completely forgot about it..

vuln 8y ago
That doesn't help push the narrative that it's all Trump's fault. Do you expect them to blame the victim?

HillaryBriss 8y ago

I don't disagree with the author's basic idea, but there's this other analysis of death from all causes in the case of 9/11 which puts the death toll higher. One analyst ascribed an additional 1595 deaths to 9/11 because of increased car traffic in the year after 9/11. So, the numerical comparison does not result in such a close match. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/05/september-11-road-deaths https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/05/september-11-r...

Retric 8y ago
Those deaths where not caused by 9/11, they where caused by people’s responces to 9/11. By that token the moon landing or any major event caused deaths by changing people’s behaviors, but saying the moon landing killed people seems more obviously wrong. By comparison some people had heath issues directly caused by 9/11 and you could reasonably add those deaths to the 9/11 death toll.
- nyolfen 8y ago
  the 3000 number for maria comes from taking the total death rate in puerto rico in the 6(?) months following the hurricane and subtracting the average death rate for that period in previous years. it's an nonstandard way of calculating disaster fatalities, chosen specifically because it gives a big number that is useful for relief lobbying purposes (it's like 9/11!), and if you calculated 9/11 casualties the same way you would surely come up with a significantly higher number. the number of people killed directly by the hurricane, during the course of the hurricane, was under 100.
  - cuboidGoat 8y ago
    I thought they ended up doing that because the bodies were piling up uncounted and the governor admitted that that the civilian infrastructure required to keep track of the dead had itself failed and so asked for outside help from academics on the mainland. They didn't go with the highest academic figure either. If they were actually trying for high figures, as you suggest, why not go with the Harvard study placing it at around 4600 dead?

roenxi 8y ago

9/11 was tragic, but consider the damage caused by the response in the last 15 years [1]. The number of Afghani civilian deaths alone is an order of magnitude more destruction than 9/11 and it seems unlikely that even a plurality of them cared about America or really understood why they were dying. Assuming that nobody thought to mention this or take a deep breath and think while mobilising the army is only barely plausible to me. It seems much more likely that the absolute damage done was never an issue, and hence it isn't a powerful comparison. There are so many things worse than 9/11, including even _the immediate response to_ 9/11, that the raw damage just isn't important. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present)#Civilian_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...

throwaway8879 8y ago
There are always side effects to geopolitical powerplay. The lives of the "them" are never as valuable in an "Us vs Them" scenario especially when the players and their motives are complex. The modern hegemony is the same as those of the ancient world. We just have better projectile weapons.
boomboomsubban 8y ago
>It seems much more likely that the absolute damage done was never an issue, and hence it isn't a powerful comparison. The comparison is not meant to argue that one event was worse than the other, but to put into perspective how much damage has been done and and how are we addressing the damage. Why were/are we willing to indefinitely spend $50 billion a year to kill thousands of Afghani civilians, yet are unwilling to spend $50 billion over four years to repair the damage caused and be better prepared for future hurricanes.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ulldma 8y ago

I don't like this comparison of death toll numbers. At the same time I think the death toll of 9/11 is unfortunately much higher as an alarmingly big number of first responders were diagnosed with cancer and many of them died already.

wruza 8y ago

While I'm sure that in reality terrorism is rather a great political leverage than a biggest threat, it also has one specific property that HN should be familiar with: scalability. Hurricane, shooters and road/cancer deaths are not scalable, i.e. they cannot be over-produced because it's just weather, psychopathy* and other statistical accidents. Terrorism though can be scaled by orders of magnitude by pretty simple means. * terrorists can be viewed psychopats, but let's leave that question open, since it is more military than civil.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
I agree about hurricanes, but about the rest - how so? Does history record any case of terrorism scaling up? Meanwhile, both road and cancer deaths scale up directly with the growth of modern civilization - more people = more cancer deaths; more roads & cars = more car deaths.
- wruza 8y ago
  But, same people = same cancer deaths; same roads & cars = same car deaths. You cannot increase it from outside and claim that it was your revenge. >Does history record any case of terrorism scaling up? Do you mean that if after first acts of terror no one would bring up a defense against it, then there would be no more acts than it is? By "first" I mean the time since our world got good enough life to see it as outstanding event -- burning village was obviously a regular thing at earlier periods.
cuboidGoat 8y ago
Deaths through weather and other natural disasters can scale perfectly fine, due to the scaling up of interlinked dependencies that are then run with minimum overhead. Puerto Rico was a Wexelblat disaster, through and through.

UncleEntity 8y ago

> Certainly, there were major logistical challenges to moving materials on an island a thousand miles away from the U.S. mainland. Yet such obstacles did not prevent the deployment of the 82nd Airborne Division across the 7,000 miles from Fort Bragg, South Carolina to Saudi Arabia in August 1990... Ok, first off, Fort Bragg is in North Carolina. Secondly, the 82nd Airborne Division's job was/is to be ready to deploy halfway around the world on a moments (OK, two hours) notice and I can say that we weren't ready to do much of anything once we landed in Saudi Arabia other than be "speed bumps in the sand". Also, as was seen in Haiti (I believe), it isn't such a good idea to send combat troops off on missions like this since they are war makers and not peace keepers -- bad things happen because up to that point you are trained to fight the enemy and not much else. So, yeah, they could've had the 82nd on the ground pretty quickly but doing so wouldn't have been a very good idea unless the Cubans were invading or something.

stevew20 8y ago

War on Weather!