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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

Yes, we are much more likely to be killed by something else. But the presence of terrorism is not replacing those other ways to die, but being added on top of them. And it also adds, as the name implies... terror. And trauma for survivors, anger for the victims families, decreases trust amongst different peoples, and strengthens conflicts in our world.

So these statistics are true... yet I'm still pretty sure terrorism is a problem worth our time and efforts to fight, even if it will not personally kill me.

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Of course terrorism is worth our time and efforts to fight it! Even better, it's incredibly cheap and easy to fight - you just have to stop doing terrorists work for them by going insane about attacks! Ignore them (while treating attackers themselves as you would treat any other organized crime group - with solid police work leading to capture, trial and sentencing), and they'll go away.

Spontaneous, coordinated action by the public is anything but cheap and easy. We live in a society of individuals, not an ant colony.

I do understand your point with these posts, but I'm not sure that the best response to a terrorist attack is to do absolutely nothing.

The best respone to a terrorist attack is to treat it as normal crime: take basic precautions beforehand, leave the police to investigate and arrest afterwards, and everyone else get on with their lives.

The UK's response to terrorism in Northern Ireland was very much more localised and stiff-upper-lip than it seems to be in response to Islamist terrorism. Similarly in the US nobody gets in a panic about the numerous white supremacist terrorists. Even spree killings have become normalised with "there's nothing we can do", due to reluctance to question the 2nd amendment. Not to mention that if the US wants to get involved with fighting murderous extremists that threaten stability, the Mexican cartels are much closer and just as dangerous.

Getting involved in the Syrian civil war is instead just going to turn into a proxy war against the Russians, like 70s Afghanstan.

Similarly in the US nobody gets in a panic about the numerous white supremacist terrorists

That has more to do with cognitive dissonance and tacit approval than calculated strategy. White supremacy is the dominant culture in the US. Violent acts are continually explained away as "isolated incidents" by the "mentally ill", a convenient escape from the hard job of inward reflection and decolonization.

This is what Bruce Schneier said after the Boston Marathon bombing:

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it'd be easy to be scared. It'd be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something—anything—to keep us safe.

It'd be easy, but it'd be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators' hands—and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don't have to be scared, and we're not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

There are things we can do to make us safer, mostly around investigation, intelligence, and emergency response, but we will never be 100-percent safe from terrorism; we need to accept that.

How well this attack succeeds depends much less on what happened in Boston than by our reactions in the coming weeks and months. Terrorism isn't primarily a crime against people or property. It's a crime against our minds, using the deaths of innocents and destruction of property as accomplices. When we react from fear, when we change our laws and policies to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed, even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we're indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail, even if their attacks succeed.

Don't glorify the terrorists and their actions by calling this part of a "war on terror." Wars involve two legitimate sides. There's only one legitimate side here; those on the other are criminals. They should be found, arrested, and punished. But we need to be vigilant not to weaken the very freedoms and liberties that make this country great, meanwhile, just because we're scared.

Empathize, but refuse to be terrorized. Instead, be indomitable—and support leaders who are as well. That's how to defeat terrorists.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-bost...

Or maybe they'll just use a bigger bomb next time.

That's really not true. We take away a greater part of human lifespan doing security theatre at the airport than we save. We spent TRILLIONS on wars. Had we not done so the 2008 derivatives crisis would have been smaller and more readily dealt with. instead we came within a hair's breadth of economic collapse. There are real costs in taking away from living, and taking away from our collective wealth, that are vastly greater than the direct costs of terrorism.

And that, let me remind everyone, is the whole point of terrorism. Making a nation destroy itself, and maybe even take someone else down too.

But then stopping terrorism should fall somewhere around where the statistics say it should on priority list (adding in the anger/trauma). So right around vending machine accidents or whatever? Those are additive as well.

Terrorism disproportionately dominates our media attention, but has a small affect on our death rate. Of course we should stop it if we can. But why place a larger priority on it than something that is more damaging to us (even after weighing in the negative emotions)?

I get it. Terrorism is scary and it's easy to have empathy for the victims. But if we accept car deaths as a consequence of modern life, than why not terrorism deaths? That I don't get.

I get that this is an unpopular opinion, but why does all of society have to have the same priority?

As a computer engineer, the likelihood of me contributing to a 'cure for <x>', is very very low. I'd like to focus on things that I can solve, or work towards.

So telling people to stop trying to solve something (that is an actual problem), because something else should be a higher priority.....seems kind of ridiculous.

As for attributing terrorism to "modern life", I think that's a joke. We should just ACCEPT mass murder?

Also, people DON'T accept car deaths, there are huge segments of the population working towards reducing car deaths (that's kind of the whole point behind autonomous cars, as I understand it).

> We should just ACCEPT mass murder?

We shouldn't. We should ruthlessly pursue those responsible and bring them to justice. Just like with any other mass murder case. What we should not do is to enter nationwide state of panic and proceed to bomb other countries while cracking down on minorities that had nothing to do with the attack and/or establishing a police state locally.

>And it also adds, as the name implies... terror. And trauma for survivors, anger for the victims families, decreases trust amongst different peoples, and strengthens conflicts in our world.

Many of those are purely a product of the way we react to terrorism. We can choose our reaction.

Dying from slipping and falling in the shower adds terror and all that as well. Why is it not fought to the same extent?

Surely terrorism is worth fighting. The question is whether it's worth all the effort and attention it gets, or perhaps some smaller amount.

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