Hacker News Reader

Comment by redstripe | Hacker News Reader

The US has sustained the fiction that terrorists are going to attack "real soon now" and people still accept it like some existential threat. Meanwhile we're onto the 15th year of toddlers killing parents with their own handguns outnumbering terrorists attacks. So I guess we can't really be surprised by their fears - it's the whole world against them and it sort of makes sense for them to dig in deeper.

View on HN

> The US has sustained the fiction that terrorists are going to attack "real soon now" and people still accept it like some existential threat.

Touche. But at least in the U.S. dissenting from this point of view doesn't get you and your family thrown in a labor camp.

We don't need to get NK to love us. We just need to sow enough doubt in the Dangerous Fiction that launching a nuclear first strike is no longer seen within NK as a desirable (or even tenable) option.

Isn't it a little insensitive to say that imply terrorist attacks on US soil are fiction when when 49 people got killed in an attack in June? I'll agree that public fear, and public official rhetoric is out of proportion to say, car accidents, but it's an apples to oranges comparison.

There's reality and there's sensitivity.

Sensitivity would be an awareness of the tragedy the Florida nightclub attacks were to the vicitms, their families, and friends.

Reality would be recognising that that event in no way, shape, or form presented the least existential threat to the US itself, and that the ties of the madman involved to organised international terrorist groups are tenuous at best. And that armed toddlers and children present a far larger clear and present danger to the United States.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com