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For the longest time, I thought about terrorism from a security standpoint. If you treat the US as a system to break, then you see a lot of weak points: bridge

by daeken 16y ago

For the longest time, I thought about terrorism from a security standpoint. If you treat the US as a system to break, then you see a lot of weak points: bridges, trains, malls, etc (in other words, the stuff you see on 24). If you damage these, you could do a whole lot of damage to the US economy, kill a lot of people, etc. But then I realized something: destroying bridges doesn't cause fear in the same way that, say, flying a plane into a landmark building does. I used to think that the terrorists were idiots that couldn't pull off a simple attack... now I realize just how good they are at what they do: causing fear. The point of terrorism isn't to kill, it isn't to cause direct harm in any way. Those are tools to make us scared, and we've all played right into it. I'll never forget exactly where I was when I found out about the attacks on 9/11, or any of the resulting protection mechanisms; they succeeded in their goals, probably more than they ever thought they would.

forza 16y ago
I can't help to think that if the US people, media and government hadn't been so busy "fighting terrorism", then events like hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, subprime mortgage crisis and the following recession could, if not have been avoided, at least been handled a lot better.
- daeken 16y ago
  I think it's a serious stretch to say that, coming from someone who sees the "war on terrorism" as completely silly. Those "fighting terrorism" aren't the same people doing, say, banking oversight. While these things are both handled by the government, the government is not all one big team, it's a bunch of individual components working on totally different things with small amounts of overlap.
  - forza 16y ago
    I agree it's somewhat of a stretch, but not completely irrelevant. I don't mean on an individual level, but more the overall political climate. For instance George W. Bush might not have been re-elected if it wasn't for the wars. I think it pretty safe to say that the "war on terrorism" has effected America in more ways than the obvious ones, but it is of course very hard to say how or how much.
hugh3 16y ago
I think it's a mistake to lump all terrorists into one group. Different terrorist groups have very differing goals, moral systems, and levels of sanity. The IRA, for instance, while an evil bunch of fuckers, would never attempt to kill thousands of people in a single attack, because they had clear and fairly realistic political goals and a strategy for pursuing them. Islamic terrorists, on the other hand, for the most part appear to just like killing -- it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that their goal is more or less the genocide of every non-Muslim on the planet, and individually their goal is to die for Allah. This gives them a very different set of priorities to old-school terrorist groups like the IRA or ETA. To summarize: the IRA wants to terrorise you to achieve a goal, but Al Qaeda pretty much just wants to kill you.
- chc 16y ago
  Then why have their attacks so far had the primary effect of creating panic when a couple dozen random bombs would both be easier to execute and cause more destruction? Why continue to attack planes — the area in which our paranoia is most concentrated — when legions of American-born madmen have proven that just pulling out a gun in a public place and shooting people is plenty effective? It seems to me that they don't necessarily want us to die, at least not on any particular schedule — just to be so afraid that we won't be able to oppose them with any strength.
metageek 16y ago
A disturbing thought: if we were sensible about the risks, and refused to be unreasonably afraid, we might see greater loss of life, as the terrorists would have to kill more people to make us afraid.
rimantas 16y ago
I was going to recommend the paper „The Psychology of Security“, so I googled for it. It was fun to see, what results were (I did not remember the author) :)

by daeken 16y ago

forza 16y ago

I can't help to think that if the US people, media and government hadn't been so busy "fighting terrorism", then events like hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, subprime mortgage crisis and the following recession could, if not have been avoided, at least been handled a lot better.

daeken 16y ago
I think it's a serious stretch to say that, coming from someone who sees the "war on terrorism" as completely silly. Those "fighting terrorism" aren't the same people doing, say, banking oversight. While these things are both handled by the government, the government is not all one big team, it's a bunch of individual components working on totally different things with small amounts of overlap.
- forza 16y ago
  I agree it's somewhat of a stretch, but not completely irrelevant. I don't mean on an individual level, but more the overall political climate. For instance George W. Bush might not have been re-elected if it wasn't for the wars. I think it pretty safe to say that the "war on terrorism" has effected America in more ways than the obvious ones, but it is of course very hard to say how or how much.

hugh3 16y ago

I think it's a mistake to lump all terrorists into one group. Different terrorist groups have very differing goals, moral systems, and levels of sanity. The IRA, for instance, while an evil bunch of fuckers, would never attempt to kill thousands of people in a single attack, because they had clear and fairly realistic political goals and a strategy for pursuing them. Islamic terrorists, on the other hand, for the most part appear to just like killing -- it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that their goal is more or less the genocide of every non-Muslim on the planet, and individually their goal is to die for Allah. This gives them a very different set of priorities to old-school terrorist groups like the IRA or ETA. To summarize: the IRA wants to terrorise you to achieve a goal, but Al Qaeda pretty much just wants to kill you.

chc 16y ago
Then why have their attacks so far had the primary effect of creating panic when a couple dozen random bombs would both be easier to execute and cause more destruction? Why continue to attack planes — the area in which our paranoia is most concentrated — when legions of American-born madmen have proven that just pulling out a gun in a public place and shooting people is plenty effective? It seems to me that they don't necessarily want us to die, at least not on any particular schedule — just to be so afraid that we won't be able to oppose them with any strength.

metageek 16y ago

A disturbing thought: if we were sensible about the risks, and refused to be unreasonably afraid, we might see greater loss of life, as the terrorists would have to kill more people to make us afraid.

rimantas 16y ago

I was going to recommend the paper „The Psychology of Security“, so I googled for it. It was fun to see, what results were (I did not remember the author) :)