After all, most people in the USA don't live near high value targets, and I doubt most people are afraid of terrorism in their day to day lives (the occasional highly unusual occurrence being the exception).
This, "the terrorists won" meme is getting old, and I don't believe is true. If you read up on ISIS extremists, they believe their destiny is to take over the world, ex. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
The truth is terrorist have engulfed themselves in anger and hate, and as the saying goes, hate breeds hate. That's what is happening to the USA. People are too embarrassed to admit it. After all, the modern enlightened individual has grown past hatred, right? They leave such petty emotions behind, don't they?
So, no one wins. Not the terrorists, nor the people... well besides a few power hungry elitists who should be lined up against a wall and shot (just kidding), but I think you see my point.
It's just a instinctual lizard brain response to a instinctual lizard brain action. And the more we deny we hate, the more it controls us.
ISIS' founding logic was Al Qaeda failed, and surely that was because it wasn't ambitious enough, and not pure enough. The solution was to rebase on fundamentalism and use the remnants of the Iraqi army to create a safe space for a caliphate to rule.
Of course, I'm offering absolutely nothing to back my assertions here, so it's fair to ignore this. :)
The West rolled back on Habeas Corpus and here we have you lamenting over economic costs.
So, who "won" again?
I told myself this was being far too fearful. Surely those reading would recognize that the absence of every other cost in the post: the lives of hundreds of thousands, mass surveillance, the Patriot act, etc, etc, etc, and recognize that I couldn't enumerate everything in a post that was already too long.
I worried more about narcissistic performance art, someone hopping in, vastly exaggerating with statements like habeas corpus was rolled back! and I had ignored it, and that seemed unlikely as well. Surely this was all manifestation of anxiety, anxiety I have to address.
Thank you for showing that fear wasn't unfounded.
We're just exchanging ideas and viewpoints here. Nothing to be nervous about, specially since we're both posting with opaque handles.
> I couldn't enumerate everything in a post that was already too long.
Right. It's just a matter of priorities for a short short list.
> narcissistic performance art, someone hopping in, vastly exaggerating with statements like habeas corpus was rolled back!
I would have welcomed a reasoned response that did not consist in toto of imaginal matters and an apparent personal attack.
Here is another piece of "narcissistic performance art" for you: http://www.nyupress.org/webchapters/hafetz_911_toc.pdf
You made an unfounded assertion, with a scolding for not enumerating your unfounded assertion in my list of consequences of 9/11. This list is no list – it's literally two items that I had chosen specifically for that paragraph because A) they were important to my reasoning B) they were the two explicit goals of al Qaeda operations, decided upon as the best strategy after increasing scare resources limited potential scope of operations, and lack of appetite to become a religious nation-state.
When called on your unfounded assertion and scolding, you attempted to take a step back. You sarcastically mocked my defense, by conflating the time I took to write a long post, with me taking time to write a long list of absolutely every cost to humanity after 9/11. You claimed my response was really just imaginary concerns and a personal attack, complained I didn't engage your unfounded assertion, and posted two pages of the table of contents of an unidentified book.
I spent ~10 minutes trying to learn more about the author and his assertions, and couldn't find any information on Google that would remotely shed light on your unfounded assertion.
Even if I had, it doesn't change anything. The most charitable version of the only argument you've offered is I'm callous to care more about trillion of dollars in economics consequences that our fundamental rights as a society. That's not what happened. All that happened is I built the paragraph around mentioning al Qaeda's only two explicitly goals, and that they had accomplished them at level beyond their wildest imagination.
At the end, I'm thinking, this was utterly a waste of time for the both of us, except you've gotten to engage me two posts in a row now. That's usually the mark of a troll.
As a helpful final note, here is the NYU Press page with reviews of the cited book: http://nyupress.org/books/9780814737033/
It was such traumatic event for the entire society, due to its stark reminder that we weren't safe, and the modern world hadn't solved every problem, after decades of comfort.
There's a feedback cycle of increased fear, leading to unrealistic demands to fix it, leading to "solutions" that are immensely amplified by the media, and the politician's justifications of the solutions. That leads to increased fear...ad nauseum, to the point that you could credibly do a "Exisentially frightening" find and replace for every instance of "terrorism" and "Exisentially frightening (noun)" for terrorist. They're increasingly synonymous, and terrorist is the one losing definitive meaning.
I don't blame politics for this. We elect them by popular vote, and don't usually reward them for giving us a stern talking to, rather than addressing our exisential fears. But, they could have avoided the types of solutions they've trumpeted. Solutions that killed tens of thousands of Americans and foreigners, altered the way we live, and wasted trillions of dollars that should have been spent lifting ourselves up.
The terrorists won. They've done exactly what we know they wanted: create vast fear in the populace, and impose high economic costs, with relatively small acts committed by madmen.
Hopefully we start choosing more reasonable solutions, responsibly fund the ones we've found (the TSA caused multi-day delays in major cities this summer), and stop demanding the impossible from our politicians. Popular opinion about Middle East military action is tortured logic. You can't be mad about Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They express the full spectrum of action we can take — at least, as far as the general public perceives it. There's interesting distinctions, but few are well-informed enough to have that be informing their opinion.