With every occurrence of a black swan event, you are made more resilient in preventing an event of a similar kind. So, now that we know that 9/11 can happen, we're now more mentally prepared than ever to prevent something like it if it happens again. Case in point, pilots now carry weapons and are much more likely to thwart attempts of hijacking. Passengers will also react more violently and vigorously now towards any sign of threat. Note that we actually have a few precedents since 9/11 in which hijacking of airplanes were thwarted in this manner.
And even if that does happen, so what? Even if an attack happens that dwarfs 9/11, it'll still be insignificant compared to the country as a whole, and not justify anything near the amount of money spent to fight it.
Barring the detonation of a nuclear bomb in a major US city, there's just nothing that terrorists can do that would really count for much, as long as we can avoid a massive overreaction.
Let's suppose that some terrorist group became skilled enough to bomb a major sporting event or other large concentration of people every six months or so. Not big bombs, mind you, just enough to kill a few dozen or a hundred people each.
By the strategy seemingly being argued for here, a "resilient" or "rational" America would just let the existing police do their work as best they can, maybe with some not-too-expensive Federal assistance, and simply accept the added risk of dying at major events, which, after all, is not that much more significant than the risk of dying in a car accident on the way.
Obviously, that is not the response we'd expect, and it's not because Americans are irrational or fearful. It's because this prioritization-by-mortality-rate policy logic is faulty. It matters that there's an agency behind these deaths. One thing our society values highly is justice, and that often requires a disproportionately expensive response to an unjust act, and not solely to buy deterrence.
> One thing our society values highly is justice, and that often requires a disproportionately expensive response to an unjust act, and not solely to buy deterrence.
A disproportionate response of the kind seen on 9/11 is mind-blowingly irrational, even if you call it pursuing "justice".
If you are so in the pursuit of "justice" you inflict a worse injury to yourself than you originally suffered, I'm not sure I can call it "rational" behavior anymore.
Especially if you're not doing it for deterrent effect.
My point is that treating it as any other spree or serial killing is rational - we already have mechanisms to deal with these kinds of events, including laws about the use of "weapons of mass destruction", etc.
The whole point of terrorism is to provoke a reaction outside of that normal process and get people to react to the terror... causing an allergy-style overreaction from the populace, much like we saw from 9/11 in the US.
So the rational response IS to simply go "ho-hum" and treat it as just another criminal act. Taking the cowardly path of "something scared me, spite it with full power phasers!" is what the terrorists wants, and is ultimately self-defeating.
Comparing it to more dangerous things - things that are statistically more likely to kill you - is a way to fight against our animalistic panic to smash! kill! destroy! the thing causing fear, and demonstrate that it is just fear we're responding to, rather than a rational danger.
tl;dr: Spending the privacy and civil rights we have on stopping the fear caused by terrorism is the height of cowardice and irrationality.
The British provide the stereotypical example of my suggestion. The famous "Keep Calm and Carry On" slogan, of course, comes from their experience during the Blitz. (And yes, I realize it was never published in that time, but it still typifies the response.) The Blitz killed 40,000 civilians, but people did basically go on with their lives and let the government handle things, because that was the best way to do it. Freaking out wasn't going to help the war effort.
The British provide another example of the approach with The Troubles. Not so much in Ireland, really, but I think the response to the attacks in Great Britain qualify.
The British approach seems to work well. The American approach got us mired in two unwinnable wars, sank the country deep into debt, and wrecked the economy. I know which one I prefer.
As to "The Troubles": Are you arguing that the British government gave it proportional attention and resources for number of people killed? I don't believe the death count was ever that high, but it was a hugely important issue for both the Irish and the British, again, for a variety of reasons that go well beyond the death count. Which, of course, is my point.
Are you really suggesting letting the terrorists win?
We need to let go of the idea that it's us or them, and that either we win and they lose, or they win and we lose.
Wouldn't an outcome analogous to the modern-day UK and Ireland be great? People getting along well, no violence, reasonably stable governments? I don't see why you paint this as a bad outcome.
However if that happened as a result of terrorism rather than politics then we would just have an escalation of terrorism anyone who was unhappy with the US (legitimately or not) started to use the now proven strategy. The 'police state' tactics we see now are nothing compared to what we'd see then.
You seem to be advocating terrorism instead of campaigning for justice.
Your position is no less "advocating terrorism" than the one you responded to. The only way not to encourage terrorism is to evaluate policy changes on their own merits, and not be swayed from acting on the merits of the policy changes themselves by the fact that terrorists have stated goals related to those policy changes, either as a positive or negative factor.
I agree totally that policy changes should be considered on their own merits. Therefore we should defend ourselves against terrorist attacks without regard for their stated goals.
There are certainly ways of assessing why particularly policies are and are not chosen. The impact of "Can't do what terrorists want, so we must vote no" is no more difficult to assess than "Must do what terrorists want, so we must vote yes".
mikeash said it was ok not to defend so hard against terrorism because the outcome was good. I was refuting that.
Thank you for the reminder that debating these topics on HN is pointless because everybody's a complete nut.
Sounds like ends (violence stopping) justifying the means (letting the terrorists win) to me.
If you think I said it, then go find it and quote it for me.
That outcome also included dead British cabinet ministers, civilians and infrastructure and decades of fear and hatred.
good means, good ends - no need for justification
bad means, good ends - the ends justify the means
good means, bad ends - the means justify the ends
bad means, bad ends - no possibility of justification
The disconnect is that I don't accept this assumption. I see no evidence that the US method fights terrorism better. In fact, it appears to result in far more and worse attacks than the British method.
Therefore, I am advocating for something that I believe will mitigate terrorism as it happens, and produce a better outcome. Thus falling squarely in the "no need for justification" line of your summary.
They stopped their attacks when their demands were met.
I fail to see what you are advocating other than giving in to terrorism.
Sure, the Irish didn't cease their attacks because of how the British fought them. Likewise, various anti-American terrorists haven't ceased their attacks because of how the US fights them.
Your proposal implies that killing civilians should earn you a seat at the negotiating table.
That said, the UK government certainly did a lot to piss off the Irish and it's not clearly the case that in the events leading up to the conflict all of the UK's actions were great and the Irish's were horrible.
Anyone who cooperates with an abusive power does so because they have been sufficiently terrorized by that power and they don't want to risk further abuse. That kind of cooperation is not a good outcome; it's only the acceptance of coercion, because the alternative is worse.
I was only arguing with this.
> There isn't necessarily a non-evil way to proceed, just worse and less-worse ways. I never said this was all roses and wine.
This is all I mean by bad means, bad ends. This mindset opens up the discussion to debating the pros and cons of different approaches. Anyway, take care.
Nuclear / biological / chemical attacks are the only high threat vector that terrorism presents. That should be the prime focus for anti-terrorism. The secondary focus should be terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers that can hurt people on the level of the Aurora shooting. Neither of those threats require abandoning the first and fourth amendments to deal with properly.
The odds are strongly in favor of young children, via gun accidents, continuing to kill more people every year than what terrorists do on average.
It has to be noted that 9/11 and Boston both happened solely due to extreme government incompetence. Those two supposed black swan events should have never happened. They were not black swan events, they were sheer incompetence. The government failed at its job in numerous ways in both instances, and that's the nice explanation. Their incompetence was not because they lacked information on Average Joe citizen or because they didn't have my email meta data. They demonstrate that they're wildly incompetent at even basic security in multiple high profile cases, and yet they're given even more power. It's a failed approach top to bottom.
The NSA programs are much like our big security / security theater approach, and they'll be just as useless for the exact same reasons. It's trying to thread a needle with a hammer.
It could escalate into civil war though, or even regular war between nation states (especially if one nation selects random nation states to attack as a counterstrike).
Interesting reading on the subject:
http://reliefweb.int/report/world/2012-global-terrorism-inde...
A nuclear bomb over New York city, smallpox distributed in all Western major airports, or simultaneous nerve gas attacks in a number of major cities.
Here's another way of spinning the same data: There have been more deaths caused by terrorism in the US in last 15 years than in the prior 135 years.
Furthermore, I don't think your comparisons to deaths from car accidents or cancer are completely valid. Those are both phenomena for which induction works well (what has happened previously is a good predictor of what will happen in the future) because the events come from more or less stationary distributions. As illustrated by September 11th attacks, the number of terrorist deaths can double in a single day. There's no reason that this can't happen again with an event with >5k deaths in a single day.
For those who have read anything by Nicholas Nassim Taleb: Nicholas Nassim Taleb might argue that terrorist attacks are black swan events (impossible to predict, potentially very large impact) and that the comparision of terrorist deaths (a distribution from Extremistan) to motor vehicle deaths is not very valuable.
On the other hand, I don't believe the level of NSA surveillance is appropriate. I'm just trying to illustrate the amount of effort one puts into thwarting something shouldn't just depend on its previous costs, but also on the probability distribution of the event (and your uncertainty in that).
tl;dr: Terrorism is more like pg's view of a startup in that it has potential for explosive growth, while motor accident deaths are more like a well established medium sized business.