Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

My personal pet peeve is when people say things like "we live in a dangerous world now". No, we don't. At least, not more dangerous than before (which is the implication). We might be breathlessly focused on some dangers, but those dangers are LESS than before, not more.

I don't want anyone to suffer, and definitely don't want anyone to die. I'm not calling for turning our backs on every idea to improve safety. Just don't apply this safety under the false premise that things are more dangerous than they were.

View on HN

If you look at terrorism in the UK and Ireland, Islamic extremists are quite safe compared to the IRA. There were estimated to be over 10,000 terrorist bomb attacks due to the Northern Ireland conflicts.

But the IRA were white so there is nothing to fear /s

And yet nobody seriously suggested deporting / monitoring all Irish people as a solution...

I wouldn't say nobody did. There was certainly enough anti-Irish racism to wrongly convict people (Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Maguire Seven). And the goal of the Loyalists was not so much to "deport" Catholics living in NI - they were after all born there and British nationals - but to force them to leave. Ethnic cleansing.

The whole thing was a much smaller scale than Syria, but still generated a "flood" of refugees: http://www.thejournal.ie/northern-refugees-ireland-state-pap...

The situation was very weird - a civil war within the UK, effectively, complete with troops on the street and armed checkpoints - but only in very specific areas. A quasi-democracy operated: Gerry Adams MP was permitted to be elected but not allowed to speak on television. Bobby Sands was elected while in prison.

That's mostly true, but Irish men did come in for a lot of extra screening at airports, being taken into rooms for interrogation and so on. Particularly young Irish men with longer hair. R

Rightwing reporting of incidents did a lot to drive anti Irish sentiment, leading to forced confessions by innocent Irish people for terrorist attacks like in Bermingham and Guilford.

Political leaders who liked to use zero tolerance rhetoric like Margaret Thatcher did a lot to help the IRA recruitment cause.

It was different, but not completely different to what we see now in the US.

By coincidence onetime IRA commander Martin McGuinness died today, a man who's conversion to pursuit of political aims through diplomatic conciliation rather than hardline methods is one of the great examples of how the former works better to end conflicts.

I always liked to point "we live in a dangerous world now" folks here: http://www.vrc.crim.cam.ac.uk/vrcresearch/paperdownload/manu... - in particular the graph on the third page.

How the hell would they get accurate crime stats from 1200? A year so long ago that I feel the need to suffix it with "AD".

Homicides are easy to document, and those are the stats used in the graphs. It's other crimes that are difficult to compare.

Find an old source saying "Blimey, we hath hadd 200 of thee black cryme of murder thys annus!" and cross-reference it against recorded population at the time, and there's your homicide rate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com