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Comment by stegosaurus | Hacker News Reader

The frustrating thing about all of this is the blatant misuse of terminology by the media.

London resident. 7/7 killed 50 people and injured 700. Ten years have passed. The Troubles were worse.

'Terror' isn't a thing. It doesn't exist. 'Terrorism', does not exist. The real terrorists are the media companies and politicians that attempt to instill terror in the populace.

They try to craft this image of a world to be feared, with danger lying around every corner. Look around you. It's more dangerous for me to eat a Mars bar than it is for me to ride the London Underground, for fuck's sake.

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Always reminds me of this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/ame...

Americans Are as Likely to Be Killed by Their Own Furniture as by Terrorism

There is a lot of evidence that terrorist groups are incredibly ineffective. Not just recent attacks in the US, but statistics world wide and through all of history. Gwern wrote a detailed essay on how incompetent terrorist groups are: http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective

>9/11, the crowning incident of terrorism in those centuries, was equaled by just 29 days of car accidents in the US - and 9/11 was only accidentally that successful! 9/11 is also a sterling example of the availability bias: besides it, how many attacks could the best informed Western citizen name? Perhaps a score, on a good day, if they have a good memory; inasmuch as the MIPT database records >19,000 just 1968-2004, it’s clear that terrifyingly exceptional terrorist attacks are just that. Remarkably, it seems that it is unusual for terrorist attacks to injure even a single person; the MIPT database puts the number of such attacks at 35% of all attacks. Certainly the post-9/11 record would seem to indicate it was a fluke...

>Many terrorist organizations keep very detailed financial records (consider the troves of data seized from Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, from Bin Laden’s safehouse, or Al Qaeda’s insistence on receipts), with little trust of underlings, suggesting far less ideological devotion than commonly believed & serious principal-agent problems. Stories about terrorist incompetence are legion and the topic is now played for laughs (eg. the 2010 movie Four Lions), prompting columnists to tell us to ignore all the incompetence and continue to be afraid.

Also see his essay Terrorism is not about Terror: http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror

Terrorism is ineffective when ignored.

OTOH, when in response, governments spend trillions invading other countries, killing 10's of thousands of innocent civilians, spending 100's of billions spying on its own citizens, and passing totalitarian laws to peek into the most private of peoples possessions, and bodies, then yes, terrorism is effective.

You're assuming that what the terrorists want is to e.g. have the US invade Iraq. You're assuming the terrorists want anything in particular, instead of being irrational criminally insane crackpots.

Unless by "the terrorists" you mean the people who make money when governments and people overreact to terrorism. For them it seems quite effective. But presumably they aren't the ones actually carrying out the attacks, they're just the ones exploiting the loss of human life to gain filthy lucre.

This is the thing right here. We should be expending more energy having a discussion on what constitutes real terrorism. It seems terrorism has become an excuse to bleed money from the general populace to fund initiatives to build police forces into local military units. It also seems that the media constantly spews the word "terrorism" for anything they believe they can monetize by drawing in viewers. To date, there have only been a small number of events that I can honestly say were terrorism, and besides 9/11, everything else has been at the low end of the scale.

(Fear for) 'Terrorism' is the Swiss knife of government/law enforcement. They can use it to justify/enforce ANY policy they would normally not be able to.

"The best political weapon is the weapon of terror" -HH

"Terrorism is an invention through which any two armed people can take over an entire industry, namely television, with the eager cooperation of its owners."

-Marshall McLuhan

Tv is a cool medium of which requires participation. If the audience (public) are not "put on" to terrorism, that is not participating, the the power of idea will cease (and the secondary effects like the issue raised here).

You can't have a hot war on a cool medium. Always a pleasure to meet another McLuhanite!

Apropos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM

"[D]ocumentary film maker Adam Curtis shown during Charlie Brooker's 2014 Wipe program"

So if government took a hands off approach to terrorism, opened our borders, let anyone fly on our planes, there wouldn't be an increase in terrorism? Is that what you're saying?

I'm saying that if the UK had open borders, we would be a better country.

I'm saying that if we could get on planes without spending hours in security, we'd be a better country.

I'm saying that your 'terrorism' is a farce. I don't believe in your 'terrorism'. Your 'terrorism' is an excuse to block good in the world, and to further evil, and I've had enough of it.

I'm saying that your actions, under the guise of preventing 'terrorism', have caused more terror. Your warnings to citizens to watch out - terror. Your pat downs at airports - terror. Your encryption laws - terror.

I am anti-empire, and anti-security theater as they come. But to say that all borders should be open, with absolutely no intelligence gathering and no consideration of massive migrant flows... this is one of the most blatantly child-like thoughts I've seen expressed here. There is a big gap between "Stop taking off shoes at the airport; stop launching drone strikes on weddings" and "No problems would arise from completely free movement between the vastly different cultures of east and west".

Why does somebody always have to go from one extreme to another...are you saying just if the government can't have access to all things in our private lives and spy on us in every manner then they are unable to provide any protecting and security on the borders, planes, and elsewhere?

That's quite a hyperbole.

Airlines don't just let anybody in. They care about not losing planes too. I'd say they have best information to balance out convenience of travel with safety.

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