4 ms·

I don't even think you need to go that far, with extreme examples of totalitarianism. I'm not American, so obviously I'm less emotionally involved. My view on

by netcan 13y ago

I don't even think you need to go that far, with extreme examples of totalitarianism. I'm not American, so obviously I'm less emotionally involved. My view on it is that the US is not under any meaningful threat of terrorism. 9/11 was big, but on the scale of decades it is still far down the likelihood list of violent ways an American may be harmed. Murder, Rape and other assaults are a reality too, a far more likely reality. The real "solution" is "ignore terrorism, it's not a big threat." That's contrary to human nature, but I think it is the most rational response.

infruset 13y ago
Even better: use all that money and intelligence, not to hunt down and kill people, not to invade countries, but to help make the world a better place. Then less people might dedicate their lives to killing American civilians.
digitalengineer 13y ago
Yes. Let's put the threat of terrorism in perceptive: In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide, while 31,672 people were killed with firearms in America alone, reports CNN’s Samuel Burke. http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-killed-by-guns-than-by-terrorists/ http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-kill...
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Be careful, you're treading into muddy waters, and it's not necessary for your argument. Consider a few problems with your statistics. First, 20k of those gun deaths in the US are suicides, which distorts the statistics into pretending to show a certain level of gun violence that's not actually evident. Second, dying in terrorist attacks is not the same thing as dying at the hands of terrorists or terrorist organizations. There are tens of thousands of people being killed every year in Syria, for example, at the hands of al qaeda or other terrorist aligned soldiers. There have been about ten thousand people killed every year in Mexico at the hands of drug cartels in what is effectively a weird kind of civil war happening there. During the Iraq war and during the war in Chechnya terrorists and terrorist aligned fighters killed tens of thousands of people, many of them civilians. Moreover, very few people die every year from jet crashes. However, that low figure is due to a truly enormous amount of effort and resources put forth, probably in the trillions of dollars per year range, to keep air travel safe and reliable. That's the danger of using naive statistics and straight death-toll comparisons the way you are doing. Sure, more people are going to die from cheeseburgers than likely will ever die from terrorism. But A: overall that's a good thing, and B: it's not necessarily meaningful. More importantly, there are much more direct and more substantive attacks against NSA surveillance effectiveness, TSA screening, etc. For example, with regard to TSA screening it's notable that the TSA has not thwarted even one terrorist attack on a plane since 9/11. However, there are many documented accounts of TSA failures to prevent weapons of various sorts (knives, guns, even bombs) from getting on planes. And there have been attempted attacks on planes which the TSA did not stop but which passengers did. The case with regard to the ineffectuality of the NSA's surveillance efforts is even stronger. They put out a list of foiled plots where the NSA surveillance had some role and it is wall to wall bullshit. Most of the "plots" are little more than entrapment, and there appears to be no case at all where surveillance was the lynchpin that made the difference between shutting down a plot when that plot would have gone undetected without the surveillance data. Worse yet, there are several examples of cases, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, of outright incompetence where the FBI/NSA et al had a case handed to them on a golden platter and they screwed the pooch and let someone they were warned about end up murdering American civilians. And one has to wonder if those sorts of failures, which vastly outweigh the vast majority of phony "successes", happened because federal law enforcement agencies were too focused on this high-tech bullshit instead of actually doing their fucking jobs.
  - digitalengineer 13y ago
    You're right of course. And even the label 'terrorist' can vary. I think if we ask the people living under the threat of predator-strikes they'd say it's the US thats causing a lot of the terror there.
    - InclinedPlane 13y ago
      "Terrorist" does not currently have a well-accepted objective definition. To me a terrorist is a guerrilla fighter who lacks popular support where they are fighting and specifically attacks soft targets for political (rather than military/tactical) goals. Regardless, the casualness with which "collateral" deaths of civilians has been handled for several of the US's recent military activities may be of a different nature but not necessarily on a higher moral standing. This is probably most true of the US's participation in the Yemeni civil war over the last several years, but there is much else worthy of approbation. The theory of arming surveillance drones was always that it would enable attacks on extremely high value targets of opportunity using precision guided munitions that would limit collateral damage. In practice it has resulted in an unprecedented expansion in the extent of the currently active battlefield and a weapon system which appears to be on the same moral level as the car bomb in the degree to which it causes deaths of innocent civilians.
      - scott_karana 13y ago
        Kofi Annan's definition seemed reasonable to me: Any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.
- salient 13y ago
  You can't even average that out, because the vast majority of those 13,000 "terrorist attacks", if true, are certainly inside countries where they are basically at war with each other. And in many of those countries, US contributes to the kill count, although I assume these reports don't count that as "terrorism", even as they blow up 15 people going to a wedding.
pizza234 13y ago
I think it's very reasonable to put things in proportion (eg. car accidents kill way more people than terrorists), but restricting the perspective on terrorism, as long as US maintains the military offensive, there will be always such threat.
Ntrails 13y ago
I have never understood how rarely attacks occur. I think of the places I visit in London, and the volume of people, and I conclude that there is simply no shortage of opportunity to create casualties of at least 3 figures. So my question becomes, do the supposed large swathes of angry terrorists not want to damage it in traditional terrorist attacks, or are they being prevented from doing so by the security services, surveillance and border controls etc. I genuinely believe that some attacks are being foiled though whether it's 1 a year or 1000 a year is extremely unclear.
- netcan 13y ago
  Some are, just like other crimes. There just isn't very much terrorism outside of civil war/independence war type situations. It's not a common type of violence. It never really was. Just try applying the same logic you apply to other horrible problems which are dealt with but never fully eradicated. Pedophilia. It's a crime. Many cases are foiled. Many are not.
cle 13y ago
I think the risk assessment should take into account more than just casualties. The risk of terrorism that scares governments is not necessarily the casualties (though that undoubtedly is a factor), but longer-term consequences. For example, repeated terrorist attacks on U.S. soil may deteriorate the confidence of citizens in their government, increase the audacity of terrorists, make the U.S. appear weak, etc. I don't agree with the U.S.'s response to terrorism, but I'm also not convinced that tallying casualties provides an accurate risk assessment. The political risk of terrorism is much higher than, say, automobile fatalities (or firearms, as digitalengineer pointed out in a sibling reply).
- netcan 13y ago
  I don't think we disagree much. But the tally of affected people (not just mortalities) is a scale of sorts, even if it must be weighted. 9/11 was significant also becasue it happened in a dense, crowded city and many were affected. But even considering heavily weighted scales terrorism is less of a threat than violent rape by a stranger (itself far less common but more impactful on the public psyche than rape by a non-stranger). People will not lose confidence in the government unless their lives are constantly affected, just like other crimes.

by netcan 13y ago

infruset 13y ago

Even better: use all that money and intelligence, not to hunt down and kill people, not to invade countries, but to help make the world a better place. Then less people might dedicate their lives to killing American civilians.

digitalengineer 13y ago

Yes. Let's put the threat of terrorism in perceptive: In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide, while 31,672 people were killed with firearms in America alone, reports CNN’s Samuel Burke. http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-killed-by-guns-than-by-terrorists/ http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-kill...

InclinedPlane 13y ago
Be careful, you're treading into muddy waters, and it's not necessary for your argument. Consider a few problems with your statistics. First, 20k of those gun deaths in the US are suicides, which distorts the statistics into pretending to show a certain level of gun violence that's not actually evident. Second, dying in terrorist attacks is not the same thing as dying at the hands of terrorists or terrorist organizations. There are tens of thousands of people being killed every year in Syria, for example, at the hands of al qaeda or other terrorist aligned soldiers. There have been about ten thousand people killed every year in Mexico at the hands of drug cartels in what is effectively a weird kind of civil war happening there. During the Iraq war and during the war in Chechnya terrorists and terrorist aligned fighters killed tens of thousands of people, many of them civilians. Moreover, very few people die every year from jet crashes. However, that low figure is due to a truly enormous amount of effort and resources put forth, probably in the trillions of dollars per year range, to keep air travel safe and reliable. That's the danger of using naive statistics and straight death-toll comparisons the way you are doing. Sure, more people are going to die from cheeseburgers than likely will ever die from terrorism. But A: overall that's a good thing, and B: it's not necessarily meaningful. More importantly, there are much more direct and more substantive attacks against NSA surveillance effectiveness, TSA screening, etc. For example, with regard to TSA screening it's notable that the TSA has not thwarted even one terrorist attack on a plane since 9/11. However, there are many documented accounts of TSA failures to prevent weapons of various sorts (knives, guns, even bombs) from getting on planes. And there have been attempted attacks on planes which the TSA did not stop but which passengers did. The case with regard to the ineffectuality of the NSA's surveillance efforts is even stronger. They put out a list of foiled plots where the NSA surveillance had some role and it is wall to wall bullshit. Most of the "plots" are little more than entrapment, and there appears to be no case at all where surveillance was the lynchpin that made the difference between shutting down a plot when that plot would have gone undetected without the surveillance data. Worse yet, there are several examples of cases, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, of outright incompetence where the FBI/NSA et al had a case handed to them on a golden platter and they screwed the pooch and let someone they were warned about end up murdering American civilians. And one has to wonder if those sorts of failures, which vastly outweigh the vast majority of phony "successes", happened because federal law enforcement agencies were too focused on this high-tech bullshit instead of actually doing their fucking jobs.
- digitalengineer 13y ago
  You're right of course. And even the label 'terrorist' can vary. I think if we ask the people living under the threat of predator-strikes they'd say it's the US thats causing a lot of the terror there.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    "Terrorist" does not currently have a well-accepted objective definition. To me a terrorist is a guerrilla fighter who lacks popular support where they are fighting and specifically attacks soft targets for political (rather than military/tactical) goals. Regardless, the casualness with which "collateral" deaths of civilians has been handled for several of the US's recent military activities may be of a different nature but not necessarily on a higher moral standing. This is probably most true of the US's participation in the Yemeni civil war over the last several years, but there is much else worthy of approbation. The theory of arming surveillance drones was always that it would enable attacks on extremely high value targets of opportunity using precision guided munitions that would limit collateral damage. In practice it has resulted in an unprecedented expansion in the extent of the currently active battlefield and a weapon system which appears to be on the same moral level as the car bomb in the degree to which it causes deaths of innocent civilians.
    - scott_karana 13y ago
      Kofi Annan's definition seemed reasonable to me: Any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.
salient 13y ago
You can't even average that out, because the vast majority of those 13,000 "terrorist attacks", if true, are certainly inside countries where they are basically at war with each other. And in many of those countries, US contributes to the kill count, although I assume these reports don't count that as "terrorism", even as they blow up 15 people going to a wedding.

pizza234 13y ago

I think it's very reasonable to put things in proportion (eg. car accidents kill way more people than terrorists), but restricting the perspective on terrorism, as long as US maintains the military offensive, there will be always such threat.

Ntrails 13y ago

I have never understood how rarely attacks occur. I think of the places I visit in London, and the volume of people, and I conclude that there is simply no shortage of opportunity to create casualties of at least 3 figures. So my question becomes, do the supposed large swathes of angry terrorists not want to damage it in traditional terrorist attacks, or are they being prevented from doing so by the security services, surveillance and border controls etc. I genuinely believe that some attacks are being foiled though whether it's 1 a year or 1000 a year is extremely unclear.

netcan 13y ago
Some are, just like other crimes. There just isn't very much terrorism outside of civil war/independence war type situations. It's not a common type of violence. It never really was. Just try applying the same logic you apply to other horrible problems which are dealt with but never fully eradicated. Pedophilia. It's a crime. Many cases are foiled. Many are not.

cle 13y ago

I think the risk assessment should take into account more than just casualties. The risk of terrorism that scares governments is not necessarily the casualties (though that undoubtedly is a factor), but longer-term consequences. For example, repeated terrorist attacks on U.S. soil may deteriorate the confidence of citizens in their government, increase the audacity of terrorists, make the U.S. appear weak, etc. I don't agree with the U.S.'s response to terrorism, but I'm also not convinced that tallying casualties provides an accurate risk assessment. The political risk of terrorism is much higher than, say, automobile fatalities (or firearms, as digitalengineer pointed out in a sibling reply).

netcan 13y ago
I don't think we disagree much. But the tally of affected people (not just mortalities) is a scale of sorts, even if it must be weighted. 9/11 was significant also becasue it happened in a dense, crowded city and many were affected. But even considering heavily weighted scales terrorism is less of a threat than violent rape by a stranger (itself far less common but more impactful on the public psyche than rape by a non-stranger). People will not lose confidence in the government unless their lives are constantly affected, just like other crimes.