Driving a car at least gives you the opportunity to reject taking on the risk.
The fabric of society is based around us not shooting each other/ blowing up trains. Every event like this (or, say, some countries bombing out neighborhoods in other countries) makes it harder to rely on the idea that this sort of thing doesn't happen.
Acknowledging that this happens because of conscious policy decisions by many people is also good.
There's absolutely nothing inevitable about these kinds of attacks. We could bring this sort of event down to a number real close to 0.
Not to mention that it's possible to worry about car crashes and terrorism at the same time
I don't think so.
Even if you exclude international politics completely the number still isn't zero. Take the 2011 Norway attacks where 77 people died. That was one guy, a Christian fundamentalist, likely paranoid schizophrenic who wanted to rid the world of Marxism/feminism/islam/something. Then you have the unabomber, most school shootings, and so on which you can point to.
My point is: This stuff is NEVER going away. All you can do is minimise it. Zero is certainly a laudable goal but likely an unachievable one.
Edit: However I agree with the part that this is never going to go away (completely). You cannot totally prevent terror, and living in a society that could would be terror itself.
In my life time, I'm much more likely to be murdered by a driver than a terrorist.
Most bike deaths are single-vehicle accidents (they do not involve another party).
> We could bring this sort of event down to a number real close to 0.
Please, would you mind elaborating a bit on these two points?
The narrative after 9/11, and after both Paris attacks were "this is a war of civilization, of culture. They attack us because we are free". I think a lot of us realise on a conscious level that this narrative simply isn't true, but the narrative still stands.
Foreign intervention make us targets for "retaliation" (I'm trying hard to not apologise for monsters murdering a bunch of civilians pretty indiscriminately). There are many major countries and populations that are easier targets for Daesch that don't seem to get attacked. If this was about maximum carnage so many worse things could be happening right now.
The whole "having a population not super happy about the current government" thing doesn't seem to help (in terms of building a support network). Though even that requires a pound of salt: a journalist on twitter pointed out that in the case of the Paris attacks, there were support networks... but they were mainly for "normal" criminals (drug dealers and the like). We're not talking about a huge set of jihadists, but a bunch of opportunists [0].
I think most people would recognise that the IRA bombings and the Troubles was a result of policy, not culture. Daesch is, I think, pretty similar. It's not like a bunch of people got up and were like "We hate the West!". There's a lot of stuff involved. Not that it justifies their actions, but it's at least good to be lucid when thinking about the why.
[0]: https://twitter.com/joshuahersh/status/712280093343793153
I agree with you on that; it's unfortunate, though, that a lot of political bad actors have spot-welded "we need to understand why they're doing this" -- which is obviously true, it's much harder to defeat an enemy you don't understand -- to "it's racist to think that we have an enemy at all, never mind actually fight them effectively."
I appreciate your point, and it is somewhat reassuring, but terrorists can cause damage beyond the raw numbers because their damage can be focused.
I have no intention of belittling the incident, but I fail to see how shutting everything down is a proper response to any incident of less than catastrophic scale.
I take that back, I can see a reason: CYA. Nobody would want to be the one who makes the decision to keep the metro system running and have a second attack occur. I'm still not convinced that CYA is a sufficient reason, however.
If you don't shut down and an second and/or third incident then happens in a coordinated attack, it's very easy to say "Why didn't you shut down? Couldn't you see that we were under attack?"
That's "what's the point of using acronyms when you can just write out the full sentence?"
Well, you could ask the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency, or even consult with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perhaps you can send them JavaScript Object Notation using the Asynchronous Javscript and Extensible Markup Language standard over HyperText Transfer Protocol?
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I use acronyms to reduce the cognitive overhead of reading, and (relevant to this discussion) make otherwise offensive terms acceptable in a broad range of environments (snafu, CYA, OMFG, WTF, etc). I'm sorry you haven't run across CYA before (though that might be a good thing), but it's not a terribly uncommon acronym either.
Regular old inclement weather does this all the time and people don't cry panic that society is going to implode.
Shutting down transportation for a day is a silly thing to be terrorized about.
>As for us, we behave like a herd of deer. When they flee from the huntsman's feathers in affright, which way do they turn? What haven of safety do they make for? Why, they rush upon the nets! And thus they perish by confounding what they should fear with that wherein no danger lies. . . . Not death or pain is to be feared, but the fear of death or pain. Well said the poet therefore:—Death has no terror; only a Death of shame!
-Epictetus
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
With accidents, you can kinda hope they won't be happening too often because nobody benefits from them. Not so much with violent conflicts, though.
>No terrorist group has achieved a kill rate anywhere near a conventional military; and are vastly less than those death tolls for guerrilla organizations or dictators. Stalin or Mao could, in a bad day, exceed the deaths caused by all international terrorism over the last 2 centuries. 9/11, the crowning incident of terrorism in those centuries, was equaled by just 29 days of car accidents in the USA - and 9/11 was only accidentally that successful! 9/11 is also a sterling example of the availability bias: besides it, how many attacks could the best informed Western citizen name? Perhaps a score, on a good day, if they have a good memory; inasmuch as the MIPT database records >19,000 just 1968-2004, it’s clear that terrifyingly exceptional terrorist attacks are just that. Remarkably, it seems that it is unusual for terrorist attacks to injure even a single person; the MIPT database puts the number of such attacks at 35% of all attacks. Certainly the post-9/11 record would seem to indicate it was a fluke... Many terrorist organizations keep very detailed financial records (consider the troves of data seized from Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, from Bin Laden’s safehouse, or Al Qaeda’s insistence on receipts), with little trust of underlings, suggesting far less ideological devotion than commonly believed & serious principal-agent problems. Stories about terrorist incompetence are legion and the topic is now played for laughs (eg. the 2010 movie Four Lions), prompting columnists to tell us to ignore all the incompetence and continue to be afraid.
They should look up north, Norway is the shining beacon in terms of how a country can handle terrorism responsibly.
It is almost trivial to be an effective terrorist if body count is what you're optimizing for. In Baghdad they blew a fuel tanker sky high, the blast rattled my windows so hard across the city that I thought we were the ones under attack.
I have wondered (ever since it was my job to think like a guerrilla fighter) why terrorists don't do similar things in the US or other countries. How many fuel tankers are there in the US? How hard would it be to GTA one of them and drive it into a dense gathering of people? How hard would it be to re-enact the CoD MW2 airport scene?
Perhaps it is symbolism not body counts they seek? After all the DC sniper effectively terrorized three states with a rifle.
In the infantry nothing is scarier than land mines and snipers.
All I know is surveillance can't stop every tanker or lone gunman. It's just too easy to do these kinds of things without the use of anything with a significant RF signature.
Saying that terrorist attacks barely impact P(death) trivializes them.
There you go. Killing 50+ people is absurdly easy. Hello, blacklists.
People should be much more afraid of dying in a car accident than dying at the hands of terrorists, yet few people are urgently pushing the government to enforce stronger safety standards in cars / on roads. Instead people demand better security to protect them against things they are unlikely to be involved in to begin with.
Compared with traffic regulation and enforcement, the response to terrorist events like this are vastly out of proportion, and well into the range of irrational response that the terrorists know is the only way to really damage a large powerful nation - by making it turn on its own people and put them in a security-state panopticon.
They had explosives, weapons, the resolve to sacrifice themselves and tried their best to do as much damage as possible. And they managed to to kill less than 30 people (provisional count).
Of course every death that brought on by this fanatic mob is too much, but we should keep our perspective.
A bus accident in Spain last week left 11 exchange students dead, in the US alone every day more than 50 people die in road accidents.
Of course we should root out the people that try to bomb our freedom away. But don't let us be terrorized by something that doesn't make a statistically recognizable dent in our probability for survival.