Use micromorts to fight terrorism
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blog.arty.name
Unless you calculate the micromorts for comparison between countries, limiting the area in such way doesn't make much sense. It's a single event -vs- activities which can be practiced for long amount of time. (someone with better statistics vocabulary can probably explain it nicely)
Ie. 2.5 micromorts is your risk if you're a French citizen, (153 + other death from terrorism) / (7.3 billions) if you're a human, 153/2M if you're living in Paris?
Edit: change the napkin calculation for correctnesss.
Most policies being looked at right now are France-scope.
Keeping in line with the other examples in the article, why not: 1 out of 1 bombing attack resulted in death? Because bombing attacks are not something you choose to do (as opposed to skydiving or riding a motorcycle). Also, the threat level is not uniform across the country. Also, there haven't been a million bombings so we're doing statistics with one sample. Also, we're also expecting the bombings to continue. There are a lot of misinterpretations and oversimplifications here.
I find it highly irrelevant, as a person working in a large town, frequently being in highly populated areas, in a country that's possibly a target for ISIS to compare myself with the average person living in a different country. It's almost like assuming that smokers and non-smokers have the same chance of dying from lung cancer, and then using the entire population of the world as reference to prove that smoking is actually pretty healthy.
Any group of suicidal, minimally-trained jackasses with a couple thousand dollars, access to Craigslist or an Uncle Henry's, and the ability to go to a WalMart, could obtain enough weaponry and ammunition to stage a significant attack on the scale of what happened in Paris this week.
I have to conclude that the pool of such people that would be willing to commit such acts is vanishingly small.
But it's a fact that we're terrible at evaluating how likely/dangerous terrorism is. We percieve far more risk than there actually is.
Terrorism is designed to play to our cognitive biases, as is the news, as is politics. A triumvirate of douchegoblins taking advantage of our inability to correctly assess risk.
(I have no idea of the veracity of this story; it sounds a little trite, but compelling like so many trite things)
For perspective you get 1 micromort from traveling 17 miles (27 km) by foot. I've walked 8.91 miles (14.34 km) today, which comparatively would be as dangerous as taking an ecstasy pill...well probably not as it would scale differently. I wouldn't be surprised if simply attending a dance-party/rave would have a micromort rating of ~0.5, regardless of substances ingested.
Context is everything.
The Micromort is not a very precise or accurate unit, but it does a reasonable job of communicating the broad 'order of magnitude' context. The disproportionate emotional response undermining rational thinking is directly countered by this frame of reference, which in turn addresses the disproportionate impacts of terrorism.
Perhaps not for walking, but for an activity like taking an ecstasy pill it is.
People who die from walking don't only die from being hit by vehicles. There's heart attacks, dehydration, snake bites, etc. etc.
Reminds me of Japanese people's reaction to the ISIS threat, they mocked them on twitter with memes[1]. Also they denied request of religious food for exchange students[2]. Any religion is not superior than others, so there will be legal or philosophical standings for them to be treated special.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/japanese-twitte...
[2] http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...
Every now and then somebody gets the idea of rewriting it in something else. Problem is that while it may look simple ( "I just need templates for front, section and articles pages") there is a lot of extras (see the 4-8 people and CMS). Note that newspaper companies don't have a lot of money these days.
I've heard they are having another go at it. For one thing it is hard to get CF programmers these days.
Ha ha ha. The absolute best way to deal with any threat.
My uni here in osaka has kosher options in all cantinas.
I suspect that I'm just unusually unfazed by things and fundamentally lack the ability to understand the perspective of people for whom bombings like this cause fear. This makes me sad.
Someone like your wife (or husband) needs a way to feel like they are in control. This is hard to do with terrorism hence why it is effective is causing terror despite the absolute risks.
[1] https://azelin.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/abu-bakr-naji-the...
But it doesn't follow logically that military response is strategically bad for us! Just because ISIS wants us to do something doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. ISIS could be very wrong about wanting to provoke military escalation. In fact: it almost certainly is.
That doesn't mean that military strikes are good, or the right option at this point. It just means that saying "that's what ISIS wants us to do" isn't a dispositive argument.
What could we do to identify such people and help change the course of human history?
Admonitions to shrug your shoulders at terrorism because car accidents kill more people always ring hollow with me.
The word terrorism is a propaganda word intended to make the audience pass moral judgment on the act and ignore the larger issue of why the conflict exists in the first place.
I too find acts of violence upsetting, but it's dangerous to buy into the propaganda around the word terrorism, since it's used to justify abandoning diplomacy and dehumanizing the enemy.
And it's used to curb the rights of your own citizens.
[1] https://azelin.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/abu-bakr-naji-the...
Is France fulfilling Daesh's goals by destroying their administrative, economic and military infrastructure? What kind of action or inaction would go against Daesh's goals in your opinion?
Bombing innocent people simply isn't right and isn't effective. If you're honestly sympathizing with these people or justifying their actions (which you seem one skip and jump from doing), you should at least want them to do things that are effective at getting the change they want.
Then again, maybe their entire motive is to bring global sharia law and secure their place in heaven by killing as many innocent infidels as possible. As far as I know, ISIS has made no claims that were less extreme than this. I have no problem dehumanizing someone with that sort of motivation. It's barbaric; it's monstrous. They have made no attempt at diplomacy, and there is no chance.
The amount of economic damage to the west has been profound, and yet our leaders would be happy to spend 20% of GDP indefinitely on ineffective projects attempting to thwart terrorism.
So yes, terrorism works very well and often terrorist groups transition into respectable and moderate political parties.
Fortunately, We would never do anything like bombing innocent people, because We are the Good Guys, and all our actions are therefore entirely justified. Only They do things like that, because They are the Bad Guys, and Their actions are barbaric and monstrous.
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/06/u-s-journalists-who-inst...
ETA: I'm talking about the Paris attacks specifically, not giving a formal definition of terrorism. If you don't count those as terrorism, I don't know what you would count. This semantic mumbo jumbo is ridiculous.
* Bombing of Dresden: Terrorism
* Nuking of Hiroshima: Terrorism
* America's Drone strikes: Terrorism
Context and motive is everything. You cannot boil it down to an easily digestible soubd-byte to base your opinion on.
Hiroshima was in the midst of a full blown state vs. state war, in which the US was not the aggressor against Japan.
While it is true that it was hoped the atomic bomb would be as useful psychologically as it was physically, there is no true comparison here, and this is argumentative for the sake of trying to make a point.
You're right, the Hiroshima attack in itself was worse in terms of the death and suffering of innocents than all Islamic terrorism of the past 20 years put together.
Thus unless we expect one side to nobly surrender, we ought to expect the most extreme atrocities to occur in war.
When you think about it, it's silly to draw an arbitrary distinction of humane combat, since if we really wanted to be humane we'd have our leaders compete in chess boxing or something that would minimize the destruction of property and loss of life.
Regardless of that, the events that you mentioned are massive, coordinated, state-level actions. I just can't accept labeling those as terrorism without that word losing any meaning. Yes, those events are horrible, but not every horrible thing that involves killing civilians is terrorism even when if's brutal mass murder. There are other words too, like genocide, war crimes, massacre, assassinations, etc.
The word is not merely propaganda, it is a word whose extremity exactly conveys the revulsion and moral judgement of the speaker. As with any label, you run the risk of superficiality and preoccupation with simplified narratives, but "terrorism" is NOT just propaganda, and it deliberately conveys more than "acts of violence". (A clinical term with its own problems of distancing audiences from the immediate reality.)
I wrote this because your last sentence seemed to imply something that I've noticed crop up in these kinds of discussions: the (typically Western) assumption that there is legitimacy to both sides of any conflict, and that, recognizing this, a diplomatic solution can be achieved. I've yet to see concrete evidence that this is the case. Short of deprogramming, how do you reason with a group of people brainwashed to be fundamentally unreasonable?
Psychological warfare aimed at a civilian population, right? Even if you agree that it was, you have to admit that is not how the history books are writte, because we don't use the propagana term "terrorist" to describe our own actions.
War criminals versus 'terrorists'.
How does that sound? Is it really a propaganda term if you're a common war criminal who committed mass atrocity against civilians? Or a terrorist?
Both side prosecuted bombing of population centers. They also both get away with it. Probably the reason why there wasn't prosecutions in the first place because they fear the precedence that will set.
It's a really bizarre amplification and dehumanization of the enemy... I realize this is a part of war propaganda, but it's particularly distasteful because it amplifies the environment of fear the terrorists were trying to create in the first place.
The goal of any tactic in war is to break the other side's will to keep fighting. Terrorism is an effective tactic because it can usually be carried out at convenient times and doesn't require much logistics, sophistication or funding.
I refuse to give up freedoms or deny those freedoms to innocent people out of fear of terrorists. That's not "shrugging my shoulders". That's not succumbing to the terror that is so obviously the tool of terrorism.
But at least Donald Trump is going to ensure that we get all the Iraqi oil. /sarcasm
Using IraqBodyCount.org's estimate, Iraqis suffered 1.86 micromorts per day from March 2003 to present. Compare to 2.18 μmorts/day during the Iran-Iraq War or 29,090 μmorts inflicted on Halabja residents in one day in 1988.
Here's a calculator, with my data in the Iraq tab:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wH6BOoKXun-C3_WLHZr7...
(n.b.: I use conservative estimates to yield higher μmorts for the US-initiated Iraq War and lower for the other two, like 1988 populations for Iran-Iraq and 2003 populations for the US invasion/aftermath. IBC measures only documented deaths; I used their figure for total deaths including combatants. Alternative figures are listed in the cells/notes on the right. Feel free to plug in different values and see how things change.)
To me, the problem with terrorism (aside from the terrorists) is that there are people willing to jump in immediately with political (or financial) agendas. Within hours, I'd already seen comments on FB about how fewer people would have died if France had a 2nd amendment. And, over the past few days, I've seen so much pro-police-state propaganda in the US media that it frankly scares me to death.
No - we really don't need more 'surveillance' or more build-ups in 'defense spending'.
Call me 'crazy', but I really think we should be spending the trillions and trillions of dollars (which would otherwise go into the pockets of the propagandists) on our generation's geniuses to enable them to create the technologies that makes disease, poverty, and inequality obsolete.
There might not be enough sample to know how many people would be harmed during a terrorist attack. But there is definitely enough information to estimate the risk of an attack itself.
So for instance, if you are estimating the mortality rate of a 25 year old and the rate for an 85 year old you would be equally confident in each estimate if your data sample contained an equal amount of deaths for each, not an equal amount of life-years.
So while we have many days of exposure to terrorism risk, we do not have many occurrences and therefore do not have a confident estimate of the rate of major terror attacks.
edit: you can get a lower bound, from a statistical perspective, the same way, where you go out a couple standard deviations to make up for small sample size, e.g. terrorism is more dangerous than being hit by two meteors at the same time, but if you wanted to make the case terrorism is more dangerous than something strange like water overdose that's probably true but not a lower-bound level statistical certainty.
The simple averaging you used, I can use it to, but I am not only French, I am also living in Paris. Last year there have been 39 deaths from car accidents, 101 from homicides, and more than 147 from terrorist relative death an counting every few months in Paris.
I can also look at my age, and that I go to concert often then my micromort explode to the roof now.
You seems like the old ladys in the Terry Gilliam film Brazil.
"There's a related term, microlife, for things that reduce your lifespan. A microlife is 30 minutes off your life expectancy. So smoking two cigarettes has a cost of one microlife."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umpqua_Community_College_shoot...
It's interesting that running one marathon per year is almost equivalent to being murdered in England.
So, yes, terrorism is indeed very, very bad.
Perspective is everything. Good approach :)
But I wonder how long a single person can remain terrified about anything, or is indeed terrified by e.g. terrorism.
That's:
a) an order of magnitude less than U.S. defense spending b) not funded by taxpayers
The common misunderstanding has allowed it to become a self-fulfilling prophesy in a way - the social media campaign from ISIS and orbiting groups has focused on using scare-campaigns to amplify the power of smaller offensives by vowing copy-cat attacks. They've observed the social and operational inefficiencies that come from being fearful and trying to preempt future attacks. If it was a misconception before, it's reality now.