US State Dept Issues Worldwide Travel Alert
travel.state.gov
travel.state.gov
Lived in Boston for the last four years, was there during the Marathon Bombing. I'm now traveling within Europe, and am pretty 100% confident it's safer somewhere like Poland or Croatia than any first tier American city.
But, really, who cares? Change of dying while commuting is catastrophic compared to a terrorist attack.
The Parisians had the right idea - day after the attacks, everyone fills up the cafes.
Which is the opposite of what we did in Boston - cower at home, while a couple kids with IEDs shut down an entire state.
Terrorists only win when the people they attack are chickenshit.
Each time the West gets hit, it gets a little harder to worry about the next one. Just like you might get into a car accident driving to work, some Islamist whackjob might blow himself up at a concert, market, or restaurant.
When the risk is going outside and doing things that involve other people, there's no different action to take as an individual. It becomes background risk.
Shameful. I want my government to be less afraid.
Given that this expires a week before super tuesday, I wouldn't be surprised if this is more about helping Hillary than about any fears of the government.
It's not that they're afraid, it's that they want you to be afraid, so you'll either look the other way or cheer while they fuck you over some more in the name of "security".
> Additionally, there is a continuing threat from unaffiliated persons planning attacks inspired by major terrorist organizations but conducted on an individual basis.
May as well just say, "We've just discovered that people can do bad things, at any time and for any reason." Random individuals are a "continuing threat" that might resolve by February 2016 when this notice expires. Really looking forward to the apparent cure for human nature they've got in the works!
That doesn't mean that bad people doing bad things is a problem that is expected to be resolved.
Also, that it implies the threat is uniform across the entire globe (except maybe lesser in Syria and Iraq? Since those are the only two locations that are named but not in connection with a previous attack. And, it says the bad guys are leaving those places, so they're becoming safer, right? /sarcasm) I had the notion that "there are bad things happening out there" from skimming the news, but thanks State Department for letting me know they might happen in "multiple regions"!
Meh, I guess maybe this is bureaucratically significant to someone (if some company has a policy to not travel when there's a State Department alert?) even if it contains virtually no information.
The idea that these three groups are somehow more of a threat between today and February across the entirety of the world than they are at other times is just patently absurd.
Still, in the case of human life, I have nothing against trying everything to make people aware. Its just the fearmongering bit I dislike.
If I am going to spend a significant amount of time extending my life, I'm going to focus on the big things that prevent an early demise: exercise, diet, and having meaningful relationships.
If the gov't said "For the next week, car travel will have heightened risk", people might take notice.
The problem is that foreign travel is safe and all this fear-mongering is unjustified.
99% of people who travel to a foreign country are completely safe. Saying anything to the contrary is pure fear-mongering.
Which is silly when they're more likely to die in a crash on the way to the airport than during flight or while abroad. It's completely illogical and actually gives weight to the actions of terrorists.
If the World Health Organization issued a world-wide alert that going outside in the month of May 2016 will have an increased risk of death from bees, you might be annoyed to have to dig through obscure, possibly unpublished analyses to find that the increased risk was +0.001% due to projected shifts in the bee population relative to 2015.
That straw-man example of announcing nearly nothing would probably be in practice more statistically relevant to people's lives than this one. Yet, here we are discussing how "foreign travel is not safe" with no information we can use to determine how much anyone should actually care.
It's like issuing an advisory about getting papercuts filling out paperwork in a war zone. No one is so marginal that it should make a difference.
It's not that the travel advisory thinks the risk is actually lower in the US, it's that the internal US security is outside the purview of the state department.
Paying attention to this "advisory" means what, exactly? It doesn't say anything. It doesn't provide any information at all. It's just pointless fearmongering by the very people who have the most to gain by having you the citizenry be vaguely afraid of ill-defined threats who might or might not be trying to harm you in unspecified ways at unknown times at any location anywhere. So the only thing that paying attention to it does is make you afraid, and therefore perhaps more likely to approve of giving the federal government (who wrote this worthless piece of trash) yet more unconstitutional power over your life. It cannot possibly help you in any way, because it doesn't tell you anything.
The best thing to do is demand the impeachment and removal from office of everyone responsible for this idiocy, and then vote out of office every single politician who supports, endorses, echoes, funds, or in any way permitted, encouraged, or enabled it. Every last one. That may not make you any less likely to be killed or injured by a criminal (of some kind, somewhere, sometime, maybe), but at least it will end the pointless asinine fearmongering that does zilch for public safety.
Then you do get it. But because terrorism is scary it gets more mind-share than mundane but more deadly things like driving.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Yes, but the risk of getting run over by a bus at the airport isn't changed from its normal level right now, so there is no reason for alert for that.
This is really crazy text. It reads like, "U.S. citizens everywhere should scuttle like rats through alleys and sewers." I see little use in telling every U.S. citizen traveling anywhere to always be on guard. Humans just don't have this capacity for eternal heightened vigilance, nor do I think it's even healthy to ramp people up this way when their real change in global risk seems very, very limited.
But sewers are where the Surgeon General tells me I'm at increased risk of contracting communicable diseases. And alleys are where the FBI tells me I'm more likely to be mugged or raped. Whatever are we to do?
> The last time the State Department issued a similar worldwide alert was Dec. 2014. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/11/23/state-departme...
>The most recent worldwide travel alert was issued in December 2014, and prior to that in August 2013, September 2011, and May 2011.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/23/politics/state-worldwide-trave...
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34907009
says "Previous worldwide travel alerts were issued in May 2011, September 2011, August 2013 and December 2014"
They're really not a big deal and shouldn't cause anyone to avoid travel.
There are a number of specific actions recommended in the alert (all of which are of potential value for any travel, but are of elevated importance to not neglect with the elevated risk level, which while still quite low for any individual incident of travel, is higher than normal.)
I think the main reason they're issued is political: it shows they're doing "something" and if there is another attack soon it gives them political cover.