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Clearly different circumstances however Spain, France, Germany, Norway all invaded Afghanistan, and Spain and Norway also invaded Iraq. Perhaps not as a direct

by CHY872 12y ago

Clearly different circumstances however Spain, France, Germany, Norway all invaded Afghanistan, and Spain and Norway also invaded Iraq. Perhaps not as a direct response, though. To your second point, it's clearly a very complicated blame game, but trying to distill it down to fit your own point is not helpful. We can easily follow the chain of events backwards - for example had the USSR not invaded Afghanistan, this might have all been avoided. Certainly the trigger point was the Taliban refusing to hand over Bin Laden, thus providing a safe haven for him and other like minded folk. This all seems to be besides my original point, which was that terror attacks clearly cost far more than the lives of the people killed, and so arguing that the benefit of the NSA is minimal by considering only a tiny fragment of its potential benefit is fallacious.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> and so arguing that the benefit of the NSA is minimal by considering only a tiny fragment of its potential benefit is fallacious. It's indeed fallacious because there is no benefit of the NSA at all - its current activities are the very cost of 9/11 attacks. Civilian deaths are not the goal of a terror attack, they're just collateral damage, means to an end. The goal of an attack is to, as you wrote, "disrupt a nation" - which is not something that the bombs do, it's something that the nation does to itself by having a crazy overreaction.
- CHY872 12y ago
  That only works if you assume that there's only ever one attack. If it thwarts another, then it's benefiting. In any case, I wouldn't really argue that the NSA 'disrupts' the nation at all - the spending on it is only a little larger than at the end of the cold war, and apart from the recent news stories only a very small minority will actually be affected by it in their daily lives.
  - deciplex 12y ago
    >the spending on it is only a little larger than at the end of the cold war I hope you realize that this means the spending on it is quite high, indeed.

by CHY872 12y ago

TeMPOraL 12y ago

> and so arguing that the benefit of the NSA is minimal by considering only a tiny fragment of its potential benefit is fallacious. It's indeed fallacious because there is no benefit of the NSA at all - its current activities are the very cost of 9/11 attacks. Civilian deaths are not the goal of a terror attack, they're just collateral damage, means to an end. The goal of an attack is to, as you wrote, "disrupt a nation" - which is not something that the bombs do, it's something that the nation does to itself by having a crazy overreaction.

CHY872 12y ago
That only works if you assume that there's only ever one attack. If it thwarts another, then it's benefiting. In any case, I wouldn't really argue that the NSA 'disrupts' the nation at all - the spending on it is only a little larger than at the end of the cold war, and apart from the recent news stories only a very small minority will actually be affected by it in their daily lives.
- deciplex 12y ago
  >the spending on it is only a little larger than at the end of the cold war I hope you realize that this means the spending on it is quite high, indeed.