The best way for people in civilized societies to defeat terrorism is not to live in fear, and to keep on advancing rationality and freedom.
I don't see that in the GP. It looks to me that he's working from the observation that personal liberty is decreasing, presumably revealing that the decisions being made are not rational. In particular, there's no reason to read into this anything about scope ("everyone"), nor their intent (to restrict freedom).
Clearly it would be incorrect to impute this to everyone when the restricted liberty can only be caused by the few in power.
Also, it may not be their intent to restrict freedom. Indeed, their intent may be to save our freedom, but due to the observed lack of rationality, their efforts carry the (assumedly unintended) side effect of restricting freedom.
I would add to it, that "advancing freedom" is one of those phrases that is, when you examine it, quite poorly defined. Freedom is more a set of associations than a strict definition, though I'm sure one can find philosophers who have attempted to strictly define it, so you get "freedom sub Professor X". Freedom is much easier to talk about in the abstract than to define, and lends itself to pithy (or, less charitably, glib) phrases that can be twisted to whatever one's own definition of freedom is.
My original post was flippant and lacking in nuance, to be sure (still not warranting the personal attack; I do, in fact, attempt to point out logical fallacies and bring about reasonable discourse). I am not immune to making the odd sound-bite myself, though calling my post cynical and then making a strawman attack also does not advance the cause of rationality.
I agree, which is why I instead used the term "liberty" in some places. While the term "freedom" has in modern times become clouded particularly with the notion of "positive" freedoms, I believe that the term "liberty" tends to be more strongly associated with the more traditional notions of "negative" liberty.
But I must concede that even this difference is at the grossest level, and there remain much more nuanced differences in definition beyond the negative/positive distinction.
It's sad and frustrating to realize that we, too, are human! and so must constantly self-check on these sorts of things. While the word "community" gets over-used, I think that's part of what community can do.
Or perhaps: civilization.
Thanks for the gut-check.
The worst evils of the 20th century were done by people with lots of scientific, industrial and psychological knowledge propping them up. And the worst evils of the 21st century will be no different.
No, there is quite some evidence behind that idea[1].
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
OK, find me a duel and a bear-baiting match in America and I'll believe you. Otherwise you're just mindlessly cynical, like any number of other teenagers.
You're probably right about bear-baiting. But there is plenty of organized dog fights and cock-fights around.
As for your link, an anecdote does not data make. If you want to argue that our society is getting more violent you need to prove that the amount of violent episodes now is higher than in the past, not that there happen violent events now. And as a matter of fact, overall in most of the Western world, the amount of violent crimes has been on a steady decline for the last 50 years at least (the amount of other crimes has gone down too, by the way).
Maybe you should study some recent history. The list goes on an on.
Compare that to WWII: "Most suggest that some 60 million people died in the war, including about 20 million soldiers and 40 million civilian"
Looking at North Korea and Iraq, every single person in those countries could die and that still wouldn't exceed the body count from WWII, not to mention WWI or any of the truly pointless European conflicts before that.
Even comparing Iraq to Vietnam, do you know what that war did to that country? Millions and millions of civilians were killed, an order of magnitude worse than even the extreme estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths.
Forced labor worldwide? Slavery was legal in the US 150 years ago. Now it is not -- in fact, we just elected a black president.
You said: "Have you seen any witches burned recently? Have 100K Japanese people on the west coast been put into camps recently?"
And my response was to indicate that tragedies like those are still happening in modern times, for very much the same reasons.
"Forced labor worldwide? Slavery was legal in the US 150 years ago. Now it is not -- in fact, we just elected a black president."
You response seems to have little to do with my point. Forced labor is a worldwide problem. Reciting US history to me does little to discredit that. I'd like to know what Obama has done recently to stop the sex trafficking of girls from Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia.
Oh yes, original sin. Wonderful. That makes sense. Can I buy some plenary indulgence from you, or is it a 'salvation by grace' thing now?
> They are representative of the state of the world in that we still allow them to go on.
The world once allowed the Black Plague and religions based on human sacrifice to 'go on', as you say. Darfur and North Korea are nothing compared to those.
Actually, it was built by the Department of Defense, aka The War Department. The freedom aspect was purely unintentional.
Indeed, I suppose that the reason that the best way to make the network robust results in making it free, creates an interesting analogy to the original point. At the very least, it proves that it's possible to be both more free and more secure, simultaneously.
While terrorist attacks may be rare, the ones that are attempted are often thwarted by people simply being aware of their surroundings. Terrorism and the threat of terrorism are not just a media creation. They are real, with real people wanting to kill real people. While we shouldn't surrender our fundamental ideals and liberties on the altar of security, pretending like the problem doesn't exist hardly seems like the answer either.
He noticed that a car was filling up with smoke. Even if had never heard of terrorism before, he still would have called the police because that's what people do when they notice a fire nearby.
pretending like the problem doesn't exist hardly seems like the answer either.
There are 300,000,000 people in the US. On any given day, tens of thousands of them will notice something that looks like terrorism to them. On almost every day of the year, every single one of those tens of thousands of people will be wrong. Completely and totally wrong. As a result, those people will become extremely anxious and will cause law enforcement to waste time and hassle innocent people needlessly.
We need to face facts: the vast majority of people are completely incapable of distinguishing terrorist activity so what they report as suspicious is often nothing but an artifact of their own prejudice. Terrorism has become an excuse to systematically harass out groups. And in the process, we are all made less safe because the police have to investigate these stupid incidents instead of focusing on real crimes.
You probably meant something larger scale in your original questions, or maybe something more tactically concrete. Hopefully, starting by getting the scale of the problem under control might help us get the tactics right, and then expand the scale.
We're just as bad as the general population as a whole. Our "Terrorism" is "possible affront on privacy" or "Apple might be evil!"
The past couple weeks I've been thinking that people are ok with small/short/quick news because it makes them think they have figured out the whole thing. Maybe they are satisfied that they've learned something, or maybe they think it is enough.
I think folks are overestimating their ability to put loosely connected ideas into something bigger. You get a little here, a sprinkle there and you're cool with that.
It's like a fast food for the brain. You're constantly satisfied, almost by the second, because you're supposedly "learning" something.
But I don't know. My train of thought stops there. I don't know how to strip people of this urge.
1. I don't consider the current situation in the US "terror". I'm talking about different times and places. If you were boarding a bus in Israel, Sri Lanka, Iraq during certain periods of time, you would have a higher chance of dying from a bombing than from an accident.
2. The natural response to terror is anything but rational. It is a completely different feeling to go on a bus knowing there's a possibility of an accident to going on a bus knowing that one of the passengers may be carrying a bomb.
You should check the stats on these things first. I'm pretty certain that isn't true. Check out the traffic fatality rate in Iraq: http://chartsbin.com/view/0lz
Even with the rate of Israel at 7.59 per 100,000, that comes out to 539 people per year.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+israel+*+...
That is more people every year than have died of terrorism in any year during Israel's history, even 1948. http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2000/1/Terror...
Even in the most terrorism-stricken places on earth, traffic fatalities still dwarf terrorism.
In any case, the stats are meaningless, as they have nothing to do with human nature and the way we perceive odds & danger. When the Beltway sniper was operating I don't think anyone was calmed by the knowledge their chances of being hit are really quite small.
I would compare the feeling to the feeling of wanting to do something, but not having the guts to just 'do it.' In this case, you want to search everyone on the bus that you don't trust until you are satisfied there is no bomb, but social pressures prevent you from doing so. This causes the stress.
The difference just being acceptance. When you believe that someone may be carrying a bomb you hold onto some hope that something can be done to stop them. When you get on a bus knowing that there is the possibility of an accident, there's not much you can do short of wrestling for control of the bus from the driver (or just not getting on the bus).
People have accepted that accidents happen. People have not accepted yet that 'terrorism' is a fact of life.
But it wasn't all that long ago really that it was perfectly common and acceptable to do things worse than terrorism. Like rape and pillage an entire city as a perfectly legitimate and really quite typical invasion tactic.
I agree, but by the definition of it as long as we have politics we will have terrorism, so there really is no defeating it.
I suspect that the general promotion of rationality wouldn't have been as effective at stopping Zarqawi as were the missiles that hit his safe-house.
Historically speaking, targeted leadership strikes have not been terribly effective at stopping terrorist movements. You kill leaders and more arise. You kill those and yet more take their place.