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Comment by kbolino | Hacker News Reader

Neither is any less dead than the other. The cause matters only to the living. My entire point is that fear of the threat in the back of your mind is entirely irrational. You're much more likely to die of cancer, and even then, you're not very likely to die at all.

The Stalin quote about "a single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" comes to mind here. I understand your point that terrorism is the result of direct, willful action by people with malicious intent, whereas cancer is just a force of nature. But you have no real control over either, so why make such a big deal of the former?

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But you have no real control over either, so why make such a big deal of the former?

Not true. Even thought they need to be much smarter about it, people with guns, whom our tax dollars fund and who's power and number I fear and would like to limit, can reduce the likelihood of a terrorist ruining my life. Scientists can do the same for cancer, but unfortunately, we have more people who can fight terrorism that who can fight cancer.

We can elect leaders are vote in the marketplace to shift resources one way or the other, or be a better cancer or terrorism fighter if we are in those fields. Our individual control might be negligible, but not society's.

You cannot effect much control over a signal that you cannot distinguish from random noise. There are so many factors that affect the likelihood of terrorism, and yet even in a bad year that likelihood is insignificant.

Our ridiculously outsized counterterrorism efforts are akin to putting a shroud around the Earth to block out cosmic background radiation. It would cost more money than we can fathom, and in the end we probably couldn't even measure the benefit. Meanwhile, the radiation you absorb from living near a nuclear plant or an old testing site is orders of magnitude greater, and yet you probably won't ever suffer a harmful effect from it.

My argument isn't that terrorism isn't real, or it isn't a threat. My argument is that it's such an insignificant threat that it fails to justify our existing efforts, nonetheless ever-more-expensive new efforts.

It's equally hard to measure how much of a threat terrorism actually poses. One could easily make the argument that the reason it's perceived to be so little of a threat today is because we've gotten damn good at stopping terrorist plots. See the recently intercepted ALQ documents which describe how good the West has gotten at tracking their movements and foiling their plans.

There have been numerous terrorist attacks in the West since 9/11, in Israel (2002-), Madrid (2004, 2006), London (2005, 2007), and Moscow (2010, 2011).

Also, I grew up with several major terrorist attacks against the United States, in New York (1993), Oklahoma (1997), Africa (1998), against the USS Cole (2000), and finally 9/11.

The death toll from all these incidents barely breaks 4000. More people died last week of cancer.

The former has a large political impact.

How many dissidents a year do you think you need to kill to suppress any opposition?

Targeted acts of terrorism are different than indiscriminate attacks, and a coordinated series of attacks is different than an isolated incident. If the group of potentially affected people is very small, or the number of attacks very large, then the probabilities are drastically increased and a larger response is justified.

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