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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

I don‘t think that is true at all. There have been numerous hijacked planes since 9/11 including two in the USA just this decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings

Plane hijacking has been on its way out anyway after the turmoil of the 1970s. And that has probably more to do with a) the relative political stability of the post cold war period, and b) a general sense that airplane hijacking isn’t actually that likely to advance your political goals. If you read the list above, you see people hijacking planes all kinds of dumb methods, hardly any of them involves carrying an actual bomb onto the plane.

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Of the two in the US this decade, one did not have a cockpit door as the plane was too small, and the other was by an off-duty pilot sitting in the cockpit…

Yes, if you read the list prior to 9/11 majority of all plane hijackings were equally dumb. And hardly any involved bringing an actual bomb on board (usually lying about having one was enough).

There has been way less terrorism in general too. I'm always curious whether the war on terrorism is that effective, or there's major socioeconomic factor that matters most (or there's just less lead in the air).

It's not "less terrorism".

Back in the day you needed to get onto TV and into newspaper headlines to get any attentions besides your neighbours. Today you can do that with a Facebook page and send your ideas worldwide.

And that works the back way too: instead of the news of bombing in some remote country you can't even find on the map you can get a funny cat videos to fill in.

In the 1970s everyone and their grandma was a member of some left wing revolutionary group, and half of them were working on some terrorist plot, bombing an embassy here, taking hostages there, hijacking an airplane, etc. etc. And in the 1980s every right wing reactionary had joined a right wing counter-revolutionary group, and 99% of them were plotting terrorist attacks (most of them targeting minorities). </exaggeration>

Today the cops are doing the job of the right wing counter-revolutionary groups, and relatively rarely do we get the right wing counter revolutionary terror attacks (but we definitely still do; just not as much). Meanwhile the left has pretty much abandoned terrorism as a viable tactic. It is mostly employed as part of an anti-colonial struggle of an oppressed minority sometimes under literal occupation of their colonizer’s military. But alas we only have a fraction of colonies today relative to the 1970s and the 1980s.

Minneapolis had a whole string of them just this month

> a) the relative political stability of the post cold war period

Most plane hijackings/bombings were middle east related (e.g. linked to one of Palestinian liberation, al-qaeda, or isis)

Not sure i'd call that a stable region of the world, especially now. Perhaps though the people involved just realized it was an ineffective strategy.

I made sure to say relative political stability.

I don‘t like it (in fact I hate it), but capitalism won the cold war. And communist revolutionaries went dormant as a result. The cold war brought a different kind of stability, particularly to Europe, and the end of it created a massive turmoil (mainly along nationalistic lines rather then political ideological ones).

In hindsight perhaps I should have been more specific and said “relative political stability along ideological lines.”

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