5 ms·

Terrorist Hunt Sends America Over the Edge

33 points by njrc 13y ago

NateDad 13y ago
As someone personally affected by the lockdown, I find this highly offensive. We were not cowering, though it would not be illogical to do so... we're talking about people proven willing to not only kill and injure hundreds of innocent people, they were also willing to get into action-movie style shoot outs with heavily armed police, tossing homemade grenades and pipe bombs, and murdering a police officer in cold blood. So, maybe keeping people inside for 12 hours isn't that much of a price to pay to make sure they stay safe. But it was really more than that. It was about finding this S.O.B. before he could get away. We knew he was in the area, but couldn't be sure exactly where. By shutting down public transportation and keeping people and vehicles off the road, we made it nearly impossible for him to escape. ANYONE walking around, driving a car, is then automatically suspect and can be stopped. There is no crowd you can mingle in, no trains or buses you can slip onto, no taxis you can hail. There are no cars you can carjack. You're trapped. Suddenly, instead of being able to hide among all the people in the city, you're in an urban ghost town where anything that moves can be pounced on. It's a hell of a lot more effective than just hoping someone recognizes him among the other 2 million people running around. If you mess with Boston we will shut the whole city down to find you. Yes, we will. And you know what, most people will be glad to do it, to get the guy who killed 4 people and injured almost 200 others. It's just one day. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I think most other people here would too. We weren't scared. We were pissed.
- Camillo 13y ago
  Being "pissed" doesn't really make people any more rational than being scared, though.
  - dakotasmith 13y ago
    This may have also been done to prevent whatever interference or vigilantism may have occurred from a city who was pissed and not scared.
- corresation 13y ago
  The shutdown of Boston was an incredible event without precedent. It is absolutely correct for people to discuss whether the right choices were made, and it is a little bit frightening to have people declaring such a conversation "offensive". In the end it was pretty clear that these two perpetrators were not the brightest of terrorists. They operated in plain sight, during a massively photographed event, and then went about their life as if nothing had changed. Their bombs, while sadly effective to a degree, were much less devastating than they could have been (and that they were throwing pressure cookers at police borders on...the word comedic doesn't quite fit given the carnage they have wrought, but it certainly is ridiculous). Did the lockdown help catch them? We'll never actually know, as the suspect could have been caught using traditional means in a fully operating city. On the flip side, if the suspect wasn't seriously injured, as they purportedly were, they could have been murdering people in house after house during the lockdown.
- jrockway 13y ago
  Where do you draw the line? Would you lock down all of New York City if some mother killed her four children by smothering them with a pillow? Why not? She's armed and dangerous and already has 4 dead to her name! What happened in Boston was an amateurish overreaction to the task of hunting down and finding someone who had committed a handful of murders -- something that happens every day in the US.
  - D9u 13y ago
    There's really no logical comparison between your fictional scenario and what occurred in Boston. The Boston Marathon is a world renowned event, and the apprehension of the perpetrators of the attacks was a necessary thing, because, as someone else has mentioned here, sending a message of "We'll catch you" to any would-be criminals is of the utmost importance. Well done Boston. My condolences to those adversely affected by this tragedy.
    - cskau 13y ago
      > There's really no logical comparison between your fictional scenario and what occurred in Boston. Care to elaborate? As he mentioned murders happen every day in the states, so would you prefer a non-fictional comparison? > The Boston Marathon is a world renowned event, and the apprehension of the perpetrators of the attacks was a necessary thing, because, as someone else has mentioned here, sending a message of "We'll catch you" to any would-be criminals is of the utmost importance. What does being "world renowned" have to do with anything? And what makes this case any different from any other criminal offence? Don't we want to catch all criminals?
      - D9u 13y ago
        The Boston Marathon is a high profile event, and when explosives are involved, the security response is elevated. Explosives != pillows. The "world renowned" aspect is just that. The world is watching how we respond to such incidents, and to attempt to marginalize this incident by comparing a mother smothering her children with pillows to bombs targeting a crowd is callous in the extreme. Of course we'd prefer to catch all criminals, especially those who target high profile events with explosives.
- mixmax 13y ago
  It's a bad way of dealing with terrorism. It's in the name - it's all about terrorising, and the Boston bombers have certainly succeded in that. With this whole spectacle you've let two guys with very little resources put the whole nation into a state of emergency. You're playing their game. This is exactly what they want. They don't deserve that honour. I wrote about it here a few day sago: http://www.maximise.dk/how-a-great-statesman-would-deal-with-a-terror-attack/ http://www.maximise.dk/how-a-great-statesman-would-deal-with...
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    A true statesman will not put fuel on the bonfire of fear. He will extuingish it by telling us that there is nothing to be afraid of. That these acts are done by moronic twisted people that don’t deserve the attention. He will tell the people that they have nothing to fear but fear itself. And despite this deathless rhetoric in the face of economic collapse, FDR interned 110,000 Japanese people because they had distinctive ethnic features shared by one group of people engaged in a war against the US, although there was never any attempt to intern German-Americans. What happened in the Boston is that the authorities requested the cooperation of the public in exceptional circumstances, and got it. If they had tried to impose some sort of lockdown on Monday after the bombing, you might have a point. But they didn't. The city kept operating normally until the suspects resurfaced, got into a shootout with police, and one of them managed to evade his pursuers. Given how many people were affected by the original terrorist incident, I don't find it odd at all that most people chose to facilitate the manhunt by leaving the streets empty.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  "We weren't scared. We were pissed." Please. The people of Boston were scared shitless. And you know what? There is nothing wrong with admitting that. When you have a couple of insane killers who could have hidden god knows how many bombs out there, being scared is the appropriate response. What is not appropriate is shutting down the entire city to find those guys. I'm very glad they were caught. But by shutting down public transportation and getting all cars and humans off the streets, Bostonian authorities greatly magnified the scare-factor for Bostonians. It was an overreaction. Now that I think about it, we are really good at overreacting to terrorism. A bunch of guys rammed planes into the Twin Towers and our response was to invade two countries. Some guy hid a bomb in his shoes and our response was to make tens of millions of people take off their shoes every time they are at the airport. A couple of guys set off bombs at a marathon and our response was to shut down an entire city. When does it end? When do we learn to respond to terror attacks rationally rather than emotionally?
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Thousands of people lined up in the streets Wednesday night for a chance at a seat inside the city's Cathedral for Thursday's memorial service. That doesn't sound like the behavior of a population living in fear, since they were making themselves a target by gathering together in that fashion.
  - Symbol 13y ago
    Thousands showed up in Dorchester on Monday night to mourn the death of one of their residents.
freshhawk 13y ago
"I don’t think that’s quite right. I’d bet the American people, if given the opportunity, are as capable as the Israelis and the Brits of withstanding the occasional deadly attack by extremist groups or individuals [...] It’s the authorities and the media that tend to go a little crazy, and their actions reinforce each other." So the Israelis and Brits don't have authorities or media? Or are their authorities and media not Israelis and Brits? Or does he mean that the authorities and the media in America are not made up of American people? Seems quite a stretch to make this distinction without a difference to try and sidestep any actual discussion of why these differences among cultures exist. Cheap rhetorical trick. Not that I can blame him I guess, it's "un-american" to propose rational reactions that might decrease terrorism rather than scorched-earth vengeance seeking.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
sopooneo 13y ago
Something to consider: it worked. It would still be presumptuous, but at least a little less misdirected, to Monday-morning-quarterback a team that lost the game.
- nekojima 13y ago
  It didn't work, as the suspect was discovered after the curfew was over, by a man who had been inside his house all day. Had the man been outside his house earlier in the day, and seen the cover of his boat, its all but likely the suspect could have been apprehended 8-12 hours earlier.
  - sopooneo 13y ago
    I'm talking black box QA. Input is suspect identified. Output is that inside 24 hours they had him alive. Every particular possible outcome has some set of strategy changes that, in retrospect, would have made apprehension quicker. But this success was reached without the benefit of clairvoyance.
  - awwstn 13y ago
    Worked === Intended outcome achieved At the point when the lockdown started, the intended outcome was likely to catch the suspect without any more death, injury or destruction. It worked. You can speculate as to whether it would have also worked with a different approach, but you can't say the selected approach didn't work.
    - Camillo 13y ago
      And all this time I thought that post hoc ergo propter hoc was a fallacy!
- Pitarou 13y ago
  > Something to consider: it worked. Damn right it worked. INPUT: pressure cookers and gunpowder OUTPUT: front page headlines around the world; whole city gets shut down That's pretty damn effective. And it's all thanks to the multiplying effect of hysterical overreaction. --- EDIT: Updated my description of the bomb, in response to comments below.
sliverstorm 13y ago
Personally, I wonder if this wasn't exactly the right sort of response. They say that severity of punishment is not nearly as effective a deterrent as certainty. If the image of the entirety of Boston so quickly working against these two men isn't the very picture of swiftness and certainty/inevitability, I don't know what is.
- Pitarou 13y ago
  Would you advocate shutting down the city every time there's a hit-and-run incident? Surely, discouraging reckless driving would save FAR more lives than discouraging terrorists.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    The next time you see a premeditated hit-and-run incident that critically injures 130+ people and involves TV-style shootouts with the police, people might consider it.
    - Pitarou 13y ago
      From your first comment, I thought you were talking about public safety and deterring criminal acts. But it's clear now that what's really got your blood pumping is the sense of spectacle. I guess I should congratulate the terrorists for putting on such a good show.
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
        In my first comment I wasn't talking about safety, I was talking specifically about deterrence. In my second comment, I was doing a poor job of getting to the part where you need to get the populace on board to drive this. This is why the magnitude of the incident is important. People are much, much more interested in stopping the bomber who injures 130 than the driver who flees an accident. Maybe it's not rational, maybe proportionality can be called into question, but the whole damn world was on board for catching these two men. I was trying to avoid typing an essay on a subject I can't write a good essay about, but to try and keep things short my theory is that terrorists evoke an unusually strong response because it feels more personal, for a number of reasons. The first that I always think about is the magnification through social connections. Those 130+ people probably have at least 5 family members, 5 friends, and 5 co-workers each. So we've got at least 2,000 people who feel directly impacted- someone they know was personally hurt. Fan that out to only one more degree, and you've got 30,000 people who know somebody whose friend was injured. Summary: You've got to get the people on-board to make such an effort. Terrorism can get people on-board like nothing else, aside from open war.
youngerdryas 13y ago
"Boston is probably the only major city that if you fuck with them, they will shut down the city, stop everything, and find you." Happy Gilmore
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
droithomme 13y ago
These actions went far far beyond martial law powers, and yet martial law was not declared. I don't know what legal authority there was to do this, I assume it exists and comes from some recent Patriot Act like bill. Whatever it is, we see that its power is greater than that of martial law and it is something that doesn't have to be activated in an emergency, the power exists at all times. That in itself is terrifying and that undeclared power is not what I want for a country that I live in. The detail that the police ordered everyone to shut down even train service, but with the sole exception being that they requested Dunkin Donuts shops stay open and continue providing free donuts for police is straight out of feudalism.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  I'd like to see evidence that the police shut down the city with martial power. I'm inclined to think the Governor said, "Everybody should stay home today", and the author of this article embellished a little.
  - Symbol 13y ago
    This. Exactly. As a resident of a neighboring town not technically on "lockdown", residents nevertheless acted that way. Streets were empty. Businesses closed. It was very very quiet. This was obviously done by choice, not mandate. Yes, there was some fear driving this, as a police officer a few miles away was killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (cop killings do not occur often in the Boston-area suburbs). However, a large motivator was solidarity with other towns on lockdown. We really wanted to give the police every chance they could to catch this guy. The value judgement was made by private business owners and employers to support that effort.
    - droithomme 13y ago
      An entire city cowering in fear of an incompetent 19 year old isn't what I would call sound judgement and solidarity. Giving up because they have no courage or sense of what it is to live in a free state, yeah that's what I'd call it. http://georgedonnelly.com/libertarian/boston-police-state-failed http://georgedonnelly.com/libertarian/boston-police-state-fa... "If you allow an angsty teenager with a pressure cooker to frighten you into abandoning your daily routine and cowering in your home as if it were a prison, then you desperately need to re-evaluate your posture towards life. Reclaim your self-respect, Boston." "When a dozen paramilitary cops with fully automatic battle rifles backed by a guy on a humvee turret and snipers come to my house, the words ‘voluntary’ and ‘cooperation’ have no place. I would be a fool to resist. They have guns to my head and the heads of anyone with me. It’s now too late to resist. I don’t blame anyone for cooperating. I blame them for cheering their oppressors." "Boston was turned into a police state for a day. It was an experiment. It failed miserably. The governments in operation there rallied all of the military might at their disposal with a near-complete suspension of liberty and they failed to find the man they were looking for – until they lifted their siege." "The bottom line is that the man on the street, the civilian, the regular joe, is a more effective agent for public safety than any hopped-up government employee with body armor, night vision, full-auto rifles and flash-bangs. Just like with Flight 93, the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber, it was the regular folks who played the key role in neutralizing a suspected terrorist – not the cops or the TSA. That should be a sobering fact for any law enforcement cheerleader." Is this house search voluntary? What about the people pulled out by heavily armed soldiers at gun point? What was their crime? Can you tell me? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LrbsUVSVl8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LrbsUVSVl8 Did this guy have a right to film soldiers on the street outside his own home? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A5vfyFyptQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A5vfyFyptQ Is that what you think living in a free country looks like? Or is it what living in a totalitarian police state looks like?
tkahn6 13y ago
1. I'm getting really good at predicting what the intellectual hipster perspective on a particular issue will be. I knew yesterday we would see op eds like this. 2. Not Hacker News. Flagged.
- harlanlewis 13y ago
  “Everyone has a different definition for hipster. Usually, they just find a person with qualities they don’t like and say “That’s a hipster”.” http://bearskinrug.co.uk/hipsters/ http://bearskinrug.co.uk/hipsters/
  - tkahn6 13y ago
    I'm using this definition of 'intellectual hipster'. http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...
lttlrck 13y ago
Reads like someone was upset their train was canceled. Pretty damn clear why some airspace needed to be closed isn't? Fool.
kevin_morrill 13y ago
I imagine very few people will question the political decisions here because it requires imagination to account for the unseen. Hazlitt famously wrote about this in Economics in One Lesson. What ground breaking research at MIT didn't get done Friday? What important meetings were delayed? And then what does that add up to when you multiply it by millions?

33 points by njrc 13y ago

As someone personally affected by the lockdown, I find this highly offensive. We were not cowering, though it would not be illogical to do so... we're talking about people proven willing to not only kill and injure hundreds of innocent people, they were also willing to get into action-movie style shoot outs with heavily armed police, tossing homemade grenades and pipe bombs, and murdering a police officer in cold blood. So, maybe keeping people inside for 12 hours isn't that much of a price to pay to make sure they stay safe. But it was really more than that. It was about finding this S.O.B. before he could get away. We knew he was in the area, but couldn't be sure exactly where. By shutting down public transportation and keeping people and vehicles off the road, we made it nearly impossible for him to escape. ANYONE walking around, driving a car, is then automatically suspect and can be stopped. There is no crowd you can mingle in, no trains or buses you can slip onto, no taxis you can hail. There are no cars you can carjack. You're trapped. Suddenly, instead of being able to hide among all the people in the city, you're in an urban ghost town where anything that moves can be pounced on. It's a hell of a lot more effective than just hoping someone recognizes him among the other 2 million people running around. If you mess with Boston we will shut the whole city down to find you. Yes, we will. And you know what, most people will be glad to do it, to get the guy who killed 4 people and injured almost 200 others. It's just one day. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I think most other people here would too. We weren't scared. We were pissed.

Camillo 13y ago
Being "pissed" doesn't really make people any more rational than being scared, though.
- dakotasmith 13y ago
  This may have also been done to prevent whatever interference or vigilantism may have occurred from a city who was pissed and not scared.
corresation 13y ago
The shutdown of Boston was an incredible event without precedent. It is absolutely correct for people to discuss whether the right choices were made, and it is a little bit frightening to have people declaring such a conversation "offensive". In the end it was pretty clear that these two perpetrators were not the brightest of terrorists. They operated in plain sight, during a massively photographed event, and then went about their life as if nothing had changed. Their bombs, while sadly effective to a degree, were much less devastating than they could have been (and that they were throwing pressure cookers at police borders on...the word comedic doesn't quite fit given the carnage they have wrought, but it certainly is ridiculous). Did the lockdown help catch them? We'll never actually know, as the suspect could have been caught using traditional means in a fully operating city. On the flip side, if the suspect wasn't seriously injured, as they purportedly were, they could have been murdering people in house after house during the lockdown.
jrockway 13y ago
Where do you draw the line? Would you lock down all of New York City if some mother killed her four children by smothering them with a pillow? Why not? She's armed and dangerous and already has 4 dead to her name! What happened in Boston was an amateurish overreaction to the task of hunting down and finding someone who had committed a handful of murders -- something that happens every day in the US.
- D9u 13y ago
  There's really no logical comparison between your fictional scenario and what occurred in Boston. The Boston Marathon is a world renowned event, and the apprehension of the perpetrators of the attacks was a necessary thing, because, as someone else has mentioned here, sending a message of "We'll catch you" to any would-be criminals is of the utmost importance. Well done Boston. My condolences to those adversely affected by this tragedy.
  - cskau 13y ago
    > There's really no logical comparison between your fictional scenario and what occurred in Boston. Care to elaborate? As he mentioned murders happen every day in the states, so would you prefer a non-fictional comparison? > The Boston Marathon is a world renowned event, and the apprehension of the perpetrators of the attacks was a necessary thing, because, as someone else has mentioned here, sending a message of "We'll catch you" to any would-be criminals is of the utmost importance. What does being "world renowned" have to do with anything? And what makes this case any different from any other criminal offence? Don't we want to catch all criminals?
    - D9u 13y ago
      The Boston Marathon is a high profile event, and when explosives are involved, the security response is elevated. Explosives != pillows. The "world renowned" aspect is just that. The world is watching how we respond to such incidents, and to attempt to marginalize this incident by comparing a mother smothering her children with pillows to bombs targeting a crowd is callous in the extreme. Of course we'd prefer to catch all criminals, especially those who target high profile events with explosives.
mixmax 13y ago
It's a bad way of dealing with terrorism. It's in the name - it's all about terrorising, and the Boston bombers have certainly succeded in that. With this whole spectacle you've let two guys with very little resources put the whole nation into a state of emergency. You're playing their game. This is exactly what they want. They don't deserve that honour. I wrote about it here a few day sago: http://www.maximise.dk/how-a-great-statesman-would-deal-with-a-terror-attack/ http://www.maximise.dk/how-a-great-statesman-would-deal-with...
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  A true statesman will not put fuel on the bonfire of fear. He will extuingish it by telling us that there is nothing to be afraid of. That these acts are done by moronic twisted people that don’t deserve the attention. He will tell the people that they have nothing to fear but fear itself. And despite this deathless rhetoric in the face of economic collapse, FDR interned 110,000 Japanese people because they had distinctive ethnic features shared by one group of people engaged in a war against the US, although there was never any attempt to intern German-Americans. What happened in the Boston is that the authorities requested the cooperation of the public in exceptional circumstances, and got it. If they had tried to impose some sort of lockdown on Monday after the bombing, you might have a point. But they didn't. The city kept operating normally until the suspects resurfaced, got into a shootout with police, and one of them managed to evade his pursuers. Given how many people were affected by the original terrorist incident, I don't find it odd at all that most people chose to facilitate the manhunt by leaving the streets empty.
enraged_camel 13y ago
"We weren't scared. We were pissed." Please. The people of Boston were scared shitless. And you know what? There is nothing wrong with admitting that. When you have a couple of insane killers who could have hidden god knows how many bombs out there, being scared is the appropriate response. What is not appropriate is shutting down the entire city to find those guys. I'm very glad they were caught. But by shutting down public transportation and getting all cars and humans off the streets, Bostonian authorities greatly magnified the scare-factor for Bostonians. It was an overreaction. Now that I think about it, we are really good at overreacting to terrorism. A bunch of guys rammed planes into the Twin Towers and our response was to invade two countries. Some guy hid a bomb in his shoes and our response was to make tens of millions of people take off their shoes every time they are at the airport. A couple of guys set off bombs at a marathon and our response was to shut down an entire city. When does it end? When do we learn to respond to terror attacks rationally rather than emotionally?
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Thousands of people lined up in the streets Wednesday night for a chance at a seat inside the city's Cathedral for Thursday's memorial service. That doesn't sound like the behavior of a population living in fear, since they were making themselves a target by gathering together in that fashion.
- Symbol 13y ago
  Thousands showed up in Dorchester on Monday night to mourn the death of one of their residents.

freshhawk 13y ago

"I don’t think that’s quite right. I’d bet the American people, if given the opportunity, are as capable as the Israelis and the Brits of withstanding the occasional deadly attack by extremist groups or individuals [...] It’s the authorities and the media that tend to go a little crazy, and their actions reinforce each other." So the Israelis and Brits don't have authorities or media? Or are their authorities and media not Israelis and Brits? Or does he mean that the authorities and the media in America are not made up of American people? Seems quite a stretch to make this distinction without a difference to try and sidestep any actual discussion of why these differences among cultures exist. Cheap rhetorical trick. Not that I can blame him I guess, it's "un-american" to propose rational reactions that might decrease terrorism rather than scorched-earth vengeance seeking.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

sopooneo 13y ago

Something to consider: it worked. It would still be presumptuous, but at least a little less misdirected, to Monday-morning-quarterback a team that lost the game.

nekojima 13y ago
It didn't work, as the suspect was discovered after the curfew was over, by a man who had been inside his house all day. Had the man been outside his house earlier in the day, and seen the cover of his boat, its all but likely the suspect could have been apprehended 8-12 hours earlier.
- sopooneo 13y ago
  I'm talking black box QA. Input is suspect identified. Output is that inside 24 hours they had him alive. Every particular possible outcome has some set of strategy changes that, in retrospect, would have made apprehension quicker. But this success was reached without the benefit of clairvoyance.
- awwstn 13y ago
  Worked === Intended outcome achieved At the point when the lockdown started, the intended outcome was likely to catch the suspect without any more death, injury or destruction. It worked. You can speculate as to whether it would have also worked with a different approach, but you can't say the selected approach didn't work.
  - Camillo 13y ago
    And all this time I thought that post hoc ergo propter hoc was a fallacy!
Pitarou 13y ago
> Something to consider: it worked. Damn right it worked. INPUT: pressure cookers and gunpowder OUTPUT: front page headlines around the world; whole city gets shut down That's pretty damn effective. And it's all thanks to the multiplying effect of hysterical overreaction. --- EDIT: Updated my description of the bomb, in response to comments below.

sliverstorm 13y ago

Personally, I wonder if this wasn't exactly the right sort of response. They say that severity of punishment is not nearly as effective a deterrent as certainty. If the image of the entirety of Boston so quickly working against these two men isn't the very picture of swiftness and certainty/inevitability, I don't know what is.

Pitarou 13y ago
Would you advocate shutting down the city every time there's a hit-and-run incident? Surely, discouraging reckless driving would save FAR more lives than discouraging terrorists.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  The next time you see a premeditated hit-and-run incident that critically injures 130+ people and involves TV-style shootouts with the police, people might consider it.
  - Pitarou 13y ago
    From your first comment, I thought you were talking about public safety and deterring criminal acts. But it's clear now that what's really got your blood pumping is the sense of spectacle. I guess I should congratulate the terrorists for putting on such a good show.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      In my first comment I wasn't talking about safety, I was talking specifically about deterrence. In my second comment, I was doing a poor job of getting to the part where you need to get the populace on board to drive this. This is why the magnitude of the incident is important. People are much, much more interested in stopping the bomber who injures 130 than the driver who flees an accident. Maybe it's not rational, maybe proportionality can be called into question, but the whole damn world was on board for catching these two men. I was trying to avoid typing an essay on a subject I can't write a good essay about, but to try and keep things short my theory is that terrorists evoke an unusually strong response because it feels more personal, for a number of reasons. The first that I always think about is the magnification through social connections. Those 130+ people probably have at least 5 family members, 5 friends, and 5 co-workers each. So we've got at least 2,000 people who feel directly impacted- someone they know was personally hurt. Fan that out to only one more degree, and you've got 30,000 people who know somebody whose friend was injured. Summary: You've got to get the people on-board to make such an effort. Terrorism can get people on-board like nothing else, aside from open war.

youngerdryas 13y ago

"Boston is probably the only major city that if you fuck with them, they will shut down the city, stop everything, and find you." Happy Gilmore

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

droithomme 13y ago

These actions went far far beyond martial law powers, and yet martial law was not declared. I don't know what legal authority there was to do this, I assume it exists and comes from some recent Patriot Act like bill. Whatever it is, we see that its power is greater than that of martial law and it is something that doesn't have to be activated in an emergency, the power exists at all times. That in itself is terrifying and that undeclared power is not what I want for a country that I live in. The detail that the police ordered everyone to shut down even train service, but with the sole exception being that they requested Dunkin Donuts shops stay open and continue providing free donuts for police is straight out of feudalism.

sliverstorm 13y ago
I'd like to see evidence that the police shut down the city with martial power. I'm inclined to think the Governor said, "Everybody should stay home today", and the author of this article embellished a little.
- Symbol 13y ago
  This. Exactly. As a resident of a neighboring town not technically on "lockdown", residents nevertheless acted that way. Streets were empty. Businesses closed. It was very very quiet. This was obviously done by choice, not mandate. Yes, there was some fear driving this, as a police officer a few miles away was killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (cop killings do not occur often in the Boston-area suburbs). However, a large motivator was solidarity with other towns on lockdown. We really wanted to give the police every chance they could to catch this guy. The value judgement was made by private business owners and employers to support that effort.
  - droithomme 13y ago
    An entire city cowering in fear of an incompetent 19 year old isn't what I would call sound judgement and solidarity. Giving up because they have no courage or sense of what it is to live in a free state, yeah that's what I'd call it. http://georgedonnelly.com/libertarian/boston-police-state-failed http://georgedonnelly.com/libertarian/boston-police-state-fa... "If you allow an angsty teenager with a pressure cooker to frighten you into abandoning your daily routine and cowering in your home as if it were a prison, then you desperately need to re-evaluate your posture towards life. Reclaim your self-respect, Boston." "When a dozen paramilitary cops with fully automatic battle rifles backed by a guy on a humvee turret and snipers come to my house, the words ‘voluntary’ and ‘cooperation’ have no place. I would be a fool to resist. They have guns to my head and the heads of anyone with me. It’s now too late to resist. I don’t blame anyone for cooperating. I blame them for cheering their oppressors." "Boston was turned into a police state for a day. It was an experiment. It failed miserably. The governments in operation there rallied all of the military might at their disposal with a near-complete suspension of liberty and they failed to find the man they were looking for – until they lifted their siege." "The bottom line is that the man on the street, the civilian, the regular joe, is a more effective agent for public safety than any hopped-up government employee with body armor, night vision, full-auto rifles and flash-bangs. Just like with Flight 93, the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber, it was the regular folks who played the key role in neutralizing a suspected terrorist – not the cops or the TSA. That should be a sobering fact for any law enforcement cheerleader." Is this house search voluntary? What about the people pulled out by heavily armed soldiers at gun point? What was their crime? Can you tell me? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LrbsUVSVl8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LrbsUVSVl8 Did this guy have a right to film soldiers on the street outside his own home? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A5vfyFyptQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A5vfyFyptQ Is that what you think living in a free country looks like? Or is it what living in a totalitarian police state looks like?

tkahn6 13y ago

1. I'm getting really good at predicting what the intellectual hipster perspective on a particular issue will be. I knew yesterday we would see op eds like this. 2. Not Hacker News. Flagged.

harlanlewis 13y ago
“Everyone has a different definition for hipster. Usually, they just find a person with qualities they don’t like and say “That’s a hipster”.” http://bearskinrug.co.uk/hipsters/ http://bearskinrug.co.uk/hipsters/
- tkahn6 13y ago
  I'm using this definition of 'intellectual hipster'. http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...

lttlrck 13y ago

Reads like someone was upset their train was canceled. Pretty damn clear why some airspace needed to be closed isn't? Fool.

kevin_morrill 13y ago

I imagine very few people will question the political decisions here because it requires imagination to account for the unseen. Hazlitt famously wrote about this in Economics in One Lesson. What ground breaking research at MIT didn't get done Friday? What important meetings were delayed? And then what does that add up to when you multiply it by millions?